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On tender and bruised soles she had hurried back to the chamber, praying that all other fly-by-night tenants, even if they’d awakened, would be cowering with their illicit bedmates, hoping to escape notice. Once past the age of twenty, few like a surprise midnight visitor. She had grabbed her skirt and returned with it, its wings wuffling, and she’d flung it over the cage. The birds fell silent at the unexpectedly immediate sunset.
She’d crouched at the top of the stairs, shivering in the cold. She’d listened and heard one, two vital words; and then a bonus, something about an increase in orders next spring. And a second bonus—another supplier was being brought on to help the Pollinger manufacturer—might Serbio consider a reduction in his bulk prices, and meet his competitor’s prices? A lower figure per unit ton…
Her client began to haggle. She had to admire a businessman able to defend his turf while standing in a freezing hall in nothing but button-bottomed pantlettes.
It was enough. Reclaiming her skirt, she stole back to the chamber and made three notes in pencil while the birds began to clamor again.
They covered the noise of Serbio’s tiptoed return. He had wanted to find her cowering with her head under the pillow, her rump exposed; she was busy writing instead.
“A letter to Mama about what a naughty girl you’ve been?” he said, though his arched eyebrow defined his attention as keenly suspicious.
She gasped and managed not to fling the book away from her. She said the first thing that came into her head.
“Notes for a story.” A long pause. “I write fancies; they only come to me when I am in distress.”
She pulled her skirt over her lap, making a game of it, but Serbio grabbed her paper, saying “Whaddya fancy then, so I can provide it times three, heh-heh?”
Blessings on the team member who had insisted she learn code. “This looks like dragon drool,” he said. “Words en’t involved here.”
“I was just starting,” she said.
“Tell me what your big idea is, that you got to get up from your sweet bed of pain to write it down.”
Maybe it was his mention of Mama. Just in time, she remembered a story from her childhood. She had no way of knowing whether it was a famous legend or an invention of her own mother. “It’s about a Witch,” she said, “a Witch who has a sudden yen for a dinner made out of fox babies. But the fox mother howls down the moon, which rolls like a grave door in front of the Witch’s cave. And there the wicked old Witch stays, for ever so long.”
He wasn’t so drunk as not to be dubious; the unexpected business negotiation at midnight had corrected his thinking. “All that in this little sketch, these scratchy lines?”
“I was just beginning,” she said.
“I’ll sit and watch you write,” said Serbio. “You can read it out loud as it occurs to you.” He dropped on his knees by the side of the bed and pulled the skirt away from her lap. He dug his hand. “I don’t know whether we should beat that old Witch out of her cave,” he said, twisting. “What do you think? What do you think we ought to do?”
“Once there was a fox mother,” she said, but where she had avoided weeping earlier, the memory of the story retold in this situation gave a greater grief.
The diversion had worked. She had escaped with the information required, which she supplied to the go-between the next morning over a market stall. “Did you get hurt?” asked the intermediary, pretending to examine potatoes as he slipped the written information into his vest.
“I’m not sure,” she replied, “it wasn’t covered in the story I told.”
For a while after that, she’d survived the worst of the injuries brought on by her espionage by escaping into stories. They served as a kind of supple armor when she was naked, a place to which her mind could retreat. Over and over again she told herself the story of the Witch and the fox babies, like singing a song in her head to give herself bravery—the same thing those filthy noisy birds had done that evening. Later, someti
mes both bruised and confused, she collected herself by trying to scribble things down. Not the notes in code—that system, amazingly, had remained undiscovered. But shreds of tales.
She became involved in the work. For a short time it became her salvation. She remembered how her aunts had read the same novel over and over again, for it was the only one they had, and how in their bleak spinsterhoods they had thrilled over false adventures in an invented world.
Then she gained some distance, and lost some momentum. She began to see that her stories were an argument through incident. What had seemed arbitrary, even magical—events unfolding out of her pencil as if it were her pencil doing the thinking—she now deduced as a reductive patterning, a false simplification of the world. Narrative shapeliness was a fiction in and of itself, a lie. The pencil was lying about how much meaning the world was capable of.
Any conclusion she could ever reach was false, because the validity of any conclusion could not be proved by any creature still imprisoned in the throes of life, and therefore still ill educated about myriad cause and final effect.
So after some years, she gave up the experiment of fiction. For a while or for good, she didn’t know. When she was engaged as a helpmeet and a nurse by the elderly widower—the Ogre, she called him—only to be locked in a tower to watch from above as he died, words failed her yet again.
Now sitting just outside of the company of the Clock, her saviors, she watched her pencil trail the paper and, avoiding language, make a long arcing line, a tree trunk of sorts. She added odd hooping branches bent like geometrically accurate arches. A stylized willow, a perfect fountain of green.
Sometimes, when words began to raise welts in her skin and panic in her breast, a drawing would suffice. It came from nowhere, this pure tree on the page. Perhaps it was code of another sort, and she could not yet read it.
The sergeant-at-arms said, “Ilianora!” At the sound of her name, she had to stir; she had no choice. “The runners are back,” he continued, “we’ve worked out our route. We’re right in the crosshairs of the EC militia approaching from the west; we’ve got fifteen minutes to get out of their way. If you don’t come now, we’ll leave you here! And bye-bye, Baby Beauty!”
The dwarf turned to the others. “North we go, boys, north to the edge of the woods but not out into the open, for we don’t know precisely where the Munchkinlanders are, and in the evening light we don’t want them to mistake us as their foe. We don’t want to draw their fire. Haste, or we’ll be collateral cost before midnight! If I haven’t lost my touch, sanctuary should lie just ahead of us.”
The boys to their harness, the dwarf to the seat up front. She tucked her pencil and her notebook into her apron pocket and pulled her veil back over her brow. Then she turned to join her family.
