Wildfire (73 page)

 

  
I lay down on her bed, which smelled of cloves and jasmine and the musk and ferment of coupling, and pulled a cloth over me, the silk wrapper she’d worn the night before: magenta, Desire’s color.

 

  
In a little while Aghazal came back and said, “Move over, ein? I’m still sleepy.”

 

  
I moved, but not too much, so our hips were touching. I felt full up with sap, my lips burning and swollen, so also my coxscomb quim, and my nipples like hard brown buds on the verge of opening, and what flower would bloom from my breasts? It must have been a last moonflower vision that showed me jasmine and bryony growing all over the bed,
I entwine.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 28
  

  
Taxonomies
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
did so well at Aghazal’s dinner party that she said I was not to spin or weave or weed the gardens anymore; I was to learn my lists.

 

  
First I had to learn the Lambaneish chicken scratches by heart. Aghazal was far too busy to teach me, so she gave the task to Second. Third and I were both her pupils, and I was humbled to be as ignorant as a six-year-old girl. Ardor had unshackled my tongue so I could learn to speak Lambaneish, and permitted me to relearn the godsigns. Every morning I burned a shred of candlebark at the kitchen hearth and asked the god to permit this as well.

 

  
We started with a poem, “Proper Conduct of Children Toward Parents,” in which each of the forty-nine lines began with a character of the syllabary. I learned to write
fedan
and
emmin,
father and mother. I learned that a child must never say no to his or her father, and forty-eight other rules as well.

 

  
I made a clay tablet with the forty-nine dancers of Lambaneish next to the sixty variants of the godsigns, trying to match the two syllabaries, though Lambaneish had some odd sounds that were like nothing in the High. Making this tablet was a labor of two days, and it taught me how to break words in both languages into small parts.

 

  
We learned about Time, from its smallest measures, heartbeat and breath, to its largest, the ages of the world. In Lambanein they had two kinds of months and years, lunar and solar. The years were not exactly of the same length, so they were like wheels turning side by side, one a little faster than the other, and from time to time priests had to regulate them to make sure they didn’t get too far apart. The festivals of Katabaton and Peranon were on the lunar year, and Posison’s were on the solar, and priests chose auspicious times for celebrations depending on conjunctions of the months and Celestial Objects.

 

  
So I was amazed to learn one morning that I was in the forenoon passage of the twelfth day of the Crane Month (lunar), and the Iron day of the
Third Month (solar), in the year 415 of the Third Dynasty, in the year 1006 of the Second Age of the World. Everyone in Lambanein agreed on it; there were no disputes, as there often were in our village, when someone would say, “That was the year the Herders died,” and another would say, “No, that was the year the snow was up to the eaves of the Dame’s manor.”

 

  
I’d never kept an inventory of my time before. I’d cared only for the seasons of the year and the plants of the season, what was sprouting or ripening or dying, what was potent and when to seek it.

 
  

 

  
The Lambaneish have such a penchant for naming, classifying, and ranking that they have created a list of lists, the Taxonomies. Day after day we copied lists, such as:

 
  

 

  
The denizens of the Overworld: the gods, demiurges, and greater meneidon, and their gifts and afflictions;

 

  
The peoples of Lambanein, their kinds and arts;

 

  
The strange-ignorant kingdoms, even those on the other side of the Outward Sea: the appearance, dwellings, and manufactures of their peoples;

 

  
The tree of the royal family, of which the arkhon was the trunk, his ancestors the roots, and his wives and descendants the limbs and branches;

 

  
The trees of the five Exalted Families;

 

  
The dynasties of the First and Second Ages;

 

  
The nineteen temperaments of men and fifty-one temperaments of women;

 

  
The thirteen forms of love and the signs by which they can be recognized;

 

  
The twenty-five Postures and twelve Abasements;

 

  
The amorous kisses, caresses, embraces, pinches, scratches, bites, and blows;

 

  
The amorous utterances;

 

  
The flirtations, flatteries, and mockeries;

 

  
The sixteen games and how to cheat at them;

 

  
The languages of colors, flowers, fragrances, birds, spices, gems, and metals;

 

  
The languages of glances and gestures;

 

  
The poets of the First Age and Second Age;

 

  
The Fragments, Odes, and Epics;

 

  
The Conundrums.

 
  

 

  
Every afternoon when Aghazal woke up she would read what we’d written that day. Sometimes Tasatyala taught us incorrectly, and we had to do the work again. The genealogies were hardest, because the names sounded all alike. Aghazal chalked the arkhon’s tree on the wall of the back courtyard. The limbs were his five wives, four of whom he’d worn out in succession with childbearing. The fifth was bearing still. The branches were his eighteen living sons and eleven daughters. There were many twigs too—grandchildren and great-grandchildren—and there would have been more if not for a Lambaneish custom that denied the arkhon’s sons the right to marry until their father died. Of course the sons had concubines and bastards in plenty; fortunately we didn’t have to learn them.

 

  
We found we could memorize the begats if we sang them. I made up silly and scurrilous verses about Arthygater Katharos and some others on the lists, and Adalana made tunes for them. I wrote the verses in clay and squashed them up again.

 

  
Tasatyala had started with more knowledge, but I was quicker to master the family trees. There was pleasure in knowing, when I met a Lambaneish noble, where he or she belonged in the ranks of names; I’d taken much the same satisfaction in being able to name every tree in a forest by its leaf and bark and twig pattern, in summer or in winter. But it no longer sufficed to merely hear the names. I needed the words to flow from ear to eye to hand and back again, to hear, see, and feel them, so they might be remembered by my right hand as by my mind.

 

  
Day by day I sounded out words and inscribed them. I was diligent, for Aghazal had promised that if I learned my syllabary quickly, she would give me the Odes and Epics to read. Second and Third already knew them by heart. I should never amount to anything if I didn’t learn them.

 

  
It had become my ambition to amount to something.

 
  

 

  
Aghazal had many invitations, and I accompanied her from one event to the next. In one evening she might sing and dance at a spectacle in a palace, dine in the mansion of a wealthy townsman, join a party of Moon-gazers in the gardens of the Temple of Katabaton, and then tryst with a patron. I was excused from attendance on her trysts; she would send me home in the cart drawn by her uncle and three nephews. Often she returned home the next morning and slept all afternoon while I studied. Another New Moon came and went, my fourth in Lambanein, but in Aghazal’s house the festival didn’t mark a day of rest, but a night of work even busier than most.

 

  
I was always tired. Aghazal was in a hurry with me and I didn’t know enough to question it. But Second asked why: why did Aghazal take me to
dine in men’s quarters and leave her behind, when she knew more than me, and had better manners, and was accomplished in singing and dancing? She was of an age, thirteen already, and Aghazal had promised her last year that soon she could have patrons of her own. At first I found Tasatyala’s eagerness to go whoring hard to understand; of late, much easier. After every visit Aghazal made, she received gifts the next day from her patrons, and they sent tokens for me as well—a praise poem, a cord with bead messages, an enameled bangle, or an ivory amulet of Katabaton. All this, and I did not have to say yes.

 

  
I added beadcoins to the fringe of my cap, and hoarded other gifts in a locked casket in a locked cabinet. But Aghazal let me know I was obliged to share—not only with her, my First Sister, but with Second and Third, the uncle and nephews who escorted us, and Aunt Cook, and I mustn’t forget the messenger who brought the gifts, and servants in the houses of patrons. I was grateful, wasn’t I, to be so well cared for?

 

  
Aghazal knew to a nicety how to calculate the worth of gifts. Was the patron generous or had he slighted her? She also knew how much to give, so servants would treat her well without taking advantage.

 

  
She sent most of her earnings to Ebanaka, to help her kinfolk, and also to pay for building a house on a lakeshore—like a palace, she said, with vineyards and orchards of fig, apricot, and almond. She planned to move there when she lost her beauty. “Beauty doesn’t last like gold,” she said.

 

  
“I can’t lose what I don’t have.”

 

  
She rolled a fat amber bead toward me. “Pakhus gave you this for a glimpse of your teeth. So he might disagree, ein?”

 

  
Tasatyala lacked suitors and gifts because Aghazal wouldn’t let her accompany us. She swore Tasatyala wasn’t quite ready, it was too soon. It was plainly too soon for me as well. Which led back to the question of why.

 
  

 

  
King Corvus sent a limner to capture a likeness of me. Aghazal dressed me in saffron silks, and the tharais servant wrapped my hair—along with plentiful silk hair, dyed to match to my own—around a spiral wickerwork, and I was laden with golden bangles and armlets and a necklace of gold, pearls, and emeralds. Arthygater Katharos herself did not dress more splendidly. I sat for several long afternoons while Tasatyala and Adalana took turns singing the Odes, and I had altogether too much time to ponder and to wonder.

 

  
The likeness was as big as my outstretched hand, no bigger. Why did the king want it? I flattered myself that he might want to gaze at my portrait, for he couldn’t gaze at me. What use would I be to him as a thrush if everyone knew I was his servant?

 

  
His bride had enchanted him with a painted portrait, so sang the rumor
mongers and rhapsodists of our army. The ballads said the portrait had spoken to Prince Corvus in his dreams, and he was so ardent he insisted on marrying Kalos against his mother’s wise counsel. Had it been the limner’s uncanny art that snared him, or a charm Kalos had learned as a devotee of the Serpent Cult, or her beauty? In the dream I had of her, she was not as beautiful as the songs had led me to expect.

 

  
Once I believed every ballad I heard was true, before I knew rumormongers could be paid to sing what-you-will. Perhaps Corvus had admired Kalos’s dowry, not her person. Perhaps he’d quarreled with his mother for other reasons. I longed to know these things, but there was no one to ask.

 

  
I watched the limner, a small man with a long beard that he braided and tucked under his surcoat to keep out of the way. He dipped his tiny brushes into pastes of egg yolk mixed with brilliant pigments, and made tiny strokes. He bent close over his work and bobbed up again to gaze at me. No one had ever looked at me so hard, not even Galan. I asked the limner if I was still lopsided, if the right side of my face drooped more than the left. He said I didn’t droop, but of course I was lopsided, everyone was. I asked what expressions he saw on my left and right visages, and he said thoughts chased across my face like the shadows of clouds over the fields.

 

  
“Are you a poet too?” I asked.

 

  
“Just a painter.”

 

  
I didn’t understand how my face could be changing when my cheeks hurt from the strain of staying motionless. “If there are so many expressions, what will you show?”

 

  
He said, “What I’ve been asked to show.”

 

  
“What is that?”

 

  
“Beauty. Pride. You will look demure, except your right eye is to have a tiny glint of ardency.”

 

  
“You won’t show my webeye?”

 

  
“Of course not.”

 

  
So this wasn’t to be a portrait of me at all, not as I was, flawed from my lopsided face to the tough soles of my feet. Divine Aboleo had called me bold and clever, and I’d tried on the words and found them a poor fit, yet I was not so ill fitted to them as I was to the words
beautiful, proud, demure.

 
  

 

  
Aghazal ate moonflower from time to time in small amounts. She said it helped keep her awake, and dried up her quim, which many patrons preferred. It made her eyes black and brilliant, and I noticed she became giddy, talkative, and forgetful after eating it. But that might have happened anyway, because of all the doublewine she drank.

 

  
I’d refused moonflower when it was offered. What I remembered of it
frightened me—dreams that seemed as real as waking, and no way to tell what was there from what wasn’t. Much of what I’d dreamed that night had proved false. Surely moonflower was under the dominion of Crux Moon, and shared his lustful and inconstant nature.

 

  
But the flower had shown me Rowney, and Rowney had told me Galan was alive. And that, I hoped, was true. That I myself had proved lustful and inconstant couldn’t take away my gladness at this thought.

 

  
It wasn’t my fault, was it, that I was no longer steadfast, that I saw King Corvus’s face when I wished to envision Galan’s, that I picked over every word the king had said to me as if looking for a precious stone in a bowl of dried lentils? It was the fault of the Initiates of Carnal; first they’d made me barren, and now they’d severed the binding between Galan and me. They must have done it or I’d not be so befuddled, one hope warring upon another—the hope of leaving, the hope of staying.