by Tad Williams
Out loud, she said, “I…was not priestess. Just…” She searched for a word, but her command of the language was still weak. “Just helper.”
“In the Hive?” Rabbit asked. “Someone said it was in the Hive. I’ve heard of that place. Was it like they say—did the priests come in and…you know? With the priestesses?”
“Silence, girl,” said one of the other new workers, an old woman with a burn-scarred face and a mouth where dark holes outnumbered ruined teeth. She glared at Rabbit. “Don’t ask so many question. She does not want to talk, maybe.” Her command of Hierosoline was better than Qinnitan’s, but it was easy to hear that she too was a southerner.
“I only wanted to know…!” Rabbit squeaked.
“Tits of the Great Mother, what are you lazy bitches up to?” Soryaza’s voice thundered through the dank room. Her bulky form loomed up out of the washtub fog and the women scattered. “The next one I catch standing and talking might as well go down to the harbor and find a place to stand on Daneya Street with the other whores, because you won’t work for me another moment!”
“Yazi, why are there so many new people?” Qinnitan asked when they were standing over their washing tub again. New faces made her unhappy, and people asking about her history in Xis made her even more so.
“New?” The round-faced girl laughed. “You’ve only been here a tennight yourself.”
“But so many! Rabbit, and that old toothless woman, and the one with the fat legs…”
“Oh, listen to you! Not everyone’s a skinny little thing like you, Nira. As it happens, Soryaza told me she’s hiring more because of the war.”
“The war?”
“Don’t you listen to anybody? There’s a war coming, everyone says so. The autarch’s going to send ships. They’ll never break this place, of course—no one ever has. But the lord protector has called in troops from Krace and…and…and other places.” She flushed, her tone of authority momentarily compromised. “And so we’re going to be having more work.”
Qinnitan felt a sudden chill—touched by a ghost, her family had always called it. She had heard rumors but had not given them much credence—as the continent’s greatest seaport, Hierosol seemed to breathe rumors like air, to serve them as meat and drink. A new continent discovered in the western oceans, one said. So much gold discovered on an island near Ulos that the overladen boat sank on the way back. Fairy armies marching in the north. The Autarch of Xis preparing to conquer all Eion. Who was to know what was truth and what was fancy?
“The…autarch…?” she said now. Memories of his pale, mad eyes, never more than a moment away from her thoughts at the best of times, now pushed their way front and center. Is it me? she wondered. Is it to find me, to torture me for running away? It was silly, unbearably self-important, even to consider it, but she couldn’t shake off the idea: she had seen enough of Sulepis to know he was a man of incomprehensible whims.
No, she told herself. He and his father and his father’s father have wanted to set their heel on Eion for years, especially Hierosol. She had heard it talked of enough in the Seclusion. This is only more of the same, if it’s even true. And if he is coming, well, the walls will defeat him. And if they don’t…
Then I will be gone. I escaped him once, I will escape him again. Despite her terror, she felt a stubborn little glow inside her, a heat like a burning coal. Or die. But one way or another, he won’t have me…
“Nira?” Yazi was pulling at her sleeve. “Pay attention, girl! If Soryaza sees you staring at nothing that way, she’ll whip us both.”
Qinnitan bent to the washing, but it was hard to keep her thoughts on the sheets and soapy water.
As Qinnitan walked with Yazi at sunset across the wide space of the Echoing Mall, she had a sudden feeling of being observed, troubling as an insect flying too near her head. She looked back and at first saw only the other washerwomen and ordinary working folk of the citadel dispersing to the outer gates or their cramped quarters within the great fortress itself; then a movement at the corner of her eye, where the newly-lit torches lined one of the colonnades, made her turn all the way around. A smear of sideways movement, at odds with the rest of the crowd, arrested her attention. She felt sure someone had stepped back into the colonnade just as she looked. Still, did it mean something, even so?
“Nira, stop that,” said Yazi. “I’m so tired my feet are on fire. Keep walking, will you?”
Qinnitan walked forward, but after a dozen paces turned again. A man was walking along the edge of the colonnade, and although he was not looking at her she thought she saw him hesitate for an instant and almost break stride, as though he had just decided it was too late to step back out of sight again.
Qinnitan pointed up at the sky above the high walls of the Echoing Mall, shot red with the last light of the day, and said, “Isn’t it pretty, with all those colors!” While performing this bit of show, she examined the man as best she could. He wore shabby, unobtrusive clothes—the kind any of the menial laborers might wear—and had somewhat the look of a northerner, with hair of the lackluster brown shade Qinnitan had learned was almost as common north of Hierosol as black hair was in Xand. He was studiously avoiding her eyes as he walked, and so Qinnitan swung around again.
“What are you talking about, the sunset?” asked Yazi. “If your thoughts wandered any farther, girl, you’d have to put bells on them, like goats.”
When Qinnitan looked back the man was gone into the crowd. She didn’t know what to think. Even Yazi suddenly seemed capable of having secret depths.
Pigeon came bounding out to greet her when they reached the dormitory hall, excited as a puppy. He threw his arms around her, then grabbed her hand to pull her back to the bed they shared, waving his free arm excitedly. He had taught her some of the hand-language he had spoken with the other mute servants back in the Orchard Palace, but at times like this he didn’t bother trying to make his thoughts known in a more subtle way, nor did he need to. Some of the other women looked up as he dragged Qinnitan down the open space between the tiny wooden beds, a few with indulgent smiles, remembering brothers or children of their own, many others with the generalized irritation of someone who had just finished a long, hard day’s labor being forced to observe the endless energies of a child. It was strange, living with so many women again—almost a hundred in this dormitory alone, with several more buildings like it on this side of the citadel. The culture was oddly familiar, the same quick-blooming friendships and rivalries and even hatreds, as though someone had taken the wives of the autarch’s Seclusion, dressed them in dirty smocks and sweat-stained dresses, then dumped them into this vast, depressing hall that had once been the royal stables for some long-dead king of Hierosol. These women were not so comely, and not so young—many of them were grandmothers—but otherwise there seemed little difference between this and her former home, or even the Hive where she had lived before.
Cages, she thought. Why do men fear us so that they must cage us all together and keep us apart from them? Hierosol was better than Xis, but even here there were strict rules about keeping out men, even for those of the washerwomen who were married. Only Soryaza’s intervention with the dormitory mistress had gained a place here for Pigeon, and he was one of but a dozen or so children, most babes in arms who stayed behind during the day to be cared for in an offhand way by a pair of washerwomen now too old to work, two crones who each morning found the sunniest place in the dormitory and sat there like lizards, muttering to each other while the children more or less looked after themselves.
“Soryaza says she has work for you again,” Qinnitan told Pigeon, suddenly reminded. He had been banished to the dormitory for being underfoot—a crime worse than murder, to hear the laundry-mistress talk. “You’ll come in with me tomorrow.”
Pigeon seemed less interested in this news than in tugging her the last few steps toward their bed. In the middle of it, nested in a pile of wood chips and shavings like the legendary phoenix, sat a slightly i
rregular carving of a bird—a pigeon, she saw after a moment. Pigeon pointed to the sculpture, then dug the small knife he had stolen from Axamis Dorza’s house out of the chips and proudly displayed it, too.
“Did you make this bird? It’s very fine.” But she could not help frowning a little. “I do wish you hadn’t done it on the bed. I’ll be sleeping in slivers tonight.”
He looked at her with such hurt that she bent and picked up the carving to examine it. As she turned it over she saw that he had arduously carved her name (or at least his childish approximation of it) on the bottom of it in Xixian letters—“Qinatan.” A rush of love for the boy collided with a burst of fear to see her real name written on something, even a child’s rough carving. Yazi and Soryaza were not the only women here who could speak the language of Xis, and some of them might read it too. She already had enough problems with people asking questions.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “But you must remember my name here is Nira, not…not the other. And you are Nonem, remember?”
This time he did not look hurt so much as anguished at his own mistake, and she had to pull him to her and hug him tight. “No, it’s beautiful, it is. Let me just take it for a moment. And the knife, please.” She kissed him on top of his head, smelling the strange boy-smell of his sweat, then looked around. Several women on either side were watching. She smiled and showed them the bird, then took it with her and headed for the privies on the far side of the dormitory hall. She sat down in one of the small cubicles there, so like an animal’s stall that she felt sure they had once been just that, and, when she felt sure no one was looking, took the knife and quickly scraped the boy’s childish letters off the bottom of the bird.
On the way back she stopped off to borrow a looking-glass from one of the other serving-women. In return for the loan she gave the woman the round ball of soap she had assembled from discarded slivers in the laundry. The mirror was the size of Qinnitan’s hand, in a chipped frame of polished tortoiseshell.
“Mind you bring it back before bedtime,” the woman warned.
Qinnitan nodded. “Just…for hair,” she said in her fragmented Hierosoline. “Bring soon.”
When she reached her bed again she saw that Pigeon had done his best to clear away the remnants of his day’s carvings. She set the carved bird on the empty barrel she shared as a table with the next bed over, and borrowed a comb from the girl whose bed that was, and who luckily did not ask anything in trade.
Qinnitan set the mirror on her knee and stared at the reflection. To her despair, she saw that her unruly hair had escaped the scarf again right where the red streak emerged. As if she had not already left enough of a trail across the citadel! She no longer had access to the cosmetics and dyes the women had used in the Seclusion, so she had done her best to disguise the flame-colored patch with soot from the candles and the laundry fireplaces, but working in that damp, hot room ensured that the soot didn’t work for long. She would have to get a bigger scarf, or cut her hair off entirely. Some of the older women here wore their hair very short, especially if they were past childbearing age. Maybe no one would think it too odd if she did the same…
“Nira, isn’t it?” a scratchy voice asked.
Startled, Qinnitan looked up, hurriedly tucking her hair back under the scarf. It was the old woman from the laundry, the one with the burned face and missing teeth who had only been working there a few days. “Yes?”
“It’s me, Losa. I thought that was you when I saw you across the room. And is this your little brother?”
Pigeon was looking at the old woman with mistrust, his usual expression with strangers. “Yes, his name is Nonem.”
“Ah, lovely. I didn’t mean to bother you, child, I was just…”
At that moment, just to add to the madcap air of sudden festivity, Yazi approached, followed by a young girl in a very fine dress—the kind of dress the laundrywomen only saw when they were called upon to clean things from the upper apartments of the citadel.
“Nira, I just…” Yazi saw the old woman. “Losa! What are you doing here?”
The woman smiled, then quickly pulled her lips together to hide her ruined teeth. “Oh, I couldn’t get out the gate to get home. All kinds of soldiers coming in, and such a fuss! Wagons, oxen, people shouting. Someone said they were Sessians hired by the lord protector. I thought I’d ask if I could stay here.”
“We’ll talk to the dormitory mistress,” said Yazi, “but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” At any ordinary time Yazi would have pressed the old woman for details and it would have been the subject of the evening’s conversation all over the dormitory, but now something even more exciting was clearly pressing on her. “Nira, there’s someone here to see you.”
Qinnitan was beginning to feel quite overwhelmed. She turned to the very young girl in the beautiful blue dress and velvet petticoat. A crowd of women was beginning to gather as people came to see what had brought such an apparition into the dormitory.
“Yes?”
“I am to take you to my mistress,” the girl said. “You are…Nira?”
Qinnitan’s confusion quickly turned to panic, but she couldn’t very well deny it. She struggled to frame the Hierosoline words. “Who…who is your mistress?”
“She will tell you herself. Come with me, please.” Beneath the formal manners, the girl seemed a little anxious herself.
“Oh, that is too bad,” old Losa said. “I was looking forward to a chat.”
“You’d better go,” Yazi told Qinnitan. “Maybe a handsome prince saw you when we were wandering around lost today. Should I come with you, in case he has trouble making himself understood when he proposes to you?”
“Stop, Yazi.” Qinnitan just wanted everyone to go away and forget about this, but it was obviously going to be the talk of the dormitory, perhaps for days.
“She is to come alone,” said the girl in the blue dress.
“But what about…my brother?” Qinnitan asked.
“I’ll watch him,” Yazi said. “We’ll have fun, won’t we, Nonem?”
Pigeon liked Yazi, but he clearly didn’t like the idea of letting Qinnitan go away with some stranger. Still, after a warning look from her, he nodded. Qinnitan rose, leaving the comb and mirror for Yazi to return to their owners, and followed the girl out of the dormitory into the cold, torchlit night.
She felt in the pocket of her smock for Pigeon’s carving knife and held it tightly as they walked back across the tiled immensity of the Echoing Mall.
“Who is your…mistress?” she asked the girl again.
“She will tell you what she wishes to tell you,” the little girl in the blue dress said, and would say no more. “
I am not happy,” said her father. Pelaya knew it was the truth. Count Perivos was not the sort of man who liked surprises, and all this had obviously come as just that. “Bad enough that a foreign prisoner should bribe my daughter to send messages to me when I already have so much else to worry on—using her as a…a go-between. But to find he also expects her to arrange some sort of assignation for him…!”
“It’s not an assignation and he didn’t bribe me.” Pelaya stroked his sleeve. The cuff needed mending, which made her heart ache a little—he worked so hard! “Please, Babba, don’t be difficult. Was there anything bad in his letter to you?”
Her father raised his eyebrow. “Babba? I haven’t heard that since the last time you wanted something. No, his thoughts are at least interesting, perhaps useful, and all he asks in return is any news I can give him about his home or his family. There’s nothing wrong with the letter, except that he knows too much. How could a foreign prisoner have so much to say about our castle defenses?”
“He told me he fought here twenty years ago against the Tuan pirates. That he was a guest of the Temple Council.”
“I remember those days, but he remembers where every tower stairway is and how many steps it has, I swear! He must have a memory like a mantisery library.” Count Perivos frown
ed. “Still, some of his warnings and suggestions show wisdom, and I am willing to believe he meant them in good faith. But what is this madness about a serving girl?”
“I don’t know, Babba. He said she reminded him of someone.” Pelaya spotted her servant coming across the garden with the dark-haired girl walking slowly behind her. “Look—here they come now.”
“Madness,” her father said, but sighed as if weak protest were all he was allowed.
Seeing the laundry maid up close, Pelaya was both relieved and confused. Relieved, without quite understanding why, to see that this girl was only a year or two older than she was, and that while she was by no means ugly, she was not astoundingly pretty, either. But something else about this laundry servant put her on edge, although Pelaya could not say what it was—something in the quality of the girl’s watchfulness, in the cool and measured way she looked around the torchlit garden, was not what the steward’s daughter expected from someone who spent every day up to her elbows in the citadel’s washing tubs.
Now the girl turned that dark-eyed gaze onto Pelaya and her father, examining them as carefully as she had the surroundings, which was strange in itself: should she not have been looking first at the nobles who had summoned her? Pelaya found the inspection a little unnerving.
“Your name is Nira, is it not?” she asked the girl. “Someone wants to meet you. Do you understand me?”
The girl nodded. “Yes, Nira. Understand.” Either she had not been in Hierosol long or she was far more stupid than she looked, because her accent was barbarous.
Not for the first time that day, Pelaya wondered what she had stumbled into. A simple friendship had become something larger and much less comfortable. She was reassured that her father and his bodyguard were here to ensure that nothing was passed between the prisoner and this servant girl and that no tricks were attempted.
Now Perivos stepped forward. He spent a moment examining the girl Nira as thoroughly as she herself had inspected everything and everyone else. “So this is her?”
