‘Yes…’ Responding to Lavik’s deep seriousness, Pryn spoke a little lower. ‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘You’ve seen one?’ Lavik asked. ‘I don’t just mean the silly scratches on the astrolabe this evening that don’t mean anything at all.’
‘Well, I’ve certainly heard of them,’ Pryn said. ‘Heard people speak of them and describe what they do. Sailors use them for navigating coastlines — my aunt explained to me about that. And I’ve seen one of them, anyway.’
‘What did it look like?’ Lavik asked.
‘Well, it was…made of clay and stuff. It was of a garden. It was covered with something that had the same texture as grass. And little molded trees were set about on it. And a toy house. Water ran through the space where the stream went, down the falls, and over bits of ceramic molded like rocks and statues — ’
Lavik laughed, quietly and shyly. ‘That’s a garden maquette! We’ve got over a dozen, scattered among the maintenance sheds all over the grounds. They make it easier for the gardeners to keep the plants in order if you’ve really got extensive landscaped property — another one of Belham’s notions. Most gardeners, you know, don’t read — maps or anything else. But you’ve never seen a map…!’ In the dark she looked at Pryn. They passed a flare, and her serious, southern face brightened — flickering — and faded.
Pryn looked away in the dark and saw nothing.
‘You haven’t seen a map! A map is just marks on a piece of parchment. Oh, you can read distances and directions on it — but not much else.’ Lavik paused. ‘I knew you’d never seen one. Somehow, from things you said, I just knew you hadn’t really seen one. I’ve never seen a city — I mean a real one, from outside it, all at once! And you’ve never seen a map!’
Pryn looked back at Lavik, who now looked away — and who sounded as alone as Pryn had ever felt. Pryn watched her, and felt as close to her as she had ever felt to anyone. After a few moments, Pryn looked away, so that she could not see if Lavik looked back at her.
Petal coughed.
The two plump young women, one a mother and one all but motherless, walked through the dark garden, shoulder brushing shoulder, bare feet now loud and now soft on the leaf-strewn brick, and were alone together.
Ahead, Ardra’s back, in the rough cloth, became visible as he passed another torch.
‘Something in the way you talked about it just made me sure you’d never seen one,’ Lavik repeated. ‘Though I swear, I couldn’t tell you what. I don’t know, but once you have a baby, you feel a lot of things — but you don’t do too much analytical thinking.’
‘I know,’ Pryn said, who, in fabled Ellamon, had babysat for many of her cousins’ children and had been, for days at a time, the sole care of her baker cousin’s two-year-old son. ‘When I take care of one for more than three hours at a stretch, I can’t think at all! That’s why I don’t want to have any myself.’ She hugged Petal, sweet and sick as she was, who felt wonderful.
‘Oh, that’s not true!’ Lavik protested. ‘I mean, well…after a week or so, you begin to think again. A little bit, at least. You really do. That is, if you take care of it all by yourself. Of course once the slaves begin taking over, then what you spend all your time thinking about is how to get them to take over more. But you really do get back to some…thinking. Eventually — I think.’
‘I think,’ Pryn said, ‘that babies are wonderful and beautiful and comforting and rewarding, the solace of the present and the hope — the real hope — of the future.’ She sighed. ‘And I don’t want one. At least not now.’
‘Mmm,’ Lavik said.
Pryn glanced at the young woman beside her and saw her looking ahead at her step-brother.
‘Well,’ Lavik said, ‘I feel the same way; and I am glad I have mine. Now. And…’ She looked down at the brick — ‘I’ll die a thousand deaths if she does die. But still, I don’t see how anyone who has taken care of one couldn’t understand what you say.’ When she looked up in the passing flare, her face bore her family’s absolute smile.
Pryn looked at the stiff-kneed boy marching ahead of them and wished he would come and carry little Petal, who, small as she was, had begun to seem heavy — for now Pryn also felt that, without the baby between them, she might be able to talk about more with Lavik. At the same time, she resolved not to offer Petal back to her mother until they were again inside the house.
Lavik said: ‘It is nice of you to carry her for me. I appreciate it.’
Pryn wondered if her great-aunt had felt the same way when she’d been presented with Pryn’s own, wiggling, wheezing self by Pryn’s mother, fifteen — well, a month shy of sixteen, now — years ago.
‘We’re almost at the door.’ Lavik touched Pryn’s arm. The path had taken them in a circle through the near night.
Ahead, Ardra walked up to a vast, mottled nothingness and disappeared into it: the castle door.
Then Pryn, Lavik, and Petal went through it too.
13. Of Survival, Celebration, and Unlimited Semiosis
…Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere…
What does this paradoxical statement imply? First, it implies that a single reading is composed of the already-read, that what we can see in a text the first time is already in us, not in it; in us insofar as we ourselves are a stereotype, an already-read text; and in the text only to the extent that the already-read is that aspect of a text that it must have in common with its reader in order for it to be readable at all. When we read a text once, in other words, we can see in it only what we have already learned to see before.
‘THERE.’ TRITTY POINTED TO the goblets on the tray the elderly slave-woman carried: their sides were joined slabs of vitric red and blue, framed in cast metal, hugely heavy.
‘And here…’ The earl lifted a thin pitcher from a tray of pitchers the red-headed slaveboy brought up. ‘This one’s yours.’ He tilted it — and Pryn quickly brought her goblet, in both hands, beneath the lip. Water-clear and tossing back firelight from the lamps’ flaming and the goblet’s own glistening sides, liquid filled it.
Because it was so heavy, she lifted it quickly to taste: the coldest water, with a fruity ghost — sharpness interrupted, which made her take a larger swallow in memory of initial cool.
Greater sharpness made her head reel.
The earl set the pitcher down, picked up another, and poured dark liquid into the goblet Lavik held.
‘Now you must tell us your own story.’ Inige came over with his own goblet, which his father filled from still another pitcher with something opaque and green. ‘Tritty’s right. It always happens when you invite guests that you expect to entertain. All you end up doing is trying to impress them. You must tell a story of your own, because we really want to hear it!’
‘Ardra,’ Tritty said, ‘come here and have your drink. It’s tradition, darling.’