This outburst caused Tamara to smile, a wide and lovely smile that broke over her face like the sun. She was much too accomplished and poised to return his compliment, in words, but her eyes were full of light and laughter, and an openness that said: 'You are very beautiful, too.'
'Is this your first joyance?' Danlo asked.
'I've attended two others,' Tamara said. Her voice was clear and strong and lovely to hear. 'Bardo has invited courtesans to each of his joyances. Everyone says he's trying to convert our Society.'
Danlo let go her hands and said, 'Could it be that Bardo just likes to surround himself with beautiful women?'
'I'm sure he must have many reasons for what he does,' Tamara said. 'But he's your friend, isn't he? I'm sure you must know his intentions.'
'No, I have not seen him for five years. People change, don't they?'
'Everyone is calling Bardo a religious man,' Tamara said. There was a wariness and irony in her voice. 'I do think he's a charismatic man. He has a very great passion, which has impressed us all. But a passion for what? He seems devoted to remembrancing the Elder Eddas. He seems involved with unfolding the racial memories. I've only recently met him – has he always displayed such a passion for the possibilities of his memory and his mind?'
'The Bardo that I knew,' Danlo said, and he was suddenly laughing, 'had a passion for other parts of himself. Other ... possibilities, yes?'
'I think I know what you mean,' Tamara said. She, too, began to laugh. They stood there facing each other, looking into each other's eyes, and laughing.
Here Hanuman coughed and cleared his throat as he shot Danlo a cold look. It was he who had engaged Tamara in conversation, a significant feat considering that she was a courtesan and he only a journeyman cetic; he coughed and looked askance at Danlo's instant infatuation. He said, 'It should be obvious that Bardo is trying to convert the courtesans. If I wanted to influence the Order to accept a new religion, that's what I would do.'
'I'm sure you overestimate our importance,' Tamara said.
'Do I?'
'Our Society has never had a formal connection to the Order.'
'Which is why your influence has been so pervasive.'
Tamara smiled, and then, in her lovely, musical voice, she said, 'But our purpose, as everyone knows, is pleasure, not politics. I detest politics.'
'Many voluptuaries say that,' Hanuman coughed out.
'And then, when they're older – well, you know what the masters say, don't you?'
'No, I don't think I do.'
'They say this: "Find a paramour, lose your soul."'
Again, Tamara laughed, and she smiled at Hanuman. 'You're a cynical man, I think. I've been taught that our Society was founded precisely to keep men from losing their souls.'
The Society of Courtesans, in fact, had been founded in the year 1018 as an investment cooperative designed to protect the fortunes of a few dozen women who were extraordinarily skilled in their arts of ecstasy. And to protect their lives. When the newly formed Society of Courtesans began buying property in the Farsider's Quarter and conducting the finances of their art themselves, they had severed all connection with their procurers and pimps. In revenge, these violent, cruel and parasitical men had beaten them, and sometimes even tortured them with nerve knives that caused their beautiful bodies to convulse and spasm. More than one courtesan had died this way. And so the first courtesans pooled their money to hire assassins. The assassins exterminated the procurers, of course, and then betrayed the very women who had hired them. They demanded three-quarters of the Society's yearly profits – or else they would assassinate the courtesans one by one. This tribute was a far greater bite of their wealth than their procurers had ever taken, and the courtesans decided not to pay it. Instead, they sent their most accomplished diva – her name was Natasha Urit – to the planet Qallar. There, Natasha made an infamous pact with the warrior-poets. In exchange for the warrior-poets' murderous services, the courtesans promised to consider the strange religion of Qallar, and if possible, to help subvert the masters and lords of the Order. This was a time when the warrior-poets were proselytizing all across the Civilized Worlds, as well as murdering for the sheer joy of living closer to death and life. The warrior-poets desired to bring all peoples to an intenser experience of life, especially the Order academicians, who valued only their vast knowledge and their minds. Natasha Urit promised to introduce young courtesans to the men of the Order, that they might ply their art and open the academicians' hearts to new realms of experience. Pleasure was their key to this opening, and over two millennia, the courtesans had learned all there was to know about pleasure. Long after the warrior-poets had murdered every assassin in Neverness, long after their proselytizing zeal had faded and they dissolved their pact with the courtesans, the courtesans kept alive the flame of the warrior-poets' teachings. And they maintained a special relationship with the Order. Over time, the Society grew and evolved, but they continued to train their novices in the arts of tantra, sex dancing, music, maithuna and bodywork. And their novices, century after century, matured and ripened into voluptuaries who enraptured any young Orderman who could afford one. And the voluptuaries grew old, and they returned their bodies to youth, and they became the paramours of masters and old lords who had learned to love them. The Order had long forbidden pilots and other professionals to marry, and so in place of wives, they took paramours into their arms. Some of these paramours even bore children, illegitimately, illegally. Some of the most famous lords acquired money and kept their families in secret splendour. They listened too well to the counsel of their paramours, and they lost their independence, if not their souls. But the best of the courtesans, whether paramour, diva or voluptuary, continued to practise their art for only the highest of reasons.
'If our Society really wanted to influence the Order,' Tamara said, and she smiled at Hanuman, 'we'd train men to please your women. Almost half your professionals are women.'
'That's true,' Hanuman said, 'but seven of ten lords are men.'
Danlo brushed the hair away from his eyes and looked at Tamara. He almost had to shout to make himself heard above the music and the many ringing voices. 'Could you really do that – train men to please women?'
In answer, Tamara laughed softly and nodded her head.
'I should think that's the secret of their art,' Hanuman said. 'What better way to enrapture a man than by exciting his vanity?'
'I'm afraid you don't really understand,' Tamara said.
For a while Hanuman and Tamara bantered with each other like two novices slapping a hokkee puck back and forth. Hanuman stared at her uneasily, his eyes hooded yet intense. He affected the manner of a young journeyman who can't afford a courtesan's arts: he seemed full of awe, resentment, guilt and ill-concealed desire. But he was partly playing at these emotions, as cetics often do. Most likely he was trying to manipulate Tamara in subtle ways, perhaps to crack her dazzling surface charm in order to show the love-blind Danlo a facet of her he might otherwise not have seen.
But Tamara was as imperturbable as a diamond and despite Hanuman's manipulations and veiled attacks, she continued to smile and sparkle. 'When you've become a full cetic,' she told Hanuman, 'I'm sure you'll find a courtesan who will teach you the greatest of all pleasures.'
'Do I dare ask what that would be?'
'I think you already know,' Tamara said.
Hanuman let loose a hollow laugh, and then said, 'Yes, I'm a cetic, and I'm supposed to discern such things.'
There was a long silence, which Danlo broke by asking, 'And what is the greatest of all pleasures?'
'The giving of pleasure, of course,' Tamara said. She looked at Danlo, then at Hanuman. 'Though some men have always found their greatest pleasure in the giving of pain.'
These words obviously caught Hanuman unprepared. His face fell crimson, for a moment, and he seemed out-
raged, hurt, shamed. It was a rare thing for him to betray such emotion. 'You should know, Danlo, that courtesans are very skilled with their tongues. They've much to teach – even a cetic could learn from them.'
'You're very gracious,' Tamara said. 'Thank you.'
'However there's so much to learn, and so few nights in which to learn it,' Hanuman said. He bowed to Tamara and smiled his frozen cetic's smile. 'And on this night we've come to learn remembrancing, Danlo and I. We should excuse ourselves and pay our respects to Bardo.'
Again, he bowed, deeply, a shade too deeply for the occasion. He turned to Danlo and said, 'I wonder if he's grown fatter these last five years?'
Danlo knew he should make his goodbyes and find Bardo, but something in Tamara's dark, lustrous eyes seized his muscles and held him motionless.
'Danlo?'
Hanuman's soft, too-restrained voice fell among the hundred other voices in the room, and Danlo scarcely noticed that he had spoken.
'Are you coming?'
'Not yet,' Danlo finally said. 'Why don't you tell Bardo I am waiting to wish him well. I shall find you ... later.'
His eyes were still fixed on Tamara's, so he did not see the look of fury that burned across Hanuman's face. It never occurred to him then that Hanuman might instantly have loved Tamara, even as he loved her. In truth, he never suspected that Hanuman was capable of such a purely self-consuming emotion.
After Hanuman had sulked out of the room, Danlo shook his head, and to Tamara he admitted, 'Sometimes he likes to hurt people, truly. But I cannot see why he would want to hurt you.'
Someone nudged Danlo from behind, causing him to step closer to Tamara. The long room was now quite full of people. The air was hot and steamy from the heat of a hundred bodies. Many were smoking triya seeds in little wooden pipes. The pop-pip-pop of the tiny seeds was everywhere, and plumes of purplish smoke unfolded like satin gauze and veiled over the room's three chandeliers. This smoke stung Danlo's eyes, and breathing it exhilarated him. He looked at Tamara, standing beneath Bardo's glass chandelier. The thousands of glass pendants were incandescent with electricity, of all things. Electric light spilled down over Tamara's head and covered her in soft violet tones. Danlo thought she looked like a statue of the goddesses they sculpt on Gemina. Then she moved closer to him, and her dancer's muscles played beneath her violet-blue pyjamas, and Danlo was very aware that she was a living creature of flesh and blood and sweet, hot breath.
'Sometimes I think the courtesans and cetics are too much alike,' Tamara said. 'We're both too aware of the power of words.'
Danlo was now so close to her that he could feel the moisture in her breath; he could talk without raising his voice. 'I have heard that courtesans are accomplished in the art of conversation.'
'Conversation is the third greatest pleasure,' Tamara said.
'I have ... never spoken with a courtesan before.'
Tamara smiled at him and said, 'And I've never known anyone like you before.'
'But you know ... about me, yes?'
'Hanuman told me how you came to Neverness. That you had to eat dogs to stay alive. I think he's a little in awe of you.'
'Did he tell you how I was born? Where I was born?'
'I've heard the stories,' Tamara said. 'It can't be easy being the son of Mallory Ringess.'
'Oh, that is not so hard,' Danlo said. 'This is what is hard: living in a city where people can worship a man who has become a god.'
'I think the people in all cities are very much the same.'
'All civilized people, yes. But other peoples have ... other ways.'
She looked at him in instant understanding and asked, 'Are you speaking of the Alaloi people?'
'Yes.'
'But could you ever return to the Alaloi tribes? To their way of life?'
Danlo rubbed his forehead and touched the feather in his hair. 'I have never told anyone, but I have often dreamed of going back.'
'Because the Alaloi live more simply than we do?'
'No, it is not that. At least, it is not just the simplicity. All my life, it seems, I have been looking for a kind of beauty that I call halla. Halla, it is ... the harmony of all life. The way all things are connected, the web, the way each thing becomes purely itself only in relation to all other things. Once or twice when I was a child, on quiet nights when the stars came out... I have a memory of this kind of beauty.'
Tamara touched his hand, then; she reached down between them where her pyjamas nearly touched the kamelaika covering his thigh, and she wrapped her long fingers around his. 'I listened to a recording of one of the Alaloi dialects a few years ago,' she said. 'I thought it was a beautiful language.'
'Are you a student of languages?'
'I think I've imprinted fourteen languages and learned the long way three others.'
Tamara, like many courtesans, preferred to converse with her clients in their milk tongues, and she did so whenever she could. Those familiar with their talents sometimes refer to courtesans – usually with snide double-meaning – as linguists.
'Do you remember much of ... the Alaloi language?' Danlo asked.
'No, but I love to hear it spoken.'
Danlo squeezed Tamara's fingers. She was standing quite close to him, almost eye to eye. He drank in the clean smell of her hair, and he looked at her and said, 'Halla los li devani ki-charara li pelafi nis ni manse.'
'But what does that mean?'
'It means: halla is the woman who lights the blessed fire inside a man.'
Tamara laughed in open delight and beamed a smile at him. 'You're a beautiful man, and I like talking with you. But it's well that you didn't say that when your friend was here. He's very jealous of you, I think.'
'Hanuman ... jealous?'
Tamara nodded her head and sighed. 'I think he was about to propose a contract when you interrupted us.'
'But he is a journeyman – does your Society make contracts with journeymen?'
'No, my Society doesn't. But some journeymen – I hope I'm not insulting anyone – despite their vows, some young men keep money. Some courtesans make secret contracts with them.'