Wildfire (54 page)

 

  
I heard a woman’s voice hailing me, and I turned and saw a woman had opened the door and was peering into the tunnel. “You startled this one, ein? What do you want?” The woman held an infant in one arm. The baby had been nursing, and the woman pulled up her tharais wrapper to cover her breast.

 

  
I gave the baby my finger to grip in a tiny fist, and the child yawned and showed toothless gums, and the woman and I smiled at each other, sharing our admiration of these small accomplishments. Of course I asked the baby’s name, and found she was called Melimelais; the mother and I traded names, and by then we were on our way to being friends. Nephelais had a broad smile that was apt to dawn at the slightest excuse, such as the way my short hair stuck through the holes in my net cap.

 

  
I tried to explain in my halting Lambaneish how I’d just come to serve in Arthygater Katharos’s bathing room and found Meninx ill, dying maybe, and how she needed clean rushes for her bed, and honey for a wound plaster, and there wasn’t but a handful of barley to eat in the grain baskets. I begged pardon for my ignorance, but did she know where I might find such necessities?

 

  
“You must be rich, ein? This one can show you where to find food—but honey? You must seek elsewhere for that.” She made a sling from one end
of her shawl to carry Melimelais, and led me farther down the tunnel to the larder. The keeper of the larder gave me a ration of barley and broad beans and lard, grumbling that I mustn’t expect to get provisions any time I liked. To sweeten her, I gave back some beans; Nephelais had said she could be bribed.

 

  
We climbed a stairway to the kitchen yard, and it was startling to enter daylight again. Nephelais introduced me to the day porter, who sat between the tharais and tharos hindgates with a wolfhound at his feet. I let the dog sniff my hand; the man, I supposed, would have to recognize me by my voice.

 

  
Back in the tunnel Nephelais told me he was a good fellow, but the night porter was greedy—I should give him two pewter coins when I wanted to go in or out, or he’d demand a grope instead.

 

  
“This one can leave? Doesn’t the arthygater be afraid her tharais servants run off?”

 

  
“Where would we go?” The baby fussed and Nephelais shifted her to the other hip. “What else do you need, ein?” she asked.

 

  
“Bedstraw.” We set off though the tunnel toward the stables, and I said it was most kind of her to show me these things. Didn’t she have tasks she should be doing instead of whiling away the afternoon with me?

 

  
She laughed and said her duties were in the evening. “This one is a napkin.”

 

  
“A napkin?”

 

  
“An attendant at banquets, ein? This one washes the guests’ feet, it offers the basin and gives purges and cleans them up, and serves as a receptacle.”

 

  
She used a word for receptacles that could be applied to pisspots and shit jars and drains, or anything that received wastes. “Receptacle?”

 

  
“Some guests prefer tharais, they don’t like to see a face.” She must have seen I was still puzzled. She said, “For copulation, ein? Or the Abasements.”

 

  
“You mean a whore?” In Lambaneish the word for whore was the same as the word for celebrant, meaning one who attends a festival or maybe presides over it. When Dulcis had called someone a whore, she’d said it with admiration.

 

  
“Of course not! Don’t you know what is proper? Tharais cannot be whore-celebrants.”

 

  
Again I asked her pardon, saying I was a strange-ignorant person, and furthermore I used to be tharos before they banished me from the manufactory for striking the taskmistress.

 

  
Nephelais hooted and clapped her hand over her mouth. “She must have been surprised, ein? Still, what a pity! She could have just given you a thrashing or had you branded instead of making you tharais. So you used to work in the manufactory? It is just above here.”

 

  
We turned a corner and passed a long row of waste jars for the manufac
tory dormitory. There were no doors into the dormitory—lest dung beetles creep into the weavers’ bedstraw, no doubt. I was disappointed, for I’d hoped to find some secret way in from the tunnels to see Catena and search for the bones.

 

  
We kept straight on, passing the dark maws of tunnels that led to other palaces, and I reckoned we were walking north now, under the eastern wall. I was beginning to get an idea of the enormous size of the palace. We came to a stairway leading up to the stables, where a tharais dungboy gave me as much straw as I could carry bundled in my shawl, for it was one thing the arthygater did not scant or measure.

 

  
On the way back Nephelais said the stables were in the forequarters of the palace, where the men lived: the arthygater’s husband, Ostrakan; their three sons, two married and one unmarried; and various lesser kin and servants and guards. Ostrakan was a wealthy nobleman, an Exactor in the Ministry of Bounty, but he was titled a Consort, for Arthygater Katharos had the royal blood and rank. Her share of the palace, which included the noblewomen’s living quarters, dining court, kitchens, and manufactory, had the undignified name of hindquarters.

 

  
I was surprised to hear that the noblemen and noblewomen slept in separate courts. I asked Nephelais if it wasn’t inconvenient when they wished to couple, and this made her laugh. “A man of refinement doesn’t want to see a woman in the morning, when her breath is sour and her hair is all mussed, ein?”

 

  
Nephelais was amiable enough to answer my many questions, and more amused than affronted by my ignorance. I understood most of her answers, though I had to make a good many conjectures when she spoke faster than I could follow. Could she really have meant that a nobleman couldn’t couple with his wife whenever he pleased, but was obliged to pay court to her with gifts and poems and messages in order to make an assignation?

 

  
Outside the door to the napkin’s quarters, Nephelais said, “This one thinks you should come to the next banquet to serve as a napkin. There’s coin to be made when the guests are generous. Our taskmistress has to hire extras for big banquets anyway, and if you give her a few beadcoins at the end of the night, she’ll be glad to let you serve.”

 

  
“But this one doesn’t wish to be a—how do you call it?—waste receptacle.”

 

  
“Then if a man beckons, summon another napkin, ein? He doesn’t care what’s under the shawl, and there are plenty who would change places—because a man gives a little something to one who has done him this service. Ein? What do you say?”

 

  
I shook my head. “You’re kind. But it thinks—it knows nothing of duties yet, from the bathing room. But it is grateful, ein?”

 

  
When we parted, I tried to give her a gift in thanks, three pewter beadcoins from my net cap. She refused.

 
  

 

  
That night I learned I was to share the little room behind the painted door with another woman as well as Meninx. Her name was Lychnais, and her duty was to wash, dye, and dress the hair of the arthygater and her women. She had a severe look, with the skin stretched over the bones of her face as if she’d pulled her hair too tight when she made the elaborate braids and coils of her coiffure. She didn’t seem pleased to find I had moved in, especially when she learned I knew nothing of the art of depilating.

 

  
We stretched out that night in fresh bedstraw. My head was against one wall and my feet another, and I was between two women, one sick and the other disgruntled. The room closed on me like a fist. I tried to lie still as long as I could stand it; I turned and thought of Meninx lying always on her left side, suffering, and how my restlessness must be adding to her torment. Long before dawn a servant began to clatter about in the next room, lighting a fire to heat bathwater in the large tank. Our room became very warm, too warm.

 

  
In the morning Lychnais squatted beside the brazier, fanning smoke toward the open door to the tunnel with her left hand and stirring a pot with her right. She was melting honeycombs with their honey into a thick golden paste.

 

  
She said, “This one thought you would never stop kicking,” and gave a half smile, which I was glad to see. I was beginning to fear she might always be cross.

 

  
“This one begs pardon,” I said. I went to open the bathing room door for air and she gestured to stop me. Already the tharos servants were in there, preparing for the bath.

 

  
I pointed to the pot and whispered. “Is that honey to Meninx?”

 

  
“No, surely not. It’s for taking hair from the skin. You should be doing this, but the bathmistress told this one you were strange-ignorant, so it will do your tasks today, and you’ll watch and learn, ein?—so as not to discommode the arthygater with your clumsiness.” The honey mixture had melted, and Lychnais poured it into an elegant golden basin suspended on a bronze tripod over a smaller basin full of burning olive oil. The tripod’s legs were cast in the shape of tharais servingwomen.

 

  
“It is grateful. It is still more grateful if it has, if you give me a little honey, just a little little honey, to put on Meninx’s sores. Honey to stop stink and rot.”

 

  
“This isn’t just honey. There is also wax and lemon.”

 

  
I had learned of lemons in Lambanein; I tried to eat one, but I didn’t like the sour taste. “What for?”

 

  
“You’ll see—you spread it on the skin while hot, and let it cool and peel it off, zup! And the hair comes out.”

 

  
“Does it hurt?”

 

  
“What do you think, ein?”

 

  
“Can you give honey for Meninx?”

 

  
She nodded toward a clay jar near her feet. “It needs to get more today. If there’s any left, you can have it.”

 

  
I washed copious pus from Meninx’s sores, and she covered her face and bit back her cries. There wasn’t enough honey to pour into the open sores, so I tore strips from Meninx’s shawl to make bandages, and soaked them in honey warmed with a little water. I covered these bandages with others made greasy with lard, just as the Dame used to do.

 

  
Meninx said, “There would be enough honey if Lychnais didn’t sell it.”

 

  
Lychnais said, “How was this one to know, ein?” Now she was vexed again.

 

  
She told me to fetch more water for our ablutions, and I took up the jar and opened the door to the bathing room. “Not there! Down there,” she said, pointing to the tunnel door. “Down and right.”

 

  
Past the waste jar niches under the arthygater’s privy and around the corner, I found a boar’s-head spout in the wall. Water trickled from the jaws into a stone basin and from there overspilled into a drain.

 

  
Lychnais said my hands were filthy, even after I scrubbed and scrubbed with handfuls of straw and sand. The stain from the dye was deep in every crack in my skin, and darkest in the bed of my fingernails.

 

  
Her own hands were ruddy from the henna she used to dye hair. She kept her nails pared short except for those of the thumb and first finger of her right hand, which were long and pointed. I saw she was uneasy. She washed, put on her shoe-stockings and tied the drawstrings around her ankles, and rewrapped her gown to make the folds drape more perfectly down the front. She took off her net cap so the coins wouldn’t disturb the noblewomen by jingling. Lastly she arranged the shawl over her head. She told me to hurry, for the first bathers would be arriving soon.

 

  
I was surprised. “You want this one there—in there? It doesn’t know how.”

 

  
“Stand still and they won’t see you, ein? Keep the hands hidden under the shawl, like this.” She stooped and peered through a peephole in the bathing room door. The hole had a small wooden cover, hanging loosely from a nail, which she pushed aside in order to look. She turned and swiftly picked up the tripod with the wax and honey mixture. I followed her into the bathing room.

 
  

 

  
On one side of the door with the peephole, Meninx lay on bedstraw already befouled. On the other side, I stood against the wall in the painted garden as still as I could be, while a breeze through the high windows stirred my shawl. Female musicians in the corner played an air as soft as the breeze itself. One made a skittering sound on a small drum, another blew a bird-bone flute, and a third strummed an instrument that looked like a small loom. A tharos servant knelt at a mortar, grinding cloves and anise to scent the air. Another servant reverently set out on a tray tortoiseshell combs, twigs dipped in honey and pepper paste to clean teeth, and a golden casket containing a sack of yellow powder to dust on forearms. Also in attendance were the factotum, the bathmistress, the keeper of jewelry, the keeper of garments, a masseuse, a painter of cosmetics, two women to tend the fire and make sure the bathwater was neither too hot nor too cold, and three to serve refreshments and carry messages. A koprophagais woman, who had crept up the tunnel stairs, waited in the privy room to cleanse the arthygater’s buttocks.

 

  
The first to visit the bathing room, just after dawn, was the arthygater’s mother-in-law. She was accompanied by an elderly kinswoman who dutifully listened to the mother-in-law’s complaints on the subjects of constipation and the ingratitude of those who ought to know better. Every noble household was supplied with a number of such inferiors, related or otherwise, who offered flatteries in exchange for patronage. The Lambaneish called them limpets, for the way they clung to their betters and could not be pried off.

 

  
After the mother-in-law left, Arthygater Katharos arrived with a following of guests and limpets. It was the first time I’d seen the arthygater, and I was somewhat disappointed to find that she looked unremarkable. I suppose I’d expected her to be beautiful. Not Katharos. She had a face square from forehead to jaw, a small nose, and two chins. Her expression was hard, or shrewd, rather. But when she disrobed and lay down on the marble bench to be shaved by Lychnais, I almost gasped aloud. She bore a tattoo of a blue serpent, which encircled her waist like a girdle and looped around her navel. The tail went between her legs and emerged again at her tailbone; the red forked tongue touched the bony notch at the base of her throat, visible even when she was clothed, if one knew where to look. This must be the same sort of tattoo that King Corvus’s wife, Kalos, had borne. No wonder they’d called her a lamia.