Now Stavia asked Corrig, “Does Myra ever come here to visit?”
“Once in a while, yes. Once in a while she leaves the little boys here while she’s doing something else. I like that, even though they’re spoiled rotten.”
“Poor Myra.”
“Myra should have been born a man. She could have joined the garrison and been perfectly happy. She’s like the warriors, living from carnival to carnival, game to game, and war to war, telling herself romances about honor and glory in between. She even watches the sports events from the top of the wall, cheering the century that Barten belonged to.”
Stavia nodded, saddened. “I don’t know what she’ll do when all the boys have gone down to the garrison.”
Corrig put his hand upon her shoulder, all at once in a familiar way as though he had known her forever. “Shell dance. I gather it’s all she’s ever wanted to do.”
It was true. Dance was the only thing Myra truly loved, and if she had been allowed to do nothing but dance, she might have done a lot with it. The ordinances required that she have a science and a craft to bring along with it, however, and Myra had found nothing to suit her even though Morgot had done everything she could to help her. Pottery, carpentry, gardening, construction skills, Myra had rejected them all along with medicine and engineering and chemistry. She had wanted to do nothing but dance. But what good would a woman be who could only dance? When she was old, what use would she be? So, Myra wove and halfheartedly studied mathematics, enough of the one to make simple blankets and enough of the other to teach kindergarten girls, hating every minute that she could not spend in the practice room.
Perhaps if they had let her dance only, she would not have turned to Barten as she had. So hungrily. As though she were nothing on her own. As though she needed him to be anything. Perhaps if the ordinances had not been so demanding, Myra could have been happier with herself. It wasn’t the first time Stavia had had these thoughts.
“Myra is so—oh, I don’t know. She got all those ideas in her head from Barten. It’s strange how they stuck. Morgot and I always hoped she’d outgrow them, but she hasn’t. Is she still being rude to Joshua? And to you?”
He shrugged, smiling. “We ignore her, Stavia, which offends her sense of importance. Now, are there enough crates here for what you want?”
“We’ll see,” she said, moving speculatively along the line of shelves as she began to take things down: an ugly ornament made of seashells; a bear, badly carved out of a chunk of driftwood; alphabet books printed on heavy cloth and obviously used by generations of children. Wordlessly, he opened the sack of straw he had brought along and began to pack the things she gave him.
An hour later, the room was much emptier. She had kept a few books, the mirror in its carved frame, the fantastic dolls Joshua had whittled for her when she was little, and the cushions Morgot had worked in multicolored wool. Everything else had been cleared away to leave the essentials of bed and chair, bare shelves, and a work table as naked as the walls.
“Better,” Corrig approved. “It looks like there’s room for you in here now.”
She gave him a surprised look, meeting his eyes, letting her own drop away. My, oh my, but this was an unexpected man, here in her own house. Imagine his having read her need and intention so easily. She cleared her throat. “All the outgrown clothes and shoes should be taken to the salvage house,” she instructed, as Corrig nodded, making a note on the crate. “The quilt makers will find some good material there. The books should go over to the main library. Most of them are in pretty good shape, and we haven’t so many that any should be wasted. The other odds and ends should probably go down in Morgot’s storage room. Label the boxes so she can tell what’s in there. Some of this stuff must have belonged to women in the Rentes or Thalia lines, Morgot’s mother’s or sister’s or even her grandmother’s, and Morgot may want them someday.”
“Except for the curtains, it looks a bit like a cell in the quarantine house.” He pointed at a strangely shaped stone she had left on the windowsill. “What’s that?”
“A boy gave it to me,” she said, picking it up, running her fingers over and through it, smooth and weird, outside becoming inside, inside becoming outside. The shape had a name which she could not, at that moment, remember. Chernon had found it on the beach and had given it to her during a carnival. It was the only thing he had ever given her.
“Are you going to leave the room as bare as this?” he asked in an interested tone.
“Not exactly,” she said, dragging in another crate which had been standing in the hallway. “I brought some things from Abbyville. Can you open this box for me?”
The crate contained more books, bulkier and more densely printed than the ones she had put aside, a thickly woven blanket in sunset stripes of blue and mauve and salmon, two paintings of misty landscapes with ethereal towers looming in the remote distance, and several bowls with a deep, sky-blue glaze on terra-cotta clay.
“The blanket was a gift from a colleague at the academy. Her craft is weaving. The bowls are from another friend. They’ve both gone back to Melissaville. I’ll miss them.” She arranged the blanket as a bedcover, then set the bowls on the shelves and hung the paintings on the hooks where others had hung before. “The paintings
