Dinner--dung cakes. That's what we muckers call them, though I don't use that crude term around my lady, of course. They're made of salted meat (simmered long to soften) and onions, wrapped in dough and cooked on coals.
That's how we used to eat them with Mama, only here I get to add spices--cinnamon and peppercorns! Two times before the tower I'd eaten spiced food, but never had I reached my own hand into a barrel and touched the raw powders and seeds. Someday when I leave this life and my soul climbs the Sacred Mountain, I imagine the Ancestors will be too beautiful and bright to look at, but their skin and breath will smell of peppercorns and cinnamon, anise, cardamom, and fennel. Heavenly, it is.
Supper--rice and dried peas, boiled with milk and raisins, and sweetened with a pinch of sugar. Delicious. My lady says she's used to eating the large meal at night instead of midday, but that makes no sense to me. She didn't order me to change the dinner and supper order, so I'll keep it the same.
These past meals have been as hearty as I ever had, and if being a lady's maid means I get to eat the same food as my lady--with spices even! --then you'll never hear me complain.
Sometimes to get her through a long day, I give my lady a mess of dried fruit or a slap of cheese. Even so, she swears she's starving. The mouth grumbles more than the stomach, my mama used to say. My lady can't really be hungry--I think she's just sad to be imprisoned away from her love and hoping that the food will fill her up where her heart breaks.
But so much food! Each day we eat three times, and I roll around on my mattress at night and laugh into my arm and pray to my mama so she knows I'm doing fine.
Day 11
It occurs to me I ought to relate the why behind our imprisonment. And at the moment, with dinner eaten and cleaned up, washing done, and my lady resting, I've nothing more to do but stare at the candle flame. It tosses and bobs like a spring foal and sometimes I find myself staring at it so long, the flame is all I can see for an hour after. But now I'll write.
I came to the city of Titor's Garden only one year ago. My mother, the Ancestors bless her, died from the floating fevers that take people in the summer. I was alone, my father dead when I was a baby, and my brothers gone to make their world way when I was a girl of eight and still in two braids. I wear one braid now, though still long down my back. My lady wears her braid pinned up, though she's not married and just one year older than me. I suppose she has the right to do her hair how she pleases, her being gentry and all.
Anyway, with my mother passed to the Ancestors' Realm, I made the long walk from the summer pastures to the city, hoping to find work. The city had too many people for my mind. Where do they all sleep? How do you feed so many bodies? My head hurt trying to reason it out. I found the house of chiefs soon enough and purchased employment with my last animal. A thin woman people named 'Mistress' had me stand before her and tell what skills I had, declaring at the end that I would be of best use working in the stables. When she rose from her chair to show me the way, she winced and rubbed her back.
'Have a pain there, Mistress?' I asked.
She didn't answer. I suppose it was right nosy of me to speak up like that, but I thought I could help her, and why sit quiet when you can be useful? So I said, 'I might help that pain, Mistress, if you let me.'
She didn't argue, so I put my hand on her back and I started with the song for body aches, the slow, sliding tune that goes, 'Tell me again, how does it go?' and then twined into it the hopping tune for buried pain that goes,
'Berries in summer, red, purple, green.'
She stretched when I was finished. 'You're a mucker, then? I've heard of the healing songs but never thought much about them.' She looked at me thoughtfully, then set in on any number of queer questions.
'What is the proper remedy for a lady in fits?' 'Make her drink warm milk and rub her back,' I answered easily enough.
'Show me a straight stitch.'
And I sewed a line straighter than the finger of Ris, god of roads and towns.
'Let me see your hands,' she said, and checked them for calluses. 'Mmm-hmm. And your mucker mother taught you all the healing songs?'
'I don't think a body can know them all, but I know the useful ones, like the song for helping a mare birth a foal and the song to get a she-yak to stand still for milking --'
'No, no, I have no use for horses and yaks. The songs for aches of back and belly and head. Like you just sang for me.'
'I know dozens, I guess.'
'Then I'm going to make you a lady's maid for the most honored house in Titor's Garden. Our lord's second daughter, Lady Saren, she's bound to need a fresh maid by the time your education is done. She certainly seems to go through them quickly.'
Mistress sent me to an old man named Qadan, who lived beside the house of chiefs. I cooked and cleaned for him, and in the afternoons, a group of hopeful scribes joined us for lessons in reading.
'As Lady Saren's maid you'll need to know your letters,' Mistress had said. I didn't know then why this is so, but I do now--because unlike most gentry, Lady Saren herself doesn't know them.
What a strange and wondrous time it was, eating two big meals every single day, sleeping by a fire always lit, and learning the secret language of ink strokes. On days when I finished chores and errands early, Qadan taught me sketching. I was so busy and my belly so full, I would fall asleep even as I was falling into bed.
But some nights, when I tossed on my mattress, awake and staring at nothing, the sorrow would strike me.
Quiet there in Qadan s dark house, my heartache felt like a river, and I was sinking into it, carried away fast in its coldness. That's the best way I can explain it, and what I mean by it is, I missed my mama.
Sometimes Qadan threw candlesticks at us when his back pinched him sour, but mostly he was a good teacher.
