What I had studied as harp and spinet and flute, one instrument at a time, was about to unfold before me in the array of a performance. I was entranced. My own skill with anything but voice was marginal at best. Mistress Maglia had given me only scraps and foretastes of this.
Mistress Tirelle stood close, stretching to speak with me. “You know the tests of the fruit. This is the same, with music.”
Mistress Maglia came to my other ear. “They will play pieces of music known to you. The first is the overture to Grandieve’s Trollhattan Moods. You will listen through. Then they will play again, but certain musicians will play flat or off-key or out of tempo from time to time. When you hear an error, you will point to the offender.”
I clasped my hands. She nodded, a sharp smile on her dark-browed features. “When I am wrong, what will happen?”
“Mistress Tirelle will record your marks as given by me, and show you punishment later.”
I had not taken a beating in almost two weeks. It seemed improbable that I would finish the day without a score of blows due to me.
When they played, the women made a beautiful sound, which twined around me. It must have been audible in the other courts as well. The Grandieve piece is a study of moods, a series of tone poems about an icy island in a high-walled northern bay. Mistress Ellera had once shown me a painting of Trollhattan. I could see the sound pictures even when I had first practiced it on my little flute.
The orchestra made it as big as the sky.
They played through perfectly, then fell silent. At direction from Mistress Maglia, they resumed. This time one of the horns was flat in the very first measure. I pointed, the woman nodded and set aside her instrument. Two bars later, a viol slipped out of key. I pointed again. Another nod, another instrument fell away.
By the end, I had missed but three. Only four players still carried the composition.
If not for the promised punishment, this would have been a fascinating exercise.
So began my training with others. All women, still, but more and more came to the Pomegranate Court in the months that followed. We staged dinner parties where some women wore black sashes to indicate they would be served and eat as men. Women in leather trousers marched in review as if they were a squad of guards. Women in pairs danced alongside me in the practice room or out in the court while a small orchestra played.
I was learning to be in the world. Somehow this was stranger and more frightening than being below the stones, because this was the truth of what they pushed me toward.
Every night I took my belled silk from its imaginary hiding place and added to it. These days, the bells were a cascade of tones and keys, different sounds that would have been a waterfall of music had such a thing ever existed in truth.
I loved it, for all that it was pure figment.
We found Septio again and again underground. Our paths crossed often enough that I soon realized it was not coincidence. He, like Federo, played a role in the silent conspiracy that wrapped my life with an invisible thread.
I did not strike him again, and Septio did not remind me of my first attack. Instead we took time to talk on occasion.
“The gods of Copper Downs are silent,” he told me. “They are real as the gods of any other country. I could show you their beds and bodies, except that their power would strike you blind.”
“It’s not merely silence if one has been reduced to bones.”
“Gods are different.”
Later, the Dancing Mistress and I spoke quietly while taking turns climbing an ornate wall and dropping free.
“His god’s name is Blackblood,” she told me.
“Not someone you should want to invoke, I think.”
“I do not know. Septio has common cause with others who disagree with the Duke of Copper Downs. Common cause does not mean common interests. My folk are not usually of significance to the gods of men, nor they to us.”
There was small purpose in asking the Dancing Mistress of her gods. She said so little of her people that I did not even know their name for themselves. Any more than I knew hers. I understood, though, that they were quite concerned with paths and souls and some connection that ran between them one and all.
“I am human,” I said quietly.
“You are not of this place. Your home has its own gods and spirits. They should be of importance to you.”
“Tulpas,” I said, the word leaping to memory. “Like the soul of a place, or of an action. An idea, I suppose.”
“The tulpas concern you. This city belongs to Blackblood and his fellow sleepers.”
“I am of this city now.” That was a hateful thought, but true. “I can scarcely converse in the tongue of my birth, while in Petraean, I can speak learnedly on dozens of topics. The music of my people is unfamiliar to me, but I know what instruments they play here. Likewise the food, the clothing, the animals, the weapons. My roots may be in the fire-hot south, but Copper Downs has been grafted over me.”
“Perhaps,” she said after a little thought. “They have dozens of gods here in this city. Blackblood is only one. Each has their concerns, their purposes, their temples and priests.”
“It is like a market, then. Each stallholder calls his wares, and people pray where the fruit is freshest.”
There was something sad in the Dancing Mistress’ voice as her slow reply came. “You may have the right of it, but you miss the deeper truth. Gods are real, just like people. Petty, noble; vicious, kind; strong, weak. But you do not buy one for an afternoon and then throw her away. Each god means something to this city. They are always of something, called at need, staying until after all have forgotten them.” She sighed heavily. “So long as it is not I who calls them.”
Federo came time and again. He would sample my cooking, examine my needlework, or watch me dance. We would talk, but I always held my tongue from the words that counted. Mistress Tirelle lurked in doorways to overhear what we spoke of. If I expressed myself too frankly, or was too bitter, there would be a beating later.
Where I wish now that I had found a different way in those years was that Federo and I never spoke in my words. We never used that language for which I then had no name. He knew some of the words, to be sure, for we had spoken thus when he first bought me away from Papa.
Mistress Tirelle treated the words as if they were an infection. Federo was no different.
My stories had slipped further and further away in the nights when I lay abed and thought on my earliest memories. What always lay close to mind was Endurance, and the sound of bells.
I never did see the other candidates, but just as Mistress Tirelle had me working amid larger groups of people and showing more of my accomplishments, so the competitions increased. Hardly a month went by that the Factor did not send for something of skill and purpose from his girls. Calligraphy, in the classic style brought from the lands of the Sunward Sea. A dance designed by me and taught to a servant who would deliver it to him, set to the same piece of music used by others. A hound to be trained at a certain trick in two weeks’ time.
The outcomes of the competitions were not reported back to me. I could on occasion gauge by Mistress Tirelle’s mood when news had come, but precisely what news, I had to guess.
The truth of the whole exercise had become plain to me. The Factor manufactured women in his house, great ladies for the nobles and high merchants of Copper Downs and perhaps the smaller courts along the Stone Coast. There was pride to be taken in what I learned and mastered, but it was still slavery.
When Mistress Cherlise came, I knew this all over again.
She interrupted my nights as no one but the Dancing Mistress had done. We sat and spoke of how my breasts were beginning to bud, how my blood would soon flow. She had little books in dark leather covers filled with pictures of men and women in the throes of passion. Mistress Cherlise showed me those as well, before explaining how I would more likely be used-hard, with no thought to any pleasure but my lord’s, and required at all times to smile and beg and plead and always play the soft, warm hand.