A Color Made for Eyes That Never Came

Havel Ostrun came to the southern arcade with a hand-cart of oiled bundles and the particular quiet of a man who has already told a story twice and found it no easier in the telling. Six bolts, he said, cut, dyed, and folded for a Serevan buyer who would have paid in bonds discounted only slightly for the crossing — dyed at my own vats, to a red he had described in a letter I answered a season ago in good faith and better madder. The southbound roll closed the morning before he reached the quay. Nobody thought to post the hour. He carried the cloth home the way a man carries something he is not yet willing to call unsold.

He asked me, standing in the arcade with rain finding its way past the awning’s edge in threads too thin to call a leak, whether the red would still be a red once it was no longer going to Serevan. I did not have an answer ready, which is rare enough that I noticed the rareness before I noticed the question.

I unwrapped one bolt myself, there, over his objection that the damp arcade was no place to open good cloth. Serevan light is not this light. I had dyed toward a saturation their sun rewards and ours only tolerates — I saw it the moment the fold opened, a red pitched for a squint I have never owned, mixed by a hand that had apparently been keeping half an eye on a harbor I have never crossed. I had not known I was dyeing for an audience until the audience failed to arrive.

But the color did not know it had missed anyone. It sat in the wet grey arcade light exactly as true as it would have sat under a Serevan window, only arguing something different now — less a shout across water, more a low claim made to whoever happened to be standing close enough, which today was only Havel Ostrun, myself, and a woman deciding at the next stall whether saffron was worth two counted drams.

I bought the bolt from him at a price we both knew undervalued the madder in it and told him to sell the other five as Rainmonth cloth, not leftover southern cloth — a true color arguing to the nearest eyes rather than the intended ones, which is a distinction, I am only now certain, this trade never once required me to make.