Me dicito, melculum,” she said, dropping herself onto his little bed to lie on her stomach and stare at his book. “What does Daddy’s little scholar study today?”
He frowned but otherwise did not dignify her ‘culums’ and ‘lulas’ of sweetness and smallness as if he were the merest boy, and not nearly almost within a few years of being a fully grown respectable man of fifteen (in four years).
“Flowers,” he said, with as much dignity as he could muster, “and how to know them.”
“Oh, I know flowers,” she said.
“You do not,” he scoffed. When she didn’t rescind her statement, but merely kept up her indulgent smile he elaborated. “You don’t. You’ve never studied. You’re a girl.”
“I’m a girl,” she said, making a face at him.
“Yes,” he said primly, “and girls don’t get to learn things like that.”
“Why can’t I know them anyway?” She grinned, picking up a chunk of hair and folding pieces out as if arranging flowers. “I know plenty of flowers. The monkshood, and snow lotus...”
“Aconite,” he said sharply, “and saussurea – and both of those are dangerous.”
“Are they now?” She raised her brows, and to any less serious little boy, or her little brother if he were really paying attention, the false amazement in her voice would’ve been provoking. “Imagine that.”
But little Dominicus was not paying attention, wrapped up in the opportunity to lecture as their father lectured, despite having fifteen minutes of learning to their father’s fifty years.
“You shouldn’t know about dangerous flowers, Catillia” he said, supercilious in spite of the way he sniffed and rubbed his nose on his sleeve. “That’s a sign of a hedge-witch.”
“Oh dear,” she said, giggling. “Is it?”
She bit her lip, but the game was up. He turned and scowled at her, green eyes full of wounded fury.
“Oh, come on,” she rolled herself off to the edge of the bed and sat up, “any woman who knows a thing or two is a hedge-witch according to those musty scholars, AND,” she said, covering the beginning of his indignant objection, “where do you supposed they learned that stuff in the first place if their mothers didn’t tell them?”
“They studied,” he said, ignoring the way she huffed in frustration. He turned round in his desk to go firmly back to his books, precisely as his father did, as if he had studied the gesture and practiced long into the night.
He probably had, the haughty little nerd.
Never mind – she knew he had.
She stood up and put hands on his shoulders, bringing her face down to speak in his ear.
“And who, my little bookworm, wrote the first book?”
To this he had no response but his own little huff of defeat and frustration. She always outsmarted him eventually – usually with some question like the one she had just asked. But always after-
“Come,” she kissed his temple, indulging his boyish recoiling (as was his duty as a serious, almost-man, not yet man enough to know how fare from manhood he was), “let’s go for a walk.”
“I don’t want to walk,” he said, petulant. “I already said I didn’t want to walk with Spes and Laeta when they went to town.”
“Well, you want to walk now.”
He double checked with his legs, wondering where she had gotten such information.
“I do not.”
She put her fists on her hips and said, in perfect imitation of their mother, “Dominicus.”
He pouted. But he thrust his books up, and his chair back, and hopped grumpily to the floor. She stuck out her hand and shook it, and he knew there was no option but to take it, as she led him down the stairs and out of the house, through the swinging curtain of the back door. She was already getting tall, and had to duck to get out the doorway and under the clothesline – he ducked, too – and kicked playfully at the chickens who crossed their path as if urgent business called them from one side of the yard to the other precisely as people were walking through.
The day was bright, and he had to squint for the first while, but soon the whining of the bugs and noises of their neighbors and the chickens and donkeys and working men all worked their magic on him. When he stopped sullenly hanging his head she let go of his hand and he followed after her, dodging rocks and holes, hopping on logs and bits of timber as if crossing mighty rivers, playing the game of journeys short and long.
“Eha! Bandits in the pass!”
She dodged behind a shrub, as if between it and its brother were high canyon walls, protecting nefarious men.
Dominicus ran up as well, taking position on the other side.
“Have they seen us?”
“No,” she said, eyes narrowed, “I don’t think... Oh no!” She hopped up, throwing hands up, “I think they have!”
A moment’s genuine surprise and then she reached down as he reached up and, with him in the lead, they ran until breathless and sure of their safety from the bandits, whose actions of pursuit they shouted to each other on their way. Sitting on a rock to catch their breath, Catillia pointed to a flower on the ground.
“What is that, little scholar?”
Domincus frowned and got closer. He crouched on the ground, cocking his head to the side. He didn’t know what it was, but he didn’t want her seeing, and maybe if he just got a little closer he could make something up...
As he reached a finger out to touch it, she snapped a hand out to catch his. He looked up at her, and she shook her head, her smile not mocking but amicable.
“Don’t touch it. Belsulidis – biasola – the bella stella.”
She crouched on the ground with him, careless of the dirt on her skirts, and put her hands out as he had, coming short of touching. She pointed to the features distinguishing the plant without describing them, watching him weigh and mark and finally the little flash of light in his eyes that meant he had learned something. She finished the silent lesson with a smile, catching his glance.
“So dark a berry for the beautiful star, yes? The Ainjir still sometimes call it dwola, which fits no better, but it’s not meant to be here, anyway. Every part is poisonous.”
He nodded, wide-eyed with fascination. As she stood and brushed dirt from her dress he looked up at her.
“Shouldn’t we pull it up?”
She grinned, knowing it would drive him nuts.
“No – Culo’s cow will eat it. Or the rabbits.”
He frowned at her, then frowned at the plant, then frowned at her, but she was already walking away so he scrambled to his feet to follow.
“Wait, what do you mean? Will it hurt the cow? Why will the cow eat it? What if the cow gets sick? How will the cow find it? What would Culo do without his cow?”
She ignored him, skipping along and brushing the trees and bushes as she went by, forcing him to half-skip to keep up as they went along the road to town.
“Don’t be silly. We’ll tell Culo, and he’ll bring his cow to eat it.”
“But... but you said...”
He frowned, trying to figure out the puzzle on his own before his foolish mouth could ask questions that would tell him the answer.
She stopped in the road and he nearly ran into her. He scowled at her and she smiled.
“What scholar could tell you that Culo’s cow could eat the stars of the sky and not be sick?”
“I dunno,” he said, sensing a challenge, “some of them.”
“Some of them who have kept cows, or who have neighbors who keep cows, and whose big sisters are nice enough not to let them get poisoned.”
She turned and started down the road again, laughing – though not at him. If she was laughing at him he would’ve been upset.
He followed after.
“How did you know?”
She smiled down, as if he were asking the right question, which to him made no sense. He was asking the only question he could think to ask.
“Mama stopped me eating the berries when I was very little; mothers who watch children must see and know the dangers. A very little taste of that plant can kill something as small as a child, and so they know, because they have seen. So they teach the name of the flower, not as ‘purple horn’ or ‘Fantastic-Wise-Man’s-flower’ or ‘grows-in-winter’ or whatever your scholars would call it, but the bella stella. Because...” she trailed and looked at him.
He frowned to himself, but soon the lullaby came back to him.
“Tullus, Tulla, Veni, Veni, vaccam tuam, adfĕrrētis. That is a stupid song. But how come cows can eat it?”
She shrugged and kept walking. “Is it stupid if it reminds you to be grateful for cows? Maybe cows don’t find beauty in the same things we do.”
This, he thought was silly, but he said nothing and thought it about it for a very long time. Catillia often said silly things that turned out to be of great import. There were confounding spirits in the texts which did the same. His sister was possessed. But maybe so were various of the Prophet’s Blessed Kindred.
Was he properly grateful for cows?
SOMETIMES Catillia just said silly things. So he thought about it.
The Midraeic part of town and the Ainjir part of town weren’t very far apart, though as if to shield them from each other, a large wood grew between the houses of each, as uncultivated as any wild place. It acted as a sort of fence, making it seem as if there were two separate towns altogether, though in fact that wasn’t the case.
The Ainjir part of town lay on the same big dirt road as the Midraeic part; to leave town in the southerly direction, one crossed through the Midraeic part as if it were no different from any other part. Likewise, to go north, the Midraeics walked through the Ainjir part of town. There were Midraeic craftsmen, the smiths and the shepherds and the butcher who the Ainjir sought out in the Midraeic part of town, and there were Ainjir carpenters and woodsmen and miners that the Midraeics sought in the Ainjir part. All clustered at the edges, if they wanted to serve both.
But there were different parts.
There was only one market – the town was not really big enough for more than one market. It was in the center of Ainjir part of town, near their big town well in the big town square that the Midraeic part of town lacked. Their part was just houses, that trailed off and ended. So everybody in the Midraeic part had to go to the Ainjir part for market goods like fruits and corn and what the farmers and millers brought on market days.
It was market day today, which accounted for why Catillia had stopped and looked more cautiously around her, and reached back for his hand again as the people milled about between towns. Not quite Ainjir, not quite Midraeic.
“You have to get permission to go into town, Catillia,” Dominicus said, clutching her hand. He wasn’t afraid, but it was true: their parents wanted to know when they were in town.
“I don’t if I’m with you,” she said, squeezing back. This was technically true. Their father had said so, as Dominicus was a boy and thus a male member of the household and thus part of the authority of the house. Technically, he had said it would be true. In the future tense.
But all of his eleven years puffed out in his chest and he agreed with her.
“Come on,” she said, taking one more survey of the crowd. She led them back down the road a little ways, into the woods again. They trooped along until they were closer to the mid-way point between towns, where there weren’t that many people lingering, but a little knot of Ainjir boys, playing at some game. She sat on a stump, out of sight, watching the road.
He sat next to her. After a while’s watching, he got bored and kicked his feet, looking at his older sister, whose eyes stayed fixed on the road.
“Where do cows find beauty?” He asked.
She glanced fleetingly down at him.
“Where do you find it?”
He blushed and thought while he watched his feet sway. He didn’t really know where he found beauty. He knew of beautiful things, but it seemed lately his ideas of beauty were changing, or expanding or... something. He knew one thing.
“I like words,” he said. “I think words are beautiful sometimes.”
She raised her eyebrows, glancing down from her watch on the road again.
“Like poetry?”
He thought a moment and nodded.
“And prayers. Sometimes just words are beautiful, too, regular words.”
“You love to read,” she said softly, not looking for his confirmation. “You want to be a scholar very badly.”
He nodded, but he didn’t know why she phrased that way. He thought his future was rather set. Sure, there were days when he still felt like he did when he was younger – so young, so childish – like he might want to run away and be a bandit on the road, or join some traveling merchants and see the world. He almost never wished – oh so foolish he had been as a child – to be a lone, wandering, warrior-sage-teacher-ascetic-artist anymore. That was silly (he could perhaps be something of a warrior and ascetic, or perhaps sage and artist, maybe even sage-teacher-warrior-wanderer, but certainly not all of them at once).
She diverted her attention from the road long enough to run her fingers through his hair and bring him near to kiss the top of his head.
“Papa is thinking of plans for you.”
He nodded and she heaved a heavy sigh, though he didn’t know why.
“Bulla mea, you can learn everywhere.”
Kicking her feet, she ruffled his hair again, concerned that he didn’t even get upset at using her child name for him. There were deep mysteries afoot – things that neither of them had a say in, and neither of them quite knew the nature of, but they knew they were coming to be. Catillia was not saying silly things, but she was speaking past him, as she sometimes did, as if the whole world appeared differently to her than it did to the rest of them. He felt more than understood her anxiety, but so deep was his trust that he felt it as if it were his own, the more appropriate anxiety of his lack of understanding subsumed in effort to see the same horizon she saw growing nearer.
“You can learn from everything. Like from watching children.” She smiled at him.
“You don’t need your books for everything. You find beauty in what your books tell you, so you want to be a scholar, don’t want to leave them, but is the beauty in the books, or in the telling?”
He glanced up at her. Another of her conundrums, but as always, he found himself thinking about it whether he wanted to or not.
“It’s in the telling,” she said knowingly, watching him scowl at her for guessing. “You like the learning and the learning of your men in books didn’t come from books before theirs, or books before those books, or however far back you want to go, but in the day God made the earth and put man upon it and said, ‘look’. Every little thing, in being what it is, is saying ‘look’, the whole world shakes with it, and of all the things on the world it’s only men who try to write back to it, saying ‘I look’. So they came up with writing, and they write poetry and they sang songs, and they wrote your books.”
She paused and grinned.
“The day a cow writes poetry is the day we know what they think is beautiful. And maybe the day we stop eating beef.”
“I like beef,” Dominicus said.
“I’m sure cows like bella stella,” she said. “You can learn everywhere, from everything, little Bulla, and that is how you find beauty anywhere.”
He stored this away, for something he would have to think about, but wasn’t for thinking about on such a beautiful day, and her eyes returned to the road. It was just when he was starting to think he ought to thank his sister (the very thought gave him a shudder) for convincing him to take a walk when she hopped down from her stump, crouching warily and pulling his arm. He scrambled down and her finger over her lips stilled his questions as she pointed for him to watch the road.
He saw nothing but the Ainjir boys, playing their games, which looked rather stupid to him. Sure, a part of him wanted to play, because maybe it was fun to toss rocks around and catch them or to swing sticks (there was lots of fun to be had with rocks and sticks anyway), but he knew better than to ask. What did Catillia want him to watch?
He shifted, ready to ask her another question, when he saw what might’ve got her attention: Spes and Laeta, coming down the road, their baskets full on their arms as they walked. They clumped together, which meant they had to kept their steps in careful pace or the weight of one would drag the other down, but Dominicus was not surprised. It was Laeta’s first trip to town, and she was only nine She wouldn’t have gone at all, but their mother was ill and Auriol was helping with the twins, and she would be going for the first time soon anyway. Catillia had reached an age where she was marriageable, which meant they kept her to the Midraeic side of town as much as possible, presumably to find a husband (Prophet bless the man who would be chosen and be merciful). Papa was off with the other men of town making decisions and saying prayers for them. Dominicus was, of course, a boy and didn’t shop the market.
Which meant it was Sepsnova, aged an awkward but pretty twelve, and Laeta, a doubtful and flighty nine, given the heavy burden of buying their food for the next week. The baskets seemed as big as they were. It was funny to watch them, heads down, mouths pressed in concerned lines, steps in careful time with one another, as they tottered home with the burden.
A rock bounced off one of the baskets, and Spesnova flinched, but didn’t stop. The boys started to say things, which Dominicus couldn’t hear well enough to understand, and Catillia’s hand on his arm tightened its grip. Another rock flew past them, and the boys laughed. Dominicus looked to his sister for some sign, but she was merely frowning, eyes watchful. Some of the boys with sticks started to walk in front of them, dangling the sticks in their path as if to make them trip. The two girls pulled tighter to one another and he realized they weren’t watching the road, but averting their eyes – they weren’t concentrating but keeping silent.
Dominicus began to be angry.
One of the sticks finally got close enough and Spes stumbled, a little cry of surprise caught before it left her mouth. She and Laeta would go down together, the carefully bought goods spilled, if either went down, and so she pulled close to her sister to steady herself.
Dominicus looked at Catillia who was now looking back at him.
He took off out of the bushes.
“Yah!”
The boys all turned at once and the girls took their moment to flee without even bothering to see who had distracted their attackers. He stopped in the middle of the road, and his active little mind finally caught up with him, comparing the sights.
Dominicus, as pale as a Midraeic boy could be thanks to spending all his days inside (not even close to the Ainjir’s range of pink to porcelain white, but still, rather wan), skinny-limbed as bickering with his sisters would allow, realized how much of scholar he looked like to the corn-fed Ainjir farmer’s sons.
“What are you doing here?” one asked him in Ainjir.
He wondered what they would do if he didn’t speak their language, like many of the other Midraeic children, or had the half-understanding of their older brothers and sisters.
“Those were my sisters,” he said back, as reprimanding as he could be.
They laughed at him. Whether at what he said, or how he said it, or that he said it, he couldn’t tell; it seemed to amuse them. They got closer, swinging their sticks and tossing their rocks and looking him up and down the exact same way they had looked at his sisters, who were only little girls. True, they were all bigger than him, but that wasn’t a hard thing to be.
He turned to see if Catillia had followed him, but could see no sign of her in the bushes.
“And?” said one of the boys. “What will you do about it?”
He didn’t reply. They laughed again.
They were going to beat him up, he realized. Five-to-one.
His five sisters ganged up on him all the time. He scowled at them and put his fists up, which was also amusing to them.
The fight was not much of a fight. Generally speaking, his sisters didn’t have sticks, which was really the deciding factor. He fended off their blows and stayed upright and even got in a few blows of his own, and then someone hit him in the leg with a stick and he fell. Once he fell there was little else he could do but curl into a ball and hope it would be over soon.
They seemed to find hitting him on the ground as amusing as hitting him standing up, so it looked as if his hopes were dashed.
Then he heard a warrior shout, and a stream of Geronese – a language that, even passed gently over dinner in his own home, sounded as if the syllables had been taken from the mouths of angry hounds. The squeaky sounding shouts of a bunch of startled boys followed, as they were laid into with a tree branch half the size of the girl wielding it. Auburn-colored hair spread wild by her swings like strands of cool fire, Catillia could be mistaken for no other.
Dominicus stayed huddled on the damn ground, trying not to breathe in the dust or take pebbles to the eye as she stormed into battle. Her words, as usual when she was mad, were a strange mix of her original Geronese Midraeic and heavily-accented Ainjir curses, impressive enough he saw the boys pale in fury as they fruitlessly attempted to rally against her. She cracked their weak twigs with thundering blows of her branch; elbows, knees, and wide swings brutally punishing any who tried to get close enough to hit her. Their own blows seemed only to turn against them; one grabbed a fistful of her flowing hair only for her to use his grip to pull him close enough that she could ram her knee into his ribs, the cracking nearly audible. She called their mothers pigs who had birthed dogs who had dug them up like grubs to be sons, and nearly ended the harvesting season for one by kicking him to the ground and stomping hard on his forearm as she bellowed in Geronese that his father’s cock shot pus instead of sperm, and that was how so useless a creature came to infect the earth.
They fled. Quite rightly. While they still could. And as they fled, she spun herself full round and flung the branch at them like a spear, noises of pure rage coming from her throat.
So, yes, Dominicus stayed the fuck on the ground.
Spitting after them she turned and knelt over him, wiping tousled hair from the sweat on her face. He peeked an eye open, and she smiled.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded. He didn’t want to nod, not really – everything hurt and he would be covered in bruises and it was embarrassing...
He had been rescued by his sister. Granted, his sister whose rage could make atheists beg for God to save them, but still – his sister.
It wasn’t like he had never taken a beating before, never lost a fight or been taunted by the Ainjir boys... but never had all of them happened at once. He sniffed and rubbed his nose and nodded that he was all right again. She helped him up.
He sniffed again, holding back tears, and she finally glanced up to meet his eyes. He tried not to show how angry he was, but he knew it would work. He looked away.
She brought her hands up and held his chin, wiping away the few foolish tears that had shown.
“You can learn from everything, little brother.” She frowned at him, eyes going hard momentarily, “Things you can’t learn from books. Like what women know and how they learn it.”
He flinched and she softened her gaze.
“And why your little sisters ask you to walk to town with them. And why they won’t make you go if you don’t want to.”
Mercifully, she released him to hang his shamed face towards the ground. She ruffled his hair, putting his hand in hers as they turned back towards home.
“And how to go do something you don’t want to do, but must. That when you must do something, you might as well do it well. That one of the things you must do is learn from everything, or you die. Luckily, there’s learning in everything, little brother, and thus, beauty.”