Geometries of Belonging by R.B. Lemberg

Author:R.B. Lemberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2022-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

GEOMETRIES OF BELONGING

I like to be alone in the healing room. It is a small place, and the low ceiling-boards smell slightly of damp. The candlebulb, a floating magical light I have created, is weak and does not jar the senses. Small square windows of tourmaline glass are the only hint at means, installed here only because I need privacy. The tenants in surrounding rooms keep quiet at my request. It is a fair price for them, to be this close to a holy place. I feel their emotions sometimes, when I work—a subdued kind of awe that spreads through the people like warmth, brown-yellow and tinted at the edges with soft orange.

But holiness is often just unholiness purified; silence sighs from the gaps of any great power, from the spaces in-between the deepnames as they nestle in the mind of a named strong. What a body learns from wounds, it cannot easily unlearn. Crude tears of the flesh and breaks of bone can be erased with magic if one acts quickly, but subtle damage is so difficult to repair.

A person knocks. It is an old woman made frail by hard work, her fingers swollen. Even though I have not yet extended my deepnames, I can feel how her joints ache with the damp and the early autumn cold. Laundry. The river, its water unheated by the passage of magic. The kind of work that women do in my neighborhoods, where named strong are a rarity.

I make her tea with birch syrup, warm enough to hold without dropping. I ask after her name, her grandchildren’s health, and finally, her permission.

She gives it, even though she does not quite remember why she made it here.

I extend my deepnames. Three, four, and five syllables—long and feeble, inconsequential. It is a marvel that I was able to take more than one, let alone as many as three. In Mainland Katra University they teach that a three-named strong has nothing to fear, but that is other people—professors, builders—those with short deepnames, real power. When I was younger, fear was all I knew of life. The fear of beatings, ridicule, of helplessness, of cold, of hunger. The fear of never earning attention, the fear of losing it. That fear has lasted and lasted. Two decades after my lord took me in, that fear is still with me—an old friend, an acknowledgment of my emptiness.

Slowly, patiently I align my names along the old woman’s naming grid, the foundation of every mind upon which magic may alight. She has no magic, but that does not matter in my work. The strands of her naming grid have warped themselves out of place.

My work is all resonance. Slowly, I make my deepnames vibrate. Slowly, the grid realigns itself. She will remember more now, pay attention to her surroundings, speak with clarity. But in a year, I gauge, maybe two, the warping will reassert itself and she will start slipping. Her mind is too used to this pattern; comfortable like an old, torn blanket.

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