Janny smacked away the speck of blackness.
Solin gestured with a crutch. “The Orange of Health.”
The swordsman was already peeling the golden fruit. Its skin curled off in his fingers like a ribbon. Before he could pull out a slice, the empress started her song.
Her melody skipped and pranced, slowed, then leaped in a joy of notes. That voice made Aja think of tinkling chalices, the flow of wind between brass towers, and the resonance of a chorus in a temple.
Janny’s tears dried while she listened, her face softening. The song had taken away her pain. It also pinned Aja sitting to the carpet. She knew she should go. She had her boon of maturity, her future, but she couldn’t move until the empress finished.
She never did. The empress collapsed, and her cry sounded like chimes striking the floor. Blueberries rolled from her hand, then came to rest. The henna hieroglyphs on her lips seemed to darken as life drained from her skin. Her breathing shriveled to a wheeze, then silence.
“What’d you do to her?” The swordsman roared. He wheeled on Solin.
He lifted his hands from his crutches in a sign of innocence, balancing on one leg.
Aja clung to the swordsman’s arm, dragging after him. “Solin didn’t hurt her.” He couldn’t have. Aja hadn’t given him the empress’s hair.
The lord crouched beside the fallen empress. He asked, “My royal jelly, how many blueberries did you eat?”
“Only…” The empress’s voice faded out. Aja stooped close to hear. “…three. Mister Wiggles…the eel ate one.”
The lord stroked a finger down her neck, raising a line of flush amid the icy skin. “She swallowed four blueberries. The first three drops from the cauldron inspire, the fourth—”
“Expires.” The djinn lit a flame between her fingers, then snuffed it out.
The swordsman stomped toward the empress. The lord sauntered out of the way.
She was dying. The ruler and her voice would be gone forever. Aja couldn’t believe it. She pressed one hand against her chest, another to her throat. Whenever she moved, her bones ground against each other in sparks of pain.
The swordsman lifted the empress against his chest, her arms hanging, her legs limp. He pressed a glowing slice of orange against her lips. When the empress made no move to eat it, he pushed the fruit onto her tongue. Her eyelids fluttered.
Aja glanced at his plate, saw that he had cut seeds out of the fruit wedge. All the speckles in her dragonfruit had been seeds. She had eaten them because they were far too small to remove. They wouldn’t harm her. They mustn’t. Her stomach cramped, and an ache ran down her insides.
“She’s not biting,” the swordsman said, “and I’m afraid I’ll choke her.”
“Squeeze it,” Solin said. “The juice will heal her.”
“It won’t,” the djinn said. “That isn’t an orange of resurrection. It’ll only slow her death.”
The swordsman glared at the djinn while crushing the orange in his fist. Rivulets of daylight ran into the empress’s mouth.
Aja asked, “Will the next course save her? And, Janny, too?”
“Not the next,” the djinn said. “But later tonight the Chef will serve stewed phoenix. That meat burns away ills and rekindles life.”
“Sounds lap-it-up good,” Janny said through clenched teeth. “But can the girl wait that long for her man?”
The empress’s throat trembled.
“She swallowed.” The swordsman beamed up at the other guests. His smile turned into a firm line of jutting jaw, and he dragged the empress away from the other men. He bent over his plate to cut the seeds from another slice.
He wouldn’t notice Aja walking from the carpet. She suspected no one would. Leaving the empress in danger hurt, but the others would protect her. Even Solin’s concern had seemed real. Maybe he changed his mind about stealing the hair. That interrupted song might’ve broken his heart.
Aja’s feet dragged, and she could no more than shuffle across the rose tile toward the palatial double doors. Why was leaving so hard? The guests didn’t need her. They wouldn’t miss her. Going now was the sensible choice, while she still lived. The scare of Janny’s suffering and the empress’s fall had proven the danger.
It was a shame. Aja liked most of the guests. Some had almost been kind to her. They could’ve become friends, maybe even family. Leaving would mean never seeing another course, or the next pattern in the carpet. But, no, she wasn’t meant to stay. She didn’t belong.
Aja hobbled the rest of the way to the doors, and she had to lean against them, fighting for air. Why did her breathing rasp so? Exhaustion crushed her.
Something was wrong.
Straining against the door made her arms feel as if they would break. Gold leaf designs in the wood showed people with goat legs dancing and pouring wine over each other. She could not budge the door.
“Let me out!”
Aja looked for a lock, a bolt, a handle. Her vision blurred, as if from tears, but her eyes stung with dryness.
“I didn’t drink the pomegranate elixir. You must let me out.”
A heat flew overhead, and the djinn parted the doors. They opened into the warehouse’s blackness.
“You may leave,” the djinn said, “but you may not return.”
Aja took an unsteady step into the portal.
“And you’ll stay as you are until your spark dies.”
Something in the djinn’s voice stopped Aja. It had sounded like a note of pity. Aja asked, “What do you mean?”
The djinn waved a hand in a fan of brightness. The air rippled as if in a mirage, and it bent into a disk of glass. Within it, Aja saw the lamp-lit ballroom, the table and guests in the distance. It was a mirror. In the foreground slouched an old woman. A hag, a wrinkled creature, she resembled a dried-out lizard in a white robe. She looked close to her last breath. Aja was certain they had never met, but something about that ancient face was hauntingly familiar.
The hag wore a bracelet of green glaze. Aja wore the same kind of jewelry, exactly the same.
Her heart pattered, frantic and faint. She pointed a trembling finger at the crone in the glass. The crone pointed back.
Aja’s voice croaked. “Who is she?”
“You ate the ‘Fruit of Maturity entire,” the djinn said. “Had you been any older, it would’ve aged you to death.”
Aja ran a hand over her face. So rough, like ruined leather. She groped for a strand of her hair, brought it before her eyes. She couldn’t focus on something so near, but she glimpsed its whiteness.
Side Dish:
THE SWORDSMAN’S TALE
If he grew up in the City of Gold, then I did in the City of Diamonds. My grandfather was the finest gem carver in the lands. My father, not so much. Me, not at all. Look at these rough-wrecker hands of mine. Couldn’t carve limestone boulders. Not that I’m complaining. Had plenty enough growing up.
How I loved playing hot brick with my sister. We’d run through the Bazaar of Fallen Stars. We’d hide in the branch caverns of the banyan trees. She’d tell me to run up the side of a ziggurat, and I would. Oh, a ziggurat is like a pyramid with steps. I mean levels. It has steps you can walk up, too, or maybe it’s less walking than climbing and gasping.
At the top of the ziggurat, the priest read the future in the webs of the sacred spiders. Me, I only could see a messy white tangle of silk, that and a songbird caught and hanging dead. Sad, I know. The priest, though, he could see my fate. This was what he told me when I was six years old.
“Fosapam Chandur’s fate is bright,
His parents will be proud,
That he’ll finish his fights,
Gain or loss, he will be unbowed,
He will marry a young woman,
Eyes a’glitter, mind keen,
She will bear a strong son,
The greatest family yet seen.
Count his wealth in more than jewels,
Measure him, if you dare,
He’ll b
etter countless fools,
And lions will run from his roar.”
Sixth Course:
SALMON OF KNOWLEDGE, ROASTED
SERVED WITH WATER OF OBLIVION
The guests looked on Aja with sorrow. Janny saw her, twitched away, and then groaned, clutching her back. Pain also throbbed in Aja’s spine. Now she was old, and Old Janny was young.
Aja collapsed on a pillow and felt a knife driving into her rear. Ahh! But there was no blade, only her own bones digging into her skin. She added a second cushion.
The Banquet’s power had almost killed Aja, and it could also cure her. She would need it to. The only other way was to leave and accept death from unnatural old age. That, Aja wouldn’t do.
She had chosen a seat next to the swordsman. He could possibly give her a slice of his orange. Even if it didn’t make her young again, she hoped it would help her breathe better.
The swordsman glanced at her once, then never again. He said something that she could not hear.
“What?” Aja held a hand to her ear.
“Your fruit, what was it supposed to do?”
“Maturity,” she said.
“Guess not the kind you wanted.” He cradled the empress’s head in his arm, squeezing another drop of orange into her mouth.
A splintery zing shivered its way through Aja. Could someone have ever cared for her that much? Death would come before she found out, unless she reversed her aging. The Apple of Youth was gone, eaten to the core, but the stewed phoenix could replenish life as soon as it was served. On her trudging walk back to the carpet she had asked the djinn if the phoenix was the last course.
“No, the last is dessert.”
“Then, second to last?”
The djinn had offered no more. She had left Aja to wonder how many more courses she would have to survive. Aja struggled just to fit enough air into her lungs.
A mouthful of health was what she needed. How to ask the swordsman for a piece of his orange? Aja fidgeted with her brass bracelet, then spoke to him.
“You were wise. All that power on the table, and you picked the fruit that’d save everyone else.”
“I’m not wise,” he said. “I just think what the best of the royal guards would do in my place. Then I do that.”
“That has the smell of wisdom,” Aja said. If only she had known someone on the streets as dependable as him. The swordsman would’ve made the best brother.
He tucked a lock of damp hair into the empress’s shawl. “She trusts me too much.”
Aja considered if it was wrong to think of herself, to ask for any help, to hope for better. Who am I? An old lady who’d never even been kissed.
The thought rotted inside her.
She didn’t even look up at the nearing clomp-clomp sound of the Chef’s feet. Her stomach weighed her down in a stony block. She wasn’t hungry, and she would eat nothing until the stewed phoenix arrived.
“Food is culture.” The Chef’s voice flowed like spiced oil. “The only way to know a culture is to eat it. To understand the significance of each dish, its heritage, its traditions.”
Below his massive boots, the carpet displayed sheep grazing on a cliff bluff overlooking the sea. Silver threads wormed around each other, and a cavern opened beneath the rug pasture. Aja leaned forward, but that didn’t help her aged eyes see any clearer. A river ran through the design of the underworld, a lone boat crossing to a fearsome gate. Was that a three-headed creature beside the yawning doors?
“To mix dishes from two cultures risks chaos,” the Chef said, “but I do so for the perfect compliment of entrée and drink. This salmon was roasted on a grill of flaming swords. Seasoned with thyme and honey, enlivened with vinegar and orange zest.”
The swordsman’s belly growled like a caged lion.
“Think of something you want to know,” the Chef said. “Take a bite. You’ll gain all the knowledge you desire and more.”
Against one arm, the Chef supported a chopping block. Pink flesh of a fish glistened. Sprigs of herbs garnished it. He motioned with a knife to the djinn, and she carried forward a black vase. Ghostly figures painted on it knelt by a riverbank.
“If the salmon’s knowledge is not to your taste, or if you have any memory you want washed away, drink,” the Chef said. “This amphora holds water of unmindfulness. Drawn from an underworld river, where souls forget their past lives.”
He held the knife handle first to the lord. The blade was a spike of bronze resting against the Chef’s arm.
“Lord Tethiel, what would you learn?”
“I’m of an age where new knowledge tastes stale.” He waved away the fish board.
How could the lord refuse another course? Aja shook her head, and her neck clicked. An aching stomach she had learned to live with, but this was a hunger of the mind. Night after night she had lain awake, wondering who her mother was. Had she died? Or had Aja walked by her in the market without recognizing her? Her mother may have even been a queen who had lost her princess daughter through a tragedy.
Her father, Aja remembered him well enough. He had smelled of onions, coughed with a deep grunt like a warthog, and tickled her with a forest of a beard. His arms had enclosed her with such warmth she had felt snug, complete, safe. Aja couldn’t bring to mind his face. That she regretted. Of her mother she knew nothing.
No harm would come to her from one bite of salmon. She didn’t see it as truly eating. Just a taste.
The lord glanced at her, and she puffed stray hair out of her mouth. She had been chewing on it. A few of the strands had fallen out. The lord spoke with a voice pitched to all the guests. “You are right to fear. The problem with learning is that you begin to understand how little you know.”
The Chef offered the salmon to another guest. “This fish satisfies with complete knowledge of a subject.”
The lord nodded to the amphora. “And with forgetfulness so close at hand there seems little risk. Any fool can learn, but forgetting, that’s a rare skill.”
Aja asked, “But you didn’t want any salmon yourself, Uncle?”
“My pumpkin pie, you shouldn’t call me uncle, given your newly advanced years.”
Blushing tired out Aja.
Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen the lord eating any of the entrées. She told him as much.
“I didn’t come to this Banquet to eat,” he said. “To me, the best seasoning is conversation.”
“But how could you say no to everything? The kraken, the roc egg, it was all too delicious.”
“Alas, not to me. I’ve lost the knack of tasting.” His face never changed expression, but the red paint on his lips had an upward barb on the left side as if he smirked. “Some would say I never had good taste to begin with.”
“You can’t taste? Is it because of your….” Aja had to know. If old age had taken away his desire for food, Aja might never taste again as well.
“My magic,” he said. “After drinking of the black chalice, all other delicacies are dust in the mouth.”
She squinted up at the lord. Was he telling her the truth? His features seemed too still and perfect to be real. He had to be wearing a mask.
Aja asked, “What is your magic?”
“I hope never to show you, my intrepid truffle.”
The lord lifted one of the wooden cups of polished ebony. The djinn poured from the amphora. Ribbons of purple light traveled up the flow of water. She said, “Think of what you wish to forget, then swallow.”
The lord hoisted his cup. “To be free of memory’s dead weight, a temptation to which I’ll boldly succumb. Who will drink with me?”
Solin also had a pour. He balanced his cup on a crutch and reached to knock it against the lord’s in a toast.
“To oblivion!”
The lord drank, but Solin hesitated. He set his cup down untasted.
Why had Solin changed his mind? Aja worked moisture in her dry mouth to ask, but after five creaking swallows her parched throat still paine
d her. “You don’t wish to forget?”
Not speaking, he tapped his fingers over the pillow hiding his bad leg.
“You shouldn’t ignore old ladies,” Aja said, “it’s not polite.”
Solin’s mouth slanted downward on either side, as hard as a tile roof. “Shouldn’t have let you eat all the dragonfruit. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things, and I’ve no right to forget them.”
“You’re not responsible for me,” she said.
“But I am for my hexes.” He glanced down. “Forgiveness must come before forgetting.”
He regretted something so much. He had one sickly leg, and he was a hexer. The three things might be linked. Aja cracked her mouth open then closed it again. She wouldn’t ask. She had offended him enough.
The Chef presented the salmon to Solin. Its steam wafted past him to Aja. She didn’t smell anything, but she glimpsed a vision of a woman’s face. An arching brow, a tired eye, a welcoming smile. Was it her mother?
Solin asked, “Why wasn’t Aja given first bite? She’s the eldest now.”
The Chef didn’t look at all surprised at what had happened to her. “The wear and tear of years amounts to nothing. It’s the quantity and quality of dining that brings distinction. A man is the sum of his meals.”
Solin turned his sharp chin away from the offered carving knife.
Aja couldn’t be the only one to ask for a cut. “You must want to know something.”
“Wanting is not deserving,” Solin said.
“Would you learn something for me?”
He inclined his head. She took it as a sign of interest.
Aja would eat the knowledge of her mother herself. She needed another secret for Solin to taste. She looked about the Banquet for inspiration and spied the dragon emblems on the lord’s glove. The Chef had mentioned something about serving dragons.
“If we’re eating dragons later,” she said, “we should learn about them first. It’d be safer.”
Solin ran his fingers through his long hair. He nodded.
The Chef extended the knife, with a morsel of pink on top. “I know the location of dragon lore by heart, just below the left gill.”
Magic Banquet Page 8