She was utterly surprised when Nazareth only nodded, as if that made perfectly good sense, and she sat down at once on the edge of the other woman’s bed, careful not to jolt her as she did so.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, not caring if she seemed disrespectful, because this was mute pain that she faced and tending pain was a function that she was not able to set aside for the sake of good manners, “I didn’t mean that! Of course not! And I will not let you go to Barren House in any other way than under my care, and in decent comfort. Please understand that, and forgive me my jokes… I only meant to make you smile, Nazareth.”
Nazareth only looked at her and said nothing at all, and something in Michaela gave way, some knot she had not realized was even tied inside her. “You’re very tired, Nazareth,” she went on, “and you need care, not clever conversation. I’ll get the nurse to help you dress.”
“Please, no!”
Michaela was firm, and there was steel in her voice. “I promise you, my dear, that nurse will be as gentle and as tender with you as if you were her newborn and beloved child. You have my word on it.”
“You don’t know…”
“Oh, but I do know! I most assuredly do know. And I promise you. She will come, and she will be respectful, and she will be kind, and she will treat you with flawless attention. She will not dare do anything else — as for what she may be thinking, that is her narrow little twisted mind, and you are to ignore that as you would ignore any other deformity. For politeness’ sake. And I will get the cab and take you home.”
“I’m not a child, Michaela… you don’t have to…”
“Don’t talk! Hush. If you were a child this would be much simpler, because I could just pick you up and carry you, whether you kicked and screamed or not. But you’re taller than I am, unfortunately, and I’m going to have to have some help — must you make it even more difficult for me than it is?”
She hated saying that, because all her impulses were to treat this hurt one tenderly, but it was exactly the right thing to say. The idea that she was causing trouble for the nurse sent to fetch her stopped Nazareth’s objections immediately.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Landry,” said Nazareth. “Please proceed.”
Please proceed! Such a funny, awkward woman, and what a very hard time she must have had with her whole personality akimbo like that… and that swift, ever so correct “Mrs. Landry!” Putting her in her place. Her dignity would see her back to Barren House, Michaela thought, and that was far more important than anything else right now.
Chapter Twenty
Then consider this, please: to make something “appear” is called magic, is it not? Well… when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, a face, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has two of them.
I will name that the “athad” of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind — perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And there are both of your athads, very nice ones.
Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. From now on. And I have made the athad appear… now it exists.
Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers… magic is quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.
And I look at you now, and I can say, as I could not say three minutes ago — “What lovely athads you have, grandmother!”
Nazareth went to Barren House bruised, as Michaela had seen that she was, and numb. The news that she was being divorced hardly penetrated that numbness, so that by the time she became aware of it any chance that it might cause her discomfort was long past. But after a while, under the competent hands of the women, she began to let that numbness go, and she realized that she was like someone who goes home at last after a lifetime of exile.
No more Aaron; he avoided her, and when he could not avoid her he was overpoweringly polite. No more being alone with him, where he did not feel obliged to be polite. Her children only a few steps away, and the little girls routinely here at Barren House in any case. And a kind of freedom. She would never have to bear a man’s eyes upon her scarred body. She would heal, and she would add to her usual clothing the garment with the false and foolish breasts, and she would go out to work as she always had; and no man would ever see her naked, or touch her body, again. Not even, so long as she was conscious, a doctor. Not ever.
She wandered about Barren House at first, absorbing it as if she had never been there before, luxuriating in the voices of the women, glorying in the bed that she could have all to herself without the snoring bulk of a man always waking her, always crowding her against the wall. It was luxury; she had not anticipated that it would be, because she hadn’t known what it was that she lacked.
Finally, when Michaela agreed that it was time, the women told her about the woman-language called Láadan, and explained the nonsense called Langlish. Nazareth sat and listened to them in amazement, saying not one word until they were finished, and then she said, “You women. You women and your fairy tales!”
“It’s true!” they protested. “Really, Nazareth… it’s true.”
“All my life you’ve told me that the tale of Langlish was true.”
“That was necessary,” Aquina retorted. “We are a better judge of what’s required than you are.”
“And now, after a lifetime of lying, you expect me to believe that you are suddenly telling the truth?” Nazareth shook her head. “Go away with your bedtime stories,” she jeered, “tell them to the little girls. Along with the unicorn and the bandersnatch and the Helga Dik! Leave me in peace.”
“Nazareth,” Susannah chided. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Should I?”
“You know you should. We’ve been waiting for so many years to show you this — I’ve grown to be an ancient crone able only to cackle and hiss while I waited. And now you won’t let us show you.”
“Show me, then,” said Nazareth, who loved Susannah dearly. But she could not resist teasing Aquina. “Aquina,” she asked, “does it have one hundred separate vowels, this Láadan?”
“Oh, you’re impossible!”
Nazareth chuckled at Aquina’s disappearing back, and Susannah told her again that she should be ashamed of herself.
“I am,” Nazareth said, with great satisfaction. “I’m so very ashamed I can hardly hold my head up. Now show me.”
“It’s down in the basement,” they warned.
“Of course. With the tub of green bubbling slime that you sacrifice a virgin to every Monday morning. Where else would it be? I can walk to the basement, I’m not crippled — lead on, please.”
She followed them, laughing again as they pulled the scraps of paper from the backs of drawers and the middles of recipes files and other assorted nooks and crannies. But she sat down and looked at the assembled materials when they handed them to her, and she stopped laughing as she read. Once she said, “It would be so easy for all this to be lost! And so awful.”