by Kate Elliott
He lifted the cup to inhale the heady scent of ginger and peach. He had great dignity of presence but the disturbing intensity of his manner betrayed a man made restless by a constant storm surging within. At first he had a great deal to say about the Emperor of Saro’s attempt to insult him and why it had required him to react as he did lest he be diminished in the eyes of the men at court and indeed the world at large. He spoke at length and neither of his daughters interrupted him. After a while he paused to eat a dumpling and drink more tea.
“Your Excellency,” said An. “Perhaps you have considered what trouble may be brought down upon a peaceful land.”
He set down his cup quite emphatically.“You are still a child, Daughter. This is the king’s duty. It must be left to the king to act.”
An’s eyes fluttered in a way Yara recognized as the heat of her anger fanning imprudent words that Yara knew must be left unspoken. She slid the platter of aromatic bean curd with its ginger slices directly in front of the king, distracting him while with her other hand she pinched An into silence.
“Is there some news you bring, Your Excellency?” Yara asked in a voice so bright it lightened the chamber.“How eager you look!”
His gaze held a smile that saw not them but a brilliantly feathered dream invisible to all others. When he told them the news they already knew, they clapped their hands and pretended surprise.
Yara plied him with more dumplings, smiling fixedly. “What wonderful news, Your Excellency! I have long harbored the most heartfelt desire to welcome a new woman into the palace for I miss my mother quite sorely.”
“How soon may this longed-for arrangement come to pass?” added An in a tone only half as sour as she felt, but her father did not notice the way she blinked too much and meanwhile crushed a rice ball flat with the bottom of her spoon.
The priests, he informed them, were even now calculating the matter, seeking the most beneficent days to hold the wedding festivities. Because Lady Nasua was born into a different divine lineage than that of Lady Rhinoceros, the temple must show exceptional attention to the phase of the moon and the rising time of certain stars.
Yara poured more tea.
He was not a man inclined to dwell on any matter for long, once it was decided. An had at last recovered enough to be able to delicately direct their conversation down more amicable channels. He wanted to know how the tapestries commemorating his victory three years ago over the Golden Hill principality were coming along in the weaving hall. Had they received the silk thread he had sent them from his recent expedition to the west? Were the colors and patterns acceptable? How did the royal hospital fare?
An detailed her work administering the royal hospital she had founded. He listened attentively, as he always did. Afterward she and her father played a game of Walls, which was sadly interrupted before its conclusion by a message calling the king to meet with his council over the matter of the Saroese ambassadors whose ship had departed with the turning tide.
The messenger was one of the women of his household, an elderly woman who had served in the palace since she was a child. “Your Excellency, the royal sorcerers have sent me to tell you that the ears have begun whispering.”
An and Yara leaned forward, eager to hear more, but the king merely glanced at his daughters and then departed with his attendants exactly as he would have done when they were small.
When he had gone and the room cleared of all trace of his presence, Yara said, “He would have discussed the matter with our mother. The sorcerers would have been brought to the queen’s audience hall so she could hear their words. With his own words he treats us as if we are still children. Can it be our father does not honor us as he ought?”
An considered the red and gold sprays of flowers which to her appeared more as smears of color than petals and leaves. “At any time within the past three years we have been of proper age to be anointed as queen. Yet he has never once encouraged the temple to inquire as to an auspicious festival for our ascension. Why have we been content to remain as princesses rather than ascend to our rightful place?”
“He is a responsible administrator and a bold commander. Under his regency, the land has prospered.”
“If the Saroese invade, it will go ill for the people and the land. As for you and me, Yara, who can say what will become of us if that happens?”
“It is a dreadful thing to consider! If I were the Emperor of Saro, I would delegate a prince to marry us and thus hold the land in our name.”
“If the Saroese care for the ancestors at all, which we cannot be sure they do,” retorted An grimly.“For I have had a worse thought.”
Yara bent closer to hear.“What could be worse than a Saroese invasion?”
“The noblewomen of the hill country hold their power through their holy foremothers just as we do. What if our father means to bury the sacred relics of the Lady Rhinoceros and erect a temple to a new ancestress? To replace our lineage with that of his new queen?”
Yara’s hiss startled a cat just then curling up to nap on the king’s pillow. The animal bolted outside to vanish among the blooms.
“This will not do,” Yara said in a hard tone.
“No, indeed, it will not. It makes a person wonder if he has more than one kind of desire on his mind when he seeks a new bride. Perhaps he seeks to overthrow the power of the Lady Rhinoceros. Or of the divine ancestresses altogether, for if a new queen is beholden to him for her power then he may believe the land is his, and not in her keeping.”
“What do we do, An?”
“We have allowed our affection for our father the king to lull us into a false peace. It has been so comfortable to go on in this way.”
“It is true we have shirked our duty,”Yara said with a lightning frown. “However much we may suffer, the land will suffer more. We must act, An.”
Sorrow had drained the light from An’s face but now she straightened her shoulders and gestured for an attendant to set out her writing desk. “We discover what allies and weapons we have. The robe of our plan must be seamless. Fetch out the new inkstone.”
With a needle she pricked her finger and Yara’s and with two drops of blood mixed a blue-black ink on the untouched stone. Because An had an especially graceful hand despite her poor vision, she wrote the notes.
In answer to Prince Ejenli she wrote, A bath of salt water kills flowers but a bejeweled fish may carve the seas at will.
“Are you sure that is not too obvious?” Yara puffed light breaths onto the wet ink to hasten its drying as it set into the weave.
“He must be answered in the same manner he wrote. A man of his temperament will expect such unsubtle treatment. I am willing to offer him what he truly wants, which I do not believe is marriage to us.”
To Lord Kini she wrote, The kite will fly higher with a longer string.
“Very good,” agreed Yara. “If Lord Kini wishes to be free of his betrothal or honestly desires Lady Nasua to gain a nobler station in life than marriage to him, then we cannot rely on his aid.”
To Lord Varay, she wrote, The banquet table.
“Goodness, that is elusive even for you, An,” said Yara as she slipped the messages into silver tubes inscribed to look like bamboo. “Even I am not sure what you mean by it.”
“What the man makes of it will tell us what we need to know about him.”
They gave the messages into the hands of trusted ladies and sent them off.
Because An and Yara wore the mark of the queen, they were too sacred and holy to walk about in the world like ordinary people. A queen’s faithful sisters and cousins and aunts and nieces and ladies act as her hands and ears and eyes to the world outside the palace complex while the man she marries acts as her spear and public voice. A queen’s responsibilities are legion, for it is her duty to see that the land and the people flourish.
Thus, after their afternoon devotions at the temple, Yara spent the last of the day’s light weaving at her loom among the other women in the
royal weaving hall, because every notable event was commemorated with garlanded tapestries. Meanwhile An stripped out of her finery and, wearing humbler garb, was carried to the hospital she had founded. The hospital lay at the edge of the vast palace grounds, reached by crossing three bridges, traversing two orchards, and passing alongside the reed-skirted Western Lake with its waterfowl and fish.
The hospital building was of An’s design, a long building built of wood with raised floors to keep damp and bugs and snakes and scorpions away. All the male patients were housed at one end, women at the other, and children in their own dormitory amid the fragrant medicinal herb garden. An’s eyes were weak but she had discovered that if she touched a person and listened with her ears and her heart and the caring that dwelt in the pit of her belly, she could hear something about their illness. From palace doctors and city surgeons and village healers she encouraged to come speak to her, she continued to learn. More importantly, in the hospital she could bring the people to her, and thus the garden of their fears and hopes was opened to her.
Now, sitting in the children’s dormitory beside a slack-faced child shivering with fever, she heard the bubbling strain of lungs filling with liquid. She was listening so intently to the child’s labored breathing she did not at first notice a rumble of footsteps at the entrance, not until they ceased and a pleasing male voice murmured, as to a guide,“Who is that lovely young woman?”
She looked up to see a smear of bright colors at the other end of the long dormitory room, sky blues and palm greens with splashes of sun yellow and searing orange. A company of foreign men had come to tour the hospital; visitors to the kingdom often did, for the palace hospital was already famous for being open to any person who needed care.
Her sight was too weak to make out distinct faces but she felt their gazes on her. Most moved away politely but one man took several steps closer to her. His gaze she felt as a pressure on her face. If smiles were fragrance then his bloomed as with flowers.
Would a man be so rude as to smile at a noblewoman he could not know and ought not converse with? Or did she, in her brown hospital robe worn to conceal stains, appear as something else entirely, an ordinary woman whom a charming man might gently flirt with?
She blushed.
Just as he took in a breath to speak, the guide hurried back to fetch him.“My lord, if you please, the party has moved on to the next building. It is not permitted to remain behind.”
“Is it not? For I have questions that only an intelligent person who knows this place intimately might answer.”
Because he was still looking at her as he spoke in exactly the sort of laughing voice An found most suspicious, she blushed more deeply. Yet she refused to avert her face as she ought as he cast a last glance toward her and finally followed the rest out.
Trembling a little, she gave instructions to ply the sick child with cold baths and a tisane of firebane. In the curtained carriage on their way back to the queen’s garden, she asked her attendants what party of visitors had trampled so discourteously through the hospital.
“The delegation from the Emerald Island, Your Excellency. Everyone on the staff was talking about it. There was a prince with them, a pleasing manner of man so everyone said. He asked a great many questions about how the hospital was established and if its presence in the city had reduced the incidence of disease.”
An’s annoyance boiled, and she had to fan herself to cool down her cheeks. For the worst of it was that she had been pleased by the man complimenting her intelligence. She had to wonder if he had guessed who she really was.
The carriage rolled to a stop beneath the sprawling canopy of the sacred fig tree that stood outside the double gates leading into the queen’s garden. Lady Aunt clambered into the carriage and signaled for the attendants to disembark to give them privacy. As the oxen started up again, she spoke so as not to be heard above the rumble of wheels on stone.
“I have yet more news which the king has attempted to keep from me. The Saroese know nothing of our sorcery so they speak freely among themselves. The commander of the ship that carries the envoys back to the fleet has praised the envoys’ courage in provoking the king to this degree of insult. To create a pretext for invasion was their intention all along. Once they return to the emperor’s court, it is expected that the emperor will order a fleet to sail here, overthrow King Karanadayara on the grounds of scorning and insulting the empire’s envoys who arrived under the banner of peaceful diplomacy, and take the kingdom for himself.”
An held the beaded curtain away from the window and let the fragrance of the garden kiss her face. The blur of trees was overladen with the depthless blue of a shadowless sky. Perhaps until that moment she had hoped for a different outcome, but if her father was concealing even this news from them then she knew they had to proceed.
“Let us go to the weaving hall,” she said at last.
Lady Aunt nodded, making no further comment.
In the royal weaving hall An left her aunt in the carriage. Yara sat apart from the main weaving hall on a span of floor where the afternoon light spilled gold over the loom with its warp and weft but left Yara seated in shadow beneath the high beams of the roof. The weight of the sun faded the cloth even as she wove it but display was never her purpose. Nor was her weaving ever finished.
She rose from her stool and hurried over so that An should not have to limp across the expanse of polished plank floor on which her crutch might slip.
An took her hands. The memory of the blurred colors in the hospital, the gaudy clothes, the brilliant presence, still made her tremble. Not even the garden’s expansive grounds and the song of wind in the branches had wiped away that memory.
“How does your work go?” she asked, hearing a quaver in her own voice.
“It will serve our purpose. If we are truly determined on this end.”
“We must be,” said An, and told her what Lady Aunt had discovered.“To do anything else would dishonor the queens who came before us.”
With a sigh of resignation followed by a deep inhalation for resolve, Yara agreed.
That evening they called Lady Norenna and Lady Aunt to their garden room. Once the women were settled for a game of four-handed dice, the princesses set their ladies to singing a long excerpt from the Opera of the Phoenix-Haunted Ship. The robust choruses and effortful arias drowned out the players’ soft voices.
Lady Norenna placed first stakes of a single ivory comb on the table.
“Did you acquire the noses?” Yara asked in a whisper.
Norenna rolled the bone dice. The four sides came up as two cups, the sign of boundless abundance, a mortar and pestle, and a ship. She touched each one with the tip of a finger. “This is a throw appropriate for the supervisor of the kitchens, do you not think? Properly dried, a nose can be ground to powder with a specially treated mortar and pestle. Food flavored with this condiment will cause the one who eats it to have his desire heightened for that which smells best to him.”
“Ah,” said Yara.
An reached for the dice.“Perhaps I may send you red-leaf powder to flavor this meal as well. It is very expensive, which is why we use it at the hospital only for the most sickly cases, to thicken weak blood. But it is also known to thicken a man’s desire.”
“That will inflame his desire, truly,” remarked Norenna.“But the dish must also be spiced with a kingly savor, to encourage his other lusts.”
An slid a gold bracelet off her royal arm and pushed it under the low table.“Flakes of gold touched by royal skin.”
Norenna tucked the bracelet into one of the ornate knots of her wrapped dress.
After placing a stake of two silver brooches on the table, An shook out the dice for her own play. They fell as a calligraphy brush, a mortar and pestle, a stalk of rice, and a knife.
“You are a predictable person,” observed Yara with a flicker of the eyelids that made her seem ready to laugh. “Each of these represents an aspect of your work at the hospi
tal. Also, two cups defeats your one knife, so Lady Norenna defeats you.”
Lady Aunt placed three silver sticks shaped as bamboo on the table as her stake. As the old woman carefully weighed each of the eight-sided dice to measure how much power burned in them, An slipped a curled strip of rice paper from each of the ornate silver tubes Lady Aunt had just set down.
On the first paper Lord Ejenli had written: The sea wind knows no walls. The waves are its bride.
“As I hoped,” said An, nodding. “He will take our offer. He is more interested in his own quest than in our garden.”
Lord Kini had written: Past the weir lies the empty pond gilded in sunlight.
“He means the fish will be trapped in a golden cage that offers no sustenance or companionship,” murmured An. “The mountain bride does not desire to become queen.”
Yara looked pensive, studying Lord Kini’s formal hand, which was correct in all its curves and angles but too precise to be beautiful. “The man’s passion is not for brushwork, but his metaphor is good.”
“More importantly I believe his heart will be willing to do what needs to be done. Yet all turns on this last.” Her hands had begun trembling as they did when her thoughts became agitated and so she had to nudge the last paper to her sister.
Yara unrolled the last message, read it quickly, then silently passed the note to An.
Lord Varay had written in a hand as elegant as An’s lovely script. The letters wore the crowns and curlicues customary to the more elaborate writing style of Emerald Island, almost too decorative, yet on the page he made it joyful, like a laughing smile.
He had written: A man savors the first two fish brought to his table and eats his fill of them. The rest he throws to the pigs.