Wildfire (85 page)

 

  
My ear throbbed. I set to work on the petal wall, deepening the slit I’d made, cutting again and again with my fingernail. The fingernail would break soon and then what would I do?

 

  
“Use a hairpin,” Sire Rodela said, landing on my nose. I brushed him off. I searched my snarled hair and pulled out a golden hairpin with a jeweled dragonfly finial, which somehow remained from the last time I’d worn a wicker hairpiece—the banquet at the Court of the Sons.

 

  
I scraped the wall with the metal tip. The flower bled droplets and I drank them, and I peeled soft rags of flesh from the wall and ate them. I was growing larger and ever more confined. Beyond one petal wall was another and another, for the flower was pleated around me. I cut my way through the last layer, the tough green calyx that cupped the base of the flower.

 

  
I heard Sire Rodela’s whine dwindle away, and I was glad. But he came back and taunted me because he was outside and I wasn’t. I thrust both hands in the hole and pushed and pulled until I tore an opening, and I wriggled out, sticky with Moonflower’s opalescent sap, onto a wide branch.

 

  
How had the flower contained me? I was too big for it now. The flower was a single petal with five stiff ribs, and I cut away the damaged part and turned it upside down and wrapped it around me, and fastened my new cloak with the dragonfly hairpin. The funnel throat of the bloom curled around my neck like a ruffled collar, and its ribs clung to my shoulders and arms and spine, adhering to my skin with the sticky sap, and truly there was no difference between my flesh and petal flesh. I spread my skin-petal wings and stepped off the branch into the arms of a breeze. Sire Rodela darted after me like a little dog, yapping wait wait wait for me, and made me laugh.

 

  
The flowers in Moonflower’s garden were transformed. The heart of a marigold was tinted with colors unnameable. I saw the simple yellow cinquefoil dressed in an intricate new pattern. Every blossom had its unique face and scent, and I was enamored of each one and drawn this way and that in a dragonfly dance. As I flew I rubbed my legs together for the pleasure of feeling skin rasp against skin, and from the desire that suffused me I made a singing sound. “My honey, my sweet,” Rodela buzzed, “I always said you were otherwise than you pretended.”

 

  
I understood why a moth flings itself against a lamp to its own destruction, for I could have immolated myself on this beauty. Perhaps only my pest, Sire Rodela, kept me from doing so: a small grievance in overweening pleasure.

 

  
Now twilight dwelled in every walled garden, and lamps were lit within rooms and colonnades. The moonflowers by the portico opened ivory and white blossoms, and though their fragrance was intoxicating, I was drawn to another smell, a musky sweet rot. Pity the thing that dreamed open-eyed under a saffron canopy. Her pupils had shrunk to the size of mustard seeds, and the breath from her open mouth smelled like sour wine. Grandmother Lagas swatted me and said, “Behave!” and I fell into the cavern and the mouth closed and swallowed me up.

 
  

 

  
Grandmother Lagas folded the canopy and took up a staff topped with a pair of curved, ridged impala horns; between the horns taut strands of gut
held small copper disks that made a shimmering sound. She struck the butt of the staff against the ground to shake loose a rhythm. She kept her feet planted in one place and moved her hips one way and her shoulders another, and she shook her head back and forth. Soon her shoulders gleamed with sweat and her garment was soaked between her fallen breasts. She sang a high question in Ebanakan and rattled the disks, and my Sisters danced in the same way and sang an answer. Now and then one of them would uproot a foot and stamp with a thunderous noise. The other women of the house clapped their hands.

 

  
I thought their words sounded something like this:

 

  

 

  
Who will, who will help her?

 

  
We will, we will help her.

 

  
Who will, who will help her?

 

  
Grandmother Lagas will help her,

 

  
Indigo pot will help her,

 

  
Grandmother Shade will help her,

 

  
Moon will, Moon will help her.

 

  

 

  
All night long I heard them sing, and I was lulled by it and forgot to be afraid. Every time I returned after drifting away, my Sisters and Grandmother were there, promising to help me.

 
  

 

  
Two days and nights they labored over me, Grandmother Lagas and the kinfolk in the house. First and Second, Aghazal and Tasatyala, were obliged to sing and play and dance incessantly to cure me, because they had caused me harm. Rooster and wren had accused them, and Grandmother Lagas had read the signs, the seeds eaten by the birds and the tracks in the sand.

 

  
The birds said that Aghazal had stinted my education; she had been piqued when I ignored her advice and submitted myself to Moonflower’s instruction, and had neglected thereafter to offer me counsel or correction. Whereas Tasatyala had afflicted me with her jealousy, because without much effort I’d taken the place she’d worked so hard to deserve.

 

  
There was railing and quarreling and weeping when these accusations were made, but I slept through all that. In the morning Aghazal and Tasatyala gave me cherished valuables: from Aghazal, her cape covered with green parrot feathers; from Tasatyala, a carved jade disk and golden cord to fasten a garment, which had been given to her by her first patron. I tried to give these gifts back, but they refused to take them. So I called for my locked casket to be brought to me, and emptied it, giving beadcoins and
jewelry and cosmetics to the people of the house, even the tharais bath servant. I gave away my shawls and wrappers. It was as if I had died, and in the Lambaneish way parceled out my precious belongings instead of burning them. But I was given so many gifts in return that I was richer for my generosity.

 

  
I sobbed and asked forgiveness of my Sisters; I had been selfish and unworthy, disobedient to Aghazal, disrespectful to Tasatyala, and a poor example to my dear Adalana. We all wept, and were gladdened by it.

 
  

 

  
Uncle Zubana and Kabara carried me to a small room, empty save for a pallet, the place of seclusion where women of the house slept when they were tharais during their tides. When they left me alone in there, I was frightened. Perhaps they had found me out. But soon the tharais servant came in with rags and a basin of warm water. She washed between my legs and the rags were stained with blood.

 

  
A memory came to me that I had lost or hidden. I’d awakened to agony in the night, with Aghazal crouching on one side of me, and Tasatyala on the other, and Grandmother Lagas kneeling between my legs. Grandmother was yanking something from my quim, a knotted clotted rag or cord, and when I screamed at the pain, Aghazal leaned down and said, “Hush now, hush, it will soon be over.”

 

  
And Grandmother hauled and hauled away and I felt the tug deep inside, and I saw that what she pulled from me was not a single cord but a net or cobweb or roots, sticky and red-black, and I feared she was going to turn me inside out, for these strands were snarled around my inwards. I shrieked and twisted in my Sisters’ grasp and they wouldn’t let me go, and Lagas would not stop pulling until that thing was all out of me and she had undammed my tides, my tides at last.

 
  

 

  
King Corvus sent a messenger every day with gifts, and every day I sent the messenger back with answers written in flowers and beads, regretting that I wasn’t well enough to receive him, promising fidelity, saying I languished without him, and so forth—no doubt his Lambaneish protocol tutor would interpret them.

 

  
I had been fortunate among women to suffer pangs from my tides only rarely, but this flow had been long pent up. It cost me such trouble and pain that I wondered if I were coming apart inside, if Grandmother Lagas, seeking to cure me, had damaged me instead.

 

  
The tharais servant came twice a day with broth from Aunt Cook and remedies from Grandmother. The servant washed me and emptied the slops, and I wondered if I disgusted her. I wondered too if Aghazal offered
the woman at banquets for the amusement of the patrons in this same small room, which was painted—badly—with images of three of the twelve Abasements. I’d never seen her face.

 

  
I said, “We’re both tharais now. You can take off your shawl.” But she would not. It frightened her to be noticed. People only attended to her when she’d done something that warranted a beating. I gave her two amber beads and she deftly knotted them in a corner of her shawl and bowed out of the room with a basin full of dirty rags.

 

  
My tides ebbed on the fourth day, and I left the tharais room on shaky legs and went to bathe. The servant tamed my hair with dragonfly pins, and set a moonflower wreath upon my head. My own flesh seemed to be imbued with the strong scent of the blooms. I would never be able to purge myself of Moonflower, for I’d taken her substance into mine. She’d made me suffer and made me see, and I couldn’t repudiate her without repudiating what I’d become and what I’d done.

 

  
But I had been mistaken to think of her as my mistress. She was my servant. And if she was, like most servants, not entirely to be trusted, and apt to go her own way when she had duties to perform—well, I was forewarned. I myself had been just such a servant.

 
  

 

  
I dressed in a magenta wrapper, and Aghazal helped me climb the stairs to the room where her sisters used to sleep. It now had a splendid bed, painted red, with gilding on the scrolled backrests and cushions of blue silk. The king sent it, she said.

 

  
I waited for him in the hot afternoon stillness. I got up to close the shutters of the windows overlooking the dining court, then opened them again to let a bee escape, and closed them again for shade. It would be foolish of him to be out when the Sun glared most fiercely. Perhaps he would come in the evening, when it was cooler. I lay down to rest with my hands at my sides, so as not to disarrange my tidy pleats. I had no intention of sleeping.

 

  
But when I woke up and propped myself on an elbow, I discovered King Corvus sitting on the other end of the bed, as far from me as he could get.

 

  
He gazed at me over his bent knees. “You don’t look well.”

 

  
I sat up with some effort. I couldn’t have been asleep long, for the rays of sunlight through the lattice shutters had hardly moved. I covered my face with my hands. “Your pardon, Corvus Rex Incus, Master of Masters. I fear I’m still not fit to be seen.”

 

  
“Will you be fit in a hand of days, in time for the initiation into the Serpent Cult?”

 

  
“I daresay—yes, to be sure.” I lowered my hands. Let him see me haggard. Or let him refuse to look, as he was refusing now. He showed me his
profile: the long nose, his left eye half closed, veiled by the fringe of his black eyelashes. But he had looked. His stare had awakened me.

 

  
I wondered if he would sit all afternoon without speaking, as long as was required for a semblance of coupling. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up, and reached for his arm to steady myself, displaying more weakness than I felt. I opened the door to the upper porch, and as expected found someone waiting to serve us, Aghazal’s cousin Gazuf. I murmured requests: refreshments, music, dice for a game.

 

  
Aunt Cook had prepared small astonishments for us such as eggs with blue shells that contained an egg-shaped pudding of ginger cream. The king had no appetite, but mine flourished. I ate delicately, bringing food to my mouth under the cover of my left hand. Down in the courtyard Adalana played the cithara and Tasatyala tapped on the fingerdrums. After three dishes, I told Gazuf to bring the wine and nothing further. “He’s impatient, ein?” she said. I let her think so.

 

  
The dice were of the kind used for snakes and hawks, and made of gold. They came in an ivory casket with wooden counters: rosewood for snakes, elm for hawks. “Shall we play?” I asked King Corvus.

 

  
He said, “I heard you’re easy to beat.”

 

  
“You were misinformed. Hazard Chance favors me—they used to call me Luck, did you know that? I always win; it only seems like losing.” I warmed the dice between my hands and let them fall on the table-tray, to see which of us would go first. Two numbered sides came up, adding to four.

 

  
The king took up the dice. “What stakes?”

 

  
“What you will.”

 

  
He said, “I’ll have the stakes my men had,” and rolled five.

 

  
Without forethought I covered my mouth to hide my surprise.

 

  
“I see you no longer pretend not to know what you did.”

 

  
“I wasn’t pretending, truly. I’d forgotten it all, like a man who drinks too much doublewine. But later, when I was ill—I remembered.” He believed me, or he didn’t. Either way he disapproved. I dropped the dice inside the casket and closed the lid. “You never meant it,” I said. “About the stakes.” My voice wobbled and I feared my lower lip was trembling. Oh gods, was it possible he didn’t know that he was cruel?

 

  
“Aghazal said you almost died. She said you were poisoned. Do you know who did this to you?”

 

  
“Yes. I did it.”

 

  
He stared. “Why?”

 

  
“You can’t guess? Surely I’m not the first—a handsome man like yourself, there must have been others.”

 

  
“You tried to kill yourself?”

 

  
He seemed merely indignant. What was the point of lying if he didn’t care? “I didn’t say I tried.”

 

  
“I should be going,” he said. “You’re still frail, I see.”

 

  
“You are too courteous, Corvus Rex Incus. You do me too much honor to condescend to visit. I regret I can’t accommodate you as I should. Would you like me to call one of my Sisters, Aghazal or Tasatyala? They would be only too glad—”