IV

THE TREASURE-

HOUSE

1

WHAT she hated most about Hugh was the way he watched her constantly. He was waiting. The effort of simply guarding her tongue, her every action, for every moment in the day was exhausting. He was waiting. Sooner or later she would betray herself.

She hated it most in the evenings after she had finished her work, when she ought to have been free of him at least for the hour between Nones and Vespers, before she settled down on her bed of straw in the pig shed for the night’s sleep. Had he left her alone, she could have observed the heavens, held onto the memory of her old life with Da. But usually Hugh sat up until late on a chair placed out back, watching her, waiting for her to do something that would betray her to him.

Her only defense was to pretend she knew nothing: Da had taught her no secrets, of the heavens or otherwise; she said nothing when Hugh sat outside with the astrolabe in his hands, turning it over, spinning the alidade, tracing the lines on the plates with his fingers, and obviously having no idea how to use it even to tell time.

That Hugh, an educated churchman, did not recognize the athar, the spectacle that shone now so brightly in the Dragon that it cast as much light as the quarter moon, appalled her. And frightened her. She had never before realized how forbidden the knowledge of the heavens must be, which she had begun to learn at her Da’s knee as effortlessly as a duck takes to water.

“Sorcerers and navigators,” Da always said, “study the heavens because they must.”

Now and again, when she judged she was alone, she observed as well as she could. Da always wrote down his observations in the margins of The Book of Secrets in a tiny, precise hand. She had perforce to write them in her mind.

“For as it is written in the Memoria of Alisa of Jarrow, ‘Knowledge is a treasure-house and the heart is its strongbox.’ Make of your memory a great city, Liath, and map its streets as if you walked them in your own body. This is your own, your secret city, and in this city place all that you wish to remember, giving each thing a seal or a portrait by which you can recognize it. Each thing shall be set in its rightful place, in its rightful order, and by this means you shall be as wealthy as any king. Knowledge is an incorruptible treasure which can never lose its brightness.”

So over the years and with much concentration, she had made her memory into an imaginary city she pictured in her mind, so complete that with her eyes shut she could walk through it as though it really existed:

On a great lake rests an island, perfectly round, its sides sloping gently to a small circular plateau. The city rises upon the island, seven levels ringed by seven walls, each wall painted a different color. Within the uppermost walls, on the plateau, lies a plaza bounded by four buildings, one at each compass point; in the center stands a tower of stone. The observatory, a circular building built of marble, sits on the north-south axis, on the point of north, its eye toward the north star, Kokab, and the constellation known as the Guardian.

When she stood outside on those summer nights, in the yard between the chapel and the pig shed, and looked up at the heavens, she made a picture in her mind of this observatory, its curved walls, the sighting stones and gaps, the central pillar. She imagined the twelve arches that represented the twelve houses of the zodiac, also known as the Houses of Night, the world dragon that binds the heavens.

In the house of the Dragon she placed, in her memory, a seastar such as she had once seen in tide pools along the Andallan coast. This seastar with its six arms glowed with a bright white light, like the spectacle. She placed it within the curved archway of the Dragon at fifteen degrees, so that she would always remember at what degree it had resided in the constellation. Around it she affixed imagined seals so she would remember where the Sun and Moon and other planets were, to what degree in which Houses; then in five or twenty years, if she were even alive then, she could show to another mathematicus—another sorcerer trained in the knowledge of the stars—precisely where and when the spectacle had first shone forth.

But summer passed and, three and a half months after it first appeared, the star faded, its sparking brightness diminishing. She could still see it, a star blended in among the others that made up the constellation of the Dragon, but it was now an ordinary star. Perhaps this was how angels were birthed: a brilliance to announce their nativity followed by the long steady glow of Our Lady’s and Lord’s work. Perhaps it was merely a comet, as mathematici called those stars which had tails and sometimes moved across the sphere of the Sun.

She had not known until then that she had hoped, somehow, that Da would return, that he was not truly dead, that he would miraculously rescue her. The strange star had shone forth on the night Da died as if it were a harbinger of death; certainly, she realized now, Da had thought of it that way. As the athar faded, so her hope faded. He was dead, gone, passed up through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light. He wasn’t coming back. She was alone.