“So you dislike that I asked,” she said, without rancor.
“I meant no offense, mevrol,” I murmured.
She hummed thoughtfully. “Up you get; follow me.” She led me into her office and shut the door, then fetched out a pair of tiny glasses and a bottle of peket. “Have a drink. You look like someone’s about to lead you to your execution.” She said nothing more until we had sat in silence, sipping our respective thimbles of peket for a time. “What kind of a story is it? Funny, sad?”
I shrugged. “Depends how you tell it. I could make it either one, depending.”
“On what?”
“On what I needed it to be. It’s a fable, a . . . cautionary tale.”
“And against what does it caution?”
“Making deals carelessly. It’s called ‘The Trout of Perfect Hind- sight.’ ”
The corner of her mouth quirked. “Start it again. Tell it properly.”
“A very long time ago and half the world away—”
“No,” she said, and topped up my glass. The peket was heavy, almost oily, tasting strongly of juniper. “You got so stiff just then. Two words in and you were as stiff as a day-old corpse. Drink, then start again.”
I obeyed, more bewildered than anything. “A very long—”
“Still no!” She slapped her open palm on the desk. “What is this between us that you’re so formal and toneless? Slouch down in your chair,” she said, pointing at me, and I had to. “Put your feet up on the desk.” I did, and she mirrored me with a grin, crossing her legs at the ankle. Her shoes were bright red leather with sparkling jeweled buckles and a gilt heel, not that she needed to be any taller. “Try again. Casual, relaxed, like you’re gossiping. Like you’re letting me in on a secret.”
A glass-and-a-bit of peket had warmed my blood. I took another sip, and closed my eyes. The room was so quiet that it was easy to pretend like there was no one else with me.
“So . . . A very long time ago, and half the world away, there was this fisherman, Zaria, who lived in a drafty thatched cottage halfway up a mountain.” And then I told “The Trout of Perfect Hindsight.” I told it like I’d tell it to myself, all alone in my room in Mevrouw Basisi’s attic or on the road in between two nowheres.
And when I had finished, when Zaria had eaten what always turned out to be an unexpectedly expensive pot of fish stew, I opened my eyes again and met Sterre’s gaze.
She was sitting back in her chair, but when I finished, she rose, her hands clasped behind her back, and paced slowly once around the room, looking thoughtful. “You said your master told you about the stars-in-the-marsh,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied, too surprised by the change of topic to prevaricate. “Some.”
“Could you tell a story about that?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “But I’d rather not.”
“And I’d rather you did,” she said.
“Respectfully, mevrol, you’ve hired me as a clerk and a translator.”
“What’s going on in your head? You’re resistant. Why?”
“It’s not something I enjoy anymore.”
“Anymore, you say. So you did enjoy it, once. You must have, to have been apprenticed for it.” I said nothing. Sterre made her way around the desk again and perched on the edge, her arms crossed, studying me. “So the matter is merely to help you enjoy it again. Or otherwise to give you enough incentive to do it regardless of enjoyment. So what would do it for you? Money? I suppose it is only fair to offer you more money for additional services.”
“I don’t care about money.”
“If you say so. But seriously: name the thing that would incline you to my point of view.”
“I don’t want anyone to look at me,” I said sharply. “I don’t want the attention, I don’t want—I can’t do it. I’m sorry, mevrol. I just can’t do it.”
“Poor lamb,” she said, her voice gentle, coaxing. “Of course. I understand. Pretty thing like you, they must look at you like you’re a plate of strawberries and cream. Of course you’re sick of that kind of attention. I can quite relate.”
“I just want to be left alone,” I said.
“Do you? Truly? There isn’t any part of you that wonders what it could be like? That thinks about taking that hunger that’s directed at you and using it like a tool? Redirecting it, building something with it?” I looked up at her, puzzled. “Hunger is everywhere, heerchen. The more you feed it, the greater it gets. I’m sure you’ve noticed that.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “That’s why I’m tired. That’s why I can’t. I fed people’s hunger all I could, and now there’s nothing left.”
“There’s plenty left. When people come starving to you, looking at you like you’re strawberries in sweet cream, you don’t give them that; you give them something else. You convince them they want the apricots next to you. Or the expensive bottle of galardine. Or the exotic new flower bulbs your employer has just imported.” The corner of her mouth quirked. “Right? Bright mannchen like you, you understand. Don’t you?”
“But I’d still have to—”
“It would be different. I’d bet a hundred guilders it would be different.”
“No bet,” I whispered, simply because I didn’t have a hundred guilders, but she smiled, triumphant.
“I thought you’d understand,” she said. She pushed off the desk and put one hand on my shoulder. “Besides, heerchen, you’d be doing it for me, not for them.” I closed my eyes, breath going out of me all at once. Her hand grew weightier. “Is that it? Is that what makes it all right? You’d have a reason. A purpose. And you wouldn’t have to think about it. I’d guide you. I’d tell you what to do.”
I opened my eyes, looked up at her. How many times had I felt untethered, drifting, lost at sea? How many times had I stood and cried at a crossroads?
“Can you do it?” she murmured. “Can you be very brave for me, heerchen?”
“I can try,” I said faintly.
“There, that’s good. That’s very good. That’s all I ever want—just you trying your very best.” And then she smiled very, very wide. “When they show you their hunger, whatever it is, tell them they can sate it with these flowers.”
And that was how I ended up in the market square, sitting on a blanket on the ground by one of Sterre’s rented market stalls, where she sends her lieutenants to make public appearances to represent her to the common people.
She wants me to be a Chant. She wants me to tell stories about the stars-in-the-marsh so that more people will buy them, so that she can drive the prices up. She says people pay more when there’s some reason to care about the product they’re buying. She says they care more when there’s a story, and she’s not wrong. So that’s what I’m supposed to do now. I’m supposed to tell stories about the flowers. I’m supposed to be a Chant.41
I haven’t decided how I feel about it. But I promised her I’d try. And there is something to what she said, convincing them to take a flower instead of my heart. It makes it . . . bearable. Almost. And the pleasure and approval she takes in my work, the way it matters to her, that makes it bearable too.
But still I need something for myself. And still I need a place to think, to work it all out, a walled garden to tend, tucked away from the world, secret and safe and mine.
* * *
38. True. Lovely sight. Bring noseplugs.
39. If you tell her, I will scream so loud you hear me from . . . wherever it is that you ran off to.
40. Whew. Floods of relief.
41. This is perverse. You let her use you and your skills and your holy calling for her own personal gain. For swindling people into buying something. Have you no shame?
THIRTEEN
Hecht Neeltje’s lover left him today. I heard all about it—I had to help tend the bar, because even though Heer Ambroos (the usual aleman) was there, most of his attention was taken up in managing Neeltje. Part of his job is to listen, I guess, just like it’s part of a Chant’s job.
I couldn’t help but overhear, and it seems I’m still enough of a Chant to be nosy about things that aren’t really my business. It was sort of instinctive.
Ambroos eventually decided to stop serving him any more alcohol, and Hecht Neeltje sat there slumped at the bar, as dejected as I’ve ever seen him. He didn’t even ask me for a story, or gush to someone else about how they should ask me for one, which was probably the most significant sign that something was really, really wrong.
“Can you watch him for a minute?” Ambroos asked me, as the night was wearing on. “Gotta take a piss.” He left before I could say anything, so I stood somewhere in proximity to Neeltje and wondered what Ambroos expected me to do about him while I cleaned glasses and wiped down the bar. (Ambroos was getting tired of Neeltje’s misery, I think—he’s one of those people who doesn’t have much interest in romantic relationships, though he will listen to his patrons’ other woes all night long.)
“Gimme a drink,” Neeltje said. He was slurring still. Hadn’t sobered up much at all, by that point.
“Ambroos cut you off.”
Neeltje sniffled. “You ever been alone?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Really alone, I mean. Alone-alone.”
“Yes,” I said again, and a dozen stories about the lonely long roads between nowheres presented themselves. I held my tongue.
“You know when you’re the most alone, though?”
“When?” I wondered when Ambroos was coming back. Likely he had stopped to smoke, or gotten caught by Mevrouw Basisi or one of the other patrons.
Neeltje set his elbow on the bar and held up two fingers, surprisingly steady for the amount he’d had to drink. “Two days after somebody’s just ditched you without explanation.”
He might as well have punched me across the face. I swallowed hard and hoped my voice wouldn’t crack. “Why two days?” I asked, and my voice did crack after all.
“ ’Cause the first day, they’re still there.” He flailed one arm towards the empty seat next to him. “You know. The shape of them. The space they take up. Even if they’re not in it, you’re used to that place having a person standing in it. It hurts, but you’re not really, really alone then. Two days, though, you start realizing.”
My mouth was dry. “Realizing . . . ?”
“That they’re not coming back. That nobody is ever going to stand in that place again, not the way they did, not taking up the same kind of space they did. Then,” he said, beginning to cry again, “then you’re the most alone.”
I gripped the edge of the bar hard enough to hurt my hands. The only other option was to sink to the floor and cry myself. Gods, how is it possible for someone who doesn’t even know you to say something like that, something that pierces to the core of you, strikes you in a place that you thought no one else could ever really understand?
“Yes,” I said, swallowing hard. “I know. I’ve been that alone.”
Neeltje looked at me, his eyes red and puffy, tears pouring down his face. “Someone left you?” I nodded. “What did you do?”
“Cried a lot. Kept walking.”
“One foot in front of the other,” he said with a sobbing sort of laugh. “That’s what my brother said. He doesn’t know about being alone.”
I took one shaking breath, then another. I reached out and touched Neeltje’s hand, just the tips of my fingers. “It won’t hurt forever,” I said. “You’re going to be okay. One day at a time.” Useless, stupid, bland platitudes, but I wish I’d had someone to tell me even those during my two-days-later.
“Yeah, I know.” He thought they were useless and bland too.
“Look, do you—do you have anyone you can talk to about it? Someone besides Ambroos, and when you’re sober. You should. You should talk about it. Even to your brother, even if he doesn’t really understand it.” He made an uncertain noise. “And you should get out of the house and go somewhere besides here. You should go out and do something, or make something. Something that makes you happy, something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the person who left you.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” He scowled. “The only reason I made it here was for the drink. You know what I did all day before I got here? Lay in bed and stared at the wall and just—existed.” He spat the final word. “Hard enough work just to exist. How am I supposed to do anything else?”
“Force of will?” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Spite, then.”
Neeltje squinted at me. “What do you mean?”
“You get out of bed, wash, put on clean clothes, and eat, and the whole time you pretend like you’re telling that empty space that’s watching you, ‘See? I’m fine. Look how fine I am. Shipwreck you.’ ”
“Is that what you do?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Go show them you can live without them. Go do something wonderful, just on the off chance they hear about it through the grapevine and realize what a terrible mistake they made when they left you.”
That made him laugh, at least, and then Ambroos came back and I managed to run away before Neeltje sobered up enough to realize what an awful wretch of a hypocrite I am, or decided to demand a story from me, as he always eventually does.
I’ll have to do better about avoiding him. He got too close there, hit too near my heart.
Thing is, I think it would be good for me if I did talk to him. You know, if I pulled myself together and took some of my own advice. Talking to him would almost certainly make me feel better, even if I didn’t tell him any of my own troubles. I feel a little different just from that one brief exchange earlier, just from telling him what he should do (mostly I feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, like I’ve walked out into the street without any trousers on, but considering I haven’t felt much of anything lately but gray and soggy, that’s still something). I don’t think I helped him very much—hell, I probably didn’t help him at all, really. Ambroos had already done most of it. But . . . He could have understood me.
It’s so stupid, isn’t it? Pathetic. To feel like that one little thing is so damn important, as if something that small can make any difference, in the grand scheme of things. To think that some stranger in a bar can possibly change anything for you just by understanding, like empty empathy is worth anything.
Look at me, look at this: Poor little Ylfing, sitting all on his own in an attic, crying because someone made him feel a little less alone for one fucking second, and he was too scared of it to stick around and let them.
Stupid, miserable child. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
No, none of that. I hear Chant’s voice when I write things like that, and there are limits to what I’ll put up with from myself. I won’t stand to let him bully me, not here, a year and a half and a thousand miles away from where he left me. Absolutely not. I really must be more sharp with myself about—about not being sharp with myself like that, I guess.
I don’t know if I can manage carrying on out of actual spite quite yet, like I told Neeltje, but I can handle sheer, bloody-minded obstinacy. I can put one foot in front of the other and trudge between two nowheres. What other choices are there? I have to keep paying work—I have to eat, after all, and at least while I’m here in the city, I need a place to sleep.
Speaking of sleep, now that I’ve calmed down and had some, though fitfully and only for an hour or so—I’ve been dreaming. The same thing every time, though it’s not every night, and lately it’s the only one that I remember when I wake up. The first time was right after Sterre showed me the star-in-the-marsh bulb. I suppose it must have unsettled me enough, seeing something that’s so much a part of the ancestry of my line of Chants.
The dream goes like this: I’m in the middle of an endless marsh. It’s the dark end of twilight, and the sky is clear and empty. All around me, the stars-in-the-marsh are blooming, glowing gently in the dark, and I smell them—rotting meat, just as the captain had said. Every time, I wake up choking.
Tonight when I woke up, I lay in
the dark and tried and tried to remember what Chant had told me about them. It can’t have been much—he wasn’t interested in plants. I know they’re hardy. I know more about them from Sterre—they take five or six years to flower from seed, but the bulbs can be uprooted in their dormant season and moved about. I know that sometimes the bulbs grow offshoots, and those can be separated from the mother bulb and will bloom after only a year.
If Sterre got them from Kaskinen . . . That’s where the Chants settled first, when they came out of Arthwend after it sank beneath the waves in the cataclysmic flood. They made landfall in the Issili Islands, on the Jewel Coast, and then (finding, I suppose, seaside living not to their taste) trickled up the archipelago to what is now Kaskinen. They were marsh-dwellers before, the Chants’ people—perhaps they brought the flowers with them. Even if it’s not true . . . It’s a good story, right?
If all my years of apprenticeship taught me anything, it’s more important to tell a good story than a true story.42
* * *
42. What’s best, of course, is to tell a story that’s good and true, but I don’t suppose that would matter much to the likes of you.
FOURTEEN
Almost every day, I go to the market square, which the locals call the Rojkstraat, and I tell people about the stars-in-the-marsh. I’m supposedly there to help translate for Sterre’s employees, but only locals come to the Rojkstraat, and everyone knows the Spraacht fluently, even the locals for whom it’s not their mother tongue.
The Rojkstraat is like every other market I’ve seen. It’s not special. There’s nothing to remark upon.43 There’s rows of tables, and some of [[p50]]them have awnings above them, and there’s people playing music for coins, or telling fortunes. It’s exactly like any other market. It’s open every day of the week, except during the stormy season, when the rains come too frequently and too heavily for anyone to linger out-of-doors for very long.
I have to go every day for the half of the week that Sterre rents her table there, because she said so, and when I arrive, I find her majordomo, Heer Teo, and I do whatever he tells me. And what he tells me is to sit on the bench, or on a blanket on the ground, and tell stories, whet the hunger of the ravening crowd, and then turn them over to Teo when they’re ready.
A Choir of Lies Page 4
