The Last Stormlord (16 page)

One of them, a young man with a beard and gingery hair—both attributes proclaiming his origins outside of the Quartern—delighted in teasing her when she stopped to look at his goods. He was selling necklaces and bracelets and rings and she thought them the most beautiful things she had ever seen.

He called her “lovely lass” and bantered with her, trying to entice her into buying.

“What are they made of?” she asked.

“Why, little love, they is corals, black ’n’ red ’n’ white corals o’ the sea. Things that grow in the sea ’n’ leave these lovely skel’tons behind when they die. And sure ’tis a lovely thing to be gracing a neck as long ’n’ smooth as yours, my sweetling.”

“I’ve never seen the sea,” she said wistfully. “Is it as beautiful as they say? Does it go on forever? Is it really made all of salt water?”

“Lovely? Sure! Go on forever? Why, not so! Else how could I live on the other side of it? And yea, ’tis salt all right. Too salt for the drinking of.”

“They say there are lands across the sea where plants grow without being watered. Is that true? Do you live in a place like that?”

“Sure I do! There’s grass and trees and bushes and no one ever waters them except the sweet God in heaven. Ah, lass, it’s not a dust hole like your land here, where a decent man finds it hard to get a drink of water, even. And where is it you’re from, my precious?”

“From a snuggery on the thirty-second level.”

The merch in the stall next door guffawed. “A snuggery, eh? Would have thought you a little young for that trade, girl!” He turned to the coral seller and added, “Watch it, lad, she lives in a whorehouse. She’ll have the pants off yer before yer say yer name.”

The first man looked revolted.

Terelle reddened in humiliation and turned away. She would
not
be a whore. She
wouldn’t
.

She hurried upwards, stopped now on every level by an enforcer asking what she was doing there, as if the higher one went, the stricter the enforcement of rules. It was a further humiliation to realise how easily they recognised her as being from a lower level. Perhaps her clothes betrayed her; the weave of her tunic was coarse compared with the clothing she saw around her. Fortunately, her explanation—that she had a message for Arta Amethyst the dancer about a new student for her classes—was accepted, and each time they sent her on her way, with a stern warning not to linger.

The way they looked at her, as if she was grubby and worthy only of contempt, brought back memories better forgotten: her stepmother Mauna, Vivie’s mother, looking her up and down and saying, “Well, not sure anyone would want to buy a water-waster, but we don’t want a useless rag like you in this house soakin’ up our water, that’s f’sure. You were born to a caravan whore, and it’s a whore you should be.” The words had cut deep, though not as deep as her own father’s acquiescence. Vivie had wanted to leave the settle, but Terelle hadn’t, and she’d pleaded with her father to let her stay. “Sell her as well,” he’d told his wife. “Don’t mind if Vivie wants to stay, but I’ve never been sure I fathered this one anyway.” Terelle may have forgotten much of her early life in the Gibber, but she had never forgotten those words.

Useless. Whore. Water-waster.
Never been sure I fathered her anyway.

And now, fuelled by rage, her own resolution:
I will not be a whore.

She would
never
give up. If Yagon hadn’t sired her, then good. She didn’t want to be the daughter of a man who would sell his children. She blinked back tears, those unwelcome water-wasting tears, and continued on her way.

It wasn’t as easy to see Amethyst as she had hoped. The steward of the dancer’s house opened the door in answer to her pull on the bell, but refused her entry. “The arta is not in need of new students.” A flat, uninterested remark uttered in bored tones.

But Terelle had come too far to turn back. Quickly she put her foot in the door, a strategy she had seen executed often enough by troublemakers at the snuggery. “Then I will dance in the street outside the door till Arta Amethyst comes to see,” she said. “It will take only a few moments. If she says I am not good enough, I will say thanks and leave quietly.”

The steward was silent for a moment while he leaned forward and peered at her in myopic appraisal. Terelle’s dislike of him was instant. His gaze lingered around the level of her breasts. He was short and plump, with a round protruding stomach that started not far under his chin and a small thick-lipped mouth now pursed in disapproval. Sweat trickled down his face to pool in the folds of his neck. “Wait here,” he said finally and eased her foot out of the door with his own. “I’ll ask.”

He was gone so long she thought he wasn’t coming back, but when the door opened again, it was to let her in. “The arta has very charitably given you some of her precious time. This way.”

He laboured upstairs, breathing noisily, while she trailed in his wake. He smelled, a sourish smell of un-washed armpits and greasy hair. At the top he had to catch his breath before ushering her into a large room with a smoothly tiled floor. At one end of the room a dancer stood dressed in her practice clothes. Standing alongside her there was another woman who held a dance flute.

Amethyst had been famous for many years, but Terelle hadn’t considered what that must mean: the dancer was no longer youthful. Even though there was a suppleness about her still—her body moved like one much younger—it was a shock to see from her lined face that she must have been forty or more.

Terelle went down on one knee, acknowledging her reverence of Scarcleft’s greatest dancer. Amethyst looked her up and down without moving. Then she said, addressing the steward, “You may go, Jomat. Come back in a quarter of a sandglass run. Get up, child. Where are you from?”

“Madam Opal’s snuggery. On the thirty-second. But I don’t want to be a handmaiden. I want to be a dancer.”

Amethyst digested that, inclining her head to acknowledge that in those few words Terelle had told her all she needed to know. She indicated the flautist. “What music do you want Meriam here to play?”

“Loskin’s ‘Desert Wind.’ ” She had designed a short dance to fit that music. The routine incorporated many of the most difficult steps and contained all that Amethyst needed to see in order to judge her standard. She had been prepared to dance without music, and it was a relief to know that would not be necessary.

Amethyst nodded to the woman and waved her hand at the centre of the room. “Your chance, child.”

Hurriedly Terelle bunched up her tunic under the belt to shorten the skirt and give her more freedom of movement. Her voice wavered as she said, “I have called this dance ‘Born Waterless.’ ”

Her heart pounded. What if she stumbled?

Don’t think about failing, you idiot. You can do this.

The woman lifted her flute and Terelle blotted out everything but the sound. Slowly she began to dance.

The early passages of the music were written to echo the peace and beauty of a windless desert. Terelle turned the tune into movement that captured—or so she hoped—the early life of a carefree child, still too young to realise what lay ahead. The first toddling steps, the smiles, the unconscious grace of the very young. As the music changed, to signify the first gusts of wind and flurries of sand and to offer a warning of what might follow, Terelle changed the toddler into a growing child. The infant grace became the uncertain movements of a girl finding out that the world could be cruel and unfair, of a girl who sometimes thirsted. As the music built to the crescendo of a full desert storm, the girl became a young maiden, rebellious and thirsty, a cunning thief of water. Her steps became more intricate, full of passion and a love of life, interwoven with rage at life’s unfairness.

Gradually the desert storm faded, and so did the young woman, dying of thirst and despair as she yearned for something she could never have: the right to water. When the tune returned to the beauty of the stilled desert, Terelle’s movements reflected her last vision of hope as she glimpsed an afterlife where thirst and inequality had no place.

At the end of the piece, she unrolled from her crouch on the floor and raised her eyes to meet Amethyst’s—and was unable to read the expression there. It wasn’t that the dancer’s face lacked expression; rather that it held too much.

“Who taught you that dance?” she asked eventually.

“No one. I mean, I made it up.”

“I see.
Were
you born waterless?”

Terelle nodded.

“Ah.” Amethyst took a deep breath. “I could take you in. I could teach you, if you had the money to pay me, which I think you have not. But I would be wasting my time and your money.”

Terelle felt the shock of her disappointment as a physical blow, snatching her breath away.
No. Oh no
.

“True, your dancing is good. You have been well taught, for a snuggery girl. But you must realise that Scarcleft doesn’t support too many full-time dancers. Most dancers earn the bulk of their income some other way; usually through a snuggery or a personal financial arrangement with a protector. As whores, if you like. It is as good a word as any. To earn enough as a dancer to support yourself independently, you would have to be more than just good. You would have to be special. You are not special.”

The words battered her hope.
You are not special.
Good wasn’t good enough. And there was that word again:
whore.

“I’m only thirteen,” she said, and knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. She may have been a child in years, but being childish was a luxury she could not afford.

Amethyst shrugged. “You will be better when you are older, of course. But you will never have the—the shining edge that makes a solo dancer. That indefinable something. It has nothing to do with looks, nothing to do with training. It is more than that. It is something you are either born with, or not. You were not.”

Terelle wanted to cry. She wanted to protest. She wanted to beg.

She did none of those things. Instead she pulled her tunic down and retied her sash. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Arta.”

“Oh, but you did not waste my time, child. Not at all. Wait, I want to show you something. Meriam, play the same tune again.”

The flautist looked surprised but lifted her instrument to her lips. To Terelle’s amazement, Amethyst started to dance, the same dance she had just been shown. She had remembered every step in its correct sequence, every nuance. Terelle watched spellbound. Every move was exactly how Terelle had envisioned it should be done. “Oh,” she said when the dance was finished, “that was… beautiful. I could never have danced it like that.”

“No. But you wrote it that way.” Amethyst came across the floor and took her by the shoulders. “You have been looking in the wrong direction, child, chasing water when you can make the vessel.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

“You are not a performer of dance; you are a creator. That is where your skill lies.”

Terelle considered that. She had always thought that a performer
was
a creator, but she was not going to argue the point with Amethyst. “I’m not sure how that can help,” she said finally.

“Neither am I, exactly. The problem is that there is not much call for new dances. I will buy one piece from you every quarter, though. A dance of about the same length for five tokens.”

Terelle drew in a sharp breath. Enough water for five days just for a short dance! “That’s… wonderful,” she said at last.

“But it won’t solve your problem, will it? You need more than that to separate yourself from the snuggery. For that, I can only offer advice. Look to making things, Terelle. That’s where your destiny lies.”

“What—what sort of things?”

“How should I know? Songs? Tunes? Pottery? Jewellery? Patterns for weavers or lace makers? Go and find out!” She sounded snappish but her next action belied her tone. She put an arm around Terelle as they went to the door, saying with a quiet passion, “Don’t become a whore. It might make you a better artist in the end, but you will lose part of your soul.”

Jomat the steward was hovering outside the door, and the smirk he gave her made Terelle want to slap him. She was sure he had overheard.

“Jomat,” Amethyst said, “pay her five tokens and show her out. She will return in a quarter year; please admit her again then.”

At the front door Jomat disappeared into a side room for a moment and returned with the tokens, which he ostentatiously counted into Terelle’s hand. “I’m sure you dance very prettily, my dear,” he said. “You mustn’t let these little setbacks get you down.”

He sounded sincere enough, and she tried not to step backwards as he patted her on the arm with a sweaty hand. She said, “The arta is a wonderful dancer, and she was very kind.”

“Oh yes, she’s the best there ever was. A perfectionist, of course, and perfectionists are difficult to live with, aren’t they? Not, of course, that we would
ever
have her any other way.”

He opened the door and Terelle slipped out, wondering if the way his arm brushed her chest as she went past was accidental or not.

Her feelings in a turmoil, she started back to the thirty-second. Elation warred with despair. She had sold a dance to the famous Amethyst—there were five shiny tokens in her purse to prove it—but she herself would never make a dancer. So, she did have a talent for creation, but how was she going to put that to good use? She had just seen the country’s most famous dancer perform something of hers, and do it beautifully, but it was something she herself would never do so well.