“Her?” asked Bee quietly.
“She was hideous. A monster.”
I kept eating, because I had to eat to be able to listen without screaming at him.
“Hideous?” asked Bee in a tone both high and strained. “What ever can you mean?”
“She was a soldier, one of Camjiata’s Amazons. A terrible, brawny woman with uncouth manners. She had injuries—terrible injuries. Her left leg was damaged, so she limped everywhere and supported herself on a cane. I suppose it must have bothered her, who was once strong enough to march from the Mediterranean basin to the Baltic Ice Sea. Her left arm ended at the elbow in a stump with a flap of skin sewn together. Blown off by artillery, so she told us. She joked about it! I cannot even bear to repeat the japes she made. The left side of her face was mangled. Her eye was missing, scarred shut. Burn marks and scars down her cheek and jaw. And yet she would stop and stare at herself in every mirror she passed. She had no sense at all of what was appropriate.”
I kept eating, one spoonful at a time. I remembered how strong her arm was, and how I always thought that she smelled as I supposed a soldier would: determined, a little sweaty, and fierce in a way that had always comforted me. That, and her words of warning. That was my mother.
“I could scarcely manage to look at her, and yet Daniel treated her as if she were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”
“Maybe because he loved her,” said Bee.
“Oh, I am sure he did. He liked sentiment. He loved nothing more than looking noble.”
I choked on a lump of soggy carrot.
“Did she love him?” Bee asked in a toneless voice.
“A good question! Camjiata’s Amazons were required to be celibate. Absolute fidelity to the general. So when she turned up pregnant, she was arrested and imprisoned. The penalty was that she should remain in prison until the child was born. Then she would be executed and the child raised in an orphanage or, if it was healthy and comely, fostered out.”
Trembling, I set down my spoon.
“Daniel was in Lutetia during the big council called by the general to write that radical civil code he meant to impose on Europa. She must somehow have gotten a message to him, asking for help. She knew him from that cursed ice expedition. And from before as well.”
“From before when?” Bee asked.
“They first met when they were young, before she went into the army, before Camjiata was a general, when he was just Captain Leonnorios Aemilius Keita fighting in a war between feuding princes.”
How was it I had never heard this tale?
“I think that’s why she begged Daniel for help, because of the history they shared. Tilly said Tara adored Daniel. I never saw it myself. Perhaps the bards and jellies would sing of it and call it love, if love is a tragedy.”
“It’s djeli,” I said. “I wish you people would use the word correctly.”
“You just said you could scarcely bear to look at her, Papa,” said Bee, more softly than before. She glanced at me. “So maybe you did not see what you did not want to see.”
“I am not a sentimentalist. Does it matter, anyway? Only to Daniel, who almost destroyed the family by agreeing to help her. He took her to the Hassi Barahal house in Havery first, you know, right after she gave birth to Catherine. They made him bring her to Adurnam, because it was farther from the front lines. Camjiata’s war had by then engulfed Europa. It was dangerous to shelter a deserter. Either Camjiata’s agents would get wind of it and come to fetch her back for trial and hurt some of us in the process, or the authorities would get wind of her presence and accuse the family of spying.”
“But we are spies,” said Bee. “The Hassi Barahals have always been spies.”
“We are not spies. We began as travelers. Like all of our people, we had to make a living, so we became merchants in the field we knew best—that of gathering information and passing it on. To be accused of harboring a spy is very different in the eyes of the authorities. It makes it look as if we have taken sides.”
I picked up the spoon with a trembling hand. I hadn’t finished my soup yet. I had to finish my soup.
“Aren’t we supposed to take sides in such a case,” demanded Bee, “by supporting your family no matter what?”
“Tara Bell was not our kin! The child she gave birth to was not even Daniel’s child! He admitted as much, for you can see Catherine looks nothing like us!”
I raised my eyes to his face, and he looked away. I stared at his face, so familiar and even in its way beloved; he was the man who had taught me how to read. He was not a particularly affectionate man, but I had always thought him a good one: loyal, hardworking, funny at times, faithfully devoted to the Hassi Barahals.