Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  My father looked up. In Acrivain he was unprepossessing, but in Liavek, with his stature and his tightly curled white hair and his bony pale face, I had seen people turn to look at him in the street. He looked benevolent enough, because of the ale that had been in the pewter mug. I thought I had better speak first just the same.

  “I’m home,” I said. “Happy Divination Day. What are you reading?”

  And that is the best question in the world, certainly in my house and quite possibly in any. An entire speech practiced on eight children in turn about their family responsibilities, the vulgarity of Liavekan superstitions and holidays generally, one’s habit of being sociable only when it was inappropriate, and any story handy about what trouble some action or possession of one’s had caused in one’s absence, all died for lack of breath. He turned the huge manuscript to face me, and I saw it was not a play at all. It was a cycle of poems by the Morianie poet Kamissor, that purports to be an herbiary but is in fact an allegory about love and art. Its herbal information is correct but not illuminating. I realized, scanning it, that it was from here Deleon must have gotten the verse form he used for two of the characters in his first play. I wondered if he knew, and if my father had noticed.

  “Do you still like it?” I said. I could tell by the color of the ribbon that it had been a long time since he had opened this one.

  He had been wanting to grumble, so he grumbled a little about the work’s uneven structure. But in ten minutes he was reading the old Acrivannish aloud; his pronunciation was not as good as my grandmother’s, but he had a nice grasp of the rhythms. When I saw him begin to get testy I yawned, and was promptly sent off to bed as if I were eight and not eighteen.

  Jehane was sitting on my bed, her long legs tucked under her and her yellow hair falling out of its braids, reading a story I was not yet ready to show her. “Put that down!” I said.

  Jehane turned pink and did so. “It was right where it always is,” she said.

  “Well, you don’t live here any more. I was going to bring it along to Granny’s in a decent civilized fashion, after Festival.”

  “You should have thought I’d come home for Festival.”

  “This isn’t your room.”

  “Gillo and Givanni have filled up my room with bolts of bad silk,” snapped Jehane.

  My mother had said something of the sort several days ago, but I had paid no attention. “Well, you might have just rolled them down the stairs.”

  I said this so that I could say later I had thought it would make her laugh; in fact, I knew that tonight it would not. Jehane was very even-tempered, but when she chose to become cross, she became very cross indeed. She only scowled at me. I said, “Why are you home at all, in this state of mind?”

  “Because it’s Grand Festival Week. Granny wants us to try our hands at celebrating a major Liavekan holiday. I finally got her to say I could come back on Bazaar Day; she wants to show me how to bargain for thread and what ready-made fabrics are worth the buying.”

  I said temperately, “I just spoke to Papa; he seemed quite reasonable.”

  “Yes, after I spent two hours soothing him down. He was at me at once about why I don’t come home more often.”

  That was very likely true, and the ease I had been silently congratulating myself on won from somebody else’s efforts. “You come too often, if anything,” I said; another remark that sounded supportive but was not. I was very ruffled that she had read that story. Until last year, every sister that I had pried constantly and Jehane’s prying was the least of it, because she loved me; now, with all of them out of the house, even Jehane made me furious.

  Jehane rose off my bed and stalked for the door. “If you left as you ought,” she said, “you wouldn’t notice.”

  Tardiness, worry, and family quarrels. The mere fabric of everyday life.

  Divination Day

  I have never seen anything like that Divination Day for good intentions gone astray. Everybody came home: Marigand and her husband with the new baby; Gillo and Givanni with Livia and Livia’s husband; Isobel from the Theater of Golden Lights; Deleon from the Desert Mouse, with Aelim in tow. Aelim was also a player, and, like Calla, small and beautiful; unlike Calla, he was both silent and understanding. If he had not either winked at me at strategic moments or engaged me in obscure linguistic speculation—for how should I be expected to know why the old Acrivannish verb forms had no future tense—at others, matters would have been a great deal worse than they were.

  The children who had lived away from home for some time, like Marigand and my two older brothers, knew how to deal with my parents, but found their habits of discourse with the recently departed children no longer adequate. The recently departed children ought not to have come back so soon. Deleon had run away ten years ago. We had found him again by going to see his first play. I knew that he and Aelim had asked our parents to supper; moreover, our parents had gone. But Deleon had not been back to the house he grew up in until now, and he looked like somebody with a bout of stomach fever, unless Aelim made him laugh. He and I shook our heads at one another a time or two, to prevent one or another angry outburst; but we found sensible conversation impossible.

  By Divination Night, my mother, my father, Gillo, Marigand, and Marigand’s husband had all shouted furiously; Livia, Givanni, and Isobel had all burst into tears; Jehane had said so many sharp things that my mother told her to go to her room, which provoked a hysterical outburst of laughter from almost everybody and made my mother burst into tears in her turn; Deleon had been sick twice into the pan in my room provided for Floradazul, who fortunately was in the habit of disdaining it except in very rainy weather; and even Aelim and the baby were beginning to look fretful. Floradazul had fled outside and gone to sleep at the top of the olive tree. Aelim and Ebulli—Livia’s husband—sat quietly, looking dark and somber and Liavekan, like spectators at some play in an unknown language. I looked at my tall, pale family with all its yellow hair and its faint lilting Acrivannish accent, and they seemed very strange to me; my own face in the hall mirror looked as foreign as somebody’s from Ka Zhir.

  We all went to bed early; Aelim and Deleon went home, which they had not intended to do until after dinner the next day. My parents were silent on this alteration in plans after Aelim and Deleon left, but we all heard about it at breakfast, in a kind of antiphonal discussion that told us they had talked it into shape half the night. I don’t know why I ever wondered that our family has produced two players and a playwright.

  Birth Day

  Aside from this performance, which after all was rude only to the absent, on Birth Day we were all tremulously polite, as people who are too frail and injured to make much effort but know what is right to do. My mother packed up the lot of us in the late morning and took us to see Granny Carry. Jehane bore her bag of clothes and a look of grim anticipation; she was not staying at our house until Bazaar Day and she looked forward to Granny’s discovering precisely why.

  It was gray and windy and threatening rain. This did not prevent large parties of people in bright clothes from running up and down the streets, laughing and singing and playing on drums and penny whistles. The taverns and restaurants had all set out their tables and chairs in the streets again, that they had taken in at the middle of the month of Wine, which had been cold this year. A few hardy souls were chortling around some of these tables; I hoped their drink was warming. Even the unbelievers don’t wish to be sick on Procession Day.

  I caught Jehane’s eye and smiled at her. “You know they’ll behave themselves at Granny’s,” I said.

  She smiled back, unperturbed. “She’ll know by the manner of their good behavior just how things have been.”

  Granny let us in serenely, gave us a brazier of coals for our hands, tea for our throats, and cats for our laps. Gillo and Givanni and my father had never been here before. Givanni was comforted by the cat; the other two simply stayed silent, drinking their tea and looking as if they expected the loom to le
ap at them or the wall hangings to fall on their heads.

  I remembered our ceremonial visits to Granny when I was small. My mother would make imperious pronouncements about Liavek, and Granny would contradict her, and so far as I could tell, they parted each feeling the victor. Today, my mother asked Granny how she did, and how Jehane was getting on with her weaving, and even how the cats were finding the cold weather. Granny dealt with the first two of these questions in an unnaturally gracious manner, but to the third she replied shortly, “Cold,” and thereafter settled back in her wicker chair to watch my family try to behave itself. When we left, Jehane did not come with us; and Granny looked as pleased as a cat in a basket of clean laundry.

  The rest of the day went rather better. We were trying for the first time the Liavekan custom of celebrating everyone’s birthday on this first day of Festival Week (it was the second day of Grand Festival, but Divination Day is not counted, it simply occurs). This meant that everyone’s favorite food must be cooked, and everyone’s favorite game played at least once, and everyone’s desires in the matter of foolish or impractical acquisitions taken into account. Cook, no one having told her otherwise, had made enough of each favorite dish for twelve; when all the serving plates were on the table, there was no room for us to eat. We dispersed all over the house, dropping crumbs and not being scolded for it.

  The present-giving was more complex, and elicited a good deal of sarcastic commentary; nobody in this family has ever been able to give another member of it a proper present. The only person who liked what I gave him was Aelim; I had unearthed a mold-spotted glossary to the plays of Petrane, given me by my father when he got a new one, and Aelim behaved as if it were bound in gold and leather. I myself received a green silk cushion that Floradazul would shred in a tenday; a pen of the wrong size and a bottle of ink of the wrong color; a very beautiful green glass statue of a Kil that Floradazul would enjoy breaking; a white shirt, a red shirt, and a yellow dress that I could not wear to work in but were, in fact, welcome, if respectively too wide, too short, and too long; and a rocklike loaf of brown rice bread from Livia that made my eyes mist up, although neither Floradazul nor I could possibly eat it.

  Givanni was not kind about his own rock of bread, and unfortunately Livia did not take his remark as the other givers had taken everyone else’s. The repercussions of this lasted until bedtime. I lay wide awake with a monstrous headache and a purring cat on my stomach, thinking that all the rest of them must have been very pleased indeed to go away rather than upstairs. Later, I thought they might have been relieved to go away but not quite sorry that they came. And I wondered if Granny might have discerned the possibility of just that outcome when she watched us visit her. I went to sleep finally, to dream confusedly of Floradazul’s breaking the statue and a great many other things I do not, in fact, own. I wondered if her dreams were getting into mine. In the morning I found out that I had probably heard in my sleep the thump and rumble and crash of the fireworks by the Cat River.

  Procession Day

  My parents had decided that celebrating Procession Day was too much to ask of anybody not born in Liavek. I was very much afraid that they planned some ceremony for Acrilat, who (even if Granny had not ordered us to abandon It) had never done any of us the least good. (Verdialos says that what good we think the gods do us is not the point, but I had learned, by the time he said so, not to argue with him on such subjects.) But when I suggested I might stay home with them instead of going to the House of Responsible Life, they were not in the least perturbed; in fact, I had some difficulty in persuading them that I did have to go after all. They did not exactly know that the House was a religion, and the thought of me copying away in there instead of watching the crazy Liavekans parade their mutually incomprehensible and contradictory gods all through the streets soothed them eventually.

  I was late for work, if I had been working; but in fact, except for the people detailed to deal with lost children, nobody was doing anything but talking and drinking Saltigan wine. Saltigan wine makes me sneeze, rather like Verdialos with Floradazul; Etriae found me some lemon water.

  Calla was there, although the Desert Mouse would be performing one play this evening and a different one on Festival Day itself and yet a third on Restoration Eve. She was extremely somber, and was wearing a short dress in an unnatural green that made her look sick. With Calla, this meant that either she was sick, she wanted people to think so, or there was some symbolic value in looking sick under the circumstances. She was handing out honeycakes to a swarm of at least twenty children; she smiled when she saw me, gave me one also, and bit into the last one herself.

  “The streets don’t look that crowded to me,” I said.

  “Most of these aren’t lost,” said Calla. “They were lost last year, or the year before, and liked it so well they came back. Some of their parents leave them off at the front door and collect them at dusk.”

  “I suppose ‘House of Responsible Life’ does have a soothing ring to it,” I said.

  “Either that, or they hope the children will take to the philosophy and cease troubling them,” said Calla.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She took a very large bite of cake, looking at the floor; when she had finished chewing, she gave me a long opaque look out of her great yellow eyes and said flatly, “I don’t look forward to remembering the dead tonight.”

  I didn’t ask whom she had to remember; it might be her father, perhaps, or someone of whom I knew nothing. Now that Deleon was restored to us, I had only my grandmother to think of, and a blue-and-cream cat with green eyes that had once been Floradazul. Cats have nine lives in Liavek—Liavekan superstitions having an irritating tendency to be true—and Floradazul was on her second, through annoying a camel. My black cat was clearly still my cat, my very same cat; and yet from time to time I missed the blue-and-cream, and would think of her on Remembrance Night.

  “What play are you doing tonight?” I said.

  Calla chortled. “Such a ruckus!” she said. “We always do Firethorn and Mistletoe, you know; and Deleon wanted to write a tragedy specially for Remembrance Night, and he went after Thrae and after her, and finally she told him he could write it when he was dead himself and knew something about it; and Aelim laughed, which meant Del couldn’t even be properly affronted.”

  I felt rather affronted for my brother, who was after all going to be a fine playwright; but I had to laugh too. Calla seemed quite over her somber mood; we went and helped Etriae do farcical readings from her Deck of Hours until Verdialos came downstairs with a smudge of ink on his nose and said it was time to go outside and watch the procession.

  I had seen one or two others, and this was much the same. I wish now I had paid it more mind, but I had fallen into one of those futile cogitations that seem to follow along with the age of eighteen, concerning why I did not enjoy such spectacles as I used to. If I had attended to it, I should likely have enjoyed it just as well. As it was, I stood between Verdialos and Etriae, with Calla in front of me so she could see better, exploring my likes and dislikes in weary and pleasurable detail.

  Etriae said in a breathless voice very different from her usual cheerful tones, “Dialo.”

  And Verdialos said, “Yes—Nerissa, get down.” He pushed me, with considerable force for so slight a man, into Calla, and we both fell to our knees in the cool dust, whereupon there was an enormous volley of barking cracks, a bare instant’s silence, and a rash of screaming. I could smell gunpowder.

  “Sorry, I lost my balance,” said Calla breathlessly beside me; and then she said, “Nerissa.”

  I had hair and dust in my eyes; the first thing I saw, swiping the hair away, was a finger of red paint sliding over the ground between Calla’s bare brown knee and my smudged skirt. Then I smelled a smell that made me think of copper, perhaps of the time I had put a half-copper piece in my mouth to tease Deleon, when I was very young. I looked up. It was not paint. It was all over Verdialos and Etriae, dappling
their green clothing like the light of sunset through leaves; it had spattered the screaming onlookers. Verdialos and Etriae lay in two ungainly heaps, several feet apart, as if whatever had made the noise had happened between them and flung them asunder. Verdialos, whose face I could see, looked absent; Etriae looked as if she were sleeping as Verdialos would tease her about sleeping, with both arms doubled under her head as if she were afraid they would get away from her. She did not smell like sleep, and none of this sounded like sleep. There was a little drift of smoke mingling with the dust, and a string of spent firecrackers fluttered by on the wind and was gone in the crowd. It was still Festival.

  I sat back in the dust, and felt the sticky touch of the finger of blood. I didn’t move; there seemed nowhere to move to. Various onlookers were shaking their heads over Verdialos and Etriae, and demanding a healer; eventually one surfaced and shook her head too. Calla was crying, quietly and with great dignity; on the platform of the theater she did it far more loudly.