by Jay Lake
“I’ll not have you play the slut with him,” Mistress Tirelle breathed, her fat face close to mine, though she now had to tilt her head back to meet my eye at such range.
“This will not be so different from Federo’s visits.” My voice held more confidence than my heart did. The Factor was no friend nor ally. Rather, he was the man who owned me in every part and piece. I was his more abjectly than any horse in his stables.
Old rage stirred.
Mistress Tirelle pinched my cheek hard. “You listen, Girl. The Factor is very different from that idiotic fop. We would none of us have food on our tables or beds at night if not for him. His word is your life. Federo…” She snorted, close as she ever came to laughing. “That man is a wastrel peacock who flies the world bargaining for future beauty.”
He’d bargained for my beauty once. Every scrap I’d eaten since then had come from the Factor by courtesy of that idiotic fop. Once again, as she always did, Mistress Tirelle saw me as receiving great favor in this house. Such charity, to raise the little farmer girl to high estate.
The small rebellions of my thoughts were no matter. We launched into a flurry of activity. First I must be washed clean, though I always kept myself fair. Especially after the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, though it had been nine days since my last such. Mistress Tirelle used cotton cloths pressed into a bowl of rose water to lave my back, then set me to wiping my arms and chest and lower body while she piled my hair.
“You do not know,” she whispered fiercely. “I have tried every minute of these years to make you ready. You do not know, Girl.”
You could have told me what I do not know, I thought, but I said nothing. She would not beat me immediately before the Factor arrived, but there were always later days. Mistress Tirelle never forgot an infraction. She also cultivated a perfect recall of any perceived slight to her dignity.
So we worked quickly at the efforts of beauty. My hair was let loose, oiled, and brushed as swiftly as we could. I had not yet been judged ready for the scented waters and alcohols used by women full grown, but Mistress Tirelle outlined my eyes in dark kohl and touched my face very lightly with brushes from the paint pots. She traced my lips with dyes, and checked my teeth for untoward stains or flecks of last night’s dinner. Then we folded me into the shift I’d tailored from a bolt of green lawn cloth. Under the instruction of Mistress Leonie, I had sewn it with a hint of bodice to signal the change that was already on its way. My painted face and the cut of my clothing would lead where my body had yet to go.
Mistress Tirelle muttered and cursed as she worked to ready me for the Factor’s inspection. I submitted to her attentions. The soft touches and momentary efforts at arranging this and that were as close as she ever came to treating me with tenderness. In some strange way, we were family to one another. She had been as much a prisoner of the Pomegranate Court as I, locked within these stone walls just as I had been all these years. I’d never asked if she’d loved a man or borne a child or found a life somewhere else. I’d just accepted all the days she had given me, along with the lectures, the punishments, and the odd bits of joy.
What else was there to do?
I tried to imagine Mistress Tirelle wrapped in bells, atop Endurance’s back for the slow, hot trip to the temple platforms and the union of her soul with the wide world. I could not envision this terrible old woman following the ways of my grandmother.
Here in this city of silent gods with a stranger on the throne, who was there for her to follow? The Factor, perhaps. He was certainly the focus of her fear. Perhaps he was the focus of Mistress Tirelle’s faith as well.
Seeing her under the brassy sun of my birth was too much to contemplate. I could not bring the image full-formed to mind, but a smile slipped unbidden upon my lips.
“Do not smirk at the Factor,” Mistress Tirelle said with a growl. She stood me and turned me, checking me in the light of my candles and lanterns. “You will not shame us,” she added. “Your life has no greater moment than this.”
I could make no answer that would not provoke far greater conflict, so I held my tongue yet again. She propelled me out the door of my sleeping chamber to the porch. I walked ahead of Mistress Tirelle down the stairs. She followed, and retreated to the deeper shadows of the downstairs sitting room. “You will await him by the tree,” she whispered from her hiding place.
The pomegranate sheltered me in the dawn’s pallid light. The sky above glowed pearlescent, some combination of mist and cloud leaching the heavens of their color in favor of a generic, glossy beauty. It had not dawned cold, but still the air had enough of a chill to raise bumps along my arm. The tree was heavy with fruit. I had already spotted enough to fill both a good basket and a beggar’s basket from the pickings on the branch.
A solitary fruit lay windfall on the cobbles, out of Mistress Tirelle’s view, about where the Dancing Mistress would usually stand to meet me for our night runs. I looked at the sad deflation of its curve, deformed in striking the ground.
That was me, fallen away from my roots. Except I hadn’t been left to lie on the cobbles. I’d come across the sea as smartly as any fruit carried to the kitchen, and been dressed here for the pleasure of a great man.
Here I had come nearly the full circle round. Perhaps the Factor would take me to the harbor and we would board Fortune’s Flight for a trip across the sea to the hot land of my birth. Clad in white, picking up bells as I walked along the road that ran over the highlands from that small fishing port, I would return to my father on the arm of the Factor as he smiled and reported my great progress.
Even in the momentary fantasy, though I could remember the brown eyes of the ox as clearly as if Endurance stood before me even now, the only image I could bring to mind of my father was a dark-haired man with skin the color of my own hurrying away through the rice paddies as Federo tugged at my hand.
He had never looked back at me. I had never stopped looking back at him.
The past yawned behind me like one of the pits underground, threatening to swallow my sense of myself, my purpose so carefully crafted in this imprisoned life.
Then my thoughts were torn away by the screeching of the gate. Both great doors were thrown open, as was done only for delivery wagons or the very rare carriage. Horses stamped and snorted as they raced into the courtyard in a jingle of harness under the small-voiced yips and calls of their riders: soldiers in tall leather boots that gleamed like roach’s wings, their uniforms rough with wear but still elegant and carefully straight. Each rider was blindfolded that he not see me, but they carried swords and spears aplenty despite that handicap.
A coach followed the soldiers, rattling toward me to creak to a stop beneath the pomegranate tree. Its glossy black body swayed slightly on the leather and iron straps of its suspension. No sigil or heraldry was blazoned upon the door. The coachmen were blindfolded, too, and seemed less at ease than their escort.
Nothing happened for a time. No motion, no voice or sound from the darkened windows of the carriage. The door did not open.
The man within owned me, owned my life. By his will, Federo had first taken me from the hot lands of the sun and brought me here to the miserable precincts of the Stone Coast. My hands tensed in patterns the Dancing Mistress had taught me, but I forced them to loosen.
Patience was always the greatest lesson of the Pomegranate Court, the same patience that the sky taught to the very stones of the soil. I waited, wondering.
Surely I deserved a word from this man. The entire flow of my life had been directed toward this moment, toward his hands.
Then the door handle of the carriage turned. It creaked. For a long second, I would have given everything that was mine to give to be anywhere else.
The door swung open.
When the Factor stepped from his coach, my first thought was surprise that he appeared so ordinary. He was a man of middling height dressed in a dark morning suit of a classic cut, velvet lapels over a coarser cloth, with low quarter boot
s folded over at the ankle. His hair was brown, his skin had the sun-seared summer ruddiness of so many of his Stone Coast countrymen, his eyes were a strange gray flecked with gold. He’d run to fat in the middle and on his cheeks. Pipeleaf spilled down his ruffled silk shirt. He came so close to me, I could smell the oils in his hair, the ambergris-and-attar of his perfume. There was no scent of sweat at all.
He possessed a presence such as I had never really believed a person could have. Like a dark prince in the stories I’d read, the Factor filled all the space in front of me and around me as if he owned the world and I were some small intrusion. The breeze stilled at his appearance. The grackles and jays at their morning chatter on the rooftops stilled and froze, until one fled. The rest followed in a panicked rush of wings.
For a moment, the sun seemed to stutter in its passage through the sky.
He studied me. His face was impassive. I wondered if I should have curtsied, or otherwise presented myself.
The calculation in his eyes told me that I was no more of a person to him than the carriage behind his back.
This man is reviewing his investment. He is not meeting a woman. But he will someday.
Here was the true architect of all my troubles in this life. This man’s hand had tugged Federo’s strings and pushed at the invisible stick that penetrated Mistress Tirelle from arse to scalp.
Then he took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back and forth. He viewed the angles and planes of my face a moment. Releasing me without pain, he swept my hair away from my ears and inspected them. Taking first one hand then the other, he spread my fingers, checked their length, then examined each nail in turn. He walked around me twice before stopping behind me.
A horse nickered. Two dozen men breathed loud, though I looked at none of them. Never had our eyes met. I continued to be nothing to him. I began to wonder what the Factor was about back there when he tore my green shift away.
Cold plucked at my skin, raising pimples all along my back. Shivering, my joints ached in the chill, and tears rose sudden and unexpected in my eyes. To the Factor I wasn’t even an investment. I was livestock.
After a miserable time naked in the wind, I felt his fingers test the softness of my waist, then the firmness of my buttocks. He walked around me once more to gaze at the buds of my breasts and down to where my legs met my body.
The Factor nodded to Mistress Tirelle in the shadows behind me. He stepped to his coach, then turned back to finally meet my eyes.
My tears had been whisked away by the wind. In their place, a stinging tremble remained, which I knew would show as a redness should he choose to reach toward me and spread my eyelids back for inspection. Within, I was torn between anger and deep embarrassment. I had been masterfully trained to conceal both emotions, and so I did. I pretended the shivering in my body was the wind’s chill.
As he looked at me, I returned the stare. Something in his gaze made me think of the lifeless gray eye of the ocean leviathan that had nearly taken my life off the shores of my home.
Here was the root of his power, or at least a lens to peer within it. The Factor’s soulless eyes were no more alive than the sea monster’s had been-filmy, quiescent. Dead.
My teeth ached as my breath shuddered in my chest. The Factor didn’t seem to breathe at all, something I realized only when I saw him inhale.
“Emerald,” he said, clearly and distinctly.
Then he was gone in a swirl of horses and men and clattering weapons. Even blindfolded, the guards circled with a strange precision, yipping and whistling to mark their places and guide their mounts. They moved like water gyring down a drain. Some men went through the gate first with weapons high. The carriage followed, then the rest of the men.
In a moment, they were gone as if they’d never been present. Only a few mounds of steaming dung marked the passage of the soldiers and their horses. That and the turmoil within my heart.
After a while, Mistress Tirelle waddled out to me. I heard her steps stumping on the cobbles of the courtyard before she rounded the pomegranate tree to look me over. Her face was bent into her almost-smile. She appeared nearly pleased.
“Well, Emerald, you passed.”
“Emerald.” I tried the word in my mouth as if it were a name. Girl had been a name that meant nothing, a description only. He had named me Emerald to mark me as a precious possession, no more.
In the language of my birth, I did not know the word for emerald. I determined that I would use that tongue to call myself Green. That was as close as I could come, and it was a word that belonged to me rather than to these maggot people. The Factor’s precious belongings I would mock with the profane infection of my own tongue.
This was also the greatest change that had come upon me since Federo had met my father at the edge of the rice paddies. I looked into Mistress Tirelle’s eyes and found all unexpected a strange species of sympathy there. “What becomes of me now?”
Her face wrinkled in thought a moment. Surely she knew the answer, and was just picking through the secrets she thought might be fit to tell me now that I had a name and standing in the Factor’s dead, dead eyes.
“That depends on whether the Duke fancies a new consort within the next two years or so.” She poked me in the chest. Her rough nail snagged at my bare skin. “Otherwise you’ll fetch a spice trader’s ransom anywhere along the Stone Coast.”
Those words chilled my already heavy heart so much, I could not hide the shiver that crawled along my spine. Somehow I had thought myself in waiting for the Factor, or a great house here in Copper Downs. I had long known that this blue-walled house manufactured women fit for thrones, but I’d never fully considered what it meant to me, for who I was. For what the Dancing Mistress had once described as the power I might someday hope to grasp hold of.
Federo had not bought me for the Factor. Not for the man, at any rate. Federo had bought me for a market. Meat with two legs and deep eyes and a face and body on which he’d wagered years and untold wealth in hopes I would grow to beauty. Salable, brokerable beauty.
Federo had bought me for meat, and my father had sold me for a whore.
Words, I told myself. These were all words. The maggot people of the Stone Coast lived and died by their words. I’d known this from the first. “Emerald” marked me as a jewel in the Factor’s case. Nothing more, nothing less.
I blinked away the sting of some new emotion I could not yet put a name to, and followed Mistress Tirelle back to the rooms that boxed my life.
There were no lessons that day. No Mistresses, no practicing, no drills or dances or calligraphy or punishment or anything. This was the first idle time I’d experienced in all the years since I’d come to the Pomegranate Court.
I sat before the hearth in the downstairs sitting room and wandered through my memories. Endurance, the frogs in their ditches, my grandmother’s face, her bells still jingling with every step of the ox. I turned the imaginary silk over in my mind, counting the days.
Nothing helped. I was overwhelmed by the bitterness in finally reaching a true understanding of what I’d known all along: I was nothing. No person lived behind Girl, Emerald, Green-whoever I might pretend to be.
I found myself wishing my instructresses had come. The snappish ill will of Mistress Leonie would have given me some focus for the rising of my discontent. Mistress Danae would have distracted me. The Dancing Mistress would have set me through paces to draw the energy forth.
Of course, I could step to the practice room or pick up a book or sit myself before the spinet. I did not need a Mistress to tell me to do those things. It was just that nothing mattered.
In time, I noticed the shadows had moved across the floor. A plate was laid next to me, with slices of bread and cheese upon it. Mistress Tirelle had come, then. Did we speak? I wondered.
I could not see how that mattered.
Darkness eventually stole into the room. No one had eaten the bread or cheese. Both had gone stale. My bladder finally moved
me from the chair. I stumbled out to find a chamber pot.
Mistress Tirelle sat before the door. She was almost lost within the shadows.
“Emerald.” Her voice was soft. “Tomorrow your days begin again as always.”
“I think not.” I did not bother to ask permission to speak. If she wished to take after me with her stupid tube, I would feed her the sand, and follow it with the silk.
“Nothing has changed.”
“Everything has changed.” I pushed past her to spend a little time alone in the privy.
I emerged with my hunger reawakened to find Mistress Tirelle awaiting me. She seemed almost sad in the darkening shadows of evening.
“When a candidate is given a name by the Factor, that is the signal honor which declares he has found her fit.”
“Who is he to find me fit?” Rage crept into my voice.
“He is master to us all, and answers only to the Duke.” Her own voice hardened. “Sit down and listen.”
Almost a decade’s worth of habit sat me down quickly enough.
“The Duke is all in this city. We are not permitted to instruct the candidates in the recent history of our times, but you will learn.” She glanced around, then back at me. “His eyes and ears are everywhere. He was on the throne long before my grandmother was born, and he will be on the throne long after my grandchildren grow old.”
I was briefly distracted by the thought of Mistress Tirelle having children and grandchildren. The flare of interest died within the gloom of my thoughts as quickly as it had risen.
“He is everything to us, forever,” she went on. “To be raised up as his consort is an honor beyond measure. The daughters of the greatest houses would cheerfully slay their lovers and their chambermaids alike to stand where you do today.”
I will trade them freely without the need for murder, I thought.
