Wildfire (72 page)

refusing. But he sucked pulp through a slit in the hard skin of a pomegranate, and crimson juice ran down his chin. He took a cloth from the tharais servant and wiped his face.

 

  
He was attentive to Aghazal, and she spoke softly so he would have to lean closer. They hadn’t touched, but I watched for it. I was jealous of how they seemed to charm each other, and how well they looked together, and if my imagination had needed a spur, which it did not, there were the paintings on the walls of the dining court. Usually these paintings were behind closed shutters to protect them from the Sun. Tonight the shutters were open, and the paintings were lit by alabaster sconces, so Aghazal’s guests might better admire the artistry of the renowned painter.

 

  
In the arthygater’s bathing room they had gossiped that the king knew the twenty-five Postures, like a civilized person. No doubt Aghazal knew twenty-five Postures and twenty-five more when those were exhausted. I admired her in the warm, breathing glow of many lamps. Delicate creases encircled her plump neck like thin necklaces, and her skin had a sheen as if she’d dusted herself with gold. She would taste of cloves and salt. If I were the king, I’d want to take her first standing up and face-to-face. I entwine, she had promised. Aghazal would have to hoist herself up to kiss him, he was tall. She would cling.

 

  
I wanted to be the one clinging. Arms around his neck, cheek pressed against his chest, legs around his hips—my back scraping against something hard, the column, the wall.

 

  
Both my eyes were open wide, and my vision was doubled. With my right hand I twisted the bracelets over the scar on my left wrist, and I shivered in a chill wind from the Ferinus. When had I truly been made captive? Not when the smith put on the manacle. There was no single moment. Unless it was this moment, now, when I saw revealed a new pattern, or rather a pattern already embedded in events, that altered everything—not only what might come, but what had gone before. Memories changed when their meaning changed, and how could I trust them when they were so faithless?

 

  
Dasasana carried forth the famous eels from the Lake of Sapheiros for our delectation: a pair of them coiled together, decorated with their long ribbons of fins, adrift in a green sauce. She showed us the dish and Krinian said, “Ah!” and she took them again so they could be delicately removed from the bone, cut into morsels, and reassembled.

 

  
I speared a bite with my trident and chewed. The flesh was delicious, but my gorge rose. Self-disgust. I had begged Desire to light my way, but I didn’t like what I saw when she unshuttered her lantern. I’d waited so long in Lambanein, in the manufactory, the dyehouse, the bathing room—not for a way back across the Ferinus—for a gesture, for acknowledgment. That he
should admit I was necessary to him. I’d cozened myself. I’d been a nuisance, and he’d found a way to rid himself of me and make use of me at the same time.

 

  
Krinian seemed in ecstasy over the eels; he smacked his lips and closed his eyes, and he stretched out his leg on the outside of the dining platform, fencing me in. His rude foot touched my ankle, but I was nothing but a whore after all.

 

  
I sat perfectly still while my thoughts scrabbled about like mice trapped in the bottom of a kettle. Surely the king had not come here to see me. Perhaps he wanted to meet Krinian, who was, of course, enormously rich. He might wish to borrow money from him.

 

  
Under Aghazal’s instruction, we Sisters had made wreaths for each guest, messages in the language of flowers. The king’s wreath was of roses, deep red, which meant endeavors rewarded—but entwined as they were with scarlet poppies, meaning consolation, the promise was ambiguous.

 

  
The moonflowers in Aghazal’s wreath had unfurled, for they are night bloomers. Each flower was made of a single flared petal, ribbed, pure white except for violet bruises deep in the throat. Aghazal had moonflowers in plenty growing in her garden, and those too were opening, and their scent was womanly, fleshy and sweet, slightly tainted with the scent of something overripe. Aghazal saw me staring at her and she plucked a blossom from her wreath and tore it with her teeth, and swallowed a small piece without chewing. She didn’t bother to hide behind her hand.

 

  
She handed the bloom to me, smiling, and I touched it with my tongue. Aghazal dared me, she did, without saying a word, and I ate a shred of the flower. I was about to give it back to her, or to Krinian perhaps, but she forestalled me with a subtle gesture I took to mean: It is yours. Moonflowers were never on the list of delicacies to be served at the feast. It was for the two of us alone, I thought she said with those dark speaking eyes. So I ate the rest of the bloom.

 

  
Before long I was like a swimmer who has expelled her last breath and given herself over to sinking. How slowly I sank, as if in honey, and the moment thick and heavy and golden and translucent, and there were bubbles of laughter trapped in it. This descending made me dizzy and I leaned against the backrest, and Krinian tilted toward me. I drew my legs away, and his foot followed and pressed harder. I looked at King Corvus as if I’d been given permission to stare. Sight was sustenance. His hair was black as raven’s plumage—so the ballads said, and it was true. His beard was trimmed close, the hair of it not straight but coiled. He wore his red crown of roses and poppies without appearing to notice it. Aghazal had told me to strip away all the thorns on the roses but two. I looked for a scratch on the king’s brow, a ruby
bead to be licked off. I wanted to pierce my tongue with a thorn, I had such a thirst. My throat was so dry I couldn’t swallow. Mad cravings.

 

  
But the king’s brow was untroubled, no trickle of blood from a thorn, no furrows, and he caught me up in his glance, inviting me, inviting us all to laugh. What was the jest? Just that he was not accomplished. It had to be acknowledged, he said, that he wasn’t born a poet, but a warrior. His wit was not his sharpest weapon; he begged to be excused from versifying, to be spared humiliation.

 

  
“You’re too modest,” said Aghazal. “You’re a poet and a warrior. Perhaps it takes a man from another country to remind us of days when men excelled in both art and deed, like Oxys and Pachys from the First Age of the World, and Balanos from this our Second Age.”

 

  
“I’ve wondered,” Krinian said, “who composed the poem you gave at the arthygater’s New Moon banquet this month. The one that says—how does it go?—something about white petals of snow burning on your skin.”

 

  
“No,” I said. “‘White petals of snow drift. They are caught in your shawl, immolate on your burning skin.’”

 

  
It had taken a great effort to speak. I had to strain against my muteness, and my face went red and my heart beat too fast. I forgot to use the high Lambaneish lilt; instead my voice plunged lower and lower until I was whispering. I kept my eyes down, sure the king watched me, but when I glanced up he was staring at Krinian instead.

 

  
“I did. I composed it,” said King Corvus in answer to Krinian. “I was obliged to say something. And might I ask how one can pay for a verse in advance, when the subject isn’t known?”

 

  
Krinian speared a piece of eel and popped it in his mouth. After he swallowed, he said, “It would be no discredit to you if you’d had the help of a poet. After all, you can’t be expected to know all our ways, as you say. Many a man born here has had some thrush find out the theme for an evening’s joust, and paid a poet to work up something beforehand.”

 

  
“Then I suppose one must be first to recite,” the king said. “Because I don’t see how one would know what other words one might have to include from the person who spoke just before—breezes or shawls or the night. Or do the versifiers conspire?”

 

  
“What shall the motif be tonight, ein?” Aghazal asked. “Would you like to pick one, Krinian? So long as it isn’t eels, my dear.”

 

  
Apparently this was a great jape, or at least Krinian thought so. He laughed boisterously and said, “It should be eels! Eels it is!”

 

  
Aghazal said, “It isn’t that sort of evening.”

 

  
The king said, “Just so we’re all on the same footing, so to speak—if there are any guests who might have winkled out this evening’s motif already—
perhaps we should ask someone else to suggest one. Suppose we ask Alopexin.”

 

  
“Why not?” said Aghazal, and Krinian, who should have been insulted by the suggestion he would cheat, as the king had been insulted, waved as if he didn’t much care. They all looked at me.

 

  
I said, “Well, if I might be so bold…Perhaps the Fragment by Kylocides, the one about the bud of the peony? The one that goes,

 

  

 

  
In the tight bud—soft folds.

 

  
The one who tempts the peony to open,

 

  
Departs before the petals fall.”

 

  

 

  
Aghazal said, “That would be most suitable.” She shielded her mouth to cover a smile, but was she amused? Her irises had gone from brown to black, and to look into her eyes was like looking into wells that reflected pinpricks of distant lamplight. She clapped her hands to call for silence, and told her guests the drinking game after dinner would be on the theme of the peony bud, in the form of six, eleven, and eight, and the winner would be the last man or woman who could still stand and recite. To me she said quietly, “You shall go first, Alopexin, since it was your idea.” That was her revenge.

 

  
They say I acquitted myself well, but I don’t remember. The rest of the banquet is gone, swallowed down the long throat of a moonflower.

 

  
I remember a street I didn’t recognize in an unfamiliar city that had terraces arranged like petals, concentric and perfect. The thinning Moon was high above the dark bulk of the mountain. I began to walk, unsteady on my feet. Someone hurried after me, calling my name, but as it was the wrong name I didn’t answer to it. I wanted to catch up with Penna, who turned the corner always just ahead, and I tried to grasp her gauze skirt, but my hand tore through it as if it were cobwebs. She had black ribbons around her throat and they fluttered in the winds tumbling down the alley. She was a mudwoman like me. Who had taught her to be so proud and implacable? I asked her forgiveness that I was not like her, that I was so weak I preferred captivity to death, that I had been unable to despise my captor. She ran away down the street, an egret on thin legs, running and beating her wings, clumsy until she took flight.

 

  
Aghazal swore I never left her house, that she wouldn’t have let me go wandering after eating a moonflower. So it cannot be true about the man I met by the bathhouse outside the eastgate. I leaned over a waist-high railing and all the blood rushed to my face. I was tharais again with a shawl over my head. He gave me two beadcoins when he was done, but he cheated me. They were made of bread, not pewter. I ate them dry and the crumbs stuck in my throat.

 

  
But I think it might be true that I stood in Aghazal’s bedchamber and
watched Krinian mount her. It was nearly dawn and the other guests had left, seen home by hired torchboys. Second and Third and I attended our mistress during the ceremony, for this was how we were to learn the twenty-five Postures and the other arts that made twenty-five seem a thousand: the appropriate utterances, bites, scratches, kisses, and embraces to be given and received.

 

  
But I thought Rowney was in the room as well, standing at the other end of the bed. I greeted him gladly and asked after Galan and his men and all their doings. They were well, praise the gods, he said, though he himself had taken a lance thrust in the chest; he pulled up his jerkin to show me, and the wound was black with blood and glittering with flies. But he was better now, truly he was.

 

  
Maybe we were not in Aghazal’s bedchamber, watching her. Maybe she was alone there with Krinian, to serve as an officiant at a secret rite. As for him, I had the strange vain notion he was thinking of me as he rutted, but my quim was dry and I was unmoved. He could never move me.

 
  

 

  
The next afternoon Aghazal sent for me when she awoke. I sat beside her on the bed as she lay amidst rumpled bedclothes. She said she was proud of me. “You were splendid, much better than I expected—reciting Arkhyios Corvus’s poem! Flattering him and making Krinian bristle—he was smitten, as I’m sure you could tell. He has already sent you a gift, and two others did as well, but of course it’s too soon to contemplate taking a patron. You were a scoundrel about the peonies, ein? Trying to find me out.”

 

  
“Do I find out? I don’t remember.”

 

  
“
Did
I find out, you must say.”

 

  
“You poison me.” I squinted down at Aghazal. My eyes smarted from daylight, even in her shuttered bedchamber. My pupils must be enlarged, as hers were. It took great effort to move; I felt I had to heave my limbs about, maneuver this body that was not quite myself.

 

  
Aghazal got up and draped a shawl over her shoulders without bothering with a wrapper. It didn’t shame her a whit to be seen naked. “You
poisoned
me.”

 

  
“I poisoned you?”

 

  
“No, no, that’s how to say it: You poisoned me. Why are you fretting, ein? You didn’t take enough to be harmed. And besides—the way you savored the flower—I thought you knew.”

 

  
“I think you eat, ate the flower to look beautiful. The way you tear the flesh between your teeth, the petal on your tongue—I thought I am to do the same.” I’d eaten the rest of the bloom bite by bite, hoping the king would look at me and not Aghazal.

 

  
“And by Katabaton, you did it well,” she said. “But I’m sorry you didn’t know, it would have been better if you’d been prepared. It baffles me that you can be so ignorant and yet appear to have knowledge. Who among the patrons last night would have guessed that yesterday morning you’d never heard of Kylocides? What a surprise, ein? When you began to utter poetry all of a sudden.” She laughed and went through the door to her bathing room.