by David Hair
Huriya leaped for joy as soon as they were left unattended. ‘Separate rooms,’ she cried. ‘A night without your snoring – this is the life!’
‘A night without your farting,’ Ramita countered. ‘Bliss!’
They wagged tongues at each other and slammed the adjoining doors, laughing.
Servants showed them the baths and they pulled out their bathing salwars. It felt strange to change into the voluminous shifts in front of the servants, for neither of them had ever been attended upon before, but the water was warm and scented, and roses floated on the surface. The eight wives crowded into the waters around them, asking all about Baranasi and the road north. Huriya did most of the talking, spinning a concoction of fantasy about Ramita and her.
Eventually the chief wife spoke, ‘Are all noblewomen of the south so dark-skinned?’ she asked frankly. All the raja’s wives were fair, and plump too, in stark contrast to the two girls, who had the sun-blackened skin of the marketplace, and who felt positively skeletal beside them.
‘Oh yes,’ Huriya answered them, to cover Ramita’s confusion. ‘We Baranasi are known for our dark skin – but everyone knows the fairest-skinned women are from the north,’ she added, making the eight wives coo self-importantly. Huriya set about describing an elaborate palace where she and Ramita had lived until her marriage to the Rondian magus. She spoke of saree-length fashions in the Baranasi court as if she were an intimate of the emir. She gossiped airily about fictional court ladies, while Ramita just nodded and agreed that yes, it was just so. It was like a game.
‘So,’ the chief wife gave Ramita a conspiratorial wink, ‘your husband, he is very old … Can he still stiffen his tool when required?’
Huriya giggled uncontrollably while Ramita’s face burned and she contemplated sinking beneath the waters and drowning herself.
They spent several days at the raja’s palace, enjoying the rich food and the entertainments: an endless variety of musicians and dancers and jugglers and fire-eaters. One man had a dancing bear – but it was scarred and timid, and Meiros clicked his tongue in disapproval and it was sent away. They viewed the menagerie, where brilliant birds sang overhead while jewel-coloured snakes slithered into the shadows. Tigers endlessly paced foetid cages and a painted, pampered elephant left droppings the size of a man’s head in the dirt at their feet. They came away fascinated and appalled.
Meiros had a long, intent conversation with the raja, then summoned Ramita to be inspected. The raja praised her beauty, though his palpable fear of Meiros made his opinion meaningless. He said something in a low voice to Meiros, something full of assurances and promises, and the mage looked pleased as he ushered her away. ‘Your name will be known to the mughal’s vizier within days,’ he whispered to her. ‘Vizier Hanook has promised his friendship to you, Wife.’
Why would the mughal’s chief advisor have any interest in me? Wives are just for breeding. They are unimportant – and I am the least of all wives …
Meiros read her thoughts in that unnerving way he had. ‘Wife, you are Lady Meiros now, and Vizier Hanook will be grateful of your friendship.’
Grateful of my friendship? Parvasi save us! She spent dinner in a daze.
After dinner, dancers filed into the room: dervishes of Lokistan. Ululating madly, spinning like tops in a torrent of colour and sound, they were captivating, and the girls clapped and cheered and stomped their feet. The raja’s wives, catching the girls’ excitement, yelled and stamped their approval too. Afterward one of the younger ones whispered to Ramita, ‘Normally we have to be quiet, but with you here, raja could not risk offending your husband by telling us to remain silent.’ She smiled softly. ‘That was such fun.’ She looked fourteen and was four months pregnant.
‘Good night, Huriya!’ Ramita kissed her friend on both cheeks as they parted outside their rooms. ‘This has been the best day so far.’
Huriya grinned back at her. ‘You are smiling, Mita. That’s good. It makes me smile too. We are going to be so happy in the north. You’ll see.’
She woke to a cold hand on her shoulder and almost screamed as another hand came around her mouth, stifling her cry. The waning moon poured its light through the thin curtains, showing her the cowled figure that held her. ‘Shhhh.’ Her husband. She felt a clutch of dread pull at her guts.
‘Quiet, girl. I won’t hurt you,’ he rasped. She could smell alcohol like a cloud about the cowl. He pulled the hood back, so that the moonlight illuminated his lined face. It made him appear older still, deepening the furrows, brightening the ridges.
‘I thought …’ She trailed off. I thought I was safe until my fertile week.
His voice was sympathetic, almost introspective, and she couldn’t tell if he were talking to himself or her. ‘It is wrong to leave these things undone. They grow to appear insurmountable obstacles if we do not confront them. They assume a greater importance than they warrant. It is not such a big matter.’
He handed her a small vial. ‘Apply this oil. It will ease matters.’ His hand shook, whether from age or uncertainty, she could not tell. Taking it mutely she turned away, knelt and hitched up her nightdress. Her skin felt clammy in the night air. She unstopped the vial and felt a soft, fragrant slickness on her fingers. Trying not to shudder, she reached between her legs and smeared the oil on the lips of her yoni. She felt him move fully onto the bed and turned in alarm.
‘Do not look at me,’ he whispered. ‘Stay where you are.’ She felt those cold hands on her thighs, pushing up her nightdress, baring her to him. His weight settled behind her and he manhandled her legs apart. She winced as his fingers touched her genitals, a bony digit prodding inside her, spreading the oil. She buried her head in the pillow to stifle herself: this was her duty. She heard him spit, and then a wet, rubbing sound. She waited and waited, trembling, her buttocks going cold, until at last she heard him grunt, then sigh. She nearly cried out as she felt the tip of his member against her yoni lips, pushing through her folds until she felt a tearing that made her grit her teeth. The penetration went deeper and his hips, cold as his hands on her flesh, clapped against her buttocks. She held her breath, tense and frightened, as his groin jerked in and out, once, twice, a dozen times, and then he gasped and she felt a hot wetness inside. He sagged against her slightly for a moment. When he pulled himself out, she fell forward onto her belly, fighting tears.
He sighed regretfully. ‘I am sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I am not the man I was.’ He retreated to the end of the bed as she curled into a foetal bundle, looking away from him. ‘See, girl: it’s not so bad.’ He pulled down his robes and stood painfully: just a pale ghost of a man, drifting away. Gone.
A few seconds later Huriya bounded in and perched on the end of the bed. She watched Ramita piss semen and urine into the slop-bucket with unflinching eyes. ‘So, how was it?’
The next stop was not a village at all, but a major city. Gradually the farmhouses were infiltrated by closer-packed, squalid lean-tos and poorly constructed hovels: the jhuggis that surrounded all the big towns. The stench of faeces and rotting food filled the air, smoke dirtied the sky and myriad voices assailed them as they fought their way through the dirty streets. ‘This is Kankritipur,’ a boy shouted in response to Huriya’s call as he chased a chicken around their carriage. Then he jumped on the footpad and peered in the window hole. ‘Pretty ladies, chapatti money,’ he begged cheerily. Ramita pressed a few copper coins into his hand. He looked slightly hurt and put out his hand again.
‘Imp, that’s enough,’ snapped Huriya, and he waggled his tongue rudely and jumped down, laughing. Another face replaced his, a filthy-faced girl with half her teeth missing, miming an eating gesture. ‘No mamma, no papa. Please, beautiful ladies.’
Huriya rolled her eyes. ‘Chod! We’re going to have every beggar in the city hanging off the footplate at this rate.’
They wound slowly through the squalor until they passed through the city gates, where soldiers beat the beggars until they dropped off the car
riages like ticks from a dog. They moved from that desperate chaos into a richer, more frenzied pandemonium. Tiny shops lined the streets and men and women called their wares at the very tops of their voices, marketing through sheer volume. Woven shawls, supari leaves, sarees, scarves, knives, roots and leaves; cardamom from Teshwallabad, ginger from the south, even Imuna water from Baranasi, sold in tiny flasks for holy rites. The soldiers rode close by and Klein shouted angrily as faces constantly pressed into the windows, beggars with missing limbs or hideous diseases, young girls with babies at the teat.
Just when it felt like it would never end, they swung into the courtyard of the guest-house and relative quiet descended. They stumbled from the carriages, almost dazed. ‘What a dreadful city!’ exclaimed Huriya, not noticing or caring that the staff all stared at her with narrowing faces. ‘What a stinking shit-hole!’
Meiros didn’t come to her that night though, or the next, or the next, until it felt like it had been just a bad dream. Ramita finally regained the ability to sleep.
Huriya grew more and more animated the further north she went, flirting with the guards, giggling uncontrollably at her own daring, clutching her mouth to mute her own hilarity. She had eyes everywhere. Nothing passed her notice. Ramita envied her this never-ending voyage of discoveries, but she could not share in it, instead retreating further and further into herself.
Beyond Kankritipur was Latakwar. They struck the banks of the Sabanati River during the week of the waning moon. The river was wide but low, more than two-thirds mud. Crocodiles glided near the barges that ferried them across the dark, sluggish water. To the west and east were distant hills, with the hint of larger, grimmer promontories beyond, but to the north, the horizon was flat. The land was grey-brown, the sparse grass brittle and dry. Gold and green bee-eaters flitted amidst the bushes and kites circled high above. Once they even saw a cobra on the roadside, sidling backwards into a crevice, hooded and hissing. There were still people – always people – sun-blackened farmers labouring in the fields, bony children driving skinny cattle with sharp horns and quick tempers. They replenished their water barrels, bought an extra wagon full of feed and swapped their horses for a bevy of old camels. The town of Latakwar was wholly Amteh, the only places of worship Dom-al’Ahms, their domes crusted with windblown dust. The whole town was similarly glazed. The men were all dressed in white, the women wore black bekira-shrouds. They had a slow, distant manner, as if nothing were important enough to hurry about when exertion cost so much in sweat and energy in this dry, burning heat.
They slept in Latakwar for two nights and as the waxing moon rose, signalling her fertility, Ramita’s husband finally returned to her bed for his brief, awkward fumblings. She felt like a piece of livestock as he pumped his seed into her while she knelt with her buttocks in the air. He wouldn’t let her look at his body, though the few glimpses revealed nothing horrific, just a pale, somewhat bony frame that was surprisingly well-formed for such an old man. He is vain, she realised with a start.
‘Do I please you?’ she found the nerve to ask him this time as he rose to leave.
He frowned. ‘You will please me when you quicken,’ he answered tartly. ‘My seed is thin, as is typical of magi. We must rely on persistence and good fortune.’
‘And the blessing of the gods,’ she replied.
He snorted. ‘Aye and that.’ He left her to lie alone, until Huriya came in, chuckling softly.
‘I asked him how it went,’ Huriya giggled. ‘He just looked at me. I think he might actually have a sense of humour, if you seek it hard enough.’
Ramita looked aghast at her friend’s effrontery. That night she prayed for the blessing of Sivraman. But she bled, as she always did, on the first night of the full moon, so they unfurled the blood-tent and she reacquainted herself with being alone. Her husband’s disappointment hung over the caravan like a pall of smoke. Huriya joined her in the blood-tent a few days later, as usual, and they retreated again into their own tiny world.
When Ramita emerged from blood-purdah a few days ahead of Huriya, she found they were hundreds of miles further north. All week she had watched the featureless lands roll by. The last week of Zulqeda, or Noveleve, as her husband called it, the dark of the moon: the air was freezing-cold at night, so that she had to use two blankets. She was looking forward to spending a couple of nights away from Huriya. Her friend was losing all her girlish modesty and a new creature was emerging, one obsessed with wealth and men, who speculated ceaselessly about both. And her excitement at the journey was making Ramita irritable. It was tiresome, but she couldn’t fight with her only friend, so she tolerated it. For now it was just a relief to be alone.
That night Meiros came and sat with her after dinner, beside the small fire Klein had built her. He pressed a book into her hands and she took it, trembling. She had never even touched one before. The lines and squiggles were odd, meaningless things that spidered across page after page. There were pictures though, of strange people with pale skin and oddly cut clothing. ‘This is a child’s atlas of Urte,’ he said. ‘It will help you learn Rondian.’
That night was a new type of awakening for her: more wondrous, more spiritual and awakening than any flesh-and-blood experience. These symbols contained language. They contained knowledge. Ramita dutifully intoned the sounds associated with each symbol and repeated them back to him until he was satisfied. Finally he put the book aside and mounted her, apparently for pleasure rather than duty. It wasn’t too awful, and he left her the book when he departed. She clutched it to her as she slid beneath her blankets, her mind bursting with this new thing. She fell asleep when her eyes could no longer take in the pictures swimming before her eyes.
From then on, she rode with Meiros in his carriage so she could continue learning to read, leaving a disgusted Huriya alone. The landscape had turned entirely to sand, a sea that rose and fell in golden waves. There were no trees, just rocks where snakes and lizards basked, or jackals snoozed in the shade, awaiting dusk. The camels walked slowly onwards, phlegmatic, surprisingly gentle animals. The camels in Aruna Nagar had been bad-tempered creatures, whipped and beaten by their owners into obedience, but these were well-cared-for, and they rewarded that care. Beneath the awning, the heat was almost bearable.
Meiros rode with his hood lowered, allowing her to study him. His long, thin hair ill-suited him and his beard was a lank thing that she longed to trim. His eyes were haunted, but he smiled sometimes as he taught her his tongue. He apologised that he had not brought a windship to speed their passage, but he said it would have attracted too much attention. She wasn’t sorry; she had never seen the legendary flying ships and the thought of going up in one petrified her.
She was slowly losing some of her fear of her husband. Behind the gauzy curtains of the carriage they were able to converse more freely, and she discovered he was a patient man for all his curtness. He seemed younger when he relaxed. ‘It’s the desert air,’ he said when she was bold enough to remark on this. She thought it was more likely being away from all his cares for a while.
Not all his teaching was of language. He taught her a mantra, a little chant, to hinder magi seeking to learn things from her mind – only for a while, but long enough to seek help. The notion frightened her, that these people could read her private thoughts, so she practised hard at maintaining her concentration on the mantra, no matter what distractions there might be. Meiros told her she learned well, which pleased her. He also taught the mantra to Huriya, who picked it up quickly.
She also learned a little about the place they were going to. ‘Hebusalim is a sacred city to the Amteh,’ he told her, ‘one of the three holiest. That is another reason why they resent the Rondian occupation. It was a major city even before the Bridge was built.’ He told her about the sultans of Dhassa and old wars, but she was interested in more immediate things.
‘Who is the Justina you sometimes mention?’
Meiros paused in midflow. ‘Justina? She is my only daugh
ter, the child of my second wife.’
‘Does she live with you? How old is she? Is she married? Does she have children?’
He was amused at the sudden torrent of questions. ‘Yes, she lives with me, but she has her own apartment and comes and goes as she pleases. No, she is not married; she has lovers, I suppose, but that is none of my business. She has no children – we magi do not breed easily or often, I’m afraid. As for her age …’ He looked her in the eye. ‘Justina is one hundred and sixty-three years old.’
Ramita went cold. It was so easy to forget that magi were not like other men. After a pause she asked, ‘What does she look like?’
He thought for a moment, then said, ‘She looks like a typical thirty-year-old woman, I suppose. She has long black hair and pale skin. She is accounted a beauty – she inherited her mother’s looks, obviously,’ he added self-deprecatingly.
Ramita pressed on. ‘What happened to your wife?’
‘She died of old age, forty years ago.’ He gazed into space. ‘She was the daughter of another acolyte of Corineus. We married when I settled in Pontus.’
‘Who was Corineus? Is he not your god?’
Meiros shook his head. ‘No, not back then, anyway. Baramitius and his ilk made him into a god afterwards, but to me he was just Johan – somewhat mad, incomprehensible, charismatic, compelling, but utterly human. He changed my life, several times over. I was a youngest son of a Brician baron, with no prospects beyond a career in the legions. Then Johan came to our village and lured me away. It was the time of the Rimoni Empire – we were all of the Sollan faith then, and the drui taught that salvation could be found through following personal vision, so travelling preachers abounded. I heard Johan Corin in the marketplace, talking about freedom and equality, and I was captivated. He painted a vision of a world governed by love, truth and understanding: a dream world. He had his woman, Selene, and a dozen other followers, and I walked away from the life my family had prepared for me and joined them that very day. I was just thirteen years old.