Jay Lake - Green

Federo sat on his heels and watched me sew awhile. After a time, he asked, “May I help you sew, or is this something you must do for yourself?”

I considered that. The answer was not immediately obvious to me. I had always thought of the silk as something a woman made for herself. Clearly, I had not sewn my own bells as an infant, though. Just as clearly, whatever tradition demanded had long been abused and discarded in my case.

The outcome was what mattered most now.

In a sudden rush of thought, the decision was straightforward enough. “I would be pleased to have your help, but at a cost.” I caught his eye in the faint light rising up from the hooded lamp. “Tell me where I came from, as you understand it. I remember the frogs and the plantains and the rice and my father’s ox, but I never have known the name of the place. None of my studies ever showed me maps across the Storm Sea.”

He picked up a needle and struggled awhile to thread it. I did not press him at first for words, for I could see the thoughts forming behind his eyes. Finally Federo got a bell sorted out and bent to his side of the silk. He would not meet my gaze as he began to speak. “Surely you know there was the strictest order never to mention your origins within the Pomegranate Court.”

“Which is foolish. All one need do is look at my face to see I was born nowhere near the Stone Coast.”

“Of course. The beauty we all prized… prize… in you was founded in part on that very thing. But to mention your birth-country would be to remind you of the past, and goad you into keeping those memories strong.”

“Unlike how you and the Dancing Mistress treated me,” I said dryly.

“Plans within plans, Green.” He finally glanced at me, then looked back down at a fresh bell he was embarked on. “You hail from a country called Selistan. It is found a bit more than six hundred knots west of south, sailing from Copper Downs out across the Storm Sea.”

Selistan!

I finally had a name for my home. Not just a place of frogs and snakes and rice paddies, but a place in the world with a name, that appeared on maps.

“Wh-where in Selistan?”

“I am not sure.” He sounded uncomfortable. “Kalimpura is the great port where much of the trade from across the sea comes. I landed at a fishing town some thirty leagues east of Kalimpura, in a province called Bhopura. The town itself is called Little Bhopura, though I know of no Great Bhopura anywhere.”

“We walked far from my village to Little Bhopura,” I said cautiously.

Federo laughed. If his amusement had not been so obviously genuine, it would have hurt my heart. “We hiked about two leagues across a dry ridgeline separating the river valley where you were living from the coast where I landed.” He smiled at me fondly. “You must recall that as a vast journey, but think how small you were then. I doubt you’d ever been more than three furlongs from your father’s farm in your life. Today you could cover the distance in a few hours. You would not even notice the effort.”

I recalled the sense of enormous space, walking the entire day, stopping to take a meal. He was not mocking me; he was describing my earliest childhood. Everyone begins small.

Another bell wanted threading. I focused on that a moment to gather my thoughts. Federo’s silence was inviting, not angry or defensive. Below us, the warehousemen pushed their great door open and began their day.

When I spoke again, my voice was low. “Where is my father’s farm?”

“I… I do not know. Not anymore.” He sounded ashamed.

Federo was not telling me something. I picked at the thought awhile. I did not wish to push my anger at him. That well was deep and inexhaustible. Right now I was thoughtful, not angry. “Federo. What was my father’s name?”

His face was so close to his sewing, he risked poking himself in the eye. “I do not know.”

“What was my name?”

He would not meet my gaze at all.

My anger raced. “You bought a girl whose name you did not ask from a man whose name you did not know.”

Federo looked up at me, though his face was mostly in shadow. “I have bought many things from many peo-”

“I am not a thing!”

We were both silent, staring at one another as some crate crashed to the floor below us.

“I know you are not a thing,” he hissed after the rumble and mutter of voices below resumed. “I am sorry for how I spoke. But please, Green, you surely take my meaning.”

Bending back to my own sewing, I grumbled that I understood. But how could he not know? How could this man buy me like fruit at a market, strip me away from my family and all my heritage, and recall nothing?

Federo resumed speaking. “I can tell you this much: A man there watches for families with children of… potential value.” His voice dropped as he blushed with shame. “F-families where there is trouble. No money, or the death of a parent.”

Which made me what? A commodity, of course. A brokered, broken child. “I suppose you have a bill of sale?” I asked in my nastiest voice.

“No.” Now he sounded weary and sad. “You were a cash transaction. I have a note in my account book.”

“Was I a bargain?”

He stared at me a long while. Then: “I believe I am done with this conversation.”

I wanted to make a fight with him. I wanted to rage at him for stealing everything from me and then pouting at my questions. Federo had claimed the privilege of power when he bought me, and now he claimed the privilege of injured dignity in order to remain silent concerning the truths of my life.

There was no purpose in attacking him. It might satisfy my pride, but anger from me would not prompt him to tell me any more than he already had. Patience was a hard lesson. My teachers had been very thorough.

The Dancing Mistress joined us that night. She brought more food, this time strips of smoked venison along with dried braids of shallots and garlic. After our conversation failed, Federo and I had spent the day sewing in silence. Occasional comments passed between us, but the best thing I could find to do with my anger was let it retreat back down the well from which it ever bubbled.

Her arrival was a fresh breeze stirring our thickening air of mistrust. She looked at us both and must have understood what had passed. Eventually I came to understand that her kind did not judge human faces so well, but they could read human scents quite clearly. The two of us reeked of the banked fire of our argument. That evening, all I knew was that she sat down and laid out a simple meal, then quite literally interposed herself between Federo and me.

“You have made great progress.”

We’d sewn over twelve hundred bells. Less than four years of my life, but a good day’s work. My fingers ached with the myriad stabs of the needle. That was progress.

“Yes,” I admitted.

The Dancing Mistress inclined her chin as she nodded gravely at Federo. Her voice was pitched low. “Your day was good enough, I trust.”

“We spoke of things past,” Federo muttered.

She turned back to me. “This upset you?”

What an astonishingly stupid question. I just stared at her.

“You are afraid,” she said.

“Angry, not afraid.”

“Fear and anger are opposite faces of the same blade.”

I’d read versions of that statement in half a dozen texts. “Don’t quote platitudes at me!”

“Just because words are often repeated does not rob an idea of its truth.” Her voice remained mild. “Some might even think the opposite.”

“I have a lifetime’s worth of anger. What am I afraid of, then?”

The answer was simple enough. “The consequences of what lies behind you. The price of what lies before you.”