I sat up with my dry mouth and my urgent bladder only to realize that if this Mauricio were canny, he might have left a man behind to lurk silently within the warehouse. What if an ear were pressed to the underside of my floor, waiting for me to move and scrape and sigh?
That new terror kept me in place very late into the night. Finally the need in my bladder became so urgent that I could not put it off for all the fear in my heart. I crept silent as fog to do my business. The splash of the stream sounded like thunder to me, but there was nothing to be done for it except finish, then continue to hide until the danger was gone.
I realized the danger might never be past.
I was startled out of dreams of being hunted across ocean waves in a small boat. Legs kicked as I reached for something with which to defend myself. I was brandishing a small hunk of cheese before I realized that Federo had lifted the trap. A quick glance at the round window showed it was still night outside.
“I do not think that Fencepost Blue is so dangerous,” he said mildly. “But I will see if I can find something a bit less stout the next time I go shopping.”
Giggling, I collapsed. “I thought one of those soldiers might be hiding downstairs to catch me moving up here overnight.”
“Soldiers?” Federo’s face grew alarmed. “A moment, please.” He reached down through the trap and brought up a pair of bulging canvas sacks. After repositioning the flooring, he sat and asked me to explain exactly what it was I had meant.
I told him what I had heard the day before, and mentioned the name Mauricio. Federo looked troubled. “They suspect you to be in one of the warehouse districts. Not that this is surprising. They searched here all evening, then departed?”
“They searched the whole area. The troop I heard marching dropped a small group of men here.”
“Hmm.” He took off his laborer’s flattened leather cap and stroked the back of his head, thinking. “I will see what I can learn. But this is not something I can ask too many questions of. I am under suspicion already, if only for having known you. It will not take long before they realize how much contact the Dancing Mistress had with you.”
“Far more than her other candidate students?” I asked.
“Of course.” He reached for one of the bags. “But here, I bring news and better.”
Out came a bolt of fine silk, tussah weave and forty-two inches across. Unrolled, the silk was seven yards in length. And beautiful, too. I set our hooded lamp on the floor to light the cloth. It showed a rippling sheen like water flowing down the threads. The color appeared green in the lamplight, some medium shade, though I could not say what in that illumination.
“This is most beautiful,” I said quietly.
“There is so little I can ever give back to you. I thought at the least you should have a good quality measure of cloth.”
He showed me the bells, a great mixture of kinds. “I could not buy so many silver bells in any one place,” Federo said by way of apology. “So some are brass, or iron, and some are larger than I might have liked.”
Still, they were bells. Real bells. The bells I could remember from home had been little tin cones on a pin. They tinkled, but they did not ring. Some of these were fit for a choir to sing the hymns of grace to. “I shall have music like a tulpa when I walk in this,” I told him. Their multitude of tiny jingles brought me a sense of peace.
Federo produced a velvet roll with needles stuck into it. “In case some grow dull or bend.” He also had several sticks with spools of thread stacked upon them.
I readied a needle and took up one of the tiniest bells. This one resembled a little silver pomegranate seed, and made a single plaintive tinking noise when I dangled it between my thumbnail and fingernail. With a silent thanks to my grandmother, I sewed the bell to one corner of the silk, which flowed like a green river from my lap.
Federo sat on his heels and watched me sew awhile. After a time, he asked, “May I help you sew, or is this something you must do for yourself?”
I considered that. The answer was not immediately obvious to me. I had always thought of the silk as something a woman made for herself. Clearly, I had not sewn my own bells as an infant, though. Just as clearly, whatever tradition demanded had long been abused and discarded in my case.
The outcome was what mattered most now.
In a sudden rush of thought, the decision was straightforward enough. “I would be pleased to have your help, but at a cost.” I caught his eye in the faint light rising up from the hooded lamp. “Tell me where I came from, as you understand it. I remember the frogs and the plantains and the rice and my father’s ox, but I never have known the name of the place. None of my studies ever showed me maps across the Storm Sea.”
He picked up a needle and struggled awhile to thread it. I did not press him at first for words, for I could see the thoughts forming behind his eyes. Finally Federo got a bell sorted out and bent to his side of the silk. He would not meet my gaze as he began to speak. “Surely you know there was the strictest order never to mention your origins within the Pomegranate Court.”
“Which is foolish. All one need do is look at my face to see I was born nowhere near the Stone Coast.”
“Of course. The beauty we all prized… prize… in you was founded in part on that very thing. But to mention your birth-country would be to remind you of the past, and goad you into keeping those memories strong.”
“Unlike how you and the Dancing Mistress treated me,” I said dryly.
“Plans within plans, Green.” He finally glanced at me, then looked back down at a fresh bell he was embarked on. “You hail from a country called Selistan. It is found a bit more than six hundred knots west of south, sailing from Copper Downs out across the Storm Sea.”
Selistan!
I finally had a name for my home. Not just a place of frogs and snakes and rice paddies, but a place in the world with a name, that appeared on maps.
“Wh-where in Selistan?”
“I am not sure.” He sounded uncomfortable. “Kalimpura is the great port where much of the trade from across the sea comes. I landed at a fishing town some thirty leagues east of Kalimpura, in a province called Bhopura. The town itself is called Little Bhopura, though I know of no Great Bhopura anywhere.”
“We walked far from my village to Little Bhopura,” I said cautiously.
Federo laughed. If his amusement had not been so obviously genuine, it would have hurt my heart. “We hiked about two leagues across a dry ridgeline separating the river valley where you were living from the coast where I landed.” He smiled at me fondly. “You must recall that as a vast journey, but think how small you were then. I doubt you’d ever been more than three furlongs from your father’s farm in your life. Today you could cover the distance in a few hours. You would not even notice the effort.”
I recalled the sense of enormous space, walking the entire day, stopping to take a meal. He was not mocking me; he was describing my earliest childhood. Everyone begins small.
Another bell wanted threading. I focused on that a moment to gather my thoughts. Federo’s silence was inviting, not angry or defensive. Below us, the warehousemen pushed their great door open and began their day.
When I spoke again, my voice was low. “Where is my father’s farm?”
“I… I do not know. Not anymore.” He sounded ashamed.
Federo was not telling me something. I picked at the thought awhile. I did not wish to push my anger at him. That well was deep and inexhaustible. Right now I was thoughtful, not angry. “Federo. What was my father’s name?”
His face was so close to his sewing, he risked poking himself in the eye. “I do not know.”
“What was my name?”
He would not meet my gaze at all.
My anger raced. “You bought a girl whose name you did not ask from a man whose name you did not know.”