Exile's Song (11 page)

“There’s the shop where my brother’s apprenticed, but you don’t want to go there. He makes bad imitations of Terranan cloth.” Geremy pointed to a shop with a deep counter covered with bolts of stuff. It did not look bad to Margaret’s untrained eye, but she could tell that Geremy was ashamed of the place.

“How does apprenticeship work here?” Margaret asked.

Both boys began to speak at once, flattered by her interest, and in a friendly competition to inform her first. She realized she was getting, effortlessly, information for which a cultural anthropologist would cheerfully have sold his mother, or taken out a mortgage on his soul. What they told her seemed well-considered and fair, not like some planets where the young were regarded as slave labor or mere property. It was a shame she had left her recorder behind in her room.

They turned into a street which appeared to be their destination. The signs showed pictures of finished garments, or in one case, just a very bright golden needle against a brown background, which she suspected indicated an embroidery shop. Where the bays in the previous street had been piled with bolts of cloth, now there were shirts hanging, or tunics. There was a great deal of embroidery on everything. She noticed fine chemises, almost sheer, and heavier and more practical ones as well. One or two of the shops boasted a dressed figure in what was clearly festive clothing—shiny, transparent stuff she guessed was the spider silk which Anya had mentioned. The sight of it gave her an odd shiver, and evoked a memory that was vague and disquieting. The mental doorway in her mind, behind which lurked some childhood fears, opened a little farther, and she felt her headache returning.

Ethan opened the door of a shop and guided her inside. A big man with black hair was standing behind a large cutting table, holding a bolt of cloth in his hands as if considering how to drape it and cut it. He had an abstracted expression on his face, the look of an artist in the midst of creation, and she was reluctant to break his concentration.

Her young guide clearly had no such reservations. “Uncle Aaron, this is the lady I told you about.
Domna
Alton, Aaron MacEwan.”

The man gave a little blink of heavily lidded eyes, then bowed gracefully. “Welcome to my shop,
domna;
you lend me grace. How may I serve you? A spider-silk gown for the Midsummer Festival in featherpod green, perhaps?” He gestured toward a bolt of shimmering textile leaning against the cutting table. Then he picked it up as if it did not weigh an ounce, and held it near her face, so he could see if the color went with her skin.

That looked very expensive, and totally unsuitable, though her hands longed to caress the sheer stuff. Close to her face, it had a scent she knew—a wonderful, clean odor. Like so many other smells in the past few hours, it was evocative of the past. Was it the scent of the silk, or of the wearer which trembled on the threshold of her conscious mind. And what wearer—Dio or some other woman? She tried to banish the memory quickly because she could feel herself starting to tense and stiffen.

Margaret rarely attended any functions which required her to wear anything more dressy than her academic robes, presently packed in a chest back on University. She hadn’t realized until that moment how often she had wanted to wear dresses like Dio did, for dinners with dignitaries, and the occasional ball the Old Man could be persuaded to attend.

She gave a little sigh. “Thank you, but what I had in mind was something practical and simple,” she said. “I need some good sturdy warm garments, suitable for walking or riding. The kind of thing Anya wears, but for out of doors. Ethan?” she appealed.

Ethan looked shocked. “But—my lady—Anya is old.” Margaret was surprised. Old? Anya looked fifty perhaps, which was not old by her measure. With the advances in rejuvenation technology, fifty was not even middle-aged. The life expectancy here must be much shorter than she had thought. Why? It didn’t make any sense. Then she realized that Anya was a matron, and probably past the age of childbearing. Lots of cultures dressed girls and young women differently than mature, married women. How could she have been so dull-witted?

“Then the sort of thing Moira wears.

“A servant,
damisela
? But you cannot dress like a servant. Uncle, perhaps that russet outfit you made for
Mestra
Rafaella, that she did not like when it was done.”

Aaron looked relieved. “The very thing,” he said. “It is completely unworn,
domna,
” he told her. “The
mestra
decided the embroidery did not suit her.” His voice sounded thinner, and a little strained. Margaret gave him a hard look, and wondered if he were lying—and why. Then she decided she was being hypersensitive again. Really, she must get herself under control soon, or she was going to cease to function at all. Jumping at every smell and shadow. Enough!

“The two of you are of a size, and of like coloring as well.” MacEwan continued, nodding as he spoke. “That boy is going to be a real help to me—he knows my stock better than I do. Manuella!” He did not notice the look of displeasure the comment brought to Ethan’s thin face. Margaret gave the lad a smile, and he brightened up immediately. She could barely believe that only yesterday she had been suspicious of him, thinking him a potential thief.

The raised voice summoned a weary-looking woman in clothing similar to that worn by Anya, and she realized that she had guessed correctly. There was some distinction, invisible to her untrained eye, between what was appropriate for a married woman, and what was right for an aging spinster like herself. The thought startled her a little—she had not thought that about herself before.

“My wife,
domna.
Take her in the back, my dear, and show her the russet outfit we made for that picky Rafaella. You, Ethan, run up to the loft and get that green rabbit-horn wool. It is light, but very warm. Then step over to Jason, the belt maker, and have him send a good selection of ladies’ belts and gloves. You, Geremy, go over
Mestra
Dayborah and have her send a good selection of undergarments for a lady—about the size of
Mestra
Rafaella.”

Margaret found herself being tugged gently into the rear of the shop by a clearly embarrassed Manuella. “Please forgive him,
domna.
He is an artist, and sometimes forgets his place. He does not mean to order everyone about!”

“I think he was deep in the throes of creation when we came in.”

Manuella gave the sigh of a long-suffering wife, then smiled shyly. “He’s been mooning over that length of cloth for days now. He’s a good man and never looks at another woman. But the way he is with a bolt of fine goods is almost more than flesh and blood can bear. How can I compete with wool or spider silk, or even Dry Town cotton? Still, he is a master craftsman. Here is the russet made for Rafaella—as fine a garment as you’ll find in all Thendara, but not good enough for that—cat! Those Renunciates! Can’t behave like a decent woman. Yet she gives herself airs, just because her father was
coridom
to the MacLorans. Well, a
coridom
is still a servant, I say, and no better than an honest craftsman.”

As she rattled on, the woman was shaking out the folds of the complex garment. There were three petticoats, each dyed a slightly lighter shade of russet, and embroidered about the hem with a pattern of green leaves, a blouse the color of the palest petticoat, and a tunic of very dark russet, which completed the ensemble. Worn all at once, it would be heavy and warm, and, Margaret thought, much more comfortable than what she had on at the moment.

“It’s beautiful,” Margaret said, “and just about my favorite color. But I think it’s a little too—too elegant for what I had in mind. What I want is a working outfit.” She somehow knew the correct word for what she wanted, as distinct from a garment suitable for a fancy occasion, and wondered how, because she knew she hadn’t gotten it from the basic language disk. It just came to her, like the song had come out of the
ryll.
The garment, lovely as it was, was too elaborate, she thought, for prowling around in a maker’s shop full of wood shavings or collecting songs in remote corners of this world, at once so familiar and so alien. “I really like it, but what I wanted would be something more like what you have on.

Manuella looked at her serviceable petticoats and plain gray tunic, then cast her eyes heavenward. Margaret had seen that gesture many times before, and it always meant the same thing—why were people so incomprehensible. She felt comforted by the very humanness of the look, and smiled a little.

“Dress like a tradeswoman? Would you shame your family? Please,
domna,
anyone can see what you are, and dressing below your station will not fool anyone.” Manuella’s voice was earnest.

Station? Margaret could not imagine what Manuella meant. Did these people know she was the daughter of the Cottman Senator, and what difference would that make? The woman was clearly distressed by the idea of her wearing the wrong clothing, but she had no idea why. She was about to ask when a wrinkled old woman came in, her arms full of soft garments. She paused, gaped at Margaret in wonder, then dropped a deep curtsy.

She heard a faint whisper of thought from the older woman as she was introduced to Dayborah, the lingerie maker. Comynara!
It is like the old days! When I was a girl.
. . ! She caught a feeling of longing, a yearning for a bygone era when people knew their places, and shook herself free of the sensation of hearing the old woman’s thoughts. Margaret was certain she was being mistaken for someone else, though she could not imagine who.

Suddenly too tired to argue about it, she let them bully her into buying what they considered the correct clothing. They tried on several pieces before Manuella declared herself satisfied. The clothes fit well enough, though the drawstrings at waist and neck left room for variations. Manuella pulled down the braid she had made, combed out her hair, and refastened it with a beautiful silver butterfly clasp, which appeared in Manuella’s worn hand, like a conjurer’s trick. It felt heavy against the nape of her neck, heavy though it was light, and familiar though she did not clearly remember seeing one like it. Most of all, it felt right.

As the two women conferred over belts, and chose a dark green one, Margaret had a disturbing sense of losing her personal identity. There was no more Margaret Alton, but instead an endless parade of strangers, garbed in layers of cloth, hair caught in butterflies, wrists banded with embroideries and bracelets. The smells of the textiles aroused memories she was sure were not hers! They aroused the disturbing image of that silver-haired man who sometimes haunted her dreams, and the screaming red-headed termagant. Suddenly she was assailed by a kaleidoscope of conflicting images. She struggled to remain in the here and now—in the present, not the dangerous past. But the previous night’s memory of the orphanage came back, and she was suddenly afraid. She bit her lower lip, and made herself pay attention to the women fussing around her.

The green rabbit-horn wool was pressed into her nearly numb hands and she found herself mechanically agreeing to have a festival tunic made up, with a matching blouse of some cottonlike fiber. Surely it was too cold to grow cotton on this planet.

Margaret mentally clutched at her Scholar’s credentials, as the questions grew and her sense of disorientation increased. She asked about the textile and found out that it was woven from the fibers of the featherpod tree. She heard about the hearty sheep that lived in the hills, and a great deal more. As she listened, she began to feel a little more focused, and Manuella took her back into the big workroom.

Aaron MacEwan brought out a length of the spider silk in a dark green-blue that was so beautiful it filled her with wordless longing. It was even nicer than the stuff he had shown her first, and her resistance wavered a little. He urged her to have it made into a ball gown. Margaret protested in vain that she had no use for such finery. They all smiled knowingly, and rushed on, overwhelming her feeble protests.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the long mirror at the end of the shop then, and her knees trembled. Margaret looked at the stranger in the glass, then looked away quickly. That was not her. She suddenly felt a desperate need to have her miserable old uniform back! She was afraid of the woman in the mirror. Margaret turned away, biting her lip and trying to still the shaking in her legs.

The faces of Aaron and Manuella and Dayborah began to take on the appearance of friendly demons, and her skull throbbed. Margaret struggled not to shrink away, feeling they were going to snatch and pinch at her at any moment. They all seemed to be speaking at once, and the words made no sense to her. There was a heady excitement in the room, one in which she could not seem to participate. It swirled around her, but did not touch her. Her shoulders ached with tension, and she listened for the sound of thunder. Surely a storm was going to start soon. But she heard only the meaningless chatter of the tailor and his wife.

Aaron sketched a drawing of the proposed garment, telling one of the boys to bring an embroiderer. Margaret summoned the last of her energy to put an end to the torment of voices around her. “Please! Stop! I don’t need any dancing clothes. I am a scholar, not a princess.” Then she fled into the back room, removed the garments and yanked her uniform back on.

When she returned to the workroom, Dayborah had vanished, and both Manuella and Aaron had puzzled expressions. Indeed, Aaron looked more than puzzled—he looked hurt!

MacEwan said, “But what about the Midsummer Ball?”

As firmly as she was able, Margaret replied, “I’m sure if there is a ball at midsummer, I will not attend. I do not move in those sorts of circles. What I want now is a good wool cloak, for a man perhaps this much shorter than you, Master MacEwan,” she gestured with one hand, “and quite elderly. I really must get back to him soon—this has all taken too long.”