Atlan Saga Omnibus by Jane Gaskell

Author:Jane Gaskell [Gaskell, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi
Published: 2022-06-10T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

By slow degrees, the place is becoming a home. But it’s surprising how any place is less likely to seem home if you haven’t worked in it. The inn with ail its squalor and degradation seemed nearer to my bones than this great shell in which I wander aimlessly. Even in the Tower of my childhood, I would often have to help my nurses keep the place clean, rinse the plates in the fountain, feed Sneede’s turtle.

Yesterday I untangled an armful of wild roses from their thorns by the moat. Then I had no idea what to do with them. I took them inside and in a comer of the kichen-ramifications (only a segment of which we have civilised) I found an old earthenware jar. It was less cracked than the others lying in unwieldy mounds, infested with earwigs and crawling buzzing things like chips of lapis lazuli. I rubbed the dust off with the hem of my petticoat, because that was all I had handy, and it became very black indeed and I hardly felt like wearing it so I had to slip out of it. I filled the jar with roses and water from the pump. Now it is leaking all over my bedroom table (a handsome hunk of oak-log, carved, with a levelled top), but though the Nurse pops in several times a day to wipe up the mess, she has in an excess of reverence to my whims not even put the jar in a shallow bowl to catch the leak. If they’re going to pay such deference to my aesthetic tastes, let them.

Bored with the known and tamed shadows of this crumbling hugeness, reluctant to adventure into the unknown shadows, somehow sickened by the three landward sides of the hill which seem to me to be its rotting sides, I am driven down the remaining side, sliding on the spume-wet rocks, clinging to the shrill grass.

It is certain that here at least they would not let me have my way. Frellis and the present Captain of the Guard have each earnestly warned me, on separate occasions.

‘I beg you not to explore the seaward slope,’ Frellis revealed urgency in her well-modulated voice. ‘Take the roundabout walk to the beach, by all means. But not the cliff. That is far more dangerous, don’t doubt me, than your former habit of riding alone beyond the gates of our Capital.’

‘Madam,’ the Captain felt he must point out, ‘I must advise against the shore, at least till the calm tides of summer.’

He expounded his warning, getting even stiffer as he spoke of treacherous tides rising before you thought it possible, taking you by surprise from behind when you thought you couldn’t possibly get cut off.

But here the air is clean. In continuous motion, virile with the sea-salt, it admits no suggestion of the dank sweetness stealthy on the hinter side.

I perched on a boulder, invisible from the Castle.

I clasp my arms round my knees, my chin on them. The air shivers against my flesh, my spine.

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