Wildfire (74 page)

 

  
I’d rather desire Galan than a king who looked on me with such disdain he tried to make a whore of me. Let me long where I was longed for—if I was longed for. If I could see Galan once, if I could speak to him as I’d spoken to Rowney, then I would know if he still wanted me.

 

  
I asked Aghazal if I could trust a moonflower dream.

 

  
She said, “She’s capricious, ein? Once I lost some jade beadcoins and Moonflower showed me where they had rolled into a corner, but many a time she’s led me a long chase and stolen my recollection of it.”

 

  
“Is there a sign that shows which of her dreams are true and which are false? A smell or something?”

 

  
Aghazal laughed. “A smell? Not that I know of. Leave her be, ein?”

 

  
“But you eat moonflower.”

 

  
She raised an eyebrow and a shoulder in a most delicate shrug, which I took to mean she was more experienced, more capable than I, and had less to fear from moonflower. Which was indisputable. But I had more need of it. I’d gone without true dreams—even dreams of Mount Sair, which, lonely as they were, had comforted me—since I stayed in the Court of Tranquil Waters. Unless the dream of Rowney had been a true one.

 

  
I made a libation of doublewine before the biggest moonflower plant in Aghazal’s dining court, and pricked the vein inside my elbow and sprinkled blood around its roots. I prayed to moonflower, and through her to Crux Moon, begging their indulgence. Show me Galan, and I would trade three golden beadcoins for a silver ingot, and have an image made of the full Moon to wear around my neck until I returned to Incus; as soon as I came upon a shrine of Crux, I would give the image in offering. Only let me see Galan, let me bespeak him. Let him be alive. Watch over him.

 

  
I vowed I would eat moonflower the next time it was offered. I begged
her, if she opposed this, to send me a vision of a dog after I partook; if she welcomed my inquiries, to send a fox. That way I’d know if I dared venture further.

 

  
She was as good as her reputation. She sent me a cat.

 
  

 

  
Aghazal was invited to entertain at a banquet offered by Arthygater Klados, Katharos’s sister. We sat with the other whore-celebrants in an upstairs arcade, while the guests ate and drank interminably in the dining court below, entertained by rhapsodists competing for the honor of presenting an ode to Arkhon Kyphos on the subject of his defeat of pirates some years past. No one seemed to be listening to the recitations, not even the historian who was to choose the winning ode.

 

  
We were fed many fewer dishes than the noble guests. For the licked course we were offered a paste of sesame and figs. Aghazal tasted it and told me she was certain it contained ground moonflower seeds. When I licked up my portion anyway, she smiled and shrugged.

 

  
I crept over to the railing so I could watch King Corvus. He sat beside Arthygater Klados, her husband, and their daughter Keros, the very same daughter intended for his brother Merle. King Corvus inclined his head politely toward Keros. I remembered her red-gold hair was down past her waist when unbound, and the hair on her arms was blond.

 

  
Aghazal whispered, “Come back here. You’ll be seen.”

 

  
After the noblewomen departed for the evening, Aghazal and I promenaded through the crowd. An old patron greeted her, and I walked on alone. It was not the first time this had happened, but it still disconcerted me. As long as I was with Aghazal, I was not required to be charming, for she had charm enough for both. Nor did I need to be wary, for she would watch out for me.

 

  
My steps tended toward King Corvus, but a man—a youth—caught my shawl as I passed by and said, “If you please, come sit with us awhile.” He had bright red hair and pale eyes and eyelashes, and he was most polite, not at all as I’d seen him last, in the tunnel under the manufactory, vowing to kill me—our hostess’s son, Arkhyios Kydos. He was sitting with his cousin Kyanos and two whores I’d seen in passing once or twice.

 

  
My heart rattled along faster and faster, and I felt a flush bloom on my cheeks. I was just afraid enough to find the fear thrilling. They’d never recognize me, for I was as well hidden as if I wore a tharais veil, dressed as I was in turquoise silks, with my lips dyed red, my eyes outlined with malachite, and my hair woven into a tower. I smiled a false, flirtatious smile, hiding it behind my hand as if I were the sort of woman who could be modest. But it wasn’t an entirely false smile, for I was enjoying their ignorance.

 

  
Maybe this was moonflower’s doing, this gift of fine careless daring, but if so it was an intoxication better by far than drunkenness, for it sharpened rather than blunted the senses.

 

  
Kydos moved over on the platform, forcing one of the women to make room for me so as not to seem ungracious. I sat beside him with one foot on the ground. I was unsure of the whores’ names; I should ask Aghazal for a list of the principal whores in Allaxios, to study as I studied the tree of the arkhon.

 

  
My throat was dry, moonflower thirst. Kydos gestured, and a tharos servant poured doublewine into a blue glass goblet and I drank it down. Whores must drink to keep their patrons company. The servant filled my glass again, and again I drank, and felt the heat flare up. I ate a confection sticky with honey, and when the tharais napkin came forward with the basin, my senses were so acute that I was disgusted by the whiff of onion and sweat rising from her; disgusted also by her chapped fingers and the way she breathed through her nose.

 

  
Kydos put a hand on my knee. Again I covered my mouth and smiled. I had yet to speak, and the two whores, Mixin and Perdik, resumed their conversation without my help. Mixin said she liked nothing more than to hear doves coo at dawn while she lay abed, knowing she didn’t have to rise. Perdik asked if anyone had heard the nightingales sing in the cypresses behind the shrine of Peranon. She swore they sang in harmony and in chorus, and wondered if they sang to comfort the Weeping Star. I knew—as I wouldn’t have known a tennight ago—that she referred to a Fragment about a nightingale who adored a wandering star, and climbed the night sky to bring her his song, climbed until his heart burst and he fell to his death; the star mourns him still. And I knew now that every mention of a bird carried a message. A bird was never just a bird.

 

  
I hadn’t mastered the language of birds, and might easily go amiss, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the one who had adored unsuitably and climbed too high and fallen so far. I said, “How far is it to the stars, ein? Can a hawk reach them, I wonder? Does an eagle flying above the highest peak of the Kerastes, as high above the peak as the peaks are above the plains, say—does that eagle fly high enough? If one were to walk to the very edge of the horizon, surely the stars are close there? This nightingale should go far, not high, ein?”

 

  
The whores tittered behind their hands, but Arkhyios Kydos seemed to find my ignorance charming. He said, “You could walk and walk forever and never come to the edge of the horizon.”

 

  
“Is the world so big then?”

 

  
He picked up an orange from a dish of fruit and nuts. “No, look. It’s
round.” He walked his fingers over it. “We’re under the sky. It never touches us.”

 

  
“What’s in between, holding up the Heavens, ein?”

 

  
“The winds uphold the sky,” he said.

 

  
“No, the gods do,” said Arkhyios Kyanos.

 

  
I took the orange from Arkhyios Kydos. “Then where is the Overworld where the gods dwell, ein? I thought one could descend to it through a hole, if there was a hole deep enough. Is it on the other side? Could I walk around the orange to find it?” They were all laughing at me now, and I was sure Kydos was telling me a foolish tale just to prove I was fool enough to believe it, but the notion tickled me, and moonflower was blooming inside me, and I laughed until I got the hiccups.

 

  
Arkhyios Kyanos said, “You’re forgetting the seas—you’d have to swim too.”

 

  
“I’d rather fly,” I said. “I’d be a gyrfalcon if I could choose, ein? What kind of bird would you be?” I grinned at Arkhyios Kydos without bothering to cover my mouth, thinking of him hopping in the tunnel with shit on his shoe-stockings. He reminded me of a bandy-legged cock, vain enough to think he could chase a fox.

 

  
He said, “I’d be an eagle; I’d stoop and take a dove in my talons,” and he pretended to swoop down on Mixin, digging his sharpened fingernails into her plump upper arms. She shrieked in the manner called Stung by a Bee.

 

  
I was not supposed to be a gyrfalcon; I was supposed to be a thrush. And here was my chance to find out something useful, something more about—about anything. I must tether myself to a purpose or soar away.

 

  
Arkhyios Kydos was telling me about his parrot. “I trained him to make the cry of a woman receiving a blow at the moment of ecstasy. He’s a marvel, he can do sixteen of the amorous utterances and Mixin is helping me with the rest. I’ll take you to the aviary so you can hear him.”

 

  
The five of us strolled through the dining court and entered the pleasure garden that rose toward the men’s quarters, which backed against a cliff. We ascended mossy stairs from one terrace to the next, and beside us a waterfall sang as it rushed down convoluted chutes of stone. Perdik panted convincingly and leaned on Arkhyios Kyanos’s arm, and Mixin clung to Arkhyios Kydos. I paused on the stairs to look over Allaxios, and motioned for the tharos servants with the lanterns to pass by. I could see farther without their lights. The coral honeysuckle draped over the pepon bushes smelled so sweet.

 

  
In company with Aghazal I’d seen many gardens, large and small, in the saffron light of evening or blue twilight or black night. Of all Lambaneish arts, gardening was the one I most admired. I should have become a gar
dener, not a whore. A gardener, or a wealthy woman. Imagine owning all of this, calling it mine.

 

  
Kydos called to me and I started climbing, suddenly heavy again, my steps going thump, thump, thump, and my heart at a faster pace, going thumpthumpthumpthump. It wasn’t the exertion.

 
  

 

  
We sat on a cushioned platform within the aviary, a tall building with carved pillars and gilded rafters. Its walls were of black silk netting, invisible. Most of the birds were sleeping in cages or roosting in the potted trees. As Arkhyios Kydos coaxed his green parrot to make the cry known as the Agitated Quail, I feared the others would hear the uproar of my heart.

 

  
Arkhyios Kydos sent a servant for more doublewine, stuffed figs, and a flute player. The two couples reclined against the backrests with their legs outstretched, and I was glad to be extra. The parrot walked up and down Mixin’s bare arm, and she fed it pellets of almond paste she’d rolled between her fingers. She was trying to teach the bird to cry, “Mercy, no!”

 

  
“I wonder if Keros has taught her starling to talk,” said Arkhyios Kyanos.

 

  
Mixin said, “I hate starlings. Nasty, noisy things, and without beauty.”

 

  
“Clever though, I’ve heard,” said Perdik.

 

  
“He hasn’t answered yet,” Arkhyios Kydos said. “My sister doesn’t mind. She doesn’t care much for talking birds. She prefers singing ones.”

 

  
They laughed while I tried to puzzle out the jest. The Starling was Merle, but who was the singing bird?

 

  
“Maybe she’ll fly away with him,” Perdik said.

 

  
“I doubt it. My mother has the key to that cage.”

 

  
Perdik said, “A musician! By Posison’s shit, however did she meet a musician? I’m surprised your father hasn’t unstrung him yet, cut his throat and the cords that hold his sacs, ein?”

 

  
“If your father doesn’t do it, maybe you should,” Arkhyios Kyanos said. “I’ll gladly help.”

 

  
Arkhyios Kydos made a gesture of dismissal, as if their teasing annoyed him. “I don’t begrudge her a little pleasure. Indeed, I pity her. I hope she takes the singer along, so he can turn the Starling into a cuckoo.”

 

  
Mixin said, “A strange-ignorant one—I suppose he has hair on his chest like an ape. It makes me shudder to think of her under him; she’s so delicate, a true beauty, your sister.”

 

  
Arkhyios Kydos, pretending to be a hairy strange-ignorant man, growled and pressed Mixin down. The startled parrot flew up with a squawk and landed on the construction of wicker, silk, and blossoms affixed to my head. Hilarity filled me and I giggled. Cicadas zinged in the feathery acacia
trees, and birds chirped and trilled in the aviary, and water splashed in the tiled fountain, and winds flew by and made off with the flute song. These sounds seemed to fall into the rhythm dictated by the drumming of my heart—even the conversation, which became a wordless music of tones, syllables, and the patter of laughter.

 

  
It was too exquisite. The parrot plucked a jasmine flower from my hair and dropped it in my lap. I reached up and he stepped onto my fingers. I looked him in the eye and he tilted his head and said, “No, I beg you!” in a shrill voice, and I laughed so heartily he took offense and flew away.

 
  

 

  
Two golden eyes reflected the lamplight, there beyond the silken walls of the aviary. A gray cat crouched patiently, hoping for a bird. I had fancied myself a gyrfalcon or a fox, a hunter, when I was just an insignificant brown bird, a wren in borrowed plumage. No wonder the cat was watching me.

 

  
Kydos untied the cord that fastened Mixin’s garment and began to unwrap her. She lay across his lap and as he tugged, she turned, once, twice, and she was naked. She made small sounds, which were, as far as I could tell, an artful combination of the Seeping Sigh and the Choked Gasp. I stood to leave, and Kydos reached for my hand and said, “Stay.” I evaded him and ducked through the door flap in the netting.