by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 19
Siniq-elb scooted around the corner of the hallway. Servants, their linen shirts embroidered with a brown triangle, wove paths around him, some cursing, others ignoring him. Siniq-elb did his best to smile and nod; the servants were valuable camouflage, but if they grew angry with him, they could ruin everything. Fortunately for him, the servants seemed more frustrated than angry, and often a glance at his crippled limbs stopped a curse while it was half-way formed.
Keeping his shoulder against the wall, struggling to contain the explosive breaths that might give him away, Siniq-elb swung his body down the hall. His arms burned, and sweat trickled down his brow and into his eyes, blinding him, but he could not slow down. Dakel strode a dozen paces ahead of him, the steely whisper of chain almost inaudible under the bustle of the servants, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was being followed. Siniq-elb prayed that the man was oblivious; the su-esis could kill him in a matter of heartbeats.
If he wanted to kill Siniq-elb at all; the su-esis’s parting words from their last meeting had shaken Siniq-elb. The cruelest punishment of the Garden is to keep you alive. It made Siniq-elb wonder if, in his desire for revenge, in his determination to keep fighting, he was not playing into the eses’ desires. Pausing in his shuffling slide, Siniq-elb wiped sweat from his brow and prayed to the tair that he was wrong.
Dakel turned down another corridor, and Siniq-elb threw himself forward, palms bruised and raw; he would have to switch to crawling soon, but his knees were as tender as his palms. It seemed that nowadays, the only part of him that didn’t hurt was the stumps themselves. They still ached at times, of course, but the healers had done their job well. Now it was the rest of his body, becoming accustomed to a new way of moving, to the tremendous strain on muscles trained to work in very different ways. Not to mention the fiery web that still marked his back. Biting back a gasp, Siniq-elb slid around the corner into the next hall.
He made it just in time to see a door swing shut. Dakel was nowhere in sight.
Siniq-elb leaned against the plastered wall. Sweat dripped from his hair, leaving long, dark lines on the mural. A scene depicting a street harvest. A woman, knife in hand, straddling an old man. The old man was not resisting; the painter had taken care to give his wrinkled face an abstracted, almost obscene look of surrender. More sweat fell, running along a pool of blood that was depicted in the mural, staining the red paint with dark, rusty streaks.
The same door. Siniq-elb had him.
It had been three days since his encounter with Dakel in the Garden, and Siniq-elb had not wasted any time in finding the man. The first day he had followed Dakel all day, only to lose him in the Garden. The second, he had followed him to this room after the evening meal, and Dakel had not emerged again. And now today. Dakel returned to the same room after supper. His room. Siniq-elb had him.
As he caught his breath, Siniq-elb examined his surroundings. It was a strange place for the su-esis to have his rooms; from what Siniq-elb understood, many of the su-eses had residences in other buildings in the compound, not within the temple itself. And even within the temple, this was a dingy hallway, the wooden floor in sore need of polishing, and the mural faded and scuffed. Servants passed along the hall at times, laughing and chatting with each other with the ease that comes of thinking they were unobserved. Not a place Siniq-elb would expect one of the tair’s chosen servants to live.
A smell reached him. Roasting meat, beef perhaps, and wood smoke. Siniq-elb’s stomach grumbled; the chestnuts had done little more than sustain him, and though the spring onions and the chicory and buckrams were additions that eased the cutting pain in his gut, Siniq-elb had been forced to abandon the acorns. Without proper treatment, they had made him ill the first night, and he did not want to spend another night in the temple’s outhouses.
The smell tickled his nose, teasing him, stirring his hunger. Siniq-elb grimaced; he still had four days left before he would be able to eat his normal rations again, and it seemed like forever. The meals, although perhaps not up to Vas’s standards, were at least filling: bread and meat, often a broth as well, and watered wine. Right now it sounded like a feast. Another rumble shook Siniq-elb’s stomach, and he sniffed the air. He knew where Dakel spent much of his time, now. Perhaps he could figure out where the smell came from.
Siniq-elb swung down the hallway, palms throbbing in time with his accelerating pulse, back on fire as the whip wounds threatened to open again. The smell grew stronger, though, and he could still see Dakel’s door, so Siniq-elb kept going.
A man stepped out of an archway ahead, arms loaded with trays. Siniq-elb pulled himself to a stop, but not before the man stumbled in surprise, the trays wobbling. For a long heartbeat, it seemed the servant would drop everything, and the man let out a yelp, but then he caught his footing. With a glare and an oath for Siniq-elb, the servant stomped off down the hall.
Salivating at the smell, Siniq-elb inched closer to the archway, wide enough for three men to pass abreast.
The kitchen.
Fireplaces, complete with roasting spits and long iron hooks for pots, lined one wall, the stonework a rare exception to the sacred wood used in the rest of the temple. Practicality could overcome religious prohibitions even here, it seemed. Tables, the wood scrubbed white, scarred and stained, filled the room. Siniq-elb moved further in. Ovens lined the wall next to him, cold now, the stone paralleling fireplaces across the room. A few servants, all with the brown triangle of the temple on their linen work clothes, worked at the tables, oblivious to Siniq-elb.
A large woman, taller than most men and wide as a horse, her hair white-blonde and so thin that Siniq-elb could see pink scalp beneath, marched between the tables. Dark brown stains marred her white apron, and the linen dress underneath was just as stained with food and wine-spots.
“Shehr,” the large woman shouted. “What are these pots still doing here?” She pointed to a pile of pots next to a tub of water against the far wall.
“I haven’t had time,” a thin girl said, running one hand under her nose. She let out a soft cough. “You sent me up to the hall with more beer. Heavy too, mind you, Jela, and I’m sick, you know.”
“Sick,” the fat woman said. “You’ve been sick since the day you started here.” The fat woman rolled down the kitchen, thin hair streaming behind her. “I’ll give you sick!” Shehr let out a screech as the large woman, Jela she had been called, dragged her through another door. More shrieks sounded after the door swung shut.
None of the other servants even seemed to notice; they continued at their work, most slicing meat or tending to food still on the fires. Their lack of response did not surprise Siniq-elb; in a land of incredible bounty, where one could live off the fruits of the land, it was only the most foolish, only the most cowardly of Khacens who would choose a life of servitude indoors over the freedom and fruit of the land.
Siniq-elb slung himself forward, into the kitchen, and made his way toward the tub of water and the pile of dirty pans. Where there’s work to be done, his father had always said, there’s someone willing to pay to have it done. It was just a matter of agreeing on a price, and Siniq-elb was willing to take anything.
He grabbed the first pan, a large, fire-blackened skillet, and set it in the water—still nice and hot. A stiff brush sat nearby, and Siniq-elb set to work, scrubbing the pan until it shone, and then he set it aside and moved onto the next one. Voices sounded behind him, murmurs of surprise and interest, but he did not pay them any attention. He had washed plenty of pots while on patrol, after a meal over the fire, but always in haste—no one had any interest in cleaning, not after a long day’s march. Now, though, he took his time, letting the hot water dissolve baked on food, working the brush in difficult corners, until the pans shone. For the first time in weeks, he found himself doing something productive—not sitting in his room, not sitting in the Garden, not sitting as Crook and Bald carried him. Working. And, in a way that he had never expected, Sini
q-elb found himself suddenly, surprisingly, happy.
When he had finished, Siniq-elb set the last pot aside and arched his back, letting out a satisfied sigh. His tunic was sopping wet, and he was sore and tired, to the point that he wondered how he would get back to his room. But he was happy; he had done something on his own.
“Tair protect us,” a voice said behind him. “Shehr would have had that work done in half the time.”
As quickly as he could, Siniq-elb swung himself around. The large, balding woman stood a few feet away, hands planted on her stained dress.
A strange look flickered over the woman’s face, but it vanished as quickly as it came. “Course, Shehr would have left those pots half full of food, and I’d have to send her back to work on them a time or two more.”
The other kitchen servants stood in a cluster behind her, watching Siniq-elb, their faces unreadable. The girl named Shehr was nowhere to be seen. On closer inspection, Siniq-elb saw that all but one of the rest had dark, foreign hair; it would be a poor Khacen family indeed that had to send one of their children to work in the temple kitchens. This type of servitude was a sign of weakness, a foreigner’s choice.
“What’s your name?” the large woman asked.
“Siniq-elb.”
“I’m Jela,” she said. “And this is my kitchen. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” Siniq-elb said. His stomach rumbled, and a smile flitted across Jela’s face.
“You’ll come after every meal to wash the pans,” she said. “And you’ll come before, too. To help prepare vegetables. Two hours before. You know how to prepare vegetables?”
He stared at her. “You want me to work here?”
With a snort, Jela said, “Tair help me, I’ll take anyone I can get. Two hours before, do you understand?”
Unable to speak, Siniq-elb nodded.
“Zeyn has food for you, and if I think you’re worth it, I’ll give you a quarter of their wage. Not until I think you’ve earned it.”
He nodded again.
Without another word, Jela turned, barging into the crowd of servants with a flurry of orders to prepare for the next day—fireplaces to be scrubbed, dough to be prepared, wood to be brought in, and more. Siniq-elb barely heard it. All he could experience, with all of his senses, was the plate of food—a platter, really, heaped with meat and vegetables—that a slender, blond man carried toward him. Zeyn, Jela had said. The blond man set it down before Siniq-elb on the floor, then returned with a cup of wine and a small pastry dabbed with blackberry sauce. Bright, hard, Khacen-blue eyes watched Siniq-elb for a long time before he finally left Siniq-elb alone.
The first bite of the slow-roasted pork, still warm and full of juice, was perhaps the best thing he had ever eaten. He gulped wine and took another bite. As he ate, Siniq-elb felt life flooding back into his body, as though the last few days had been passed in slumber. Suddenly, he understood Vas, at least in part. Siniq-elb had never thought he would cry over food, cry from gratitude for being allowed to wash pots and pans, to work. The stout man’s optimism, his kindness, in spite of what he had lost, impressed itself on Siniq-elb in that moment. He realized that he had underestimated the stout, flabby man who cried and spoke like a philosopher.
When he had finished the plate of food, his stomach groaning in satisfaction, Siniq-elb washed it in the tub of water. He tied the pastry into a corner of his tunic and returned the plate and cup to Zeyn, who accepted them without a word.
Arms and back aching, Siniq-elb began the long journey back to his room. The kitchen, in addition to giving him a chance to earn some food and money, also offered a perfect spot for watching Dakel’s door; he would be able to keep an eye on the su-esis much more easily now.
Halfway back to his room, Siniq-elb changed course. He needed to find Vas. Tomorrow, Siniq-elb would start work in the kitchen, and he realized that he had a small problem.
He had no idea how to prepare vegetables.