Nell didn’t understand Susan sometimes. Had she forgotten why they’d come? It wasn’t to learn to heal bed-wetting with corn silk.
“I’m waiting to hear about windows, that’s why! Aren’t you?”
But Susan looked again like she hadn’t heard.
“Susan!”
Susan jumped a little, but now she only seemed annoyed. “Of course! Of course I am,” she said. “And when I find the right person to ask, I will. Maybe Max has had better luck.”
She moved down the hall then, as if they’d finished the conversation. Nell looked at the girls passing in the hallway in their brightly colored dresses, laughing and talking. Between the doors hung needlework scenes of young men beside a fountain, listening to an old man expound; a hooded man emerging from a cave; and crowds of robed scholars standing in boats, crossing the sea. Waves of cerulean wool, stones the color of ashes, vines of green satin thread that spread like fingers across low walls, these Nell turned to, away from the throng of people who moved past like flowing water, with Nell alone an unmoving stone, a solitary rock battered by a sense that something was wrong.
She studied the weavings, standing there a long time, until the hall quieted and she was truly by herself.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Mistress Meva stood behind her, smiling as always. Nell took a step away from her. She disliked the earnestness of the woman, the strident jolliness that seemed like some kind of obligation the woman performed, a perpetual, hard-to-do good deed. But she knew her own silence wasn’t polite, so she said, “Who made them?”
In the unseen but very heavy chart she thought the mistress carried around in her head, Nell could tell she’d just gotten a gold star. The Shepherdess grinned widely. “Women!” she said, as if the fact ought to be a shocking surprise. “Women all through the ages. Of course, these aren’t as old as that. Only a few of the very ancient ones were saved. They say some go back as far as the sage kings, which is quite ancient. But of course those would be in the heart now, along with the books of mystery.”
“The heart?”
“Of the sanctuary — in the last garden. A very special place.”
“Have you ever seen them?”
Nell watched her invisible gold star drop right to the floor with the look of consternation this question brought to the Shepherdess’s face.
“Oh, no! No, of course not! Only the council members go there — the sacred elders. And even they only on the most important of occasions.”
Her smile came right back, though, as she explained that the weavings and needlework in the other bands were the product of the past hundred years, and that among the artisans, there were several weavers now who were known to produce beautiful work.
“You could visit them, if you’re interested. We always like to encourage our girls’ interests.”
Nell said she’d very much like to see them, and the Shepherdess, delighted, promised she would speak to the artisans. Nell thanked her and watched the woman walk off, bouncing. She thought she’d earned back her gold star and another besides.
But by that afternoon, she’d lost them again, without understanding how. Each day, the girls began after lunch by reciting the chant of order.
To the day the sun,
To the night the moon.
To each its realm,
Its bounty and boon.
In order created
And in order, life.
Thus banish longing
And banish strife.
Nell had only just begun to learn the words, and she wasn’t sure she understood them. What did longing have to do with order, anyway? She discovered the answer by accident not too long after when, responding to a question from the Shepherdess, she said idly that she’d rather emulate the sage king Plauth than his dutiful mother, who had risen daily before dawn to bring her small son to the great academy in Kiyakosa, the mountain city.
“Modesty,” Mistress Meva admonished her, frowning slightly.
Nell, who hadn’t much experience provoking people unintentionally, just stared at her, and the Shepherdess softened.
“In the city,” she said gently, “there is confusion and disorder. But here we understand that there must be those who nurture and those who lead, those who open the first of doors and those who go through them, to others. Do you understand?”
Nell didn’t. Or perhaps it was that she was afraid she did, a little. And she didn’t like it. Behind her, she heard Zirri snicker.
Nell said nothing, and she turned to the windows when Mistress Meva went on with her lecture. The afternoon classroom was one of the few that sat not above the kitchens but beneath the dormitories, and looked also onto the valley. From this angle, Nell couldn’t see the hill; the view was lost in the high fronds of corn. Outside, women and a few men moved through the rows a second time, filling their coarse-woven bags with any cobs the girls had missed. Nell watched them, slightly hunchbacked as they picked, making the lacy heads of the cornstalks shiver and bend. She wished she were outside again. She wondered if Max was hearing stories of the great mothers and their many exploits gathering firewood in the snow and making do with little so they could send their sons away to cities that sat on peaks, full of forbidden doors.
In the sky outside, a bright mountain of white clouds crossed the sun, casting shadows onto the valley. From the west, a lone dark cloud drifted their way until it moved among them, a gray stain on a white dress.
The rain came down and wetted the trees on the mountain and the plants in the garden, and the crops in the valley, far below. It had been a harvest-weather morning — clear and breezy, bright and fair. Now the rain came and the old rhyme with it, the memory of children chanting at the windows:
A blessed rain damps the ground
And never touches
