Wildfire (84 page)

 

  
How I must have looked to the other guests as I entered the dining court on his arm! Wobbling, stunned—turning to him in disbelief—weeds in my hair, stains on my garments—while he seemed unspeakably tidy in his stiff surcoat, and unspeakably pleased with himself. Wild Alopexin, caught at last.

 
  

 

  
Under the arched ceiling of the colonnade, I beckoned a tharais napkin and washed my face and hands in her silver basin. With gestures I bade her fetch a comb for my hair. After a long while she reappeared with a hairdresser. We went to a tharais room off the dining court, where the hairdresser did the best she could. I had no coins, so I gave her the dice. All without a word between us.

 

  
I took my place beside King Corvus, leaning against him, exerting myself to perform Flirtations, the ewe’s gaze, the feather touch on his arm, the
smiles just for him, hidden from others behind my hand. I fed him peppery pickled radishes and his teeth nipped my fingers. I improvised an Ode to a Radish, to her red blush and pale flesh, so shapely, so tasty, such a bite to her. I was flushed and dizzy and my skin burned with dry fever. The king whispered in my ear, asking if all was well.

 

  
Very well, oh very well indeed.

 

  
But I seemed to have gotten too far away from myself, the thread all unwound from the shuttle, and I couldn’t find my way back. I was a spectator who watched the agonists with a critical eye. One could almost believe she was the kind of woman a man like him would desire, though she was not. And he did not.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 32
  

  
Moonflower
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
was ready to forswear my oath to Moonflower, but she wasn’t ready to let me go. I had eaten too much of her, day after day for almost two tennights, and now in turn she consumed me. I fainted in the cart on the way back to Aghazal’s house, and she couldn’t rouse me. Grandmother Lagas made a pallet for me between two Ebanakan shrubs with healing fragrances in the back courtyard. They hung an awning to protect me from the Sun, just showing over the walls of the house. I lay in a swoon all day and night.

 
  

 

  
I remembered now. Night after night I had made Moonflower my guide, and she had led me and hidden my memories of it. Now those memories opened to me, and I walked through the nights, each one a chamber thronged with strangers, and Alopexin a stranger among them.

 

  
In one room we stood in a garden admiring apparitions we saw in the clouds by moonlight, and everything I uttered came out as a poem in the pattern of four, five, six:

 

  

 

  
Plum blossoms crowd

 

  
a crooked black bough

 

  
of night starred with lichens.

 

  

 

  
Other guests tried to match me poem for poem, but no one could do it as effortlessly, for I was not trying.

 

  
Another night I watched a cockfight and took offense when a man stepped on my foot. He was a servile scholar, and perhaps that’s why I dared to strike him, or I didn’t care—Moonflower made me quick to kindle to lust or rage. The man hit me back, and we went blow for blow, and I felt such glee, such fury, screaming with all my might, impervious to pain. We made a better spectacle than the cocks. When I woke up with bruises, I took them to be signs of an especially vigorous patron.

 

  
There was the night a nobleman confided in me that he’d borrowed ten thousand in gold from Arthygater Katharos to pay off a debt, and had gam
bled the money away instead. And now she’d made of him a mere kynamolgos, a go-between, and he couldn’t deny her any sort of favor she required. What sort of favors? I’d asked. He was known as a swordsman (the nobleman said, boasting a little); he’d picked quarrels with certain men on her behalf, and killed them. He named the men. No doubt the king and Divine Aboleo might have made good use of his secret, if I’d remembered to tell them.

 

  
Among those many nights was one bright day, the day of the Hunt. I squatted beneath the pillars that held up the high pavilion in the oak grove, dicing. A crowd of hunters waited their turn to dice snakes and hawks with me.

 

  
Alopexin won more than she lost. She was afire like brush on the mountains after a dry summer. She drank doublewine to quench the flames, but it only fed them. She was giddy and frivolous; her voice was shrill and she laughed easily, above all at her own wit. No wonder the rumor had been quick to reach Divine Aboleo and slow to reach the gossips of the town. The men who gambled with me were followers of the king, and I was giving them a chance at the king’s dreamer, the king’s whore.

 

  
They say Chance cheats, but she didn’t, she let the dice fall. When a man won, he followed Chance up the ladder to the pavilion, but it was Desire who turned to embrace him when he reached the top. Desire could have taken a hundred men as soon as three or five, because she suffered a craving deeper than any man could reach. I knew the winners, all five: three cataphracts, an armiger, and an Auspex of Rift, Divine Volator. Probably the young priest was the one who told Divine Aboleo about what had happened during the hunt, how he’d broken his vow and spent his strength on a woman.

 

  
I wondered if he’d told his superior everything—how I wrapped my legs around him, and how he raised himself above me on stiff arms and labored in my grip. The look in his eyes was startled, awed. Sweat ran from him in rivulets, as if he were a smith at a forge. He seemed to strain away from me with the upper part of his body even as he hammered into me below.

 

  
I could tell my gaze frightened him. One of my eyes had a black pupil with a blue flame in the center and the other was full of smoke. I knew this because I hovered over the platform in a sky of celestial blue tiles, and witnessed everything. Maybe his third eye, the one tattooed on top of his brow, saw me looking. Maybe he saw my iridescent moonflower shadow, how it flowed from my skin and enveloped him, until his arms trembled and he lowered himself down and gave way to my embrace.

 

  
I’d wanted revenge on those who possessed me the day of the Hunt, when I was not in possession of myself. But how could I avenge myself on the gods?

 
  

 

  
I dreamed of falling from a height, and this frightened me so that I woke up. I was on the porch of my house on Mount Sair. Inside me was a huge hunger. I’d been ill, I knew that; I must have been ill for some time, because when I got up I was dizzy and my legs were weak.

 

  
I shaded my eyes and went down the stairs to the herb garden on the sunny slope, and fragrance rose around me as I trod the thyme and maythen. But I was hungry for clay and only clay, and it had to be clay from the bank of the Wend River, so I descended all the long way down from terrace to terrace to the Athlewood, shaking as I went, pausing many times to get my breath. I didn’t know how I’d climb back up again, I only knew I must have clay to save me from the poison. I dug a handful from the bank, under the roots of a fallen tree, and the clay was reddish and slippery. I pressed it between my palms into the shape of a flatbread, and inscribed on it with my fingernail: She may refuse.

 

  
Much as I craved the clay, I was frightened by how the mouthful was heavy on my tongue and slid thick and smooth into my throat and lodged there so I couldn’t breathe. I knelt on a pebbled strand to drink from the river and in my throat the clay dissolved into silt in spring floodwaters, and I was the delta that received it. I leaned over the river to drink again and as I touched my lips to the water, the reflection of the Sun smote me and I was thrown down. I lay on the strand and my hot left side convulsed while my cold right side could not move.

 
  

 

  
I was startled awake from a dream of falling to find I was on a pallet in the back courtyard under a saffron canopy ablaze in the Sun. I was too hot. I pulled off the cloth that covered me, so there was nothing between my skin and the breeze. An old woman and a young girl sat nearby playing a song. The old woman’s brown skin had an ashy bloom, and the girl’s was like burnished clay. The girl played a skylark trill on her flute; the old woman played a long-necked wooden bird, strung with one string of gut and three of wire, which shivered in metallic harmony whenever she plucked the gut string. She sang through her nose with a quavering voice, and though the words baffled me I understood the melody.

 

  
I couldn’t sit up. My limbs were willing but too weak. I turned on my side and groaned, and saw four women sitting in a row and spinning in the shade of a portico. One of them hurried over and knelt to give me a drink of water. She wore an orange wrapper, and her skin was warm and sticky and she smelled of myrrh. She poured water in my mouth, and some dripped down my scorching skin like a cool blessing, and some ran down
inside me into my big empty belly that was hollow like the clay-lined cistern under the courtyard.

 

  
The woman wiped my cheeks and chin with the palm of her hand. I was afraid she would scold me, sure I’d done something unpardonable, though I didn’t know what it was. But she leaned over me with a tender look and said, “You’ve come back to us, ein?”

 

  
“What’s wrong with me?” I said. “I’ve turned, returned insight out.”

 
  

 

  
I dreamed I climbed a sand cliff, on the shore of a sea too bright blue-green to be the Inward Sea. Sand crumbled underfoot, and as I fell I screamed and awoke on a pallet stuffed with straw under a canopy.

 

  
I lifted my head from the pallet, craning to look at Grandmother Lagas, who sat beside me with her legs straight before her, shelling fat brown beans from pods about the length of my palm. I’d seen those pods on a vine with purple flowers that twined around a column in the dining court; on either side of it grew moonflower plants.

 

  
Grandmother Lagas swept the beans from her lap into a bowl. Her arms were stronger than they looked. I used them to pull myself up to sit. I hung my head and panted, hnh, hnh, hnh. Moonflower was going to kill me.

 

  
I’d been dry as salt before and now sweat oozed from me everywhere. Grandmother Lagas touched the back of my neck and licked my salt from her fingers. She considered the taste the way Aunt Cook Angadataqebay savored a dish to see if it needed a pinch more of this or that. Grandmother spoke to me in Ebanakan, and I didn’t understand her. She sang Adalana’s name, and Third came to sit beside us. Adalana said, “Grandmother says your heart is a lame runaway horse, and you must try to slow it down. She has something to help.”

 

  
Grandmother Lagas had hands with swollen joints and crooked fingers, but they were nimble enough to split a brown bean lengthwise with her sharp little knife, and then quarter the half. She took an eighth of the bean and crushed it in a small granite mortar. She added water and I drank it.

 

  
I leaned on Adalana, and watched between my fingers as Grandmother Lagas poured sand on the pavement beside the fountain and leveled it with a broom. She drew a circle in the sand with her digging stick, and crossed it with two lines right to left, and two top to bottom, dividing the circle into nine parts. She sprinkled seeds from nine clay bowls into divisions of her circle, muttering as she worked. Adalana said, “Grandmother Lagas is asking the birds about you.”

 

  
By the short shadows on the ground, I could tell it was near noon, but the Sun had dimmed, or my eyes had dimmed. My heart was slowing. What
I’d swallowed was coming up again and there was no way to stop it. I spewed up brown flecks of bean and silt and gasped, hnh, hnh, hnh, and there was a pain in my side as if I’d been running. I was afraid.

 

  
Grandmother Lagas fetched Old King Rooster from his little palace and set him on the fountain’s rim, above her sand circle. The rooster squawked and preened, and while he was bragging a little wren flew down and landed on the circle. She scurried about gleaning like a quick brown mouse. Rooster jumped down to chase her away, thrusting his head at her, and when the wren fluttered off, he strutted back and forth, pecking at seeds.

 

  
I fell back on the pallet and Adalana wiped my face with linen dipped in cool water, or was it Aghazal who knelt beside me? I took the wet cloth between my cracked lips and suckled.

 
  

 

  
This time when I dreamed of falling, I let myself fall, for it was more terrible to awaken to dying. I fell into the long funnel of a moonflower, down down to the narrow throat, ivory tinged with violet and apricot. All this time I had been falling toward her and I didn’t know it. The flower coiled shut around me, and I lay enfolded like a worm in a bud. The scent was overripe, oversweet, mortifying and fructifying. I writhed and twisted, but I was too tightly bound to free myself.

 

  
Sire Rodela sniggered in my ear. “You poisoned me. How do you like it?” I could feel his little fly feet crawling around on the wrong side of my eardrum. My arms were bent and pressed tight against my sides, and my hands were near my face.

 

  
“Oh hush!” I stabbed at him with my dagger fingernail and pierced my own eardrum, and the pain made me cry out. Rodela the fly climbed through the torn ear and buzzed about my face determined to annoy me. He landed on my eyebrow and I swatted at him. We were so enwrapped in the flower that he couldn’t fly far if he wanted to.

 

  
Perhaps I could cut my way out. With the sharpened nail of my mother finger, I scratched a slit in the petal. It was too thick to pierce all at once. At the bottom of the slit a pearl of moisture formed, gleaming in the faint light. I took the sweet dew on my tongue, and found it answered my thirst and my hunger. But it aroused another craving.