Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  It’s not a large house. Etriae took me all over it the first time I visited them, while Verdialos cooked the supper. They have a lot of spindly Liavekan furniture that looks odd in so solid a house, and they have even more printed books than my father has; and up on the third floor they have two empty rooms. Etriae told me, in approximately the tone one might use to say this was where she did the sewing, “These were to be for the children.” She did not seem to expect an answer.

  After that first supper, Etriae always did the cooking. Verdialos had served a dish so spicy it made me sneeze and hurt my throat like the spotted fever. He was more amused than hurt; Etriae got rather sharp with him about it. But this time, on the last sparkling-cold evening in the month of Frost, she was the one who let me in the red door. She was almost as tall as I am, but very dark, with a flat nose and wide mouth and huge black eyes that took up most of her narrow face. Calla, who works with Deleon at the Desert Mouse theater, says that if one could give Verdialos half Etriae’s distinction, they would both be very handsome to look at. I think they are very well as they are. Calla is too much concerned with appearances.

  Etriae always spoke firmly, as if to make up for the fact that Verdialos said everything as if he were thinking of something else. “He will do it,” she said, following me into their sitting room. “He says you’ll be able to eat it.”

  I said I was sure he was right, and we sat down rather awkwardly near the fireplace. I’ve always found it hard to visit with people who don’t keep cats; but cats make Verdialos wheeze. He and Etriae had a monkey when I first met them, but it was very shy—the only reason, Etriae said dryly, that she could bear it. It died a year later, and they did not get another. I asked my brother Gillo how long monkeys lived; he said that the small sort I described generally managed about ten years. Their not getting another monkey therefore made me uneasy, and not just because of the subsequent difficulty of conversation. Sometimes I brought my own cat, and we would sit in the garden a while and watch her chase the moths. But she was out wandering today.

  It had been dark outside for some time, but the only light in the room came from the fire. This made it easier to sit without speaking, but I was still grateful when Etriae finally did.

  “How are you getting on, Nerissa?” she said equably.

  “Very well, I think,” I said. I wondered what the question meant. Verdialos did not tell her everything, although he certainly told her things I did not want him to mention. If I left the answer at very well, I thought, we would just have to be uncomfortable again. I could hear Verdialos chopping something in the kitchen. I held my right hand near the fire and showed Etriae the ink ingrained in the skin of the first two fingers. “I’ve got only fifty years to go in copying the Green Book.”

  “What will you do then?”

  “I hadn’t thought. It will take several more years, I think; people nowadays are very voluble about everything. The first stories I copied were hardly half a page, but fifty years ago everybody wrote six or eight pages, and I know there are some coming that are more than twenty.” I added, when she said nothing, “I shouldn’t complain. My own is much longer than that.”

  “Had you thought of moving out of your parents’ house?”

  Verdialos had certainly been talking to her. Well, if she liked to do his work for him, it would not harm me to answer. I said, “Yes, but I should need somebody to live with, unless the Green House cares to pay me more than it does at present.”

  Etriae smiled, as one who has been asked if iron might float and fish might fly in the foreseeable future. I said, “I’d thought to ask Jehane to live with me, but she’s gone to Granny Carry to learn weaving. And Deleon lives with Aelim. And I couldn’t really bear to live with Livia or Isobel.” I didn’t even think of my two other brothers, not until I was writing this down.

  “Haven’t you a friend or two you might share rooms with?”

  “Well, there’s Thyan; but she’s quite happy living above the Tiger’s Eye. And she’ll marry Silvertop eventually.”

  “What about Calla?”

  “I couldn’t live with Calla. She’d be always making me uncomfortable for my own good.”

  Etriae grinned.

  “Yes,” I said, “Verdialos does that. Well, I don’t need two of them; and at least I invited him to begin, if not perhaps to continue as he’s done.”

  “But you feel you could live with Thyan, if her circumstances permitted it?”

  “Well—I’m not certain. She makes me feel ungrateful and petty.”

  “Verdialos’s mother was very skilled at that,” said Etriae.

  “No, Thyan doesn’t do it on purpose. It’s just—her family sold her to Snake, because they couldn’t feed her. She can remember the first time she got enough to eat, when what I remember is once being sent to bed without supper. She says what she remembers most vividly is the second time she got enough to eat. But she spent her first eight years being cold and hungry and neglected; there wasn’t room or time for her. So why is she briskly working for Snake while I’m skulking in the House of Responsible Life?”

  I stopped talking. I knew how Verdialos got me to go on at length, but that Etriae could manage it also I had not known ’til now. Her method was altogether different; something to do, perhaps, with how very matter-of-fact she was about all her questions.

  Well, now I had asked her one. What I wanted her to say was what I had half worked out for myself: that there are cruelties of the heart as sharp as cruelties of the body; that to be bought by Snake might be better than to be kept by my parents; that I had a sensitive nature and Thyan a sturdy one and this was somehow a virtue in me. I wanted to hear somebody else say all these things. Verdialos would never do it, whether he thought so or not.

  Etriae said tranquilly, “We are all fashioned differently. We can but work as we are made.”

  That was not the sort of thing Etriae said. It sounded to me either too simple to need saying, or else not true; Verdialos would come out with such statements to see if I would argue, but that was not Etriae’s way. “Who said that?” I asked her.

  She looked pleased. “Lerre ola Advar. You won’t have got to her yet if you’re still fifty years out. She was one of mine.” I hoped, if Verdialos ever said that of me, he did not say it in that tone of voice, cool, reflective, and rueful. Etriae went on, “A most ingenious child, and one of whom you thought, though we are not allowed to, that the sooner she made her ingenious end the better for all. She wanted to take other people with her, and not for love.”

  “Just a short way to shedding her responsibilities?” I ventured.

  “No; that would have been more forgivable.”

  “For what, then?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Etriae. “Perhaps some complex variation on the old simplicity that misery loves company. But not that only. She really did want to die, spectacularly if not horribly; and she knew there were others who did not, and it was they whom she wanted to take with her.”

  “Did she?”

  “One of them,” said Etriae. “She married him just in order to do that; she was very clever, turning the rules of the House and Verdialos’s and my situation against us.”

  This was the most uncomfortable conversation I had had in months; far worse than all the mind-writhing ones with Verdialos about what was wrong with me, and my family, and all the world. I did not know what she wanted me to say. Verdialos had told me soon after we met, when I expressed astonishment that a sworn suicide should be married, that his death was bound to Etriae’s in ways that he could not speak of. He wanted to take Etriae with him, when he went. And though she was presumably not unwilling, I had in fact never heard her speak of death as Verdialos would sometimes talk of it. So after a while I became irate, and said, “Forgive me, Etriae; but what is the difference between the situation she contrived and the one you and Verdialos have concocted?”

  “To the mind, very little,” said Etriae. “To the heart, very great.” She said this so
peacefully that I knew she had been hoping to make me ask that question; and whatever malice or thoughtlessness in me she had tugged on to make me ask, it did not hurt her in the least. I had not in fact wished to hurt her, and yet the realization that I could not hurt me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, both truly and at random.

  “It was the same method,” said Etriae, and she gave me a smug and secretive smile. “If it’s your marriage that holds you back, my own advisor said to me long ago, then best use your marriage. Sometimes, she told me, it’s the flesh that is reluctant, and sometimes it’s the spirit. For the reluctant flesh there are remedies.” She looked into the fire, still smiling. She did not seem to be contemplating death; she looked into the fire as a cat will look at you when you have fed it six shrimp and may yet feed it a seventh; she looked at nothing, pleasedly, as Livia would when she came back from walking with her lover in the twilight.

  I felt myself turning extremely red, which in the light of the fire did not show. And Verdialos came to the door and called us to supper. He had made the same dish as the first time. It’s a chicken dish with a lavish addition of strips of red pepper, which look dangerous but are in fact sweet, and an even more lavish addition of round black seeds that look like poppy, and harmless, and will in fact take the bumps off your tongue. There were fewer of them this time, and he had made also a peculiar dish of melon and tomato that ought to have been vile but was very nice, and counteracted the black seeds a little. There was some Ombayan bread, too, to stretch out the hotness and make each single bite less alarming, though the final effect was the same. I managed to eat enough to make both Verdialos and myself happy; I knew my cat would not scold me for failing to bring her any of what she smelled on my breath.

  Whatever unsuitable revelations Etriae might make, whatever unspeakable things Verdialos might make me say, when the three of us were together we were always comfortable. We talked lightly of a new translation of the Tichenese poet Seng; of the prospects for snow during Festival; of Etriae’s new secretary, who spelled as if he were asleep and insisted on making all his letters separately as if he were a printer; of my cat’s latest exploits; of my new niece, and a new playwright who did not cast his dialogue in verse, and five peony trees that Etriae had ordered from Saltigos for next spring that had unaccountably arrived yesterday and were presently occupying both the children’s rooms.

  Long before we would have talked ourselves out, Etriae looked at Verdialos and said, “It will be midnight soon, Dialo; you’d better take Nerissa home so you can get back before the bells go.”

  As always, I said, “I can walk,” Etriae said I couldn’t, I said we could call a footcab, and Verdialos said he would walk me home to settle his dinner and find a footcab to come home in. Etriae kissed Verdialos; gave me the kind of one-armed hug she always bestowed, as if she wanted to make sure the object of her affection didn’t feel trapped; and watched us down the pale brick path to the dark street.

  It was very still and chilly. The stars were sharp and far away. We saw nobody, not a City Guard, not a stray cat. Verdialos walked quickly for such a short man. We went down narrow winding ways, striking echoes off stone, and emerged in time onto the Levar’s Way, which was also empty. Liavekans are cautious about Divination Eve, in case anything they begin then should leak over onto the day; and fanatically conservative about Divination Day itself: do nothing, they say, that you would not gladly do. I always wonder if it’s my ill fortune or their blindness that they think to stay home with one’s family is safer than to venture among strangers. When I was very young, I could trace each catastrophe in the papers my father read to some slight or unkind word or outright squabble committed by my family on Divination Day. Then I grew scornful of all such beliefs; and now I do not know what I think.

  I said so to Verdialos, and looked down in time to see him smile. In the starlight his face was mostly eyes. He said, “That’s a proper philosophy for your age.”

  “What age is disbelief proper for?”

  “A much greater one,” said Verdialos. “Disbelief must be earned.”

  “Has my father earned it?”

  “Possibly,” said Verdialos.

  “And does belief need to be earned?”

  “Belief needs to be honored,” said Verdialos, rather sharply. He has a great many peculiarities, but perhaps his real fault is to be both definite and pompous about the gods. Since he does not plan to go to any of them after his elegant and beautiful death with Etriae, this attitude of his seems, in fact, not earned. I thought about saying so, but a long bristly shape shot out from behind a tree, made a series of wavery chirps, and wound itself around Verdialos’s ankles.

  “Hello, Floradazul,” I said to my cat.

  She acknowledged me with a low noise rather like the bleating of a goat, but went on trying to trip up Verdialos. To my considerable surprise, he sat down in the dust and let her climb into his lap. She commenced an enormous purring, and Verdialos said, “She’s very heavy.” His voice was already clogging up.

  “She’s still growing, too,” I said. “I think this time around she’s got some ship’s cat in her, though they’re mostly striped.”

  “So is she,” said Verdialos thickly, and rubbed her ears. Floradazul rose up in his lap and bashed the top of her head into his chin so hard I heard his teeth click together. Her purring was phenomenal. Verdialos sneezed, and went on, “Etriae showed me one day. She’s black with black stripes. Look at her carefully in a good light.”

  Floradazul bashed him again; he grunted, and then sneezed twice.

  “Dialo, you won’t have any peace from now on. I told you not to give in to her.”

  “I thought the attraction was all in my avoidance,” said Verdialos, and sniffed vigorously. I gave him my handkerchief. Floradazul turned around three times and settled in his lap, still rumbling. Verdialos stroked her and blew his nose.

  “Think how much avoidance she has to make up for,” I said.

  “Must I?” said Verdialos, and coughed alarmingly. “You’d better take her, Nerissa; this is exactly as bad as I thought it would be.”

  I picked up Floradazul, who protested but didn’t struggle and absently went on purring. Verdialos sneezed again and stood up, shaking dust off his robe. “Who’s awake still?” he said, looking past me at our house.

  There were two lights, one on the first floor and one at the very top. “Papa must be reading poetry. And that’s my room. Mama leaves a light on sometimes.”

  “Well,” said Verdialos. “Try not to fret yourself too much; I’ll see you on Procession Day.”

  “I still say it’s a pity the House of Responsible Life won’t march in the parade.”

  “You wouldn’t if you’d seen how we used to do it,” said Verdialos.

  Something in the relish with which he said it made me think he was probably right. Just the same, I said, “It does get wearing staying indoors with a swarm of misplaced children.”

  “Ah,” said Verdialos. “But thereby we garner strays from all the other faiths and make ourselves pleasant to harried parents by returning their offspring unharmed.” His tone was ironic; he was probably quoting some proclamation of the order’s Serenities, who worried sometimes about the House’s reputation in Liavek. I smiled; he reached up and pushed back from my forehead a strand of hair Floradazul had loosened. “Good night,” he said, and sneezed, and walked briskly away down the empty street, taking my handkerchief with him.

  His other fault had always been that he was profoundly undemonstrative; Etriae and I had occasionally shaken our heads over it. It seemed unlikely to me that asthma made one affectionate.

  I looked after him for a long time, not precisely thinking. Into the unoccupied spaces of my mind there stole Floradazul’s view of matters: she liked the way I smelled, although the translation of her olfactory abilities to my senses made me want to cough; she wanted my arm to be fatter so both hind legs would rest securely on it; she had been stalking a lizard that
went under a stone and stayed there until she was bored. This ability to see through her eyes and nose has never seemed to me of much use, but when The Magician of Liavek bound my luck to my cat, so that I would not die until she, my only responsibility, died also, he had insisted on including this power.

  Floradazul began to struggle and complain, and we went in.

  The clock in the hall was just striking twelve; Verdialos was going to be late and Etriae anxious. Well, if tardiness and worry were the worst things that happened in the new year, nobody would have cause to fuss. Floradazul, still muttering, finally kicked me in the stomach, leapt to the floor, and streaked for the kitchen. Cook would have left her something. I sniffed: woodsmoke, tallow, dried roses and orange-blossom, beeswax, cabbage, and something complex that was either chicken with rosemary or else eels doctored with such a lot of herbs that they might as well have been so many parsnips. Floradazul would eat either; that was all right.

  I went on standing there. The house creaked around me. Down the long hall, in my father’s study, there was a rough and substantial rustle. He was reading one of his old plays, the huge ones on paper so thick you kept trying to pry each page into two or three. I wondered which it was: Five Who Found Acrilat, Thy Servants and Thine Enemies, Maladromo and the Five Muskrats. Deleon and I had read them all surreptitiously and been smacked or scolded, when discovered, for touching the manuscripts; lately, though, my father had taken it for granted that we had read them, and would talk to me sometimes about them. My mother doesn’t care for poetry.

  Do nothing that you would not gladly do. I walked down the hall and tapped on the door.

  I had not set foot in his study in five years. It was the same as ever, a frail but enormous bamboo desk entirely surrounded by books, some on shelves and some not. There was a path to the desk, with waist-high stacks of books and papers on either side of it. The desk held a lamp and a pewter mug and what my father was reading; it was the tidiest desk I had ever seen, even in the House of Responsible Life, and the untidiest study, too. In a stack near the door lay plans for the invasion of Acrivain. They were at least five years old, but not dusty. We had been forbidden in no uncertain terms by Granny Carry, who in the usual Liavekan way has great but not official power here, to stay in Liavek while yearning for Acrivain. She said it caused a great deal of trouble to Liavek; and I daresay she ought to know. My parents had taken her ruling badly, and still argued about it; but in fact long before she issued it, my father had given up on political meetings and taken to beer and poetry instead. And both of them had made only the sort of fuss that means nothing when my brothers and sisters began to leave home.