Janny leaned over Aja to point at his kabob. “You’re not finishing that?”
“I’m dedicated to leaving everything unfinished,” he said.
Aja slid back to clear a path between Janny and the lord. Aja’s mouth had numbed with saltiness. She refreshed her tongue with a swig of the chocolate’s spicy sweetness.
“Don’t have the stomach?” Janny asked him. “And here I was beginning to think you had more in you than ash.”
“My plump olive,” the lord said, “eating your fill is always too much.”
“Here’s the best food you could ever eat, and you’re wasting it.”
“If I wanted to avoid waste,” the lord said, “I wouldn’t have come to a feast.”
“Janny,” Aja said, “you could finish it for the lord.”
“Not touching it after him. Probably poison now.” She wagged her skewer at him. “Admit it. Eating all those souls shriveled your stomach to the size of an oak gall.”
Aja laughed, then puckered her mouth closed. Maybe it hadn’t been a joke. She eyed the wall of fire that the lord had made. It still protected them. Flames like scales coiled within it, a dragon half seen and half felt. Even in its heat, Aja shivered.
The wall of fire shrank into nothing, not even coals, by the end of the course. All the guests had stopped eating. Aja sprawled back, patting her belly. Though it didn’t feel so full.
The swordsman belched, and Janny said, “That’s the trumpet call for the next course.”
He blinked up at the remains of the bird. “Did an army march through and eat all that?”
Ribs curved toward the night sky. The leg bones formed a rubble. The guests had excavated the mound of potatoes and demolished half the bird. It seemed impossible.
Janny lifted her skewer in the pose of a conqueror with a sword. “A feat of eating worthy of song.”
“It’s the magic of the nine-tailed fox,” Aja said. “The food is shrinking inside of us.”
“Shhh!” Janny mashed a finger to her lips. “‘Twas skill.”
The hem of Janny’s dress dangled off the side of the carpet as it lifted. The carpet flew the guests back to the stone ruins, the jumble of blocky hills and reaching roots. Somewhere below, a door that could not have been a door opened on the Chef’s kitchen. Aja wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen.
Golems removed the plates and returned from the temple with statues of ice. The sculptures were of three men wearing only boldness. The beard of one flowed down like waves, and he held a three-pronged spear. The middle figure had a face of command, one arm forward and the other back in a pose to throw. He gripped a strange spear, with no head and a zigzagging length. Whatever that was supposed to be, it flashed in the moonlight. The third statue crouched on a pile of gold, coins incased in ice.
“What are they?” Aja had seen them before, somewhere.
“Gods.” The Chef stepped from the abandoned temple. He carried an amphora and bowl. Something inside glowed through the clay. “And this is their fare.”
Tenth Course:
AMBROSIA
SERVED WITH NECTAR
Bands of golden light pulsed upward from the base of the slender jar. Aja would’ve thought the amphora was made of dusky glass, but, no, it was clay and glazed. The liquid within still glimmered through.
Food also shone within a bowl. Spheres of blue blinked inside with a hypnotic cadence. By their shape, they could be fruit. To think of holding them, tasting something so bright. Aja cupped her hands together. A lid concealed the bowl’s treasure.
“I am not a humble man.” The Chef held out the pottery vessels, and the carpet levitated to their level. He let go of them. “It would be wrong if I were, I who have traveled to each land and eaten its greatest animals. I’ve stolen from the gods. These are the victuals of immortals, and this, their drink.”
The bowl and amphora rested on the rising carpet. The guests lifted with them, leaving behind the Chef. Aja and the rest coasted above over the steep steps of a pyramid temple.
The Chef called after the carpet. “Nothing gives me more pride than serving them to you. May you take all the bliss you can from them as a mortal.”
He grew smaller among the receding buildings. Aja shouted back, “How do we eat them? What’s the etiquette?”
The carpet soared out of earshot, above the swaying heave of jungle treetops, high as the distant range of frosted mountains. Clouds trundled by. Aja saw them as sliding ships of puffy moonlight, half-melted palaces of mist.
Between them passed the magic carpet with its glowing food. The bowl was covered by a lid. A clay stopper sealed the amphora. They waited to be opened. All the guests stared.
Janny was the first to reach. “Who’s hungry for divinity?”
“Wait, Janny,” Aja said.
Janny did not wait. She grasped the lid. Inside the bowl, light flashed like blueberries exploding. The lid scraped free.
The empress covered her eyes, peeking between two fingers. She hummed to herself and matched the pitch of the winds.
“Don’t touch it.” Aja scrambled toward Janny. The flying carpet rippled and pushed at Aja’s knees. These statues, these clouds, Aja had seen them before. But where? “Maybe we aren’t supposed to handle….”
Janny picked up ambrosia. Her fingers cradled a bulb of radiant azure. It tapered at one end in a root tail.
“It’s a turnip!” The empress clasped her hands together.
“So the food of the gods is a vegetable,” the swordsman said. “Mother would be happy.”
“Doesn’t smell like a turnip.” Janny sniffed, and her head swayed back. Her rolling eyes shone white in the moonlight.
Aja smelled it too. She had to sit down. The aroma was like water from a cool spring bathing her mind and trickling down her spine to shimmer through her arms and legs. She fluttered her fingers and wiggled her toes with the joy of it.
“It’s like…It smells like….” Aja couldn’t think of a comparison. She would have to eat it to know. A slice of the glowing root on her tongue would let her understand. She reached for a knife.
No! Not yet. She had to be the careful one.
“Smells like nothing I’ve ever tasted.” Janny’s teeth opened to bite the ambrosia.
Aja yanked Janny’s hand from her mouth. “You can’t. Not until we know the safe way.”
“I eat what I please.” Janny pulled back. The blue of the ambrosia glared through her fingers. Her bones looked like broken black sticks.
“It might kill you.”
“Might make me immortal.”
“Remember the Apple of Youth,” Aja said. “You ate a seed, and what happened?”
Janny stopped tugging. Her stomach gurgled and mumbled complaints, but she nodded. “Have to peel it first or something? Like a carrot?”
“I’m not sure.”
Aja glanced over the rug. Each guest had a plate, but the golems had left only one knife and one ladle for utensils. The bowl was decorated with mosaics. Aja gripped its handle and turned it. Maybe she would find a clue how to eat ambrosia. The paintings showed a woman with leafy-twig fingers and flowers in her hair. She served the tubers of ambrosia to gods and goddesses sitting at a table. Aja tapped three men in the mosaic. The same three were sculpted above her in ice.
“I can’t see how they’re eating it.” Aja angled the bowl into the moonlight. “There’s not enough detail.”
Aja set it down and saw that Janny had passed the ambrosia to the empress. She rolled the blue root between her palms, swaying her head as she inhaled.
“So lovely,” the empress said. “It smells of all the worlds and all the distances between, spinning around one breathtaking instant of being.”
Janny snorted. “Smells like what again?”
The empress held the ambrosia against her chest. She twirled around and tipped close to a fall. “It doesn’t smell ‘like.’ The smell is.”
“Well,” Aja said, “I guess that’s why I didn’t
recognize it.”
She cupped her fingers around another ambrosia in the bowl and lifted. She had to hold her breath. The root’s light spread from its core to trace over its skin in patterns of a labyrinth. The ambrosia would probably crunch in her mouth and tingle. She feared it might also shock her to death. Biting her lips shut, she inhaled through her nose.
This one smelled different. Like oranges in the rain? No. Like….Oh my! Aja was free. A hundred doors had been locked inside her, and she hadn’t even known. Now they all flew open. She could run through her mind and revel in the flowing breeze. Pink veils swayed and kissed her skin as she pranced by.
“Ohhh! Doesn’t this one smell wonderful?” Aja held out the ambrosia.
The empress leaned in, and their noses touched. “Oh, yes! It’s poise in the face of a thousand, thousand pleading souls, each with a conflicting star-bright wish.”
“Poise doesn’t have a smell.” Janny butted in to steal a sniff. “You’re royally bamboozling us, aren’t you?”
“No, she isn’t.” Aja inhaled again. The scent went from her nose to her toes. “That’s what it is. At least it could be.”
Hills of white flowed past the carpet. The guests skimmed over a cloud.
Janny set an ambrosia on her plate and picked up the knife. “Can’t wait much longer for a taste. I’m peeling this one.”
The blade touched the root, and the wind changed. Stars blacked out. A storm cloud towered, flickering with lightning. It loomed as a sky mountain, a cliff top with an overhang in front of the moon.
Aja’s hairs stood on end. This was bad. Death and doom and all too soon. Across from Aja, Janny’s locks curled upward from her head. The empress had lost her shawl, and her hair lifted and stood straight out in all directions. Thunder shook the carpet.
“I’ve seen us eating this course,” Aja said. A memory flitted through her. “In the jewel-frog vision.”
Her eyes shifted to the ice sculptures. Those had been there, yes. And the jagged bolt in the god’s hand was lightning. Aja remembered a blinding flash. Someone had fallen through the clouds.
“What happened, Aja?” The empress hugged her from behind, arms crossing over Aja’s stomach. Static zapped where they touched. “How did we eat it?”
“Not the right way, not that I saw.” Aja tried to push down her own hair, but it sprang back outward. “Stop peeling, Janny.”
“What?” Janny stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth in her focus. “You have a better idea?”
“The Chef would’ve given us some hint to cut off the skin. If that was the right way.”
“He told us less than a toothless horse,” Janny said.
“Maybe that was telling us something.” The empress rested her chin on Aja’s shoulder.
“I do know this,” Aja said. “If we don’t eat this right, lightning will strike.”
Tenth Course, Part II:
Wrath
The swordsman pried out the amphora’s stopper. Sunlight of a kind beamed from the vessel’s neck. Aja had to look away, and it left spots over her vision.
Two feet behind her, the carpet ended in a drop-off. A sea shimmered below like beaten silver. The statues on the rug had a similar sheen. Crescent moons reflected off the glassy surfaces, but the glow of the foods did not. Aja found that curious.
The djinn served the nectar. It did not flow from the amphora so much as seep. The pour had to be cut off between cups with a blade. The hue was close to honey, but it smelled warmer, more powerful. After inhaling, Aja felt light. A gust might even coax her off the carpet and into the air. The following plunge through the sky would be a nuisance at most. She was above such trifles.
She asked, “What do you smell, Empress?”
“No! We’re friends. Call me Ryn. Or sing Nephrynthian with me. Neph-RYN-thi-annnn!”
Aja lifted her cup to the empress. “Please, Ryn. Tell me what the smell is.”
“This one’s easy. You could tell me.”
“I’ve never smelled it before.”
“You know, Aja. Just say it.”
What would a god drink? Aja had a guess, but it might sound foolish.
“Go on.” The empress squeezed her around the middle.
Aja tilted her cup. Light stuck to the sides. “Devotion?”
“Yes! The devotion of thousands who’ll never more than glimpse you.”
The lord set down his cup. “Then it can’t be wise to drink. Devotion can never be long endured.”
Once the djinn had finished serving the nectar, Aja examined the amphora. The painting on one side showed a strong man accepting ambrosia and nectar from the gods. He stood among them in the next frame. Aja turned over the vessel, and on the backside, another man crept off with the same food. The following panel had him in a cave with an expression of anguish. Grapes dangled above his head.
“These paintings must mean something.” Aja ran her fingers over the glaze. “Maybe we have to ask the gods’ permission. Can you tell us, Starlight on Dunes?”
The djinn said, “I’m forbidden from answering, for now.”
“‘For now’?” Aja asked.
“Until one guest dies.” The djinn flowed away into a ravine between two clouds.
“Perhaps,” the lord said, “only the empress can eat the ambrosia and nectar. She’s the closest among us to godhood.”
“I’m not a goddess yet,” the empress said. “The vizier tells me so every day, sometimes twice. I don’t want to try a bite and die again. Dying wastes so much time! What do you think, Aja?”
Not tasting food tormented Aja when it smelled so divine. “The Chef wouldn’t serve something that only one of us could eat.”
While thinking, Aja reached for a lock of her hair to suck. The strands still stood on end, and she let them go. She was too mature to chew on her hair now anyway.
She remembered the empress’s hair. Aja plucked it from her bracelet. She had carried the black strand long enough. It glistened with the luster of daily brushing and oils stroked into it by loving hands. Aja held it over the brink of the carpet, above the miles of empty air.
A burning sensation on her neck made her turn and see Solin. He gazed at her, and she hesitated. He had saved her more than once. She didn’t want to disappoint him, but she couldn’t let him hurt the empress.
Ryn danced over the carpet with her graceless strides, sniffing each ambrosia held out to her. She told what they smelled like in her irresistible voice.
“That’s the meaning of life!
“Yay! This is reflecting on the limitless depths of the future.
“Oooh! That’s a naughty one. A god’s love for a mortal. A flash of scorching pureness that snuffs out in an instant.”
The city priests had told Aja something about the empress ascending to godhood. Was that why she could name the smells? Or maybe she only had a knack. The empress had eaten the Blueberries of Muse. Whichever way, Aja wouldn’t let the empress come to harm.
Aja unclenched her fingers, and the hair flew behind them to be lost in the night.
She hazarded a look at Solin. She braced herself for his anger.
He gazed into the starry darkness behind them. “You did right.”
“I—I what? But you wanted that.”
“With it I could’ve returned to my city.” Solin sighed. “Sometimes the price of redemption comes too high.”
“I didn’t want you to hex Ryn.”
His cheek tensed as he adjusted his bad leg on a pillow. “Me too.”
They hadn’t spoken above a whisper, but the empress frolicked their way as if she had heard. She held out an ambrosia that lit up her hands and her smile.
“Taste it with your eyes,” she said. “Isn’t it delicious?”
Aja winced. There was their answer, one no one wanted. “That’s it. The Chef told us little, but he did say this is food for gods. None of us can eat it.”
Her words drew a cry from Janny. “This is the Banquet. We have to be able to e
at.”
“We can see it. We can smell it.” Aja wafted the aroma of ambrosia to her nose and shivered. Wow! “That has to be enough.”
Janny crawled to the edge of the carpet. “Tell me how I can eat it. Or I’ll throw myself off.”
Solin sprang off one crutch and caught her around the arms. He pinned her in front of the statue of the god with the hoard of gold. There Solin held her until she stopped weeping.
Aja turned to see the empress’s reaching hand. Those smooth fingers with their glistening nails slid through Aja’s lank hair.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Ryn said. “Your hair died.”
“What?”
“It’s lost its zing of expectation.”
Aja’s hair no longer stood on end. The tension had left the air. The gods must’ve calmed their storm. So she had guessed right. They could only enjoy the ambrosia and nectar as long as none passed their lips.
The empress tipped and swayed her way over the flowing carpet. The swordsman caught her from falling onto the bowl, and the two shared a laugh.
Aja smiled herself, and a warmth spread over her back. The heat increased, and Aja glanced over her shoulder. The djinn was hovering.
“Hello, Starlight on Dunes. Are you taking us to the next course now?”
“Soon,” the djinn said.
Three shooting stars passed behind the djinn. She lingered as if she had more to say.
“Aja…” The djinn folded her hands together, and her flame fingernails licked against each other. “…there’s never been a Banquet where all the guests have lived through the tenth course. Until tonight.”
“I’m keeping us safe through all the courses.”
Sparks flared in the djinn’s pupils. Then they went dark. “Cling to what intelligence you have over the final courses. I think I’d be upset if you’re the one to die?”
Her last words had an uncertain tone. Aja wondered if the djinn cared for them after all. What a sweet, flaming heart she had.
And had she called Aja by name? Yes, she had.
Aja said, “Thank you. I’ll be careful as a human can.”
The djinn swiveled around in the air, but only her lower half changed position. Her bright toes pointed toward a nearby cloudbank, while the rest of her still faced Aja.
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