The Pattern Scars (2 page)

That’s a boy’s name
, I thought. I just had time to look up beyond the spindly branches at the balconies and the silent girls before the boy arrived. He crossed the wooden walkway so quickly that his fair hair rose behind him and his linen leggings rippled around his shins. When he reached us his hair settled on his shoulders and over his eyes; he thrust at it until it was behind his ears. As soon as he turned to look at me the strands escaped again.

“This is Bardrem,” said Yigranzi, “who, as you can see, is always lurking somewhere nearby.”

“He’s a boy,” I blurted, and flushed—I could feel this, even though my hands were in my lap again, resting on the mirror.

“He is,” Yigranzi said. Bardrem scowled at his leather boot’s toe, which he was digging into a ridge of dried mud. “Though he looks as dainty and lovely as a maid, does he not? I’ve made him promise to cut his hair by the time he turns eleven, when his resemblance to a maid may cause him some trouble, here.”

“Yi
gran
zi,” the boy said, throwing his head back so that I saw his rolling eyes. The old seer smiled—a broad smile this time, all yellow-white teeth and dark gaps—and he grinned back at her.

“Bardrem is the cook’s boy,” Yigranzi said, and held up her hand as Bardrem opened his mouth to interrupt. “Though really, he is a poet. Yes?”

“Yes.” He looked serious now, though not in a way that made me think he wanted to seem older (I had already determined that boys usually wanted to seem older).

“He is a poet and a cook, tender
and
strong, and is thus able to withstand the strangeness of other people’s vision. He’s very useful, our Bardrem.”

He shrugged, smiled again. “It helps me with my poems. And,” he added, “I like it. Other people’s vision.”

Yigranzi put a hand on his forearm, which was covered with tiny golden hairs (like the thread, I thought, so slender but catching the daylight anyway). “You will look into the mirror with Nola until she sees, and speaks.”

“If she does.”

“What does he mean?” I asked Yigranzi the question but kept my narrowed eyes on Bardrem’s.

“Many have come to me claiming Othersight. Many like you, who desire a different life, a life of renown like Teldaru’s.”

I did look at Yigranzi now. “I don’t want renown. And I’m not pretending about Otherseeing.” I spoke loudly but still did not believe myself.

“Very well,” said Yigranzi. “Let us all see.”

At first I saw only myself. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to look, but I couldn’t help it—there was a girl beneath me, her features blurry because of sunlight and metal and dents, but sharpening with every blink. She was pointy—her nose and chin and even, somehow, the angle of her brows. Her cheekbones jutted. Her hair was an indeterminate shade of dark, as were her eyes, though as she blinked some more the eyes seemed to grow larger, swimming up through copper toward her real ones, which could not blink any more. . . .

“Nola.
Do not look at yourself
. Look at Bardrem—now, child. Look at him.”

I heard Yigranzi as if she or I were underwater (though I’d never truly been underwater—just had my hair soaked, from time to time, with drinking water too dirty for drinking).

“
Look at him
”—and I did—I shifted my reflection-eyes and found his.

“Speak the words, Bardrem,” said Yigranzi, and I watched his lips part.

“Tell me. Tell me what will come, for me . . .”

He doesn’t sound like a boy, and he doesn’t look like one. His face smudges in the mirror, and then all its lines dissolve. It oozes together again, so slowly that each pore must be taking its own turn—but soon it is done, and he’s back, but he’s a man. His hair is darker and cropped close to his head. His lips are thinner. Even as I strain to hold his face still it recedes, so swiftly that it feels as if I am falling backward. There are stones behind him: row upon row of them, all tall, all bent into terrible, bulbous shapes. He stands among them and cries a long, raw, ragged-ended cry. Looking at me—but not at the child-me: the mirror-me, who (I see, glancing down) is wearing a cream-coloured dress. There is a thick red-brown braid hanging over my left shoulder. I wrench my gaze to him again—this isn’t right; how can I be with him among these stones?—and he shouts again. Maybe it’s my name? I try to turn away from him but cannot, because we are both Otherselves, in another place that doesn’t exist for us but is part of our Pattern anyway. His mouth twists and he rubs tears away with his palms, viciously. Just then a bird rises from the stones: a glorious scarlet bird with a blue head and a green and yellow tail. Blood is coming from his eyes now, and from mine; I feel it on my arms, warmer and thicker than tears. If I could look down and see the pattern of the drops; if I could just do this perhaps I’d be able to find a way back through the copper-tinted sky. I try to look, but I’m frozen, watching him bleed and weep, and suddenly a scream rises in me, as quick and bright as the bird was, but even
it
gets trapped—

“Nola! Nola, come back. . . .”

I was lying down, but this time Yigranzi, not my mother, hovered above me. She had looped her cool, dry, hard fingers through mine and was squeezing them so tightly that the pain returned my breath to me. I gasped and coughed.

“What did you see?” Bardrem’s voice—his boy’s voice, awed and high. “Your eyes went black and silver: I saw them. What did you
see
?”

“Bardrem,” Yigranzi began. That was all I heard her say. I stared at him (he was holding his fair hair back from his eyes, and his lips were slightly open and very red) and I turned my head and vomited, and then I saw nothing at all any more, not even darkness.

I woke up in a bed. A
bed
, not a thin, smelly pallet on the floor. I rolled to one side and then the other atop the mattress (rough linen stuffed with straw that prickled my bare skin) and listened to the creaking of the wooden frame beneath it.

I woke up alone, in silence. No babies wailing; no older children pressed up against my back, quivering with fear or fever. No mother. I stared at the walls, which were wood, and a deep, deep red. I had never seen a painted room before, and it made my heart race, for a moment. Perhaps I was dreaming, or dead? But when I squeezed my eyelids shut and opened them again the dark red walls were still there, as was the door in the one opposite the bed. There was a window, square and very small and set high enough up in the wall that I would have to stand on my bed to see out. I did not do this—not yet. It was enough to look at the sunlight, and the latticed pattern of a shutter I could not see, wavering like water on the red paint.

It was dark when the door opened. I had not moved—not because I was afraid of what I might find, but because I was still sure I would discover that it was all a fashioning of my mind that would vanish the moment my feet touched the rag rug on the floor. “You’re awake.” The woman was wearing her blue dress with the silver belt; its oval links shone in the light of the candelabra she held in one of her hands (each of her fingers had a ring, I noticed).

“Yes,” I said, thinking, despite my awe,
It’s
obvious
that I’m awake; what a silly thing to say.

“Sit up, child. Let me look at you.”

I obeyed her—and right away I could tell that I was different. My skin—all of it bare beneath the woollen blanket that I now held against my waist—was clean. I could see this, in the candle-glow, but I could also sense it: there was a lightness about me, a burnish that made me feel like a smooth piece of metal. And my hair was gone. There was no weight of it against my back, and when I lifted my hands to my head I felt only thick, dense stubble. For a moment I remembered the braid I had seen in my vision, but then I ground my fingertips against my skull and forced the memory away.

“Better,” said the woman. She set the candelabra down on the low washstand that was the only other piece of furniture in the room. The little flame-lights danced on the surface of the water in the basin. Clean water, waiting for me.

“So you’ll stay—which is well and good, since Yigranzi is old and ugly and men have little desire to pay money for her to look at them in her mirror. You, though . . .” She crossed her arms, leaned her head forward, thinned out her lips as she regarded me. “You’re young, at least. And you may grow pretty enough to draw the coins from men’s pouches. Though you’ll never be one of my girls. You will not lie with men for money, and you will not mix with the girls. A seer’s place is apart—and if you forget this you’ll be flogged. It’s not your
flesh
that matters, after all, and I won’t fear you as all the others will.”

She paused—for breath, I imagined. I had never heard one person speak so many words together.

“Have you anything to say before I leave you?”

I was safe: I knew this now. And flogging had never frightened me. I pulled my naked shoulders back and gazed straight up into her eyes. “I’m hungry.”

Her brows rose. I was beginning to enjoy having this effect on adults. “Impudent girl,” she said, almost lazily. “You will get your dinner. No doubt it will be the finest meal you’ve ever eaten in all your life. Was there anything more?”

“My mother.” I hadn’t known I was going to say these words, and this unexpectedness—and the sudden quaver in my voice—made me flush. I twisted the blanket in my hands, which were so clean—even the nails—that I hardly recognized them. “Is she gone?”

The woman nodded. “The moment the copper pieces were in her hands.”

“Did she speak of me?” The quaver was gone from my words, but I could still feel it in my chest, which both confused and angered me.

“No.” She picked the candelabra up again. The links of her belt made a soft, singing noise as she moved to the door. She looked back at me. “She was a horrible woman. You should be thankful that the Pattern has brought you here.”

“Yes,” I said, and then I was alone again, in deeper darkness than before, hugging myself as tears I did not understand fell upon my new, clean bed.

The girls
were
afraid of me. They stepped quickly aside if I was coming toward them in one of the brothel’s narrow hallways. If they were alone they lowered their eyes, and if they weren’t they fell silent, though they would murmur and hiss when I had passed. Many of the ones who did glance at me would put their hands to their own long hair. (Mine was cut every few weeks to keep me undesirable to the clients—though as Bardrem said once, “Some of them like boys, you know; you’d still better look behind you, especially in the dark.”)

At first I didn’t see many of the men. I spent most of my time with Yigranzi, either in the courtyard or—when it grew too chilly for her there—in her room, which was as small as mine but filled with wondrous things: sea shells hung on dyed string, and masks carved out of enormous leaves, and candelabras made of volcano rocks moulded into the shapes of snakes and fish. The rest of my time I spent in the kitchen, where Rudicol the thin cook shouted himself hoarse and Bardrem slipped me pieces of seasoned meat and sometimes even apples and pears: food intended for the men, not for me.

The men I did see, in those first months, were the ones who sought out Yigranzi. She always sent me away when she saw them coming, but I’d peek at them, either on the walkway or after. I’d turn, look over my shoulder, and Yigranzi would call, “Nola! Go!” even when she wasn’t facing me. These men, I saw, were all different. One was tall and red-bearded, and for a moment I thought he was my father—or the person my mother had always told me was my father. But then I drew level with him and saw that he was younger, his eyes wide and darting beneath his red brows, and although I was relieved that he was not my father I was a little sorry, too, for I’d always liked his wink and the flash of his silver-capped tooth.

Another of the men was short and so fat that his belly rippled beneath the green silk tunic he wore. His breath whistled and a sour smell wafted from him. I stared at the silk, and at the gold chain that was nearly vanishing beneath one of his chins, and thought,
This is what a rich man looks like?