Wildfire (82 page)

 

  
Arkhyios Kenoun did me the honor of inviting me to share his platform, with his younger half brother Arkhyios Kyprinos and a celebrant named Pantalops, a beautiful creature. As we dined we watched an obscene antic performed by three tharos men in goat masks, a tharais woman, and a donkey, but the guests paid little attention to it. The brothers gossiped about Arkhyios Kyparisos. They wondered what he would die of. If one of the arkhon’s sons challenged him outright, the arkhon executed him outright by sending him a basket of asps; but one who defied him secretly died by secret means. His priests wielded curses that could strike at any distance. A wound from one of their invisible poisoned arrows caused a slow and miserable demise from festering boils, convulsions, or itches so severe they made a man flay himself.

 

  
I was an outsider, newly arrived in an inner circle of the Inner Palace, and I knew how to be curious, be credulous, be amazed by whatever small secrets the men chose to share with me. Pantalops, elegant as she was, was a jaded jade. She yawned and covered her mouth when I asked my host why the arkhon would want to curse his son Kyparisos, who had saved Arkhyios Corvus from the panther.

 

  
Before I left Aghazal’s house that evening, I had eaten five moonflower seeds, and in the scented course we had been offered smoke from her leaves. Yet Moonflower had not embraced me. I was dull and the world was dull. I felt as though I were swaddled in gauze. Sire Rodela snickered in my ear, saying that this Prince Kenoun had no use for women, so why had he invited me? He was impotent, save when a tharais boy subjected him to the fifth and seventh Abasements.

 

  
Meanwhile Arkhyios Kenoun was saying that Kyparisos hadn’t saved King Corvus, he’d tried to kill him; I pretended amazement. He said Kyparisos had asked the oracles at the temple of Posison if the arkhon would be pleased to see the Crow dead, and they said yes. And no wonder,
crows were tharais carrion-eaters, and Arkhyios Corvus was polluted with misfortune.

 

  
Arkhyios Kyprinos said, “The arkhon doesn’t want to kill Corvus. That would only comfort Queenmother Caelum. Kyparisos should have consulted his common sense instead of priests whose interpretations have been paid for by Fifth Wife. She laid a neat snare for anyone fool enough to step into it. I never use those priests myself—I send to the shrine at Mount Omphalos, where one can be sure the oracles are above bribery.”

 

  
“What of the king’s men, Arkhyios?” I asked. “What would have happened to them if the king had been killed?”

 

  
Kenoun had a snorting whuffling laugh that issued from his nose, the way a horse might laugh if horses laughed. “I heard you had a yen for strange-ignorant ones,” he said. “No fear, they’re safe now. But I heard Kyparisos had Ebanakan guardsmen ready to descend on them after he killed Corvus. He had friends in the Orange Banner, and one in every ten guardsmen in that banner was executed three days ago.”

 

  
“He meant to kill the king’s men?”

 

  
“There’s more profit in their lives than their deaths. The Blood would have been held for ransom and the servants sold as bondmen. You could have visited your friends in the cage, and comforted them in their imprisonment.”

 

  
I leaned forward and rested an elbow on the table-tray. Arkhyios Kenoun sat across from me and I let him see me rudely slip two fingers of my tharais hand between my sandal and foot to scratch my instep. “I’d have the whip hand of them then, wouldn’t I, Arkhyios? They’d have to do exactly as I pleased, ein?” The fifth Abasement was cleaning feet with a tongue and the seventh was performed with a whip. It was so easy to make Kenoun think of them. I smiled.

 

  
I could make him want me, but I didn’t want him. I didn’t want any of them, these sons of the arkhon. The Court of the Sons was a tomb in which living shades were confined. The vision of my right eye was obscured by a dingy pall, and with that eye I saw Arkhyios Kenoun and his brother with yellowing skin and bruised eye sockets, and tarnished eyes. As if they were already dead.

 

  
All the arkhyios were as good as dead, all save the one who would inherit the rule when his father died, and kill his brothers. But the arkhon was seventy-five years old and dwelled in the Court of Longevity, and he was going to live forever. He had already outlasted four wives, and for proof of his vigor one need only look at his fifth, who had a belly out to here. In Lambanein they were rather proud that their arkhon sired children so large that their mothers died trying to bear them.

 

  
His sons couldn’t leave the Court of the Sons unless upon official busi
ness. They couldn’t leave the Inner Palace at all. Their servants were the arkhon’s thrushes, and likewise most of their visitors. Their rooms had peepholes, and I wondered if their skulls had peepholes too, so the arkhon could spy on their very thoughts. Every word Arkhyios Kenoun had spoken to me was spoken in the knowledge that it would be repeated to the arkhon. And to King Corvus—that was why I was there. To be a tattletale. But was there any truth in the tale he told me? In the warning?

 

  
I took a certain pleasure in stitching together facts and surmises, and arranging small signs into large patterns. King Corvus was a man with an army, albeit a weak remnant of the great army he’d once led. Here among the sons, without warriors of their own, he was a power, a threat, and the possessor of an enviable prize. If the king had died, his soldiers would have been masterless—an army for hire—and the arkhon would have had to send his Ebanakan guards to massacre them. But the king had survived, and the arkhon had granted him an audience. He was safer now, by a hairsbreadth, than he’d been before.

 
  

 

  
It was unbearable to sit still any longer. I rose, though it was forward of me to be the first, and walked the paths of the courtyard. If I could find Moonflower in the garden, I meant to eat more of her, that she might cure me of numbness and the absence of desire. Cure my boredom. The courtyard held roses and jasmine, but I found no moonflowers, not until I sat on the rim of the pool and saw, mirrored in the dark water, moonflowers affixed to the wicker spire on my head. I plucked two flowers and ate them both, and set the rest of the blooms afloat beside the reflection of the crescent Moon. They reminded me of ships, of King Thyrse’s fleet on the Inward Sea and the lightning so long ago, and I remembered my struggle to speak, Galan’s tenderness, and Mai’s friendship. It was a blessing I was healed, and yet I’d never properly thanked the gods for the gift of speech restored to me. And look what I used their gift for now: lies, mockeries, blandishments, telling or ferreting out secrets. For a moment I was pierced by shame—just a small prick, as from a thorn or a needle.

 

  
I moved my hand through the water to send Moonflower’s fleet sailing across the pool. A man sat next to me, took a little ship from the water and ate it. We had been introduced, but I had forgotten which branch he was on the arkhon’s tree. I leaned toward him and whispered, “I’m drowning. Save me.” But when I tried to grasp his shoulder, my hand passed through him.

 

  
“I’m over here,” he said.

 

  
I said, “No wonder I can’t touch you. You’re dead too.” Or perhaps I didn’t say it.

 

  
My throat was dry and I dipped up water in my cupped hands and
caught a squiggling reflection of the nail-paring Moon. It hurt to swallow. The man moved closer to me until our thighs were touching. He told me he was thirsty and I let him drink from my hands. His tongue lapped my palms. He smiled up at me; he was a sardonical corpse, a doomed arkhyios. I grinned back and told him I knew how to raise the dead.

 
  

 

  
Just after dawn I found myself lying on the paving stones of a steep street in a familiar but unknown city. Familiar because it was like Allaxios, but reversed. The mountain rose above me to the east, a bulk between me and the rising Sun. Her red light gleamed on the gilded roofs of a palace that covered the heights, but below we were still in shadow. The wooden shutters of the shops were already propped open. I sat up and waited for my queasiness to subside, and tried to straighten my wrapper. I’d lost my shawl of morning dew. Someone had pulled the wicker spire from my hair and my scalp hurt. My hair was tangled; the netting and beadcoins were missing.

 

  
A woman lit a lantern hanging from one corner of a raised shutter, and I thought it an odd thing to do when day was coming. I stood and asked her the name of the city, and she answered in a strange-ignorant tongue. She had a foreign look about her, as if her people had been made from chalky clay.

 

  
I leaned on the counter of her shop, which had rows of stoppered clay jars, each with a fish painted in two simple strokes of red glaze. Before me were mounds of grayish crystals on wooden platters: salt. Gods, I was thirsty. If my veins had held seawater instead of blood, it would all be dry by now, leaving behind just such clots of dirty crystals. I asked for water in Lambaneish, in the High, the Low, and Ebanakan, but the shopkeeper refused to understand me. I raised my voice and she scolded me. All I wanted was water—was that so much to ask? I reached across the counter to pinch her ear, but I couldn’t hurt her. My golden fingercaps had been stolen too. I backed away, and turned and stumbled downhill, past shops where men stood at counters eating fish soup full of billowy dumplings.

 

  
Oh I was lost, lost, and everything had been stolen and I was in a strange city and how would I get home again?

 

  
And all at once the world reversed, and left became right and east became west, and I knew the Sun was setting behind Mount Allaxios, not rising, and it was evening and I was running through the lower town, in one of the enclaves of strange-ignorant ones within the body of the city, and I couldn’t remember what happened after I’d launched Moonflower’s fleet.

 

  
I began the long trudge uphill. The steep streets and stairs, the terraces towering above me—even the sight of them made me weary. I seemed to have no sinews left in my thighs. My heart stuttered. I drank at a fountain and begged its meneidon to grant me strength.

 

  
At home Mother Yafeqer chided me. Where had I been? Had I forgotten we were supposed to entertain at the palace of Arthygater Klados? Aghazal and Second and Third had been obliged to go without me, but there was still time if I hurried. I told her that I’d gotten lost, and been robbed too, and that I was exhausted. Besides, I wouldn’t be missed, my part was small because my art was small. Without pity she marched me to the bathing room where the servants repaired me: glue and paint to hide a cracked jar.

 

  
Moonflower had swallowed a night and a day and I wasn’t prepared for the enactment, though we’d practiced for so long. Kabara escorted me to Arthygater Klados’s palace, carrying my costume, a surcoat with padded shoulders, a helm covered in iridescent green feathers, and a long red wig. My part was indeed important, but I thought anyone stuffed into that stuffed surcoat could have done as well or better than I. Kabara, for one. And I was afraid King Corvus would be there and he would shun me for all to see. I slowed my pace. Nevertheless we arrived.

 

  
My Sisters were one and all furious, but there was no time for them to scold. I donned the costume and the helmet, in which I could hardly breathe, and strutted like a dunghill cock onto the arched bridge in the center of the courtyard. But I kept my steps too small, as if my legs remembered the confinement of a woman’s wrapper. I was pretending to be the poet Akantha pretending to be a man, so she could win the love of the beautiful maid Nephelin.

 

  
Akantha was a famous poet of the First Age, but her eloquence was useless in the pursuit of Nephelin, for she couldn’t speak to her beloved lest a high voice betray her. She hoped to win her by showing a fine figure, even if that figure was a sham that Nephelin would surely discover at their first tryst, as soon as she found the stuffed leather phallus beneath Akantha’s surcoat. I let this show from time to time; we were supposed to make the spectators laugh before we made them cry.

 

  
Aghazal played the cithara and sang all the lovely longing thoughts Akantha dared not speak aloud, and Adalana, with her flute, was an impertinent skylark who served as a go-between. Tasatyala sang and danced the part of Nephelin, a guileful girl who was still innocent of the many ways a heart can be wounded. The Ode had been chosen so Tasatyala could shine, and shine she did. I was so proud of Second. It could all be forgotten now—the endless practice, the maddening repetition, the musicmaster’s blows and cruel words—as her gifts flowered before our eyes.

 

  
Sire Rodela had adored the braggadocio of Akantha in her padded surcoat, and roused every time we practiced, but tonight he slumbered. I had to do it by myself, with my limbs heavy and grit in my eyes and mouth.
Halfway through I glimpsed King Corvus sitting with Arthygater Keros, and at once I became more awkward, jerking along like a puppet propelled by sticks and strings.

 

  
In every good Lambaneish tale at least one of the agonists dies, so of course Akantha died before she gained her heart’s desire, fighting like a man to defend her beloved. It was said the real Akantha lived to be at least sixty. No matter, the spectacle required her death, and required Nephelin to cradle Akantha in her lap, and take off the helmet so she might see at last the face of the man she loved. The long hair of my wig tumbled out, and Tasatyala sang a lament, and I swear I heard sobs as I pretended to be dead.

 

  
I began to cry too, silently, with tears leaking from my closed eyes and collecting in the whorls of my ears. I cursed my thoughtlessness. I should have warned Aghazal, I should have dissuaded her from choosing this Ode, of all Odes the one we should not have performed. All along it had been as plain as the nose on my face and as easily overlooked. King Corvus’s wife had died the way Akantha died in the Ode, in the guise of a man. In my dream I’d seen Sire Galan take off Kalos’s helmet and reveal her long hair.