CHAPTER SEVEN Her Mother’s Rooms
CHAPTER SEVEN
Her Mother’s Rooms
Threnn took me on the seventh day and didn’t warn me, and I’ve since decided that was a mercy on her part.
We went up. I hadn’t been up before. On its eastern shoulder the city climbs in terraces, and they get older the higher you go, the light shading from blue-white down at the Court to a deep, steady amber near the top, and the walls up there are ridged and thickened and pitted with age like the bark on an old tree.
The sound changes as well. The chord drops a fifth.
Climbing through it was like leaving a market by the back door and finding yourself in a church.
“Nobody lives at this height now,” Threnn said. “It’s out of fashion. It’s been out of fashion for about four hundred years, which down here is the same as saying since Tuesday.”
She stopped at a plain arch, nothing carved on it at all, and laid her hand flat on the wall beside it. The surface gave under her palm and the way opened.
“I’ll be on the terrace. Take as long as you like. I have nowhere to be, and I’ll say so on the hour if that helps.”
? ? ?
Three rooms and a window, and thirty-four years of nobody moving anything.
The dust first. There isn’t any, which is so much worse.
Up there the water hardly stirs, so everything sits exactly where it was put down, nothing settling on it, nothing rotting off it, and you don’t feel you’re in a place that’s been preserved.
You feel somebody walked out ten minutes ago and might walk back in.
On a low table stood a cup. There was water in it, of course, there’s water in everything, but at some point somebody had put a dark measure of something into that water, and over three decades a fine sediment had sunk and lay on the bottom in a ring.
I stood over that cup until my neck ached. I couldn’t make myself touch it.
? ? ?
Her bed was low and wide, with a heavy cover on it, deep blue-green.
It was turned back on one side.
Turned back, not made. The way you leave a bed when you mean to get into it again that night.
I got about two steps towards it before my legs went.
I sat down on the edge harder than I meant to, and the bed gave under me the way the walls give, warm and a bit resistant, and I put my hand flat on the folded corner where hers would have been.
A sound came up out of me. The room swallowed it the way that room swallows everything, and I couldn’t tell you what sort of sound it was, because I’ve never made it before or since.
This is the part I hadn’t prepared for.
All my life I’d lived with a dead woman who was really an argument.
My father had his version, and he shouted it.
Mara had hers, careful and held back. The town had a story about a beautiful stranger and a sad young sailor that’s more or less a ballad somebody lost the tune to.
Every one of them was about what Nerissa meant.
Not one had a single fact in it about what she was like to sit in a room with.
And she’d turned her bed back.
She’d gone out for an evening, or a week, or however long the going turned out to be, with the cover folded off one side the way you leave it when you expect to come home tired. She never came home. In thirty-four years nobody had so much as straightened it.
I sat on my mother’s bed with my hand on that corner and cried like a girl of nineteen, which is not how I cry, and it went on a good while.
Then it stopped. It left me scraped out and a bit foolish and very cold, which is what crying really does to you, and nobody ever bothers putting that bit in books.
? ? ?
I went through her things. I’m not sorry.
A shelf. A dish that had held the pale figs, long since gone to nothing. A comb, a proper one, made of what might have been horn, with three dark hairs caught in it. I looked at those for one second and shut the drawer.
Eleven books in their script, which I can’t read.
One in Vaelmoorish, which I can.
? ? ?
It was a book about growing apples.
At first I couldn’t make sense of it at all. I turned it over twice, looking for what it was really, because there’s no earthly reason for a woman at the bottom of the sea to own a farmer’s handbook on managing orchards, printed in Rellhaven eleven years before I was born.
The corners were soft. Handled, I mean, not damaged. Paper goes furry like that when somebody’s picked a thing up and put it down four hundred times over ten years with their thumb always in the same place.
Page forty was folded down.
My hands opened it there before I’d agreed to anything. Page forty is about frost. It’s about what happens to a young tree in a hard spring, how you tell whether the wood’s dead or only sleeping, and what to do in the third year if it still hasn’t taken.
I sat down on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, two hundred fathoms under the sea, holding that, and laughed until it wasn’t laughing any more.
She’d wanted to know about apples.
That’s all it was. In a place with no sky and no seasons, no soil, no frost, a woman had got her hands on a book about orchards and read it till the corners went soft, and turned down the page about a tree that might be dead or might only be sleeping.
Somebody in this city had catalogued it and called it a gift and filed the note.
Then she’d walked out of this room, and in the end she drowned.
I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted anything as badly as that woman wanted an apple tree.
And I’m the reason she never got one. I’ve turned it over from every side there is and it comes up the same each time.
She left the sea and got as far as a fishing town and a bad marriage, two children, a handbook, and the closest she ever came to an orchard was forty pages of print. Then she went back into the water.
I put it down the front of my dress. I stole my mother’s book about apples out of her own rooms, and I still have it, and I’m not giving it back to anybody.
? ? ?
The third room was a workroom, and it was the only part of the place anyone had touched since.
You could see that straight away. The rest had sat quiet for its thirty-four years; this room had been gone through.
Shelves half emptied. A long table ringed with marks where things had stood and then been carried off.
And on the floor, shoved against the wall and forgotten there, one piece of the pale, bone-coloured stuff they keep records on, about the size of a roof slate, with their script cut into it.
I took it out to Threnn on the terrace.
She was at the rail looking down the whole fall of the city, nine hundred feet of it, amber into gold into blue-white, and the great slow shapes moving over.
“They cleared her workroom.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Within a season of the news reaching us.” Threnn didn’t turn round. “Everything of hers went to the House archive. It isn’t there. It hasn’t been there for thirty-three years. I’ve looked six times.”
“Six.”
“The last was eleven days after you came up out of the water. I’m not a brave woman, Miss Angel. I’m a thorough one. It’s a much less useful quality and it’s the only one I’ve got.”
I held out the slate.
Threnn took it by the edges and looked at it, and that schoolmistress face of hers came apart for about a second and a half before she got it back together.
“What does it say?”
“It’s a fragment. The bottom of a longer piece, and the rest is gone.” She tilted it so the amber caught in the cuts. “It says: and the child to be raised on land, and untaught, and unmarked, and when she is grown.”
“And?”
“And nothing. It stops. It’s been broken off.” She turned it over. The back was blank. “Miss Angel, this is a draft. There are corrections. Somebody cut this badly and re-cut two of the words, and then threw it on the floor and made a fair copy.”
“Of what?”
“If I knew that,” said Threnn, “I’d have looked a seventh time.”
? ? ?
That night I went back by myself.
At what passes for night down there, the city dims from the bottom up. The vents bank down first, then the big avenues, and the amber on the eastern shoulder goes last and never really goes at all.
I sat on her bed in the half-dark and didn’t cry, having already got that over with.
What I did instead was take the cover and draw it back across, and square it, and smooth it flat with both hands, the way you make up a bed in a house where somebody’s died, once you’ve stopped pretending they’ll be back to sleep in it.
It took me four goes. My hands wouldn’t do it the first three times; they kept stopping halfway. The fourth time I did it fast, like ripping off a dressing, and then I sat there and didn’t move.
And I said out loud, to a room that had waited thirty-four years for anybody to say anything in it:
“Untaught and unmarked. Well. They got their money’s worth.”
? ? ?
It happened on a stair. These things always seem to.
The eighth day. I was going down the eastern stair with Threnn behind me, and two women were coming up, and they did what everyone down there does when the archivist is on a stair, which is stand to the side and wait.
One of them murmured something to the other. Four or five syllables of the script-language, low, not for me.
And I understood one word of it. It was the word Threnn had used in the Court, the long one I hadn’t been able to keep hold of. Apparently I had kept hold of it, somewhere underneath where keeping happens, because when it went past me on that stair the whole back of my neck went cold.
I stopped.
“Say that again.”
The woman looked at Threnn. Threnn said nothing.
“Don’t look at her. I’m asking you. Say it again.”
She said it again. Six syllables, dropping at the end.
“What does it mean?”
She was fifty or so, in dark green, with a good face, and she answered me in careful Vaelmoorish. “It is your mother’s name, madam.”
“No, it isn’t. I know my mother’s name. It’s four sounds. It was the first thing I ever learned about her. So what’s the rest of it?”
Nobody on that stair breathed, if breathing’s even the word for it down there.
“That is her name,” the woman said, “and what comes before it.”
? ? ?
I made Threnn tell me on the terrace. I wouldn’t let her walk off and I wouldn’t let her put it off till later, and I stood myself square between her and the arch.
“Say it in Vaelmoorish.”
“Miss Angel.”
“You told me you were thorough. So be thorough.”
Threnn put both hands on the rail and looked down the amber drop for a long time.
“It translates badly.”
“Everything does. Say it.”
“She who holds the tide at Ilmarren.”
The city hummed. The great shapes went over.
“That’s a title.”
“It’s a title.”
“Whose?”
“It isn’t a question of whose.” Her voice had gone flat and quick, the way it does when she’s being accurate so she doesn’t have to be present.
“It isn’t a courtesy, and nobody hands it out as an honour.
There are nine such titles, attached to nine places.
Whoever holds the title holds the place, and the place is a gate, Miss Angel, one of nine in the whole of the Deep, and the person who holds one is. ”
She stopped.
“Is what?”
“Is not somebody who’s permitted to go off and live on land with a sailor.”
? ? ?
I’d been told my mother was a Siren. I’d been told, by Mara, in a warm kitchen with the cat on the chair, that she was probably more than a beautiful woman who’d married badly. That there were bloodlines, and successions, and that she’d left things undone.
For two months I’d carried all of that around as one sentence. Probably something.
And now a woman on a stair had said six syllables, and my mother was somebody who’d held a gate, one of only nine of them, and walked away from it with a book about apples under her arm.
My back slid down the wall. I didn’t decide to sit. The wall just went up past me, and then I was on the terrace floor with my knees pulled up and the amber going by overhead.
Threnn didn’t tell me to get up.
“Ilmarren.”
“Yes.”
“Again.”
“Ilmarren. It’s the northernmost. It’s the one nearest your coast, and that’s no coincidence, and I’d ask you to hold off on the questions that follow from that for a day or two, because they’re large and you’re not at your best.”
“Threnn.” I was looking at my hands. “Elias found that word.”
She turned round.
“Where?”
“In his family’s books. Twice, once on each side of a cut. He didn’t know if it was a man or a boat.” My voice seemed to be coming from somewhere off to my left. “He said it to me at two in the morning, the night before I came down. Eight nights ago. And I never gave it another thought. Not once.”
Threnn came and sat down on the terrace floor next to me, grey skirts and all, in the amber light, which I’m fairly sure the archivist of a great house doesn’t make a habit of. She arranged her hem first. Then she sat.
“Miss Angel. Do you understand what it means, that a Keeper family on the Vaelmoor coast had that word in its private record, and that somebody in that family then cut the pages out?”
“Say it plainly. I’ve had a bad morning.”
“It means the arrangement wasn’t made in the Deep alone.” She folded her hands in her lap, exactly the way she had at my kitchen table. “Somebody up there was party to it.”