For the flowers were all inside, Madame Astranzia was wont to say—with a lifted eyebrow and complicit smile—and bloomed best out of the heat and light of the noonday sun. Indeed, of the residents of that House, none but the domestic staff and Astranzia herself were ever seen outside its rose-colored walls. But any male in the capital above a certain age could recite, whether from hearsay or experience, the use-names and descriptions of every coveted courtesan behind that discreet façade.
Once inside, it was said, one instantly perceived that the much-observed walls were in fact pared from stone so fine as to allow sufficient illumination from both moon and sun to bathe the interior in a muted roseate glow. This hushed incandescence was augmented as necessary by Cantment-crafted glass globes, which floated obligingly along to follow each courtesan and each guest, if they so desired; and in which floated, as if stirred by some internal current, infinitesimal glowing motes of that precious mineral called lambent, which even the highest Families of nobility possess only in short supply.
In either the muted or immediate glow of th ese light sources, the reception chamber of the House was revealed to be a most marvelous amalgamation of the most opulent indulgences from all corners of the Empire. Fine wines, cheeses, fruits, and sweetmeats—including, on occasion, such exotic delicacies as pickled slivers of adarna tongue or the cloudy, heady liqueur distilled from the potent tears of lung—were served to guests awaiting their favorite companions, or suffering an agony of indecision over which exquisit e beauty to select for the night’s pleasure.
Here, atop an irysk-fur rug mottled a pleasing indigo and cream, was strewn a sultan’s ransom of pillows handstitched by the otherwise-violent desert tribeswomen of the distant South; each pillow encrusted with semiprecious gems and threads of silver and gold, yet soft to the touch as the skin of the aptly-named courtesan Velvet, who hailed from that region and reclined upon those very cushions when she was not otherwise occupied entertaining h er gentleman visitors. It was said that every available inch of Velvet’s dusky body—saving only the harder tissues of her nails and teeth—was so smooth, so supple, so yielding that even the harshest scars inflicted on a man in battle would melt painlessly away upon contact with her, leaving only skin as unblemished as Velvet’s own, and a spirit similarly healed from the rigors and weariness that all too often shadowed a soldier’s career.
There, in the opposite corner, hung a profusion of rare story-silks created by the spider-people of Eastern Chiensai, who spend half of their lives suspended from ropes in mid-air so that they may use all four of their double-jointed limbs to craft those gossamer-fine, intricate tapestries of weave and wonder. In the House of Bliss, these finished silks were twined about pillars painstakingly carved from whole whalebones, also with scenes from stories of the Oriental demesnes. The courtesan named Lithe was often to be found perched elegantly atop these pillars, or entwined among the sumptuous silks of her homeland. Her porcelain skin and refined features were as d elicate as the masterpieces that surrounded her; yet her limbs were every bit as honed as those of the spider-people, and capable of all manner of acrobatic contortions within the more clandestine chambers of the House—including the famed Cerulean Room, where expensively-maintained Cant rendered the earth’s pull so weak as to be negligible, so that guests with a taste for adventure might be freed from the weight of their burdens in an ambiance of literal weightlessness. Lithe’s companionship was often requested in tandem with a reservation for use of the Cerulean Room; and it was said that the experience was itself a tale well worthy of chronicle in any story-silk or scrimshaw.
And of course there were the more commonplace beauties—fair of skin, blond or brown or red of hair—though not a one of them could truly be dismissed as merely commonplace. Golden-tressed Aria, for instance, tended to sing rather than shout her pleasure, in notes of such surpassing sweetness and purity that she was of necessity designated a room all her own, in which the mirror and window glass had been especially prepared so as to withstand the reverberant onslaught of her passions. And the higher and louder the note, it was knowledgably reported, the higher, as it were, a man found himself rising to the occasion.
But the center of the reception chamb er was devoted to Sorrow, so named because the depthless solemnity in her eyes belied their appetizing color of burnt sugar, as the charcoal-dark of her hair formed a cloak of nigh-impenetrable mystery over skin of delectable honey, kissed with cream. She alone in that entire room was wholly, perennially naked, for Madame Astranzia claimed that the fountain of perfumed water in which Sorrow basked was necessary to counteract the emanating heat that had been steeped into her very pores by the tropical sun of the island territories from which she hailed. She was accounted by all and sundry to be as dangerous as she was alluring—surpassing even the awe and dread tendered to her crueler colleague, Cicatrix of storm-scoured Odanis—for it was held that any man, having once been consumed in the fires of Sorrow’s fervid embrace, would thereafter yearn and burn for her touch till the end of his days, though he should be detailed to the farthest northern reaches of the Empire, where even the mightiest glaciers would prove incapable of quenching the flame of desire from his scorched and shattered soul.
One such unfortunate was a certain Nicolas, a bladearm of some repute from the 47th detachment of the Western brigades.
“I love you,” Nicolas said to Sorrow, as they lay in the starlit dark of the Ebon Room, the sourceless chirping of crickets becoming audible once more in the aftermath of their first time together. He was fresh from yet another victory at the front then, and nearly swaggering with it before he first caught speechless sight of her in her fountain-pool, glistening-wet and faintly steaming. From that moment, he had felt as though he were the one submerged, drowning in the scent of her, the taste of her skin, the feel of her hair, the burnt-sugar sea of her somber eyes. “Let me take you away from here. We can marry, if you want; or not, if you don’t. I know the quality of your Madame Astranzia—she’s an eye for profit, but she will not bar our way.”
Sorrow answered him as she had responded to countless other declarations of blazing ardor. “You do not love me,” she said; and though he could not clearly make out her face in the evening dark, her voice was not unkind. “You love what you think of me—and for that I thank you, and for the generosity of your spirit. But do not think, please, that lovemaking makes love, for we have known each other, yet we do not know one another. And I am well with that.”
“I love you,” Nicolas said again, greatly daring on their sixth night together, this time upon the sandy shoals beneath gently undulating seaweed and drifting glimmerfin replicas of rare fish in the Aquamarine Room. His need to be with her had led him to greater and greater feats in the fulfillment of his duties, such that he had been promoted so often that he no longer required monetary rewards to afford Madame Astranzia’s costly hospitality. He had also fallen, nearly, into Sorrow’s manner of speaking, so frequently had he r ecalled and reviewed in his mind their all-too-sporadic shared moments of communion and conversation. “Let me purchase your contract, please, so that you need no longer be required to entertain any guest but myself. If you insist on remaining here, then let it be at your leisure, and our pleasure, yours and mine.”
Sorrow gazed at him as he gazed at her, enthralled anew by the shifting tones of her honey-cream skin in the wavering unders ea light. “We dare not love,” she said. “Perhaps you might love me, and perhaps love may turn the world, as it is said—but at the other end of the world we would find the Empire still. And do not think, please, that we can belong to one another when we belong foremost to the realm. That is the way of things, and coin will not change it.”
“I love you,” Nicolas said to her on their seventh night together, their mingled scents wafting away into the fragrance of living pines, grass, and wildflowers in the Viridian room. His zeal for his vocation had diminished significantly since his assignment to a command post overseeing a spice-wealthy archipelagic protectorate.
It was the humidity, he often claimed, both out loud and to himself; but by the solitary light of his utterly-unnecessary fireside he could acknowledge that he was troubled by the natives’ vague resemblance to his beloved Sorrow. And even the unending fire of his passion in the heat of that island air could not assuage his growing cold suspicion that he was not, perhaps, the hero his Empire presented him to be. “At least tell me your real name,” he implored.
Sorrow wept, unexpectedly— and beautifully, of course, her tears turning to vapor nearly on the instant that they touched her flawless, glowing cheeks. “I have given up striving not to love you,” she said. “It is futile, as striving to love is also futile, for we are neither of us who we are; nor can we be one when we are each of us less than half who we should be. So do not think, please, that my true name is of moment when my true self is not who I am. Love is for those who live.”
On the ninth night, the soldiers came.
“How long did you think you could conceal her nature beneath a fountain?” the leader asked Madame Astranzia contemptuously, even as he viciously kicked in the door to the Vermilion Room, the lovers’ haven of choice for that evening.
The normally-genteel doyenne bristled with outrage as she replied, “You are mistaken, I assure you; and you will regret this violation of my place of business! Your superior is a frequent guest here—”
As Astranzia thus loudly attempted to stall for time, Nicolas was already in motion, having thrust Sorrow to the far corner of the room and leapt across, still unclothed, to retrieve his previously cast-aside blades. For a moment, when the battle was first joined, it almost seemed that he might win, so experienced a fighter was he… but he was naked, and they were in armor; and he was weak with love and sudden, sick terror while they were strong with conviction and duty; and there simply were too many of them, in the end. It was the fourth or fifth soldier that ran him through, piercing the unprot ected flesh of his stomach and spattering the hectic walls of the Vermilion Room with the brighter crimson stain of freshly-spilled blood.
And the courtesan called Sorrow erupted in flame.
It began with her eyes, the eternal solemn darkness of them turning suddenly bright enough to elicit answering sparks from the exposed swords and cuirasses of polished steel massed before the narrow doorway. From there the blaze grew quickly—so quickly!—barely giving her own flowing hair time enough to rise, halo-like, in the air before crisping into soot; turning her skin to burnished bronze and then to purest fire as it devoured her face, arms, torso, feet; making of her a living effigy, at once glorious and terrible and indisputably Wild. And from her body the conflagration spread all but instantaneously—in a moment scarcely more than the moment between heartbeats—outward, ever outward.
The Vermilion Room was engulfed before any save Madame Astranzia could think to turn and flee. Even she was not quick enough to slip out the door—yet the flames did not touch her, nor the grievously-wounded Nicolas, nor any of the courtesans of that incomparable and ill-fated House. But the other soldiers burned, so swiftly and absolutely that they had not time even to utter a cry before they were seared to ash in their armor; and ev en the extraordinary stone walls, presumably proof against all but the most outward ravages of extreme heat, were lit and consumed as though they were flimsy as mer e parchment. And the once-green lawn blackened and charred to powder; and the conflagration grew, and grew, and grew.
“My name is Malaya,” said the woman once known as Sorrow, before she became indistinguishable from the rest of the burning.
*
VELVET HEALED ME, of course, when we found one another outside the House at the smoldering break of day—after which she, Astranzia, and the remaining disheveled courtesans fled to the compass points, to avoid being captured for complicity in the cataclysmic debacle. Even so, the injury and my unblemished record were sufficient to attain the honorable discharge I later sought—or perhaps the bureaucrats were merely all too occupied to intervene over a trifle such as mine, troubled as they were with the complexities of transf erring the seat of governance to the new capital at Aylanar.
In recent years, they have been more troubled still; struggling, for one, against the self-proclaimed “true” Emperor, who has mustered an upstart militia of his own in the once-echoing ruins of the cindered old court.
For another, even a retired officer such as myself has managed to catch wind of the inadequately-suppressed rumors—that numerous SkyWild slaves have been escaping from isolated ships at sea, aided by an inexplicable band of renegade Wild who are led, it is recounted, by a bald yet inarguably beautiful woman, with skin of bronzed honey, and eyes marked even in triumph by some fathomless, ineffable grief.
It is further said that she is attended, among others, by a girl-child of twelve or so years, who carries their company aloft upon winds of her own creation; who calms the oceans simply by speaking to the wat ers in a strange, susurrant tongue; who breaks the crafted chains of Cantment with a gestur e once thought dead and gone with the last of the hunted EarthWild. She is believed to be the bald woman’s daughter; for though her hair is long and lustrous—charcoal-dark—her skin is of a similar, if slightly lighter, honeyed hue.
But I like to imagine that she has my eyes: illuminated, yet not consumed, by sorrow.
JOSEPH NACINO
WALKING BACKWARDS
Joseph Nacino is the daytime online editor for philstar.com. Being an inveterate reader of science fiction and fantasy, the publication of his first story in a Filipino anthology of speculative fiction is a tremendous source of fan-boy glee for him. Hopefully, this wouldn’t be his last.
“Walking Backwards,” which Nacino describes as “a historiographical soft SF story”, looks into the ties that bind a young man to his past as well as his future.
DANNY KNEW THE antique clock on his desk intimately. The program, the result of tinkering with an old Macromedia Flash CD he found at a tiangge, was a bit slow compared to the clock on his computer despite several modifications.
Still, as he worked, it was at the antique clock he kept looking at. Though it was only a realistic-looking animation on his screen, he loved how it looked: a mantel clock of dark lacquered wood with the clock’s face lined with gold. Below it, its pendulum swung with a will.
Danny shivered. The office air-condition vent over his head was spewing straight down at him and he squirmed in his chair to avoid the draft. This knocked off the virtual reality mirror-shades on his face and his attempt to keep it steady ruined the screen, scattering a number of icons.
He sighed as he waved his gloves in the air—akin to a conductor and his baton—to clear the mess. Fortunately, no calls came while he was cleaning up.
“It won’t go faster, you know?”
Danny jerked in surprise at hearing the female voice. He put his computer on ‘hold’ and turned to see Marla’s smiling face peering over the cubicle wall.
“Yep?”
Danny’s team leader stepped into his cubicle and leaned against the wall. She always looked amused, as if she was on the brink of laughing at a joke only she knew about.
“The clock won’t go faster if you keep watching it, I said.”
His jaw dropped in surprise: “Huh? How did you know I was looking at the clock?”
Marla grinned and said, “You keep looking to the side where the clock is usually located. Don’t worry, I do the same thing.”
As Danny tried to explain, Marla waved a hand, “It’s okay, Danny. Anyway, Mr. Toledo wants to see you about the China tech-support report as soon as possible. Don’t worry though, I think he just wants to know how the Chinese are taking to the new English translation program.”
“Um, okay. No problem. ”
Marla gave him a thumbs-up and a smile before exiting his cubicle.
“She smiles a lot, don’t you think?”
“Why does everyone keep making comments at my back?” Danny grumbled aloud, turning to the speaker in the cubicle behind his.
Ed
gar smirked, his mirror-shades resting precariously on the slope of his forehead as he folded his arms before him. To Danny, Edgar’s fat frame looked like a piece of longganisa wrapped tight in the wrinkled polo barong.
Edgar said mock-innocently: “What? Weren’t you the one who told me she was cute?”
“Ed, quit it …”
“What?”
“I swear to God that’s the last time I’m going to tell you anything.”
“So you don’t want to boink her?”
Danny had to smile.
He once remembered Mang Bal describing Edgar as a “burbling stream”: unlike the polluted Pasig River, it was noisy but generally harmless. Mang Bal had taken a drink from his beer and pointed a gnarly finger at him to make his point, “But then again, he only likes you because you’re the only person he knows who can drink him under the table.”
“I wonder why?” Danny had replied wryly as he hoisted his own bottle.
Danny held up his mirror-shades to peer at the clock-program and compared it with the antique clock. They gave different times: 4:30 p.m. and 4:47 p.m. He sighed.
“So what’s on your mind that you’re so eager to leave?” Edgar said as he leaned sideways, the stylish-looking swivel chair creaking pitifully under him.
Danny sighed, massaged the bridge of his nose, and said, “Just tired out of my freaking mind, is what. This call center business gets old really fast.”
“Ah, fuck this,” Edgar declared, adding in a sing-song voice, “It’s a Friday night and we got mucho money. Let’s hit the town, pick-up some girls…”
“Nah. Have a prior commitment.”
Before Edgar could say anything, they heard Edgar’s name being paged via the network, a soft electronic voice declaring, “Edgar dela Fuente, you have a call on 124.”
Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 6