10. Winter Is Bad and Time Passes

10. Winter Is Bad and Time Passes

All the dwellings of Grey had been on summer rations before the seasons collapsed on each other. The bounty of spring had already faded when winter came unannounced, and the fields and orchards were not ready for harvest, and in fact were in danger of being frozen away. Most of the fruit trees had been dead for years, and the snow was likely to finish off the remaining few. In Grey House, the women and girls continued for a good while yet, and all the people who made signs at them to avert ill fortune came crawling up the great steps to beg.

Pell had never seen most of them before. Though the cloisters of Grey spread wide around the tower, its population had always been small and scattered, requiring the services of the women for only two events in their lives, and when tithe-tide came every three months the same three representatives had always arrived to deposit their offerings of grain, fruit, and fodder.

Ginkgo LXXVII, steward of the south cloisters of Grey, was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a puff of yellow hair where a bird or two nested. Before, she had brought sacks of wheat and barley and bundles of herbs and given them with quiet haughtiness. Now she was thin and concerned, and around her huddled a dozen withered people with the stooped backs of that region's farm laborers, like chicks around a hen.

Oak LXXIV, steward of the north cloisters of Grey, was a little man in lace. His ears rose up in feathery pink points over his head, though now they were bundled up in a large scarf printed all over with elephants. Before, he had brought bales of hay and cords of firewood, and given them with many speeches and thanks, as if Yarrow and Arnica were Ladies of Grey Tower and not merely two old women who handled life and death. Now he was sallow and silent, and behind him in a short line were husky northerners.

There was a space between Ginkgo and Oak wide enough for another retinue, which they maintained in memory of the west cloisters. Nobody had lived in the west cloisters since the Bellflower Era.

Madrona LXXV, steward of the east cloisters of Grey, was an otter-furred person of middling height in a brown robe. As warden of the East Passage, they kept watch on the bridge and any trade flowing between Grey and the courts of Red and Blue. There was precious little of it, and Madrona's people depended on the other Grey districts as much as the house itself did. They brought a chipped dish of antique design, which even Pell could see meant that nothing had crossed the bridge in months.

Yarrow and Arnica received them in the great hall of Grey House. Yarrow explained to Pell that this was meant to reinforce the authority of the house over its satellites: though the women in grey were only the last tattered remnants of a vibrant, sacred court, they were still the legal successors to the Ladies. She (Yarrow) had long suspected the outlying cloisters of tithing their second-best to the house, and she knew for certain they were not providing the proper complement of children for the women in grey; she wanted to remind them that they existed on the house's sufferance, not vice versa. Pell approved.

Despite Yarrow's grand plan, custom forbade her or Arnica's use of the Lady's throne, which rose atop a dais of many steps, and all that sat enthroned there was dust. The chair itself was too large for a normal behind. When the Ladies had stopped being quite so large, a much smaller chair had been set up on the throne, reached by a flight of stone stairs, but even that chair and those steps were coated in dust, for the Ladies of Grey were no more.

Both women seated themselves on the second-lowest tier of the dais, and Pell sat at their feet. Light sifted down through the holes in the roof. Snow lay here and there, collected among the flagstones or piled up in corners by the drafts. Though the hall was ruinous and very cold, it was still impressive. The grandeur was a bit undercut when the outer court people arrived and the wind roared in through the open door, rustling the shredded tapestries and pulling one of them down entirely. But when the door was shut, the hall was full of awesome majesty once more, and since the women took no notice of the mishap, Pell would not either.

"Speak your piece and begone," said Yarrow in a bored voice. This was not only hauteur: the Ladies and their successors had used this formula to open their audiences since time immemorial.

"If this winter holds any longer, we'll have no food," said Ginkgo. "The orchards may be lost already, and the barley won't survive much longer." Even the birds in her hair were sober as she spoke.

"The arrested growing season and cold weather will deplete our stores of wood," said Oak. "It has killed the new saplings from Blue, and in the proper order of things we cannot get more for another year."

"And this," said Ginkgo (the birds in her hair fluttered), "is leaving aside the problem we've spoken of to you before, Mother. The cloisters no longer produce even a tenth of what they used to."

"The very soil is sour," said Oak. "It began in my father's grandfather's day, and the Mothers did nothing. Now we are lucky to get one year of growth before the trees die."

"We know," said Arnica.

"It is why the western cloisters were abandoned," said Yarrow. "The women remember." Pell was very proud of the grand melancholy with which Yarrow said this.

"The women remember but do not act," said Ginkgo, her tone supplying the respect her words lacked. "More than the west was abandoned in my grandmother's day, and all the women did was make a song."

"Grey cannot continue like this, Mother," said Oak, his tone supplying the disrespect his words lacked. "If the women refuse—"

Yarrow sat upright, the prickles on her hands standing at attention. Her eyes met Oak's. He was silent but defiant.

"We must appeal to Black Tower," said Madrona. "I've no doubt this is punishment."

"Perhaps we have been Ladyless too long," said Ginkgo.

"If that is the crime, then it took them a hundred summers to realize it," said Oak. (He was wrong, of course; the songs of Grey House told the real number, which was far greater.)

"Then it must be something else," said Madrona. "This wouldn't happen for no reason."

"We will not appeal to Black Tower," said Yarrow. Arnica sniffed derisively at the same time. "Grey has done nothing wrong, and I think it's likely this is the result of other courts' infighting."

"So we'll suffer for a crime we did not commit," said Ginkgo.

"The lot of Grey is to bear," said Yarrow. The spines on her hands and the back of her neck were stiff with dignity. "The lot of Black is to rule, the lot of Blue is to make, the lot of Yellow is to take, the lot of Red is to see and send, but beneath all these is Grey, the bedrock of the palace. And the bedrock does not say to the foot, ‘Why do you tread on me?'"

"We learned the catechism as well as you, Mother Yarrow," said Ginkgo. "But it will not make our children cry the less from hunger, and it will not put the more grain into our bushels."

"The winter will end soon, I am sure," said Yarrow.

"We've had two months and more," said Oak. "And no sign of spring to be seen, I'll add."

"And there is no guardian," said Ginkgo. "They say after Hawthorn died, her apprentice left. Where is he? Find him, Mother! Confirm him in her place!"

"Why?" said Yarrow coolly. Nobody from outside the house knew how much Yarrow and Arnica disliked the old guardian. After the talk at the tombs, she seemed willing to let the office lapse just to avoid the trouble of a new one. With how much the women and girls had to do even without all that, Pell couldn't blame her.

"The songs all say winter heralds the Beast," said Madrona. Everyone made the sign to avert evil.

"If that were true, it would have come every time the wheel's wobbled," said Yarrow. "If the guardian's apprentice has chosen to neglect his duty, I've no power to summon him back and make him do it."

"But this winter," said Oak. "If he has neglected his duty and ended his line, is that not a crime? Might that not bring punishment?"

"No," said Yarrow. "If that were so, it would have happened with the end of the tutors and of the doctors. Yet we know it did not, and they were more useful in their time than the guardians."

The audience was not going the way she wished. Who were these farmers to question the Mother? Pell could see Yarrow dearly wanted to make these people say their catechisms and go to bed without dinner. That was only right, and yet they wouldn't be here if something wasn't very wrong. But Yarrow had to know best. She and her forebears had steered Grey through worse things than an errant winter.

"If it lasts—" said Oak.

"No one season has ever lasted longer than the span of three," said Yarrow. "Except when the Ladies took it into their heads to punish, and Grey has done nothing. Perhaps they wish to favor a different tower with a longer summer, but even then, such a gift must end soon, before it becomes a punishment in its turn. The wheel will move, and winter will end, and you will all feel foolish for your fear and panic. Go. To the glory of the Lady."

There was nothing more for the others to say, not if they wished their young born and their dead buried, so they took their leave. A swirl of snow followed them out the door. With brow knotted, Yarrow rose stiffly from her place and dusted her bum.

"I almost believed you myself," said Arnica.

"Damn this winter," Yarrow said, stretching backward. Her spine went pop pop pop like a set of knuckles. "Fuck it South and North."

Cursing! In the hall? Pell stifled a noise of disapproval. Arnica seemed to hear it anyway and gave her a crabbed grin and a wink.

"What's to do about it?" said Arnica.

"Pell, take the other two and make a full inventory of larder and granary." Yarrow bent forward, and her spine made the same popping noises in reverse. "Servant will have the keys. Bring me the tallies and we'll go over them. If there's extra, as I'm sure there's not, we'll send it to the outer cloisters with our compliments."

It was on the tip of Pell's tongue to ask about the sour soil. Nobody had mentioned it in her hearing before. But then, the business of the women was birth and death. They would only act if extraordinary circumstances required it. Since they hadn't acted in this matter, nothing must be required of them. Anyway, Yarrow was always a little touchy after tithe-tide. How much touchier she'd be after this mess!

The girls spent the rest of the day following Yarrow's orders. A surprising amount of food lay hidden in the recesses of the larder, though some of it was so old that Ban was certain nobody could eat it and live. Past the shelves of fresher fare they found jars of figs preserved in honey, olives in brine, cheese in waxed wrappings, heels of bread, sacks of nuts and dried fruit, crock after crock of pickles. There were also several small dusty miracles: crimson bread on a silver plate, a jug with a mouse running endless circles inside it, a little wooden bee. Ban tried to pick up the bread, but it screamed and writhed and bled, so they left it and the other miracles alone.

The figs were still good—over Pell's protests, Grith opened one jar "to try some" and wound up eating the contents with Ban's help—and they had some hope of the olives; but the cheese had shrunk to wrinkled, moldy disks; the bread was of course wholly inedible; and while the nuts and fruit seemed all right, the pickles were of such a vintage that, when opened, the air itself turned to noxious vinegar. Ban found a small crock half-full of meat preserved in honey, but none of them could read the label, and the bits of meat were too small and few to be useful. So the larder did not come out very well, all things considered. But in the granary, they had enough sacks of meal and unmilled grain to last Grey House through nearly a year.

Yarrow had them pack up food (more than Pell expected her to give away) and load it onto Monkshood's little fish-drawn cart. The old man drove it off through the long white afternoon, and the women and girls went back to their lives.

Winter or no, there was much to be done around Grey House. Some rooms were cleaned for convenience's sake, others for tradition's. The Lady's Bedchamber, for example, must be swept once every seven days and the chamber pots ritualistically emptied out of the window. They never contained anything but dust and the occasional spider. One of them had been broken in ages past and replaced by a dented copper pot; Yarrow always said it was the action that mattered.

The bed in the chamber was huge, as big as a room all its own, but its deep, soft mattresses and quilts were sagging and rotten, and the silvery hangings faded and moth-eaten. Forty could have slept in the bed; in the old days, they did so for warmth, with the women clustered around the great Lady like kittens around their mother. But nobody slept there now. Every night, Arnica closed the bedcurtains, humming the minor-key tune of The Lullaby of Reeds. Every morning, Yarrow mounted the stairs and opened the bedcurtains, saying in a desultory voice, "Wake, Lady, and look."

This room was at the top of one of Grey House's turrets, and its three windows faced north across the cloisters' slate roofs to Black Tower. Pell would always take a moment from her sweeping and lean on the windowsill, her eyes fixed on the dark thorny mass from whence all power in the palace flowed. Its huge buttresses, its arched windows like yawning mouths, its banners and its intricate spires, its crown lost in mist, all frightened her. But generations of Ladies and their handmaidens and children had worn the sills down until they were soft as silk; initials were carved in corners or pilasters, in writing so old that even if Pell could read, she wouldn't understand them. All that history was a great comfort. If her tower was the heart of the palace, Grey House was the heart of the tower, and the Bedchamber was the heart of the house.

If she wasn't cleaning the Bedchamber, Pell was helping clean the rooms they did use: the kitchen, the southern side-hall, the dormitory and schoolroom, the Mother's study, and the long upper hall. Other rooms were half-kept up, like the southern turret chamber where every nine days Arnica went to the window and looked for a flag to be raised over Yellow. There never was a flag, and Arnica didn't know why she had to look for one, but look she did, and so there must be a path for her to walk. On either side of her path was the debris of years that filled most of the house. There were miracles and spinning wheels and old chests and broken statuary. Some of these things had names all their own, as if they were important once, like the Serpentine Girl whose hair held flowers. None of that meant anything now to the life of the house. Sometimes Yarrow would take it into her head to set some disused room or other in order, and she, Arnica, the girls, and Servant would tie cloths over their mouths and rummage through the dust and cobwebs, poking any miracles they found with the leg of a chair to be sure they were dead. None of these attempts lasted beyond a day: not even Yarrow relished dealing with all the pleading spiders, or the miracles that could make your eyes bleed, or the choking dust. Anyway, nothing could be gotten rid of: it was all sacred for some reason or other.

On fine days, Pell and Ban had to work in the garden, tucked in a courtyard beside the house. That was generally pleasant, though sometimes things crawled out of the ground. It was up to Ban to smash those between two rocks, and there were more and more as the days went on—though no rats, thankfully.

When there were no chores, there were lessons. The three girls sat together at a desk in the long, empty schoolroom while Yarrow or Arnica drilled them in lore, herbs, body parts. There were books in the schoolroom, but the women in grey had never written down their trade, and so Pell and the others never learned what the mildewy pages contained. The women possessed ancient arts of memory—taught to them, it was said, by the Lady herself. You had to make a place in yourself for knowledge, a little palace, and populate it with striking images. To remember the use of arnica, you might think of a person beaten black and blue, and from their bruises grew the tiny yellow flowers of that herb. The litanies helped; you would sing them to yourself as you walked the corridors of the palace in your memory. Some things, like slabroom lore, were striking enough on their own that Pell didn't need to add them to her memory so carefully, but she did it anyway, and the rooms of her mind were soon lined with bright caskets full of bodies. You would get a rap on the knuckles for poor memorization, but if you did particularly well, Arnica might give you a bit of candied angelica. Ban was best at sums, and Grith was best at herbs, but Pell was best at anatomy and recitation.

After lessons ended at noon, the other girls had a few free hours. Pell, however, was taken to the slabroom for more instruction. Yarrow had marked her out as a successor, which was a great honor, but Pell found she missed playtime with Grith and Ban. Though they were no longer small children, they still had games to play in the vast rooms of Grey House: hide-and-seek in the Gallery of Images, tag in the courtyards, featherball in the upper hall. Now Pell was to be a woman sooner than the others, and must leave games behind.

In place of the games, Yarrow would sometimes tell Pell things about the house's past. The court had been more populous when Yarrow was a small child. There was no Lady even then, but the women in grey had numbered a full score, and the girls twice that. There had still been tutors in Grey House, and a chamberlain—small and mean though he was—and a butler, and even a doctor, who was pleased to take a glass of honey wine with Yarrow's predecessor of an evening.

It was not all dull. The more Pell learned about the passages and chambers of the body, the more she wanted to know, and Yarrow was pleased to teach her—as pleased as Yarrow ever was about anything. For most of her life, Pell had thought Yarrow was strict and parsimonious simply because adults needed to be strict. Now she began to realize that Yarrow truly loved Grey Tower, and under her stern outside, the woman felt a child's unreasoning fear of the court crumbling away entirely. Rules were the means to shore up her home: even if Yarrow broke them herself, she would ensure the next generation followed them to the letter. Teaching the function of the gallbladder or the proper song for a dead tutor made Yarrow a little less afraid for the future, and so Pell learned it.

About six weeks into winter, lessons came to an abrupt end when Yarrow slipped on some ice in the courtyard. Inside the kitchen, the girls heard the whump and the scream, and they raced out. Yarrow had fallen against the fountain, striking her spine right in its center then sliding heavily to the ground. Between the girls and the stricken woman was a smooth sheet of ice where they had spent a glorious hour sliding the day before. Now they had to cross it with tiny careful steps, waving their arms like dolls held in a careless hand, and meanwhile Yarrow lay just ahead of them and moaned and cried.

Pell told Grith and Ban not to move Yarrow. She sent Grith to find Arnica and took her own cloak off to cover Yarrow. Ban did so as well. Yarrow cursed volubly.

After half an hour Grith and Arnica returned, moving with the same ridiculous gait across the ice. Arnica felt about on Yarrow's body and looked very grave.

"Get Monkshood and his barrow," she said, and Grith set off again across the ice.

"Doesn't look good, does it," said Yarrow through gritted teeth.

"Bout as bad as ever I've seen," said Arnica.

"I'm sorry," said Yarrow.

"Not sorrier than I," said Arnica.

It seemed hours before Monkshood and Grith returned, pushing the wheelbarrow before them.

"It's sorry I am, so so sorry," said Monkshood. "It's only that it wanted cleaning out first, it being full of dry leaves—Mother."

"We'll slide a cloak under her," said Arnica. "Two, more like. Then we'll each take a corner and heave-ho into the barrow and get her up the stairs. Yarrow, it'll hurt like fuckall."

Yarrow nodded, her face very red with two tiny tears frosted over in the corners of her eyes.

Getting Yarrow into the wheelbarrow was no easy task: she was by far the tallest person in the house, and her lower half was limp. She screamed and cried whenever they touched her, which was very horrible and pitiful to hear. But at last they succeeded, though her calves dangled out the front, and push-pulled her carefully over the ice, up the stairs, and into her own bed. Arnica left to get a dose of poppy for her, while the girls and Monkshood lined up against the wall, uncertain what to do.

"Everyone out," said Yarrow, her voice now low and hoarse. "Except you, Pell."

They obeyed quickly and with an obvious sense of relief.

"Come here," said Yarrow. Her hands resting on the thick coverlet were still and pale; when she raised one to beckon, it fell back down again as if it weighed ten tons.

"What is it, Mother Yarrow?" said Pell. "Do you need anything?"

"There is no way this turns out well for me," said Yarrow. "I fear bleeding inside, and my spine slides around itself. Even if I live, I'll never be able to go about my duties."

Pell said nothing. She sensed something enormous on the horizon, and feared to speak lest it recede again, or worse, speed up.

"I am Yarrow LXXV," said Yarrow. "Before this winter ends, maybe even this week, you will be Yarrow LXXVI, Mother of Grey House."