“Half-set gelatin makes you shudder. When’s dinner tonight?”
“Seven chimes and a half. She turns my stomach.”
Six left, having run out of expressions of disgust, and Sarima had her tea in bed until her bladder complained. Six had banked up the fire and drawn the curtains, but Sarima pulled them back to look down into the courtyard. Kiamo Ko boasted corner turrets and towers, built on massive circular salients thrusting upward from the stone of the mountain itself. After the Arjiki clan had wrested the building from the waterworks commission
, they had added toothy crenellations for defense. Despite the reworkings, the plan of the house was still simple. It was built in the general shape of a U, a central hall with two long narrow wings thrusting forward around a steeply pitched yard. When it rained, the water churned over the cobbles, and slipped out under the carved gates of iron oak and jasper panels, past the sickly cluster of village houses nestled up against the castle’s outside walls. At this hour the courtyard was charcoal gray. Cold and filthy with scraps of hay and bits of leaf flying in the wind. There was a light in the old cobbler’s shed, and smoke spinning from the chimney that badly wanted repointing—like everything else in this decaying manse. Sarima was glad the guest hadn’t been shown into the house proper. As Dowager Princess of the Arjikis, she enjoyed the privilege of welcoming a traveler into the private chambers of Kiamo Ko.
After bathing, she dressed in a white shift with white piping, and put on the beautiful torque that had arrived, like a message from the Other Land, from her dear departed husband several months after the Incident. Out of habit Sarima shed a few tears admiring herself within the flat embrace of its jeweled, segmented collar. If it was too dressy for this itinerant, Sarima could always drape a napkin over it. But she would still know it was there. Even before her tears had dried she was humming, looking forward to the novelty of a guest.
She peeped in on the children before going down. They were jumpy; strangers always did that to them. Irji and Manek, twelve and eleven, were almost old enough to want to bust out of this nest of venomous doves. Irji was soft and cried a lot, but Manek was a little bantam, always had been. If she let them go off to the Grasslands with the clan, in the summer migration, they both might have their throats slit—there were too many clansmen to claim leadership for themselves or their sons. So Sarima had kept her boys near.
Her daughter, Nor, long-legged and thumb-sucking at nine years old, still needed a lap to crawl into before going to sleep. Dressed for the meal, Sarima was inclined to forbid it, but relented. Nor had a delicate lisp and she said wunning in the wain for running in the rain. She befriended stones and candles and blades of grass that grew against all logic in the cracks of the coping stones around the windows. She sighed and rubbed her face against the torque and said, “There’s a boy too, Mama. We played with him in the mill yard.”
“What’s he like? Is he green too?”
“Nah. He’s all right. He’s a big baby—fat and strong, and Manek was throwing stones at him to see how far they would bounce off him. He let him do it. Maybe if you’re so fat it doesn’t hurt?”
“I doubt it. What’s his name?”
“Liir. Isn’t that a queer name?”
“It sounds foreign. And his mother?”
“I don’t know her name and I don’t think she’s his mother. He wouldn’t say when we asked. Irji said he must be a bastard. Liir said he didn’t care. He’s nice.” She moved her right thumb to her mouth, and with her left hand felt the cloth of Sarima’s gown just below the torque, until she found a nipple, and she ran her thumb over it lovingly as if it were a small pet. “Manek made him pull down his trousers so we could make sure his thing wasn’t green.”
Sarima disapproved—on the grounds of hospitality if nothing else—but was compelled to ask, “And what did you see?”
“Oh well you know.” Nor turned her head into her mother’s neck, and then sneezed from the powder with which Sarima kept her chins from chafing. “Stupid-looking boy’s thing. Smaller than Manek and Irji. But not green. I was so bored I didn’t look much.”
“Neither would I. That was very rude.”
“I didn’t make him do it. Manek did!”
“Well, no more of that. Now let’s have a story before sleeping. I’ve got to go down soon, so a short one. What do you want to hear, my little one?”
“I want to hear the story of the Witch and the fox babies.”
With less drama than usual Sarima rattled through the tale of how the three fox babies were kidnapped and caged and fed to fatness, in preparation for a cheese-and-foxling casserole, and how the Witch went to get fire from the sun to cook them. But when the Witch came back to her cave, exhausted and in possession of father flame, the foxlings outwitted her by singing a lullaby to make her sleep. When the Witch’s arm fell, the flame from the sun burned the door off the cage, and out the foxlings ran. Then they howled down old mother moon to come and stand as an unmovable door in the entrance of the cave. Sarima ended with the traditional back-and-forth. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”
“Did she ever come out?” asked Nor, doing her line from an almost hypnagogic state.
“Not yet,” said Sarima, kissing and biting her daughter on the wrist, which made them both giggle, and then lights out.
The stairs from Sarima’s private apartment ran without railings down into the castle keep, hugging first one wall and then, after the corner, another. She descended the first flight full of grace and self-possession, her white skirts billowing, her torque a yoke of soft colors and precious metals, her face a careful composition of welcome.
At the landing she saw the traveler, sitting on a bench in an alcove, looking up at her.
She made it down the second flight to the flagstoned level, aware of the cynicism that seethed beneath her loyal remembrance of Fiyero, aware of her overbite; of her lost prettiness; of her weight; of the silliness of being the doyenne over nothing but irritating children and backbiting younger sisters; of the thin pretense of authority that scarcely masked her fear of the present, the future, and even the past.
“How do you do,” she managed.
“You are Sarima,” said the woman, standing, her stalactite of chin thrust forward like a rotted swede.
“Likely to be!” she said, glad of the torque; it seemed like a shield now, to protect her heart from being punctured by that chin. “Greetings to you, my friend. Yes, I am Sarima, mistress of Kiamo Ko. Where do you come from, and how are you called?”
“I come from the back of the wind,” said the woman, “and I have given up my name so often I don’t like to bring it out again for you.”
“Well, you are welcome here,” said Sarima as smoothly as she could, “but if we have nothing else to call you by, you will have to be Auntie. Will you come in to dine? We’ll be serving out soon.”
