The Client in Brown

The old woman made the letter disappear into the dun folds of her rough robe with a speed and economy of misdirection to make her the envy of every showman’s shill.  Like an actor, too, she recognized his admiration, even though he would have said that his expression had not changed from the blank he affected while listening to his client’s words.  For the first time since she strode to his corner, long gliding steps parting the market crowd as smoothly as if a wind before her blew them gently from her path, she smiled.  Gold-toothed and savage as a pirate’s, her silent laugh erased all trace of the subservient ancient from the backwoods.
In a voice pitched to be unheard by anyone beyond their radius, she spoke to him in fluent and unaccented __________ known also as the Secret Tongue.  “You make a good citizen for this shadow place, boy of (cap city).  The hand that put you here with that small curse I do not recognize, but my sister did you a favor of sorts to put you here, though that might not seem so to you.  Such a clever and subtle work would not have been some reflex spiteful move, but intention.  She used bits of your essence in the ties that hold that spell, or I’d have repaid your courtesy and let you slip its bonds.  But she is good that one, and I hate to admit, better than I am.”
She leaned closer, and he caught from the folds of her robe or the deep dry crevasses of her skin the sharp smell of cracked green _____seed.  Looking into his eyes, she reached forward as if to give a tired grandmother’s caress to his cheek.  And stabbed into the joint of ear and jaw with a cats claw blade thin as a thorn.
The instant ice and numb paralysis that stole the right side of his face staggered him like a like the glance of a loose boom.  He stumbled.
A thin hand on his shoulder caught him, and pressed him to sit before he fell.  The woman knelt along with him, still holding him in upright.
He tried to ask.  Something.  It did not matter that his mind was too muddled to form a thought because his mouth would not form a word, would not open or entirely close, and his leaden tongue seemed to fill the entire cavity.
The old woman whispered, a cupped hand’s worth of brief syllables.  She settled back on her heels.  When she spoke again, she might have been any concerned and aged customer.  “Are you all right now?” she asked.  “You northerners forget that heat here is not like other heat.  You should be sure to drink in the afternoon when the winds are born in deserts and cross the islands in search of human blood to dry.  So my old husband’s people would say.  I say you should sit until the dizziness goes away.  You should rest in the shade until you are steady and then go to your home and sleep.  A little nap.  A wineskin of water.  You will be fine.”
Cayfall’s eyes were functioning no better than his mouth.  They refused to focus on the near, and those things blurred into transparence, becoming shadows of distortion between himself and the too sharp objects in the distance.  The old woman was so close  he could hear her breathing, smell the seed scent, but she was invisible.  In the Secret Tongue she said, “My unknown sister may be better with a curse than I am, but not by much.  Not by much.  I have eased some of her knots.  And made another change or two.  You will approve.  Do not doubt it, you will approve.”
The air stirred where she had been.  Cayfall tried to nod.  To agree.  To thank her for leaving.  His head moved slightly, and that cheered him.  In fact, he was beginning to feel fine.  Light.  Very clear.  He spent some time on that thought, and concluded that he might, indeed be growing clear to the eye.  He gazed down at his hand, browned from those long months sailing, and not soft, pale and groomed for having left the sea.  He stared at the blood inside it flowing, amber brown.
The closing marked seemed unusually bright and at the same time, difficult to see.  The contradiction amused him, and he found that thought so fascinating that he grew lost in all it’s ramifications.  He was sitting on the side of his own bed when he realized that he was no longer in the dusty market.  He had a great thirst, and thought that perhaps a little rest would be worthwhile.  He had no plans for the evening.  A little water, a little sleep.  It seemed like an excellent idea.T

Watching

“He’s a strange one,” she said.
Horace, looking past her shoulder, down and past the gateway to the square, ignored half a dozen men she could have used those words about, and said, “The Scrivener. Who’s this that calls him strange?  Not Wanda, surely.”
She looked at the table she was using for a writing desk, set to catch the afternoon light and cluttered with weighted piles of paper scraps.  “Wanda has unplumbed depths.  But no, Pinky, I’m serious.
“He’s always there.  Always around.  And listening.  You like him, don’t you?  Not just the boy; the poet.  Better than me, I imagine.  I think more people have  heard his little rhymes than have ever seen mine.  With all there are in print, nobody reads them.  Father—yes, I’m using “Father” now—he has them set in type and gives the things away like they were some sort of tea biscuits with the royal favor stamped in gold.”
He thought that John did well with the books.  The crests were barely noticible.
“Michael wants me to move back home.”
That would be the reason for her mood now after the visit.  “Hmm.  You would have known they might expect that some day he would produce an heir.”
“Oh, I’ve convinced Aunt Emily at least.  Finally.  That however things might look on paper, Michael can do much better.  I have her looking more closely at Robin.  Poor little duck.  She’s been in love with him since she was nine.”
“You’d have him trade one cousin for another?  Swap a Swan for a duckling.”
“Oh, but Michael’s half in love with Wanda.  I think he would marry her instead of me, if I’d go through with it.  I admit it has it’s charms.”
“The mistress wife.  You wrote that one already in The Bishop’s Second Woman.  And the way you turned that ending shows you know better than to try it, even if only as a joke between the two of you.  You have a better grasp of reality than that.”
“You think I would make a poor tragic heroine?”
“I think you’re insane and this whole whoring business proves it.”
“But, Pinky, I ‘m a very well-respected whore.  And it is what tipped the scales with Auntie Queen.”
The lower angled sunlight put her face somewhat in shadow, but tipped the the curls formed from her newly shortened hair.  He wondered if she’d washed away the tint and before or after her interview.
“I saw you the day of your Baptism,” he said.  It was the light that made him think of that.  The light and the thought of the Queen and her strange brood.  “I met (___cousin) in the market.  They were drunk or halfway there and making a party up as they went along.  Buying presents for a baby.  You.
“You know the things Linette did to have you born within the city and acknowledged by the family?  Six months of secrets and plotting boiled down to that.  Drunks buying presents for a baby.”
“They dragged me along to (________house).  I got lost.  Then I walked into the Little Garden.”
“The Pretty Garden.  I called it, as if all the others there weren’t”
“You were sleeping in her lap.  In that contraption Phillip’s uncle designed.  Glider swing.”
“I think you may have mentioned the moment once or twice. You bad thing thinking you had fallen in love with some new mother.
“You know, Pinky, I only recently found out you could have been my father.  Not me, of course.  I wouldn’t have been me with you for a father, but Linette’s baby.”
“John told you that?”
“No, Linnie, silly.”
“You went there.”
“I had some questions.”  For both Linette the mother and Linette of the church, he imagined.
“You would go that far.  Rather than marry Michael?”
“As she said:  even now a woman could do worse than going to the church.
“She ‘s proud of me, Pinky.  She doesn’t just have my books, she reads them. She knows them at least as well as Roger does.  Almost as well as you.”
“And this recent phase?”
“Is sex: pftt!”
“Emily would not have been so cavalier”
“Well, she has wanted me for Michael, or Elaine—god help, if I had been a boy—since the day she found out John had done the deed to Linnie.  It’s difficult for her to let an idea go.”
“And you will be punished.”
“Or have her take it out on everyone I care about.”
“Not an easy woman to have a disagreement with.”
She did not need to answer that.  In the square the lamps were being kindled.  The scrivener was folding the letter he’d composed for an old woman wrapped in brown cheap cloth that pooled into the dust and hid her feet.  The woman touched the still warm sealing wax to print it with her thumb.  A sensation almost as intimate as the way he formed thoughts into words and wrote.  As Wanda, she had found that disconcerting.”
“No,” she said, “not an easy woman.”

O wat the hay

I’m thinking life’s too short.  Giving the idea of a little sensitive fantasy the royal send-off.  Once the ghost of old chris morley settled in, I could see I don’t have much of a chance .

So, why not just go all the way and make her royal, as well as a royal pain.  Or three or so removes from royal, in the family.  Supposedly betrothed to cousin Michael, who’s somewhere in the line of succession, and answers to Auntie Queen about where he goes to say his vows.  pippip

I can’t remember what they’re called–the liner notes?  In Shakespeare’s plays somebody stands and gives the setting, telling you what’s happening and what to look for, tragedy or laughs.

Well, I’ve written me a brief synopsis in that vein, not going into much, though.  No mention of disguise and whoring women poets. Or, for that matter cursed poemizing men, sent away from home as boys.  I use the plural, both of these are singular, but what the hey.

we shall have rot and poppycock

and laughing voices off

let us have tears upon this stage

laughter’s tears or if not tears

let’s have the smiles

that recognition brings

and find no wisdom here but incidental

here fools play at nobility

while nobles play the fool