CHAPTER SIX The Court of Tides #2
A woman came out of one of the doorways and looked at me.
She was the first person in the Deep who’d properly looked at me, and I liked it a good deal less than I’d have guessed.
“You’re the one.”
“Yes.”
“They’ve been saying you’d come down.”
“I came down six days ago.”
“They’ve been saying it for thirty-four years,” she said, and went back inside.
I stood a while in a street with a wrong note in it. Then I went back to the western terrace and didn’t tell Threnn where I’d been.
? ? ?
I’ve got ahead of myself. The Court came before the fish market, and Kael came before the Court.
He found me on the evening of the fourth day, on the low wall above the vents where the rose light comes up.
He sat down a yard off, hung his bare feet over the edge, and said nothing for ten minutes or so, which I’ve since decided was the most decent thing he did that whole autumn.
“I told you.”
“You did.”
“I took no pleasure in being right.”
“You took some.”
“I took some,” he admitted, and looked at his fingernails.
“A modest amount. It’s so dreadfully warm down by these vents, madam, I must get my pleasures where I can.
” The rose light drifted up past us, slow as breathing.
“It gets worse before it gets better. Tomorrow you’ll be presented.
The Court will look at you, every last one of them hunting for a reason to have an opinion, and you’ll find you’d rather be ignored after all. ”
I watched the light.
“Kael. Tomorrow, when they look at me. What is it they’ll actually see?”
He took so long that I turned my head to look at him.
“Your mother.”
? ? ?
They put me in grey.
Threnn brought it herself that same evening, folded over one arm, and stood in the doorway of the western room while I looked at it laid out on the bed.
“It’s not a flattering colour.”
“No.”
“That’s deliberate.”
“It’s neutral. Colour can be neutral down here in a way it can’t be up there. Wear anything in the four houses’ colours tomorrow and you’ll have answered eleven questions before you open your mouth, nine of them wrongly.” A pause. “I counted.”
The cloth was extraordinary. Heavy, and it moved in the water like smoke, and it had no seams either. Of course it hadn’t. Nothing down there has seams.
“Threnn. At my kitchen table you said you were junior in her household for nine years.”
“I did.”
“And you haven’t said a word about her since, and I haven’t asked. I’d like to know if that’s because you’re waiting for me to, or because you’d rather I didn’t.”
Threnn stayed in the doorway a moment longer with one hand on the frame, holding it, as if it might not stay up otherwise.
“I would rather you didn’t,” she said. “I’ve no right to that. You should ask me anyway. And would you please not do it tonight.”
? ? ?
The Court of Tides isn’t a room, or a chamber. It’s a hollow, a wide shallow bowl sunk into the floor of the city, four hundred feet across perhaps, terraced in rings going down, with the light strongest at the centre and fading out towards the rim.
You don’t go into it. You go down into it, past the standing ranks on every terrace, with everyone above looking down at you, and by the time you reach the floor there are nine hundred people on the slopes over your head.
Nine hundred. I counted the terraces afterwards and did the sum, because I couldn’t sleep.
The water in there is stiller than anywhere else in the city. They do something to it. Sound comes through without any blur at all, so a voice from the far rim reaches the centre as cleanly as one at your shoulder, and the first time somebody spoke behind me I spun round so fast I nearly went over.
? ? ?
Threnn took me in. Kael was somewhere up on the third terrace and I didn’t find him till it was nearly over.
She said my name. Not Rose Angel: a long sound in their script-language that I couldn’t keep in my head for more than two seconds at a time. And then, in Vaelmoorish, clearly, to the whole bowl:
“Of the line of Nerissa, come as a guest, under precedent, by her own will.”
The bowl said nothing.
Nine hundred people, a silence you could have stood a coin on its edge in, and the low chord of the city coming up through the floor.
? ? ?
I’ll try to describe what it’s like to be looked at by nine hundred people who don’t want you.
I’d have known what to do with hatred. I’ve been hated by wives, and by men who couldn’t have me, and I’ve had plenty of practice at both.
This was assessment, row on row of it. Nine hundred faces lit from below with the shadows in all the wrong places, every one of them doing sums, and I could feel the sums land on me and move on in waves, from one part of the bowl and then another, as different people got to their totals.
And nothing whatever came back the other way.
I have never in my life stood in front of a crowd that didn’t react to me.
I’ve loathed the reacting since I was fifteen.
I’ve prayed it away. And standing on that floor, I reached for it.
I did. I went hunting, opened that shut hand as wide as it would go and shoved at nine hundred people with everything I had.
Whistling at a stone, Kael had called it. He’d been kind.
It was like shouting into a house and hearing, from the sound of your own voice, that it’s empty.
My ears rang. My hands had gone numb, and I couldn’t have told you when.
In my chest was the lurch of a boat dropping off the back of a wave, only it didn’t stop.
It went on for the whole length of the proceedings, that small endless falling, and I stood in the middle of it with my arms at my sides because I couldn’t think what else to do with them.
? ? ?
They asked me four questions.
A woman on the second terrace, in deep green, asked whether I meant to claim. Threnn answered for me: by precedent, the guest claims nothing. The woman said she hadn’t asked the archivist. Threnn said, with enormous courtesy, that she’d like that on the record.
I said, “No.”
A very old man asked whether I’d been spoken to by the watchers, and how many words, and could I repeat them. I said yes, and that I didn’t know how many, and that it had called me daughter of the sea’s own blood and said it had waited a long time to see what the line became.
The bowl shifted. Nine hundred people moving a few inches at once makes a sound down there like a wave running up shingle, and it went round the terraces and came back.
A younger man, high up, asked something in the script-language that I didn’t understand and Threnn didn’t translate. All she said was, “That question is not put to a guest.” After a moment someone above him said one syllable, and he sat down.
Then, from the rim, a voice I couldn’t place, in perfect unaccented Vaelmoorish, and the whole room changed underneath it.
“Does she know what she’s for?”
? ? ?
Nobody answered.
Nobody answered, and nobody ruled the question out of order, and Threnn, who’d laid down a three-hundred-year precedent to block a question about claiming, said nothing at all.
She looked at the floor of the bowl.
I stood on the light at the centre of a drowned city with nine hundred of my mother’s people above me, and felt the pulse of the Deep come up through the soles of my feet. Six seconds. Six seconds. Six.
“No,” I said, to the whole room. “So somebody had better tell me.”
Nine hundred people looked back at me. Not one of them opened their mouth, and Threnn still didn’t lift her eyes from the floor.