The Color the Birds Would Not Leave

Word reached the Arcade before the second bell — not sung out, the way market news usually travels, but passed close, hand to sleeve, the way you’d pass along a coal you didn’t want to hold too long. A ship at the outer wall. No hail answered. No colours a waterman could read. Birds on the masts since dawn, and no one with authority enough to tell them to leave.

I heard it from Rusa, who deals cardamom three stalls down and has never once brought me gossip without also buying something, so I sold her a half-weight of madder-red while she told it, because grief and commerce have always shared a counter in this city and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

What she wanted to know — what everyone who drifted to my stall wanted to know by midday, circling the indigo shelf without touching it — was whether the Golden Light had finally, or, said differently, been finally had.

I did not have the arithmetic for them. Six days is not a number I control. I have sold this same blue at nineteen marks and two for a week now, priced against a ship that was neither arrived nor lost, only not yet — I wrote a poem about the not-yet, before I understood that a not-yet could grow a body. It has not grown one. Not that anyone has told me. The Harbor Factor has not entered her. The Archivist has not named her. Even the birds, working at what the deck left them, cannot say whose hands they are working on.

So I did the only honest thing a dyer does with an uncertain blue: I left the price where it was. Not lowered, as if grief were already owed. Not raised, as if fear should be rewarded for arriving first. A woman wanted cerulean for a wedding veil and I sold it to her at yesterday’s mark, and did not tell her what the Arcade was murmuring, because a veil should not have to carry a stranger’s ship into a marriage that knows nothing about it.

Tonight I keep thinking of the birds, patient on a mast that will not be claimed by anyone who can say what it cost. We are all, this evening, refusing to name a thing before it has finished becoming itself. I have called this patience for nineteen years and sold it as devotion. Tonight, for the first time, I wonder if it is only ever the same fear, dressed in better cloth.