“You know everything about Culleyho!” Caulie said. This was already more than any Haphan history book contained.
“Try to find a man in Ed-homse that don’t secretly love her,” Mama Goldros said over Uncle Goldros’s shoulder. “You hear them speaking to her spirit in the fire, and you-knowing they don’t need the fire to keep them hot. Heh.”
Momma Goldros was the first of a bucket brigade of women who dropped stone tureens and mugs along the table. Individual bowls and spoons were a secondary consideration, which seemed to Caulie to be a tactical mistake. The boys fought over utensils. Those with mugs simply quaffed the contents and dipped them again into the stew.
“Queen Culleyho did very well against the Haphans. Against us, I mean,” Caulie said. “How did she do it?”
“You’re asking how she fought you?”
Caulie shook her head. “Fighting isn’t the problem for the Tachba. If you can get them close to an enemy, the fighting takes care of itself. I guess I’m wondering how she organized her people.”
Uncle Goldros nodded again, but this time his dismissive good humor was gone. He spoke more quietly, his eyes alight. “Everybody asks questions about our famous queen, but they are always the wrong questions and we have to answer in pain. You might be the first, little Caulie, to notice the real oar beetles squirming in the eye sockets of history.”
Please let that be another bad translation. She kept her face attentive.
“The truth about our lovely queen continuously amazes me, though she is more than a century in the dirt. It’s not just Ed-homse pride when I say she may have been the best of us, the highest fruit ever picked off a tree.” Uncle Goldros glanced at the kitchen women. “But really, my dead brother’s wife ought to answer you. She can keep the facts straight in her head. Makes the rest of us look helpless.”
Across the huge room, Momma Goldros shouted, “The tiny overlord is not getting a single dry word from my lips.”
“Which it only means she is not at leisure,” Uncle Goldros assured Caulie.
“Leisure is a male vice,” Momma Goldros screeched next. “If you find me at leisure, throw me over the wall because I’m dead. You couldn’t keep up with me, old man.”
“I should not have invoked the harpy.” He stretched in his seat with his eyes closed, saying, “Me-remembering Fat Culleyho in general strokes.”
He tipped his mug on its side theatrically to demonstrate it was empty. The pitcher began its way back up the table, but everybody was refilling their own mugs and, if it ever arrived, it would be empty. Next to him, Grampharic had a fresh mug at his lips. Uncle Goldros simply pulled it out of his hands. Caulie wondered if this meant a fight, but Grampharic simply stole a cup from a field boy across the table.
Caulie slid her own mug to the boy. She nodded at him and his disappointed face unfurled into happiness.
Uncle Goldros rocked forward and spread his hands on the table. When he spoke, his voice had a special cadence—there was something of the warming song in it. The table fell quiet as Uncle Goldros progressed, until the only remaining sounds were atmospheric—the women’s muttered curses and crashing utensils.
“It is Culleyho what gives the Haphans their defeat in the mountains. Which the mountain people are too thickheaded to submit like all the rest. Which the people will not be dominated again, but by the maiden they love best. Fat Culleyho with her tender words and her sharp knife.”
“Well done!” exclaimed Grampharic. “Oh well done! The Haphan tongue tastes the flavor of the Tachbavim.” He said to Caulie: “He’s pitched the tongue on the nose for your ears.”
They shushed him from all sides and Uncle Goldros resumed:
“Fat Culleyho keeps her larder full but has nothing for herself. Fat Culleyho with tears in her eyes, she leads on paths that only go up. Which we play the clapper-songs for strength. Which we knit ourselves from threads of hope. Hard days, hard days.
“La, the Haphans kill us from the air, kill us from the ground, kill us from afar. Which the Happies kill us one and ten and thousand. Fat Culleyho, with her tender words and her sharp knife never once says, ‘Yield.’”
Uncle Goldros held up a finger, catching Caulie’s eye.
“The queen is a maiden in a flower patch, with a sharp knife and a heady love of flourishing. She prunes and thins and cuts it back. Culleyho with her tender lies and her sharp sight, she feeds the cuttings to the fire.
“Do not cry my queen, for what you do is right, and what you ask is given. ‘My lovely men,’ she chants, ‘that I raised from clay: feel first the knife, next the words, and make this garden full.’”
Uncle Goldros’s voice changed, jarring Caulie from her reverie. “That’s the start of a teaching rhyme, what we call a ‘song.’ It goes on and on, until you want to tear your ears off. For myself, I always liked the lead-up first, about the garden. It sets the problem, it mentions our beloved overlords, and it sketches the heart of the queen, who may have only been a sorrowful and broken little girl.”
The boys at the table, their attention directed for too long, snapped back into chaos. The older men across from Caulie, the ones with higher function, remained serious. Even young Prodon had watery eyes.
“I don’t wish to have an opinion,” Grampharic said, “or draw attention to myself . . .”
“Not possible,” Uncle Goldros said.
“. . . But I always liked the start of that song because it’s not simple queen-worship. It sounds like Pretty Polly talking. That teaching song sounds like the Pollution when it thinks about our existence.”
Several men nodded.
“I can answer that as an old man who hasn’t heard Pretty Polly in a boy’s lifetime,” Uncle Goldros said. “The next time someone gets drunk and bawls out a Culleyho song, switch her name with Pretty Polly in your mind. You’ll hear it then. She’s the same girl. I don’t know if the first singers drew the connection between the queen and the Pollution. Maybe Culleyho, in her brilliance, stole the voice of Pretty Polly and knew she was doing it.”
“Now there’s a thought,” Shanter said. “Using the Pollution to control an army.” He met Caulie’s eyes across the table.
Uncle Goldros turned back to her. “Pretty overlord, you asked how Fat Culleyho organized her people.”
“She sounds lovely,” Caulie said, feeling her way. There were many things an overlord probably shouldn’t say about Culleyho, and she didn’t trust herself. “I have learned so much already.”
He waved that away. “You were hoping for ideas that wouldn’t slip through your fingers like water, neh? Well, let me dash the water out of your hands. How she organized us then is how we organize today. To see her brilliance, just look around you at any group of Polluted. That’s her magic. It was so strong and good it spread to the world. Ah, I see your disappointment.”
Caulie blushed. Some impassive Haphan she was.
“If you think we’re bad now, pretty overlord, you should’ve seen us before the queen. Strongmen dominating the forests. Every household a kingdom of its own, beholden to no one. Every transaction paid in blood. It was different from today and we have no heritage from that time. Here in Ed-homse at least, everything starts after Queen Fat Culleyho, because before her nothing could thrive.”
“The flower patch was small,” Caulie said, “but she made it grow.”
“Truth from a smiling mouth.” Uncle Goldros took another sip. “For that song, the mood is the message. A sharp knife does it all: it prunes the worst men, it thins the weak men to make room for others, it cuts back the wild men and lets them come forth in order. There may be tears in her eyes and the girl may be sad, but you can’t argue with the results.”
Caulie turned her head at a sudden new uproar. It was not in the kitchen, but a different corner of the house.
“And here’s the end of our peace and quiet,” Uncle Goldros bellowed. “Our girls are done with their teaching. Little Caulie, if you want to see how it’s done, you must watch the girl
s train the middle boys. Watch them tomorrow.”
The kitchen was already full, but now it flooded even further with yet another swarm of children, wild little bodies that screamed war cries and flung themselves across the room. From the energy on display they may have been fleeing a forest fire. They swamped the table, squeezing beside Caulie or simply sitting in the laps of the men. The dinner properly started. More bowls, hot buns, and pitchers brimming with foam were dumped onto the table.
“You can’t be serious,” Caulie muttered. “There are even more boys?”
“The eternal front must be fed,” Uncle Goldros said.
Chapter 31
The next morning, after a drunken night full of noise and at least two earnest fistfights, Caulie woke from her stupor and remembered she wanted to see the young Tachba maidens teach. The girls had finally made an appearance well into dinner, if Caulie remembered correctly. It was all somewhat fuzzy. She should never have let herself drink even one measly gallon of beer.
In all, the maidens had struck her as fragile and quiet. They’d eaten away from the kitchen, but had appeared later on with the dark beer that had finished the night. They didn’t partake, but they reconciled the arguments that accrued at the table, chastised the drunken, bound the knife wounds, and generally helped in the kitchen.
They were as advertised in every history and popular entertainment: bewitchingly beautiful. Slim, sylphlike creatures, half-woman and half-child, they somehow seemed to Caulie barely human. Their wide bright eyes were lined with kohl, and their penetrative gazes dominated the tops of triangular faces that tapered past button noses into modest lips and pointed chins. Their hair, their dresses, their everything flowed as they moved through the kitchen. They managed the boys and men with embarrassing ease by dispensing touches and entreating words in husky voices.
Their voices weren’t magical to Caulie’s ears, but Ouphao’an thought she had found something when she dissected her longtime servant, Lala. Once, as Caulie had toyed with a finger-knife left out for the roasted vegetables, she’d caught herself staring at the throat of Maggey, the oldest maiden, and wondering what it might contain. Now, in the harsh light of morning, Caulie wasn’t sure what she had witnessed. Had the girls controlled the males, had the males been tractable and drunk, or—most likely—had Caulie simply projected what she’d expected to see?
To her surprise, Caulie was not unhappy with herself for failing to notice those details like a proper scholar. It had been, after all, a delightful evening. She had acclimated enough to miss the noise when the boys departed to the main hall for their final practice session of the day, the knife melee, and to then be pleased when their screams began anew. The energy of these people! Maybe this was why Jephia always seemed so guiltless after her twelve-hour cocktail parties: simple regret could not compete with the pleasure of it, even hungover memories of that pleasure. Had Caulie really danced with Shanter? Had that been real? Gods. She remembered dancing with Grampharic and Uncle Goldros too.
Prodon had grabbed her waist for a turn, but Shanter had become angry with the young soldier and had been held down until he started laughing. So . . . dark beer apparently turned Caulie into Ecloptra, the temple whore from Haphan history. Now she felt a twinge of regret, but even that fell away when she pulled away the covers and found she had slept in her clothes. Drunk Caulie had wisely spared herself the chore of getting dressed that morning.
She stumbled out of her room, through the empty kitchen, and down an unexplored hall, hunting children. Shouts and footsteps rang promisingly somewhere in the house but she was half-asleep or still drunk and she lost her bearings. She nearly trapped herself in the pantry, which had an intricate childproof latch to keep little thieves out.
Finally she found a single boy trudging the halls. He looked like Caulie felt, and she guessed he had a day of education ahead of him. She lurched after him until he drew nervous and bolted. Struggling to keep up, Caulie spilled out into a hall full of children and teachers.
There was no schoolroom as such; the children simply divided themselves into three different bedrooms, one for each of the girls, who leaned in their doorways, arms crossed over their stomachs, watching the boys enter.
None of these young women had spoken to Caulie the night before or, if they had, she didn’t remember. In stark contrast to every male in the kitchen, they had made no effort to learn about Caulie or become her best friend.
She entered the room that belonged to Maggey, the girl with the throat. She was the eldest maiden of the household and Caulie reasoned she would be the most experienced. Thick, black, unruly hair billowed from Maggey’s head, decorated in places with white ribbon. She wore the only fitted dress Caulie had seen in Ed-homse, with a bodice embroidered with flowers, herbs, and animals. There was even a brain bird stitched over Maggey’s heart. To Caulie, the significance of the dress and its precision was clear: the rest of the house might be overbuilt to withstand drunken giants, but this girl was delicate and special.
Maggey stood at the front of the room next to her bed, her hands clasped and her face turned down. The smarter and higher-function children arranged themselves first, settling on the floor as far away as possible. When the other children took too long, Maggey raised her chin, parted her lips to show teeth, and hissed. It was as if she’d shot them—the boys spun and fell were they stood.
Maggey raised a hand and their eyes followed. She clasped her breast, released it, and showed them her palm. Caulie was mystified. When she glanced at the boys, however, they were bemused and still.
Maggey’s eyes touched Caulie’s. “It is the mudra of the Patient Mother,” she said in her husky voice. Her gaze was alert and intelligent.
Caulie nodded, pretending to understand.
Maggey swung her hand in a slow arc, landing it with a chopping motion against her other fist.
“It is the mudra of the Falling Beam,” she explained next. “When the boys have been opened by the mother, they are focused by the beam. Now I remind them of my value.”
She squared her shoulders and raised her chin. The children mirrored her exactly.
The song was in old Tachbavim, what the Tachba sometimes called Deep. Caulie was no linguist, but it sounded entirely different from the smatterings of Tachbavim she’d pieced together in the trenches. This dialect was more percussive, full of glottal stops and sharp consonants. Xs and “Ch” sounds stacked on top of each other, and there never seemed to be enough vowels to smooth them out.
Maybe it’s the rhythm? It seemed to be less about the sounds and more about the spaces between them. Caulie suddenly realized what she was hearing: the ancient “Lever” song, sung by women all across Grigory IV. It was widely suspected to have a subversive anti-Haphan message.
“Am-a truly as I am,
When a young maid dissever:
Cut the neck-meh, peel it back,
Inside you find a lever.”
When Maggey repeated it, Caulie stopped listening to specific words and instead let the cadences gel in her mind. The words said one thing, but the spaces between the words communicated something different:
“This girl tears herself open.
You who know sacrifice,
Be alive to her gift.”
When she finished, Maggey again pierced Caulie with a look. “It is the teaching magic. I have opened the boys. They are listening and must be quickly taught. The effect does fade. I will not sacrifice time to explain everything to you.”
Caulie shook her head with a jerk. She was afraid to utter a sound.
“But of course we use the common tongue,” Maggey added, “so you will follow.”
The boys stared up at Maggey, their faces docile. When the maiden spoke next, it was in a vastly different voice: harsh, grating. “Do you know who loves you?”
“You do,” the boys answered. They spoke with higher voices but in the same cadence, in unison.
“Who am I?”
“You are Maggey.”
“What am I?”
“You are a girl.”
Maggey hissed and the children flinched. “What am I?”
“You are a woman.”
Caulie recognized that voice. The maiden was witch talking: low and hoarse, in the deeper registers, with long drawn out sibilants and hard consonants. Why did rhythms work better than words? Caulie thought suddenly. If the Pollution could hear songs, why not make them easy to sing? Now listening, Caulie realized that if one spoke directly to the Pollution in a normal voice, then every accidental shimmer and lilt in the intonation could impart an unintended meaning. Witch talking added nothing superfluous; it let Maggey control every nuance that crossed her lips.
“Do you know, boys, that a woman shall lead a man?”
“From our first days of thought.”
“Who can teach you?”
“You can.”
Maggey’s tone was hypnotic. There seemed to be more meaning that Caulie couldn’t decipher beneath the words, but the boys understood.
“You are speaking but another man interrupts you,” Maggey prompted.
“I take the chance to listen. I will not kill him.”
“You walk through a doorway and a man on the other side is watching you.”
“He is curious. I will not kill him.”
“The young soldier at the front has a wife back home. He draws angry when she is mentioned.”
“He has sadness I cannot see. I will not kill him.”
“You sit at a fire and see it is beautiful. If you hold the fire in your hands, you will see into it.”
“That is an impulse. I will wait for it to leave.”
What the Thunder Said Page 26
