Wildfire (81 page)

 

  
But I would never have a child growing under my heart.

 

  
Grandmother Lagas patted my knee, and Aunt Cook rubbed my back, saying, “Oh what sorrow! Poor thing. I didn’t know you couldn’t.”

 

  
Gazuf said, “At least you don’t have to bear a child and give it up,” and she began to cry as well.

 

  
Adalana asked Aunt Cook in a whisper, “Is Gazuf giving away her child?”

 

  
She whispered back, “If it’s a boy, she’ll send him to live with Aghazal’s sons in Ebanaka. He must grow up properly, ein? Or he’ll be a rascal like Kabara.”

 

  
I dried my face on the shawl, embarrassed now that the rainstorm had passed. “Aghazal has children?”

 

  
“Of course. Two boys.”

 

  
“She doesn’t speak of them.”

 

  
Aunt Cook shrugged.

 

  
I said, “When Aghazal is as big like Gazuf, when she showed, what did you do? She couldn’t work then, ein?”

 

  
“That was when Ostrakan was her benefactor,” Aunt Cook said. “We lived well then, not like now with all this debt, all this coin pinching. He used to visit and play with his sons, until he got sick with jealousy. Aghazal swears she didn’t give him reason, but you know her, ein? Always the Lightning Passion, and she’s blind to anything else while it lasts.”

 

  
“Ostrakan—the consort of Arthygater Katharos?”

 

  
Grandmother Lagas squeezed my knee and leaned close to me. She was tiny but stout, and had smooth skin for her age. Her gray hair, under a net cap, was the only sign she was old enough to be a great-grandmother. “I can help,” she said. “I can untie the knot. If you want.”

 

  
She was a canny old woman to see that I didn’t know what I wanted. I hated the barrenness laid upon me by the Initiates of Carnal, but without it I would not have dared follow Moonflower wherever she led.

 

  
I was the king’s dreamer; if I was not, I was nothing but a whore. The bones were burned, and I could no longer ask the Dame and Na for signs. Moonflower taught me how to summon true dreams instead of waiting for them. But her gift was poisonous. I had submitted myself to her tutelage, but I couldn’t risk the life of an unborn child.

 
  

 

  
If I had behaved scandalously at the Hunt, it was a petty scandal, for Aghazal heard nothing of it from her acquaintances. They gossiped of Arkhyios Corvus’s lucky escape, and soon he gave them something new to talk about: his petition to see Arkhon Kyphos was granted at last—for shame, some said, that one of the arkhon’s tame beasts had been so discourteous as to attack a guest.

 

  
During the audience the arkhon lavished upon Arkhyios Corvus gifts of spices, cloth of gold, and rubies.

 

  
The arkhon ceded him lands.

 

  
The arkhon offered to adopt him as a son.

 

  
The arkhon promised him an army.

 

  
The arkhon promised him a wife.

 

  
The arkhon promised him nothing, as usual, but implied everything.

 

  
In short, no one knew what Arkhon Kyphos had given or promised the king, but these extravagant rumors passed from one courtier to another, and he was praised and flattered by those who had formerly scorned him. And he was envied. The arkhon was stingy with his favors, and what he gave to one, another went without.

 

  
Days and nights passed, four, five, six, and the king did not invite me to attend him. I wished he would send a token to show I wasn’t forgotten: a poem, a ruby the size of a teardrop, a cowrie shell, a peach, anything. But I had proven myself too vile. He couldn’t bear to see me, even to maintain the pretence that he was my patron. I couldn’t distinguish the king’s contempt from that I bore for myself. It was no consolation to know that the Taxonomies had a name for what I suffered, that famous poets had already described every particular agony of Desire Repulsed by Scorn.

 

  
I had long since stopped tying knots in my red cord to tally the days and tennights, but reckoning by the Moon it was more than four months since I’d stood on the precipice and seen Lambanein for the first time, four lifetimes. The passes must be open again. Yet Midsummer came and went unremarked by the Lambaneish and their festivals.

 

  
We were preparing for a different celebration, a feast in honor of Tasatyala’s coming of age, to be held on the next New Moon. Second Sister was about to enter the second stage of her apprenticeship, which only reminded me of how hurried and inadequate had been my own education. I gave up my daily lessons in favor of sleeping, and no one seemed to notice. I had suitors in plenty, even if they were the sort of men who mistook a few quotes from the Fragments for knowledge of the classics.

 

  
It didn’t help that Aghazal was joyous these days; it seemed her Lightning Passion was shared. Yet she was discreet, and kept to herself the name of her beloved.

 

  
In the late afternoons we Sisters bathed together. While Tasatyala and Adalana chattered like finches, I remained passive under the ministrations of the bath servants: fingers and combs in my hair, hands rubbing oil on my breasts and buttocks or scraping me with the obsidian blade. Firethorn lay slack, adrift in unbearable melancholy; as Alopexin I arose to go forth, moonflowers in my hair, my lips plum and plump, my eyes outlined in green malachite, my face powdered with mica and my arms with saffron-colored dust. Alopexin was busy. I worked.

 

  
I had impressed the arkhon’s grandsons, Kydos and Kyanos, who were younger and wilder than the patrons of Aghazal. I was invited to banquets where the entertainments tended to be vulgar: cockfights, quail fights, dog
fights, drinking contests, and gambling; the poems were lewder; the singers and dancers performed Antics rather than Epics.

 

  
In such company I discovered I was a wit, in my way. My Lambaneish improved between the third glass of doublewine and the tenth, and I was mistress of the list of Mockeries, from the Jolly Scoff to the Dry Taunt. I made gibes sharp as the golden fingercaps I’d taken to wearing everywhere, and some bore repeating, and came back to me as poems or aphorisms. But they earned me enemies.

 

  
In Incus or Corymb such words between men would have led to duels, but in Lambanein duels were a rarity, and brutal pleasantries the fashion among the young folk. Sometimes I thought, quite smugly, that Sire Galan would have cut a swath through these coxcombs, with his wit and his sword. His honor couldn’t be bought with a cheap apologia written by a hired poet.

 

  
My own wit was sharpened by contempt. How easily my companions were taken in! No one knew, no one guessed. Sometimes I myself forgot. And sometimes, when I remembered, I felt a thrill of fear—just enough fear to give me pleasure in my own daring. In one man’s bed I draped my morning-dew shawl over my head and swore to him I was a hairdresser; the game delighted him. I suspected it would. He told others who had the same tastes.

 

  
It amused me to imagine how horrified my patrons would be if they found out my secret; how they would scurry to the priests and spend lavishly to cleanse themselves of the pollution left by my touch. But they would never guess. How could they? For I wasn’t tharais, I never had been. I was born tharos, in the valley of Sapheiros, and no one could take my birthright from me for a whim and a trifle, not Zostra or Gnathin or anyone else.

 

  
I wouldn’t go home with the same man twice. I wouldn’t go home with a man at all unless he paid suit properly, sending servants with garlands and gifts and poems written in my honor, and musicians to sing outside the house at night; I liked a man to be eloquent, with words and speaking looks and gestures—or else his tongue should be hobbled in my presence, as if he were overawed. He might sleep on the doorstep as Sire Vafra did, or hammer on the door and wake up Uncle Zubana. Whether a patron was content to conquer for a night, or wanted to conquer my heart, he had to give lavishly or I’d ridicule him for being thrifty-stingy. A man shouldn’t trouble his head about money, such a womanish trait.

 

  
I collected marks as well as presents: necklaces of bites, neat parallel lines of scratches from sharpened fingernails. The Lambaneish have a single
word for the twinned sensation of pain and pleasure:
erotakhos.
They prize it highly. The marks were soon lost, overwritten by new ones, but most of the gifts I kept. Twice I made the journey down to Katabaton’s cave, carrying valuables. I also hid my useless divining compass pouch there, and in it the scrip I treasured from Sire Galan, fearing that otherwise I might lose it when I was lost myself in a Moonflower maze. I gave Katabaton garlands of roses and libations of goat’s milk. It seemed no one else visited the shrine anymore.

 
  

 

  
My reputation rose higher among men; not so among women. At Tasatyala’s banquet, certain celebrants, supposed friends of Aghazal, wouldn’t even speak to me. They thought one could lay claim to a patron by bedding him a few times, and the rest of us should respect such claims. They praised Tasatyala’s grace, learning, and respectful demeanor, and her shyness, so appropriate to a maiden, though she was not to be a maid much longer. They mocked my low voice, my ugly webeye, my ignorance of the Odes, and my clumsiness in the dance. They supposed Aghazal must have been in great need of patronage to take such a rude bumpkin as myself as a Sister.

 

  
I’d labored hard to prepare for Tasatyala’s banquet; I’d given gold too, and plenty of it, to pay for the celebration in honor of my Sister. But I said nothing to contradict Aghazal’s guests.

 
  

 

  
As for Moonflower, my treacherous teacher—in her realm every sense was more sensitive, and every perception entered me more forcefully. It was easy to believe her domain was the true world, and dull day the inferior copy. In those Moonflower nights, I forgot Firethorn. So it wasn’t a great hardship that the next day Firethorn forgot much of what Alopexin had said and done.

 

  
But after Moonflower dreams it was as if I wore the tharais shawl again; what I saw was dimmed, what I heard muffled. Moonflower leached strength from my limbs and memories from my mind. Once I broke my vow and refused her when she was offered, thinking to spare myself the painful aftermath.

 

  
I didn’t try again. I couldn’t be Alopexin without her. Firethorn wasn’t fit for the task.

 

  
I saw Moonflower sometimes, with her delicate skin the color of the veins at my wrists, just barely blue. She had a fly at her heels like a dog: Sire Rodela. She’d roused him from his long drowse and he liked to make me jealous. His shade lolled on the bed while I coupled with a patron, and he hissed that Sire Galan had done things I didn’t know about when we were
in the Marchfield—did I remember Dame Hartura, Sire Farol’s wife? Did I remember how she used to shriek during tourneys until her cheeks were scarlet as an apple? It was all for Sire Galan, a proper man, not like some. “I knew all about it,” Sire Rodela said, grinning in his lopsided way.

 

  
I supposed the shade was lying, but I put my foot to my patron’s face and made him bite my instep. I was wonderfully limber when Moonflower was in my blood, I could turn every which way and stay impaled. I was all dry friction and heat, nothing slippery; a man had to stay hard. I said to Sire Rodela, “If you know so much, why don’t you say what happened to me at the Hunt?” He only laughed, pleased to keep it secret from me.

 

  
But he buzzed other people’s secrets in my ears, how this man had cheated his mother of the profits of her dower lands, and that man’s wife had been lightened five times by a miscarrier, for she’d sworn at her wedding she’d never give the old goat an heir. Arthygater Katharos would have known how to profit from such tales with a judicious use of threats and promises, gathering more threads for the great pattern she was weaving. To me this petty gossip was useless—nothing of import to tell the king, no secrets worth the coin I spent for them: my health, my pride, my arduous nights.

 
  

 

  
After Tasatyala’s festivity, the musicmaster Skolian came daily to torment us. Aghazal had been honored with an invitation to present an Ode at a banquet to be given by Arthygater Klados, and all four of us Sisters were to perform the enactment. It was to be Tasatyala’s first time dancing a role at a palace banquet, and Aghazal had chosen Akantha’s Ode to Nephelin to show Second Sister’s gifts to best advantage. Skolian was a bully, and I was amazed Aghazal endured him; but it had to be admitted, he sang well enough to make a stone cry. When he rapped me on the knuckles, I threatened to break his brass baton over his head.

 

  
I sowed quarrels all around the house. The servants got the worst of my short temper, for they couldn’t argue with me, unlike Aghazal’s relatives. I accused the tharais bath servant of making an owl’s nest of my hair, and pinched her arm hard enough to leave bruises. It irked me when she reminded me of her presence by being clumsy.

 

  
It had been more than a tennight since I visited the king in his quarters. I’d seen him only three times since at banquets, always at a distance. “People must be saying he discarded me,” I said to Aghazal.

 

  
“No, they say he’s at war with his vows, or his better judgment. They are wagering on the outcome, and the odds favor you, Sister. He’s a Hero, ein? No one wants a Hero with good sense.”

 

  
“Then someone should tell him so.”

 
  

 

  
Aghazal and I were invited to a banquet in the Court of the Sons by a certain Arkhyios Kenoun, the Exarchos of Granaries in the Ministry of Bounty. He was an older and rather important arkhyios, being the only son of the arkhon’s second wife. Aghazal declined to go. The invitation was meant for me, she said. Alopexin’s wanton repute had wandered far if it had reached the Inner Palace, but after all, it had been my aim to put myself in a position to learn something useful.

 

  
I’d hoped to meet Arkhyios Kyparisos at the banquet, but I was disappointed. Despite a public proclamation of his bravery in slaying the treacherous panther, it was thought his father was displeased with him. No one dared invite him anywhere.