He dropped Aqib, who fell bonelessly. Before Aqib quite gained the floor, the Corporal snatched him up again by a wrist, dangling, and punched him in the belly, then let go once more. Aqib caught a low table’s edge and pulled himself up to sit on the brim, hunched-over. The Corporal bellowed questions the wildness of Aqib’s sobs rendered inanswerable. And resenting this failure to reply, the Corporal drew back his hand, fingers clenching closed for the sequel. Oh, had they really passed the point of slaps, gone on to fists now? Things rarely got so far.
Someone—Saints be praised—Lucrio caught the fist and, with it, plucked the Corporal up off his feet, bearing him through the air, over the table, and headfirst against a wall. Which was only a woven-reed screen, and swung outward, spilling the Corporal into the flowers and shrubbery surrounding the refectory porch.
Blows to the belly were worst. Even a shallow breath hurt. The nausea, and ache of abused guts, always made Aqib hate himself and wish to die. What’s the use, he thought; why go on? Wonderful to be touched, though—mirabile sensu—by a man who didn’t hate him. He clung to Lucrio. Then shoved him away.
“Look”—Aqib panted, short of breath—“out!”
Through the fondac’s doorway, the Corporal barreled in with his battle spear. Never before had things got so far as murder! Lucrio stomped a low table’s edge, caught the thick wood square as it flipped upwards. He caught the spearpoint, too, embedded deeply in wood; and flung away the table. The Corporal lurched aside, trying to hold on to the shaft and jerk the point free. Lucrio leapt to close the distance. Rocked by a blow to the face, the Corporal abandoned the stuck spear. Fists flew. A scuffle followed too fast, too entangled to parse. At the upshot, Lucrio had twisted the Corporal’s arm up behind his back, making him kneel, then screech and beg.
As breath returned, Aqib began shouting one thing over and over: “Don’t hurt him!” A brilliant idea it was too. But to whom, Aqib, do you address yourself, exactly—to brother or to lover?
To whom it applies!
Lucrio looked up. Love visibly transformed him when their gazes met: from something furious and strange, to someone tried and true. He looked down again. “Usually I kill them who come at me with spears. But since you’re his brother . . . Still, you’d better not try anything else, or I’m gonna break your arm at least. Probably worse. So think about it first, hear?” Lucrio let the Corporal go.
They’d all gathered back, the night-working menials, with the rabble thrilling to crises of the quality, just as they ever had done. Off the boulevard, two passersby gaped from the doorway, slack-jawed as imbeciles. Lover naked, brother wallowing on a filthy floor, himself snot-nosed and cheeks slimy with tears: Aqib swiped a sleeve across his face and rose up with resurrected arrogance. “You two”—he made his thunder-clap—“away. Or the next names called by the Reverend Master Flagellant shall be your own.” The gawpers at the door fled. “You menials, clean up this mess.” Aqib swirled a managerial hand. “Tell the owner he may send to the younger son of the Master of Beasts and the Hunt for recompense. I will make good all damages.” Cups began to click, stacked-up; or to scrap and clatter, as shards were swept.
Wine and long-cook-gravy mucked the Corporal’s fine robe, and for so enviably tall a man, he did look cut down to size now. Wheedlingly, he began to say, “Aqib . . .”
Who sliced a hand through the air. Shush. Previously Aqib had drawn such daggers of gesture only on menials. “Go home, Brother,” he said, in a voice suddenly verging on tears. “You’ve attacked a Daluçan. For that, His Holiest Majesty should run you through and roast you alive. Go home now—go in peace—and your silence wins ours.” Aqib glanced at Lucrio, who was shrugging on a robe given to him by the cheeky menial girl.
The Corporal looked at his battle spear swinging up vertical, some nine feet into the air, as menials righted the impaled table. Making to speak again—and shown his way by the haughtiest finger in all Great Olorum—he simply left.
The girl with the green kerchief untied it from about her neck. “You were wonderful, Master Daluçan!” She laid her bright cloth across Lucrio’s palm. “This . . . it was a gift to me. It’s far-west silk, and worth something.”
Lucrio said, “Thank you, Senie.” He knew the menial’s name! “And it’s really good silk, too. I could wear it on my head when I’m working in the sun.” Lucrio smiled at her and said thank you again. A charmer, that one, who understood well how the emotions of the saved sometimes compel a sentimental gesture toward the savior . . .
Not that Aqib wouldn’t have snatched the filthy rag away, and restored it to the girl with a rebuke for her impertinence, if only his brief flare-up of mettle and spirit hadn’t gone all to ashes again. Shakily, Aqib groped for a joist or wall to keep him upright. His lips were trembling; he bit them.
Next to importune Lucrio were bouncer and cook. “Master Daluçan, sir. Could you maybe see what you could do with that spear there? We can’t even budge it.”
His robe’s loose sleeves slid down forearms thick and sinewy, which bulged more thickly still, and the cloth tightened to a second skin across the broad, packed muscle of his shoulders and back, as Lucrio strained to draw the spear out of the table. Sleepily blinking his eyes, Aqib watched this virile spectacle and thought, Sweet Saints, how I wish that glorious man were mine own lover for me alone to love. The spearpoint jerked, shrieked in wood, and popped free. Then, chilled by shock, he realized his wish had already been granted! Aqib giggled. Threatening to buckle, his knees barely held. A sob escaped.
“Oh, you’re worn out, ain’t you?” said Lucrio—right there suddenly, beautifully there. He looked so worried! “You’re just all shook up and tired . . .” His beard and brown eyes blurred as if under running water. “Aqib . . . ?” Why did his voice sound so faraway? Arms bore Aqib up as he swooned.
He woke first. Tender and stiff, his face hurt worse than it doubtless looked. Brother had a knack for dealing pain out plentifully, but with nary a lip fattened, eye puffed or purpled, nor any blood let.
Picked out in dawn’s pale light, a young man’s clutter disposed itself through the narrow room: clothing heaped wherever fallen; unstoppered wine gourds, empty; a half-eaten dish Lucrio must have brought in last night, now hideously swarming with roaches. There were all manner of equipage and packs, various arms and martial impedimenta—who knew what all those things might be? Aqib’s eyes fixed on his brother’s spear propped upright against the wall beside another spear of the Daluçan style.
He sat up and found Lucrio’s signet ring, a huge thing of tarnished silver and semiprecious stone, slipped loosely round his own thumb. Always before, Lucrio had blinked awake as soon as Aqib stirred, but not today.
Poor love, he was looking much too pale by daylight: white, indeed. In this good light, Lucrio ought to have looked tawny and tanned from the sun. This morning, his pallor was unwholesome, purple flesh encircling his eyes. Nor did he sleep so decorously as before. Mouth open, he drew breath with a stertorous burr, exhaling loudly.
This ugliness somehow served only to quicken Aqib’s love—and watching Lucrio, caring so much for him, made it hard to breathe. There was pain in his chest like some beast clawing to be free. Dear Lucrio, he thought, poor, poor love . . . But enough already, enough. Get yourself to work, Aqib.
He slipped the signet ring from his thumb and left it in the sheets. He befouled the pot; availed himself of soapberries, the washwater urn, a cloth or two; and then dressed. Awkwardly Aqib hefted up his brother’s spear and made away for that morning’s chores at the Menagerie.
[34 years old]
The foreman stood at the enclosure’s edge while Aqib caught a hippo calf breaching out of its groaning mother. He waded from the muck, ducked his slimy arms into the bucket of soapy water held for him: “Yes?” he said. “Tell me.” The foreman said that, upfront in the courtyard, the reconstructed gate lay finished and ready for raising into place. Oh, and too, Reverend Master—said the foreman—some Royal Cousin down from th
e Sovereign House had come calling. She was asking for the Master’s daughter Lucretia, may all Saints bless her.
There, hesitantly, at the gap in the Menagerie’s palisade, hovered some Royal Cousin he hardly knew—by face only. She looked far too soft, far too fine, amidst the ugly mess of axes and saws, wood chips and raw timber, all littered about the recumbent immensity of the new gate. Seeing him, the young lady called, “O Most Sanctified and Reverend Master of Beasts and the Hunt!” She waved, too, every finger of her little hand fatly bejeweled: “Good morning to you—hello, there!” The child picked her way into the courtyard, over the rubble of construction, screaming minutely in punctuation of every stumble. Shadowing her came a liveried crone, holding up and over a banana-leaf parasol.
Aqib wanted no outsiders about, especially today, but the girl offered him every assurance that she was a most excellent friend of Lucretia’s, and even alluded to the feat of witchcraft to be performed this afternoon. She fell silent then, little chit of a Cousin, for Aqib had frowned in stern astonishment. So one’s dear and only child, it seemed, might have a “most excellent friend” whom one had never met or heard of: some chic girl who chattered intimate family secrets that should hardly be whispered. Aqib waved the Cousin in—no sort of outdoorswoman, as Lucretia was, but a queen’s-attendant. She said she was a linguist and translator (a delicate flower meant for the indoors, was what she was, in watered silks, and slippers suited better to marble floors, or polished wood, than to the dung and dust of the Menagerie. Impractical child!)
“Well,” Aqib said, wiping wet hands on his grubby robe. “Lucretia left before dawn with the prince and his men. They meant to hunt duck mid-bayou. But, yes, the Blest is due back very soon. Are you quite certain, however, that she asked you here, now?”
“Oh, no, Sanctified Cousin; it was I who did beg the Blest to attend upon her miracle.” The little Cousin huddled prettily in the shade of her parasolist. “Would it be a fearsome bother were I to wait here for her, just a while?”
Aqib sighed. How could one persist in beastliness before so much gentle courtesy? “Not a bother,” he said; and was counseling the Cousin to stay upfront by the unrisen gate, never to wander off among the pens and cages, when at that moment a sparrow flew by overhead singing She comes! Aqib said, “Ah, the Blest comes now,” and Lucretia arrived. At a run, bathed and redressed; though she hadn’t dressed in more ladylike fashion, Aqib saw with a pang. Lucretia pulled up short, beginning to walk, when she saw the Cousin and her father. That stride—a lope, a prowl—belonged unmistakably to an athlete, a hunter.
Lucretia’s shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow, which left bare, of course, the old lion’s-bite on her right forearm. The macabre work of those teeth, looking hardly just rinsed of gore, did leave one rather staggered and gutted—though Lucretia had taken the wound, and healed of it, many long years ago. Still, Aqib felt sure the pretty little Cousin must have seen that prodigiously mangled flesh before, and it struck him therefore . . . overdone, the fuss and flurry she made over the scar. Lucretia, too, might have more decently worn those sleeves pulled down. The whole scene keenly recalled some other, very similar, but Aqib couldn’t for the life of him think what.
Beside the exquisite courtier, the sight of his daughter fell on his eyes anew—as would the apparition of some stranger. Aqib was a little shocked. One day, a tiny girl, Lucretia had asked to wear a youth’s shirt and trousers: far more practical clothes for working in the Menagerie than the layered gowns of a lady. Carelessly Aqib had allowed it. But now Lucretia was bigger than her father, a strapping sixteen-year-old, and seeing this first-order Cousin of the Blood sauntering about in boy-dress brought home to Aqib how poorly he’d done by his daughter, no mother to guide her, no wife to guide him.
Lucretia clapped her hands. Aqib and the others present jumped in startlement. “Up now, boys,” she hollered, pointing laborers to either side of the aperture in the wall. “Let’s get this gate hung!” The men hustled. Lucretia waved her father and the Cousin back a safe distance, though only the latter went.
“Now,” said Aqib, “you aren’t to overstrain yourself, Lucretia. You do, I hope, still recall that big rock, the boulder? Your nosebleeds—do you remember them, darling—your dreadful headaches, for all of a season? Lucretia? Are you quite listening to me? We can always have down a proper gang of brutes from the quarries, and they can hang the gate, so, really, you mustn’t—”
“Master Aqib,” Lucretia cried, and bodily shooed him back, “for love of All the Saints, I pray you will stop your fussing, Papa, please!” She went down upon a knee, and lay hands on a great timber of the gate. Staticky sensation bristled through Aqib’s hair and over his scalp. The robe clung to him, prickling. Arrows, or a spear, went effortlessly and untouched wherever Lucretia wished them to, but she liked a good firm touch for these true burdens. The gate’s timbers, crossed by thick teak boards, stirred, raising powder from the dusty courtyard. A hot metallic smell began to charge the air. And the gate’s top half jerked from the ground—floating up to knee-height. Lucretia stood, hands still upon a beam. Folk gasped, a man grunting in astonishment, some woman calling upon the Saints’ succor.
Aqib looked about and saw menials peeking out everywhere from various corners and hidey-holes—though they’d all been told to make themselves scarce. Angrily he began to clap and shout.
“Oh, Papa, really. What difference can it make?” Lucretia called to him. “By now, all our people have surely seen me at it. And the whole world knows the prince calls me his ‘Right-Hand Witch.’”
So Aqib stood down. He decided upon sharper words later on, and the crowd crept out to watch the feat. This wasn’t one of Lucretia’s wonted “miracles”—hurling some missile with great force and deadly accuracy—and she had once, when younger and more foolhardy, done herself grievous injury trying to shift a weight beyond her strength. Aqib cursed himself for the weakest of fathers. To be talked into folly, even knowing better! He clenched hands in his robe.
The gate rose slowly. Lucretia spoke no more. She set her face. When seeking to shift terrible weight, from forehead to feet her body displayed its strength, muscle and tendons popping out in sharp relief, gnarling the surface of her skin. The gate rose further still. Lucretia perspired, her rigid face flattened to a mask of utmost effort. Nearly there, the gate rose.
Wonder held them all dumbstruck. In trembling commiseration, they leaned forward. Sweat purpled the back of Lucretia’s fresh blue shirt.
Aqib roared. “Now.”
Laborers swarmed up the ladders—slamming home heavy bolts, fastening the lashings into place—but for all this dispatch, Aqib cursed them coarsely as the Blessèd Femysade might have done. Moments passed, but seemed slow eternities. Lucretia went down upon one knee, not smoothly or by choice, but buckling violently, as if struck a blow. Indeed blood spurted from her left nostril, and began to dribble down her lips and chin, soddening her shirt collar. Aqib cried out in alarm, and so did the pretty Cousin. About to speak some grim covenant, Aqib drew in breath—oh, they would know, these laborers, the shit-ass malingering oafs, what doom awaited should his only child, the Blessèd Lucretia, come to harm!—and at last the call came down. “That’s got it, Master Aqib!” the foreman shouted desperately from his ladder. “Please, Master—tell the Blest to let the gate go. It’s good and fast in place, now!” The hum, crackle, and stink of lightning left the air.
Aqib lunged. But the pretty Cousin reached Lucretia first—who was afoot already, and laughing even as she gasped.
“Oh, be still, you,” said the Cousin, dabbing at Lucretia’s nose with her sleeve. “Be still, I say. How you frightened us!” She pressed some bunched-up cloth to Lucretia’s face, heedless of her precious silks. The bleeding staunched, and anyone could see Lucretia was well, but Aqib needed to stow his fear for her somewhere. He began to scold, promising nevermore for such, such . . . “futile pranks,” he called them. Amidst this fuss and to-do, a huge white bird—a seagull—came
to ground beside the trio, crying out its savage cries. Icy dread washed over Aqib, but he dampened his panic quickly to more sensible emotion: sobriety and foreboding. When? he asked in return. The bird cried quork! and flapped up clumsily from the earth. Again in its proper element, the seagull vanished with swift grace into the void.
The girls stared at him, the witch of most renown in Olorum.
“Papa, what is it?” Lucretia spoke no longer with any hint of adult command, but as might a little girl. “What did the bird say?”
As he’d schooled his heart, so Aqib schooled his face from bleakness. “Your Blessèd mother will visit us today,” he said: “Just at the red hour, as afternoon divides into dusk.” He saw the shock seize his daughter’s face.
Lucretia took the elbow of the pretty little Cousin and drew her aside for a private word. The young lady nodded seriously to all Lucretia said, seemed to extract some promise in return, and then, sweetly shaded—workmen pulling open the newly hung gate for them—left under the shadow of her parasolist.
Lucretia wanted to rush home to the Blessèd Femysade’s palace.
“It’s hours yet, child,” Aqib said to her. “We can hardly be late.”
“Papa . . . !” Lucretia dashed on ahead.
He followed, wishing she wouldn’t get so excited. He wished he wouldn’t. Hope made the letdown worse. In the resolved quiet of the heart it was possible to say, “Give up; it’s done,” but in practice, hopelessness was too bitter wine for drinking day after day. One would steal a little sip of sweetness and wonder, “What if . . . ?” At which point no time at all would seem to pass before—again, already—one was tippling nothing but the headiest stuff, cup after cup of hope, heart leaping at the least little sign, as if this were some fresh new lesson, without years of broken hearts and a sea of tears behind it. Whatever melancholy words Aqib spoke to others, he secretly hoped the Blest might return across the bayou one day, and they would be friends again—most excellent friends—as they had been in the first few years of marriage.
A Taste of Honey Page 6