Spirit by Gwyneth Jones

Author:Gwyneth Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781619760202
Publisher: Aqueduct Press
Published: 2008-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

XXXVI

They talked through the night, in the glow of Bibi’s stolen light bulb, while the little girl slept: the young woman and the crone feasting on words, their eyes shining, their cheeks flushing, drunk on the sight of another human face, the mere sound of a human voice. Nef dismissed her own adventures, but she insisted on hearing every detail of Bibi’s purdah in Black Wing, her lost years. How she’d been convinced she was going to be murdered, how she’d come to Fenmu. How she’d recovered from her madness, and made up her mind to escape. Bibi was startled to find how much came back to her. It was as if her mind had been dormant, never lost, only needing another person—

When the light above Lady Nef’s door hissed and clicked, and the red glow propagated through the glass, Bibi went to fetch her daily meal. The hand mustn’t know that anything had changed, and she couldn’t be a burden on her mistress. Her old cell horrified her: it stank of despair, degradation, soul-eating loneliness. She snatched up her mattress and bundled it under her arm; grabbed her food, and the clean chamber pot; and fled.

‘The right decision,’ said Lady Nef when Bibi returned, uncertain of her welcome, with all her worldly goods. ‘The lifer cells, if not much else, are generously proportioned. There’s plenty of room for three. Now, if we are to keep house together, I must show you how things are done.’

-------

The golden mats were woven from serpent bristle, recovered from old mattresses. The hangings were mattress-sacking, fixed to the walls with a carapace-porridge glue. To make paper Nef teased fibres out of the same sacking: beat them smooth, soaked them in tea, layered them together in sheets; dried and beat the sheets again. Her lamp was a broken cusp of food bowl, ground to translucence. Her ink was blood tea, partly dried, mixed to a paste with a friable black mineral, and shaped into sticks—

‘As you’ll observe, Bibi,’ she said, ‘the grinder and the black mineral are not native to my cell. Like you I have been exploring, and occasionally I have brought back treasure. I have a nub of metallic ore, from which I can strike a light; and there’s another stone, a kind of quartz — I believe it’s colonised by a microbe tolerant of complete darkness — that gives a scented powder when ground, which I add to my lamp oil.’

To make the oil she reserved the shards of tooth-cracking chitin that appeared in their porridge. When she had enough she pressed them between two flat stones, one of which she had pierced: she bound the press tightly, and increased the extraction by means of a screw, chipped and smoothed from the spine of the case that had held her lifer regulations. Ink, paper and light were vital to the project of her leisure hours: a history of Fenmu Prison, which might throw startling new light on the history of Sigurt’s World itself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.