The Book of a Thousand Days (4 page)

I smelled it like I was starving and the odor alone would fill up my belly. My head got dizzy with memories of Mama and being cold and cozy.

"It smells like the winter nap," I said, longing for some truth to tell. "Midwinter every year, my mother would decorate our... our home with pine boughs, cracking the needles to get the richest smell, then we'd curl up in blankets and take our winter nap, five days of no food but milk, sleeping on and off all day and night, like the burrowing animals do."

"That sounds strange and lovely and wearying, too. Is winter nap a common custom in Titor's Garden?"

"Common enough." I didn't say that it's common for muckers. We do it as a prayer to Vera, goddess of

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food, to help us through another year, and we do it because at midwinter there's not much food for the having anyway. I don't suppose my lady needed a winter nap, with her honored father's cellars full of grain.

"In Song for Evela, our midwinter rite is just the opposite. All folk come together under my roof and eat and eat and eat. Enough cakes, apples, mutton, and raisin rice to last a year! Sometimes it feels good to feast until it hurts."

"You feast with muckers, even?"

"What are muckers?"

"The folk that live on the grassy steppes in ghers--those are felt tents they make themselves."

"Are they herding folk?"

"That's right. The steppes of Titor's Garden are too hard for farming, rocky and windy and rough. Muckers do work when work is sent out from the city folk, and the rest of the time they travel with the seasons, herding sheep, horses, reindeer, yaks."

"May I say something? Will you be offended?"

"No...," I said, though I was thinking, He knows I'm a mucker!

But then he said, "Your hand, when you took my pine bough, I saw--your hand is beautiful."

I tucked my hands under my arms and looked

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at my lady. She was staring at her own hands and frowning. All I could think was, thank the Ancestors that I took the bough with my right hand and not my left, which bears the red birth blotches.

"You've gone quiet," he said. "I've offended you. I'm sorry."

For some reason that got me laughing.

"What's funny?" he asked, even though his voice hinted at laughing, too.

"My hand--you thought it was beautiful! And then you thought I'd be offended...."

My heart is beautiful, Mama used to tell me, and my eyes, but never my blotchy face, never my browned and callused hands. If next to my own he'd seen my lady's pale, smooth hand....

"Don't stop laughing!" he said, and he started to say things to get me to laugh again, telling a story of how he was once riding a horse that stopped suddenly, sending him flying off the saddle to land headfirst in a barrel of water. He wasn't satisfied that I was truly laughing then, so he sang the silliest song I guess I've ever heard. It was about a bodiless piglet, and I remember one verse of it because it repeated several times:

This morning I found a piglet,

grunting beside my bed

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This piglet, she had no body --

she was only a head!

She rolled about while squealing,

moving by snout and by jaw

Happily snuffling for treats

without use of hoof or paw.

My lady even smiled, which made me feel fat with goodness. He did keep us laughing until fear of the guards was eating at him. Then he sent up a bag of fresh meat, raw and still warm.

"From an antelope my war chief slew for you. He's fierce with an arrow. I wish I could claim I'd slain it myself, but my clumsy shot went wide. I thought fresh meat might make a pleasant change."

"Oh, Khan Tegus, oh, my lord," I said, and that's all I could say for a few moments. "We have salt meat... but fresh, it's a difference, isn't it?"

"I'll say! Eating salt meat, you have to drink so much for your thirst, there's no room in the belly for food."

"And we have salted everything here--vegetables and meat and cheese and cracker bread. Though I'm not complaining, please don't think. The food's wonderful, as long as I can keep the rats out."

"There are rats?"

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I hadn't meant to grumble, but there was this little pressure inside me, pushing inside my chest, urging me to confide some truth to him. "We've a plague of rats in the cellar. We swat at them and even got one in a trap, but I'm afraid my... my maid won't have enough to eat, after a time. My, uh, my father brought us so much food, but not enough for the rats, too."

"Your voice is tilting down, my lady," he said, "and I guess that you're frowning. You're worried. I should go now before the guards return, but keep the rats out of your hair tonight and I'll return tomorrow."

He left.

I don't have anything else to write, but I don't want to put down my brush yet. I want to keep all that happened, the feel of the evening still thick in my head, the sounds of his words awake in my ears, twitching pleasantly inside me. I'd guess I'm tower-addled and talking to someone from outside just made me wistful. That's all. That's why I feel this way, twisting and floating, as though my heart is bigger than my chest.

I do like the world quite a lot. Nothing more to say, so I'll draw.

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[Image: Drawing of a Foot]

[Image: Drawing of an Acorn]

[Image: Drawing of a Hand Writing on a Book]

Day 33

It must be past midnight now, but I'll write till morning if I have to. I don't want to forget a word.

Her khan came again. When I heard him calling, I didn't wake my lady, who was asleep upstairs. Should I have? Or was it right to let her sleep? And asleep or not, should I have ignored him and refused to continue the lie? Ancestors forgive me, in the moment I didn't think twice. I just opened the flap and let his voice come in.

"Did you sleep well last night?" he asked. "I might take offense if you went ahead and slept with rats in your hair, after I specifically warned you against it."

"I slept well," I said, laughing. "Sleep is always sweet."

"Not all would say that. You're an antelope who bounds through life, I think. Here you are, locked in a tower and laughing still."

"You make me laugh."

"Why is that?"

"I can't say." And I couldn't. Why do his questions make me laugh?

"I think I'd like to make you laugh all day long. If

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I could take you out of here, I'd hold a feast and a dance, and see you bedecked in a silver deel, laughing and bounding about."

"Why silver?"

"Because in the dark, your voice sounds silver."

My face burned feverish hot, so hot I thought I might die of the mud fever at once, but the feeling eased as I kept talking.

"That's a pretty thing to say." I forced my tone to sound light. "I wish I could think of pretty things to say, too, besides that your ankles are skinnier than a jackrabbit's ribs."

He cleared his throat. "It's just the cut of these boots, I assure you. And no excuses, my lady. You've had a flowery tongue in your time. Don't you remember our first letters?"

"It's been so long," I said, unhappy with the lie. "What did I say?"

Her khan chuckled. "Before coming here, I looked over all our letters, and the early ones, when you were thirteen and I fifteen. Well..."

"They were fairly ridiculous, weren't they?"

"In truth, you weren't so bad--more formal. You're very different to speak with in person. But I found some drafts of letters that I sent to you, and in one I wrote something akin to, 'When I think of you,

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my heart melts like butter over the bread of my stomach.' I thought it was very poetic at the time. Or in another letter I wrote, 'You are like a shiny red apple with no worms.'"

I wanted to be respectful of his first words of love, but trying to hold in the laugh made me snort like a camel, and then he snorted, so laughs came rumbling out of me. We were trying not to laugh, of course--I didn't want to wake my lady and he didn't want to wake the guards, but that made it even harder to stop. How my side ached! I wheezed and said I couldn't breathe, which made him laugh harder, which in turn made me laugh harder because, truth be told, his laugh sounds like a yak's grunt. I told him as much, which was a mistake, because that brought up his laugh anew.

Can I describe what it felt like to sit in the dark, laughing with her khan through a bricked wall? The hard grayness lifted out of me like the bones from a fried fish. I felt strong enough to float, warmed as if by sunlight, my bones thrumming and my skin tingling. My mama used to say that the mightiest of the healing songs was a good laugh.

When we'd calmed down and I'd wiped the tears from my face, we sat in silence. I leaned against the wall, resting my head on the bricks. I could see by

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the angle of his boot that, outside, he was doing the same. It was almost like touching.

"My jaw hurts," I said.

"I can't stop grinning. Some of my warriors are watching for the guards a few paces off, and they're sure to think I've gone crazy."

"Maybe you have, did you think of that? You certainly sound crazy, laughing like a wild dog."

"Careful with the accusations of insanity, oh my lady whose home is a tower with windows of brick, all for the sake of some skinny-ankled, laugh-prone boy of a khan."

"If a lady is crazy to be bricked up in a tower, then what is a khan who sits outside to laugh with her?"

He sighed and groaned at once, the sound of his smile gone. "I'm sorry I can't break you out. I can't believe you don't despise me for it."

"Stop that. What's bothering you? I mean, besides this tower? I can hear your voice is tight, you've got an ache somewhere, nagging at you."

"How did you know? Yes... you're right. It's my leg. I was injured at sword practice last year. When I stand for a time..."

"My maid, she's a mucker girl, she knows the healing songs."

"The healing songs?"

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"What a large world it is if there are people who never heard of the healing songs. Here, I'll have her sing to you. To work right, she should be touching your leg. Just you touch the leg yourself and listen, and close your eyes."

I crouched by the hole, down low so I was as close to him as I could be, and I sang the song for old injuries and wove it with the song for strong limbs, singing up with the coarse chanting of "High, high, a bird on a cloud," and singing down with the low swinging melody of "Tell her a secret that makes her sigh."

When I stopped, he was quiet for a good long moment. I could hear his breath, up and down like a bird's wings flapping.

"Thank you, my lady's maid," he said. "That was..."

He didn't finish, leaving me wondering. Some say hearing the songs makes them tickle inside, some say they feel as if they've suddenly gone hot to cold or cold to hot. Some say it's like dreaming while awake, or swimming while dry. I wish I knew how it felt inside her khan.

"My lady's maid, where did you learn such things?" he asked.

I gasped and bit my knuckle and wished I were

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smarter than I am, but then I thought to say, "My maid is shy. She's a mucker and thinks she shouldn't speak to gentry, but she's grateful her song helped you."

"How does that work? I mean, the songs sing about birds and secrets and sighing, not about healing, nothing like the conjuring words of the shamans."

"What the words say doesn't matter. The sound of the words and the sound of the tune together speak a language that the body can understand... or so I've been told by my maid. The body wants to be whole, and when you sing the right sounds, you're reminding it how to heal itself."

"Can muckers heal? Does she have the power to stop blood flowing and stave off death?"