Brin’s Barge

(Kara)

The barge smelled of turnips.

I want that on the record first, before any of the rest of it, because it is the truest thing about the happiest night of my life and I would not have it tidied away in the remembering: that we held my daughter’s eighteenth birthday on a flat-bottomed agricultural barge that spent its working life hauling root vegetables up and down the lake, and that no amount of scrubbing had got the turnips out of it, so that the whole evening went on in a faint honest fug of old swede and damp timber, and the food we’d brought sat in it, and the people sat in it, and nobody minded, because it was the barge we could afford and the lake was free and the evening was ours. You can have a thing be perfect or you can have it smell of turnips. It turns out, if you are lucky past your deserving, you can have both, and the turnips are part of how you know it’s real.

We were towed. That was the shape of the thing: a great wallowing flat barge with the whole party on it, and out in front a little rowboat on a long line, and in the rowboat one of Ron’s many friends taking a turn at the oars, pulling us slow and crooked up the lake into the long gold light of the evening. Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody was going anywhere. That was the entire point of it — to be out on the water with the people who mattered and let the city sit on its shore and mind itself for one night.

There was food for everyone. Not fancy. Bread and the cold meats and the good cheese and a quantity of small cakes that Della and Orla had been three days over, and more than enough of all of it, because the one extravagance I will always commit, the one sum I never run tight, is that no one leaves my table — or my barge — hungry. I have my reasons.

And there was the whole of it, everyone, gathered on the boards in the slanting light, and I stood at the rail for a while near the start and just looked at them, and counted them the way I count, and I will set them down because counting them is most of what the night was.

My own first. Ron, of course, easy in himself the way he is on water, more at home on a lake than he has ever quite been on land — there’s a thing in Ron that the water settles, and I have always known why, and tonight of all nights I knew it sharper than ever. The three of them: Brin, the birthday girl, eighteen tonight and lit up with it; Ged, sixteen and a head taller than last year and showing off for the girl he’d brought; Dilly, fourteen, watching the whole party the way she watches everything, from a half-step outside it, reading it, already plotting something — I could see her plotting something, and I let her, because Dilly plotting is Dilly happy. And Pip. And Wick.

Wick, who is ours now, who came to us out of the worst week the kingdom has had in a generation and simply stayed, folded into the household the way water finds the low place, and belongs here as much as any of them. Wick and Pip, side by side, fourteen and thirteen, thick as thieves — and I use the word on purpose, because I have seen what those two are when you let them off the leash into the streets of this city, and I will tell you plainly: they rule them. There is not a lane or a runner or a back-kitchen in three quarters that those two don’t have the measure of; they go out my door of a morning and the city arranges itself around them, and I have decided, as a matter of maternal policy, that there are things about my household’s standing in the underworld of Rivermeet that I am happier not knowing in detail. They were eating their way through the cakes at a rate that would have shamed a plague of locusts, and conferring, heads together, about something, and I felt the old shudder go through me that I feel whenever those two confer, and looked away on principle.

Then Della and Orla, who are family in the way that the people who sit at the table with you are always family. Pip, again, counted twice because Pip is the sort of person you count twice. And the rest, fanning out from the centre of us into the wider warmth of the night.

Brin’s friends from the debate, grown now, every one of them flowering into the women they’d argued at each other about becoming. Cassia among them — Cassia, who ran from her mother’s clouded house to my plain one and has not looked back, who is the best pen in the city and spends it now in the hospital quarter teaching the letters to people the city never taught anything; Cassia, blooming, here at the birthday of the girl she’d once debated and now loves like a sister. And beside her, where he has lately taken to being, Bram.

I should set Bram down properly later, because Bram is going to matter to this evening in a way nobody but me has braced for; but for now let me only say that he is a big plain farm boy off the northern plains, and looks it to the last inch — broad as a door, brown as a saddle, hands made for hauling — and that he is, of all the unlikely things, the funniest young man I have met in a year, and is becoming quietly famous for it in the pubs of the lower city, and spends his days, when he isn’t on a stage, in the hospital wards making the dying laugh for nothing; and that my Cassia — clever, polished, chancery-minded Cassia — is somewhat seriously in love with him, has been to the plains to sit in his mother’s kitchen, and glows beside him like a banked coal. But I’ll come to Bram. He earns his own telling.

And Thea, beside them — Thea, who started the whole avalanche with one frightened word to a friend, who the world tried to break and instead set free, living now in the open air of the hospital streets where the truth is, doing real work with her hands, more herself than I think she has ever been allowed to be. The two of them thriving. I looked at the pair of them, the conscience and the gradualist, side by side and easy, and thought: the cause is in good hands, when those two are the hands.

Thea I will also have to come back to, because Thea’s heart is its own small comedy and the night provided a fresh instalment of it. The short of it, since we’re counting: there are, at present, two young men of the hospital quarter under the firm impression that they are courting Thea, and neither of them has the first idea where he stands, and the joke of it — the joke the whole company has been enjoying for weeks — is that Thea doesn’t know either, and could not be made to care if you paid her. She drifts between the two of them like weather, perfectly kind to both, committed to neither, entirely present and entirely unpinned, the most in-the-moment soul on that whole barge full of people busy building futures. She has done the one enormous thing her life required of her, the brave true thing, at the one moment it mattered most — and the reward she has claimed for it, without anyone deciding to grant it, is that she never has to account for herself to anybody again. Two boys watched her all evening with the same baffled hope. She looked at the water. I rather think she had it right.

Nessa, lit from within the way she’s been lit since the night she ran the world home to her mother. Lys, the prince’s maid who hid him in the dark and is Dilly’s own dear friend, here as one of us, because she is one of us. And Chell.

Chell I should explain, because Chell is new and Chell is a delight and I have lost my heart to her entirely. Chell is Ged’s girl — won, I should say, against a field of considerable competition, because my Ged is a personable lad and the girls of the schools are not blind. There was a contest for him, quiet and ferocious the way those contests are at sixteen, and Chell won it, and the more I see of her the more I think Ged is the one who got lucky in the bargain. And I’ll confess, since I mentioned the competition for him a moment ago and let it stand as though it were only the good looks and the easy way — that I left out the half of it that actually counts, the way this family always leaves it out, because we do not make a thing of what we did. The girls of the schools were not only competing for a handsome boy. They were competing for the boy who helped bring down two kings — who made the impossible swim that brought the first one down, and who sat at our own table and helped his sister take the new King’s commander to pieces over a cup of tea, and then ruined the rebel king’s coronation. That is the lad they were after. He does not mention it and neither do we, and so it goes about that Ged is merely charming, which suits us all. But Chell knew what she’d won. She’s from Madrigal’s; she’s pretty in the way that makes a room turn, and she knows it and wears it lightly; and underneath the pretty she is quick, and funny, and warm clean through, and she looked at my son across the barge that night with a fondness that had no calculation in it anywhere, and I decided, watching her, that I approved with my whole heart. I do not approve of everyone my children bring home. I approved of Chell.

Tum and Sefa and their two with Tilda, the household that the morning of the coup had gathered to wait in, whole and settled and theirs. And Vivienne, with her three.

That was the thing that moved me most, perhaps, of all the night’s quiet arrangements: Vivienne, here, with her children about her — the three of them folded now into the care network that the city’s women run between their houses, the watching and the minding and the passing-along that keeps the broken mended; folded in not because anyone made her, but because she’d asked, after she’d seen with her own eyes how it had held Sefa’s children, how it had held her own those first hard weeks on Sefa’s kitchen floor. She’d watched the thing work and she’d chosen it, the fallen not-quite-Queen, chosen to raise her children inside the same warm web that holds the bath-slave’s and the engineer’s, and her three were running the deck that evening with Sefa’s and shrieking like any children anywhere, the coronation silk months behind them now, and you would not, looking, have known which children had come from the top of the world and which from the bottom. That is the whole of what the network is for. It does not ask, when it takes a child in, which kind is knocking.

And Fiona. Off to the side, quiet, watching.

I had worked for that. I will not pretend otherwise — getting Fiona onto that barge, into this company, after everything, was a labour, and I did it with both hands over weeks, because Fiona is mine to keep however the world has gone, my oldest friend, the girl whose window I climbed to on the worst night of my life; and because the alternative was to let her sit alone in her clouded house growing stranger, certain to the last that the King was courting her Cassia, while the daughter who’d fled her bloomed in a world Fiona couldn’t see.

But there was a harder reason under that one, and I’ll be honest about it because this is my account and I don’t lie in it: I got Fiona onto that barge because of Bram. Because Cassia is serious about that farm boy — serious enough to have gone to the plains and met his people — and that means there is a reckoning coming for Fiona, a day when she will have to understand that her daughter is not going to be a queen, is not waiting on any king, is in love with a penniless plains comedian who sings to the dying, and means it. That day was coming whether I arranged it or not. And I had decided, weeks back, turning it over, that I would not let it come to Fiona the cold way — in a letter, or a piece of gossip, or worst of all from Cassia herself in some final scene that broke the last thread between them. I would rather Fiona meet the boy. Here. On a warm barge, in friendly company, with me at her elbow, across a deck of music and cake and laughing children — so that when the truth arrived it would arrive wearing Bram’s open farm face and Cassia’s plain happiness, in a place too kind for Fiona to make a tragedy of it. That was the whole of my scheming. I brought my oldest friend out onto the water to lose a fantasy gently, surrounded, instead of keeping it alone in the dark till it soured her for good. Whether it would work I did not know. But there she was, and there was Bram, and the evening had all night to do its quiet work on her.

So I’d worked her in by inches. And there she was, at the edge of it, not quite of the party and not excluded from it, watching her runaway daughter laugh among strangers she didn’t understand — and I’ll say this for Fiona, who understands almost nothing: she was trying. She’d come. She watched, and she didn’t spoil it, and once or twice I saw her smile at a thing without knowing why it was funny, and that was as much as I’d hoped for and a little more.

There was music. The school friends had brought their bits and pieces — a fiddle, a pipe, somebody’s small drum — and Tamsin her flute, grown so much better this year than last that I’d stopped being able to call it a child’s playing; and they passed the music round between them, easy and unpolished, the kind of playing that’s for the playing and not for the showing.

And then Bram did his set.

I had wondered what the farm boy would do in this company, whether he’d go shy among Brin’s clever friends and Cassia’s polished world; I needn’t have. He took up a battered guitar that had clearly travelled a great many miles on his back, and he planted himself on an upturned crate in the middle of the deck, and he did the thing he does in the lower-city pubs that has the whole town starting to say his name — and within a minute he had the entire barge in the palm of his big farm hand. He sang, and the songs were funny, and between them he talked, and the talk was funnier — a slow, sly, plain-faced patter, the timing of it perfect, the kind of comedy that looks like a man just thinking out loud and is in fact built like a clock; he did the city as the plains see it, and the plains as the city imagines them, and the hospital wards where he spends his days, gently, so that even the sad parts came out as laughter, which is the hardest trick there is and the one that tells you what he truly is. And the whole boat roared and roared. Even the children stopped their own mischief to watch him. Even Fiona — I marked it — even Fiona laughed, helpless, before she could remember she disapproved.

And the thing I could not stop looking at, the thing that told me the whole story before any reckoning forced it into the open, was Cassia. Because my Cassia — the best pen in the city, the chancery mind, the girl who could parse a clause like a surgeon — was sitting on the crate beside him with the little drum between her knees, keeping his time. Playing backup. Grinning up at him, laughing at jokes she must have heard a hundred times, catching his rhythm and feeding it back to him so he could fly out over it — utterly, gladly, his drummer. That was the picture. The girl her mother meant for a throne, sitting on a crate on a turnip barge, drumming for a plains comedian, and lit up with it like I have never once seen her lit at anything her mother wanted for her. I looked at that, and I looked over at Fiona, and I thought: there it is. The whole of it is right there, in a guitar and a drum, if she ever lets herself see it. But she was still only laughing at the jokes. And then, of course, because it could not be otherwise, somebody started the streetpads’ song.