Jay Lake - Green

There was something sad in the Dancing Mistress’ voice as her slow reply came. “You may have the right of it, but you miss the deeper truth. Gods are real, just like people. Petty, noble; vicious, kind; strong, weak. But you do not buy one for an afternoon and then throw her away. Each god means something to this city. They are always of something, called at need, staying until after all have forgotten them.” She sighed heavily. “So long as it is not I who calls them.”

Federo came time and again. He would sample my cooking, examine my needlework, or watch me dance. We would talk, but I always held my tongue from the words that counted. Mistress Tirelle lurked in doorways to overhear what we spoke of. If I expressed myself too frankly, or was too bitter, there would be a beating later.

Where I wish now that I had found a different way in those years was that Federo and I never spoke in my words. We never used that language for which I then had no name. He knew some of the words, to be sure, for we had spoken thus when he first bought me away from Papa.

Mistress Tirelle treated the words as if they were an infection. Federo was no different.

My stories had slipped further and further away in the nights when I lay abed and thought on my earliest memories. What always lay close to mind was Endurance, and the sound of bells.

I never did see the other candidates, but just as Mistress Tirelle had me working amid larger groups of people and showing more of my accomplishments, so the competitions increased. Hardly a month went by that the Factor did not send for something of skill and purpose from his girls. Calligraphy, in the classic style brought from the lands of the Sunward Sea. A dance designed by me and taught to a servant who would deliver it to him, set to the same piece of music used by others. A hound to be trained at a certain trick in two weeks’ time.

The outcomes of the competitions were not reported back to me. I could on occasion gauge by Mistress Tirelle’s mood when news had come, but precisely what news, I had to guess.

The truth of the whole exercise had become plain to me. The Factor manufactured women in his house, great ladies for the nobles and high merchants of Copper Downs and perhaps the smaller courts along the Stone Coast. There was pride to be taken in what I learned and mastered, but it was still slavery.

When Mistress Cherlise came, I knew this all over again.

She interrupted my nights as no one but the Dancing Mistress had done. We sat and spoke of how my breasts were beginning to bud, how my blood would soon flow. She had little books in dark leather covers filled with pictures of men and women in the throes of passion. Mistress Cherlise showed me those as well, before explaining how I would more likely be used-hard, with no thought to any pleasure but my lord’s, and required at all times to smile and beg and plead and always play the soft, warm hand.

The first time she put this forward, I grew angry. I held my emotion in check, but the Mistress must have seen it in my face.

“What do you think the lot of women is in this world, Girl?”

I spoke without thinking. “T-to choose, if nothing else.”

“You were not born here. You came from somewhere, yes?”

I nodded.

“A small village, or a farm?”

“Yes.”

“When you grew, what would your choices have been? A farmer, no doubt. A boy from some neighbor’s land who would know nothing more of love than what he’d learned from his father’s bullock. Here, at least, you know what can be, and how to achieve it if you get the chance. There, your choices would have been narrow as a thread, and brought you little joy at all.”

They still would have been my choices, I thought. That was my oldest argument with myself, and one I somehow always seemed to lose.

She showed me much, undressing her own body with casualness so I could see how a nipple perked with chill or damp or a gentle touch, how the curve of a breast felt beneath the fingers. Likewise her sweetpocket below. We discussed shaving and hair, how the blood coursed in the monthly rhythm, and the different fluids that came with sex. Mistress Cherlise gave me certain exercises to perform deep within my body.

“These will not defend you from a beating, nor save you from a fall, but they will help you manage your choices and keep your body safe,” she said.

We both lay naked on the bed in my sleeping chamber. “When will I need the exercises?”

“Soon. Always be ready.”

She sat up, and I helped her into her smallclothes.

Soon? I was not quite twelve years of age. How soon could it be?

When I had first come here, I had barely been as tall as Mistress Tirelle’s waist. Now I could see the wart at the top of her head. Almost nine years I had spent in the Pomegranate Court. Growing, learning, being remade time and time again. If not for the stolen freedom of the night lessons by the Dancing Mistress, I would have had nothing but the company of women within these bluestone walls that whole time.

My education was frighteningly detailed, but it was also incomplete. I could prepare ducklings Smagadine over cream and rice, and find a flaw in a polished silver service for forty-eight at a glance, but I had no idea how to buy a cabbage in the market, or where one might hire a cart. A great lady did not need to know everything. She needed to know only those things worthy of her attention.

There were other holes, as well. None of Mistress Danae’s books had discussed anything of the recent history of Copper Downs. If not for meeting Septio in the underground, I would have had no idea of the city’s gods, let alone that they had fallen silent for centuries. No one ever discussed the Duke within the walls of the Pomegranate Court, either. He was another thing I learned of only in my stolen moments outside.

Government, trade, the true state of affairs in the city: Why would these be hidden from a great lady in training? The Factor’s house was wrapped in mysteries enclosed in a circle of questions spiraling in on itself until the truth was swallowed like a shadow under the noonday sun.

I had added more than three thousand bells to the silk I carried in my mind. The tally of the wrongs done to me had grown so lengthy that I’d long since set it aside in favor of my original resolve to rule these people through their words. My own words I kept more carefully since I’d realized how many of them I had lost.

I lay in my bed very early in a morning of my ninth autumn in the Pomegranate Court and wished perversely that my arms were long enough to massage my ankles while leaving my legs straight. Mistress Tirelle swept into my room in a flurry of huffing breath. Her rounded face was flushed dark and miserable, like one of our tree’s fruits gone to rot, and she was sheened with sweat.

My first thought was for what I might have done to wrong her. My second was a nasty pleasure in her discomfort.

“Up, up, you lazy girl!” The duck woman slapped the covers away from me.

“I am-”

Her murderous glare cut my words short. “The Factor will be here within minutes. You must present yourself.”

It was not even daylight outside. He could not be so early. No one of importance rose before the dawn. Not in any book or story or hallway gossip that I had ever heard.

I remained calm in the face of her fear. Sitting up, I stretched. “Then I will wear the green silk shift. And take the time to brush my hair with a few drops of oil.”

The dress was the color of Federo’s eyes. It also set off my dark brown skin to great advantage. As for my hair, though I kept it coiled and pinned most often, when it was down, it flowed to my thighs and drew admiring glances from many of the women who came to work with me. Mistress Cherlise was especially taken with it. She’d advised me not to let my hair grow ragged with neglect, and never forget the effect it would have on men.