The woman seated there was as beautiful as Jaia, and even more colorfully dressed. Her petal-painted breasts were in flaming jungle colors. Oken read her name as Jaianne. Looking back and forth between their faces, Oken saw that they were as alike as their names, more than sisters, perhaps twins. Jaia spoke to Jaianne in a language Oken had never heard before; he had a feeling he would hear it again and often in the days and weeks ahead. He hoped the women who spoke it would also be as beautiful as these two.
Mademoiselle Jaianne was delighted see to the transfer their luggage and the return of their vehicle. She smiled with her teeth as she told them that it was easily done. She was even more pleased to report that they had time for dinner before they had to go on board. Mademoiselle Jaia recommended the café on the roof of the station.
The air outside was brisk, even with the Casablanca sunlight warm on their backs as they climbed the staircase on the outside wall to the roof. The café terrace was dotted with umbrellas in peppery hues of yellow, red, and green over round tables. Everything was made of bamboo in one form or another; indeed, bamboo dominated the design— airy and lightweight. Brilliant feathers of tropical birds were arranged on the tables in jade vases, with flowers of the same colors. There were no orchids.
They were served an exotic meal, mostly of bright red and hot yellow, with flavors as fiery as the colors. The view of Casablanca from the café apparently charmed Mabruke. Oken was too aware of the expanded view of the Atlantic that they must cross. The geometric designs of the stucco buildings and the dark green of the palm trees beneath the blue sky did not have their usual calming effect on his soul.
After their first bottle of wine, a magnificent Andalusian rosé, Mabruke finally asked Oken why he seemed so distracted.
“There are monsters in that deep,” Oken said after a moment’s consideration. “Fear is the least among them.”
“I’ve never known you to be afraid of the water. That’s not like you.”
“Well, it’s not the water,” Oken said. “It’s the distance we fall before we reach it.”
Mabruke laughed, but he avoided Oken’s eyes. “I would never let you fall. Anyway, you’re a better swimmer than I am. You’d probably end up saving me.”
“I do not swim better than you— I just don’t care as much about what happens to my suit.” Oken made himself smile.
Mabruke raised his glass in salute.
Oken did as well. “May your suit stay as dry as your humor.”
A flash of hot color caught Oken’s eye. He glanced over and saw one of the lovely cinnamon twins emerging from the stairwell. The highlights in her dark hair were pinpoints of blue diamond framing her face. She folded her hands one atop the other in front of her in the Gesture of the Attendant, her eyes downcast for the privacy of her clients. Her flower-petal breasts looked rounder in the dazzling sunlight, with the blue sky behind her. Her flower petals were clearly paint, not tattoos, a paint that concealed and revealed in the same gesture. Oken found himself wondering how might that paint taste?
“She has a layer of a soporific coating over the color,” Mabruke said, breaking into Oken’s contemplation. “At least, the breast on this side does. The other might be something different. I can’t tell from this angle.”
Oken turned an annoyed look to his friend—at the same time just as amused that Mabruke could read him so easily. “How can you tell that?” He tried to sound stern. Laughter sparkled at the edge of his words.
“That specific formula is from my earliest days of training,” Mabruke said with a dismissive wave of his hand, nonetheless with a tone of casual pride. “I’ve seen it used in a variety of ways. Hers is lovely, if unoriginal.”
Oken turned back to the colorful if soporific view, noting with a pulse of pleasure that she was approaching their table. “Every breast is an original,” he said with arch reverence.
“Indeed?” Mabruke crossed his arms over his chest, tilting his head to smile at Oken’s profile. “Her left breast is slightly higher than her right.”
Oken returned to her. “As one looks at it, sir?”
“Her left,” Mabruke repeated.
Oken kept his smile. It was Mademoiselle Jaianne, the twin from behind the marble counter.
“The nipple, however,” Mabruke said very softly, “is poison. At the tip.”
“The left or the right?”
“Both.”
“Ah.” Oken’s smile, as she walked up, was slightly more forced. His eyebrow tilted in a line of regret.
She stopped beside their table and bowed with the same formal touch of hands to forehead. “The gentlemen are enjoying the view up here?”
“We are, ma de moiselle,” Oken said generously. As she straightened up, he tried to determine whether Mabruke was correct about the attitude of her breasts. He was. “What can we do for you, my dear?”
“The gentleman would come with me, at such time as your repast is complete?”
Mabruke touched his napkin to the corners of his mouth, then laid it upon the table and stood. The Mademoiselle Jaianna was gazing suddenly at the buttons of his jacket. Oken admired the view from his seated position, then stood as well. “Lead on, my dear.”
She bowed, turned on her heel, revealing that the gracefully contoured lines of her bare shoulder blades were painted in the tawny gold and black markings of a jungle cat. She led them down the steps, but at the bottom she turned, not to the left toward the lobby entrance but rather to the right, toward the rear of the station. Oken could see the corner of a small, railed balcony that extended around to the back of the building, overlooking the shore of the Atlantic beyond.
He was not too keen on that view. The obvious distraction of the lovely but poisonous Mademoiselle Jaianna got on his nerves. He was reminded of a pair of white breasts glistening with droplets of water, glowing in a pool in faraway Novgorod. An ambush had been waiting for him that night.
Mabruke put a finger on Oken’s wrist, gently, with clear meaning. Oken did not look at him. He nodded in a gesture indicating the woman in front of them.
Mabruke shrugged.
When they turned the corner, the balcony was not empty.
Oken and Mabruke each took a step sideways to increase the distance between them.
There were four men dressed in long white robes, turbans, and boots, and wearing the formed and lacquered silk masks of desert people, each painted with the stylized face and enigmatic smile of Leonardo’s Lady. They gestured simultaneously with drawn scimitars, directing Mabruke and Oken down a narrow set of steps in the middle of the balcony that led to a cobbled path to the nearest wharf.
They walked along the cobbles with an honor guard before, at each side, and after.
“Are these more of your friends, Mik?”
“I have never seen those masks in my life.”
Oken contemplated the specific wording of this while walking along the cobbled path threading through hillocks of beech grass. Mabruke had acknowledged only that the mask was unknown, suggesting that the faces behind the masks might be known, or not.
“I do wish you would just tell me whether we are hostage to friends or to enemies?”
“If I did, how would you learn?”
Oken glared at him.
Mabruke shrugged, evading Oken’s direct gaze. “I won’t always be here to pick out the dangerous ones. You have to find out for yourself what the cues are.”
“So be it, Professor.”
“Like your life depended on it.”
Oken focused on the men walking with them, trying not to look directly into the glare off the surging Atlantic.
The clue finally got his attention: the scimitars were ceremonial. The grip and the angle at which they were carried were formal and stylized—the gesture of an honor blade, not that of a weapon. Oken slipped his hands into hispockets and marched grimly on.
From the corner of his eye, he could see Mabruke trying to suppress a smile.
THE ACCUSTOMED view from th
e deck of a ship made Oken more comfortable with the promise the journey ahead. The Atlantic was only as big as the horizon from here, with the water itself touching the hull. He found himself hoping that this was the real journey, that the preparations for traveling by aeroship had been made so openly for the very reason that he and Mabruke would not actually be on board. He did not bother to ask Mabruke. Oken did not fancy having to unravel another riddle just then.
Mabruke was riding in the fore of the ship like an eager dog, sniffing the ocean winds that blew across his face and made his coat flutter around him, mad wings striving to take flight. Oken was amused by Mabruke’s sheer delight in the journey itself, traveling for the sake of traveling. The puzzle was that Mabruke had nevertheless opted for a teaching career that might have kept him in one place for generations of student lives. Oken had yet made only a few journeys out of Memphis in search of the secrets of the Pharaoh’s enemies. He had enjoyed every such affair. He enjoyed returning to Memphis even more. He knew the older man would explain it to him someday, when his professorial muse was ready. Oken wondered if, perhaps, the professor himself did not yet know his own heart in this matter.
A cloud-enshrouded mountaintop resolved itself on the horizon ahead of them. Oken felt a brief disorientation. Surely they had not yet crossed the thousand leagues of the wide Atlantic to be this close to the New World continent so swiftly? Then he saw Mabruke grip the fore-rail to keep his balance in the winds and turn, gesturing for Oken to join him.
Oken did not want to leave the relative comfort of the windbreak where he sat, but he stood reluctantly and wentover. The craft rode with amazing smoothness, considering the speed at which the water jets were pushing her.Oken felt the decks quiver beneath his feet, as though he trod on a living beast and not on a wooden deck and laminated hull.
Mabruke turned his face back into the winds, pointing to the misty mountaintop growing taller out of the horizon. “Madeira!” He had to shout to be heard above the wind rushing past their faces. “That’s our next stop. We will be boarding a Quetzal there.”
Oken nodded, but he sighed inwardly. Too good to be true. A flight above deep waters was yet ahead of him. Still nodding, he wentback to the bench and sat down, arms folded tightly across his chest. He closed his eyes and spent the remainder of the boat ride walking through his memories of the Avenue of the Sacred Places, gathered closely against the walls of Marrakech.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ATTENDANTS referred to their aircraft in the masculine, the opposite of sailors, who saw the feminine nature of their watercraft. It made sense to Oken. Women and ships were far more accommodating in their interiors. The corridors of the Quetzal were even narrower in real life than they had seemed as lines on a page. Both men had to duck, then bend their heads sideways to get through the entryways. Mabruke could stand in the middle of their cabin and touch both sides with his fingertips, and he had to bend his head respectfully so as not to scrape the top of his head if he did. Everything was bamboo, the ubiquitous building material of the Quetzals—carved, bent, formed, layered, and laminated with colored resins, sometimes embedded with flakes of mica so that corners glittered.
Sunlight shone in from a single, round window. The pane of glass was crystal clear and just big enough to permit a view of the ocean far below.
The beds, at that time of day folded up flat against the walls, were ornate frames with intricately woven leather straps as a mattress. The cup and basin set out in front of a shaving mirror were hollowed-out bamboo sections, polished smooth and lacquered a pale rosy color that emphasized the grain. To Oken, the images of the two pieces as they reflected in the mirror looked as though they were slowly oozing lines of blood from a hundred cuts.
No matter. He was thirsty after the long trek across the island and the even longer climb up the stairway to the top of the Quetzal station, then the nerve-racking walk up the ramp into the Quetzal himself. The only water Oken was interested in just then was the drinking water in the pitcher, set in a niche above the basin. He ignored the bloody-looking image of the cup and filled it from the pitcher. The water was icy cold, and especially thirst quenching because of the bubbles dancing through it. He poured a second cupful and drank that. Then he filled it a third time and passed it over to his friend.
“Good of you to test it for me,” Mabruke said with a tease in his voice.
Oken teased back. “Shouldn’t you wait a bit first to see if there was anything slow- acting in it?”
Mabruke took this with a totally serious look. He frowned at the cup, then bent his head and sniffed at the water carefully, several times. He closed his eyes, searching memory, and sniffed once again.
He opened his eyes, looked at Oken, and smiled. “Just a nice bit of bubbles! You shouldn’t be so suspicious.”
“If I weren’t,” Oken said in retort, “how would I learn?”
Mabruke emptied the cup in a single draft, then held it out for more.
WHILE THEY were seated later in the crowded dining compartment, the Quetzal lifted up and away from his mooring atop the station, so gently that the two men almost failed to notice. Oken, however, glanced out the nearest porthole, felt a delicious thrill through his flesh when he realized that the station building was falling slowly away. Not an altogether unpleasant thrill. He had felt the same thrill when he once stepped up close to the grand windows in Natyra’s apartment, in order to lean his forehead against the cool glass. Novgorod, far below, was quilted with a layer of white velvet and diamonds, gleaming in the soft light of the full Moon. He had had too much champagne, at Natyra’s insistence. He felt, just for an instant, that he was falling downward, spiraling toward that moonlit quilt. He had taken himself then to the silken quilts of Natyra’s bed and recovered. That instant of thrill remained. This was the same, the thrill of surrender.
“Fear is not the least among them,” Mabruke said, quoting Oken’s words.
Oken met his friend’s intense gaze. “How can I serve Egypt if I am so transparent?”
“You are too well trained as royalty to be transparent about anything.” Mabruke lifted his glass of wine to see its color in the light. “I am curious to hear if you had a quote from the Horus Scope about why we should not be flying today?”
Oken did. “Do not sail on any wind this day.”
Mabruke saluted him with the glass, then sipped at the wine, rolling it in his mouth carefully before swallowing it with a show of pleasure. “I thought you might say that. No winds here. Not even a breeze to ruffle your hair.”
“Never mind my hair—look at your glass.”
Mabruke was holding his wineglass level, with a steady hand, yet the wine was slightly askew, pooling as though creeping up one side to escape. Startled, Mabruke released the glass in midair, snatching his hand back as if the glass were suddenly too hot to hold, or too dangerous.
Oken reached out swiftly and caught the glass by its stem just before it hit the table. Droplets of wine splashed over the rim onto his hand, and onto the cuff of his white silk jacket.
“That’s too fine a vintage to waste on sleight of hand,” Mabruke said, much too evenly.
The edge in his voice struck Oken’s ear. He put his hand up to his mouth, and quickly licked the drops from his skin. “Not the least bit underhanded.” He drank the wine in a long, slow draft, then set the empty glass in front of Mabruke.
Mabruke carefully laid one dark, long-fingered hand on the table, placing the other hand as deliberately across it.
“They use uneven flotation on first launching,” Oken said as explanation. “The sails get better purchase on the winds closer to the ground that way. The passenger section rotates to adjust. Our flight should level out shortly.”
“It said that in the book, did it?”
“You read it, too, long before I did.”
“Not as permanently. You must remind me, from time to time.”
“THERE IS clearly nothing holding this ship up in the sky—at any instant, everyo
ne will realize it, and we will plummet into the sea!” Mabruke spoke wearily, despite his effort to make a jest.
Oken had wondered why Mabruke insisted on taking his meals in their cabin, and kept the curtains drawn. Oken was surprised and dismayed by this explanation, however, accustomed as he was to Mabruke’s childlike pleasure in traveling for traveling’s sake. “The physics of it is in the book.”
Mabruke shook his head, then reached up to rub his forehead. “Pay no attention,” he said. “I am not myself yet, I suppose. Having gone from captivity underground to captivity in the sky is not the journey I had anticipated. Please, do not take this amiss. I need sleep and our travels so far have provided me with very little. The quiet here is peaceful.”
Mabruke sighed and his countenance grew still, introspective. Oken waited for him to continue.
“Just let me sleep. I will return to my usual self before we arrive.”
“I’ll go back to prowling around the ship, then, shall I?”
“Prowl on! Take your key, and lock the door behind you.”
Oken assessed the contents of his pockets and selected a pair of gloves. “Pleasant dreams,” he said cheerfully as he went out, making certain that the lock clicked clearly as he pulled the door shut.
A NARROW catwalk was woven into the netting that bound the Quetzal’s top tubes together. Despite the seeming frailty of the materials, the bamboo treads between the curved walls of the gap were as surprisingly stable as the Queen’s Bridge. Oken could easily place a hand on the bamboo railing on either side. Even filtered by the net, the view was overwhelming.
The aeroship moved with serene calm. The only sign of their speed was the brisk wind that tossed his thick curls about. The sky above and the ocean below were unchanging, eternal, calm, and endless, the sublime expanse of the Atlantic. As the pilots said, up here they were “one with the sky.” Oken felt his spirit shift and expand to encompass the vastness of the world seen from the Quetzal’s vantage. There was no place within that vastness for fear. The voice of the wind was a wordless cry of triumph.
Three Princes Page 12