16. Yarrow Becomes a Schoolmistress and Like All Teachers Is Taught by Her Pupils in Turn

The Last Schoolhouse was like Grey House, in that it was large, ruinous, and packed to the rafters with old, moldering furniture and a few broken miracles, but there all points of comparison ceased. Though the House looked like several chapels leaning on each other for support, it was a single structure built around one ancient core. The Schoolhouse was more like a district: a set of courtyards, corridors, and rooms in the warren around Yellow Tower. Jasper was mostly uncommunicative about the place's history, but it seemed to have been chartered by a Lady of the Bellflower Era to provide schooling for children along the rim. Despite being very jealous of the privileges attached to it, Jasper did not seem to know much, and resented his own lack of knowledge when questioned, so Yarrow learned before noon the next day that if she wanted to learn something, she had to find it out for herself.

She slept in an attic over the schoolroom. At one end was the door she came and went by. At the other was a door that Jasper waspishly told her never to open. A clean path through the dust showed that someone regularly used that door, but he did not comment and she did not ask. The raftered ceiling tilted up from the floor to a sharp peak, and one side of it was crowded with dormer windows. Shrouded furniture filled about half of it. The rest was all odds and ends: old dishes, discarded clothes, miracles. Yarrow's bed was an old sofa, made as comfortable as possible with a pile of tattered robes. From it, she could see out the windows to the blade of Yellow Tower, which was unfortunate, but there was nowhere else to move the bed, and Jasper said there were no other rooms.

At night, greenish lights came and went in the windows of Yellow Tower. No warm candlelight or lamplight or firelight, just a wavering, sickly glow that passed along the windows as if something inside were moving in ceaseless circles. Yarrow had to put a robe over her head to shut out the sight. She slept poorly, with poor dreams, but awoke somehow refreshed (if a bit cloth-tongued and aching).

She had eaten gruel and milk in the kitchen the night before, so she knew her way there. It was staffed by three reddish apes with huge purple faces, and though they knew where all the utensils and cookware were, they had no idea how to cook porridge. It was a pity that this whole time, Jasper and his scholars had been putting up with burnt slop every morning. She showed them how to do it better, and they were fast learners.

Jasper's egg had been put in a wire casket with dozens of others just like it. She boiled these until the yolks were soft but set, and put them in egg cups for the table. The table itself was a crusty mess, and she and the smallest ape spent nearly half an hour scrubbing it until it shone.

The breakfast parlor was a large room with white plaster walls. Down the center was the plain, rough wooden table, now damp from washing. Morning light came through large windows facing a flowering courtyard. Yarrow was surprised her first morning in Yellow had passed so pleasantly. Then she rang the gong for the meal.

Within moments, the parlor filled with chattering apes. They fought each other for food, splashed porridge on the table, threw eggs about. Jasper appeared a little later. Instead of stopping them, he joined in, wielding his staff to defend himself with one hand and slopping porridge into his mouth with the other. Yarrow clenched her fists and her jaw. Silently, she rose and went back to the kitchen, where she stood at a granite counter and ate her breakfast. To treat her this way—! As if she were Servant.

A little later the gong rang again. Shuffling feet passed the kitchen door, and Yarrow ran to see the apes filing in two long, porridgy lines down the hall to the schoolroom. Jasper followed, flicking bits of egg from his robe. He paused near the door to lay another egg, then moved on after his pupils. Sighing, Yarrow picked up the egg and put it in the cellar, then went to the schoolroom to see what was happening there.

"Ah, excellent," said Jasper when she entered. "Saves me the trouble of shouting for you. The apes will need their pens trimmed and inkwells refilled; please attend to that as needed. Otherwise, I will expect you to sit quietly on that stool in the corner."

That was no problem. Yarrow was used to being quiet and out of the way. Jasper went up and down the aisles, checking the apes' work. After a little while, he went to a large slate slab at the front of the room and wrote a great many words. The apes stopped what they were doing to watch. When he finished, as one they discarded the scrolls they had been writing, took up blank parchment, and started again. Over the shoulder of the ape nearest her, Yarrow saw that they were copying from the board.

Jasper sat at his own desk and promptly fell asleep. The smallest ape chittered, holding up its pen. Yarrow darted over to help. She had never trimmed a pen, but its end looked a bit bent and ragged, so she pared that part away. When the ape went back to writing, she stayed to watch.

After a moment, it looked up at her questioningly and pointed to a word. She shrugged. It pointed to another.

"I can't read," she said.

The ape chuffed with irritation and picked up the discarded parchment. On the blank back, it wrote a few signs and pointed to her.

"Me? You?" she said. "Yarrow?"

The ape nodded.

"Well, which is it?" said Yarrow. "Is it my name?"

The ape nodded more aggressively. It wrote a set of several small signs and pointed around the room. Book. Chair. Table. Robe . Yarrow tried to commit them to memory, but they were a little slippery and wouldn't quite stick. Impatiently, she drew out the guardian's book.

"Can you read this?" she said.

The ape was about to take it when the grass staff whisked down and slapped its wrist.

"No no no," said Jasper. "My apes must not be corrupted by outside knowledge. Their wisdom comes from within. Put that away."

The second day was much the same: messy breakfast, hours spent sitting in the schoolroom, talking to the apes when Jasper napped, remaining still and quiet when he was awake. Yarrow learned her own name, and a few important words like food and water, but she had so much trouble remembering anything more that she almost started crying. She had always been good at memorization. The songs were easy, the rituals more complicated but comforting: rhythmic, and always the same. But written words shifted shape, sometimes looking one way, sometimes another. Even food and water did not always look the same. The signs would jumble around and melt together. Perhaps that would go away with time. Perhaps not. Either way, she had more important things to do.

The third day, Jasper slept so long into the afternoon that the apes rose on their own and left the schoolroom (in two lines, always in two lines) and went out to the courtyard for playtime. Yarrow, for her part, tiptoed up to her attic and opened the other door. She needed time away from the apes and from taking orders, and the schoolmaster was not to forbid her everything . The door creaked alarmingly and she hesitated. What if Jasper had heard? But after a few moments of silence, she stepped over the threshold.

On the other side was a long gallery, all windows on one wall, all fresco on the other. Yellow Tower glared through each of the windows, so she turned her attention to the fresco. It was faded and flaking, but mostly intelligible. She soon realized it was a kind of map of the palace—or, if not a map, at least a representation of its districts. And the images it bore were of the same shocking, strange nature as those made in the art of memory.

Closest to the door was Red Tower with its light. A smudge of blue was the sea, which she had heard about, but had never seen, and neither had anyone in Grey. Around the tiers of Red fluttered bluish pigeons. Next to it, nearly as tall as itself, was a being she instantly knew for a Lady, hands upraised in warning or blessing, eyes shut in contemplation. The Lady wore crimson armor and a chestnut cloak striped with black. Her head rose in overlapping leaves and turrets and thorny vines, out of which birds came and went, or perched, preening and shitting. Beneath her feet was a pile of eggs.

A noise disturbed the silent room. Yarrow started, expecting Jasper, but the smallest ape stood there, and behind it several of the others. They entered, ignoring her, and went past her to the center of the wall where a greyish blot took up the heart of the fresco. Something went cold in Yarrow's stomach.

After Red Tower came Blue, rising from its courts of white-plastered walls, its azure dome floating like a smaller sky beneath the larger. Honeycreepers and swallows fed among the flowering vines on its flanks. And beside it was a Lady in a simple white shift over cerulean hose. Her head was a lapis turret, flecked with windows and warty with balconies. In one hand she held blobs of translucent blue. The faded paint was hard to grasp; perhaps they were frogs' eggs. Certainly the Lady, with another hand, was drawing forth something small and slimy from them. With a third hand, she was placing a little froggy creature in a balcony on her head. Several others were already peering from its windows or holding out their hands to feed birds.

So it was the Five Sisters. Yarrow held her hands together to stop a sudden tremble. How did they come to be painted here ? Now she knew she shouldn't look in the center. Custom, prohibition, tradition, all were against it.

A dull little click echoed in the room. The apes had seated themselves in a semicircle at the foot of the fresco, their eyes fixed on the grey bit. One of them was placidly scratching its nethers. As Yarrow watched, the smallest ape opened its mouth as wide as it could, then brought its teeth together in the same click as before. The others followed suit. Not taking their eyes from the fresco, they sat there and clicked their teeth, nearly in unison, and clicked again, and again.

She had to walk around them to reach the other side of the fresco. Yarrow averted her eyes as she passed. What lay in the middle of the painting was something she was not meant to see. The others, yes. Not this.

The Red and Blue Ladies had faced the door, with the towers to their left. Here, the Ladies of Yellow and Black faced the other direction, with the towers to their right. Presumably, Grey faced the viewer. Nothing would induce her to look.

The Lady of Yellow Tower wore a saffron gown and a high collar of greenish lace. She had a bird's head, which was all right—Ban was feathered, and there were people in the cloisters with beaks or bird's heads or wings. But her beak was biting into a person, whose struggling legs stuck out wildly. One hand held the person there lightly as if they were a delicacy. Another held a writing tablet, while a third wrote something upon it. The tower's white birds speckled her. All around the Lady were bones, broken eggshells, dirty platters with crumbs or rinds still upon them. She was the holiest thing Yarrow had ever seen.

The apes kept clicking and clicking. They groomed each other or themselves, or simply sat still, but their gaze did not stray from the center, from Grey. Yarrow wanted to scream.

Black Tower thrust upward from the slate roofs around it, like a spear aimed at the heart of heaven. She knew it well, its buttresses flying out to satellite towers, which in turn were buttressed by smaller ones. She knew its huge thorny spire and abyssal windows. She knew every pinnacle and clerestory.

The Lady of Black Tower was clothed in stag beetles. Her bodice was of woven snakeskins. Her seven ebony arms held the emblems of the other four towers, plus three unique to Black: the wheel, the apple, and the flail . Her head was like a complex of ruined walls, and fires burned in them, and sparrows flew about them. She was crowned with the moon, and beneath her feet was a disc of flaking gold leaf. She was very holy.

Yarrow stepped away to go back into the attic, but the smallest ape, unbeknownst to her, had come up beside her. It took her hand. She resisted, but it pulled her into the semicircle with awful strength, and she saw Grey Tower and the Grey Lady, because her eyes would not close and her head would not turn.

There should have been effigies around the foot of Grey. But there were none, and the tower looked young and fresh and new as it had not for centuries, for era upon era. The fresco had either been painted when the palace was built—which was not likely, since Yellow was far younger than Grey—or was a copy of a copy, like a memory of a song. The crows and yellow butterflies were there, swirling about the pale stones as they had for ages. And seated cross-legged at its base, where effigies now stood, was the Lady of Grey Tower.

Her dark robe was Yarrow's own, and so was her wimple. Two pale arms emerged from her sleeves and split into four wrists, each with its proper hand. Each hand held a mask: the guardians' green mask, the Mothers' blue slate mask, the yellow oaken mask of the doctors, and the red jasper mask of the tutors. Beneath her, the earth gaped in a great angry mouth, and a creature lay coiled within it, a creature of wings and tails and teeth, all its eyes closed, and a chain wrapped around its limbs. That chain ran up and up, and Yarrow, who had managed to avoid the Lady's face thus far, felt her gaze drawn along it, as it passed behind the guardian's mask and up to the holy head.

The Lady had no face. There was only a fall of loose ash-colored fabric from under the wimple, and the chain vanished under it. Upon the fabric was written the word that the ape had said was Yarrow's own name. Yarrow clicked her teeth.