He lay his fingers here and there upon them. “And perhaps if we learned how to refine and part them, it might be that we would find them to be not just impurities to be discarded, but purities to be discovered; not alone different names, but different uses as well …” His fingers ceased to move. “The signs,” he said.
“Yes, the signs.” She chuckled. “I gave them all names, you see, when I was young, still so young that these would slip off my wrists unless they were padded — and of course I didn’t want them to be padded, so I walked around like this —” then Vergil laughed — “as though my hands had been painted with henna and were still wet, and —”
“And what did you name the signs, then?”
In a beam of silvered sunlight he observed the motes dancing.
“Oh, childish nonsense!”
“A boon! Tell me!”
She made no more demur. “I think that this one is the white ewe for the sun and this one the black ram for the earth, see with what pains it is stippled there? — and these others, I am not sure what they are, or even if they were made at the same time or by the same artist; sometimes one sees strange creatures pictured, are they real creatures from so far ago far that one does not know them? or did someone dream them, perhaps after gluttoning too much thick food too soon before sleep? These others, they are odd. As though one might picture a crayfish or a scorpion who had never really seen a —”
The fragrance as of some fragrant wood fairly freshly sawn, was most pervasive; did he know that wood? he did: what was its name or nature? he did not know. He feigned a scowl. “Their names! The Court insists to know their names!”
She feigned fright. “Mercy, the Court! Oh, well, if I must (I Must!), well, the ewe, I suppose it is a ewe, I called ‘Pony-lamb’ and the ram, if it’s not meant to be a black ram, what then, O Court? But these, these others … I don’t really think that I entirely … what? oh, I called the ram, simply, ‘Spots’ … I hadn’t yet reasoned that it was meant to be black …”
He lifted his eyes and looked at her. “And the others? whom you are not entirely sure you like?”
She gave him a swift look, not astonished, but indeed surprised, for she had not finished that phrase, and he had guessed how she meant to, and he was right. “Well … there is no simply to these others. This one I called Arristamurrista. And this one I called Arretagoretta. And this one I called Arrantoparanto. But I never told their names to anyone after the first time, when they laughed at me. My Father said, ‘This is neither Punic nor Latin.’ And my Mother said, ‘Nor Berbar nor Etruscan.’ They were laughing fondly, of course, but I — So now you know all, O Court.”
Musingly, he said, “That is certainly a singular sort of ‘childish nonsense’. Where —”
Without emphasis she said, “I heard their names inside, how shall I explain it? no: I felt their names … inside of me … as though in a rhythm … Well!” She laughed, gave her head a certain shake, adjusted her head-cloth: already he had come to delight even in the way she would sometimes laugh, sometimes give her head a certain shake, even in the way she adjusted her head-cloth or cap afterwards.
Vergil said, “The Court now has you in its power.”
“Ishtar and Melitta! It has?” In a less-pretended tone, she said, “You did sound just like an advocate, you know. Have you spent much time hanging around them? In Apollo’s Court, perhaps? Or —”
Now he gave his head a shake (but he wore no kerchief, no attorney’s robe or cap). “Enough time. As much as I could stand. I’ve been a litigant —”
“Oh, that’s bad!”
“ ‘Bad’? Even worse. I was an advocate once, myself.” He made a face.
She made one back. “Were you a good one? Is there a good one?”
By now he had left off wearing robes, trews, tunic; adjusting to the climate, he had on only a short kilt, rather like the Ægyptians wore, but simpler. “A very bad one. And I lost my case. Well, both my cases, including the only one I ever pleaded. My client made quite a thing of paying me the copperkin,” referring to the minimal sum paid even to the losing lawyer; the smallest of small coins, however much debased since original coinage, still it retained its olden name of copperkin. Huldah laughed a slow, rich laugh. “And he said, ‘Take an old scoundrel’s advice and go plant the white spelt and millet in the mountains.’ ” He imitated the client’s imitation of a supposed rustic accent, “ ‘and never come back here no more.’ ”
“And did you? Never go back, I mean?”
He had been gazing at the motes in the beam of sunlight once again, not idly: he had been wondering if this would help him identify whatever kind of tree had made the floor; it was certainly not of cedar … and yet, like cedar, it gave off a characteristic scent. In the concentrated light he could see the grain, like the grain in ivory: it told him nothing. All this in a second, then he answered her question, “Never if I could help it, I assure you. But I still retain the Single Privilege, of course.”
“Oh, of course!” and now she laughed lustily; it was a matter of common knowledge (and, Vergil thought, common was a very proper adjective for it), more or less, that being a qualified advocate entitled one to a single privilege outside the court, to wit, “to break wind in the presence of the cooling-room slave in the Bath at Huta Hippodopolis:” that remote and almost certainly mythical town in which tales of absurdities were commonly set. Huldah lifted her head as she laughed.
He might, of course, simply have asked about the floor.
Scarcely much of a thought he gave more to the ship that brought him. He was aware of shapes on the shore: the vessel itself careened and being scraped, then caulked, perhaps … even … painted. Slow groups lading things aboard once it was righted and floated once again; once or twice vaguely he saw the forms of men carrying burthens ashore from it. A slow trade of sorts was being done; he did not care. One time as an afterthought he’d been aware he’d seen a caffile of men and beasts preparing to be off — off where, he knew he did not know; it was too much to consider, even, that neither did he care; as shadowy as a scarce-remembered dream the thought later flitted through his mind that he’d heard them talk of the need to carry water: so he supposed a journey to or through a dry land was entailed; he passed on …
Huldah … Huldah herself a dry land, no facile lushness there, path-trails thin as filigree; yet a rich land, with many a concealed spring and many an occulted deep, deep well. A rich land, she, lying alone. Her eyes … at first he’d thought them ever so slightly, ever so skillfully painted: but soon he saw that none artifice had done this work. And faint her half-shy, half-sly smile. Never raised, her voice. She: richer than the ransom of a richer city. Sometimes she wore the two silver armils on the one same arm, though not always the self-same arm each time. Hear their tinkling, hear them now and then ringing.
Huldah and he together in her atrium one day, plants in half-buried jars and pots roundabout. She, after drawing lines in the sands in the atrium, straight, curved, wavering: shores, she said. Coasts: she said, slopes; rivers which once had flowed and flowed no more, rivers which flowed yet and always, and rivers which flowed only sometimes. Huldah at length drew another line, and this (she said) was “the long road to the Pass of Gold …” After silence, said she, “It runs through the heartland of Five-Limbed Uluvendas, the Great Bull of the Woods and Plains.” And, after another silence, said she, “Now none know this way save me and thee. Well,” she said, “of course all my people here know it, but, for one thing, scarcely they know that they know it. And what they know, know it or not, they would not betray. Not while three sticks of this house stand together.”