The mushroom man looked very comfortable and complacent. He was sitting on a bench at a worktable, and there were several people sitting with him. The little man with the tic was there, his left eye twitching away. The alchemist. Retoebaeni. And the scout, who was just standing up to fetch her when Manrie walked through the door. A woman with a very still, watchful face, was straightening from a cage that sat in the center of the table. She was wiping a little knife on a torn piece of cloth. There was a fox in the cage. It was lying in the center, bleeding from a cut throat, its furred chest raising in its last stuttering breaths.
The room was full of cages. Each seemed to hold a different type of creature. Snakes and turtles and small rodents. Larger cages held tiny deer, and there was an angry looking lynx in one of them. There was a worktable along one wall, where crucibles and retorts clustered around a giant alembic. A miasma of mineral stench, singed hair, and boiled meat emanated from this table and clung to the air.
There was more to see, but she was aware of the mushroom man’s pompous gaze, and she went and sat across from him. The cage with the dead fox was between them. Their eyes met through the wire of the cage, and he smirked. “Aizdha’s little slave,” he said.
“I am not a slave,” she told him. Her fingers pressed into the uneven grooves of the rock that she’d picked up.
He waved a hand. He was wearing a blue tapestried robe. His sleeve was decorated with embroidered panels. Plants and animals, the threads catching the light from the open doorway. “He didn’t give you your freedom.”
“He died. You killed him.”
The frilled eyes widened. “Killed him? Not at all. I believe that you are guilty of that terrible act. I was lost in a betzazarra dream. When I awoke Aizdha was dead and his bestiary was gone. Where did you take it?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Manrie insisted. “And nobody thinks that I did.”
He regarded her, judging her, the sheen on his eyeballs oily, like rot on the surface of still water. “Who told you that?”
“The bounty hunter. Raeflin.”
His eyes widened. “Raeflin,” he whispered.
“Yes, Raeflin. She said that the Archivist of the Third Tower was only concerned for my safety, and wanted me to bring the bestiary back.”
“She?”
“No, the archivist,” Manrie said, not understanding his confusion.
Then the flabby lips parted in a smile. “Ah,” he said. “A question answered. Something I have wondered about for a long time. A level of initiation that I was never permitted to attain. No matter. We have our own initiations, now.”
“Do you…I wonder…do you have the bestiary?” Retoebaeni asked.
“No.”
His face fell. It was a genial face. Apologetic. A face that wanted to be kindly but, unfortunately, had important work to do. “Do you, perhaps, recall the entries? Does your mind retain facts well?”
“Maybe. Where’s Taeyaho?”
“You’ve just come from him,” the scout said, moving his hands across the surface of his robes in search of invisible specks of dirt. “In the infirmary.”
She should have tried all of the doors. Her fingers tightened around the rock. “Will you let us go?”
She watched them look at each other, their expressions dour and embarrassed. As if she had said something unseemly, a child speaking out of turn, and they had to decide which of them would chastise her. The task seemed to settle on the woman with the knife. “No one ever wants to leave this place,” she said softly. She had a heavy voice, low and earthy, and each word sounded like it had to be dug up before it could be said. Her own tapestried robe was brown and green, and there were earthworms and bees embroidered on the panels. “This is a place of great safety.”
Manrie looked around at the creatures in the cages. She recognized most of them. She had drawn a few of them into the bestiary. A dorleku clattered as the plates on its shell shifted. She remembered the dorleku that the Man on the Mountain had been keeping for Aizdha, a kind of lure meant to bring an old friend back to his lonely house. She wondered if he had managed to dig through to the upside down land on the other side of the unseen river. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her gaze moving to the work table and the gleaming brass of the big alembic.
“This is our home,” the mushroom man said.
“No, I mean, you have some project. You are working at something. What is it?”
The mushroom man smiled. “You are very direct. I believe I told you that a slave should know her place.”
“I’m not a slave,” Manrie repeated.
He considered. “No,” he said. “Here, all people are free.”
His companions shifted slightly, as if he had given the right answer to a question that they were asking. “People here seem to spend a lot of time staring at fields,” Manrie said.
“Ah. Yes. The Grounding Practices. A pun, I’m afraid. Not mine.” He nodded to the woman with the knife. “Naiklora’s.”
“But what’s it for?”
“She’s very curious,” Naiklora said.
“Yes,” the mushroom man agreed. “I suppose it’s why Aizdha treated her so well. He even sent her on little voyages, all by herself, wandering through this dangerous land.” His gaze shifted back to Manrie. “I believe that you had just come back from Hasra, when I met you. You had that marvelous drawing of a carapace. In fact, when I leafed through the bestiary, it was plain to me that much of it was written in your hand, and many of the drawings were yours. Aizdha was getting old. His life’s work, and he was ceding more and more of it to you.”
Retoebaeni turned his twitching eye to her. “Are you familiar with Gahnkaerahn’s classification system?” he asked, one scholar to another. “Is the bestiary organized along sound Gahnkaerahnian principles?”
“I’ve already told you that it isn’t,” the mushroom man said.
Manrie said, “Aizdha didn’t like it. He said that true monsters would always slip beyond our classifications. Gahnkaerahn is good for plants, maybe, and domesticated animals. But anything truly wild can’t be contained by a family or a genus.”
The twitch increased its pace, and seemed to envelope the little man’s entire body. “He was wrong. Things are only wild until we understand them.”
“You know that’s not true,” the mushroom man said softly.
The little man made a gesture with one spastic hand, as if he could fan this statement away. His own robes were sky blue and yellow. The tapestried panels showed little bursts of sunlight and bars of metal. They were burned and stained in many places. “The fact that wildness returns only means that our method of domestication is suspect. You agree, Baenlaez, as you have launched us on our current inquiry.”
“We can tame them,” the mushroom man said, “without having to understand them.”
“Monsters are a separate category,” Manrie interjected, surprised to find her mind sharpening, her interest in the debate growing. “Once we can classify something, it is no longer monstrous. The truly monstrous must, by its very nature, live beyond our attempts at classification. Or domestication.”
The twitching eye stared at her. “Then what is the purpose of your bestiary?”
“Aizdha’s bestiary,” Manrie corrected.
“He raises a good question,” the mushroom man, Baenlaez, said. “I enjoyed Aizdha’s company a great deal, but as I believe you overheard when snooping on our conversation, I contend that his entire project was flawed. He was blessing the land with his curiosity. All he wanted was to record things as they are. He lacked the appropriate spirit of husbandry.”
“Husbandry?”
“The true scholar, the true human, I will say, wants to tame the land.”
“So you’re a farmer.”
The frilled nostrils flared slightly, but Baenlaez’s voice remained genial. “Yes, of course. This is a farm. The one true farm that humanity has created in all the years since we came through the Door at Hasra. The earth here does what we tell it to. The animals are entirely domesticated.”
Manrie felt her mouth twist into a little smirk. “Until a cow becomes an aurochs again,” she said. “Or grain becomes indigestible.”
His eyes widened. “Where did you hear that?” he asked in a quiet, dangerous voice.
“Isn’t it in one of your scriptures?”
“It is not for the uninitiated!” Naiklora mumbled.
A tense moment passed. Baenlaez regarded Manrie with one eyebrow cocked. The little alchemist’s body was thrumming in his chair. The big scout shifted, his movements quiet, purposeful. He ran an open palm across his bald spot.
“It seems that someone has been guilty of the Seventh Disobedience of the Will,” Baenlaez said. “Tell me who it was.”
“Just some old woman, reading to me in the room I woke up in.”
“So the bestiary only contains the rarest creatures? Those that haven’t been tamed?” Retoebaeni interjected, obviously feeling that the conversation had gone astray from its main point.
“It contains some things that it shouldn’t,” Manrie admitted. “Creatures that we thought were monsters, and then discovered that they’re common, or that they’re…adaptable to human contact.”
“This is purposeless, Retoebaeni,” Baenlaez said. “I have already told you that I looked through the bestiary, when I was in Libreigia.”
“But the girl and her master must have encountered creatures that they didn’t include in the book,” the little man insisted. “Tell me, did you journey far to the west of the mountains?”
“What we are seeking might still be in the east,” the scout said, and Baenlaez glared at him.
“What are you seeking?” Manrie asked.
“Answer Retoebaeni’s question,” Baenlaez told her. “How far to the west have you gone?”
Manrie hesitated. She looked around the room. “If I tell you,” she said, “will you let us go? Me and Taeyaho. And Uku, if he’s here.”
“You will tell us,” Baenlaez said.
“If you let us go.”
He sat back and looked up at the ceiling. The others fell silent, watching him. His mouth moved back and forth, as if he were engaged in an internal dialog. Then his eyes dropped to meet her gaze. They looked at each other through the wire of the cage. “There is little that we don’t come to know. Eventually.” He turned to the scout. “Taeslahbin.”
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The balding scout got up and went to stand by Manrie’s side. “You will come with me,” he said.
“Come where?”
“You will come with me,” he repeated.
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Oh, you foolish girl,” Naiklora snapped, “just go with him. It’s mealtime. He’s taking you to the refectory, that’s all.”
“I ate when I woke up.”
“We all eat at the same time,” she said.
“But you’re staying here.”
“We’ll be there momentarily.”
Reluctantly, Manrie stood, feeling foolish but angry at this chastisement. She allowed Taeslahbin to lead her from the room and back across the bridge. She dropped the rock she’d been holding in the rushing water as she crossed over it. The spray from the waterfall wetted her shift again, and she looked down and saw the brown skin of her breasts pressed against the white fabric. She blushed. She had been nearly naked while conversing with the scholars. Scholars? Did they deserve that name? They were certainly behaving like scholars, even this big man with his careful movements and incredibly clean clothes. He barely made a noise as he walked. As if he were stalking something across the farm.
They crossed through fields that were planted with grain. The golden heads of the oats were moving softly, fanned by an obedient breeze. There was a large square building in the center of the fields, skirted by paddocks. Horses in one paddock, their bodies lined up in strangely regimented order as they lowered their sleek necks to eat from a long trough. *Everyone eats at the same time,* Manrie thought. Cows in two other paddocks, also eating. People were leading oxen along the paths through the fields, the big beasts lumbering and snorting. At least the flies that buzzed about their heads weren’t tame, unless they had been trained to only bother the oxen at mealtimes. What did flies eat, anyway? Dung, she suspected. She imagined them hovering in the air with nothing to do until it was noon, and then diving at the cow patties as people took their midday meal.
They came to a barn, with many stalls and the deep, heavy odor of manure thickening the air. Taeslahbin led her past racks of harnesses and stands of saddles. The darkness of the barn was cool, and her damp shift made her feel her nakedness. She noticed a stack of saddle blankets and wanted to move to it, but she felt the scout’s careful regard. She could imagine him grabbing her arm and frog marching her along. No one would object, she was sure, even though they claimed that they were free.
They were approaching the far door. Dust floated in a wide block of light that fell through the opening. As she stepped from the shadows into the light there was a sudden commotion. Voices shouting, and an angry squealing. The scout paused, freezing into an exaggeration of his deep carefulness that seemed like a kind of panic. He stalked towards the door, reaching out and putting a hand on her arm to make sure that she was with him.
There were more paddocks on the other side of the door, and the grunting of pigs filled the air. Loud grunting, worried, upset. People were running to the furtherest paddock. Some of them were carrying spears. The scout let go of Manrie and ran. She took a few steps to convince him that she was following, and then darted back inside the barn. The horse blankets were rough. She found the one with the fewest stains and wrapped it around herself, tucking an end into a fold above her breasts. A scratchy makeshift robe. Hard to move in, but warm, and she had no reason to go quickly. As she stepped out into the sunlight she noticed that the blanket had a red, diamond pattern. Very pretty.
There was a scream from the paddock ahead of her. She walked towards it with her head held high. As if these people couldn’t hurt her. As if she had cloaked herself in a sense of superiority, an armor that they couldn’t penetrate. She felt much like she had in Libreigia, during the eleven years when she had been Aizdha’s slave.
There was a boar in the paddock, and it had gored a woman. The woman’s headdress was spread out in the mud, and her veiled face was staring up at the sky. The boar was standing above its victim, and its hooves were digging into the bloody cloth of her robe. As if the boar were rooting for tubers. It was staring down the people who were crowding against the fence. Someone was crying. Someone else shushed the crying voice. The other pigs had massed in a far corner of the paddock. They were squealing and grunting their distress. The boar’s tusks jutted from either side of its mouth, and its hair tufted up as if it had been struck by lightning. It was grunting, a low sound in its throat, like the earth rumbling. Taeslahbin had climbed up onto the fence and was perched on its highest rail, looking down at the beast. He had a heavy spear clutched in one hand.
A farmer was jittering at his side. “I don’t know,” he was saying. “I don’t know how it happened. She had only just gone in to feed them.”
The scout grunted. “It doesn’t matter how it happened,” he said.
“But it’s a wasted death,” the farmer said, and Manrie stared at him. He was passing a dirt encrusted hand over a bald head, again and again.
“Yes,” Taeslahbin said. “Bad.” Then he leapt down from the railing and stalked towards the boar. The boar kept its head lowered. It’s hooves scratch at the woman’s robes. A terrible sound. Soft. Like a scholar scratching his belly.
Someone shouted, and Taeslahbin lifted his spear. Manrie looked away. A mad squeal, hooves scrambling, and the thunk of the spear going home. She looked back. The scout was kneeling by the boar and inspecting it, peeling its eyelids back as the last breaths stuttered from its chest.
“The third time this moon cycle,” the farmer muttered unhappily.
“That many people?” Manrie asked him.
He looked at her, his gaze traveling from the straps of the shift on her shoulders down to the horse blanket. “You are just an infant,” he said. “You are barely within the First Realm of Knowing.”
Taeslahbin had finished his inspection. He was standing, dusting off his palms. The skirts of his robes were muddied. He frowned down at them. Then he turned to the farmer. “Burn it,” he said.
The man nodded. “And the Sprouting Leaf?
“Also the leaf,” Taeslahbin said. He clambered back over the fence and took hold of Manrie’s arm. He didn’t seem to notice the horse blanket.
“What leaf?” Manrie asked. There were no trees growing near the paddocks.
The scout said nothing. He started to lead her away. His fingers held her arm tightly. The grip he had used on the spear, no doubt. She imagined him hefting her and throwing her at the boar. A hysterical image, brought on by panic. She was beginning to tremble. “Don’t you want to eat the boar?” she asked, to distract herself. She could hear Cloedeya speaking in her head. *Wild boar cooked in vinegar and red wine, with carrots and onion and juniper berries, and shavings from the roots of the prahnosisi tree.*
The scout gave her a sideways glance. “That is starvation thinking,” he said. “We don’t need to worry about waste on the farm. Besides, we don’t eat wild.”
“You don’t hunt? Then what do you scout for?”
But he wouldn’t answer. He led her on, through another ring of fields around a central building. Tomato plants and pole beans and pepper bushes. Veiled people, working in each field, the women in their headdresses, the white, starched wings casting shadows on the ground, as if birds were circling high overhead. Vultures, Manrie thought. Gorpsarra. She wanted to call out to them. To tell them that one of their own had just died. But each woman seemed enclosed in her separate task. Shut away from each other by the veils.
Taeslahbin led her through the door of the central building and she found herself in a giant dining hall. It was empty. Sunlight streamed through tall windows and across the dark wood of the tables and benches. Ceramic plates and cups were set out in neat order, with glinting cutlery set beside them.
“I thought that everyone ate at the same time,” she said.
“Wait,” the scout told her, and gestured to a table that was close to an interior door. He watched her sit, then nodded to himself and strode out of the room. She absorbed the shock of being left all alone. She could get up now and hide someplace and then escape in the night. Just as she could have overpowered Pumpkin and run off as she was led to the house with the waterwheel. They seemed to think that she had been tamed, just by being brought into the valley. But of course, they had Taeyaho. No one had denied it. And maybe they had Uku. And maybe Tafaemi, although she didn’t care about Tafaemi. But they all ate together. All she had to do was sit and eat, and she would see her friends. She thought about this, and gazed out the window, and tried not to look at the interior door.
A bell started ringing outside. Then it was picked up by many bells. There was the sound of footsteps, and she looked towards the open windows. People were coming along the paths. Coming from all directions, and she started to count them, then switched to counting the tables and the places set at each of them, and guessed that there might be four hundred people in the valley. They made their own cloth. And their own pottery. Perhaps their own metalwork as well. They grew their own food. They could remain entirely hidden from the world. Protected from the land. Unless the land decided to invade them. To reach into the mind of a boar and turn its tusks upon them.
A large figure appeared at one of the doors, and her heart leapt. But it wasn’t Uku. It was another man, and after he moved through the frame of the doorway she saw that he was smaller than Uku, and thinner. Her eyes moved back and forth as people flooded into the room. Taeyaho wasn’t in the crowd. Nor Uku. Nor Tafaemi.
A line of people were brought in. They were guided by veiled women and distinguished from the rest of the crowd by their shifts. Like Manrie’s own. Barely covering them, and almost transparent. Their veiled guides led them to Manrie’s table and left them, and they looked around uncertainly, then seated themselves around her with many awkward movements. Some of them were quite old. Others were very young. There were a few children among them, but not children like Pumpkin. These children were frightened, looking around with wide eyes. Many of them were too skinny. She could see sharp ribs beneath the thin cloth. A boy was sitting across from her. His cheeks were sunken and his nose had been thinned by hunger. It was like looking into the face of her own childhood.
The bells fell silent and the room went silent with them. An eerie hush, everyone seated, the veiled faces looking straight ahead. There was a figure in a tapestried robe at the head of every table, including Manrie’s own. A man with a huge goiter bulging out his neck. He stood and looked down the length of the table, studying every frightened face. His goiter made him look as if he had tried to swallow all of the farm’s food and it had gotten stuck in his throat. His robes were patterned with cornstalks, the tassels picked out in gold thread. He saw Manrie staring at him and grimaced and shook his head. She looked away, down at her empty plate.
Another bell, and everyone stood. Baenlaez was coming through the far door, followed by Retoebaeni, Naiklora, and Taeslahbin. The woman with the high voice from the infirmary was there. And several others whom Manrie hadn’t seen. The other masters, no doubt. They swept through the room to a long table that sat before the windows. As they made their way, Manrie saw Farahzin, seated at one of the tables they were passing. His heavy beard climbed his face, and for a moment Manrie thought that he had gone wild like the boar. She expected him to stand and attack Baenlaez and the arrogant procession that followed him. But Farahzin’s posture was timid, his head swinging back and forth, staring at the faces as though in confusion.
The masters all stood at their table in a long line, gazing out at the assembly. Baenlaez’s gaze moved slowly over the faces. As if he could see past the veils. As if he were recognizing and acknowledging everyone in the room. His gaze moved over Manrie and she shivered. She wondered if he noticed her shivering, or if this was merely a dumbshow of looking, meant only for effect.
“Good friends,” he said in his pompous voice, “I rejoice to be among you in this place of safety. I rejoice that we all will be fed. I rejoice that we are of one mind. That we do one work. Here in our haven. Here on our beautiful farm. I rejoice that we have so many…”
But he was interrupted. Farahzin had stood up. He was bending forward, as if into a wind. And he was staring across the room, to a table near the masters, where women and men sat with unveiled faces. He raised an arm and pointed at this table with a long finger, the shreds of a bandage dangling down from his wounded hand. “My face!” he cried. “Why is my face there?”
Baenlaez blinked. “Your face, brother?”
“She has taken my face!”
A woman stood up from the table that he was pointing at. Manrie recognized her. The woman who had sat in the chair and read to her as she pretended to sleep. The woman who had been guilty of prideful disobedience, or something like that. This woman crossed the room as all eyes watched her. Farahzin waited for her. He was trembling. When he had come stumbling into Tzurfaera, Manrie had turned and taken comfort in Uku’s arms. She wished that Uku was here now. Not for her, but for Farahzin. She wished that there was someone to hold him as he shook.
“Poor infant,” the woman said. The sides of her headdress seemed to swing back and forth of their own volition, like the wings of a bird that wanted to roost on Farahzin’s face. “We removed you from the cradle too early. You are lost, poor child. But never mind. Come with me. I will return you to the infirmary.”
Farahzin lifted a hand to try to touch the woman’s cheek, but she shied away from him. She caught his wrist and held it. She was smiling at him. A firm smile that would not be questioned. She turned to lead him away. He looked about, as if wondering who would help him. No one moved. But Manrie saw Baenlaez glance down the line of masters and catch Taeslahbin’s eye. The scout moved silently after the departing pair. Manrie could see them through the windows as they walked from the building. Sunlight beat down on the woman’s headdress as she lead Farahzin across the fields. The scout stalked after them, his robes freshly laundered, all signs of the boar’s pen vanished from his person.
“Good friends,” Baenlaez began again. “I rejoice that we are all together here in safety. I rejoice that the land has been made to give good food. I rejoice that we are of one mind. That we do one work. I rejoice that we have so many newcomers among us. It is hard to shed the influence of the land. It is hard to become a human being. To come into our true humanity. To learn that we are masters of this land. We must all help each other. We must all take steps along the Road of All Knowing. We must all be purged of the disobediences. When we are, when you are, you will know true mastery. Ah, my friends, my good friends, what a gift it is to be together.”
He sat, and the other masters sat with him. The interior door opened. Manrie’s head jerked towards it just as a veiled figure came out, carrying a terrine. The terrine was followed by a bread, which was followed by bowls heaped with fruit. Veiled figures were setting them on the tables. Manrie glanced at her table companions. She saw starvation in their staring eyes. They leaned towards the food as if they were being hooked to it with grapple and rope.
Someone passed her a basket of bread. Someone else ladled stew onto her plate. An apple, green and with a few brown marks on its rough skin, appeared beside her drinking cup. She found that she was ravenous. She had been fed by nothing but poisoned soup, and one rushed meal in the infirmary hadn’t been enough to satisfy her. Was it a few days since the boat had crashed into the shore? Weeks? Where was Taeyaho? They said that he was still alive, but why wasn’t he here, in the refectory?
She ate ravenously, without thinking. The stew was good. The meat was tender. The interior door opened and closed, and she saw a kitchen beyond it, veiled faces bent over counters. More than four hundred people on the farm, then. There were people working while the others ate. So it wasn’t true that everyone ate together. It wasn’t true that they were safe. It wasn’t true that the land was tamed. She ate, licking the grease from the sides of her mouth, sponging up the stew with a piece of bread. She bit into the apple. It was crisp and pungent. It had an odd taste. She chewed it curiously. Then she took another bite, because she was eating automatically, without thought. She felt the juice slide down her throat. She was suddenly very tired. Tired, and the table seemed odd. Misshapen, somehow. And the hungry faces of her companions were like those of dolls. She thought she could see the marks left by the carver’s knife on their cheeks.
She stared at the apple, then tried to push herself up from the table. The room seemed to rock wildly, like the boat on the storm-tossed lake. She gripped the table edge. There was a commotion, but it wasn’t because of her. At a far door, the scout had come back in. He was holding up a bloody hand. She heard him cry, “He murdered Graecelle! And he stabbed me!”
And then she collapsed.