Page 21 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Thirteen

T he next night I dress carefully before heading to the gate, choosing one of the new pairs of trousers that Petaccia has had made for me and a shirt that reminds me of a man’s, except looser than most. It’s so warm outside that it feels like midafternoon, the air syrupy against my skin.

We’ve had no rain for five or six days now, and the grass path is parched and crispy beneath my window.

I could hardly concentrate through my lectures today, and although Leo caught my eye, I managed to make sure I was long gone from the hall before it was time for his customary break-time cigarillo.

I felt guilty about it, but not guilty enough that I stopped.

My head is too muddled for him. I worry that if he asks me, I might tell him about Olea—and I want to keep her for myself, at least for now.

My father dominates my thoughts more than he has for weeks, and I know it is because of her.

Because of the way speaking to her made my pulse flutter and my stomach flop; this is not a way I should feel, not about her, not about anybody but my husband when I was a new bride—only I didn’t feel it then.

Her name has been on my lips all day, every time I open my mouth, threatening to pour out like sweet, treacherous honey.

Olea, Olea . It sounds like the plant oleander.

Is this a coincidence? Like sweet poison.

I spend my break pawing through one of my taxonomies.

Nerium oleander. Rose laurel, dog bane, sweet sea rose.

It’s evergreen, subtropical, hardy, and fragrant.

Like many plants, it has a myth for its name, though this is one I don’t know by heart and I’ve yet found only references to it.

Olea.

Part of me is frightened by the feeling this girl has stirred within me.

It’s as though I shouldn’t think of her, shouldn’t talk of her.

As if she really is a ghost. I even consider not leaving my rooms tonight because the feeling has unnerved me so.

I could sit and watch from my window and see if she waits for me—I’m half convinced her offering to meet me again is all part of some hoax—but in the end I can’t do that.

If there’s any kind of caper at play, I’m old enough to deal with it.

I spend so long debating whether to go to the garden that by the time I leave my rooms it is already midnight and I have to run along the path to reach the gate.

I arrive panting and completely out of breath.

But I needn’t have worried—for there is Olea, just out of reach on the other side of the gate, her usual basket in her hand and her long hair swinging about her slender hips.

“You came,” she breathes, and the sound of her voice is like the first sensation of sinking into a warm bath in midwinter. I shiver. “I’m glad. I thought maybe you wouldn’t. I know it’s all a little bit strange, this midnight gardening.”

“It’s nice to have some nocturnal company,” I say truthfully. “I always seem out of time with the rest of the university. Nights are my favourite.”

I lean my shoulder against the wall while I catch my breath and watch Olea place another flower in her basket. She does it with such care; I want to touch the velvet petals, to feel what she feels as she lays it down.

“I didn’t ask you yesterday, but when you say you’re tending your plants—what are you doing? These flowers look happy enough, so I assume you’re not deadheading them.”

“I’m cataloguing them.” Olea tilts the basket so I can see what’s inside. It’s hard to make it out exactly in the dim moonlight, but it appears as though the flowers she has picked are held between sheets of some kind of waxed paper beneath a smooth grey rock.

“Are you an artist?” I ask. “Will you draw them once they’re pressed?”

Olea’s expression shifts from openness to something more wary. “No,” she says coolly. “Why does everybody always assume all I’m doing is painting them? If I were to write my catalogue into a book, which I might one day, I certainly wouldn’t only be responsible for the drawings.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that—”

“And anyway, there’s nothing wrong with drawing or painting them. It’s just not the only thing I want to do.” She lifts her chin with defiance. Her skin, in the moonlight, is pale as cream. Her lips are dark, thinned by her annoyance. My scalp prickles with embarrassment.

“I didn’t mean anything,” I say again. “Honestly. I ask because—well, if you’re a scholar, I wondered why I haven’t seen you in any of my classes. The professor who has taken me on never said anything about another woman studying botany, and you’re clearly a student.”

“I’m not a scholar.”

Olea speaks so softly that I can hardly hear her.

I step closer to the gate, wrapping my hands around the bars so I can lean more comfortably.

She doesn’t move any closer—still a careful few feet away.

She grips the basket with both hands so hard they look as if they’ve been stained by shadows, her fingernails darkening away from the tips.

Her feet, I realise with a small thrill, are completely bare beneath her gown. She reminds me of a dryad.

“You’re not? But you know so much. Were you ever a scholar?”

“I’m not a scholar because I don’t want to be one,” Olea says pointedly. “Just because there is a university here doesn’t mean I have to be a part of it. I can still be educated without having to attend lectures and silly little seminars—no offence. I like the peace and quiet here.”

I raise an eyebrow, hurt but trying not to show it.

“But you’ve obviously spent so many hours learning what you know to be able to build a catalogue. Isn’t that the same thing as being a student?”

“Well, exactly, and I don’t have to prove myself to anybody. Books have taught me most of what I know, and they don’t care if I’m a woman or a man or clever or stupid.”

I’m truly not sure what to make of this girl. And what’s more, I’m not sure that I believe her. It’s a noble thing to want knowledge for the sake of knowledge—but is it realistic? There’s something in Olea’s face that tells me there’s more she’s not saying.

“No, that’s true,” I say, “but if you learn in isolation you don’t get the credit for it either.

Isn’t that something you want?” I think of Petaccia’s comment about sharing the credit with her father for the cure she developed because it seemed right at the time, and it rankles.

“If I put that much work into something, I’d expect to be credited for it.

Why wouldn’t you publish it? Aren’t you afraid somebody will steal your work?

Why must women always be condemned to the footnotes? ”

Olea pauses at this. She’s watching me carefully again, her dark eyes sharp as a tiger’s, fixated on my every breath. She wants something—but what? My belly swoops and I push my face closer to the bars of the gate, wishing I could peel back the moonlit shadows so I could see her better.

Who is she?

“I like you.” Olea lays her basket on the ground and puts her hands on her hips, her nightgown—I’m sure now it is a nightgown—flowing around her legs in the faint breeze that whips up.

I train my eyes on her face, instead of the visible shape of her thighs through the gown.

“You’re funny and you speak your mind. Some of my friends beyond the gate haven’t been so… strong.”

“Friends beyond the gate?”

“I don’t get to know many people from the university,” Olea says with a shrug. “The scholars tend to avoid me. They’re all afraid of the garden.”

“Well, you did say it’s dangerous—were you joking?”

“Oh no, not at all.”

“So it is dangerous?” I swallow.

“Yes.” Olea laughs and it’s that same throaty chuckle from last night. It ripples through me. “That is, it’s dangerous for you—and for them. Not for me. These plants know me.”

A sound comes then. It’s the rustle of leaves in a breeze, only there is no breeze. The plants nearest to Olea’s hands sway. If I didn’t know better I’d say their flowers might be intentionally angling towards her body. As if they hear her. As if they do know her.

I yank my hands back through the bars of the gate, a strange sensation bubbling in my belly.

Something isn’t right here. It’s like Dr. Petaccia’s vine that seems to move of its own accord.

I know plants grow using sunlight and a sophisticated biological system, I know they’re living , but they’re not usually so…

sentient? How could a plant know one person from another? It’s not a cat.

“You… raised them?” I can’t keep the suspicion from my voice, though it is tinged with awe.

“Most of them. And those I didn’t raise are still sort of… my wards? I’ve tended them and helped them to grow. It’s symbiotic. Does that make sense?”

I can’t quite understand what she means, but I don’t say that.

Instead I watch closely as Olea gathers huge handfuls of her thick hair and braids it over her shoulder before reaching down to one of the plants growing near her bare feet.

It’s a thin type of grass, looks a little like wheat only shorter, with little black bushy fronds.

Olea’s lips part, and it looks like she’s murmuring something, though the sound doesn’t travel even this short distance.

Then she picks one of the pieces and pops the stem in her mouth.

“Wait, isn’t that…?”

“Sweetgrass,” Olea admits. “I’m partial to the, well, the sweetness of it.”

My mother used to put sweetgrass in the vodka she brewed—she’d grown up with traditional farming parents and it was pretty common—but she always warned me not to play around with the stalks, as their sweetness was not without risk.

It thins the blood , my mother would always say, and then the mind .

Olea’s eyes are wide and dark, and her shoulders droop a little as she chews on the stalk.

When she smiles it’s without her teeth and it gives her face a haziness it didn’t have before.

I want to ask her more about the plants, or about what she meant when she said she had friends “beyond the gate,” but my head is clouded—as if I’m the one chewing on sweetgrass.

“Your hair is very short,” Olea says suddenly.

I run one hand through the rough-shorn curls. It’s growing a little, coiling around my ears and at the nape of my neck. Sometimes I forget what it was like to have hair down below my shoulders, but on nights like this when the breeze plays against my skin I’m more grateful than unhappy.

“My father died.” I curl my toes inside my slippers. I don’t want to talk about my father here, with her. He wouldn’t have understood. “And then my husband.”

“Oh.” Olea pauses, chews the stalk some more, and then lets it drift gently down to the earth. “That’s sad. But what does that have to do with your hair?”

I stare, dumbfounded. Olea’s face is that of a child who has asked the most innocently stupid question, her dark eyes round and her lips slightly parted as she waits for an answer.

Only the effect is less childlike than it is eerie, a grown woman playing pretend.

Surely , I think, surely you can’t be this removed from the world?

“Have you… have you never grieved?”

Olea wrinkles her nose, as if she’s really thinking hard about this. “Mm, no, I don’t think so. Well, maybe once? I don’t really remember.” Then she tilts her head to the side, playing with the end of her plait absently. “Is this something you do when you grieve? You cut your hair?”

“It’s not just me. It’s something everybody does when they grieve.

It’s a sign of honour and of love, from the ancient world when Memephestia shed her earthly form and sheared her threaded golden locks so that the burial fire might send Andynedes’s ashes skyward, back to the gods.

Women re-create the sacrifice into the funereal fire. ”

“But you said everybody. Do the menfolk too?”

“I… Do you really not know?”

Olea shrugs. “No. The walls are thick and I’m pretty happy here in my little paradise.

Like I said, I don’t meet many people and that’s—well, generally that’s okay with me.

The hair cutting make a lot more sense now you’ve explained it.

It seems obvious now I know that’s something people do.

Although I would quite like to hear that story—the one of Memephestia and the burial fire. ”

I think of my father, what he would say if I could have told him I would one day meet a girl with absolutely zero concept of grief or the art of mourning.

Olea is a blank slate; she has no idea about sepulchres and cradles, about women’s Silence while their men celebrate life over death in the world above.

She knows nothing of incense and dried procession flowers, of punishments for breaking the fast or the significance of the shearing of hair.

For a long minute I’m entirely speechless.

Olea, meanwhile, has started to drift away. She’s back to collecting her flowers—a big, fat black rose-like plant with a stem studded with hundreds of tiny round white berries in her hands—and seems to have forgotten all about me again.

“Olea,” I call.

She turns, her neck arched gracefully, flowers in both hands and the basket hanging from the crook of her arm. “Yes?”

“You said you liked me—before. Because I speak my mind?”

“Yes.” Olea smiles. “And you’re funny.”

“Well. I…” I wipe my palms against the rough linen of my trousers.

It feels wrong, what I’m about to do. Olea isn’t like anybody I’ve ever met, though, and her knowledge of the garden alone…

I think of what I could do with that knowledge, so much of it untapped and trapped in a naive recluse who barely leaves her garden.

“I guess you’re funny, and I like you too.

” It isn’t a lie, I tell myself. It just isn’t true yet .

Olea’s smile widens. “Oh good,” she says warmly. I ignore my guilt—and more, the swell of my heart that says there’s more than just the garden to like. “You’re the best friend beyond the gate I’ve had yet. I can’t wait to get to know you better.”

“And maybe you’ll let me come inside and have a look around?” I prompt gently, as if she’s a horse I might spook at any moment. “I’d love to help you with your catalogue.”

“Tomorrow night,” Olea urges. Her dress slips off the tip of one shoulder and my heart lurches. “Come again tomorrow, won’t you?”