“And did he?”
“No. A few of them understood the danger and took a group of scholars and their families into hiding in the mountains across the sea. They took with them all the books they could gather and set out — the last of the thinkers.”
“The library? That’s a lot of books!”
Susan smiled. “There were more, if you can believe it. These were only what they could save. Plenty burned in the wars; I can only dream of what they were like.”
She’d almost lost the thread of the story as she speculated, but now she took it up again, describing the years the scholars spent in the empty spaces they could find in the far-off lands, Elsare and Ferent and Sayca. Most of them had been lost among the people there, but a few came back when the first Genius was long dead, when his son and then his grandsons and great-grandsons had taken his place. Those scholars — Susan guessed they were the ancestors of the ones today — built the sanctuary in secret and hid it in the mist.
Nell thought about this. “If they can do things like make the mist, why haven’t they used it to destroy the Genius or take the city? What’s stopping them?”
But Susan had no answer, and at talk of the mist she’d retreated into herself again, if only a little. She set the book down and rubbed her eyes.
“I’m tired now,” she said. “And I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find out more. We’ll tell Max, too.”
She reached up and snuffed the lamp, leaving the room in darkness. Nell blinked and turned her head to the window, now the only source of light. She heard Susan lie down, sighing. Outside, stars crowded the sky, dust and glitter and splintered radiance, as the faint glow of the half moon, nearly out of sight over the sanctuary, spread a milky sheen across the dark.
The corn harvest took the first hours of the next day, and Nell found herself walking beside Minna and a frail-looking girl named Chim beneath the tasseled heads of the corn, peering into them to check if the silk that flowed from them had browned. She pulled a fat cob from the stalk and tossed it into the wide burlap sack the others carried between them. She had the urge to lag, but Minna and Chim kept her moving. The morning mistress, a stout, dark-skinned young woman called Leese, was up ahead, lecturing as she pulled corn on the wonders of crop rotation. Mistress Leese spoke in slow, perfectly articulated sentences, as if she were always reading aloud at the front of the class. Nell tried to imagine her in a hurry, anywhere, for anything, and failed.
The morning cool lingered in the fields, and the sweetness of the corn was in the air. All around Nell, the green stalks waved and whispered, and she thought that she could love this kind of school, despite the Shepherdess’s persistent cheer, despite Mistress Leese, now expounding on the mysteries of winter rye and oats and the beneficial qualities of hairy vetch. She could love it for the cool of the morning air and the smell of corn and the blue eggshell sky overhead, and the sounds of the little girls singing.
But corn and sky and hairy vetch were nothing to do with windows. She wondered what Max was learning.
Later, when the girls had washed and turned the corn over for shucking to Susan’s group, who waited to separate the cobs from the silk before passing it to the herbalist who would take the silk for his medicines, Nell met Susan in the hall.
“The older class, what do they learn?” she asked her.
Susan frowned in that way she had now, as if she were hard of hearing and trying to make words out.
“I don’t know. Proper shucking techniques, this morning. And the uses of corn silk.”
“Yes, but what else?”
Susan shrugged. “Geography. Some history. And we’re analyzing a long poem called ‘The March of Anam,’ about one of their heroes. Why?”
Nell didn’t understand Susan sometimes. Had she forgotten why they’d come? It wasn’t to learn to heal bed-wetting with corn silk.
“I’m waiting to hear about windows, that’s why! Aren’t you?”
But Susan looked again like she hadn’t heard.
“Susan!”
Susan jumped a little, but now she only seemed annoyed. “Of course! Of course I am,” she said. “And when I find the right person to ask, I will. Maybe Max has had better luck.”
She moved down the hall then, as if they’d finished the conversation. Nell looked at the girls passing in the hallway in their brightly colored dresses, laughing and talking. Between the doors hung needlework scenes of young men beside a fountain, listening to an old man expound; a hooded man emerging from a cave; and crowds of robed scholars standing in boats, crossing the sea. Waves of cerulean wool, stones the color of ashes, vines of green satin thread that spread like fingers across low walls, these Nell turned to, away from the throng of people who moved past like flowing water, with Nell alone an unmoving stone, a solitary rock battered by a sense that something was wrong.
She studied the weavings, standing there a long time, until the hall quieted and she was truly by herself.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Mistress Meva stood behind her, smiling as always. Nell took a step away from her. She disliked the earnestness of the woman, the strident jolliness that seemed like some kind of obligation the woman performed, a perpetual, hard-to-do good deed. But she knew her own silence wasn’t polite, so she said, “Who made them?”
In the unseen but very heavy chart she thought the mistress carried around in her head, Nell could tell she’d just gotten a gold star. The Shepherdess grinned widely. “Women!” she said, as if the fact ought to be a shocking surprise. “Women all through the ages. Of course, these aren’t as old as that. Only a few of the very ancient ones were saved. They say some go back as far as the sage kings, which is quite ancient. But of course those would be in the heart now, along with the books of mystery.”
“The heart?”
“Of the sanctuary — in the last garden. A very special place.”
“Have you ever seen them?”
Nell watched her invisible gold star drop right to the floor with the look of consternation this question brought to the Shepherdess’s face.
“Oh, no! No, of course not! Only the council members go there — the sacred elders. And even they only on the most important of occasions.”
Her smile came right back, though, as she explained that the weavings and needlework in the other bands were the product of the past hundred years, and that among the artisans, there were several weavers now who were known to produce beautiful work.
“You could visit them, if you’re interested. We always like to encourage our girls’ interests.”
Nell said she’d very much like to see them, and the Shepherdess, delighted, promised she would speak to the artisans. Nell thanked her and watched the woman walk off, bouncing. She thought she’d earned back her gold star and another besides.
But by that afternoon, she’d lost them again, without understanding how. Each day, the girls began after lunch by reciting the chant of order.
To the day the sun,
To the night the moon.
To each its realm,
Its bounty and boon.
In order created
And in order, life.
Thus banish longing
And banish strife.
Nell had only just begun to learn the words, and she wasn’t sure she understood them. What did longing have to do with order, anyway? She discovered the answer by accident not too long after when, responding to a question from the Shepherdess, she said idly that she’d rather emulate the sage king Plauth than his dutiful mother, who had risen daily before dawn to bring her small son to the great academy in Kiyakosa, the mountain city.
“Modesty,” Mistress Meva admonished her, frowning slightly.
Nell, who hadn’t much experience provoking people unintentionally, just stared at her, and the Shepherdess softened.
“In the city,” she said gently, “there is confusion and disorder. But here we understand that there must be those who nurture and those who lea
d, those who open the first of doors and those who go through them, to others. Do you understand?”
Nell didn’t. Or perhaps it was that she was afraid she did, a little. And she didn’t like it. Behind her, she heard Zirri snicker.
Nell said nothing, and she turned to the windows when Mistress Meva went on with her lecture. The afternoon classroom was one of the few that sat not above the kitchens but beneath the dormitories, and looked also onto the valley. From this angle, Nell couldn’t see the hill; the view was lost in the high fronds of corn. Outside, women and a few men moved through the rows a second time, filling their coarse-woven bags with any cobs the girls had missed. Nell watched them, slightly hunchbacked as they picked, making the lacy heads of the cornstalks shiver and bend. She wished she were outside again. She wondered if Max was hearing stories of the great mothers and their many exploits gathering firewood in the snow and making do with little so they could send their sons away to cities that sat on peaks, full of forbidden doors.
In the sky outside, a bright mountain of white clouds crossed the sun, casting shadows onto the valley. From the west, a lone dark cloud drifted their way until it moved among them, a gray stain on a white dress.
The rain came down and wetted the trees on the mountain and the plants in the garden, and the crops in the valley, far below. It had been a harvest-weather morning — clear and breezy, bright and fair. Now the rain came and the old rhyme with it, the memory of children chanting at the windows:
A blessed rain damps the ground
And never touches day.
For the ground must feed,
But the ground is blind,
So why disturb our play?
In the valley there were children still, even newcomers, to sing songs and chant rhymes. And yet despite the joy of harvest and song, the mist boiled and rolled, unstopping. Like an unhealed wound, pricked and bleeding, like an animal hurt and enraged, it growled just out of sight, muttering and dangerous. Its venom seeped into the day, fouling even the blessed rain. Fearsome it had always been, lying in wait. But the exile knew the power of the thing and yearned suddenly for the old fear, known and long endured. For the sound told its tale. The mist no longer crouched, waiting. It was rising to the hunt.
Late that afternoon, Nell found Susan alone in the room. She sat facing the window, a new stack of books beside her on the bed. Nell’s heart lifted a little. Despite the annoyances of the day, Susan was shaking off the weight that had been flattening her lately. Here she was again, with her books. Nell waited for her to go on about Mistress Bianna and the rows and rows of things to read.
But when she came around the bed, she saw that Susan sat rigid, staring blankly at the book that lay open on her lap. A tremor passed through Nell; she had the urge to raise a hand and check Susan for fever. And yet the color remained in Susan’s cheeks. Only her eyes looked strange. She gazed out the window, at the rain pounding the green corn and the ruby-studded grapevines and the rows of peach trees with their soft-skinned fruit among the leaves. The plants crouched and bowed beneath the downpour. Susan didn’t look as if she saw any of it.
“What’s wrong?” Nell asked her.
Susan glanced up, startled. “Nothing,” she said. She seemed to wake to her surroundings, and looked down at the stack of books. “The nice woman in the library gave me everything I asked for. It’s just — I wish I could get some quiet.”
“You mean from the rain?”
Susan shook her head. “Rain? No. I’m talking about that echo. Don’t you hear it? That sound from the mountain? Doesn’t it get to you?”
Nell hesitated. She strained for a minute, trying to hear something beneath the rain. Was it like the sound bats made, high and scratchy, in the dark? She tried, but there was nothing.
“What does it sound like?” she asked Susan.
Susan furrowed her brow and closed her eyes, listening. “Like — like the sound a pot makes, bubbling, or the sound of people talking in another room. Words you can almost hear the shape of. I can’t really make it out, but it’s there. It makes it hard to think.”
Nell shifted uneasily. Never in her life had she seen her sister unable to disappear into a book, and now she had stacks of them but sat frowning over a single page.
“Those books say anything about order?” she asked, trying to pull Susan from her funk. “That’s all I heard about today! If order were a fat old man, I think Mistress Meva would be married to him by now.”
Susan looked up and laughed at that. The sound was almost enough to make Nell relax. “Well, you can see why,” she said. “Order. That’s tradition, really, and it holds this place together. They’ll pretty much do anything to protect it.”
Nell stopped smiling, and Susan again grew quiet. Nell watched her look around at the light-colored walls, the unlit lamps, the rain.
“It looks like home in some ways,” Susan said quietly. “Only it isn’t.”
“No,” Nell agreed. “It isn’t. And no matter how much people look like us here, I want to get out.”
But Susan sighed. “We can’t, though, Nell. There’s nowhere to go. We have to learn what they know here, or how will we ever get back?”
“Yes, well, when are we going to do things, then? And not just hear about other people doing them?”
Susan shook her head. “I don’t know. But that’s their way. It’s the old way, and so for them, it’s the only good one.”
“Hmph.”
“It’s going to be that way here, Nell. Don’t you see? It’s because of the Genius. He wanted change, and that’s what he got.”
Nell rolled over and stood up. The window had two smaller panes, one on each side, and she pulled open one of these, then thrust her hand out to catch the rain. She wondered if this was the mist, breaking into pieces, falling cold and gray on the pretty valley. If it was, would it be gone then? Or would it seep into the roots of everything and spoil it?
She turned her face from the window. “I’m starting to hate tradition, the way they talk about it around here. If it were a fat old man, I think I’d kick him.”
Susan laughed. “You probably would,” she said. “But it wouldn’t get you anywhere.” She closed the book she’d been staring at and studied the cover of it, running her hands along the raised lettering.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Traditions are important. They’re really just stories about what used to be. And stories are what keep you knowing who you are. If they hadn’t had the stories, they couldn’t have built this place and turned the change back. You have to admit, it’s beautiful here.”
Nell shut the window. Her hand had grown cold. Outside, the water ran in rivulets down the glass, turning the valley and the hill and the trees at the edge of the ridge into green paint. She’d spent most nights since they got here telling herself stories of home to keep from forgetting. Maybe the Shepherdess and the Master Watcher and all the rest of them felt the same way. Maybe they thought that if they didn’t keep hold of the stories, they’d lose everything. But could a story be good and also bad? Could it reverse the change and make the mist at the same time?
She had no answers, and Susan, despite her pile of books, could be no help. For a while, Nell watched her struggling to read, but when she hadn’t turned the page after ten long minutes, Nell felt as if she could almost see the mist pushing at her sister, wrapping itself around Susan’s head, trying to smother her. It made her want to jump in and block it somehow, put her arms around Susan and bat it away. But then Susan would never let her do that. So she sat, helpless, as her sister squinted blindly at the book. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, Nell got up and left the room.
If rain kept everyone indoors, Nell had the urge to be out in it. No matter how high the ceilings or airy the rooms in the sanctuary, looking at Susan’s strained face made her feel closed in. She walked down the corridor toward the hillside stairs and on impulse knocked at Wista’s door.
Zirri opened it and eyed her coldly.
&nbs
p; “Nell!” Wista called from behind. “Come to tell me stories?”
Nell slipped past Zirri, who pointedly had not moved to make space for her.
“I guess so,” she said. She looked uncomfortably at Zirri, who was sneering.
“Want to go for a walk?”
Wista bobbed to her feet, her copper pendant swinging.
“Of course! Zirri, do you want to come?”
Nell smiled to herself. You couldn’t not like Wista, with her persistent friendliness. Her face had grown pretty, these last few days, as the last of the change had receded from it. She had become a round-eyed girl with a square chin and a little gap between her bottom teeth. The fingers that played with her pendant were slim.
Zirri, too, had completed the change, but if it had sweetened her disposition, Nell hadn’t noticed.
“Why would I want to walk in the rain?” Zirri said. She went and sat on her bed.
They left her there and made their way downstairs to borrow a walking canopy from Mistress Seta, who kept a store of them for rain harvests. An oilskin strung between poles, it let two walk side by side, each holding a pole, leaving a hand free to work. They took it out into the cornfield and walked beside the lines that had yet to be harvested.
“Wista, after you came down here, did you hear the mist? You know — sort of a hissing or anything?”
Wista shrugged, making rain spill off Nell’s side of the canopy and slap wetly into the mud.
“Does the mist have a sound?” she asked.
Nell guessed that was as much an answer as any.
For a while they just walked, listening to the rain. Nell couldn’t hear anything else.
“You’re different,” Wista said after a while. “You and those others you came with. Maybe that’s why you ask the questions you do. I wish I could do what you can.”
A little jangle of alarm rang in Nell’s chest.
“What do you mean, do what we can?”
“You know, read. And write. I saw that little one, Jean, do it. Who taught her so young? Did you?”
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