Wildfire (69 page)

 

  
I wondered why I was unsure of what to do. For it was simple: I couldn’t be a whore.

 

  
I sat cross-legged and emptied the satin purse in my lap. Garrio had strung the beadcoins on a red cord, in the Lambaneish way: three of silver, twenty-six of pewter, two of amber, and one of blue glass against the evil eye.

 

  
Thirty-one beadcoins, not counting the glass one. It was dear of Garrio and the others, but all the same I doubted they had scraped the lint from their purses for me. Add those to the coins hanging from the cords of my cap, and the sum was altogether paltry.

 

  
It had taken nearly a tennight to journey from Sapheiros to Allaxios, and we’d been given fresh horses at every post town. How long would it take to return on foot? The money wouldn’t last, and I’d be living like a stray goat eating roadside weeds—and if I strayed from the road, I’d be stealing. On the plains of Lambanein, every handspan was owned and worked.

 

  
I dreaded the solitude more than the hunger. I had known both in the Kingswood, and knew which was worse. And I’d rather face the wolves and bears of the Kingswood again than the men who would prey on a woman traveling alone.

 

  
I could stay in Allaxios, become a dowser, and live by my wits and such tricks as my wits proposed. And I’d be stealing from poor folk such as Meninx, for I was not a true dowser who could cure them of Lambaneish afflictions. Or I could sell sweetrush root and woven sacks and the like, and
with diligence I might make enough to eat, maybe even enough for shelter, but nothing to set aside to cross the mountains.

 

  
Or I could be a whore and the king’s thrush.

 

  
But to think of any man—even a man such as Divine Aboleo, who had summoned me to sit and drink with him—paying for me. I’d as soon couple with a bear as Divine Aboleo; I should have to make myself into a she-bear with metal claws, golden fingercaps with jeweled nails like the ones belonging to Arthygater Katharos, and prick him as we grappled. Had I not pictured this when I sat beside him and felt the weight of his stare and saw, from the corner of my eye, the strange delicacy with which he plucked feathers from the pillow? I had feared that despite his vows he was thinking of how to devour me, a heavy man like that. Any man who had the money. Carnal Desire was pleased I should think this way and she touched me on my cleft.

 

  
Gods, what playthings we are. For a moment my right eye was filled with the divining compass and I saw a single die spinning and coming to rest on Desire. I saw a hand pick up the die to cast again. I used to be so sure I was in Ardor’s keeping, and now I was passed from one god to the next, as cheap as any little carved cube of bone: the means of the game and never its purpose.

 
  

 

  
I dreamed my spade clunked and jarred against rocks as I dug a new planting bed on a terrace below my house on Mount Sair. Another clunk, a different sound. I crouched and put my hands in the earth, breaking up clods, tossing stones into the hedge. I found a rotted leather strap, then a tarnished cheekplate, an iron bit jointed in the middle, and a buckle. Pieces of a bridle too fine for a farmer’s nag. Probably used for hunting rather than war, because the reins were not protected by iron scales.

 

  
I rubbed the cheekplate on my kirtle. The disk was as big as my palm, and had an embossed design of a fox chasing its tail, in a simple and lively style. It was made of silver under all that tarnish, and it smelled of dirt. I couldn’t find its twin, but I did uncover two horse teeth, and planted them again with their long forked roots down.

 
  

 

  
When I awoke I arranged and rearranged the signs, as if I were reading the bones. The fox in the bridle’s silver disk was Crux Moon, of course; the fox showing under his skin meant trickery and deception. But the fox chased his tail—fooled himself?

 

  
The dead horse had been used for hunting—Prey Hunter, a seeker and devourer. But why would they have buried a horse, bridle and all, on the sec
ond terrace? To dream of a horse meant a journey—that was to be expected, I must leave soon. But the horse was also a sign of Carnal Stallion, meaning lust, potency, generation.

 

  
Yet they say a dream of teeth is a warning of sorrow to come. I always thought that was the safest of all predictions.

 

  
These were gods of Corymb, and the dream of a place in Corymb. Why then, when I awoke, was the word that tarried in my mind Lambaneish? Alopexan, the fox.

 
  

 

  
I asked Garrio to ask the king if I could be permitted to speak to him. The king sent word I might speak with Divine Aboleo instead. Garrio wondered why I didn’t take the thirty-one beadcoins and the one glass bead and leave while I could. Moreover he feared I’d reveal to the priest that I knew about the brothel, and Garrio was the only one who could have told me.

 

  
I swore I wouldn’t let on, and then shilly-shallied a day and a night, too afraid of Divine Aboleo to approach him. The next morning I spoke to the priest’s manservant when he came to the courtyard fountain to draw water, and in a while he came back to say I’d been granted an audience.

 

  
The strategos was in the antechamber of the bathing room, wearing his hose and a thin shirt. His body servant scraped the priest’s scalp with a blade like the one I’d used; no tharais barbers here.

 

  
I pointed to my webeye and told the priest I’d had a vision. I’d seen myself as a tharos servant at a banquet, and my mistress was an Ebanakan whore. I said I might do well as a thrush, if I were handmaid to a whore, for she would be much in the company of men who would speak unguardedly in her presence, and I might easily overhear them. Did he think I might be of use to Corvus Rex Incus, Master of Masters, in this way?

 

  
“Tell me how the whore looked,” Divine Aboleo said.

 

  
I clamped my arms against my sides to hide the sweat that darkened my wrapper. I’d only seen one Ebanakan whore, and likely they had a different one in mind. “Well—like an Enakanaban, an Ekanaban, of course, with reddish brown skin, and rather short. She had a small nose and a large mouth, and huge dark eyes. Her hair was in a long coif down her back, as thick as your arm.”

 

  
“She had a name, I suppose.”

 

  
I pointed again to my eye. “I saw, I didn’t hear.” I thought, fool, fool, fool. He never believed I was a true dreamer, he’ll see through the ruse—he’ll know Garrio told—and Garrio will get a beating, never mind what they’ll do to me.

 

  
“This might be arranged,” he said.

 

  
“If I had something to tell, how would I get word to the king?”

 

  
“That won’t be difficult. The whore will have patrons from amongst our men. They’ll be sure to seek you out.”

 

  
“If I am the king’s thrush, will it be appreciated?” I brushed the coins hanging from my net cap so they clinked together.

 

  
“That depends on how sweetly you sing.”

 

  
Garrio claimed that Divine Aboleo had called me bold and clever. For a man to be called bold is praise, and to be called clever is backward praise, meaning be wary of him; but for a woman to be called bold and clever is no sort of praise at all. Yet I’d been flattered—and gullible enough to believe it.

 
  

 

  
The next day Garrio escorted me to the Ebanakan’s house. I carried a gift for her, a woolen hanging embroidered with a scene of a peacock hunt. Garrio’s stride was long and his steps quick, and I had to dash to keep up.

 

  
“Are you angry?” I asked.

 

  
He hurried along the paved banks of the canal. I stopped and crossed my arms and waited. He was quite far away before he noticed I wasn’t following and turned back.

 

  
“Why are you so vexed?” I said.

 

  
“You don’t have to go.”

 

  
“Garrio, I thank you, I thank all my friends—but how long would your gift last on the road to Incus? Likely I’d end up a whore, and a hedge-whore at that, working on my back in a stony field.”

 

  
“So you’d rather be in a prickery,” he said.

 

  
“I told Divide Aboleo I could be a maidservant to a whore, and spy just as well.”

 

  
Garrio lifted his tunic and showed me the wallet hanging from his belt. He hefted it and said, “They’re paying for you to go there. They called this a dowry—what is that but an apprentice fee? They’re going to make a whore of you.”

 

  
Where I came from, women were sold to brothels, they didn’t pay to be in them. What need for an apprenticeship when the task was easy? “How much is it?”

 

  
“How should I know?”

 

  
“You could count, eh?”

 

  
We squatted down on the pavement beside the canal, and he emptied the purse. I caught one of the beadcoins just before it rolled into the water. Garrio didn’t have a scale, which was the only proper way to measure the value of beadcoins, for they came in many shapes and sizes. But there were fifteen gold coins, seventeen of silver. We reckoned it a fortune.

 

  
Garrio scooped up the coins. The backs of his hands were crisscrossed with kinked veins, and his knuckles were swollen like an old man’s.

 

  
I said, “Give me that purse and I’ll be on my way. Say you were robbed and I ran off.”

 

  
He looked away and frowned.

 

  
“Then suppose you just give me one golden beadcoin, or a handful of silver ones? Enough to be able to leave the city.”

 

  
He shook his head and his cheeks reddened above his beard.

 

  
I threw a chip of stone into the canal and watched it sink. “What’s the matter with whores? Don’t you like them?”

 

  
“Of course I do,” he said, without meeting my eyes.

 

  
I didn’t doubt Garrio bought a woman from time to time, and if I became a whore he could buy me—if he had the coins for it. The thought discomfited us both.

 

  
For so long Galan had been my shield from other men. Though we had parted, I’d kept my shield raised high, and on it was written,
I belong to another.
Some men saw this right away; some men never did, or didn’t care. But it was mere mist, wasn’t it? There was no shield.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 27
  

  
House of Aghazal
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
t wasn’t a brothel, never say that. The whores of the Marchfield had their kinds and degrees, from the throngs of two-copper slags at the bottom to a quean with her own pavilion at the top; so too the ranks of the whore-celebrants of Lambanein. At the pinnacle were those they called the gifted. Meaning one who receives gifts, and one who bestows herself as a gift, but above all one who is gifted in the arts. Aghazal was one of these, and the house was her home.

 

  
I’d watched her at the first banquet where I’d served as a tharais napkin, watched her in fascination as she arched her foot and leaned forward to speak passionately of the masque, and brushed a man’s arm to make him tremble.

 

  
Aghazal was the Lambaneish word for the small leaping deer we called gazelle in the High, and indeed she bore some resemblance to her namesake, with her long neck, lustrous eyes, and graceful movements. But she was Ebanakan, and her true name, the one her mother called her, was Yamimarek.

 

  
Her house was a tall narrow house on a street of similar houses in a wealthy part of the city, up near the walls of the palace district. The house was full of people, Aghazal’s kin and servants. She seemed to be the only whore among them.

 

  
Her mother sat at the loom all day, as did her two unmarried sisters. Her aunt cooked, her grandmother herded the little children, and the older girls—cousins, nieces, who-knows-who—helped in the kitchen, spun, and washed clothing. Her father was dead, but her uncle (married to the cook) and his three sons farmed a plot of good land she rented beyond the city gates; at night they came home weary, and then dressed in finery and escorted Aghazal to banquets. At home they guarded her from thieves and from guests who were drunk or importunate. Her young brother served as her messenger; he was the only Ebanakan there who was taller than me. They were not all the same ruddy brown as Aghazal; some were lighter,
some darker. A few of the children were almost the same ivory color as a person of Lambanein. But there was a strong stamp of kinship on them all: they were smallish people, with fine bones and large dark eyes that gave a misleading appearance of delicacy.

 
  

 

  
Aghazal received the purse from Garrio and the cloth from me, with a pretty speech of thanks that I translated for Garrio, for he still knew very little Lambaneish. After Garrio took his leave, she asked me, “Do you sing?”

 

  
“I suppose. Like anyone, ein?”

 

  
“What songs do you know? What instruments can you play?”

 

  
I shrugged and showed her my empty palms.

 

  
“Dance? No? Can you recite? Do you know the Odes and Epics, can you recite the Fragments, have you heard of the One Hundred Sage Poets? Do you even know poems exist, can you read, ein? Oh, no doubt it’s an accomplishment to read your godsigns, but no poem of any worth was ever written in that strange-ignorant tongue; it’s only good for ciphering. You can cipher, I hope, add and subtract and so forth, divide by twos and fives. Do you know the twenty-five Postures? Ah, I can see by your blush you know two or three, but can you name them? Have you practiced?”

 

  
She dug deep but couldn’t find the bottom of my ignorance. Every other word she corrected me; I had no idea I still spoke Lambaneish so badly.

 

  
Could I concoct scents and cosmetics, cook leaf pastry, make lace, play horses-and-houses, play at Spices? Did I know how to sit, how to rise, could I read the messages in beads or flowers, did I know the proper garlands for various occasions, could I answer a poem with a poem if called to do so? Well then, what