Wildfire (57 page)

 

  
He had failed to show an interest in any women whomsoever, Phleibin said.

 

  
“What about boys?”

 

  
“No boys either.”

 

  
“The praise poems were not too bad. Better than I expected from a strange-ignorant person.”

 

  
“Surely he had a poet do them up beforehand.”

 

  
“None will admit to it.”

 

  
“He must pay a lot for silence. When poets have done something well, they want everyone to know.”

 

  
But Keros was a granddaughter of the arkhon—therefore an arthygater by title—and a prettier prize than any offered before.

 

  
Poor girl, they said. A man of no prospects.

 

  
I edged sideways to see King Corvus between the columns. He smiled at Keros, his teeth white in his dark beard. But my nearsighted right eye saw him otherwise, saw pictures woven of strands of lamplight and the dark threads of my shawl. I saw the king turn in his saddle to squint at a line of men behind him, on one of those strange days in the mountains when the Sun shone even as winds drove storm clouds across the peaks. There was snow in the raven feathers of his tall hat and the fur of his wolfskin cloak, and snow in his beard and mustache. He bent over, coughing, and straightened up and wiped his face, and spurred his horse to breast the frozen waves and fathoms of snow.

 

  
I rubbed my wrist. The higher the master, the more boastful the servant, it is said. How desperate he must have been to listen to me in the mountains—a tharais—a mudwoman. How I’d flattered myself, thinking I might be important to him even now. Because all that, the ice and rock and winds of the Ferinus, seemed a dire dream, and here and now was another sort of dream in which I observed but did not act.

 

  
I leaned against a wall painted with dancers. Reflected lanterns shimmered in the waters of the circular pool in the courtyard. Soft breezes carrying scents of apple blossoms and spices pressed my shawl against my face. And now the musicians played a new tune, loud and joyful.
The bride is coming, make her welcome!
Some of the guests sang and clapped in time to the drum, rejoicing:
The bride is coming!

 

  
I wondered who was to be wed tonight. The bride came dancing in from the outer garden. She was much taller than her female attendants, and it took me a moment to realize she must be wearing tall pattens or stilts under her robes. She wore a red wig, and her silver moon mask, twice the size of an ordinary face, seemed astonished; the eyes and mouth were round holes, and the eyebrows curved like sickles.

 

  
Her betrothed too was a giant accompanied by a retinue of dancers. His huge mask was of gold, and likewise of gold his cuirass in the shape of a muscular torso. Bride and bridegroom crossed arching bridges to meet on a stone island in the pool, and their dance was wedding and consummation.

 

  
No use now to retell the story they enacted that night—for it was a story, and not a real wedding between nobles, as I had first supposed. I couldn’t understand all the words, but there were other languages intelligible to the senses: the lover strutting like a stallion, a defiant gesture from a wife who had seemed all submission, her husband’s wrath, the frightening stench of oil set ablaze on the surface of the pool, and above all the music, which entered by the portals of my ears and found the quickest corridor to my heart.

 

  
The stone island was in turn marriage bed, garden, and battlefield, and lastly a wasteland where the bride—the wife—the adulteress—lay shivering
in the cold. She sang a lament unaccompanied, in a voice of such purity she won silence from the jaded spectators, and as she sang, a gust sent a blizzard of apple blossoms swirling over the courtyard, snow falling on a desolate land. The singer’s voice thinned to a fine thread, a whisper. When it broke, she died.

 

  
I was glad of the shawl that hid my tears. I knew she hadn’t truly died. I knew boys in the apple tree had shaken the branches to make petals fall like snow. But it was no mere artifice. It was an enchantment, and I had willingly believed it.

 

  
I missed the summoning gesture of Phleibin’s husband until he made it so emphatic it caught my eye. I hurried forward to offer the basin and cloth. He was vexed with me and wiped his sticky hand on my skirt, rubbing hard from buttock to knee. He did it again, digging his fingers into my thigh, while he spoke to his wife and the others, saying Aeidin had been in fine voice but Ripan should never have attempted the lover. Did you hear his voice shake?

 

  
I was shaking myself, in a fury at his touch and the way he’d tried to ruin the enchantment with his sour whine. If Phleibin’s husband wanted a receptacle, let him have one. It would not be me. I slipped away along the wall, and whispered to the first tharais woman I passed, “Do you trade with this one? It thinks he, that man, wants a receptacle.” She shook her head and said nothing. The second napkin hissed, “Go back! Hurry!” By the time I reached the third, I’d taken two pewter beadcoins from my net cap. When I pressed the coins into her hand, she nodded. I took her place against the wall, and dried my palms on the wrapper and thought of the man’s hands on me.

 

  
I was closer now to Arthygater Katharos and King Corvus. One of the guests seated before me was a cataphract named Sire Vafra, a follower of King Corvus. He’d taken the longer route out of the Ferinus, by horseback—so the rest of the king’s army must have arrived in Allaxios. A tharos servant poured doublewine in Sire Vafra’s glass goblet, and he emptied it quickly. She gave him more, and he drank again. His brown beard was trimmed like a hedge all along his lower jaw, and his bobble moved up and down under the shaven skin of his throat as he gulped.

 

  
Sire Vafra wielded what little Lambaneish he knew with a clumsy tongue, in conversation with a plump, white-haired man and his plump, black-haired wife who shared the same dining platform. The wife seemed half the age of her husband, and yet well past her fruitful years. Perhaps her hair was dyed.

 

  
A young man arose from one of the platforms and stepped in front of a
column. He raised his arms, and spoke loudly over the hubbub, saying something about the breeze and white petals.

 

  
Arthygater Katharos raised her voice, saying, “Hush! Let’s hear it again.” This time everyone quieted, and he declaimed so that I understood every word.

 

  

 

  
“You beckon and the breeze

 

  
brings to you white petals.

 

  
I would serve you as faithfully.”

 

  

 

  
He returned to his seat, and a murmur came from the crowd, followed by a surprisingly long, expectant silence.

 

  
A woman stepped forward and in a clear high voice she said,

 

  

 

  
“Who leans upon a breeze,

 

  
will fall upon hard ground,

 

  
not a bed of soft, white petals.”

 

  

 

  
“Oh, well done!” said the arthygater, laughing, and women applauded in the Lambaneish way, snapping their fingers.

 

  
A briefer silence. The black-haired woman nudged her husband, and he stood quickly, as if afraid another would get there before him. He said,

 

  

 

  
“To remember this night,

 

  
I gather white petals.

 

  
Longing grows even in hard ground.”

 

  

 

  
He sat down and his wife praised him lavishly. Sire Vafra raised his glass to him and the tharos servant filled it again.

 

  
The same woman who had spoken before came forward and said,

 

  

 

  
“Night hides under her shawl.

 

  
She passes swiftly by,

 

  
a breeze scattering white petals.”

 

  

 

  
The guests applauded with enthusiasm, and the white-haired man admired the way she’d neatly stitched in the breeze as well as the night.

 

  
King Corvus stood and I held my breath. He said,

 

  

 

  
“White petals of snow drift.

 

  
They are caught in your shawl,

 

  
immolate on your burning skin.”

 

  

 

  
Silence after this, the highest praise of all, and I wondered if the storm of petals had made the king recall the Ferinus too. Then everyone snapped their fingers and cried Ah! and Oh!

 

  
Arthygater Katharos rose for the first time since the feast had begun, and her husband stood with her. She took his hand and said, “This night too must pass in her shawl.”

 

  
Surely the feast was over. But no, it was merely time for the female guests
to take their leave, which they did at leisure, parading around the courtyard to greet one another and say farewell in the next breath. I thought the night would never pass, in a shawl or otherwise, for after they left, whores strolled into the dining court. Rather than saffron garments, they wore silks dyed magenta or cerulean blue or apple green, with bright striped bands at the ends.

 

  
The old man beckoned one of the whores, and he must have spoken to her with some gesture, for she sat beside Sire Vafra and twined her arm around his. She had the ruddy brown skin and thick black hair of an Ebanakan, but she spoke Lambaneish as if born to it. Her sandals were of glove-thin leather laced with silken cords. The tops of her feet were bare and the pale hollows of her arches revealed, and by now I knew that was obscene. But drink had made Sire Vafra too sleepy to appreciate her provocative feet. He rested his head on the scrolled arm of the platform, with his eyes shut and his mouth open. She raised her eyebrows and the white-haired man patted the seat beside him.

 

  
The banquet commenced all over again: eating, drinking, and improvisations. By then they had tired of white petals.

 

  
The first one to recite after King Corvus said,

 

  

 

  
“I crave immolation.

 

  
She shows me her cold back,

 

  
smooth as snow on a winter field.”

 

  

 

  
The next said,

 

  

 

  
“Why talk of winter fields?

 

  
In spring she’ll thaw and yield.

 

  
She will be plowed, if not by you.”

 

  

 

  
The white-haired man stood again, saying,

 

  

 

  
“Young men speak of plowing

 

  
as if they knew something.

 

  
Their hands are without calluses.”

 

  

 

  
A young man stood up and said,

 

  

 

  
“Show me your calluses,

 

  
old poet! Your fingers

 

  
are as soft as…”

 

  

 

  
He paused, and shouted, “White petals!”

 

  
The young man sat down as guests hooted and laughed and hissed. I heard a woman’s shrill voice above the clamor. “That’s only seven!”

 

  
The young man stood up again, and bellowed, “Are as tender as white petals!”

 

  
“Oh better, much better,” the woman shouted back.

 

  
They tired of that game, and turned to others. When the whores had arrived, I’d been scandalized to think the banquet hall would be turned into
a brothel—and curious, I admit, to see the twenty-five Postures and more besides. Wondering what King Corvus might do to prove or disprove the rumors of his abstinence.

 

  
But there was a reason the word
whore
in Lambaneish had its double meaning of whore-celebrant. Their trade was not the simple exchange of coin for coupling. I watched the whore lean against the white-haired poet, her head on his shoulder. Her affection for the old man did not seem feigned, nor his for her. Affection, familiarity, maybe even an old passion transmuted to friendship.

 

  
Three men taking a turn about the courtyard stopped to greet them, and at her invitation they sat down. Two squeezed onto the platform and the last sat on the ground. She dangled her foot next to him and he stared at it while the others talked and Sire Vafra snored.

 

  
I’d never heard a woman converse so freely with men, caught up in the pleasure of making her thoughts known. They spoke of the masque that night, and one man dispraised it with cutting phrases that seemed unanswerable. But she answered that every time she saw the masque performed, she saw something new in the old tale, and this time she had been moved by how much Pachys loved the friend he had betrayed. She marveled at how Ripan had shown this with a gesture and a glance, like so, and her praise made the clever man’s wit seem sour rather than sharp. Sire Vafra closed his mouth and raised his head and blinked at her.

 

  
I was thirsty, and I’d been standing since sundown, and before long the birds would sing up the Sun, yet I didn’t tire of watching her. The game afoot was which of them she would take home—the old one, the simpering one, the one with the acid wit, or the one who stared. Or perhaps she’d disappoint them all. Consummation was one art, anticipation another, one she practiced with apparent artlessness.

 

  
I almost missed her summoning gesture. I held out my silver basin and she dipped her palms into the water. The yellow powder on her dark forearms looked like gold dust. She belonged to Desire and I could smell her desire in the aromatic musk that clung to her garments. When she left before first light, the white-haired man and his friends left with her. I never knew which one she chose.

 

  
Sire Vafra stayed behind. He had been refreshed by his nap, perhaps, or he waited for his king, who sat long in converse with Consort Ostrakan, Divine Aboleo, and several other men. No whores. Perhaps the rumor was true. Sire Vafra called for more doublewine, and when the tharos servant leaned toward him, he put a hand on her waist and pulled her closer. She drew back, murmuring, and beckoned me. I came forward with the basin. Sire Vafra opened his purse and showed me a few beadcoins, and the