Wildfire (68 page)

 

  
Garrio raised his eyebrows, and all his worry lines were transformed. He looked mischievous. “I did that,” he said.

 

  
“You?”

 

  
He laughed, delighting in my surprise. “I sent a message to you in the manufactory, just to see if you were well, and they said you’d been sent away. I found out where you went, with a copper beadcoin here and a few pewter ones there and a golden bead to Gnathin to take you back into the palace. So you owe me,” he said, poking me with his finger.

 

  
“The king never sent for me?” Garrio was, perhaps, disappointed that I was disappointed. I put my hand on his sleeve. “I’m grateful to you.”

 

  
“Well, I did my best. I couldn’t make you tharos again, but I see you did that for yourself.” He pinched my shawl between two fingers. “At least you don’t reek like a dye vat anymore. Though I can smell the onions.”

 

  
I should have been flattered that Garrio had fetched me of his own will, out of friendship, out of gratitude—when the king had none.

 
  

 

  
Divine Aboleo, Auspex of Rift Warrior, summoned me one evening. His room was better furnished than most in the Court of Tranquil Waters, having two wooden platforms inlaid with mother-of-pearl. One held a striped mattress, rolled up. He sat upon the other, cross-legged and upright, without availing himself of the cushions.

 

  
I knelt doubled over, resting my forehead on clasped hands; only a king deserved a full prostration. The floor depicted the sea in brilliant squares of blue and green glass. I saw the saffron hem of a tharos servingwoman who came to take away a platter of food.

 

  
I had glanced at Divine Aboleo when I entered the room, a furtive swift peek to judge the mood of a master. He’d regained the flesh he’d lost in the Ferinus, the folds of fat on his neck and padded jowls. The rooster tattoo was bright red on his gleaming pate. He looked as though it wouldn’t matter to him one way or another if he had to kill me.

 

  
I felt him stare. I remained with my face a handsbreadth from the ground while he asked questions.

 

  
“You offered yourself to the king as a thrush,” Divine Aboleo said.

 

  
“I did, yes.” I tried to recall the inscriptions on the broken crockery, and what the inscriptions meant: House Tricari, five; back, years; quarrel.

 

  
But that wasn’t what he wanted to know. “You are from Corymb.”

 

  
“Yes.”

 

  
“The sheath to Sire Galan dam Capella by Falco of Crux.”

 

  
“Yes.”

 

  
“Who is the First of Crux in Corymb?”

 

  
Surely he knew that. “Sire Adhara dam Pictor by Falco.”

 

  
“What kin is he to your master?”

 

  
“His uncle.”

 

  
“How many cataphracts in his company?”

 

  
“Their strength was seventeen when they set out on campaign. But four died in the Harshfield and one was wounded and left behind.”

 

  
“Why so many in the Marchfield?”

 

  
“Sickness. Tourneys.”

 

  
“Tell me about the tourneys,” he said. I told him about the time Sire Galan had cut off a man’s ear and returned it to him, but he had many questions I couldn’t answer. He wanted to know the tallies, the notable fighters and their feats, the quality of their weapons and armor, and the lineages of their mounts.

 

  
When I told him about the mortal tourney, his silence urged me on, and I said more than perhaps was wise: how Sire Galan had been forbidden to ride, and how he’d made a fortress of dead horses. How the clans of Ardor and Crux had made an enforced peace, but there was still enmity between them.

 

  
My knees were sore and my back ached, and I stared at the floor until the mosaic blurred. He asked: How many ships had been lost in the storm? Who had fought in the treacherous assault on Lanx? Who had massacred the clan of Torrent?

 

  
His voice was heavy and uninflected, and his questions thudded on and on. How many bakers in the army of Corymb, how many whores, how much grain did the horses eat, how many leagues did we march each day?

 

  
Why did he want to know these trivial things? And why question me, a sheath? What little I knew was stale as old bread, tales of varlets who rebelled when their master fed them salt cod, and baggage carts drowning in mud. He must have learned more from the Wolves captured during the king’s retreat. Once a Wolf had howled all night as the Auspices scrutinized him, and in the morning on his pyre we saw the meat and sinews of his arms and legs where they’d peeled him question by question.

 

  
For a moment my webeye opened wide and I peered through Divine Aboleo’s eyes just as he endeavored to look through mine. He saw too much. He saw the army of Corymb as a tapestry laid over a landscape; he saw it whole and he wished to see it now in every particular, to know
which dyes would fade and which were true and which would in time eat away the fabric, and which strands were strong and which might break. With every question he tugged upon a single thread.

 

  
The army of Corymb was but one of the armies warring over Incus, and as the king’s strategos he was obliged to know them all. But even his formidable mind could not encompass everything. Surely much would forever remain unknown. Pull a thread and something somewhere else unravels.

 

  
I trembled with weariness. The questions of the Auspex had plumbed me. I thought back over my answers, praying I’d said nothing that could harm Galan. I should have said less, or made Divine Aboleo pay for my answers with assurances of favor. Instead I’d knelt there wagging my tail in the air like a hound eager to be useful. He wasn’t finished. But it was too late now to stop answering.

 

  
He gestured to the cushion on the other side of the brazier and said to me in Lambaneish, “Come, sit here and tell me: who visits the arthygater in her bathing room, and what do they say?”

 

  
I arose from kneeling in one smooth motion, as was proper, but my knees creaked. I perched on the edge of the platform with my benumbed feet on the floor. With a flicker of a gesture he indicated I should pour doublewine from the flask on the tray before him. I gave him a bowlful and he gestured again, so I poured one for myself. I took the clay bowl in both hands, and waited for him to drink. Only whores drink with men in Lambanein, but I couldn’t refuse. The doublewine scorched its way down my throat and up my nose, and nearly made me sneeze.

 

  
When my lips stopped trembling, I set the bowl down with a click on the gilded tray. One by one I laid before Divine Aboleo the gossip and guesses I’d collected and inscribed on my memory.

 

  
I kept my gaze averted, but I watched him nevertheless. The right and left sides of his countenance were equally impassive, without the contradictory expressions that wandered over less well-governed faces. Yet when he was intent, his left hand plucked feathers from a small hole in a cushion. He wore on his right hand a gold ring that spanned four fingers and was set with fat garnets.

 

  
I told Divine Aboleo about Arthygater Katharos’s many dealings as she went about selling, bartering, and borrowing to raise money for an army. But his questions showed that he believed Consort Ostrakan planned everything. The priest thought moving a few more bales of gauze to Incus and a few more fleeces back to Lambanein was too paltry a matter to concern a nobleman such as Ostrakan. What was he after?

 

  
All by myself, it seemed, I had planted distrust of their most trusted ally.

 

  
I said, “Truly I am a strange-ignorant one, privy only to the gossip of
women. How do I guess what a great man such as Consort Ostrakan means to do?”

 

  
Divine Aboleo said, “Faugh. You’re forward enough; don’t pretend to be backward.”

 
  

 

  
I was stretched out under the pomegranate tree, swatting mosquitoes, when Garrio sent Lame for me. The horseboy led me up the stairs of the tower over the entrance. Guards and musicians had long since abandoned it to doves. The walls of the fourth story were of marble lattice, open to breezes. Garrio squatted in the patterned shade.

 

  
“What’s the bother?” I asked him when Lame went away. I peered through the lattice. From here I could survey the grounds and buildings of the Inner Palace, the home of the arkhon and his sons, which covered the summit of Mount Allaxios. The golden roofs of the central dome and the many courts shone as if the Sun had taken up residence there. Even the Court of Tranquil Waters, so long neglected, had gilded tiles.

 

  
A large city could have been crammed within the Inner Palace, so great was the space encompassed, and indeed a multitude of people lived there. But there were also streams and ponds, fields, meadows, orchards, and walled pleasure gardens, and even a forest. His realm was re-created there as a small tidy world, a miniature perfection.

 

  
“The king has decided what to do with you,” Garrio said.

 

  
I turned from the view and crouched beside him. I went quiet inside, waiting as one waits between the throw of dice and the fall when too much has been wagered. I could tell Garrio was unhappy; that must mean I was to be tharais again.

 

  
He said, “There is this prancing go-between, a musicmaster—he tells the king how to act like a poetry-spouting Lambaneish do-nothing fop.” All this he said in the High, except for the word go-between:
kynamolgos.
There was no word quite like it in the High, nothing that carried the same derision.

 

  
“Yes?”

 

  
“Well, he—and Divine Aboleo, he never favored you, you know—they’ve convinced the king to send you to a brothel.”

 

  
“A brothel?” My head was ringing like an empty kettle after a blow, and all I could do was echo him.

 

  
“They called it something else, but I heard them right enough.”

 

  
“To do what? To be a tharais bathservant again? Or a tharos maid, or—or a laundress?”

 

  
Garrio scratched at dove droppings on the tiled floor with the tip of his dagger. “Divine Aboleo said you were bold and clever, and you’d be good at it. I don’t think he meant a laundress.”

 

  
“So King Clever is going to be a pander now, eh?” It was a dire insult, but Garrio didn’t reprimand me. “What exactly did he say?”

 

  
“Very little.”

 

  
“But what?”

 

  
“He said, ‘Find one of good repute, so she can be trained properly.’ Then the kynamolgos started talking about which one entertained which men of the court, and which had the most influence, and which was invited to the best parties. And they settled on a foreign one; the musicmaster said that would be most suitable.”

 

  
“A foreign brothel?”

 

  
“A foreign whore, some Ebanakan. So the go-between says that as the whore is foreign herself, she’ll be more patient with you, and then the king asks how a foreigner can teach you to behave properly. The go-between says she is an adept in all the arts, better than most who are born here. And besides, you are in her pay, says Divine Aboleo to the go-between, and he says, indeed, I have the honor of serving as musicmaster for her young sisters. How else could I have observed at close hand that she is quite the best choice, for she knows everyone and everyone knows her?”

 

  
I thought of the Ebanakan whore I’d watched on the famous evening of the white petals, and how I’d admired her grace and her artful ways. In the Lambaneish way of thinking she was a respectable woman. But I’d been raised in Corymb by the Dame, who had a stricter notion of respectability. I had friends among the whores in the army and yet I’d fancied—hoping I kept it well hidden—that I was better than they were. Because I coupled with one man instead of many.

 

  
But I was a mudwoman and a sheath, and plainly the king and his priest judged me no better than a harlot. What did it matter if I had to whore to be a thrush? What mattered was that I should attend the best parties. Perhaps I should be flattered they had such aspirations for me.

 

  
Garrio said, “I don’t see why, if he wants you for himself, he doesn’t just keep you instead of packing you off to a brothel.”

 

  
“If who wants me?”

 

  
Garrio raised his eyebrows.

 

  
“The king? He doesn’t want me. He has a
use
for me. He wants me to pry—to spy.”

 

  
“Maybe. I suppose no one ever told you that you look a bit like his wife, or maybe one of her cousins, a skinny runt of a coz. You have her coloring.”

 

  
I’d seen Kalos in a dream, and I didn’t resemble her at all. Her hair was the color of a ginger cat’s fur, and she had a round face where mine was sharp. Rumor proposed a likeness where there was none, for it made a better tale.

 

  
We were silent awhile. Garrio asked, “What will you do?”

 

  
I picked up a straw fallen from a dove’s nest and folded it between my fingers. “I don’t know.”

 

  
Garrio opened the leather wallet he wore on his belt, and pulled out a pouch stitched from a remnant of embroidered satin. “Some of us—some of us think it isn’t so fair, and we have a small—a few coins, that’s all. Sorry there isn’t more. Just so you can refuse. Here. Take it, take it!”

 

  
“Oh, Garrio. Oh my friend.” I could tell from the weight it wasn’t much money, but I was moved and pained by the gift. How could he know he made it harder for me? Now I’d have to choose. Betrayed by Chance again, that seductress. She was so fickle, vanishing just when one had surrendered to her.

 
  

 

  
I stayed behind when Garrio left. Doves walked on the railing above me, their feet making a scritching sound, and coos bubbled up from their throats. Face-to-face with the necessity of leaving, I saw that once again I’d mistaken hoping for striving. I’d lulled myself into thinking the king would provide for me. And he had, very neatly too. He’d disposed of me again.