The Margarets (9 page)

The ship bringing me from Earth landed on the colony world of Thairy. A door opened from the ship into a somewhere outside, a place full of mist, an impenetrable nothingness. Voices echoed, but they made no sense. Words were meaningless. I was moved here and there. I had a sense of motion but not a sense of being, as though it happened, had happened, was happening to someone else. I was aware, but not sensible of. I laughed quietly to myself, finding this all most amusing.

Then suddenly, not. Something reached inside me and pulled. It wasn’t pain, one couldn’t call it pain, but it was not something one wanted to happen, it was a strangeness one wanted desperately to stop happening. I cried out. There was an abrupt sound, as though someone spoke angrily in an unknown language, and a dark curtain came down.

When I, Naumi, wakened, I found myself in a narrow bed in a small, very clean room. Very clean, I thought, and empty, for it held only the bed, a stool beside the bed, and a few pegs with clothing hanging on them on the far wall. Above the pegs was a label: Naumi’s clothes. Below the peg, a shelf, a label: Naumi’s shoes. I read this with some concern. Who was Naumi?

The sound of feet outside somewhere, then a white door opened through a white wall and someone came in.
It was the very nice old man who only had one eye. His name. His name was…

“Mr. Weathereye,” I said.

“You remembered,” the man chuckled. “Very good! You see, I told you it would all come back to you. What else?”

“My…my ma. She was killed.”

“That’s right. And your father, also. But that was a long time ago. Since then, you’ve been living…where?”

“With…Pa Rastarong. He took me in.”

“Exactly. You see, you knew all this. It’s just that bump on your head that made you forget for a little while. You live near the town called Bright on the colony world of Thairy. You live with your pa, and your name is…?”

“Naumi Rastarong,” I said.

“Exactly. What else?”

I frowned.

“Reach for it!” demanded Mr. Weathereye.

I reached. There was something there, just out of reach. Ah. Well. What was it?

“Some other language,” I said. “I know some other language!”

“You do indeed. Several, as a matter of fact.”

We fell silent, the man smiling, humming quietly to himself while I was preoccupied with something else. “Mr. Weathereye,” I said at last, “I don’t feel like my skin fits!”

“That’s natural,” the old man said. “Any time you get a good bump on the head, that’s natural. You’ll feel a little strange for a while, but you’ll get used to it.”

We fell silent again, and this time I drifted into what was almost sleep. An elderly lady and a lanky, lazy-looking fellow came into the room and sat on chairs near Mr. Weathereye.

“Rastarong,” he said. “Lady Badness.”

They nodded. The woman asked, “How is he?”

“Ah,” replied Mr. Weathereye, “feeling a little strange, as who wouldn’t. All that long journey.”

“Does he know his name?” asked the other man.

“Naumi,” said Mr. Weathereye. “I asked him, the way we do, when he was half asleep, ‘Hey, boy, what’s your name,’ and he said Naumi.”

“What does it mean?” asked Lady Badness.

“How in galactic parlance should I know?” Mr. Weathereye said in a testy voice, running his finger around the edge of his eye patch, as though it itched him. “It’s his name. I asked, and he told me.”

“When can I take him home,” asked Rastarong.

“Soon. Just don’t hurry him.”

“I have fostered before,” said the other, slightly peeved.

“Of course,” soothed Mr. Weathereye. “Haven’t we all.”

They rose and departed. Behind them, I was surprised to find my face wet with tears, my heart swallowed up in a sorrow I couldn’t or identify or connect. Mama and Papa, dead and gone? No, not that. That was long ago. This injury they said I’d had. I couldn’t even remember that. No, it was some word, some label that lay within reach of my tongue but not within reach of my mind. Who was that? And why was I grieving for her?

Joziré and I sat on a haystack above a town with no name, the remains of our picnic luncheon scattered around us. I was chewing on a straw and making pictures out of clouds when Joziré asked, “Willy, do you know when your birthday is?”

I thought a moment. “I don’t even know how long a year is, here. I’m not even sure how long we’ve been here.”

“Here is somewhere on B’yurngrad, and we’ve been here about three school years,” he said. “I know because I’m working on volume three of the history of governance.”

“I’m still reading about laws.” I sighed. “The sisters at the temple say I have to learn all about laws before I can study justice. I think it ought to be the other way around, but they say not.”

“It’s the same with the brothers at the abbey. I have to learn all the stuff that didn’t work before I can study the things that did. They say if a ruler doesn’t know what didn’t work, and why, he’ll waste time, treasure, and lives learning it the hard way.” He stared at the sky, cleared his throat, chewed his lip.

I made a face at him. “What are you so twitchy about?”

“Lady Badness says I have to go away to school next year.”

I sat up, horrified. “Just you? Not me? Where?”

“Just me. Maybe it’s only for boys. She didn’t say where.”

“I guess that’s how Lady Badness got her name,” I said angrily. “She’s all the time bringing bad news.”

“It’s not bad, exactly. It’s just…troubling. Lady Badness says I can’t come into my full powers until I’m well schooled, and I can’t be king until I come into my full power….”

“What powers?”

“I have no idea. Something Ghossy, I guess. She says when I’m well schooled, I’ll know, and if I don’t get well schooled, it won’t make any difference. I’m sure she’s right, but…I don’t want to leave you, Wilvia. Four years is a long time.” He turned his head to stare sightlessly at the two nameless hills that rose gently above rolling grasslands, each bearing a school on its crest: the gray-towered abbey for boys, the white-domed temple for girls. His school; my school. Between the two, the town straggled down into the valley on both sides of a boisterous, nameless river crossed by half a dozen old stone bridges. From the hayfield where we sat, we could see the whole town: gardens, farmlands, orchards. For all we knew, it could be the only town on B’yurngrad.

“It’ll probably be just as remote as this is,” he said. “My mother sends me letters by couriers, telling me I have to stay hidden.”

“Because of the Frossians trying to kill you.”

“Well, they killed my father, they’ve tried three times to kill my mother, they’ve been hunting for us ever since we left Fajnard. Mother’s spies on Fajnard say the Frossians want to wipe out the royal house before they invade, so our family won’t be a center of rebellion.”

I whispered, “The sisters told me about it, and I’ve studied all your mother’s writings. I know she was the one who established the Court of Equity on Fajnard. Think of that, Joziré! A court dedicated to pure justice, one that can overrule the law! They didn’t even have one of those back on old Earth!”

“I know.” He fidgeted. “Willy…?”

“What, Jos? Don’t fidget.”

“When I go away, will you wait for me until I come back?”

“Unless they send me somewhere else. Of course.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, will you not get too friendly with any other boy until I come back.”

I felt myself turning red. “You mean wait for you…that way.”

He sighed deeply, running his fingers through his dark, curly hair. “You’re really too young to make a promise like that. You’re probably about thirteen, developmentally speaking, and I’m probably about sixteen. I know I have to go to this school, but I don’t want us to be separated. That sounds soppy, but I don’t want us to forget one another…”

I took his hand. “Jos, I’ll wait for you forever. My stomach won’t let me forget. No one else in the world can make a fried garlwog sandwich the way you can.”

He aimed a blow at me. I blocked it and aimed one at him. I didn’t dare let him go on talking that way, or I’d start to cry, and I didn’t want to cry. We tumbled into the hay and came to rest, me with arms pinned at my sides, him above me, nose to nose.

“Promise!” he demanded. “Or I’ll leave you here for the big wild garlwogs to make dinner of.”

“They don’t eat meat.” I tried to laugh.

“You,” he said, fixing me with his eyes. “You, they’d eat. Now promise.”

“I promise Prince Joziré, heir to the throne of the Ghoss, that I, Wilvia, will not…get friendly with any male person until said prince returns.”

He let me go suddenly and turned away to hide his face before he got up to gather the remnants of our picnic lunch into the basket. I had promised, but I could see it hadn’t helped much.

“Jos,” I whispered from behind him. “I really mean it. I will wait.”

He forced himself to grin. “I know you will.”

We walked back along the farm road, each of us thinking of all the wrong things we could say and do. At least I was. I was having other thoughts, too. Old ones. As we came near the town, we saw Lady Badness sitting on a waystone.

“There you are,” she cackled. “I’d about given up on you. If you don’t mind, Highness, I must speak with Wilvia.”

He was Highness instead of Majesty because he hadn’t been
crowned king, yet. And he did mind, but he gritted his teeth and plodded on.

“He told you he’s going away,” said Lady Badness, after he had gone halfway to the town. “You’ve promised to wait for him, but…”

I felt the words leave me like a gush of water. “I’ve promised. But is it because I really want to wait for him, or is it because I’m supposed to be a queen, and the only way I’ll ever be a queen is if I marry Jos.” I put my hands to my face, which was burning, wishing to call the words back. They had been true, the words, but I hadn’t meant to speak them out loud.

“Ah,” said Lady Badness in a satisfied tone, “that’s the true question, isn’t it. One you have to answer, Wilvia. Do you want to be queen?”

I stared at my feet, unable to answer.

“You see yourself with a crown. I know you do. You see yourself being gracious and wise. Isn’t that true.”

“Yes,” I said grudgingly.

“Are you gracious and wise?”

I desperately wanted to lie, knowing it would do no good. “I…I don’t…No. I’m not.”

“Well, no matter how much Joziré loves you, he will not marry you unless you are gracious and wise, for the Queen of the Ghoss must be both. Becoming a queen is extremely hard work, and why would you want to do it? To be queen? Or to be with Joziré? Or because it is a worthy thing to be? If Joziré were gone, dead, would you go to all that work, just to be queen?”

We went up the hill together with the questions unanswered. I couldn’t answer them. Not then. Not for a very long time.

The Gardener told me that Swylet had been founded by several wagonloads of malcontents who, tired of being told what they might and might not do by the Lords of Manland, had set off westward in search of a place where they might do as they pleased. They left the coastal cities of Manland, Chottem’s only human-occupied continent, and turned west, through the surrounding orchards and vegetable plantations, the dairy farms, the estancias with their horses and herds of cattle and haylands and grain-fields, then left settled people behind as they moved into endless plains, where flocks of purple-feathered jibbernek bruised the sky at midday and whole villages of skritchers pranced on their rock-mounds, screaming alarm in the voices of old women. They climbed slowly into rolling hills, thence to a high tableland from which people could see for the first time retreating ranges of mist-valleyed mountains: indigo on azure on sapphire on ice.

Moving into those mountains they had arrived at last—and purely by fortune, so they thought—at a well-watered valley, hidden and protected by ramparts of immemorial stone. There at the end of nowhere they found an area fenced off, grown up in shrubberies and trees, and occupied by the Gardener. She welcomed them and told them to build beside the flowing river and to name their hamlet
for the small, swift birds that nested there, the swylets.

Every now and then, a man or two from the village might backtrack into the world on an urgent errand, to obtain breeding stock, or seed, or certain tools the settlers could not make for themselves. Sometimes they brought new settlers with them when they returned, though, as time went on, such additions became extremely rare. No one ever found the place by accident, though Swylet-born folk who went adventuring could always find their way home.

One such adventurer was the young artist Benjamin Finesilver. He had wandered the land with hunters, climbed the mountains with miners, sailed across the great freshwater seas of the north with fishermen. He had spent a season following the herds across the grasslands with the nomadic Skellar people, humans drawn from an ancient itinerant culture on Earth to inhabit the endless northern plains. From the black city of Bray he had sailed eastward toward the sunrise land of Perepume. The ship had anchored far out and discharged its trade goods into small boats crewed by little people no taller than his waist, who wore veils and talked a strange language in the high, sweet voices of children. They did not show themselves to strangers, the ship’s captain told him, nor did they allow visitors.

To Benjamin, this was a great disappointment, but he was not long downcast. Since he had no way to see the farther side of the world, he would forget about Perepume and concentrate upon Manland. Though the eastern half of the human continent was flat, fertile, and relatively boring, the west and north held innumerable wonders in their broken, mysterious lands. Blue butterflies the size of a man’s two hands. Beetles with gemmed carapaces that fought battles with the spears on their noses. A little fox the size of a kitten, which crept about the houses at night, crying like a baby, then laughing as it ran away when people came out. And the k’yur, which were rather like large cats but more like very thin bears, who stood atop the hills on three-moon nights and sang with the voices of angels.

Benjamin Finesilver talked with printers and booksellers and found them eager to help him. The people of the sea cities had plenty of time on their hands and plenty of money in their pockets, and
though they were far too complacent and indolent to seek the marvelous for themselves, they were mightily amused by seeing or reading of anything wonderful and strange. The printers introduced him to people who published books, and the people who published books introduced him to people who financed such things, and thus Benjamin was brought to the attention of Stentor d’Lorn and his daughter, Mariah.

It followed that after ten years absence from Swylet, Benjamin returned with Mariah d’Lornschilde as his wife. She was lean and disdainful, with hair black as a traveling tinker’s pot and blue eyes that silvered like swift fish in shallow water. She was taken aback some by Swylet, for it was smaller and slower than she had imagined. Still, she thought she loved Benjamin Finesilver, both because he adored her and because he had given her a way out of a sore predicament, and she was willing to spend a year or two in a dull, bucolic place if it pleased him.

Gardener knew this, as she knew everything about everyone in the place. She told me that even as a boy, Benjamin had been so eager to leave Swylet that he had paid very little attention to the place. Even had Mariah been interested in the hamlet, he could not have told her anything important about it, and he would never have thought to mention the Gardener to his new wife, even if he had remembered that the Gardener existed.

So, when the Grandmas came to welcome the bride, she was astonished when the first thing they said was, “You must go along to the gate and speak with the Gardener.”

“And why must I do that?” she cried, laughing and shaking the ribbons in her hair so they danced on her head like butterflies. “In my home, my father speaks to the gardeners, and that is quite enough attention paid to them.”

The Grandmas shared swift glances, some puzzled, some amused, a few even angry. “It’s a custom,” said Grandma Vine. “One we have. You might like to share our customs.”

The others nodded, making light of it, saying yes, yes. Do share our customs.

“Well then, I will,” said Mariah. “When I have time.”

When they talked with her after that, time and again they would
bring the Gardener into the conversation, for more than one had noticed the bride’s waist was thickening and her steps had slowed. “A good time, now,” said Grandma Bergamot. “Especially with your first.”

Mariah, who felt nauseous most mornings and out of temper most afternoons, turned the talk to something else: the carpenter’s newly built shop on the green, the plethora of lambs in the meadows, the way the cats kept on crying so strangely outside her window, keeping her from sleeping.

“Those are the Gardener’s cats,” they said. “Inviting you to visit.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “If the woman wishes to meet me, let her pay me a call.” Indeed, she regretted mentioning the cats at all, for when she had peeped out the window to see what cried there, the moonlight had disclosed a crowd of furry, prick-eared animals dancing a gavotte. Mariah had a strong appreciation of her noble lineage and costly education. She was quite sure that if dancing cats existed anywhere in Chottem, her highly regarded professors would have told her of them. Therefore, she had simply been dreaming.

What could the women say? They had said no less than they had said to any of their own. They had suggested, invited, encouraged. If she had been of Swylet, they might have surrounded her, swept her away, and not let her go until they were outside the Gardener’s gates, but she was not of Swylet. Who knew what family she came from, or what power it might have to upset their lives? Who knew what she thought or meant or intended with that easy, scornful laughter and superior mien that just missed being contemptuous. All very mannered, nothing to complain of, but very much as though they were
merely
a group of well-meaning ewe sheep while she…she was something else.

“Let her be,” said the newest Grandma Vinegar. “She’ll come to us soon enough when she needs to.”

“No,” said Grandma Bergamot. “I’ll plead some tea for her. That much I can do, at least.”

It was soon after my arrival on Chottem that Grandma Bergamot came to our gate and rang the bell. The Gardener and I went to the gate, the cats trailing around us.

“This is my ward, Gretamara,” said the Gardener. “She has come
to live with me while she learns to be a healer.”

Grandmother Bergamot bobbed a curtsy, said a how-dya-do, and I greeted her with a smile. She glanced from me to the Gardener and back again, and I knew she was thinking we were kin, for we had the same tawny hair and green eyes, the same golden skin. Only our eyes were different. The Gardener’s eyes were full of wisdom, but mine could have held only an endless list of the questions I had been asking since I arrived.

Grandma Bergamot recalled her errand and pled some tea for the new woman, who had come from far away.

“What is she like,” the Gardener asked.

“Tall and dark, with silver eyes and a proud walk,” said Grandma Bergamot. “She was Mariah d’Lornschilde in a sea city called Bray, and our Benjamin brought her home as a bride. She does not nest well here. It’s as though she’s counting the days until she can…”

I could see Grandma Bergamot hadn’t known this until she said it, but it was right. We had seen the proud, dark woman. To us, too, it had seemed she was counting the days until she could…what?

“See my proud cock, there,” said the Gardener, pointing at a peacock beneath a willow, tail and wings spread wide, quills rattling an accompaniment as he pranced before three inattentive hens. “See how he dances. He would dance to the cabbages if there were no hens about, but his joy would not be in it. Perhaps the people of Swylet are only cabbages to Mariah d’Lornschilde, and though she dances, joy is not in it for her.”

“If her heart does not dance for Benjamin, then for what?” whispered Grandma Bergamot.

The Gardener shook her head. “Who knows. Gretamara will give you tea for her, Grandmother Bergamot, but I do not think she will drink it. Come back just before sunset.”

I made the tea myself. The brew, heal-all, was the first brew I had learned, and when Grandma Bergamot came, I was waiting at the gate for her.

“I thank thee, Gretamara,” said Grandma Bergamot.

“I will take your thanks to Gardener,” I responded.

“Do you plan to visit long?”

“So long as the Gardener wishes,” I said. “I am learning a great
deal from her.”

“And do you like it here in Swylet?”

“I have heard the history of Swylet and its people,” I admitted. “And I like it very much where I am.”

Grandma Bergamot took the tea. Gardener told me she had probably spent the day devising some way to get Mariah to drink it, and so she had. Grandma’s own house was on the street where Benjamin Finesilver lived, and Mariah walked down that street each afternoon with a market basket in her hand and a parasol over her shoulder. So, next afternoon, when Mariah went by, Grandma Bergamot was sitting beneath her grape arbor, tea things set ready on a little table, and she invited Mariah in. “Do come. Have a cup of tea. I’m feeling lonely today.”

Such a plea could not be politely refused, so Mariah came in and drank a cup of tea, while Grandma Bergamot only pretended to join her, for everyone knew the Gardener’s gifts were for the intended ones alone.

“Odd,” said Mariah. “An odd taste. Lovely, rather…what? Like rose petals but with something else. Where did you get it?”

“It’s a brew gathered hereabout,” Grandma replied. “If you like it, it would please me to make you a present of the packet.”

Mariah started to refuse, then realized it would be rude to do so, and while she was often thoughtlessly haughty, she was never wilfully rude. She accepted the ribbon-tied packet with gracious words, picked up her basket and her parasol, and went off down the street. Though it had all worked just as Grandma Bergamot had planned, something about it had not been satisfying.

The Gardener stood on the stoop of her house, eyes fixed on the treetops as she spoke to me. “I see the packet of tea is going home in the marketing basket. It is sliding down as Mariah walks, and there it is beneath the apples and potatoes, the honey and the flour, the fresh eggs and the cut of lamb for Benjamin’s supper. With most women, this would not matter, for she would see it when she put away the foodstuffs. However, Mariah is no cook, so Benjamin has hired one. There is Mariah, giving the basket to the cook, ah, yes. And the cook is putting the packet away in the cupboard.”

“Won’t Mariah ask for it?” I asked.

“No.” The Gardener shook her head. “Tomorrow she will feel well, very well. She will not think that it has anything to do with the tea she drank. In a day or two, the effect of the tea will wear away, but she will never think of it again.”

Benjamin Finesilver, meantime, was getting on with his work. He had finished a good many paintings of places he had been. He had a comfortable study in which to work and sufficient funds to live decently for a year or so; he had written a good deal about the areas he had traveled through. He had not bothered to write anything about Swylet; he seemed scarcely to have noticed it since returning there. I saw him go by, several times. He did not even glance across the fence.

It was not long thereafter that Mariah considered it best to stay at home. She told Benjamin that the village women might show themselves swollen as melons as, indeed, most of the younger ones did at intervals, but Mariah’s people did not do that. When one became ungainly, one stayed home with the front curtains drawn. One sunned in the garden and read books and sewed clothing for the baby, or so Mariah’s aunts had instructed her. Mariah obeyed faithfully, though her days were so boring that she prayed for the baby to come quickly so her visit to this provincial backwater could be over.

Grandma Bergamot tried once again. She called on Mariah and was admitted if only because she broke the boredom of an endless afternoon.

“Our Gardener is a healer, you know,” Grandma Bergamot said. “I know you’ve had the midwife here, and she’s skillful, but when one has one’s first, it does no harm to have a little something extra. Wouldn’t you visit her, Mariah? In your carriage, just to her gate?”

“What is all this nonsense about the Gardener,” cried Mariah in a temper. “I have written to my father in Bray. He has sent word that his doctor is coming to tend me, all the way from Bray, where my father is Lord Governor. When the baby comes, I’ll be well enough provided for.”

And that was that. The Gardener knew this as she knew everything that went on. She could stand in thought for a moment, staring into nothingness, then be able to tell me what everyone in Swylet was thinking or doing. This time, she stood outside the door, and her
mouth was sad, for she pitied Mariah.