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Apr. 23rd, 2008 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladean[Edited to add: I've really been enjoying the late comments by people who just got around to reading this, but I've been getting a lot of comment spam on this entry, so I'm closing comments. You are very welcome to send me email if you are so moved -- see my user info page.]
Wait, wasn't there a "wretch" in that phrase somewhere?
Well, we can apply the adjective to my formatting, anyway.
Behind the cut is the first chapter of This Green Plot, a Liavek novel rejected by one publisher and presently undergoing reconstruction, or at least it will be when I am finished revising Going North. It's been moved through several different programs and sits a little uneasily in Open Office at the moment. I don't think there are any hideous problems, though.
Chapter 1
At sunset on the first day of the month of Wine, Thrae ola Gendi went round her theater with a lantern in her hand, testing the locks. The little door at the side where the water came in every spring: barred. Sinati had left her red slippers on the floor again, just where the door, opened at dawn by Malion, could grate over them and disperse sequins over the boards, to the equal distress of Sinati and Malion. Thrae picked the slippers up with her free hand.
The windows in the dressing room: shuttered, barred, and well bespelled. Aelim had left the lid off the hair powder; Deleon had noticed and had put onto the box the lid of the lip paint. The lip paint itself was nowhere to be seen. Thrae dropped Sinati's slippers into Sinati's chair. Aritoli the cat had been sleeping in it again; well, it would serve Sinati right to have cat hair on her intact sequins. Thrae took up the proper lid to the hair powder from the rack of feathered masks where Aelim always stuck it, put it back onto its box, and carrying the lid to the lip paint, went on her way.
The large door in the back with its sliding window: barred, and the window shuttered. This door refused bespelling. Naril said someone in the theater's distant past had probably tried to provide it with a talking knocker to keep out peddlers, which had given it a permanent aversion to magic, but it was not always possible to tell when Naril was making a joke. Thrae patted the door. "Just do your best," she said to it, and went on her way.
The triple front doors, their red paint peeling, the thick green and purple and gold glass in their small round windows turned by the light of the lantern to small glimmering scenes of unknown meaning, dialogue unheard: these were barred, locked, and well bespelled. The window in Thrae's room with its carving of bindweed: shuttered and barred. The jar of Worrynot was down. Who in the world was Calla courting now? Thrae sniffed what remained, found it fresh enough, put down the lantern and the lid to the lip paint, and wrote herself a note. I should write Calla a note, she thought, if only her work ever suffered from these adventures; but it doesn't. Other people's work, now -- I could write notes to them, but oh, the upheaval.
The Desert Mouse was moving house. This sentence, more and more as time went on like one pronounced by a court of law, went through Thrae's head every day. She wished it were literally true, that her theater might like its wild hopping namesake bound three miles and take up a new place on X Street. And yet that would remove the entire point of the exercise.
They were cramped here, treading on one another's toes, elbowing one another in the eye, bumping heads as they fled from a squabble to what had once been a corner where one could be solitary. Their audiences, swollen from the theater's first days to a size Thrae still found both incredible and inexplicable, were not in much better case, even the ones who could get in in the first place.
Aritoli ola Silba had refused to review their last production at all, spending instead twice the words he would have used on a review to describe the difficulties of the production's venue, in terms ordinarily reserved for bad work by people he already despised. Calla said he had done so because he had discovered that the theater cat was named for him, but since he had suggested the naming himself, this was just vaporing. Or, just conceivably, a joke, but unlike Naril, Calla did not even want you to know if she was joking. Thrae got some satisfaction out of taking everything she said at exactly the same level.
She collected the lantern and the lid to the lip paint and went on her rounds again. In Malion's room as she passed it the Tichenese clock chimed midnight. It would probably never work properly again after being moved; to placate it after its original shipment from Tichen had taken Malion and Naril and Sinati, whose mother, unexpectedly, had been a clockmaker, almost four years.
The jar of lip paint was nowhere to be found. Thrae was annoyed, which discovery annoyed her further, since spending the capital of blood and nerves on trivia was not the way she had come to be where she was. She put the lid on her desk and at last bore the lantern through a tangle of passages and cubbyholes to the small side door, and let herself out into the Lane of Olives. The lamplighters had not been by. The sky was colored like copper in the west and like lapis in the east. The evening was still hot, but along the narrow lane ran a brisk Wine-like breeze, which made, although the stones were swept clean and there were no growing things larger than heartsease and salad flower in the whole of the street, a great rushing rustle like the wind through a grove of trees.
When Aelim first came under her care at the age of five, he had asked where the olives were, and walked up and down the street looking for them, not crying, because Aelim did not cry then or ever, but looking with a terrifying doggedness. Thrae thought he was hearing that wind, which no one had ever explained to her satisfaction. It was Malion who discerned after some months that what Aelim heard was not the wind but the words. The Lane of Olives should have olives in it. The oil merchant across the street had kindly told Aelim that the lane was named for people who sold olives, not for the trees themselves, but Aelim only gave him a look in which astonishment, disbelief, and a kind of scorn vied with the need to be polite.
Much the same sort of look, thought Thrae, absently bearing the theater's lantern away down the dark lane on her way home, as Aelim had given her latterly when she told him where they were moving. He was not five now and he knew that the relations of things named to their names were complex and chancy and sometimes perfectly random. But he still gave her that look.
The lamplighters had not been by in Cat Street either. Thrae hung the theater's lantern outside the door of the bakery and climbed the wooden stairs to her own door, hers and Malion's. Malion had left her a spell-light in the kitchen, which meant he had gone to bed. Thrae gestured the little sphere of blue bristly radiance irritably in the direction of the kitchen dresser, took out her heavy crackling documents, and spread them on the table. She heard toast crumbs crunch dimly underneath and chose to disregard them. The mice were afraid of the spell-light, and it was better that the documents be coated in crumbs and honey too than that they be eaten by mice.
She was buying Jolkratha's Manor, with Additions and Embellishments, Including but Not Limited to the Storehouses, Outbuildings, Stables, Fields, Fountains, Wells, and Pathways Thereto, Most Especially Including that Which was Sown or Planted and Watered Thereon. This was not legal language; she had paid a pretty fee to a scholar at the Levar's University and a smaller one to an archivist at the House of Responsible Life, to ascertain this. It was the name of the property, and had been its name for seven hundred years.
She had not bought it for its Storehouses, Outbuildings, Stables, Fields, Fountains, Wells, Pathways, or anything Sown or Planted on it or anywhere. She had not even bought it for its Additions and Embellishments, though since these included a marvellous array of plumbing, hot water on demand, kitchens with ventilation and drains that did not rise and flood the cellars every spring, her company would probably thank her for them. She had bought it because it contained within its peculiar scalloped demesne no fewer than three theaters, one to seat a hundred, one to seat five hundred, and one, terrifyingly, to seat a thousand and a half. Thrae could think of no dramatic event less spectacular than a coronation or the execution of a villain worse than any in the theatrical repertoire of Liavek, Acrivain, and Tichen combined, that might require her to seat a thousand and a half people. But how handy, she had said to Aelim, to have such a venue should it suddenly be wanted.
Aelim had given her that look, and said, "Jolkratha means 'he will have been forgotten.'"
"In what?" Thrae said.
"Defunct Theatrical," said Aelim, and refused to say more.
You could often tell when Aelim was making a joke; you just couldn't tell what it was. He was not making one now. Calla, Isobel, and Naril, all more forthright and probably more practical, had each expressed apprehension at the disparity between the price and the property. The price was not small, but the property was immense. Isobel said that the present company would wander about in it like dolls in a house of the wrong scale. Naril said that the upkeep of so much space that they were not using would wreck their finances. Calla said that hiring a crew to do the work would wreck their peace of mind. Thrae had an answer to the last two objections, but she knew it would just raise more. Those would be less practical, however, so she had provided the answer anyway. She smiled at the salt cellar, thinking over that conversation.
"Jolkratha was immensely rich," she said.
"How did he become so?" asked Calla.
"Piracy, I gather," said Thrae. "Not the noble kind!" she added, successfully forestalling a burst of quotation from the Desert Mouse's oldest play.
"And what did he do with it?" said Isobel.
"He built his manor," said Thrae, "and he hired the entire Magician's Guild to put a thousand-year upkeep spell on it. That spell has three hundred years to run."
"By the holy preservation of Acrivain," said Isobel. "What will happen when it runs out?"
"Decay will begin," said Thrae. "In the usual manner. Drip, chip, slump, crack. A tendril of ivy here, a tree root there; a hawkweed in a crack, a forgotten olive seed in a roof tile." Why am I declaiming like this? She cleared her throat. "It will not, my children, turn to dust on the instant; nor will it blow up like ten thousand firecrackers or collapse injuriously as though an earthquake had wracked it. At any rate, if any of us are here to worry about it in three hundred years I daresay we will be pleased enough to have any problems at all."
"Why doesn't it cost more?" said Naril. "Not," he added, "that I believe in it at all."
"Possibly the seller doesn't believe in it either," said Thrae.
"Who is the seller?" said Calla.
"Well," said Thrae. "In point of fact, it is the Red Temple. Wait, stop, don't enact me ten scenes out of the wrong plot, I implore you. They have never used it. One of their number inherited it. They had considered founding an auxiliary temple, as it were, but their fortunes have been uncertain since the Levar came of age, and moving wholesale outside the city walls is not feasible for them."
"I wish they would move outside the city walls," said Isobel. "I wish they would move to Tichen. I wish they would move to the bottom of the sea."
"Indeed and truly," said Thrae, "but at least we shall be further from them than we are now."
"If their fortunes have been uncertain why don't they wish to wring more money out of their
inheritance?" said Naril.
"I understand that they have made the attempt," said Thrae. "Our offer was the best they received."
The three of them looked at her.
"It is a not inconsiderable amount of money," Thrae told them sternly. "I am not a scampering Rikiki always hoping nuts will fall from the sky; I put them away like the striped squirrel; I do not conjure them like the blue."
Naril stood up. "I'm going to get Malion," he said. "You are sounding so fanciful that I think you must have a fever."
Thrae laughed and let him go. She and Malion had had all the arguments already.
Aelim was supposed to be packing. He was not certain who supposed him to be doing so -- Thrae, no doubt, and Deleon, and of course his and Deleon's landlord, who had greeted the news of their departure dismally but turned up eager new tenants soon enough. They might suppose all they liked, but he was not packing. He had taken all the books from their shelves and chests and boxes and spread them all about the larger of the two rooms he and Deleon shared, on the floor, on chair and couch and desk and windowsill and the top of the cold woodstove. He had two pamphlets and a battered scroll on the vocabulary and grammar and provenance of Defunct Theatrical, but he could not lay hands on any of them. Deleon never borrowed books without asking, and the landlord was only interested in pharmacological treatises, of which Aelim's were all in Zhir and outdated besides.
When they were living in one of the towers of Jolkratha's Manor they would have room for five times as many books, and they would be only a little closer to their place of employment than they were now. He wondered how the place would employ them. In walking, certainly; it was as well paved as the richest streets of Liavek and larger than the Levar's Park. Thrae was the oldest person he knew, and he wondered if everybody went, not mad precisely, but somehow peculiar -- or did he mean particular -- having reached the age of sixty-three. This was an auspicious number in several religions and one system of medicine, but it seemed unlikely that any of these was operating upon Thrae.
Aelim got up from the floor and went into the smaller room. Deleon had already packed a great many bags and boxes. He had demonstrated a somewhat alarming enthusiasm for ingenious packing, as if he were putting together a puzzle, and might well have snatched up the pamphlets for padding, or the scroll because it would fit inside something round. Aelim knelt and began unstrapping the nearest bag.
Calla came into the dressing room with an armful of feather fans. "Malion found these in the root cellar," she said. "They don't seem to have any moth."
"They will," said Sinati, who was sitting on a table and folding silks. "The horrible creatures can tell when something that's their rightful dinner has been sitting in a protected spot for years." She spread a layer of thin muslin, smoothed a layer of dull green silk over it, and reached for another piece of muslin.
"You know, Sinati, all those will only have to be ironed again when they are unpacked," said Calla. "Why not just put them in eighths and have done with it?"
"No, they won't, Naril bespelled them for me, but if there isn't muslin between they'll fuse."
Calla blinked and forebore to comment. Naril, as a magician, would have made a splendid poet. This was not to say that his spells did not work, but merely that they had hidden structures and embellishments that surprised you, usually at just the wrong moment. She wondered how Sinati had even got him to tell her about the muslin in time. He was meticulous about his theatrical spells, which were what Thrae had hired him to do; but he seemed to regard domestic matters as not worthy of much comment. This drove both Deleon and Aelim to distraction. Calla thought it was funny but knew better than to say so.
"Naril must be worn to a piece of muslin himself," she said after a moment.
Sinati put the square of green silk and muslin into the open chest at her feet and reached for a pile of vivid orange. She said nothing. The serenity of her beautiful face did not alter by a hair. Calla regarded her with a familiar irritation and then felt a reflexive prickle that was much newer but already almost as irritating.
Don't meddle, Granny Carey had said to her on a most embarrassing occasion, don't meddle. Granny had not said, though whether or not she had known was impossible to determine, that Calla had meddled out of sheer insouciance, because she did not care; and that ceasing to meddle had, infuriatingly, caused her to start caring.
It was a commonplace at the Desert Mouse, hardly worthy any longer of direct comment, that Sinati must be kept happy, preferably with a lover, because when unhappy she was impossible to live with. But it was not a commonplace, at least for Calla, to simply wish that Sinati be happy for Sinati's own sake. She sat on the nearest stool and considered Sinati, who had moved on to a piece of black silk with golden dragonflies embroidered on it. One could make a few insinuating remarks about Naril until Sinati got furious, which never took long; then one would take away whatever she said and work on it for a day or a week and maybe conclude something, or more likely not. One could just ask. One could not ask.
"What's the best way to pack feather fans?" said Calla.
"Naril said he could make them fly to the new theater, but I don't quite know where he's got to. Instead you might --"
Calla burst out laughing. Sinati lifted her head and glared.
"I'm sure he could," said Calla, still chortling. "But I was just thinking of the sight they would make. And someone might mistake them for supper, you know."
"He could make them invisible."
"I must go look for him," said Calla, and ran out of the room, and indeed out of the building and along the narrow spaces of Neglectful Street so that she could laugh in peace.
It was raining, in a desultory absent-minded way. A collection of finches sheltering in the eaves of a bakery twittered at her. Calla whistled back at them, but she did not make a very good job of it because she was still laughing. Inside the bakery the denizens were making or had recently made one of the reliable joys of her childhood: dough scraps fried, covered with honey, and then rolled in ground cardamom.
When she had exhausted her laughter she went inside. The bakery was smaller than the one Thrae and Malion lived over, and made of ruthlessly scrubbed wood rather than flagstones and brick. It was warm and close and extremely redolent, like being right in the middle of a fried scrap of dough. Behind the counter a youngish man in a green cap and a blue apron straightened up suddenly and said, "How may I serve you?"
Calla did not jump, but she stared. Oh no, she thought, not now, not now, we are moving lock stock and barrel and I had thought to be taking no baggage.
The man in the green cap did not notably look like baggage, being compact and vigorous, and rather shorter than Calla. He was a rich cinnamon color and had dark-red hair and brown eyes. Deleon, in an extremely unfortunate moment during his worst infatuation with Calla, had once told her she ought to be covered with sugar. She had emptied Sinati's entire supply of the stuff, which revoltingly Sinati put in her tea, over his head at the next opportunity, and asked him how he liked being treated like a pastry. To his credit, he had said, "Not in the least," and made no further such observations about her, nor indeed any at all that a person not notably infatuated might have made. I will not be notably infatuated, nor secretly so neither, I will not; this is no time for insouciance.
"How we are served with the dishes we have made," she said.
"I beg your pardon?" said the man in the green cap.
Calla bit her lip, hard. I know that trick, she told herself, don't try it again. "I meant," she said, "that while I do not see it in your trays, I smelled from the street a delicacy of my childhood, and came in to see if you indeed were making it."
"Oh, the ribbon cakes? Yes, Jurmi is making them now. It won't be long; should you like to wait?"
"Yes, thank you, I think I should," said Calla.
His tone in speaking of the ribbon-cake maker was proprietary. Child, lover, friend, cousin, what? Calla was exceedingly willing to share, but a remarkable number of people were not.
"I haven't met you before, have I?"
Just good business sense, thought Calla, and it would really be better if you did not smile at me like that. "No," she said. "I work at the Desert Mouse, and our manager lives above a bakery. They don't make ribbon cakes, though."
"We try to make all the old country recipes," said the young man. "What else have you been missing since you came to the city?"
"Oh, I was born in the city, but my mother was a farmer and my father was a fisherman, and both their families made ribbon cakes."
"Did you call them that?"
"No, but it's really a better name than what we did call them. Seaweed fritters, because of the way they twist and sometimes puff up in places. My father's family made actual seaweed fritters, and there was endless confusion all around."
This was like talking to Aelim, although she had never told Aelim about the seaweed fritters. She must remember to do so. It was true, however, that Aelim tended to repel any familial remark of any character, which perhaps after all was why she had never told him.
"In Tichen they make them too," said the man in the green cap, "though with ginger and sesame; they call them lace scraps."
"I don't think they would be the same without the cardamom," said Calla.
"Not for you, certainly," said the young man. "The memories of youth are very potent."
He smiled at her again. Calla smiled back, cautiously. There was something unruffled about him that was restful but made her intensely curious.
"Not only of food," said the young man. "Words also, and indeed plays. I was taken to see a performance of The Mountain Walker when I was six years old."
"Good heavens, who would take a child to that?" exclaimed Calla.
He smiled -- again -- and then shrugged. "It has elephants in it," he said.
"Oh, well, it has; and Two Houses in Saltigos has a fine display of fireworks and lightning, while Merry is the Wind has, if I recall aright, not only dogs and cats but also a number of actual children and a talking doll; and yet had anyone taken me to see any of them at the age of six I do not think I should presently be working in the theater."
"Do you think so?" said the young man, leaning his elbows on the scrubbed wooden counter and considering her from under his hat. "You look to me as if you were born to it."
"How do you believe you may tell such a thing as that?" said Calla, having meant to say something much sharper about people who were born to flirtation. It was as well not to have said it; if he had not so struck her merely with himself, would she call his manner anything in particular?
As he straightened up again and looked ready to answer her, something altered in his face. Calla, watching with the eyes both of intense interest and of her long experience in the theater, saw the dawn of a manner far more like to be justly called flirtatious, and saw clouds cover it before its sun had risen. He looked straight at her. No, truly, no, thought Calla, this is worse, play the fool with me, tell me that I move well, and have a thrilling voice, and am beautiful, and ought to play Queens and Empresses, as if that were the end of drama; so that I may go away.
"That question has a very long answer," he said.
Aelim would like you, thought Calla.
"If you will let me render it smaller, I might perhaps be able to reply."
Aelim would love you. Calla nodded. "Certainly," she said.
"Well, then. I think that you must play parts, as the prism must strike the light into colors."
"That answer is so short that I cannot understand it."
"So pointed, too, perhaps. You did ask how I might tell such a thing, not about you, but just such a thing."
"Yes; indeed, I think you have taken the wrong small question out of the rendering."
"The others are much larger," said the young man, frowning slightly.
Behind him the door swung open and a tall man shouldered through with a tray. The scent of the ribbon cakes redoubled. The man in the green cap smiled at the tall man, and then smiled at Calla, in a way that left her utterly unsure whether he thought of them both as lovers or both as brothers.
"How many?" he asked her.
"Two dozen," said Calla, at random.
Jurmi, also smiling at her, tipped the ribbons of dough from the tray onto a sheet of paper, apparently without counting them; folded the paper around them, added a second sheet, and a third, did some complicated business with twine to produce a tidy bundle and a handle, and passed the entire business over to her.
"Six coppers," said the man in the green cap, kindly.
"Oh," said Calla. "I beg your pardon, I ran out without my purse. I can fetch it in a moment."
"Never mind," said the young man. Jurmi, engaged in putting the remaining ribbon cakes in neat rows on more paper, looked sidelong at him and rolled his eyes.
"No," said Calla, "truly, I -- "
"You may pay me when I have rendered your question."
"Oh. Well. Thank you." She smiled at him, not altogether pleasantly, she thought. He gave her an inquiring look. "I should like to know -- " she began.
"Yes?"
Jurmi piled up his trays and went back through the door.
"No, one question is surely enough," said Calla, smiled again, and added, "When shall I apply for the answer?"
"Oh, when you please. I am always here."
Calla touched her forehead vaguely with the hand not holding the bundle of ribbon cakes, and went away. What I want to know, she thought, trying to tease out one cake without dismantling the entire package, is whether you think you are stifling intrigue or nurturing it. She eased out a long twisted ribbon of crisp dough, shedding cardamom, and bit into its end. Immediately in her mind's eye she saw the marsh behind her house with birds tilting in the reeds, the air alight with dragonflies and midges and the small sea butterflies, yellow with black spots, that gathered every fall on their long journey south. She swallowed the first bite, and the soft gray streets of Liavek were there again.
"Memory is as dangerous a game as I know of," she said aloud, quoting that most ambiguous of plays, Two Houses in Saltigos.
She went back to the Desert Mouse, and in by the side door.
Sinati did not care for sweets. Calla took her bundle into Thrae's office and left it beside the jar of Worrynot. She lifted the lid of the jar thoughtfully. Good heavens, she thought, who has been cavorting when and where? The level in the jar was well down. "Well," said Calla aloud to the empty air of Thrae's room, "someone hereabouts must keep a level head." She let the lid down gently and went to see about packing the feather fans.
Wait, wasn't there a "wretch" in that phrase somewhere?
Well, we can apply the adjective to my formatting, anyway.
Behind the cut is the first chapter of This Green Plot, a Liavek novel rejected by one publisher and presently undergoing reconstruction, or at least it will be when I am finished revising Going North. It's been moved through several different programs and sits a little uneasily in Open Office at the moment. I don't think there are any hideous problems, though.
Chapter 1
At sunset on the first day of the month of Wine, Thrae ola Gendi went round her theater with a lantern in her hand, testing the locks. The little door at the side where the water came in every spring: barred. Sinati had left her red slippers on the floor again, just where the door, opened at dawn by Malion, could grate over them and disperse sequins over the boards, to the equal distress of Sinati and Malion. Thrae picked the slippers up with her free hand.
The windows in the dressing room: shuttered, barred, and well bespelled. Aelim had left the lid off the hair powder; Deleon had noticed and had put onto the box the lid of the lip paint. The lip paint itself was nowhere to be seen. Thrae dropped Sinati's slippers into Sinati's chair. Aritoli the cat had been sleeping in it again; well, it would serve Sinati right to have cat hair on her intact sequins. Thrae took up the proper lid to the hair powder from the rack of feathered masks where Aelim always stuck it, put it back onto its box, and carrying the lid to the lip paint, went on her way.
The large door in the back with its sliding window: barred, and the window shuttered. This door refused bespelling. Naril said someone in the theater's distant past had probably tried to provide it with a talking knocker to keep out peddlers, which had given it a permanent aversion to magic, but it was not always possible to tell when Naril was making a joke. Thrae patted the door. "Just do your best," she said to it, and went on her way.
The triple front doors, their red paint peeling, the thick green and purple and gold glass in their small round windows turned by the light of the lantern to small glimmering scenes of unknown meaning, dialogue unheard: these were barred, locked, and well bespelled. The window in Thrae's room with its carving of bindweed: shuttered and barred. The jar of Worrynot was down. Who in the world was Calla courting now? Thrae sniffed what remained, found it fresh enough, put down the lantern and the lid to the lip paint, and wrote herself a note. I should write Calla a note, she thought, if only her work ever suffered from these adventures; but it doesn't. Other people's work, now -- I could write notes to them, but oh, the upheaval.
The Desert Mouse was moving house. This sentence, more and more as time went on like one pronounced by a court of law, went through Thrae's head every day. She wished it were literally true, that her theater might like its wild hopping namesake bound three miles and take up a new place on X Street. And yet that would remove the entire point of the exercise.
They were cramped here, treading on one another's toes, elbowing one another in the eye, bumping heads as they fled from a squabble to what had once been a corner where one could be solitary. Their audiences, swollen from the theater's first days to a size Thrae still found both incredible and inexplicable, were not in much better case, even the ones who could get in in the first place.
Aritoli ola Silba had refused to review their last production at all, spending instead twice the words he would have used on a review to describe the difficulties of the production's venue, in terms ordinarily reserved for bad work by people he already despised. Calla said he had done so because he had discovered that the theater cat was named for him, but since he had suggested the naming himself, this was just vaporing. Or, just conceivably, a joke, but unlike Naril, Calla did not even want you to know if she was joking. Thrae got some satisfaction out of taking everything she said at exactly the same level.
She collected the lantern and the lid to the lip paint and went on her rounds again. In Malion's room as she passed it the Tichenese clock chimed midnight. It would probably never work properly again after being moved; to placate it after its original shipment from Tichen had taken Malion and Naril and Sinati, whose mother, unexpectedly, had been a clockmaker, almost four years.
The jar of lip paint was nowhere to be found. Thrae was annoyed, which discovery annoyed her further, since spending the capital of blood and nerves on trivia was not the way she had come to be where she was. She put the lid on her desk and at last bore the lantern through a tangle of passages and cubbyholes to the small side door, and let herself out into the Lane of Olives. The lamplighters had not been by. The sky was colored like copper in the west and like lapis in the east. The evening was still hot, but along the narrow lane ran a brisk Wine-like breeze, which made, although the stones were swept clean and there were no growing things larger than heartsease and salad flower in the whole of the street, a great rushing rustle like the wind through a grove of trees.
When Aelim first came under her care at the age of five, he had asked where the olives were, and walked up and down the street looking for them, not crying, because Aelim did not cry then or ever, but looking with a terrifying doggedness. Thrae thought he was hearing that wind, which no one had ever explained to her satisfaction. It was Malion who discerned after some months that what Aelim heard was not the wind but the words. The Lane of Olives should have olives in it. The oil merchant across the street had kindly told Aelim that the lane was named for people who sold olives, not for the trees themselves, but Aelim only gave him a look in which astonishment, disbelief, and a kind of scorn vied with the need to be polite.
Much the same sort of look, thought Thrae, absently bearing the theater's lantern away down the dark lane on her way home, as Aelim had given her latterly when she told him where they were moving. He was not five now and he knew that the relations of things named to their names were complex and chancy and sometimes perfectly random. But he still gave her that look.
The lamplighters had not been by in Cat Street either. Thrae hung the theater's lantern outside the door of the bakery and climbed the wooden stairs to her own door, hers and Malion's. Malion had left her a spell-light in the kitchen, which meant he had gone to bed. Thrae gestured the little sphere of blue bristly radiance irritably in the direction of the kitchen dresser, took out her heavy crackling documents, and spread them on the table. She heard toast crumbs crunch dimly underneath and chose to disregard them. The mice were afraid of the spell-light, and it was better that the documents be coated in crumbs and honey too than that they be eaten by mice.
She was buying Jolkratha's Manor, with Additions and Embellishments, Including but Not Limited to the Storehouses, Outbuildings, Stables, Fields, Fountains, Wells, and Pathways Thereto, Most Especially Including that Which was Sown or Planted and Watered Thereon. This was not legal language; she had paid a pretty fee to a scholar at the Levar's University and a smaller one to an archivist at the House of Responsible Life, to ascertain this. It was the name of the property, and had been its name for seven hundred years.
She had not bought it for its Storehouses, Outbuildings, Stables, Fields, Fountains, Wells, Pathways, or anything Sown or Planted on it or anywhere. She had not even bought it for its Additions and Embellishments, though since these included a marvellous array of plumbing, hot water on demand, kitchens with ventilation and drains that did not rise and flood the cellars every spring, her company would probably thank her for them. She had bought it because it contained within its peculiar scalloped demesne no fewer than three theaters, one to seat a hundred, one to seat five hundred, and one, terrifyingly, to seat a thousand and a half. Thrae could think of no dramatic event less spectacular than a coronation or the execution of a villain worse than any in the theatrical repertoire of Liavek, Acrivain, and Tichen combined, that might require her to seat a thousand and a half people. But how handy, she had said to Aelim, to have such a venue should it suddenly be wanted.
Aelim had given her that look, and said, "Jolkratha means 'he will have been forgotten.'"
"In what?" Thrae said.
"Defunct Theatrical," said Aelim, and refused to say more.
You could often tell when Aelim was making a joke; you just couldn't tell what it was. He was not making one now. Calla, Isobel, and Naril, all more forthright and probably more practical, had each expressed apprehension at the disparity between the price and the property. The price was not small, but the property was immense. Isobel said that the present company would wander about in it like dolls in a house of the wrong scale. Naril said that the upkeep of so much space that they were not using would wreck their finances. Calla said that hiring a crew to do the work would wreck their peace of mind. Thrae had an answer to the last two objections, but she knew it would just raise more. Those would be less practical, however, so she had provided the answer anyway. She smiled at the salt cellar, thinking over that conversation.
"Jolkratha was immensely rich," she said.
"How did he become so?" asked Calla.
"Piracy, I gather," said Thrae. "Not the noble kind!" she added, successfully forestalling a burst of quotation from the Desert Mouse's oldest play.
"And what did he do with it?" said Isobel.
"He built his manor," said Thrae, "and he hired the entire Magician's Guild to put a thousand-year upkeep spell on it. That spell has three hundred years to run."
"By the holy preservation of Acrivain," said Isobel. "What will happen when it runs out?"
"Decay will begin," said Thrae. "In the usual manner. Drip, chip, slump, crack. A tendril of ivy here, a tree root there; a hawkweed in a crack, a forgotten olive seed in a roof tile." Why am I declaiming like this? She cleared her throat. "It will not, my children, turn to dust on the instant; nor will it blow up like ten thousand firecrackers or collapse injuriously as though an earthquake had wracked it. At any rate, if any of us are here to worry about it in three hundred years I daresay we will be pleased enough to have any problems at all."
"Why doesn't it cost more?" said Naril. "Not," he added, "that I believe in it at all."
"Possibly the seller doesn't believe in it either," said Thrae.
"Who is the seller?" said Calla.
"Well," said Thrae. "In point of fact, it is the Red Temple. Wait, stop, don't enact me ten scenes out of the wrong plot, I implore you. They have never used it. One of their number inherited it. They had considered founding an auxiliary temple, as it were, but their fortunes have been uncertain since the Levar came of age, and moving wholesale outside the city walls is not feasible for them."
"I wish they would move outside the city walls," said Isobel. "I wish they would move to Tichen. I wish they would move to the bottom of the sea."
"Indeed and truly," said Thrae, "but at least we shall be further from them than we are now."
"If their fortunes have been uncertain why don't they wish to wring more money out of their
inheritance?" said Naril.
"I understand that they have made the attempt," said Thrae. "Our offer was the best they received."
The three of them looked at her.
"It is a not inconsiderable amount of money," Thrae told them sternly. "I am not a scampering Rikiki always hoping nuts will fall from the sky; I put them away like the striped squirrel; I do not conjure them like the blue."
Naril stood up. "I'm going to get Malion," he said. "You are sounding so fanciful that I think you must have a fever."
Thrae laughed and let him go. She and Malion had had all the arguments already.
Aelim was supposed to be packing. He was not certain who supposed him to be doing so -- Thrae, no doubt, and Deleon, and of course his and Deleon's landlord, who had greeted the news of their departure dismally but turned up eager new tenants soon enough. They might suppose all they liked, but he was not packing. He had taken all the books from their shelves and chests and boxes and spread them all about the larger of the two rooms he and Deleon shared, on the floor, on chair and couch and desk and windowsill and the top of the cold woodstove. He had two pamphlets and a battered scroll on the vocabulary and grammar and provenance of Defunct Theatrical, but he could not lay hands on any of them. Deleon never borrowed books without asking, and the landlord was only interested in pharmacological treatises, of which Aelim's were all in Zhir and outdated besides.
When they were living in one of the towers of Jolkratha's Manor they would have room for five times as many books, and they would be only a little closer to their place of employment than they were now. He wondered how the place would employ them. In walking, certainly; it was as well paved as the richest streets of Liavek and larger than the Levar's Park. Thrae was the oldest person he knew, and he wondered if everybody went, not mad precisely, but somehow peculiar -- or did he mean particular -- having reached the age of sixty-three. This was an auspicious number in several religions and one system of medicine, but it seemed unlikely that any of these was operating upon Thrae.
Aelim got up from the floor and went into the smaller room. Deleon had already packed a great many bags and boxes. He had demonstrated a somewhat alarming enthusiasm for ingenious packing, as if he were putting together a puzzle, and might well have snatched up the pamphlets for padding, or the scroll because it would fit inside something round. Aelim knelt and began unstrapping the nearest bag.
Calla came into the dressing room with an armful of feather fans. "Malion found these in the root cellar," she said. "They don't seem to have any moth."
"They will," said Sinati, who was sitting on a table and folding silks. "The horrible creatures can tell when something that's their rightful dinner has been sitting in a protected spot for years." She spread a layer of thin muslin, smoothed a layer of dull green silk over it, and reached for another piece of muslin.
"You know, Sinati, all those will only have to be ironed again when they are unpacked," said Calla. "Why not just put them in eighths and have done with it?"
"No, they won't, Naril bespelled them for me, but if there isn't muslin between they'll fuse."
Calla blinked and forebore to comment. Naril, as a magician, would have made a splendid poet. This was not to say that his spells did not work, but merely that they had hidden structures and embellishments that surprised you, usually at just the wrong moment. She wondered how Sinati had even got him to tell her about the muslin in time. He was meticulous about his theatrical spells, which were what Thrae had hired him to do; but he seemed to regard domestic matters as not worthy of much comment. This drove both Deleon and Aelim to distraction. Calla thought it was funny but knew better than to say so.
"Naril must be worn to a piece of muslin himself," she said after a moment.
Sinati put the square of green silk and muslin into the open chest at her feet and reached for a pile of vivid orange. She said nothing. The serenity of her beautiful face did not alter by a hair. Calla regarded her with a familiar irritation and then felt a reflexive prickle that was much newer but already almost as irritating.
Don't meddle, Granny Carey had said to her on a most embarrassing occasion, don't meddle. Granny had not said, though whether or not she had known was impossible to determine, that Calla had meddled out of sheer insouciance, because she did not care; and that ceasing to meddle had, infuriatingly, caused her to start caring.
It was a commonplace at the Desert Mouse, hardly worthy any longer of direct comment, that Sinati must be kept happy, preferably with a lover, because when unhappy she was impossible to live with. But it was not a commonplace, at least for Calla, to simply wish that Sinati be happy for Sinati's own sake. She sat on the nearest stool and considered Sinati, who had moved on to a piece of black silk with golden dragonflies embroidered on it. One could make a few insinuating remarks about Naril until Sinati got furious, which never took long; then one would take away whatever she said and work on it for a day or a week and maybe conclude something, or more likely not. One could just ask. One could not ask.
"What's the best way to pack feather fans?" said Calla.
"Naril said he could make them fly to the new theater, but I don't quite know where he's got to. Instead you might --"
Calla burst out laughing. Sinati lifted her head and glared.
"I'm sure he could," said Calla, still chortling. "But I was just thinking of the sight they would make. And someone might mistake them for supper, you know."
"He could make them invisible."
"I must go look for him," said Calla, and ran out of the room, and indeed out of the building and along the narrow spaces of Neglectful Street so that she could laugh in peace.
It was raining, in a desultory absent-minded way. A collection of finches sheltering in the eaves of a bakery twittered at her. Calla whistled back at them, but she did not make a very good job of it because she was still laughing. Inside the bakery the denizens were making or had recently made one of the reliable joys of her childhood: dough scraps fried, covered with honey, and then rolled in ground cardamom.
When she had exhausted her laughter she went inside. The bakery was smaller than the one Thrae and Malion lived over, and made of ruthlessly scrubbed wood rather than flagstones and brick. It was warm and close and extremely redolent, like being right in the middle of a fried scrap of dough. Behind the counter a youngish man in a green cap and a blue apron straightened up suddenly and said, "How may I serve you?"
Calla did not jump, but she stared. Oh no, she thought, not now, not now, we are moving lock stock and barrel and I had thought to be taking no baggage.
The man in the green cap did not notably look like baggage, being compact and vigorous, and rather shorter than Calla. He was a rich cinnamon color and had dark-red hair and brown eyes. Deleon, in an extremely unfortunate moment during his worst infatuation with Calla, had once told her she ought to be covered with sugar. She had emptied Sinati's entire supply of the stuff, which revoltingly Sinati put in her tea, over his head at the next opportunity, and asked him how he liked being treated like a pastry. To his credit, he had said, "Not in the least," and made no further such observations about her, nor indeed any at all that a person not notably infatuated might have made. I will not be notably infatuated, nor secretly so neither, I will not; this is no time for insouciance.
"How we are served with the dishes we have made," she said.
"I beg your pardon?" said the man in the green cap.
Calla bit her lip, hard. I know that trick, she told herself, don't try it again. "I meant," she said, "that while I do not see it in your trays, I smelled from the street a delicacy of my childhood, and came in to see if you indeed were making it."
"Oh, the ribbon cakes? Yes, Jurmi is making them now. It won't be long; should you like to wait?"
"Yes, thank you, I think I should," said Calla.
His tone in speaking of the ribbon-cake maker was proprietary. Child, lover, friend, cousin, what? Calla was exceedingly willing to share, but a remarkable number of people were not.
"I haven't met you before, have I?"
Just good business sense, thought Calla, and it would really be better if you did not smile at me like that. "No," she said. "I work at the Desert Mouse, and our manager lives above a bakery. They don't make ribbon cakes, though."
"We try to make all the old country recipes," said the young man. "What else have you been missing since you came to the city?"
"Oh, I was born in the city, but my mother was a farmer and my father was a fisherman, and both their families made ribbon cakes."
"Did you call them that?"
"No, but it's really a better name than what we did call them. Seaweed fritters, because of the way they twist and sometimes puff up in places. My father's family made actual seaweed fritters, and there was endless confusion all around."
This was like talking to Aelim, although she had never told Aelim about the seaweed fritters. She must remember to do so. It was true, however, that Aelim tended to repel any familial remark of any character, which perhaps after all was why she had never told him.
"In Tichen they make them too," said the man in the green cap, "though with ginger and sesame; they call them lace scraps."
"I don't think they would be the same without the cardamom," said Calla.
"Not for you, certainly," said the young man. "The memories of youth are very potent."
He smiled at her again. Calla smiled back, cautiously. There was something unruffled about him that was restful but made her intensely curious.
"Not only of food," said the young man. "Words also, and indeed plays. I was taken to see a performance of The Mountain Walker when I was six years old."
"Good heavens, who would take a child to that?" exclaimed Calla.
He smiled -- again -- and then shrugged. "It has elephants in it," he said.
"Oh, well, it has; and Two Houses in Saltigos has a fine display of fireworks and lightning, while Merry is the Wind has, if I recall aright, not only dogs and cats but also a number of actual children and a talking doll; and yet had anyone taken me to see any of them at the age of six I do not think I should presently be working in the theater."
"Do you think so?" said the young man, leaning his elbows on the scrubbed wooden counter and considering her from under his hat. "You look to me as if you were born to it."
"How do you believe you may tell such a thing as that?" said Calla, having meant to say something much sharper about people who were born to flirtation. It was as well not to have said it; if he had not so struck her merely with himself, would she call his manner anything in particular?
As he straightened up again and looked ready to answer her, something altered in his face. Calla, watching with the eyes both of intense interest and of her long experience in the theater, saw the dawn of a manner far more like to be justly called flirtatious, and saw clouds cover it before its sun had risen. He looked straight at her. No, truly, no, thought Calla, this is worse, play the fool with me, tell me that I move well, and have a thrilling voice, and am beautiful, and ought to play Queens and Empresses, as if that were the end of drama; so that I may go away.
"That question has a very long answer," he said.
Aelim would like you, thought Calla.
"If you will let me render it smaller, I might perhaps be able to reply."
Aelim would love you. Calla nodded. "Certainly," she said.
"Well, then. I think that you must play parts, as the prism must strike the light into colors."
"That answer is so short that I cannot understand it."
"So pointed, too, perhaps. You did ask how I might tell such a thing, not about you, but just such a thing."
"Yes; indeed, I think you have taken the wrong small question out of the rendering."
"The others are much larger," said the young man, frowning slightly.
Behind him the door swung open and a tall man shouldered through with a tray. The scent of the ribbon cakes redoubled. The man in the green cap smiled at the tall man, and then smiled at Calla, in a way that left her utterly unsure whether he thought of them both as lovers or both as brothers.
"How many?" he asked her.
"Two dozen," said Calla, at random.
Jurmi, also smiling at her, tipped the ribbons of dough from the tray onto a sheet of paper, apparently without counting them; folded the paper around them, added a second sheet, and a third, did some complicated business with twine to produce a tidy bundle and a handle, and passed the entire business over to her.
"Six coppers," said the man in the green cap, kindly.
"Oh," said Calla. "I beg your pardon, I ran out without my purse. I can fetch it in a moment."
"Never mind," said the young man. Jurmi, engaged in putting the remaining ribbon cakes in neat rows on more paper, looked sidelong at him and rolled his eyes.
"No," said Calla, "truly, I -- "
"You may pay me when I have rendered your question."
"Oh. Well. Thank you." She smiled at him, not altogether pleasantly, she thought. He gave her an inquiring look. "I should like to know -- " she began.
"Yes?"
Jurmi piled up his trays and went back through the door.
"No, one question is surely enough," said Calla, smiled again, and added, "When shall I apply for the answer?"
"Oh, when you please. I am always here."
Calla touched her forehead vaguely with the hand not holding the bundle of ribbon cakes, and went away. What I want to know, she thought, trying to tease out one cake without dismantling the entire package, is whether you think you are stifling intrigue or nurturing it. She eased out a long twisted ribbon of crisp dough, shedding cardamom, and bit into its end. Immediately in her mind's eye she saw the marsh behind her house with birds tilting in the reeds, the air alight with dragonflies and midges and the small sea butterflies, yellow with black spots, that gathered every fall on their long journey south. She swallowed the first bite, and the soft gray streets of Liavek were there again.
"Memory is as dangerous a game as I know of," she said aloud, quoting that most ambiguous of plays, Two Houses in Saltigos.
She went back to the Desert Mouse, and in by the side door.
Sinati did not care for sweets. Calla took her bundle into Thrae's office and left it beside the jar of Worrynot. She lifted the lid of the jar thoughtfully. Good heavens, she thought, who has been cavorting when and where? The level in the jar was well down. "Well," said Calla aloud to the empty air of Thrae's room, "someone hereabouts must keep a level head." She let the lid down gently and went to see about packing the feather fans.
