HAYNTA-3
All of the stories Mrs. Camden told had a shining sweetness to them that soothed the ever-present anger within me. Not a cloying sweetness, or insipid sentimentality, but a warming, tingling, liqueur that stayed with me, gladdening my heart for hours or days after hearing them. Her characters were noble, her plots were simple, and best of all, her stories didn’t have a point, a message, or a moral.
One of my favorites was the one about Queen Fiona and the scullery maid. It went a little something like this (though of course Mrs. Camden told it with much more flair and in much greater detail): The king of Osbondia, Tulpo the Great, died before he was old, leaving the kingdom in the hands of his daughter Fiona, who at the time was quite young. This worried some of his erstwhile advisers—his loyal ones—because they thought that she was too young. She wasn’t ready, they feared, to be queen; she would be out of her depth, and the kingdom would suffer because of this. Others—his not-so-loyal advisers—looked forward to her reign. She would be easy to manipulate, they thought. They could become her puppet masters, or, if and when she proved incapable of ruling, they could seize power without an outcry from the populace. To the respective surprise and disappointment of all, however, she proved quite a capable leader, and the kingdom thrummed along just fine and thank you very much.
One of the qualities that made her a good leader was that she could make a quick and accurate assessment of a situation; so she had, of course, known about both camps of her father’s advisers, the doubters and the plotters; and perhaps in part because of this, she felt a little alone in her own palace, and the natural proclivity she had displayed as a child to a quiet reserv-edness that could often be taken as sullen aloofness, became more pronounced when she was queen.
She refused to cloister herself in the royal chambers, however. She found comfort and pleasure in the bright open spaces of the palace and grounds—the gardens, the terraces, the great tapestried halls—and she wasn’t particularly fond of sitting around. Early in her reign, she took to taking walks, all about the palace and the palace grounds, and sometimes, to the great discomfiture of her advisers, even into the city proper. Though she would hear petitions from citizens and meet with visiting dignitaries and foreign diplomats in the palace stateroom, she would often have “walking meetings” with her advisers. She would ramble here, there, anywhere, nowhere, and everywhere—wherever her mood led her—while they, the advisers, less accustomed to invigoration than she was, “indeed, with more the disposition to huddle over their workdesks,” to quote Mrs. Camden, huffed and puffed along behind her, briefing her “about whatever things advisers brief queens about.” The activity, she said, sharpened her mind.
Walking as often as she did, it was not uncommon for her to cross paths with, or at least to walk past, the vast majority of the servants and employed workers of the castle; and because of the aloofness of her bearing, along with the predictable accompanying fact that she wasn’t one to give away many friendly smiles, most if not all of these workers were afraid of her. She seemed, they thought, to be looking about and at them with general disapprobation. To allay any anger or disapproval she might be about to give vent to, and just because it was the kind of behavior expected of servants in the presence of queens, they were all sure to bow or take a knee, or both, or give some alternative sign of fealty whenever she went by. The kitchen workers, the gardeners, and the stablemen all had one worker on staff whose sole job was to keep an eye out for her, so that when she came by, they wouldn’t be caught off guard. They didn’t want to find out what might happen to them if they didn’t offer her the proper homage.
The scullery maid, one Ehonne, a durable and strong, but, as Mrs. Camden put it, very diminutive worker, having been honed of all excess by years of being the lowest of the servants and therefore the one with the most to do, was not taken to notice when the queen or anyone else happened by, for the simple reason that she was working too hard to look up from what she was doing. If she had thought about the matter, she would have said “in a voice uncouth and yet matter-of-fact, as those of scullery workers are wont to be,” as Mrs. Camden put it, “It don’t make no sense to stop and curtsey or what have you. I’m workin’ for her, and if I’m gonna always be stoppin’, I’m not gonna get any work done for her. That’s just plum dumb.” But she was too busy doing her work even to think about it.
Most of the time, Ehonne’s ignorance of etiquette, or, if you prefer, diligent service to the royal house, offered itself up for no repercussions, because she was likely to be back in the scullery slaving away unseen when the queen came by. However, one day she happened to be scrubbing the floor of the corridor that connected the back of the kitchen to a stairway that led to the royal wing, when the queen and a couple of her advisers came down the stairway deep in conversation. While the other members of the kitchen staff gave their homage on bended knees with bowed heads, Ehonne kept scrubbing away. The queen and her advisers waited some moments for her to move, one of the advisers even making bold to clear his throat a time or two as they waited, but Ehonne took no notice of them, and at length they had to sidle past her.
A couple of days later, the queen came through the kitchen area again, this time accompanied by just one of her advisers, an ambitious and sour fellow who had been among the group who had hoped to take advantage of Fiona’s predicted incompetence but who now offered grudging admittance that she was ruling well. All of the workers, of course, took a knee and bowed their heads, but Fiona appeared dissatisfied. She asked one of the workers, a cook, “Where is that scullery maid who was scrubbing the floor the other day?” The cook, scared witless, tied herself in knots with various bows and curtsies and “your majesties,” and looked with nervous propriety at the adviser, who told the queen that she had been put out for her insolence.
“Put out?” The queen said, “What do you mean by that?”
“Expelled from the palace,” the advisor revealed, with just the right combination of righteousness, smugness, and obsequiousness.
It happened at this point to be the middle of the winter, and a very nasty winter at that, and Fiona said nothing, just stared at the adviser in disapprobation, or what the cook later would describe as such to her co-workers, and then departed. Nobody saw her leave the palace, but a stableman later claimed to have seen her saddling her charger, Grimgrim; whether he saw her or not, it was true that she did saddle Grimgrim that icy night and then rode out into the town searching for Ehonne, whom she found just before dawn huddled in a culvert, freezing and near death. Fiona managed to get her up on Grimgrim, and supporting her there herself, carried her back to the castle, where after a couple days of recovery, she was returned to her duties as scullery maid.
And that was all there was to it: if somebody else had been telling the story, Fiona would have been a haughty young princess who learned humility from her dealings with her childhood friend, Ehonne, or something like that. Even as it was, the class was expecting Ehonne to get revenge on the adviser, or at least for him to get his comeuppance in some humiliating fashion, perhaps for the queen and the scullery maid to become friends, or at the very least for Ehonne to become a member of the court. But Ehonne returning to her duties as scullery maid was the end of the story: and I loved it for that.
My favorite of Mrs. Camden’s stories, however, was the one about the boy who crossed the Norgold Mountains in winter, to bring the fabled molgrehu snail, the slime of which is a panacea, back from the Islands of Summer to save a dying child.
The northerners have a saying, “to die in the Norgold Mountains,” to describe a noble undertaking that has no chance of success. It’s a saying because crossing the Norgold Mountains is a near-impossible undertaking. It has, reportedly, been done a handful of times, but thousands have tried, and failed—during the summer. Anybody from north of Star City listening to a story about daring the Norgold Mountains would know that to attempt a crossing in the winter would be suicide and that to suggest that it could be done would be pure nonsense. So when Mrs. Camden told the story of this boy, Innikno, heading up into the mountains, a solitary dark speck, as she described him, if you were to see him from a distance, threading a winding path up a monstrous white hulk, an impossible vastness, in the dead of winter, you almost had to know he was going to make it. I mean, if he were going to die, you wouldn’t have to add in the part about it being winter; adding that changes things. It makes it so that if he doesn’t make it, it wouldn’t fit.
But, as she told the story, and it came alive in the rolling cadence of her wonderful voice, as calm and sparkling as a summer river, and I could see this boy in vivid clarity as he trudged through the unending snow, sleeping now and again with woolly goats, devouring twigs, bark, and scraps of sparse vegetation, and battling ever and ever onward, his eyes determined, and hopeful, compassionate, and lonely, I wasn’t sure if he would make it. It was so vivid, so real, I wasn’t sure what might happen; stories you can predict, real life you can’t.
I was rooting for him; I wanted him to make it, I didn’t want him to die in the Norgold Mountains, I willed him with all my strength to come to the Islands of Summer on the far side of the mountain, find the molgrehu, and bring it back to save the little girl; but as Mrs. Camden told the story, I was afraid he wasn’t going to. I hung on her every word, my heart beating for this noble boy, and found when she had finished the story that I was relieved he had survived.
Mrs. Camden’s class was an oasis, for me. It gave me something to look forward to, even if it was just a couple of hours every couple of days. It was something to enjoy, something to give savor to life besides going to sleep in the hopes of an exciting dream.
And I wanted to say something to her. I wanted to thank her for being such a great teacher, or something like that (I couldn’t decide, or maybe even articulate, exactly what I wanted to say); and I started staying in my seat after class until the rest of the students had filed out, with a plan to speak to her alone. But every time, once everybody had gone and she and I were alone in the silent classroom, I would get shy and follow everybody else out, embarrassed, hoping that it seemed to Mrs. Camden as if I’d just been slow gathering up my books.
After quite a number of these false attempts, however, I worked up the nerve to approach her: One day, after a memorable day-four class that had left me giddy with the liqueur of stories—it was, in fact, the day she told the tale of the boy who crossed the Norgold Mountains in winter, which had initiated a string of solid student stories—I stood up with the rest of the class when Mrs. Camden dismissed us, but this time instead of taking me to the door in the vortex flow of the class’s mass departure, my feet carried me up to Mrs. Camden’s desk, where I waited, heart pounding, hands like clubs, in all my awkward glory.
All of the classrooms at Clarks Hill had high, beamed, ceilings, along with windows that were too far from the ground to provide a view of the outside world (other than squares of sky), but which because they were on two sides of the rooms, and because the walls slanted inward near the ceiling, lighted the rooms with surprising effectiveness morning, mid-day, and evening with dusty crisscrossing light; and now, as I stood before Mrs. Camden, ready to bolt should she display the slightest displeasure, early evening sun slid in slants from high windows, drawing out, or enhancing, the smell of the old wood of the beams, floor, desks, and door.
She noticed me at once, and pulled off her spectacles to regard me, which was a little disconcerting because while she looked silly and harmless wearing those glasses that magnified and crossed her eyes so, without them she seemed shrewder (though still friendly, and kind), and not quite so old and dowdy.
She waited for me to speak, though not in an impatient or put-out way—not as if I was imposing on her or holding her up or anything like that.
“I love your class,” I blurted, with no voice control because of my nervousness. “Thanks for being such a good teacher.” I was almost yelling.
I don’t think I expected her to mock me. In fact, I knew she wouldn’t; I knew she would be nice and pleasant. I was suddenly afraid she would be distantly polite, though, which, I thought, would somehow be worse. Standing there, I felt awkward and ridiculous, and I blushed crimson. Or so it felt: I could feel my ears and even my neck and cheeks burning red, and I was about to rush out of the room. I waited just a tick, though, watching her, perhaps something in her demeanor holding me in place, and I was rewarded by the expression that spread across her face.
My eldest brother, Doppin, fourteen years my senior, was my mother’s favorite. The two of them had a special bond. It wasn’t as if she was always complimenting him at the expense of his siblings, or giving him preferential treatment, or that she favored him in any overt way; nor did he go around saying, “My mother is the best,” or anything like that. I’m sure that outsiders, that is, non-family members, had no idea that he was her favorite; but if you lived in the house with the two of them, you knew. My other siblings and I, knew. I can’t even say how exactly we knew; I couldn’t have pointed out any specific actions that revealed their closeness, such as exchanges of glances, or inward smiles, even; it was a thing too subtle to be apprehended with conscious observation. The knowledge of it crept into our consciousness unnoticed until it was there—we just knew.
When Doppin came into his manhood, he moved away and lived by himself outside of town in a little cabin at the foot of Rafayaf Hill, where he made a living tending potatoes and mending fences. For a long time, he lived alone, in no hurry to take the wife he was expected by custom to have. He seemed quite content to me and to my father and siblings, but it was different for my mother. To say that she thought him sad or lonely, and that she was sad because of this would be an oversimplification; but it was something in the neighborhood of that, or at least it seemed so to me.
When at long last he brought a bride, or future bride, home to visit us, I in the incompleteness of my understanding of the relationship between my mother and my brother, thought my mother would either regard the young woman with suspicion and judgment—as some complicated amalgamation of rival and person who could hurt her beloved boy—or that she would be shy with her, as oftentimes two individuals who don’t know each other but are both close to a third are when they meet. Instead, upon first setting eyes on Doppin’s bride, my mother looked at her with an indescribable expression, not of love as for a daughter or even a close friend, but something in the same category of feeling, but unique, a shared-ness of some sort, for sure.
Something akin to this look came into Mrs. Camden’s face when I blurted out my generous assessment of her teaching skills. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar enough that the one reminded me of the other. Seeing the look on Mrs. Camden’s face, I remembered the look (and hug) my mother had given my brother’s bride. It made me feel as if I’d given Mrs. Camden something—something magnificent, not just a little compliment—and this was a wonderful feeling: My nose got hot, and my bowels felt like they were filled with light.
“Thank you, Haynta.”
“I liked the Norgold Mountains one.”
She smiled. It was just a regular ol’ smile this time, but it was unique. It was unique because it was just a regular ol’ smile. It wasn’t patronizing or indulging at all, as a superior, or anyone who thought themselves superior, or more mature, than you would give you, or as any of the other teachers at Clarks Hill would have given me. It was just the smile one soul gives another. “I like that one, too.”