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She draws the first flower on a scrap of parchment in a brief moment of unsupervised time in the scriptorium. The parchment is a slim leftover from someone’s shoddy job trimming edges and the only ink she has is black, so the drawing isn’t colored or large, but it’s vibrant enough in her mind to carry over in essence: the swift curves of the leaves, a cross-hatched shading for the inside, an almost-graceful whirl of the inner stem. Something about it appeals to her and frightens her all at once. Perhaps it is the alien features of the flower, or the faint sense of compulsion.
That night she sneaks out of her square cell of a room, the scrap of parchment crumpled in her fist. There should be a senior Cousin walking the hall, but she knows that he sleeps more often than not, especially on cold nights when there is a half banked fire in the hearth.
She walks out unnoticed. The garden is eerie and dark, and her bare feet ache with the winter-cold earth. The outside wall is as high and forbidding as ever, the world beyond as mysterious. She has never seen it, having been brought here before she could speak like all of the scribes and workers. Only the Father and the Cousins are allowed to come and go.
But she knows the inside of the garden almost better than herself, the result of the few precious days they are given free of work. There is a dense thicket of berries on the north side; she goes to it directly and then down on her knees to dig a thin, deep hole. The wad of parchment is warm in her fist – the result of her own body heat, of course (of course). She thinks that perhaps she ought to shred it, but somehow she can’t bring herself to do it.
Down it goes, covered over with packed soil. Like a seed, she thinks, and regrets the thought immediately. She draws a few of the drooping berry stems into an arch, hiding the disturbed ground, then pushes herself to her feet.
The walk back to her cell is as silent as the walk out, uninterrupted, and when she lies down on her thin straw pallet, she looks forward to the heavy weight of sleep.
Her dreams are cradled in the embrace of soft leaves.
-----
She wakes at the first bell and rises, walking to the washroom down the hall. The water slashes iciness and her shift brings barely more warmth when she pulls it on again. Around her, the others exchange gossip in soft, careful words, passing from person to person down the line. She takes her part in the chain but otherwise says nothing, still dwelling on the dream of thick, brown seeds, slowly pushing upwards.
Cousin Daniel comes and leads them to the mess hall. Normally this is a silent walk, intended to be solemn and contemplative; in practice it’s merely tired, each of them too wary of punishment to do anything but follow the routine.
But as they pass along the outer hall, a disturbance catches the eye – a group of Cousins hurrying out all together, some carrying lengths of measuring tape, others with thick, precious books. She doesn’t have to watch their path to know they are headed for the berry patch.
Cousin Daniel hurries them on.
-----
There is nothing to know until the evening meal. A few hand signals pass along the length of the table. The tilt of a spoon hilt just so from one of the garden workers, which means ‘I have something to tell,’ followed by a hollow, patterned clink against the side of the wooden bowl. ‘Something big.’
They haven’t had something big in months, not since Cousin John was caught with a ball of gold threads hidden under his pallet.
The evening wash provides an opportunity for them to share what they know. There is a new flower in the garden. Not white, winter-blossomed, or even the red of holly berries. Bright green, like a spring shoot but fully grown. A cup shape, or perhaps a mouth – as tall as Cousin Sarah on one side and half that height on the other. Lined inside with a fuzz, red as fresh blood. A stem growing from the center, spiraling upwards, with a tip that looked like the nose of a worm, ready to open and to eat.
It was nothing that the garden workers had ever seen, nor any of the Cousins either, to judge by the cloister's atmosphere of astonishment. And yet somehow it’s no surprise to her. A flower drawn, a flower grown. Frightening, but no surprise.
That night, as she lies on her pallet waiting for sleep to come, she draws idly on the floor, one cracked piece of slate scratching over another. When she looks down at last, the moonlight reveals another flower, as strange as the last: a thin stem, thickening into sharp waves at the bottom; above, a round ball, red underneath, draped in black strands of hair, dripping with something like tar; on top, a single blood-red berry.
A terror comes over her and she drops the chip of slate from her hand. It clatters, the noise sharp in the night’s silence; she goes still, waiting for any reaction, but none comes. After a few moments of soundless breath she picks up the chip again, sticks the edge under the broken edge of the floor slate and levers it upwards. As it comes loose there is a faint grating sound, but nothing more.
She runs her thumb along the edge of the slate and then across the flat surface, testing the drawing as much as the material. Neither of them cuts her.
The question of what to do with it requires an answer. She could stick it under the pallet – they’re not due for a cleaning day until three days hence – but what if it grows? If the last one could grow from a scrap of paper, why couldn’t this one grow from a piece of slate, roots burrowing down into the soil beneath the floor stones? Perhaps she’d wake pillowed on a blossom.
It’s an amusing thought, but of course she knows better. So much would follow: the questions, the suspicion. Would they send her away? She’s curious about the outside, of course, but it would be terrifying to be cast out without a hint of what to expect.
She looks up at the moonlight revealed on the high, small square of window. It’s dimming already. With instinct more than thought she stands, draws her arm back, and sends the shard of drawing up and outward, passing easily through the opening. It lands outside in the dirt with a faint whuff.
She sleeps easily that night, too.
-----
In the morning the scriptorium is lit brightly as ever but the air feels thick and watchful. She focuses intently on her assigned pages, not daring to look around, but it's impossible to miss when Cousin Ruth comes in with something held in her cupped hands. They all turn to look.
It's delicate, thinner than parchment but softly bubbled rather than flat. Unmistakably a leaf, somehow: translucent green and dotted with the brown of soil, shot through with dark golden threads so thin as to be almost invisible. There is something not quite natural about the shape of the threads, too regular, as if they mean something more than just the offshoots of growth.
Cousin Ruth casts her gaze around until it settles on the acknowledged best scribe, the one always given the most difficult work. She carries the leaf over and the scribe, understanding immediately, pushes away her half-finished sheet to clear the table. The leaf is settled gently on the desk and their supervisor Cousin Leah brings a fresh sheet of parchment along with four glass bottles of ink.
The scribe bends his head and begins to work. The shape comes first, smooth lines on one side followed by the soft curves on the other. Then on to the veins, his wrist twisting carefully as he follows the lines, trying to keep in perspective.
She knows that she ought to go back to her own work, but the Cousins are intent on the leaf and there is no one to stop her. The others obviously feel the same, since the only sound in the room is that of one scratching quill.
And then there is another sound – Cousin Ruth's sharp gasp. The scribe's hand slows.
The veins of the leaf are fading, sliding from gold into dark brown and then lightening into the green of the leaf itself. In a few seconds, the leaf is only a leaf.
Cousin Ruth snatches it out of the scribe’s hand and stares at it, then curses and turns away. The scribes cannot help but watch her go – even Cousin Leah is stunned. It takes her a moment to recover herself, but when she does so, she snaps, “Back to work!” as if it had been they who had chosen to interrupt. Still, such is her authority that they all scramble to obey, even as she collects the precious bottles of colored ink and stores them safely away in the cupboard. The barely-marked sheet of parchment is forgotten, pushed away to the side of the desk in favor of the scribe’s previous work.
Cousin Ruth doesn’t come back.
-----
When the light begins to fade and the bell rings for supper, she lags behind just long enough to snatch up the forgotten piece of parchment and hide it under her shift. It feels stiff and obvious as she eats, but no one seems to notice and she makes it back to her room with it undetected.
It stays under the pallet until the bed check has come and gone. Then, in the light of the waning moon, she pulls it out, smoothing her hand over it to ease out the wrinkles from her body hunched over the table.
The parchment is blank but for the outline of the leaf and the first curls of the veins. She knows somehow that this needn't be completed – this flower is already grown – but there are many others just beginning to push up through the dark soil of her mind.
A few drops of saliva are enough to moisten the gold ink again and she dips the tip of a fingernail into it, using that as a stylus to sketch out the outline and then a few inner details of one flower and then another. The ink scrapes dry before she can get to any more, but the plants understand.
How do they understand? How does she know that they do?
She uses a broken piece of slate to slice the parchment into pieces, one for each of the two flowers, the rest to be saved for tomorrow. Where to grow them is a more pressing question. Not thrown through her window, not a second time. She doesn't dare sneak out, either; surely the Cousins will have someone on night watch in the garden now.
In the end she merely hides them both under her shift again, waiting for an opportunity, perhaps on the morning's walk to breakfast. Then she closes her eyes, wondering which of them will come and hold her in her dreams.
-----
The days that follow are filled with plants, moving from flowers to other types. Two blade-sharp leaves arched over each other, joined by a berry that looks like nothing so much as an eyeball. Three-lobed roots. A sprig of overlapping dark leaves that blossoms into three familiar fruits all growing nestled within each other. Bulbs with misshapen nuts growing from them. A miniature tree that whips off its leaves each night only to have grown them back again by morning.
She finds a way to draw one at least daily – crudely with smudged ink or graphite from the day's work, more delicately with a thin piece of grass snagged from a garden-worker's shift and broken open for sap. Sometimes with a bit of cooked root stolen from her bowl at supper.
Often she cannot release them until a few days pass. The gardens are growing full of them now, in bloom despite the winter frost. The scribes are brought out in turn to draw the patterns of veins from life, since a touch seems to destroy them; she takes her turns, watched, but she learns how to drop a ball of parchment from the underside of her shift and kick it gently away, or tip it forward into the mouth of a flower like a pitcher, whence it will be spat out, several hours later.
Spring is easing at the corners of the garden when she begins to hear their voices. It is a whisper at first, not unlike oats in wind. Then true speech – not words as she knows them but a twisting language that seems to match their structure. The curl of a root makes a solid noise that travels to her through soil; a flower petal chants rhythmically like some of the garden workers in the summer; arcing stems make thin puffs of air that spatter sound like a fine spray of mist. They come together into a hum and then a song, layer upon layer, vines of sound curling around each other.
She has known no mother, but she has seen and drawn pictures of Mary and Rebecca and Jochebed. They spark an instinct inside her.
This humming is a lullaby, a love, a calling. Not her name, but something that means her nonetheless. Something that knows her.
-----
The parchments the scribes create are carried away with careful hands. She doesn't see them again, but knows they must be forming a tidy stack in the Father's locked office. They will be studied, certainly. Copied out again and again. Sent outside the walls to other mathas like this one.
Outside the walls. That's calling to her, too. The plants she's drawn are growing here but they aren't confined by the height of the stone walls, by the emptiness of the sky above. They aren't like her.
They could be like her. Or – no. Not that.
-----
Their rest day comes heavily overcast. Most of the scribes and workers have chosen the warmth of the hall, the chance to play the usual games and chatter and laugh. But she and a few others have chosen the solitude of the garden despite the slightly chilled mist that keeps fading into rain and then back again. They are forbidden to touch the new plants and know better than to disobey, but otherwise they are permitted to walk the rows of freshly-sprouting oats, to lie in the dirt under a berry thicket and let their thoughts drift.
The humming is crisper here and she can almost catch the meaning. You listen, the plants sing. You listen to us and you grow us. That isn't quite it, but nonetheless they are calling to her again. And again. And again.
She wants it, whatever it is they offer. She longs for it.
-----
Another stretch of days passes. She sleeps uneasily now, lying awake more often than not, looking up at the sky with its waxing moon. Her window is small but it barely matters when the sky is so big. Out, she thinks, out, out, becoming more certain than ever that this is what she needs. This place has always been her home and has never been her home. What's out there could be freedom or death. It almost doesn't matter.
-----
One night, the words come bare and clear. The way the plants speak to her hasn't changed, but she has. Changed enough to understand. She stands and leaves her cell without looking back.
In the garden, plants and flowers lean towards her like a beckoning hand, then sway backwards to lead her off the stones into the warm dirt. She walks forward, hesitates, then weaves between them until she finds the berry thicket where the first was planted. It seems vibrant even in the moonlight, standing tall. The wormlike mouth of its inner blossom parts and spirals open, wider and wider and wider.
'What is your name?' it asks her. Without a moment's thought, she casts off the old one.
'I am ȣĦƛʘᶘƘƂⱵ,' she says, and reaches in, feeling slickness on her palm as she touches the mouth's velvet inside.
'You are,' it says, and bends down to swallow her in. She pushes herself up into it. Her feet leave the ground, but she knows what's happening behind her. The plants are bursting new shoots, new roots, growing themselves under the wall and over it, breaking free and out into the unknown.