Jay Lake - Green

Surely I deserved a word from this man. The entire flow of my life had been directed toward this moment, toward his hands.

Then the door handle of the carriage turned. It creaked. For a long second, I would have given everything that was mine to give to be anywhere else.

The door swung open.

When the Factor stepped from his coach, my first thought was surprise that he appeared so ordinary. He was a man of middling height dressed in a dark morning suit of a classic cut, velvet lapels over a coarser cloth, with low quarter boots folded over at the ankle. His hair was brown, his skin had the sun-seared summer ruddiness of so many of his Stone Coast countrymen, his eyes were a strange gray flecked with gold. He’d run to fat in the middle and on his cheeks. Pipeleaf spilled down his ruffled silk shirt. He came so close to me, I could smell the oils in his hair, the ambergris-and-attar of his perfume. There was no scent of sweat at all.

He possessed a presence such as I had never really believed a person could have. Like a dark prince in the stories I’d read, the Factor filled all the space in front of me and around me as if he owned the world and I were some small intrusion. The breeze stilled at his appearance. The grackles and jays at their morning chatter on the rooftops stilled and froze, until one fled. The rest followed in a panicked rush of wings.

For a moment, the sun seemed to stutter in its passage through the sky.

He studied me. His face was impassive. I wondered if I should have curtsied, or otherwise presented myself.

The calculation in his eyes told me that I was no more of a person to him than the carriage behind his back.

This man is reviewing his investment. He is not meeting a woman. But he will someday.

Here was the true architect of all my troubles in this life. This man’s hand had tugged Federo’s strings and pushed at the invisible stick that penetrated Mistress Tirelle from arse to scalp.

Then he took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back and forth. He viewed the angles and planes of my face a moment. Releasing me without pain, he swept my hair away from my ears and inspected them. Taking first one hand then the other, he spread my fingers, checked their length, then examined each nail in turn. He walked around me twice before stopping behind me.

A horse nickered. Two dozen men breathed loud, though I looked at none of them. Never had our eyes met. I continued to be nothing to him. I began to wonder what the Factor was about back there when he tore my green shift away.

Cold plucked at my skin, raising pimples all along my back. Shivering, my joints ached in the chill, and tears rose sudden and unexpected in my eyes. To the Factor I wasn’t even an investment. I was livestock.

After a miserable time naked in the wind, I felt his fingers test the softness of my waist, then the firmness of my buttocks. He walked around me once more to gaze at the buds of my breasts and down to where my legs met my body.

The Factor nodded to Mistress Tirelle in the shadows behind me. He stepped to his coach, then turned back to finally meet my eyes.

My tears had been whisked away by the wind. In their place, a stinging tremble remained, which I knew would show as a redness should he choose to reach toward me and spread my eyelids back for inspection. Within, I was torn between anger and deep embarrassment. I had been masterfully trained to conceal both emotions, and so I did. I pretended the shivering in my body was the wind’s chill.

As he looked at me, I returned the stare. Something in his gaze made me think of the lifeless gray eye of the ocean leviathan that had nearly taken my life off the shores of my home.

Here was the root of his power, or at least a lens to peer within it. The Factor’s soulless eyes were no more alive than the sea monster’s had been-filmy, quiescent. Dead.

My teeth ached as my breath shuddered in my chest. The Factor didn’t seem to breathe at all, something I realized only when I saw him inhale.

“Emerald,” he said, clearly and distinctly.

Then he was gone in a swirl of horses and men and clattering weapons. Even blindfolded, the guards circled with a strange precision, yipping and whistling to mark their places and guide their mounts. They moved like water gyring down a drain. Some men went through the gate first with weapons high. The carriage followed, then the rest of the men.

In a moment, they were gone as if they’d never been present. Only a few mounds of steaming dung marked the passage of the soldiers and their horses. That and the turmoil within my heart.

After a while, Mistress Tirelle waddled out to me. I heard her steps stumping on the cobbles of the courtyard before she rounded the pomegranate tree to look me over. Her face was bent into her almost-smile. She appeared nearly pleased.

“Well, Emerald, you passed.”

“Emerald.” I tried the word in my mouth as if it were a name. Girl had been a name that meant nothing, a description only. He had named me Emerald to mark me as a precious possession, no more.

In the language of my birth, I did not know the word for emerald. I determined that I would use that tongue to call myself Green. That was as close as I could come, and it was a word that belonged to me rather than to these maggot people. The Factor’s precious belongings I would mock with the profane infection of my own tongue.

This was also the greatest change that had come upon me since Federo had met my father at the edge of the rice paddies. I looked into Mistress Tirelle’s eyes and found all unexpected a strange species of sympathy there. “What becomes of me now?”

Her face wrinkled in thought a moment. Surely she knew the answer, and was just picking through the secrets she thought might be fit to tell me now that I had a name and standing in the Factor’s dead, dead eyes.

“That depends on whether the Duke fancies a new consort within the next two years or so.” She poked me in the chest. Her rough nail snagged at my bare skin. “Otherwise you’ll fetch a spice trader’s ransom anywhere along the Stone Coast.”

Those words chilled my already heavy heart so much, I could not hide the shiver that crawled along my spine. Somehow I had thought myself in waiting for the Factor, or a great house here in Copper Downs. I had long known that this blue-walled house manufactured women fit for thrones, but I’d never fully considered what it meant to me, for who I was. For what the Dancing Mistress had once described as the power I might someday hope to grasp hold of.

Federo had not bought me for the Factor. Not for the man, at any rate. Federo had bought me for a market. Meat with two legs and deep eyes and a face and body on which he’d wagered years and untold wealth in hopes I would grow to beauty. Salable, brokerable beauty.

Federo had bought me for meat, and my father had sold me for a whore.

Words, I told myself. These were all words. The maggot people of the Stone Coast lived and died by their words. I’d known this from the first. “Emerald” marked me as a jewel in the Factor’s case. Nothing more, nothing less.

I blinked away the sting of some new emotion I could not yet put a name to, and followed Mistress Tirelle back to the rooms that boxed my life.

There were no lessons that day. No Mistresses, no practicing, no drills or dances or calligraphy or punishment or anything. This was the first idle time I’d experienced in all the years since I’d come to the Pomegranate Court.

I sat before the hearth in the downstairs sitting room and wandered through my memories. Endurance, the frogs in their ditches, my grandmother’s face, her bells still jingling with every step of the ox. I turned the imaginary silk over in my mind, counting the days.

Nothing helped. I was overwhelmed by the bitterness in finally reaching a true understanding of what I’d known all along: I was nothing. No person lived behind Girl, Emerald, Green-whoever I might pretend to be.