Jay Lake - Green

“I’ll not have you play the slut with him,” Mistress Tirelle breathed, her fat face close to mine, though she now had to tilt her head back to meet my eye at such range.

“This will not be so different from Federo’s visits.” My voice held more confidence than my heart did. The Factor was no friend nor ally. Rather, he was the man who owned me in every part and piece. I was his more abjectly than any horse in his stables.

Old rage stirred.

Mistress Tirelle pinched my cheek hard. “You listen, Girl. The Factor is very different from that idiotic fop. We would none of us have food on our tables or beds at night if not for him. His word is your life. Federo…” She snorted, close as she ever came to laughing. “That man is a wastrel peacock who flies the world bargaining for future beauty.”

He’d bargained for my beauty once. Every scrap I’d eaten since then had come from the Factor by courtesy of that idiotic fop. Once again, as she always did, Mistress Tirelle saw me as receiving great favor in this house. Such charity, to raise the little farmer girl to high estate.

The small rebellions of my thoughts were no matter. We launched into a flurry of activity. First I must be washed clean, though I always kept myself fair. Especially after the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, though it had been nine days since my last such. Mistress Tirelle used cotton cloths pressed into a bowl of rose water to lave my back, then set me to wiping my arms and chest and lower body while she piled my hair.

“You do not know,” she whispered fiercely. “I have tried every minute of these years to make you ready. You do not know, Girl.”

You could have told me what I do not know, I thought, but I said nothing. She would not beat me immediately before the Factor arrived, but there were always later days. Mistress Tirelle never forgot an infraction. She also cultivated a perfect recall of any perceived slight to her dignity.

So we worked quickly at the efforts of beauty. My hair was let loose, oiled, and brushed as swiftly as we could. I had not yet been judged ready for the scented waters and alcohols used by women full grown, but Mistress Tirelle outlined my eyes in dark kohl and touched my face very lightly with brushes from the paint pots. She traced my lips with dyes, and checked my teeth for untoward stains or flecks of last night’s dinner. Then we folded me into the shift I’d tailored from a bolt of green lawn cloth. Under the instruction of Mistress Leonie, I had sewn it with a hint of bodice to signal the change that was already on its way. My painted face and the cut of my clothing would lead where my body had yet to go.

Mistress Tirelle muttered and cursed as she worked to ready me for the Factor’s inspection. I submitted to her attentions. The soft touches and momentary efforts at arranging this and that were as close as she ever came to treating me with tenderness. In some strange way, we were family to one another. She had been as much a prisoner of the Pomegranate Court as I, locked within these stone walls just as I had been all these years. I’d never asked if she’d loved a man or borne a child or found a life somewhere else. I’d just accepted all the days she had given me, along with the lectures, the punishments, and the odd bits of joy.

What else was there to do?

I tried to imagine Mistress Tirelle wrapped in bells, atop Endurance’s back for the slow, hot trip to the temple platforms and the union of her soul with the wide world. I could not envision this terrible old woman following the ways of my grandmother.

Here in this city of silent gods with a stranger on the throne, who was there for her to follow? The Factor, perhaps. He was certainly the focus of her fear. Perhaps he was the focus of Mistress Tirelle’s faith as well.

Seeing her under the brassy sun of my birth was too much to contemplate. I could not bring the image full-formed to mind, but a smile slipped unbidden upon my lips.

“Do not smirk at the Factor,” Mistress Tirelle said with a growl. She stood me and turned me, checking me in the light of my candles and lanterns. “You will not shame us,” she added. “Your life has no greater moment than this.”

I could make no answer that would not provoke far greater conflict, so I held my tongue yet again. She propelled me out the door of my sleeping chamber to the porch. I walked ahead of Mistress Tirelle down the stairs. She followed, and retreated to the deeper shadows of the downstairs sitting room. “You will await him by the tree,” she whispered from her hiding place.

The pomegranate sheltered me in the dawn’s pallid light. The sky above glowed pearlescent, some combination of mist and cloud leaching the heavens of their color in favor of a generic, glossy beauty. It had not dawned cold, but still the air had enough of a chill to raise bumps along my arm. The tree was heavy with fruit. I had already spotted enough to fill both a good basket and a beggar’s basket from the pickings on the branch.

A solitary fruit lay windfall on the cobbles, out of Mistress Tirelle’s view, about where the Dancing Mistress would usually stand to meet me for our night runs. I looked at the sad deflation of its curve, deformed in striking the ground.

That was me, fallen away from my roots. Except I hadn’t been left to lie on the cobbles. I’d come across the sea as smartly as any fruit carried to the kitchen, and been dressed here for the pleasure of a great man.

Here I had come nearly the full circle round. Perhaps the Factor would take me to the harbor and we would board Fortune’s Flight for a trip across the sea to the hot land of my birth. Clad in white, picking up bells as I walked along the road that ran over the highlands from that small fishing port, I would return to my father on the arm of the Factor as he smiled and reported my great progress.

Even in the momentary fantasy, though I could remember the brown eyes of the ox as clearly as if Endurance stood before me even now, the only image I could bring to mind of my father was a dark-haired man with skin the color of my own hurrying away through the rice paddies as Federo tugged at my hand.

He had never looked back at me. I had never stopped looking back at him.

The past yawned behind me like one of the pits underground, threatening to swallow my sense of myself, my purpose so carefully crafted in this imprisoned life.

Then my thoughts were torn away by the screeching of the gate. Both great doors were thrown open, as was done only for delivery wagons or the very rare carriage. Horses stamped and snorted as they raced into the courtyard in a jingle of harness under the small-voiced yips and calls of their riders: soldiers in tall leather boots that gleamed like roach’s wings, their uniforms rough with wear but still elegant and carefully straight. Each rider was blindfolded that he not see me, but they carried swords and spears aplenty despite that handicap.

A coach followed the soldiers, rattling toward me to creak to a stop beneath the pomegranate tree. Its glossy black body swayed slightly on the leather and iron straps of its suspension. No sigil or heraldry was blazoned upon the door. The coachmen were blindfolded, too, and seemed less at ease than their escort.

Nothing happened for a time. No motion, no voice or sound from the darkened windows of the carriage. The door did not open.

The man within owned me, owned my life. By his will, Federo had first taken me from the hot lands of the sun and brought me here to the miserable precincts of the Stone Coast. My hands tensed in patterns the Dancing Mistress had taught me, but I forced them to loosen.

Patience was always the greatest lesson of the Pomegranate Court, the same patience that the sky taught to the very stones of the soil. I waited, wondering.