Complete Short Fiction, page 55
Dalka’s face went cold. “Oh, isn’t it?”
“Dalka!” Tessa felt a chill at her anger. Her mother, she felt with sudden loss, was gone. Without Dalka, who would she have to talk to? Even if she was at times unpredictable. “It’s important to me. Something’s wrong, with the Merewins, with Malena . . . I have to know.”
“Oh, do you?” Dalka was not mollified. She undid the top of a ceramic container and dipped herself a mug of spicy kitchen beer, a prerogative of cooks and their helpers, moving slowly, building tension. “Why?”
“The Merewins work the land under Pakor Spur,” Tessa said. She hadn’t been ready to speak her thoughts, and she fumbled at the words. “It was Carlyn land, before. It comes through Fila’s family, the Toromas. Her father settled it on Fila before she ran off with Gorr. Or was kidnapped, whatever.”
In the past six months, she had intensely studied the patterns of land use throughout upper Cooperset and adjoining drainages. The interrelationships were complex, and not entirely comprehensible, but she felt that she was starting to get some sort of grip on it. No one could work entirely independently, unconcerned with the behavior of his neighbors.
At the root of the Cooperset farming ecology was the network of pipe plants through which flowed, from field to field, what had once been the Cooperset River. All worked together for the common good, not because of some high-minded realization of emotional interdependence but because the system would fall apart if they didn’t. Everyone, from the highest Dalhousie to the lowest Trepak in the huts down by Brant Spur, knew this and donated their labor. Refusal to participate was the one unforgivable sin.
“If something has happened to Gorr and Fila . . .”
“Why do you think something has?” Dalka was sharp. “They keep to themselves. And their daughter always wanders around the canyon. We’ve all seen her, we all know to watch out for her.” Dalka shook her head. “Too much love between a man and a woman can squeeze their child out. It’s a crime, an indecency.”
“Lewis . . . don’t make that face, Dalka, I grew up with him, he took care of me, of all of us, in his own way. And that’s why he’s down here, standing out in the open where you can see him from the road: he’s down to watch after Malena, as he would be to look after us if something happened to Poppa. And if something has happened to the Mere wins, well, then Malena becomes our responsibility, that of the Wolholmes.”
“Along with her land?” Dalka seemed almost amused. “What about Swern Toroma?”
“He can’t manage that land. That’s clear to everyone. And so he can’t take care of Malena.” Tessa didn’t need to temporize or conceal with Dalka. “Managing that land would help the Wolholmes survive. You know how hard my mother worked.”
“I do, dear. And I think she would be proud to see you now.”
“Oh, Dalka.” Tessa blinked and felt the tears wet her eyelashes. “It’s so hard, and I’m so afraid. What will happen to us? What will we do?”
“Hush, dear. Here, help with this, we should be getting it ready.” Tessa leaned near Dalka’s comforting bulk, and together they filled a platter with cooked vegetables, arranging their different colors in an intricate pattern. “What do you know about Gorr’s scar?”
Tessa held her breath until she thought she could speak without her voice quavering. “Not much. But I overheard one of the Merewins’ neighbors, Lessa Tergoran, describe Gorr’s scar. She laughed at herself, said she was getting old, but she really thought it moved around, that it was never in the same place she had seen it before.”
“Lessa Tergoran’s an old gossip,” Dalka said. “Don’t encourage her, whatever you do. Your life will never be your own again. No one receives gossip without paying a price for it.”
“Dalka. Fila cut Gorr, didn’t she? To defend her brother, whatever. And she tipped the blade with—”
“Shh!” Dalka’s eyes darted to the door. The men would soon be in to eat. “Be careful, Tessa.”
“Tell me!”
“She should never have done it. It’s an old piece of knowledge, almost forgotten, intended for marking animals, for making a brand without wrestling with the beast.” A few still herded, Tessa knew, up on the step plateaus leading to the Boss, but no longer in the canyons. It was a precarious, severe existence. “It’s a self-sustaining fungus infection of the basal layer of the dermis.”
“She coated the knife with it!” She was half horrified, half delighted.
“Be quiet, please!”
“But why, Dalka? What did she say she wanted it for when she asked for it?”
Dalka looked disgusted. “Small doses of it tone up the skin, get rid of unwanted hair. Fila said she needed it, for her husband’s sake. To be more beautiful for him.”
“For her husband’s sake. Did she plan it, do you suppose? Or did she just have it around and decide to use it on the spur of the moment?”
“I have no idea, Theresa,” Dalka said. “I just know that she did, finally, use it. It’s there, under his skin. It should stay in the epidermis, above the blood and lymphatic vessels, but her blade infected the vascularized dermis. The infection shifts sometimes, colonizing new areas. I’m surprised it hasn’t spread and killed him. It will do that in human beings. It wasn’t designed for them. I guess he’s been lucky. He’ll always have it. Something to remember her by.”
The Merewin house was isolated, hanging in a shattered side crack of Cooperset Canyon. Tessa imagined them living there, the two of them, with their tiny daughter. She realized that, much as she thought she knew, she didn’t really understand what went on with people. That savage coupling, a woman mutilating her husband’s face but staying with him, and he agreeing to it. She wondered if she ever would understand it.
Tessa pulled the roast out of the oven. The golden skin had crisped and pulled away from the rose-colored flesh, her slashes forming the vivid network pattern of a proper Christmas feast. She undid the twine holding the legs to the body and pulled them out to their full length. It looked ready to jump.
“Come with me, tomorrow, for the Christmas visits. I’m going out with Alta Dalhousie.”
Dalka made a face. “Alta? She makes me tired. I don’t even know how she persuaded me to help make her the center of attention Christmas morning. You know the way she comes to the door with a question and ends up in the kitchen eating your bread? Eventually you find yourself baking it at her house, filling Dalhousia with the smells that belong in your own kitchen. You be careful with her.”
“I need you, Dalka. We’re going to be visiting the Merewins.”
“Oho, it’s like that, is it?” Dalka chortled. “Check them out while being philanthropic. But why take Alta along? She has her own interests, you know.”
“I know. So I might as well have her with me from the beginning. Without her help, and the help of the Dalhousies, I don’t know if I could win a fight with Swem Toroma.”
“What did you tell her?”
Tessa shrugged. “That I wanted to go up Pakor Spur, to make it easier for me to collect the baskets after, since we’re so near.”
“Such a polite girl, that Tessa Wolholme is.” Dalka was delighted. “Willing to help Alta Dalhousie look her best. Ah, dear, I will go. You underestimate her, but you’re doing well. I’ll go.”
Tessa arranged the massive top frog on the platter, surrounding it with greenery. She thought back to the previous spring, when this frog and all its brethren were still tiny peeping creatures, starting their season-long climb up the tulap trees to the vines on top. This one had probably hopped across her foot with beady-eyed intentness shortly after her mother’s death.
“Let’s go out and light the candles,” Tessa said. “Then we can come back inside and eat.”
The castle glowed in the night, a candle in each of its many windows. Everyone else had gone to bed, but Tessa couldn’t sleep. Or rather, she hadn’t even tried, but sat up instead going over a part of her mother’s fossil collection.
Families had strolled through Calrick Bend to look at the castles in the night, as was traditional. The castles were ostensibly built as a stopping place, a caravanserai, for the Traveling Kings, as they searched the endless stars for their Messiah, born but not yet found. Each family had one, some small and simple, some ridiculously elaborate, so that the Kings could freely choose. Perin’s was a fine demonstration of his architectural skill, and was one of the most popular every year. A steady procession had come through the yard to examine the high ramparts, the soaring towers, the elaborately decorated screening walls. Children ran up and peered through the sugar windows at the interior passages, then ran back to their parents, who offered Perin their congratulations.
Tessa had paid more than ordinary attention to the parents and children gathering in the yard, but had seen no sign of Malena and the Merewins. She might have missed them, she thought to herself. The yard was crowded and she’d been busy. She might well have missed them.
Now Tessa stared into the darkness, her breath steaming, indecisively balanced at the door. She’d have to close it soon, they were losing too much heat, but she somehow didn’t feel ready to find her coat and put it on.
Her mother Sora had always kept vigil out there by the castle. It was an old habit of hers, a tribute to her husband. Heavy shawl across her shoulders, she would walk slowly around the castle, no matter how cold it was, and admire it, for even as it was finished, it began to vanish. Animals came from beneath the fields to devour the highly edible thing: the long, elaborately spike-scaled legged snakes that dug through the soil and lived in the tulap tree roots, the field mice, the lumbering, hard-shelled land crabs, all of them in some way necessary to the functioning of the farm ecology. The castles provided them with food during the coldest and harshest months of winter, food without which they could not have survived in adequate numbers to do their work during the growing season. The castle would slowly slump down into the ground until, by the warm days of spring, when it was completely gone, the shoots of the carwa plants came up through the earth in all the fields, marking the start of planting.
Tessa gasped. A dark figure was walking slowly around the castle. But that was ridiculous. It was obviously not her mother. Taller and about twice as wide, to start with. It was her brother, Dom. And he wasn’t looking at the castle, but out into the surrounding darkness, as if waiting for someone’s approach.
He would be annoyed to find that she had been watching without letting him know he was being observed.
“Dom!” she said.
He gestured: come out. She grabbed her coat, feeling the cold lick at her chest and neck as she ran out into the yard still tugging it on.
“When I was little,” Dom said, “Kevin’s age, I would sit up and watch for the Traveling Kings. Not just because they would leave me presents, though I liked that, but because I was convinced they would come by Poppa’s castle, pause . . . and go in to take a rest, since they were so tired from their years of searching. They’d be gone by morning of course, wouldn’t stay for breakfast, but I wanted to see them.” He looked at her. “And I was always annoyed with Momma for walking around out here. They’d see her, I knew, and go somewhere else for the night.”
Tessa looked up past him. High up on the left was Kevin’s window, lit by the dim glow of his night light. Was that his little head, peering down at them, worried that their unnecessary presence would frighten the Kings off, cause them to go elsewhere? There wasn’t enough light to tell.
“If you’d told her, she would have stayed inside,” Tessa said. “She wouldn’t have wanted to scare them away.”
Dom hunched gloomily in his coat. “That’s true. I was always so mad at her for not realizing.”
“I always wondered what you were looking at. You wouldn’t tell me, and even got mad that I was asking.”
“Well,” Dom said. “It wasn’t any of your business, little sister.”
They took a turn around the castle together, just as Sora would have. Its battlements gleamed in the darkness. Dark shapes ran at the edges of their vision. To Dom and Tessa, the sight was comforting, for the appearance of these usually subterranean creatures was the first sign of the approach of the distant spring.
“I didn’t want to talk about it at the table,” Dom said, “but there’s something I want to tell you.”
Tessa knew better than to prod. Dom was giving her information to help her make a decision, and he didn’t like it, feeling it should be the other way around.
“In Perala . . . you remember it, from when you were at school.”
“Yes, I do.” Tessa had studied at Hammerswick Academy in Perala for a year before Sora’s death had brought her back to Calrick Bend, perhaps forever. She usually thought about it only late at night.
“Well, we Cooperset men were all there, and the men from the lowlands. We got good prices . . . some of the valleys west of here have had bad storms and crop damage . . . Gorr Merewin was there. So was Swern Toroma.”
“How is Swern’s hand?”
Dom grimaced. “Not any better after the trip. Swern and Gorr came to a fight. They always do, other people told me. It’s like a regular part of the trip, that one picks a quarrel. But this one . . . Swern mentioned Lewis. That’s what started it.”
“They fought because of Lewis? What did Swern say?”
Dom shrugged uncomfortably. “I wasn’t really paying much attention. Too much else going on . . .” He paused for a long moment. “To tell you the truth, I was drunk.”
Tessa laughed, delighted by his embarrassment. “It’s part of your job, Dom. Negotiations always give you a hangover. Remember when Poppa would come back, his face all green, and Momma would put him to bed for a day?”
“Yes.” The memory didn’t seem to comfort him.
“But it’s important, what Swern said.”
“I told you, I wasn’t paying much attention. But it was something about Lewis and Fila. And some infection. Gorr’s sick, Fila treats him, Lewis helps . . . hell, I didn’t understand it, but Gorr sure did. Took a swipe at him, right at dinner. Food flying all over. Took the rest of us to hold them both down, and the lowlanders were right there, watching the canyon people beat each other up. Part of the fun for them.”
“Ah,” Tessa said. “That’s interesting, though I don’t know what it means.”
Dom looked at her, his gaze sharp. “You have some plan, right? I can see it. You’re smart, Tessa. We all know that. But smart isn’t everything. In Calrick Bend, I’m not even sure it’s much important. You went off to school, so maybe you’ve forgotten that.”
He was trying to be helpful, but his tone grated on her nerves. The family needed protecting, and he resented her trying to do it. She could see that.
“Dom—”
He raised a hand. “You’re going to be mad at me. I can tell from your eyebrows. I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know. . . .” He took her arm as they walked. “I just wanted you to know that you can count on us. All of us. If you need to. Me, Benjamin . . . Kevin too. Him most of all. He’d do anything for you. I was just trying to say that. But I don’t talk good. I never have, have I?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re talking pretty good now.”
Dom was embarrassed. “Okay. Just promise me one thing. Whenever you make a decision, try to imagine that you’re only half as smart as you really are.”
She smiled. “I’ll give it a try.”
Tessa slept little that night, and was up with the sun in the morning. Kevin was already circling the wrapped presents. His takings would be small enough this year, but he would make the most of it.
“Where are you going?” he said.
She gathered up her things and put on her coat. “I’ll be back soon.”
“But where are you going?”
“To Alta Dalhousie’s. We’re going to visit the poor families with food.”
He sat on the floor and pouted. “You won’t be here to open your presents. Wait until you see what I got you.” He dug through the pile.
“I’ll be back soon, Kevin. It’s my job, now that Momma’s gone. I have to go.”
He pulled out something that looked like a forked tree limb wrapped in layers and layers of silver foil. Taking it from him, Tessa realized that that was exactly what it was.
“Open it!”
“Kevin, let’s wait until—”
“Open it!”
She knew an irresistible command when she heard one. She pulled at the frenziedly taped foil, tight and thick as if the package were to be buried as a message to future generations, and finally managed to get it open.
The crotched limb had delicate, peeling-back bark, somewhat compressed by Kevin’s packaging, and was bright with red, blue, and orange patches of lichen. Tessa wondered if any of them were of medicinal or enzymatic value. She’d have to ask Dalka.
“It’s beautiful, Kevin,” she said. Indeed it was. Of all the fallen branches in Cooperset Canyon, this was no doubt the best. He had probably taken a great deal of time over it. She thought it would look perfectly fine on a shelf in the room containing Sora’s fossils.
“It’s full of borer beetles!” he said gleefully. “I’m sure they’ll come out when it gets warm. I like the way they wiggle their heads.”
She looked more closely at it. The bark was pierced by countless tiny holes. If she set it on a shelf in the warm house, they would awaken early and come swarming out, to devour the furniture.
“Oh, Kevin. . . .”
Fortunately, at that moment Benjamin appeared, blinking in his pajamas, hair a mess, looking desperately young.
“ ’Morning, Tessa,” he said, “Where is everybody?”
“I’m in here making breakfast,” Dom called from the kitchen. “Poppa’s up, Kevin’s making trouble, and Tessa’s going to be late for her appointment if she doesn’t hurry.”
“I’m not making trouble!”
Benjamin sat in a chair and Kevin climbed into his lap. Benjamin patted his brother’s head. “Trouble’s what you’re best at.”
Tessa winked and ran out the door. The landscape was frosted and silent. The mountains loomed overhead, the white dusting on their shoulders giving them extra dignity. Castles stood by their houses, proud battlements, towers, flags, and arches gaily proclaiming the holiday. Tessa followed a path she had known since childhood, a twisting way around storage barns, over fences, under hedges. Burrs stuck to her coat, and a few dried leaves got into her hair. She dirtied her stockings jumping over a narrow ravine. In their younger days Dom had always beaten her at it despite her most strenuous efforts. Now it was easy. She enjoyed it so much she jumped back and did it again.
