by Tad Williams
The Favored of the Seclusion, perhaps in deference to a tradition no one could now remember (or perhaps for other, less exalted reasons) considered themselves women, not tremendously different from those over whom they watched, and made the traditional attributes of womanhood their own, although exaggerated into parody they were almost all extremely excitable, romantic, vengeful, fickle. And of course the wives and their born-female servants had their own complicated webs of influence and intrigue as well. Altogether, walking into the Seclusion was like entering a magical cave out of a story, a place strung with invisible strands and snares, full of beautiful things guarded by deadly traps.
Qinnitan’s own role in the place was confusing from the first, and within days of entering she had begun to long for the certainty of her old life, for her uncomplicated role as one of the youngest and thus lowest of the low among the Hive Sisters. All the autarch’s wives and wives-to-be—and it was hard to tell sometimes what the difference in status meant, since he so seldom visited any of them—were of infinitely greater importance than any of the Seclusion’s servants, and yet the hundredth wife, let alone new-minted Qinnitan who was something closer to the thousandth, had to wait weeks for even the briefest appointment to see Cusy, the immensely fat chief of the Seclusion’s Favored—the Eunuch Queen, as she was sometimes laughingly called in the Orchard Palace. But nobody in the Seclusion would ever have laughed at old Cusy to her face Of all the denizens of that place, only Arimone, the autarch’s paramount wife—a flinty, beautiful young woman known as the Evening Star, who was the autarch’s cousin and had been the wife of the last older brother Sulepis had murdered to clear his path to the throne—would have stood up to Cusy without a great deal of consideration. Since Arimone lived almost as removed from the Seclusion as the autarch himself (she had her own little palace and grounds nesded at one end of the vast compound like the inmost chamber of a nautilus, and no one, not even the other high-ranking wives, came there without an invitation) there was nobody to challenge the Eunuch Queen’s authority.
Qinnitan had the fantastic luck—or so it seemed at the time—to be taken under the wing of Luian, one of Cusy’s deputies, a motherly Favored (at least in size and demeanor, since she was not particularly old) who took an unexpected interest in the new wife and within days of Qinnitan’s arrival invited her to come to her chambers and drink tea.
Qinnitan was treated to the promised tea, along with powdered Sania figs and several kinds of sweet breads, in a tented, cushion-strewn room in Luian’s chambers. The meal was accompanied by a gale of gossip and other useful information about the Seclusion, but it was only at the end of the meal that Luian explained why her eye had lit on Qinnitan.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?" she said as Qinnitan bent to kiss her hand in farewell. Qinnitan had been caught by the fact of Luian’s large hands, one of the few things now that betrayed her beginnings as a man, and so she did not for a moment understand the question.
“Recognize you?” Qinnitan said when the import finally sank in.
“Yes, darling girl You don’t think I lavish my time on every little queen that comes through the door of the Seclusion, do you?” Luian patted her chest as if the idea gave her breathing problems; her jewelry rattled. “My goodness, we have had two already this month from Krace, which is practically the moon. I was shocked to hear they even spoke a human language. No, my sweetness, I asked for you because we grew up in the same neighborhood.”
“Behind Cat’s Eye Street?”
“Yes, my darling! I remember you when you could barely walk, but I see you don’t remember me.”
Qinnitan shook her head. “I . . . I must admit I don’t, Favored Luian.”
“Just Luian, dear, please. But of course I was different then. Big and clumsy, studying to be a priest. You see, that’s what I thought I would be until I was Favored, and then I lost my taste for it. I even went to your father once for advice. I used to walk up and down the alleys between Cat’s Eye and Feather Cape Row, reciting the four hundred Nushash prayers, or trying to . . .”
Qinnitan let go of Luian’s hand and stood up. “Oh! Dudon! You’re Dudon! I remember you!”
The Favored waved her fingers languidly. “Sssshh, that name! That was years ago. I hate that name these days—ungainly, unhappy creature. I am much more beautiful now, am I not?” She smiled as if to mock herself, but there was something other than self-mockery involved in the question. Qinnitan looked at the person before her—it was a little harder to think of Luian as female now, after the recollection of her former self-—discreetly examined the broad features, the thick makeup, the large hands covered in rings, and said, “You are very beautiful now, of course.”
“Of course.” Luian laughed, pleased.”Yes, and you have learned your first lesson. Everyone in the Seclusion is beautiful, wives and Favored. Even if one of us should hold a knife to your throat and demand to be told she is looking poorly that day, just a little peaked around the eyes, perhaps, skin just a little less rosy than it should be, you will say only that you have never seen her more beautiful.” For a moment Luian’s kohl-rimmed eyes grew hard and shrewd. “Do you understand?”
“But I meant it sincerely.”
“And that is the second lesson—say everything sincerely. Goodness, you are a clever girl. It is too bad that I will have so little to do with your training.”
“Why is that, Luian?”
“Because for some reason the Golden One has ordered that you must be schooled by Panhyssir’s priests. But I will keep a close eye on you and you will come to take tea with me often, if you would like.”
“Oh, yes, Luian.” Qinnitan wasn’t quite certain what she’d done to rate such attention, but she wasn’t going to turn her back on it. Having a link to one of the Favored, especially an important one like Luian, could make a world of difference in one’s accommodations, in the skill and tact of one’s assigned servants, in any number of things up to and including the continuing favor of the autarch himself. “Yes, I would like that very much.” She paused in the doorway. “But how did you know who I was? I mean, I would have been not much more than a baby when you left our old neighborhood—how could you recognize me?”
Luian smiled, settling back in her cushions. “I didn’t. My cousin did.”
“Cousin?”
“The chief of the Leopards. The very, very handsome Jeddin.” Favored Luian sighed in a way that suggested she had complicated feelings about this handsome cousin. “He recognized you.”
Suddenly Qinnitan, too, remembered the solemn-faced warrior. “He . . . recognized me?”
“And you did not recognize him either, I see. Not surprising, I suppose. He has changed almost as much as I have. Would you remember if I called him Jin instead of Jeddin? Little Jin?”
Qinnitan put her hand to her mouth. “Jin? I remember him—a bit older than me. He used to chase after my brother and his friends. But he was so small!”
Luian chuckled deep in her throat. “He grew. Oh, my, he certainly did.”
“And he recognized me?”
“He thought he did, but he was not certain until he saw your parents. By the way, please write and tell your mother that she will be invited to visit you when the time is right, and to stop pestering us with pleading messages.”
Qinnitan was embarrassed. “I will, Favored Lu . . . I mean I will, Luian. I promise.” She was still stunned by the idea that the slab-muscled Leopard captain could possibly be Little Jin, a perpetually wet-nosed boy whom her brothers had more than once smacked in the face and sent home crying. Jin—Jeddin-^-looked now as though he could break any of Qinnitan’s brothers in half with one hand. “I’ve kept you too long, Luun,” she said out loud. “Thank you so much for your kindness.”
“You are quite welcome, my darling. We Cat’s Eye girls must stick together, after all.”
“The gardens are beautiful!” said Duny. “And the flowers smell so lovely. Oh, Qinnitan, you live in such a beautiful place!”
>
Qmnitan drew her friend away from the climbing roses and toward a bench at the middle of the courtyard. Queen Sodan’s Garden was the largest in the Seclusion and its hedges were low, which was why she’d chosen it.
“I live in a very dangerous place,” she told Duny quietly when they sat down on the bench. “I’ve been here two months and this is the first conversation I’ve had where I won’t have to worry whether the person I’m talking to might decide to have me poisoned if I say the wrong thing.”
Duny’s mouth fell open. “No!”
Qinnitan laughed in spite of herself. “Yes, oh, yes. My dearest Dunyaza, you just don’t know. The meanness of the older Sisters back at the Hive, the way they’d get after the younger ones or the pretty ones—that was nothing. Here if you’re too pretty, they don’t just push you down in the hallways or put dirt in your soup. If someone is jealous of you and you don’t have a powerful protector, you’ll end up dead. Five people have died since I’ve been here. They always say they fell ill, but everyone knows better.”
Duny looked at her sternly. “You’re teasing me, Qin-ya. I can’t believe all that. These women have been chosen by the autarch himself! He wouldn’t allow anything to happen to them, praise to his name.”
“He scarcely ever comes, and there are hundreds of us, anyway. I doubt he remembers more than a few. Most of the brides are chosen for political alliances—you know, important families in other countries—but some of them are like me. Nobody knows why we’ve been chosen.”
“We know why! Because he fell in love with you.”
Qinnitan snorted. “I thought I asked you not to make up stories about me, Duny. Fell in love with me? He scarcely noticed me, even when he was making the arrangements with my parents, such as they were.” She made a sour face. “Not that they could have said no, I suppose, but they sold me.”
“To the autarch! That is not being sold, that is a great honor!” Duny’s face suddenly froze. “Won’t you be in trouble for saying such things?” she whispered.
“Now you know why I brought you out here, where there are no walls or high hedges for spies to hide behind.” Qinnitan felt as though she had aged ten years since leaving the Hive, felt very much the older sister now. “Do you see that gardener over there, over by that pavilion?”
“Him in the baggy clothes?”
“Yes, but not a him, and the gods save you if you ever said that in front of her. That’s Tanyssa, one of the Favored. Most of them go by women’s names here. Anyway, it’s her job to watch me, although I don’t know who’s given the job to her. Everywhere I go, there she is—for a gardener, she seems to travel from one part of the Seclusion to another very freely. She was in the baths yesterday morning, pretending to have some errand with the young Favored boy who heats the water.” Qinnitan looked at the well-muscled gardener with distaste as Tanyssa pretended to examine the leaves of a monkeyfruit tree. “They say she killed that young Akarisian princess who died last month. Threw her out of a window, but of course they say she fell.”
“But, Qin, that’s terrible!”
She shrugged. “It’s how things are here. I have some friends, too—not friends like you and I are friends, of course, although I may make some of those too someday. The kind of friends you have to have if you want to stay alive, if you don’t want to fall over dead after drinking your tea some evening.”
Duny looked at her without saying anything for a long time—a long time for Duny, anyway. “You seem different, Qinnitan. You seem hard, like one of those traveler girls that dance in Sun’s Progress Square.”
Qinnitan s laugh was a little harsh, but something about Duny’s innocence made her angry. It was the fact that Duny could still afford to be innocent, more than anything else. “Well, I probably am. Everyone talks nicely here—oh, they do talk nicely. And other than the occasional hissing catfight, everything is quite peaceful and comfortable. Do you like my dress?” She lifted her arm and let the pleated sleeve fall, graceful and translucent as a dragonfly s wing.
“It’s lovely.”
“Yes, it is. As I said, everything is quite peaceful and comfortable . . . on the surface. But underneath, it is a pit full of scorpions.”
“Don’t talk like that, Qin.You’re scaring me.” Duny took her hand. “You are a queen! That must be wonderful, even if the people here are tiresome. What is the autarch like? Have you . . . did you . . . ?” She colored.
Qinnitan could not resist rolling her eyes—after all, it was a self-indulgence she could not allow herself most of the time. “Duny! Don’t you listen? I already told you the autarch almost never comes here. When he wants to see one of his wives, he has her brought to his palace. Well, I suppose this is all his palace, but you know what I mean. He has never spoken to me since he bought me from my parents, let alone made love to me! So, yes, since you are wondering, I am still a virgin. As you may remember from listening to the older girls, in most cases a deflowerment requires the man and the woman to be in the same room.”
“Qin-ya, you shouldn’t talk like that!” Duny said, but whether because she was embarrassed or because she did not want to suffer further damage to her flowery illusions wasn’t clear. After a moment, she asked, “But if he didn’t fall in love with you, and you’re not a princess of somewhere—you’re not, are you?—then . . . then why did he marry you?”
“First off, he hasn’t married me yet,” Qinnitan told her. “At least I don’t think so. I’ve had some religious instruction from the priests—some very strange rituals—so maybe that’s why, to prepare me for the marriage ceremony. Some of the women here went through ceremonies, but some others were . . .well, just taken. But as to why he chose me . . . well, Duny, I don’t know. And nobody else in this poisonous place seems to know quite why either.”
“I have such a nice treat for you, darling,” Luian announced when Qinnitan arrived, a little breathless, in the Favored’s chambers. “We must primp and prepare, both of us. We don’t have much time.” She snapped her fingers and her pair of silent Tuani slave women came into the room like shadows.
“But . . . but, Luian. Thank you. What are we . . .”
“We are going to the palace, my sweet. Out of the Seclusion, yes! Someone very special wants to see you.”
For a moment Qmnitan found it hard to breathe. “The . . . the autarch?”
“Oh, no!” Luian threw up her hands and laughed. The Tuani girl with the curling iron, who had come within an eyelash of burning her mistress on the arm, paled a little. “Oh, no, if it was the autarch himself they’d be preparing you for days. No, we are going to see my cousin.”
It took a moment for Qinnitan to understand. “Jeddin? Of the Leopards?”
“Yes, my dearest, we are invited to see handsome Jeddin. He wishes to speak with you, to hear stories of the old neighborhood. I am going along as chaperone, lucky girl that I am. I do so admire that young man.”
“But . . . am I allowed to meet with any men at all?”
A look of annoyance creased Luian s powdered forehead. “He is not any man, he is chief of the Leopards, chosen by our autarch himself, praise to his name. Besides, I will be with you, child, I told you. If that is not respectable, what is?” But the Favored’s eyes darted briefly to the Tuani slave beside her, and Qinnitan could not help wondering if it was truly all as obvious and ordinary as Luian made it out to be.
When they were both ready, Favored Luian, rigged like a festival ship in a fringed-and-beaded robe, and Qinnitan in a less ostentatious and properly virginal white robe with a hood, different only in quality from something she might have worn in a Hive procession, they set out. Despite her misgivings, Qinnitan could not help being excited: it was the first time in three months she had been outside of the Seclusion’s walls, even if it was only to another part of the great Orchard Palace. Other than Duny, and Qinnitan’s mother, (who had spent most of her visit weeping over their family’s good fortune) this would be her first chance to see anyone from outside. And, needless
to say, Jeddin would be the first natural man she had seen since he and his soldiers had brought her here, to this invincible prison of beautiful blossoms, splashing fountains, and cool stone arcades.
The Favored who guarded the Seclusion’s outer gate did not dress a bit like women. They were the largest people Qinnitan had ever seen, a half dozen hulking creatures with ceremonial swords whose flat, curved blades were almost wide enough to use as tea trays. They engaged in a long whispered discussion among themselves before Luian, Qinnitan, and the two silent Tuani servants were at last allowed to pass out of the Seclusion and into the greater palace, but only with one of the guards bringing up the rear of the small procession like an enormous dog guiding a herd of sheep. The little company continued on for a good portion of an hour, through lush but empty gardens and unused corridors and courtyards so opulent that they seemed to have been prepared for some royal princeling who had not yet moved into them.