Firethorn (23 page)

She didn't answer. Instead she said, “Did you hear who she was after? Her stepson, that's who. She was too young to wed such an old man. Her parents should have chosen better. Sell that to a rumormonger! There'd be a few silverheads in it—now, don't fret, don't purse your lips at me! I ' d hardly sell her secret when it's worth so much more locked up in my strongbox.” She tapped her forehead. Then she cupped my face in her hand and her fingers dug into my cheeks. “It's true you held your tongue in there, but you have a very speaking face. I can read you like an omen. You nearly made me laugh. Had you never heard of sucking a prick before?”

I was abashed, the more so that her men and Noggin were behind us, and could hear what she said. But I'd been puzzling over something, so I whispered to her and she inclined her head to hear me. “Mai, I don't see how you keep from biting.”

I was sure she'd mock me for my ignorance, but she just shook her head and looked at me with pity. “You learn fast or get your teeth knocked out, don't you? You don't want to end up like those toothless old whores they call sucklers—all gums. Their quims have dried up and they're good for nothing else.” She laughed, and there was a bitter sound to it. “Now your ears are burning! Stay with me, Coz. I'll teach you not to blush.”

After midday, while many were sleeping off their dinners, Mai took me to see some whores of her acquaintance who lived down the market road, in a tent striped red and rose. Trave wanted to come inside; he said he had coin for it. Mai gave him a shove and told him these whores were not for the likes of him. We left the men outside again and went in.

Seven whores lived in that tent with an old crone and two or three girl children to haul slops and cook and launder—and a pander, who had little to do by my reckoning. When we went in the pander was lying in bed. He got up and pulled hose over his skinny legs and tucked his dangle into a huge leather prickguard that hung to his knees. Mai said, “If only your prick was that long!” and he smiled and said, “Oh, it's long enough when it stands up, even for a great big woman like you—just try what I can do with it!” And he waggled the prickguard and turned his grin from Mai to me.

When he'd gone out, Mai sat on one of the beds, which griped under her weight. She asked the whore lying under the covers, “What
does
he do with it?” and the whore replied, “Not as much as he thinks,” and that set them all to laughing and piling one quip upon another.

I stood stiffly just inside the doorway. I'd never yet spoken to a whore. A wooden statue of Carnal's female avatar, Desire, the benefactor of harlots, stood face-to-face with me. She was naked, as always, save for her cap shaped like a foreskin. Her hips were as wide as Mai's, and her round breasts and the folds of her belly were polished from the hands of the women and their patrons who rubbed her for blessings on their way in and out of the tent. She held her lamp high, casting a golden haze within the dim tent. The daylight that seeped through the striped canvas walls behind her was tinted red. The whites of her eyes were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and her pupils were onyx.

I owed Desire a debt and I wondered how she would make me pay. I should sacrifice a dove to her before it was too late. But she'd already exacted my homage—hadn't she?—when she made me so greedy for Galan, when she made us both so greedy that we brawled and battered against each other, stealing the breath from each other's mouths, until Galan shoved me half over the edge of the cot, and I was hanging on, saying things that shouldn't be said aloud, and the cot juddered and rocked under us as if it might give way.

I felt Desire's touch on my cleft, and the shock of heat from it. She reminded me that she presided here, where whores coupled for coin. She outstared me and I looked away from her.

Some of the whores were still abed; some sat about clad in sheer under-dresses, breakfasting or applying their paints at tables laden with half-eaten birds, bread crumbs, apples, and walnuts, with wigs, paint pots, powders, mortars and pestles. Their beds were crowded close as the boats moored down in the harbor, each with striped gauze curtains draped from bedposts tall as masts. The curtains, like their clothes, hid very little. The air was ripe with the commingled smells of musk, smoke, sweat, chamber pots, and too many perfumes. And under it all, the stink of the tannery farther down the market road.

Mai beckoned me and I came a few more steps into the tent. She gave them my name and told them I was Sire Galan's sheath. Their names were easy to remember, being all flowers, though I was hard put to match the flower to the doxy.

“Sire Galan?” said one. “Is he the prickmaster who wagered against a maiden's virtue and won?”

“I'd like to meet the fool who bet against him,” said another, who went by the name of Corncockle. “He must be easy to cozen if he laid money on a woman's chastity. Maybe he'll believe I'm a maiden too.” She sat with her eyes closed and her head tilted back, wearing little more than a sly smile, while a short, wide-bottomed whore brushed her long black hair until it fell straight as rain down her back.

Rumor must have jumped like a flea from one gossip to the next. How else could Galan's wager be known here among the whores? And how long before the maid's father knew?

“I heard the maiden's pining away for Sire Galan now that he's done with her.”

“That's because he's better than other men—they say he has a bone in his prick, that he stands always at the ready. Is it true?”

They all laughed at my offended expression, and Mai laughed the loudest.

A towhead harlot—she was called Corona—came up close to me. She touched my eyebrow, saying, “Is your hair truly red like this? Or is there a dye for it?” There was something odd about her. She had lean hips and a bobble in her throat like a man's. Was she a eunuch? I'd heard tell the whores hadn't much use for boy children, but some chose to cut the sacs off their baby boys rather than leave them to die on some hillside.

I said shortly, “I was born with it.”

“May I see?” she asked, and she tugged at my headcloth.

I pushed her hand away.

“Oh, why not?” said Mai. “We're all women here. Come, sit here and I'll give your hair a good brushing.” She patted the bed beside her.

I let myself be coaxed. Mai had tickled my vanity, for my hair was the only beauty on which I prided myself. Besides, to be admired, even by a whore, was better than to be mocked. I sat on the tumbled quilts and took off my headcloth. The bawds came around, cooing and wrapping my curls around their fingers, and I ducked my head and tried not to smile. Mai took up a brush and tugged it through my hair until my scalp stung. “Such tangles!” she said, but soon the brush went freely, and I was as content as a cat having its chin scratched.

“Your hair is very shiny. Do you wash it with piss?” asked a whore called Cowslip.

I wrinkled my nose. “Water of maythen is better, and doesn't stink.”

Cowslip said, “Can you get me some of this maythen?” Her own hair was lank.

“You'd be better off eating pig knuckles and bone marrow, if you can get them. It will make your hair grow thick.”

Mai gave me a nudge. “Bring her some of this water, next time we come,” and she yanked my hair for emphasis.

“Surely,” I said. “I' ll make some up for you.” Already I knew where to go for maythen, for I'd seen a place on the sea cliff where it spread among rocks, in a carpet. The flowers were dry now, but still smelled sweet when they were trodden, a sign that they kept their strength.

And so, slowly, we arrived at our purpose. We dawdled so long I'd begun to think Mai visited only as a friend, but these were customers too. She brought out an amulet she'd made for one of the whores. It was in a leather pouch with a thong to go around the neck. Neither said what it was for, but I saw six silverheads (graybeards, the whores called them) go into the purse Mai hid between her breasts.

Then Mai brought out the childbane and named her price. She boasted that she meant to make the miscarrier go a-begging; not a woman in the Marchfield would have to trust her life to that bloody butcher again, now that a quickening could be stopped before it started. Then Mai swore that childbane grew only on the peak of Barren Mountain, in an ice garden patrolled by bears walking upright and dressed as men, and that I—a renowned greenwoman—had braved wolves and storms and bears and all to pluck the berries from under the very noses of the gods. The tale was riddled with nonsense, and yet the whores didn't go astray, trusting her. I knew myself that childbane worked, and furthermore that Mai was no mountebank. Hadn't she given me a potent cure for jealousy?

Corncockle, the black-haired whore, chaffered with Mai over the price until they settled on less than the dame had paid, for a good many more berries. Then Corncockle said, “Mai, I need you to make a virgin for me.”

Mai laughed. “Why bother? There's none of you could pass.”

Corncockle waved her hand and called, “Come here! Come on!” in a sharp voice, and a naked girl came out from behind the beds. She was thin save for a belly round as a porridge pot. Her breasts had yet to swell, and there was no woman's beard to hide the smooth lips of her quim. She didn't try to cover herself; I supposed she had no use for modesty, living in a whore's tent. She stood beside Corncockle, resting one foot on the other, and I could see the resemblance. Her hair was black, in a long plait over her shoulder.

“Your daughter?” Mai asked.

“Yes, and just look at her! She's been sulking ever since she lost her maidenhead. What a pruneface! Who'd want her now?”

The girl did have a sullen look, and dark pouches under her eyes like an old woman's.

“She's young, isn't she?” Mai said.

“She's been on my tit for ten years. It's time she earned her keep.” Corncockle gave her daughter a shake, and the girl scowled at the floor.

I'd been lulled, thinking the harlots were amiable women—forthright enough to blister my ears, but harmless nevertheless. Here was the harm.

I asked the girl her name and she wouldn't look at me.

Her mother said, “I'll call her Prune if she doesn't mend her ways—but for now she's called Catnep. She has firepiss, or so she says, and she's shirking—aren't you, my heart?—but soon we'll have her good as new.”

“No wonder she's sour,” Mai said. “What did you expect? A big pestle in that little mortar, grinding away. Of course she has firepiss. Many a grown woman catches it after her wedding night. It would be worse for a little one like her.”

Corncockle said, “It's that crone, Hobblen. She aimed a curse at me, because she has a fancy for Sire Trasera and he fancies me instead. I'm shielded, so it struck Catnep instead.” She touched the tattoo she wore at the base of her throat.

Mai said, “No need to look so far for cause, when the cause is she's too young.”

“No younger than I was when I started,” Corncockle said.

I went to the girl and took her hands in mine. Her palms were dry and her fingers cold: no fever, then. She let me hold her hands as if they had nothing to do with her, and Corncockle didn't object, though she rolled her eyes at me when the girl looked away.

I asked Catnep, “Does the piss burn on its way out? Do you have to use the pot many times in the night?”

She nodded and looked at me from the corner of an eye.

“Is the piss cloudy or clear?”

Catnep shrugged. I leaned closer. She smelled frowsty, like unaired sheets. Her pulse quickened under my fingers and I let her go. She sidled away and put the bed between us. I asked her which pisspot she used and she pointed to a cot in the darkest corner.

Corncockle spoke up. “Well, as you said, Mai, plenty of women get firepiss when they're first broken to riding. And they get over it.”

I stooped and found the chamber pot. An acrid smell hit me when I raised the lid. There was a milky look to the piss, but no sign of blood.

I was angry and didn't trouble to hide it. “No more men,” I said. “I'll make a tisane for her that should help—but no more men.” I looked at Corncockle straight. “It's true that most get over it, but sometimes after the burning goes away and a woman seems cured, fever sneaks upstream and brings a pain deep in the kidneys, and before you know it, the fever has carried her right off. So have a care, will you? I'll come back, and meanwhile you must sacrifice to Torrent, who rules the waters of the body. Ask the priestess of Wellspring, she'll tell you what's owing. And feed Catnep coddled eggs and a mash of parsnips—parsley root too, if there's any to be found—to strengthen her kidneys.”

I took up my headcloth and hid my hair again. “Give her plenty of warmed wine, very much watered, with a spoon of honey and verjuice in every cup. She must drink and drink until her piss runs clear.” Honey was good for almost anything, but more than that, it would keep the girl drinking and make her mother (or her pander) fish deep in the purse. They should pay, and pay dear. “Make sure it's honey from the linnflower tree,” I added, for that was the hardest to obtain.

Catnep stared at me openly now; they all stared. Corncockle looked to Mai, saying, “She has costly notions, your friend. Does she suppose we sleep on sacks of coins?”