Jay Lake - Green

Federo grasped me tightly, more for safety than fear of flight, as the deck began to pour onto the dock and vice versa. The din was immense. Ship’s officers wielded stick and blade to keep order, or Fortune’s Flight would have been overrun. Still, it all had the flavor more of playacting than a brawl, as if the docksiders were expected to push and the ship’s company were expected to resist. A dance in five hundred parts, for men and cranes and plunging mules.

Federo leaned close and yelled something in my ear that I could not make out over the racket. I nodded as if I understood. The grip on my shoulder relaxed a trifle.

Soon enough the chaos sorted itself into a systematic ebb and flow. All the shouters had an intended audience. Everyone on deck knew who they were looking for. Gear was broken down and packed off quickly, hatches to the cargo holds thrown open, sailors told off for liberty with pay in their hands all in one swirling rush. Federo soon spotted his contact deep within the churn.

“Come!” he shouted.

Sailors carrying Federo’s gear surrounded us. With the aid of their muscles and fists, we pushed through the mob to a high-sided cart that waited on the cobbles at the head of the docks. Its surfaces were a deep, glossy red traced with gold striping and a small black design upon the door. The huge wheels were finished to match the body, with iron straps around their rims. A pair of large black animals, mad-eyed with trailing tails and flowing hair along their graceful necks, stamped in their traces under the watchful gaze of a man on a high bench at the front.

Federo opened the door and pushed me inside. He then slammed it shut to shout orders concerning the stowage of his gear. Several small windows admitted light, but the carriage was so tall, all I saw were rooftops, sky, and circling birds. I sat on a leather bench which was the softest thing I’d ever encountered in my life. Useless little buttons were set deep in the seat in a mockery of how I’d sewn my twice-lost bells. I picked at them and smelled the oils someone had used to polish the interior-lemon, and the pressings of some vegetable I didn’t know-until Federo returned.

He climbed in and took my hand with a firm squeeze. “We are almost there, girl.”

“I have a name,” I said sullenly. I must have still known it then.

His voice grew hard. “No, you do not. Not in this place. It is gone with your bells. Forward, always forward.”

As if responding to his words, the carriage lurched into motion. I could hear the coachman’s whip crack, the whistles and hup-hup-hups as he signaled his team, the curses as he shouted at the traffic. Soft as the seat was, the ride ran rougher than Fortune’s Flight even on stiff swells. Though Federo had told me of cobbles, I had never seen a stone road before that hour. The ride was miserable.

I stared at the passing rooftops and wondered if I should have thrown myself into the harbor after all.

We bounced past bright painted columns and burnished roofs and, once, a tree of copper and brass that overhung the road. I knew that if I climbed on my knees to stare outside, a parade of marvels would pass before my eyes. Later, I would wish very much that I had done so. In that moment, I merely wanted to go home.

The carriage passed through a large gate, then a smaller one, before finally creaking to a halt. Looking up through the windows, I could see walls all around us. The bulk of a large building loomed on one side, anchoring them. Walls and structure alike were made of a pale blue stone of a sort I had never seen. My entire village could have fit within this place.

Federo banged on the door. Someone opened it from the outside.

Our carriage could not be exited from inside, I realized. Caged again.

He stepped out and ushered me down. I saw the coachman climbing cautiously back onto his box. His eyes were now covered with a length of silk. That had not been true down at the docks.

This was a great puzzle.

Opposite the tall building was a low, wide structure of two storeys. The upper balcony provided deep shade for the lower floor. Its posts were carved with detailed scenes now overgrown with flowering vines. The second storey was roofed by more of the bright copper, backing up to the rise of the bluestone wall. A pomegranate tree grew out of a little circle of raised stone in the middle of the cobbled court. Somehow that lone, lonely tree reminded me of home.

Federo crouched to meet my eye level. “From here, you are among women. You have left the world to be in this place. I am the only man you will speak with, expect for the Factor himself, whenever he comes to see you. Use your head, little one.”

“I have a name,” I whispered once more in my words, thinking of Endurance’s bell.

He ruffled my hair. “Not until the Factor gives you one.”

My maggot man stepped back into the carriage and slammed the door behind him. The coachman cocked his head if listening, then drove his team very slowly around the pomegranate and through a narrow gate that shut behind him, pushed by unseen hands. The doors were some age-blackened wood, bound with iron and copper. They seemed as stout and unforgiving as the surrounding walls.

Though I saw no one, I heard throaty laughter.

“I am here,” I called out in my own words. Then I said it again in Federo’s words.

After a while, a woman not very much taller than I, but fat as any house duck, with protruding lips curved to match, waddled out from the shadowed porch. She was swathed in coarse black cloth that covered even her head. “So you’re the new one.” She used Federo’s words, of course. “I’ll have no more of that…”

The rest I did not understand. When I tried to ask what she meant, she slapped me hard upon the ear. I knew then that she intended me never to speak my own words. Just as Federo had warned me.

I resolved to learn her words so well that eventually this duck woman could never order me about again. I will clothe myself in bells , I thought proudly, and leave this place with my life in my own hands .

“I am Mistress Tirelle.” She didn’t look any less like a duck up close. Her lips stuck forward, and her two small eyes were so far apart, they threatened to sidle outward to her temples. She wore her black dowd like a badge of honor. I was never to see her clad in colors of any sort. Her thin hair was pulled back hard and thickened with some fiber, then painted black as a bosun’s boot.

She was a woman pretending to be a shadow pretending to be a woman.

Mistress Tirelle walked around me, stepping back and forth as she inspected. When I turned my gaze to watch, she grasped my chin hard and pulled it straight forward. “You never move without purpose, girl.”

I already knew there was no point in having that argument with this aging troll of a woman.

She leaned in close behind me. “You do not have purpose, girl, except what the Factor lends you. Or I in his place.” Her breath reeked of the northern herbs that had found their way into the stockpot aboard Fortune’s Flight -astringent without any decent heat to them, and strangely crisp, the smell gone half-sour from its journey through her mouth.

The woman continued to circle me. I remember this, like so much else in those days, through the lens of later understanding. In that first season, I was little taller than her waist, though by the time the end came between us, I could see the part in her hair without craning my neck. Somehow in memory I am both sizes at once: the small frightened girl whom Federo had spirited away from the fields of her home, and the angry gawk who fled those bluestone walls with cooling scrapings of a dead woman’s skin beneath her fingernails.

She was to be my first killing, at a time when I should already have known far better. I would have slain her that initial day, out of simple spiteful anger. It was the work of years to lacquer the nuances of a worthy, well-earned hatred over the fearful rage of the child I was.