Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  Josquin closed his eyes and sank into the water up to his chin beard.

  And so she told Josquin about her search, with a few omissions: how she had gone to St. Bert’s hoping to learn more; how only Will had seemed to believe her; and how they’d planned to go searching for the World Serpents together, but that had fallen through (she didn’t go into detail); how she’d determined to find one on her own after she ran away from home (she felt some delicacy about Pathka’s pilgrimage, so she glossed over it); how she’d fallen down a hole and glimpsed the beast; how she’d followed it to its lair, met a mournful monk, and then the library of Santi Prudia had sunk into the earth.

  Josquin listened without interrupting. Tess drifted around the room as she narrated, from the desk to the bed and back, until she was seated on the little bench beside the tub, with his towels. His body looked pale and contorted under the water, like some strange fish.

  Tess leaned her elbows on her knees. “I want to present this discovery at the Academy,” she said. “What did you think of it? Is it believable?”

  Josquin opened his serious blue eyes. “I believe you, but the way you tell it is a bit personal for an Academy presentation. You’d be telling hundreds of strangers, you realize.”

  “Personal?” cried Tess. That was what she’d been trying to avoid by leaving out Pathka’s quest, Will, and Julian/Dozerius—by concentrating on the facts. “Which part was personal?”

  Josquin exhaled, rippling the surface of the water. “I don’t even know what to call it. The ecstatic-revelation-alongside-a-monk part?”

  “That’s the most important part,” said Tess, crossing her arms.

  “Important to you,” he said gently. “The Academy isn’t always sympathetic to that sort of thing. If they get scornful, it’s going to hurt.”

  Tess laughed. “I’ve got a mask to wear. I’ll go as Tes’puco. He can take it.”

  Josquin rolled his eyes. “You know that name is childishly rude?”

  “I revel in it,” she said haughtily.

  “If you’re going under an assumed name,” he said, “at least pick something with more dignity. What’s the other ne’er-do-well you sometimes pretended to be? Brother Such-and-so?”

  “Brother Jacomo?” Tess shook her head. “Not for this. He’s too earnest, desperately trying not to be the terrible clergyman he knows he is in his heart. He would take it personally if they laughed. Tes’puco is sassy and bold. Tes’puco doesn’t care.”

  “If you say so,” said Josquin, clearly unconvinced.

  “Anyway,” said Tess, waving it off, “they won’t think twice about the personal parts, not when there are so many significant facts for them to cogitate upon. How does it glow? What does it eat? How did it heal me?”

  She blurted out the last question before it struck her that Josquin would have feelings on this subject. In fact, she’d expected him to ask about the healing, and was only now thinking that perhaps his silence meant something—but what?

  “I don’t know if it would be possible to…to collect its blood or something,” Tess stammered. “Did the blood heal me, though, or was it touching the serpent that…?”

  Josquin pursed his lips and said nothing; his fingers drummed on the rim of the tub.

  He didn’t seem hopeful or excited or even particularly curious about the prospect. Tess tried to make sense of that and couldn’t. She’d assumed…she’d assumed Angelica would be grateful. Assuming was, perhaps, not the best way to understand things.

  “Would you want to be healed, if we could figure out how?” Tess asked quietly.

  Josquin looked up at her, a look with uncountable facets; she waited for the words. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I feel like I should, and maybe someday I will, but…I don’t know how to make you understand. On a bad day—and there have been plenty of those—I might’ve said yes, please, wave your wand and make it go away. Now, though? I hate how ungrateful I sound, but I find the idea insulting, as if you were saying, ‘All your pain was a mistake. Here, have everything back.’ Except it wouldn’t be everything, not the time, not the suffering, not the thousand ways I’ve changed.”

  He shifted in the water. “I wouldn’t wish for this, Tess, but I’m not sure I’d wish it away, either. Does that make any sense at all?”

  Tess couldn’t speak. She remembered Countess Margarethe, swooping in like some fairy godmother with all of Tess’s abandoned hopes on a plate, and remembered her own reaction.

  His hand was still on the edge of the tub. Tess laid her hand over his and squeezed. And that was the beginning, though neither of them knew it yet.

  Tess, who was occupied a great deal with embroidery, did not at first understand that Josquin didn’t stay home all day. She’d assumed he must be a shut-in; he’d mentioned friends, but she figured they came to see him and not the other way around. Only when she noticed that Gaida never seemed to do any shopping but there was always food at home did she begin to realize Josquin had an entire life outside the house.

  If the weather cooperated, he went out every day. He’d been off the herald circuit for more than five years, but he still knew half of Segosh. When Tess had an afternoon off, she began to accompany him, to market or the Hall of Archives or the Spotted Livery, where elderly members of the Brotherhood of Heralds drank.

  If Tess didn’t have an afternoon off, she soon learned that she could get one by saying to Gaida, “Josquin asked me to—”

  “Of course,” Gaida would reply. “Go.”

  Josquin knew the masters of the Ninysh Academy. “When you’re a marvel of medicine and engineering,” he explained to Tess as she followed him through the market with a shopping basket, “of course they all want a good look. I should have died, if not from my injury then from infection. Between Dr. Belestros and St. Blanche, I’ve been a prop at more than twenty lectures.”

  Tess looked at him sidelong. “ ‘Prop’? That must get old quickly.”

  “It would,” he said, “but St. Blanche is a darling and I can begrudge her nothing. Also, it’s important. Others will be saved, thanks to my patient posing. It’s a small price to pay.”

  He didn’t say it aloud, but Tess understood: a miraculous serpent-cure would render their work and his sacrifices unnecessary. That didn’t make it bad, just…less simple than it seemed.

  Tess polished an apple on her jerkin. “Could you get Tes’puco an invitation to speak?”

  “I can advise Tes’puco—if that is his real name—that Grand High Master Pashfloria wants to be petitioned in writing.”

  Tess got right to it, colonizing Josquin’s desk when they got home. He barely had time to hide his poetry. “He who snoozeth gets his verses read,” said Tess while Josquin snatched away notes, correspondence, and poems dense with scrawled commentary. Tess wasn’t that interested in his poetry, which was surely all damp laments for lost Seraphina; she only meant to tease him.

  “What hand would Tes’puco use? Something brash and masculine.” She wrote I swashed and buckled my way across Iboia in several trial scripts.

  “Which hand is your own?” said Josquin, sorting his work onto different shelves.

  “All of them,” said Tess, choosing her manliest and setting to work.

  She signed her long petition Tes’puco the Explorer. “You sound like a character in a children’s story,” Josquin teased, but Tess would not be dissuaded.

  Master Pashfloria replied two days later, expressing mild doubts about her story. Tess sent him one of the bowl-sized scales from Big Spooky, a sketch of Santi Prudia and the caverns beneath it, and finally, for good measure, a wholly inadequate drawing of Anathuthia.

  It took the Grand High Master a week to write back, and Tess despaired that her request had been denied. When his letter finally arrived, however, it told her she was booked to give a speech before the entire assembly at th
e Great Odeon in three weeks. She wrote a gracious note of acceptance in Tes’puco’s best formal handwriting. Less formally, she danced around Josquin’s room; he watched her with a spark of fond amusement in his eye.

  Josquin had called upon his old comrades at the Brotherhood of Heralds to deliver these missives. “We need the work,” he told her as they trundled down to the Spotted Livery. “Now that thniks have become so commonplace, our ranks are dwindling. We still escort dignitaries, but we’re not the fastest way to carry news anymore.”

  Tess noted the first-person pronouns. He was still a herald in his heart.

  Taking the letters gave him an excuse to spend an afternoon with the old-timers. Not that he needed an excuse; in addition to his poetry, he was writing a history of the Ninysh heralds, so he went several times a week to take notes and drink beer around the flimsy green tables.

  Tess liked to go along and listen. The old heralds had ridden every road in Ninys, and there was something comforting and familiar in their tales. The Road took them from adventure to adventure; they met curious characters, left them behind, and found them again. Tess could almost see the warp and weft of a great tapestry, the world, being woven as they spoke.

  Occasionally the stories got ribald. Tess’s presence seemed not to deter anyone from telling such tales; she only hoped Josquin didn’t see how she blushed. Indeed, Josquin’s bawdy stories were in some ways the worst. Not that he went into lascivious detail—he wasn’t one to wax rhapsodic about heaving bosoms or curvaceous backsides—but he was unfailingly frank. If he’d painted himself as a dashing romantic hero, she could have imagined he was talking about someone else. Tess found herself uncomfortably moved by his transparency.

  “Tell me something,” she said one day as they walked home to make supper for Gaida. The late autumn sky arced clear and blue above them. “Have you had a lot of paramours?”

  “How many is a lot?” he said. “More than six? Less than eight? In that case, yes. Most of them after the accident, if that’s your real question.”

  Tess gaped at him; she should have known he’d be forthright and direct. “But…do you have bastard children? Surely you must.”

  “Heavens, I hope not. No one’s ever told me so,” he said, raising his brows mildly as if this had never occurred to him. “It’s easy enough to avoid.” Tess frowned at the word easy.

  “Remind me sometime and I’ll show you Rebecca’s ‘basket of joy,’ ” he said. “Midwives know these things; she always had a mountain of herbs, Porphyrian pessary resin, you name it.”

  Tess could not have named any of it and was lightly appalled that he could mention such things so casually, as if they were nothing. Deep in her gut, a little flame of anger burned. She could’ve used such knowledge, once upon a time, if anyone had seen fit to inform her. She scowled to herself, but had no intention of reminding him to show her the basket.

  And yet.

  Like the metaphorical cat she was—stalked by curiosity—she finally conquered her mortification and asked. Josquin showed her everything in the basket and explained what it was for. Tess learned new words and went red as a beet, and Josquin kindly pretended not to notice.

  * * *

  It was probably inevitable that Tess began to feel things for Josquin that she would rather not have felt.

  It wasn’t merely that he was so open about his lovers and willing to answer her questions, although that certainly helped. Tess saw Josquin naked almost every day. He was beautiful, there was no denying it, even if his legs were thin and he had odd equipment. This was not a euphemism: he had a variety of apparatuses that helped him live—braces, tubes, catheters—designed and installed by St. Blanche. Tess had at first pretended not to see, but after a while it seemed no more grotesque than anything else a body had on offer—sinew, blood, or bone. There was a poetry to it, and a comedy, and much less tragedy than she would have assumed.

  “The body is forever an indignity, for each of us,” Josquin would say when his got complicated. “I’m working on a poem about it. ‘We are the farting children of Heaven, blessed be our slippery viscera.’ ”

  Then Tess would sing “The Flesh Is but a Sack of Goo,” and Josquin would laugh uproariously. That laugh was worth everything. She could have kissed him then.

  She worked very hard not to.

  Not that she feared he wouldn’t welcome it; she was terrified he would, and that she wasn’t strong enough or together enough to keep the past from rearing up and biting her. She’d suddenly be thirteen again (against her will) and crossing that final line, unable to breathe—

  She quashed such thoughts before they went further. A few nightmares still festered in her mind’s oubliette, and she wasn’t ready to look. She might never be ready.

  Even so, Josquin occupied Tess’s thoughts more than she wanted. She daydreamed. He’d be serving dinner and accidentally touch her hand…Or he needed help unfastening a troublesome buckle on his doublet, and…Or she offered to scrub his back, but she dropped the scrub brush, and then…

  What a burden those ellipses bore. She dared not put words to what came next.

  The cure for sin-bridled thoughts, she well knew, was St. Vitt’s Invocation Against the Demons of the Flesh. She’d had to learn it by heart even though Mama had claimed that only men ever really needed it. “Your future husband may not know it,” Mama had warned. “It might be up to you to teach him.”

  It went like this: St. Vitt save me, for I have sinned in thought. Pleasure is deceit, longing is selfish, and bodily lust distracts us from our purpose, the greater glory of Heaven. I am meat, and meat is for worms; it does not deserve to want. I place my desires in your hands, for you to break upon the Anvil of Virtue—

  It went on and on, a dismal parade of recrimination and remorse. Tess rarely got past the Anvil of Virtue, which gave her a fit of giggles incommensurate to how funny it was. Laughter brought her some relief, but not enough. She couldn’t sleep.

  Then one day Josquin knocked his inkpot into the bath—which was entirely Tess’s fault, for setting it by his elbow on the bath desk without warning him it was there. She’d been trying to anticipate him and deliver it before he asked. Anyway, it spilled into the water, which made it urgent to get Josquin out before he was stained blue-black all over. Tess efficiently removed his writing papers and the desk, without further disaster. He hoisted himself out, but needed help getting dry quickly. Josquin was laughing, good sport that he was, while Tess rubbed down the places that were hard to reach.

  By bedtime, alone in her room, she was still drying him in her mind. The texture of him was fresh and vivid, the heft and give and pull. The smell of him, too, and remembered laughter ringing in her ears, and the warmth, and she imagined kissing that mouth—had longed for it in the moment, he’d been so close—how soft his lips would be, how sweet—

  She wanted him. There it was, the unthinkable thought.

  Saints in Heaven, she couldn’t go on like this. She couldn’t rush downstairs and pounce on him, and St. Vitt’s Invocation was useless. She’d generally resolved or circumvented this inner struggle, but lusting after Josquin brought it back: her sordid nature was forever pitted against her longing to be good. Despairingly, she flopped around in bed like a trout out of water, until two memories struck her at once.

  The first was Mother Philomela saying, There are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply.

  And the second was what Darling Dulsia had been saying before Tess’s painful memories interrupted. She’d been too upset to listen, and yet apparently she’d retained the words, because here they were, sprung up in her hour of need: Your body is yours, the enjoyment of it is yours, and you should never let anyone, even a Saint, rob you of it.

  Two women from her journey—polar opposites, or were they? Both worked with bodies and dispensed advice; there were more similar
ities between nun and whore than she could have guessed. What if those poles weren’t mutually exclusive? What if opposites could be combined and transcended, paradox embraced, a whole life lived in contradictory case?

  She blinked, and for a second she glimpsed it again, an afterimage of pale blue fire. City life had been so busy that she’d forgotten that other feeling, of being completely free to choose.

  She had permission to let her body do and be and have what it wanted, this once. She hadn’t banished Josquin with all this thinking; he came back to her, full and glorious and blazing like the sun. She touched what demanded to be touched and she let her mind fly where it would.

  The endpoint was like nothing she could ever have expected, like all the beauty of the world channeled down her spine at once. Like being struck by lightning made of music. She felt dissolved all the way to her extremities.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. No one had told her. The body was. All. Nothing.

  There.

  Afterward, though her body felt pleasantly adrift, she couldn’t stop thinking (she’d never thought of herself as a thinker; Seraphina was the smart one). This, whatever it was called—Josquin probably knew, if she’d dared to ask—was one more way to put herself back together, like walking or turning hay. All right, pleasanter than turning hay.

  Mama had been quite clear: men might enjoy their bodily lusts, but a woman’s lot was duty and pain (although there was pleasure, presumably, in doing one’s duty and knowing what rewards awaited in the hereafter). Tess wondered whether her mother had ever experienced this. She couldn’t have. How could she omit to mention it if she knew?

  It was possible to bear children and still not know. She herself was proof of that.

  As she drifted toward sleep, Tess was struck—hilariously—by the thought that she should tell her mother. She should tell everyone, preach the word on street corners. That was absurd, of course. This was even more personal than Anathuthia. Even she did not have the brazen gall to mention this holy mystery in public.