Six Moon Dance (32 page)

“I’d rather the gardens for me,” said Ornery, making conversation to keep Mouche’s mind off the wound. “I was raised a farm boy, and I can do gardening without thinking about it. It would smell better out there, too. It really stinks in here.”

Mouche wrinkled his nose, testing. It did indeed stink in the stable, and he knew that the stench was not entirely horse. The fetid odor was the same as he had smelt years ago in the cave, and on his dog, and later in Madame’s front parlor. He knew it came from the brothers below, though they had not smelled like this at House Genevois.

Mouche was unaware of the special bath soaps, the additives in their food, the unusual unguents used during morning massage. Today there had been no morning bath, no morning meal, no morning massage. Bane and Dyre had come a long way in an open cart, sweating under the sun and had begun to smell very much as they had smelled at the Dutter farm.

Ornery murmured, “We can talk to that head man, if he comes back down here today. Personal, I think he won’t remember us until nighttime comes, and maybe not then. This place is in a uproar, just as Sendoph probably is, all at greasy glasses and burned biscuits, I’d warrant. Everbody depending on those Timmys, years and years the way they have …”

“… ou ha … nt?” Mouche whispered.

“No, I haven’t. No Timmys on ships. No sir. They don’t like the water, and that’s a fact. You find ‘em on the wharf and you find ‘em stowing stuff in the hold, but you don’t find ‘em once the ship goes out on water. No Timmys on the Bouncing Isles. No Timmys at the sea farms….”

“Sea … arns?”

“Out there in the Jellied Sea, they got sea farms. There’s a kind of weed draws gold out of the seawater and fixes it in the leaves, and they hook it and tie it to a hawser and pull it in by the quarter mile into a great pile, and they dry it and burn it and mix the ashes with water to make bricks, and they send the bricks back to the smelter, to get the gold out. And it’s not just gold! There’s other good metal in the ashes. There’s fishes out there, too, kinds we can eat, and dried Purse fish eggs, for making jelly….” She went cheerfully on, trying to keep Mouche’s mind occupied.

Though the two below continued to search for some way of reaching their prey, they had not accomplished it by the time the stable door opened with a crash. Both Bane and Dyre turned their angry faces to confront the steward once more, along with several Haggers. In the loft, Ornery urged Mouche to the edge of the loft and arranged his veil so the wound would show while Mouche quivered with newly kindled rage and shock.

“You’ve got the stalls mucked out?” demanded the steward.

Bane said something about the other two taking a rest.

“No rest, sir,” said Ornery in as respectful a voice as she could muster. “They tried to kill us, sir. We came up here to get away from them. They’ve cut Mouche all to bits.”

An argument below built rapidly into shouting and threats, falling silent as suddenly as another voice cut into the fray: “Silence.”

It was Marool herself. “Who has cut whom?”

Explanations. More argument. More yelling. Through all of which Mouche and Ornery quietly sat at the edge of the loft, their veils so arranged as to allow a full view of their battered faces in the light falling through the air vent.

“Well, boy,” said Marool to Bane, who was by this time held in the grip of several Haggers. “Look at them up there. Their little faces all beaten and bruised, one of them possibly scarred for life, and who’s to pay for it? Ah? You baby Hunks have to be returned untouched, unharmed, and here you are, already costing me money. Well, boy, you owe me. I can’t get it out of your pockets, so I’ll take it in services.” And she jerked her head backward. Two Haggers took Bane away, still yelling, while the others restrained Dyre from following.

Marool followed his departure with her eyes, casting only a single infuriated glance upward as she said to her steward, “Separate them, Nephew. And see they’re tended to. I may get enough use out of one not to mind paying damages for the one he’s ruined, but damned if I’ll pay for more than that.”

And she was gone.

“I was reared a farm boy,” called Ornery in a level tone. “If you need gardening done.”

“… e, too,” said Mouche.

The steward exchanged looks with the Haggers, who shrugged, one of them commenting: “The gardener says the two you gave him are useless, they don’t know roots from sprouts, and they’ve planted three rows of fennet upside down.”

“We’ll bring them back here, then,” said the steward, in a glum voice.

Mouche and Ornery were beckoned down from their perch. They were then taken down through the paddocks to the lane, and up the lane to the stone house of the head gardener, and there traded for the two other pressed men who shambled sourly down the lane to the stables. Behind the gardener’s house were several daub-and-wattle houses, brightly painted, where the gardener’s invisible help had lived, and the contents of Mouche’s pack were soon laid out there, together with a few clothes for Ornery, who had only what she’d carried on the boat upriver.

Thus it came that Mouche and Ornery, their wounds washed and medicated, sat over a late lunch beside a Timarese hearth, drinking broth from Timarese bowls, spied on, though they did not know it, by a good many Timmys in the walls, including Flowing Green who was in as near to a frenzy as the Timmys ever got. Mouchidi had been wounded, and badly. Mankinds could die from such wounds. Tim had seen it happen!

When Ornery had gulped all and Mouche spooned down half what they had been given, enough that they were no longer famished, Ornery set down her bowl and leaned confidentially toward Mouche.

“That was rotten of him, saying you were bad luck. It isn’t true, you know. It’s just the inscrutable Hagions, making mock of good sense.”

“I … udden … ind so … uch,” muttered Mouche, “if aw had jus tol … ee.”

“I told you why. Your pa didn’t want to hurt you.”

“He could haw ‘ought me ‘ack!”

Ornery gave him a long, level look. “He couldn’t buy you back. Not from a Consort House.”

Mouche flushed. Of course he couldn’t have been bought back. He knew that. Someone could have tried, though.

“I … ove’ ‘at farn,” he muttered resentfully.

“I loved my family’s farm, too,” said Ornery. “It was beautiful there. We had a vineyard …”

“So di’ ooee.”

“And we had sheep and chickens and a garden and orchard. But the mountain blew, and the ashes came on a terrible wind, and when I got home they were all dead, Mama and Papa, brother, all gone. There was no sense to that, either. Maybe when they felt the hot wind coming, they hated me because I escaped and they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t even think of me. Life’s hard enough, so my captain says, that most times we should do very little thinking about what other people think or do or say, just enough to get by. Otherwise we just jangle ourselves for nothing. So he says.”

“I renen’er how uh hayhield snelled,” said Mouche, stubbornly, determined to make his loss the greater.

“And the smell of strawberries, new-picked,” said Ornery. “And the flowers in Mama’s garden, outside the kitchen door.”

Mouche heaved a huge sigh and gave up the effort at grief supremacy. “You’re righ’,” he announced. “Likely he didn’ wan oo hur ny ‘eelings….”

“And you’re nobody’s bad luck,” insisted Ornery.

Mouche nodded and forgot himself enough to try to smile, more because of Ornery’s good intentions than at his interpretation of the facts. If good fortune had come to his family, it had happened only after he, Mouche, was gone away. If that wasn’t bad luck, what was it? Almost as though he hadn’t belonged there. And if not, where did he belong? Was it possible he had been brought here, well, at least to House Genevois, for a purpose? By fate? Now there was a large thought.

When they had finished eating, Mouche still ruminating on fatefulness, the gardener took a look at Mouche’s face, then told him to do no more than he could comfortably do for the rest of the day. A barrow was laden with tools and they pushed it to a long arbor walk overgrown with fruit vines and edged with flowers, where things needed a general clipping and weeding and neatening up. Mouche had his own taste to guide him, which was considerable. Ornery had a shipman’s love of order, for, as she told Mouche, disorder breeds death at sea, where a loop of rope or a tool left out of place can spell the difference between life and death.

Mouche found that concentrating on the work made the pain lessen. Between them they worked, both sensibly and conscientiously enough to feel a sense of satisfaction in late evening when the gardener finally came to see what they’d accomplished. The man nodded once or twice as in pleased surprise, then patted their shoulders as he took them back to his own house to give them a plentiful supper.

“Well, now, I’d have said you were both useless as tits on a boar, but you’ve proved me wrong,” the old man said when he had filled Ornery’s stew bowl and salad bowl and laid out a thick slab of cheese on a chunk of brown bread wrenched from the new loaf. After another long look at Mouche’s face, he furnished him with a mug of broth and more chunks of the bread to be softened, he said, by dipping.

“What are you doing here, and how did it all happen?” he asked when he had them provided for.

Between mouthfuls, Ornery explained about the Timmys without once referring to them by name. “And Mouche told me his Madame says, people who don’t exist, can’t exist, not until this Questioner person goes away. And the Questioner person is to be staying here, in Mistress Mantelby’s house.

“Far’s I’m concerned, it’s all a mistake, an’ I got to get me back to the ship,” said Ornery. “This Mantelby woman, she took me wrong, she did. I’m no supernumerary. I got to get back, or maybe I’ll lose my place. An’ I got to get word to my sister, too, or she’ll fret herself sick over me.”

“ ‘ould you sto’ us?” Mouche asked the old man. “I’ we ran away?”

The old man poked the fire and snorted. “Well o’ course I’d stop you. Old I may be, and not so spry, but I’ve still got good sense, as well as work that needs doing. Now, you stick around here, workin’ away, stooped a little, maybe, so’s you look older, with nice thick veils over your young faces and a good deal of manure rubbed in your hair and eyebrows, that one up at the house, she’ll ignore you like you don’t exist, just like she alius did them others that don’t exist. That cut on you, thas good protection, too, for she doesn’t pay attention to people that’re hurt, or sick. But you run off, that steward, he’ll report it because he’s her nephew, and if he doesn’t tell her everything, she’ll put him out on the street, maybe blue-body him into the bargain. My, she loves disposin’ o’ nephews. So, he’ll tell her if you run off, depend on it, and right then you’ll go down in her bad book. She don’t abide being crossed, so people don’t stay in her bad book long. Right soon they just vanish, quick as you can say, oh, my gracious. Sometimes there’s bones and sometimes there’s not. And who you think she’ll take to task for you leaving? Whose back will she stripe? Whose bones will she roast? Eh? Mine, that’s whose.”

He shook his head sadly and set a burning splinter to the pipe he had just filled with shreds of fragrant willowbark, then waved the smoking pipe about his head to drive away the midges. “No, sailor, I’ll send letters for you, so your people won’t worry, but you’ll be smart to wear those old invisibles’ robes and the thick veils. I scrounged ‘em for you as uglification, just to keep you meek and safe from harm. I had the laundry boy wash ‘em and stitch ‘em together, to make them big enough. I figure anybody in those robes likely won’t get seen anyhow, seein’ as how we don’t see those robes, if you take my meaning.”

There was a good deal of sense in what he said, and though Ornery fretted over her shipboard position, the gardener assured her the Hags would set it right. It wouldn’t make sense for men to lose their positions because of some emergency measure. Once everything was back to normal, it would be fixed.

It was weariness as much as anything else that made Ornery agree. They wrote their letters, one to Ornery’s captain, one to Ornery’s sister, and one from Mouche to Madame, then they went out through the dusk into a Timmy house where they curled up on Timmy mats under Timmy blankets. Ornery fell asleep while it was still light outside, though Mouche stayed longer awake, feeling with delicate fingertips the swollen flesh of his face and wondering what was to happen to him now.

 In the cities and towns of Newholme, things went from greasy glasses and burned biscuits to filthy streets and food rotting in the fields before some kind of order began to emerge, or, if not order, at least a more amenable disorder. A kind of controlled chaos, as the Hags put it. A godawful mess, according to the Men of Business. Priority was given to food and fuel. Necessary things were getting done. Unnecessary ones, uncritical ones, were long delayed and might, in fact, not get done at all.

The Consort Houses held only staff and boy-children too young to work. There were no supernumeraries to be found anywhere on the streets, and it had even begun to dawn on a good many people that had the Timmys not been so ubiquitous all those generations, likely there would have been no such things as supernumes. The new order required a new economic basis, of course. The Timmys had worked without pay, though they had been provided with housing, clothing, and food. The new workers took up more space, ate more food and required more fabric for clothing, and some of them even demanded wages. The CMOB struggled with these matters while trying to pretend that things had always been this way.

At House Genevois, Madame sent a message to a certain one and awaited a visitation in her parlor, and when he arrived, she tried not to breathe as she told him his wards, his protégés, the Dutter boys, had been pressed into service.

“Who by?” He grunted.

“By Mistress Mantelby,” she replied, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

The man across from her shook. For a moment she thought his spasms came from illness or distress, but then she realized he was laughing.

“Monstrous Marool has them? Oh, does she? What a joke! Oh, that’s a rare one, that is. Well, Madame, all our agreements stand. I won’t hold you responsible for their being
pressed into service
, not even if they come back in worse condition than when they left.”