Seeder, Chapter 8

8. Orchid

As the train glides through Belovode, Atuma lets her silk robe slip off her shoulders and land in a ring about her feet. She hopes for some reaction from the painter: a gasp, an appreciative nod. Nothing comes save the scrape of charcoal on paper. Atuma stands, unsure if she should pose or be stock still, and the painter offers no direction. The charcoal moves rapidly, a rat scurrying across the page, seeking bits of Atuma’s body and secreting them away. She wants to cover herself, and she wants to stand proud, and she wants the tenor of the painter’s attention on her to change, from this gleaning, gobbling her up, to something that might be reciprocated. Atuma took in the painter with her eyes when she first boarded the train, hobnail boots clacking the cobbles in the emptied square. Atuma’s first impression was confusion, a question that hung in the air. It was like the questions she’s asked a thousand times a day as the dynastic train cuts its constant path across Lod. What do you want? servants ask, to meet and anticipate all her needs. Sometimes she invents desires: foods she has no interest in eating, that she isn’t sure exist, to send them away and escape constant solicitation. Suitors, arranged by her mother, picked up in backwater villages and rich estates with their own stations, met under chaperone in the parlor car, ask what she wants and mean what would it take? Their inquiries have an endpoint: What would I have to do to fuck you, marry you, graft myself onto the fruitless branch of the dynastic tree you represent? For suitors, her answers are more elaborate. An iron ingot indistinguishable from gold. An auroch that spouts poetry. Rongovia conquered in my father’s name — the war included an ill-advised Rongovian offensive front that may have been Atuma’s fault. She tries to send them away without hope; there’s nothing she wants from them. For it to matter, she’d have to want them, not some object they might provide.

When the painter stepped onto the train, the question recurred, changed. Not what do you want? but what is this thing that you want? The wanting came first, a priori of the question posited — Atuma is schooled in continental and native Lodi philosophies and has been allowed to expand her studies into historical heterodoxies. Atuma watched the painter set up tools wanting answers, regardless of what they were. The painter, inscrutable, indifferent, dismissed the servants and ordered — there was no other word — Atuma to disrobe. Atuma did, immediately. Now the painter circles, charcoal scratching, pages flipping. Atuma can only see the back of each page, a faint shadow of whatever’s drawn there.

“I’ve heard when men see a woman naked for the first time, they react,” says Atuma. “Stare.”

“Men do,” the painter says. Maybe this is the answer Atuma wants, but she doesn’t feel satisfied.

“There’s a story about a man who saw Queen Atlanna Urizen dressing,” says Atuma. “They say he saw only her bare shoulder and his eyes were put out.”

“Do you want to pluck out my eyes?”

“I was only — ”

“You’re not a queen,” says the painter. “When your father dies, you’ll be…”

“Sister to the king.” Atuma straightens her neck.

“A step down from princess, eh?” Another page flips, another orbit begins.

“The women of Lod are liberated,” says Atuma. “Even if we aren’t allowed a ruling queen.”

“Liberated to work in the factories?” the painter asks, intent on the drawing. “To die at the front?”

“To actualize. To be their best and fullest selves.”

“And you?” asks the painter. “Are you your best and fullest self?”

Atuma pats her hips. “I could be a little less of my full self.”

The painter scoffs, the first true reaction Atuma’s gotten. It flutters in her stomach. Before it settles, the painter pockets the charcoal and folds the sheets of the sketchpad back over, tucking them into a bag so Atuma can’t see.

“We’re done,” the painter says. Atuma pauses, sure whatever is happening between them is not done. She gathers up her robes and ties them around herself as protection.

“The portrait won’t be — ” Atuma starts.

The painter waves a hand at their bag. “These are studies,” the painter says. “I’ll make the portrait on my own time. No need to waste any more of yours.“

“What I meant was, in the portrait, I won’t be naked,” Atuma says.

“They plucked out that man’s eyes for glimpsing Atlanna Urizen’s shoulder,” the painter says. “What would they do to me if I painted you bare for the whole country to see?” Atuma imagines the painter doing exactly that, the two of them standing next to each other in a gallery as citizen parade by, consuming Atuma’s naked image. The painter is closer and Atuma cannot remember the approach, close enough now she can smell something floral and something else, deeper and herbal, like campfire smoke. The smell dizzies her.

“I was hoping you might paint me in something billowing,” says Atuma. “To conceal my size.”

The painter is next to her now, lips near Atuma’s chin, looking for something tucked behind Atuma’s ear. “Why the fuck would you want to conceal your size?”

The profanity induces a fresh shudder below Atuma’s stomach. “Why sketch me naked if you’re going to clothe me for the portrait?” Her attempt at dynastic defiance is undermined by the quickness of her breath, the rapidity of her pulse the painter could taste by leaning an inch forward.

“I know everything about fabric,” the painter says. “How it drapes and bunches. How it catches light and holds shadow.” The painter taps the bag of charcoal sketches, breath on Atuma’s neck. “Now I know your body. I can turn it around in my mind. I can clothe it or disrobe it, pose it as I need it. An oak on your land is indifferent to the lights and garlands placed upon it.”

Atuma knows the words from her studies: one of the heterodox books. The Aphorisms tug at her mind when she reads them, but hearing one spoken bypasses her mind and melts the iron in her belly.

The painter holds their breath. They’re closer now, and Atuma feels the brush against her neck as the painter’s lips twist up into a grin. “Now you know what I am,” the painter says.

Atuma shakes her head gently, slightly. She doesn’t want to do anything that might remove the painter’s lips from the pulsing spot beneath her jaw. “I’ve showed you all my secrets,” she says. “And I have none of yours.”

“Your mother and I agreed on money, not secrets.”

“You and my mother agreed on a portrait,” Atuma says. “Not a viewing of my body.”

The painter’s head tilts, hair brushing Atuma’s jaw. “The latter’s needed for the former.”

“Give me one.”

The painter cranes upward, lips against Atuma’s earlobe, breath carrying the content of their words. “My real name, my true name, is Phlox.”

The painter’s hand is on Atuma’s hip, light pressure pushing down and closer. All Atuma wants is to submit to it. The painter pulls back so Atuma can take in a grin like a wolf about to eat. “Do you want to know yours?” Phlox asks.

“I know my name,” says Atuma.

“Your true name, one you can blossom into,” Phlox says. “Do you want it?” The grin is less hungry, taunting. How many more answers can Atuma need?

“Yes.”
“Queen of Orchids,” Phlox says. “Hothouse-grown, broad and stunning.”

The dynastic train screeches to a halt at Fulcrum Center station. Atuma should be used to these hard stops, but the braking tosses her into Phlox’s arms. She extracts herself, straightening the robe where it reveals too much, the flesh she’s already shown.

“How long?” Atuma asks.

Phlox shrugs. Atuma grieves that she can’t feel the shrug because their bodies no longer press against each other. “Two weeks? Three?” Phlox hands her a business card, summoned from nowhere and held up in the small chasm between them. There’s an image of a flower, white at the edges and deepening pink and purple towards its center, and the address for a studio in West Flat. “Come check in,” Phlox says. “See how a garden grows.”

Eliza knocks on the door, polite but insistent, as if she thinks Atuma’s in danger. She is. Atuma takes the card, realizes she has nowhere to put it, and folds it into her palm, worried her sweat may bleed the ink. The door opens and Eliza escorts Phlox back to the entry car. Atuma — Orchid, the seed of a name settling into the soil of her heart — locks the door behind them, then crosses the car and locks the other that leads into her younger brother’s room. She’s only allowed the locks when she’s in her car alone, and even then only since she turned seventeen. Her mother has a key, but her mother never makes it farther down the train than Dwellon’s sick room. Atuma falls back onto the bed, letting her body go limp, giving it over to the forward motion of the train, imagining Phlox posing her, turning her this way and that way until every bit of her has been examined, catalogued, consumed.