‘And you…?’ Pryn asked. Chills cascaded her back, made the skin of her thighs pull in. If it was fear, she’d never felt this particular sort before. She had no idea what to do with it; so she tried to go on as though she weren’t feeling anything. ‘Who are you? What do you do…?’
The alley opened out. A covered cart with a single horse stood in the shadow of an arch.
‘Me?’ The woman took down the horse’s reins. ‘My mistress calls me the Wild Ini. Her secretary calls me the Silver Viper. (Her name is Radiant Jade, but that’s because she’s a barbarian!) You’ll probably find your own name for me—if we know each other long enough. What do I do?’ The breathy laugh. ‘I do what I like. And I like to kill people. A lot!’ Then she pushed Pryn up the short ladder at the cart’s side, while Pryn, with aching flank and bruised arm, reached for balance into the darkness among the cart’s maroon hangings.
5. Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations
Psychoanalysis tells us that fantasy is a fiction, and that consciousness itself is a fantasy-effect. In the same way, literature tells us that authority is a language effect, the product of the creation of its own rhetorical power: that authority is the power of fiction; that authority, therefore, is likewise a fiction.
SHOSHANA FELDMAN,
To Open the Question
‘DAWN IS THE LOVELIEST time in this garden,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘One would think that these blue dahlias, that those black tulips had been set in the shadow of this high rock or banked beside that grotesque stone beast to catch the precise subtlety of this light and no other. Will you walk with me up this path?’
‘I’m very confused, Madame Keyne,’ Pryn said. ‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘No doubt you are also frightened. The Wild Ini can be very frightening if seen in the proper light. But she is useful. She tells me she pulled you from the arms of a street pander—put a knife in him, too! You do not look like a woman used to such violences. Certainly you must have been terrified!’
Pryn thought of her dragon, of her own killings, of the carnage in the cellar. The pale-haired woman’s blade (whose thrust into Nynx Pryn had not even seen) had, if anything, brought the mayhem to a close; and because Pryn had not seen the thrust, it had also seemed a closing that was, somehow, external to the mayhem rather than of it. ‘Madame, I was—and am—more confused than frightened.’
‘Ah?’ Madame Keyne’s blue skirts floated back in the light breeze from more sheer blue. (Pryn remembered the thick cloth from her aunt’s loom.) ‘Well, I understand. Such violence engulfs the person caught up in it the way air supports a bird or water suspends a fish: one moves through it; it contours one’s every move. Yet one hardly realizes it’s there. I understand your state, believe me. A young woman of your sensibilities, brought to a strange house in a strange, if beautiful, suburb of the city, ministered to by unknown servants, made to sleep in a strange bed, unsure of who might enter during the long night, while the violences of the day vanish simply through incomprehension—surely this calm and alien domesticity has produced in you the real terror?’
‘Was that big woman who took my clothes and gave me a bath last night a servant?’ Pryn asked. ‘I’ve heard of servants, but I’ve never really seen one—up close.’ Pryn looked down at the new dress she had been given. Her side was much less sore this morning, but she knew that beneath the green material was a wide, purplish bruise. ‘Before she turned down my bed and told me to sleep, she said I had nothing to be afraid of.’ Recalling the nights she had slept beside the road in the forests and the fields, Pryn wondered how to explain the half-sleep that had become natural to her. ‘It was easier to believe her—and sleep—than to doubt and lie awake till morning. Again, Madame, I was not so much frightened as confused.’
Madame Keyne sighed. ‘My entire life I have found things seldom to be as most people expect them, and I have grown wealthy catering to people’s expectations by my manipulations of the real. Yet my own expectations are as hard for me to let go as the superstitions of some barbarian living in ignorance and squalor in the Spur. I expect you to be terrified, and, quite mechanically, against all your protests I have done everything to alleviate that terror. Even accepting your protest is, for me, a matter of assuming my efforts have been successful—rather than admitting there was no need for my concern.’ She smiled at Pryn with an almost elderly irony. ‘So. You are no longer terrified. Very good. Perhaps we both can accept that. Such a marvelous morning!’ Madame Keyne’s white hair was coiled about her head on silver combs. Her dark skin, here smooth at cheek and forearm, there wrinkled at wrist and neck, glowed like noon. ‘Acceptance is so simple! I walk in my garden, here, at dawn, to find simplicity. Look around you—at the rising paths, the falling waters, the protective walls ranged about us, the tiled mosaics decorating my home, the large statues there, the little ones over here. For me, that is simplicity. And for you, it’s confusion.’
They were walking up a path paved with red brick—the same brick, Pryn saw, that had covered the market place. Here, however, moss reached across it from the path’s edge or lapped out from carefully tended flower banks and sapling groves.
They gained a rise.
Beyond the garden wall, Pryn could make out another house, a house about whose upper stories much tiling had fallen away. A dozen men, some with spears, all with leather helmets, ambled the roof behind cracked crenellations.
‘Really, you know, I am the despair of my gardeners.’ Madame Keyne pushed her bracelets up her wrist—most of which fell jangling again. ‘One would think, by custom, this is the time they would be up, preparing the grounds for the later risers. But I have demanded Clyton keep the place free for this first hour after sunrise so that I might come and walk. But I notice your gaze has strayed to my neighbor’s lawns—if one can call them that. The garden there is no longer tended at all. His soldiers stamp along the balustrades. Now and again someone rides up to shout an incomprehensible message, and someone rides away…’
‘Do you know,’ Pryn began, ‘your…your neighbor?’
‘Know him? He’s no acquaintance of mine! That isn’t even Sallese—over the wall is Neveryóna, the old neighborhood of Kolhari. Look how it’s falling to pieces! That’s what inherited wealth leads to, I tell you. Though he certainly didn’t inherit his! Well, it’s not surprising he would take over some ramshackle mansion there! Know him? Know this Liberator all the city talks of? I’m terrified of him! He rented that old run-down shell of a house six weeks ago. Everyone who borders on it thought he would soon have workers and artisans repairing, refacing, bringing that once-beautiful property back to a state we could all admire. But as you can see, he keeps his headquarters no better than a barracks. And within those littered halls and peeling chambers sits our Liberator—planning and plotting liberation, no doubt. It’s quite unsettling. You spoke of servants? Six weeks ago, there were three times as many of them working here as there are today—he’s scared them off! Myself, I think they’ve gone to join him, those that haven’t simply fled. And you can be sure it’s not my liberation he’s planning! Terrifying, yes. If that’s the way he treats his own house, what may he eventually do to mine?’ Madame Keyne shook her head and took Pryn’s arm—very gently—to lead her around a stone hut that had broken from the bushes at the top of the rise. Had Pryn been more used to gardens of such extent, she would have assumed it a storage shack for tools. As she wasn’t, however, she wondered who might live in the little enclosure, for it had no windows—only some grilles set high in the walls. The recessed door was hewn of thick plank. The hedges and trees around it were arranged to hide it from you completely while you were not actually on its circling path. The stone bench at the hut’s back, however, offered an extraordinary view. ‘Come, sit with me.’ The bench itself was a sculpted replica of one of the split log seats Pryn had seen in the inner city. Madame Keyne sat, patting the stone beside her. ‘That’s right. Right here. From where we are, the Liberator and his ugly home ar
e comfortably out of sight—though, like so many such phenomena, once they have been put behind, they tend to pervade all that lies before. You can see almost the entire city from here. I had this bench set so one could sit and contemplate Kolhari, for there is no prospect opening upon it quite so impressive, at least from within city limits. There, of course, is the High Court of Eagles. That break among the buildings is the Old Market, just across the Bridge of Lost Desire, where you were last night. The trees there mark the Empress’s newly designated public park; only a street away, in that open space between the buildings lies the New Market—the Old Market in the Spur, I fear, has become merely a quaint and archaic metaphor for commerce, whereas really to know the life and pulse of this city, one must lose and make a fortune or two in the New Market—don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pryn said. ‘How could I? Madame, why have you brought me here?’ Pryn was, indeed, thinking of the ruined house behind her. Perhaps because Madame Keyne had suggested it, or perhaps because the suggestion was simply true, the notion of the Liberator had begun to extend for Pryn over the whole of the city, so that, though she was not really sure he was still alive, much less in the dilapidated mansion, he had become a figure of such invasive power that her next question, a moment before she asked it at any rate, seemed logical enough: ‘Does my being here have anything to do with the Liberator?’
Madame Keyne looked surprised. ‘Only insofar as many of the residents of both Sallese and Neveryóna have felt more confined to our own little worlds since he has been about in the great one. You might say one reason you are here is that I am attempting to live my own life more intensely.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yet there is nothing so strange about it, really. I have frequently taken an interest in the careers of exceptional young women. When I first saw you in the street, riding behind that scarred country gentleman, you struck me immediately as someone who…well, had seen the stars, descried cities in the clouds, ridden dragons, gazed into the ocean and seen through to secrets the tides obscure!’
‘I did?’ asked Pryn.
‘Oh, yes! Such characteristics always show on a woman’s face—if another woman has eyes to read them.’ Madame Keyne sat back and regarded Pryn. ‘You are clearly a young woman who knows her own name.’
‘I am?’ asked Pryn. ‘I mean—oh, I am!’
‘I thought so.’ Madame Keyne folded her hands on her lap’s blue. ‘Perhaps, then, you might tell me what it is…?’
‘Oh! Of course.’ Pryn looked around by the bench leg for a twig. She found one and bent down to scratch in the dirt. ‘It’s Pryn.’ She glanced up at Madame Keyne, then turned back (her side was still sore) to glyph the syllabics, majuscule and minuscule, and add, finally, the diacritical elision. ‘“Pryn,”’ she repeated, sitting up and taking a breath. ‘There.’
‘Well!’ Madame Keyne bent forward. ‘Not only do you know your own name, you know how to write it.’ She sat back amid tinkling bracelets. ‘That does make you exceptional!’
Pryn was surprised; she’d thought that was what the woman had been speaking of all along. But the pleasure of the compliment lingered despite her misreading—as did Madame Keyne’s smile.
‘My aunt taught me,’ Pryn explained. ‘Whenever anything new came to our town, like reading, or figuring, or writing, or a new kind of building, or a new medicine, my aunt was always there to see what it was and how it worked—at least she used to be. But she’s very old, much too old to take care of me now. She’s even older than you.’
‘To be sure,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You ask why you’re here? Well, shortly after we had our first surprising encounter on Black Avenue, one of my servants, on an errand back in that direction, reported seeing you put down on the street by the men you rode with. Clearly you were a mountain girl, unused to the city. My servant’s account of your indecisions and hesitations over which way to go were sure signs you were on your own. I sent our little Ini to look for you in the three places an unaccompanied woman might end up in Kolhari. She found you, I might add, in the most predictable. Now you are here.’
Pryn looked out at the city. There was no fog this morning—or rather, since they were within the city, the fog was only a general haze about them, and no longer a visible object with location and limit. ‘But certainly, Madame Keyne, many young women must come to Kolhari—many every day; from the mountains, from the deserts, from the islands, from the jungles. You can’t possibly take an interest in the careers of them all…’
‘But my dear, the thought of a poor child, a stranger in our town, without prospects or friends…? It would not have let me sleep for a week! What do you suppose might have happened if our little Ini had not been there with her quick blade?’
To Pryn, Madame Keyne’s words seemed more like ones that should have come before her question than after it. Indeed, trying to locate an answer in this woman’s so sensible protestations was like trying to see the fog that, from here, was only the faintest of dispersions. ‘Madame, my gratitude is real. But so is my confusion. Gratitude doesn’t end it.’
‘But I don’t know if I can speak of the reasons you want to hear.’ Madame Keyne suddenly turned to touch Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Say that when your companions nearly ran us down in the street—say that when the horse on which you rode first reared to avoid us, say that when the morning sun caught so in your unkempt hair…when the hooves stamped on the pavement, when you drew a breath so that your eyes widened in a particular way—well, there was a smudge of dirt on your calf, I recall, that I could not shake loose from my memory the whole day. It’s gone, now, brushed from you in your bath last night by one of those marvelous new sponges, only recently imported from the Ulvayns. But it is fair to say that if the smudge, or the angle of your arm about the sweating chest of your rider, or the particular width of your astonished eyes had been other than what, in that instant, they were, you would not be here. There are, alas, no better reasons I can give. Girl—’ The hand on her shoulder had grown heavier. ‘You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death—that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely. Such features are different for each of us. For one, it is the toes of the feet turned in rather than out; for another it is the fingers of the hand thick rather than thin; for still another it is the eyes set wide rather than close together. But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am. That is not who I have struggled to be. Have I been struggling just the slightest bit harder since the Liberator has confined me, as it were, to my own garden? Perhaps.’ Madame Keyne lifted her hand. Bracelets clinked toward her elbow. ‘Say that you are simply here by magic. Do you know what magic is? It is power. But power only functions in the context of other powers—which is the secret of magic. The strongest man in the world—even the Liberator, who they say is a giant of a man—may only “liberate” as the play of power about him allows. Set him raging alone in a desert, and he will be as ineffectual as any other isolate, angry child—while the proper word spoken to the proper official of the Empress, whose reign is numinous though knowable, may result in the erection of a granite and basalt temple to the greater glory of our nameless, artisanal gods.
‘Why are you here?
‘The truth is simply that you are a young mountain woman wh
o has come to the city. That is to undertake a kind of education. I, my secretary, the servants of this house, our little Wild Ini, are merely some among the instruments through which part of that education will occur. The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People who come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here—really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things once were done—which is the key to why they are done as they are today. And you—you wish to know why a woman, knowledgeable in her city’s history of infamies and generosities, would snatch an untutored country girl (of exceptional tutoring, as it now turns out) from the very arms of pain, abuse, and dishonor?
‘Be content with this: It has been done before. No doubt it will be done again.
‘And iteration abolishes the strangeness of any human action, making it merely repetition, while it reveals the purely human—desire—impelling it. Have I done what I was going to do? My girl, leave me a while and walk about the garden on your own. Yes!’
Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Page 11
