Finally wrestling free, I planted my feet on the floor. I recollected that Mefao could not easily burst in on me, my door being locked. Latches and locks were a novelty in this country, imported by and insisted upon by the merchant-adventurers’ consortium when they had the subcontinental canton built. The damnable heat slowed and confused my thinking. Sweat trickled distractingly down my sides. I was far from the only northerner, I imagined, who had learned early not to wear as much as a shirt into bed, though it still felt peculiar to me, unseemly. Adepts, acolytes, and saints of the Kandadal cult stalked unclothed about the streets of Folau. I had seen them already, as short a time as it was since my arrival. A nude man would be no particular novelty for Mefao—not even a tall, pallid, hirsute northerner: I had been told about several subcontinental converts among the Kandadal’s devotees. But I was not a saint. Making a noise so she would not believe me ignoring her, I stood and reached for the crumpled sarong thrown across the back of the chair.
Wrapping and tucking, I had my lower parts covered before I reached the door. The key slipped in greasy fingers.
The door had been locked all night. Oil glistened on my body hair and skin. Fragrances persisted in the still, enclosed air: tuberose and heavy sweat and the salted-milk odor of a man’s emissions—my emissions—under the swirling, luxurious smoke of incense meant to discourage flying insects.
I pulled the door wide and immaculate Mefao strode through, the clap of her wood-soled pattens loud against the floor. Her arms were laden with freshly laundered, starched, pressed fabrics: the garments of an haut-bourgeois of Trebt. These she piled atop the bureau. When she turned, I knew she saw the ruin of pest-netting over the bed but she said nothing.
“I—” I began but could not recall the thought.
Her eyes rested lightly on me, as if I were the same man she had bade goodnight after guiding me back to the canton from a tedious banquet. With a practiced tilt of her head, she said, “You forget the way to the baths, sir?” as though I had not been resident in the canton nearly a full month, bathing every other day.
“No, of course not. I—” I extended open palms as if they held something whose meaning I could not decipher. “My door was locked. All night.”
Mefao’s eyes narrowed, widened as her nostrils flared. She glanced at the bed again, then the tall, wide windows. Like the door, they were louvered, but additionally screened by lengths of stretched white muslin—taut, undisturbed. She sniffed again. “Ekeksengek,” she said.
The word or phrase was not part of my very meager vocabulary.
“You had best bathe, sir,” she said very quickly. “Ask the attendant for clove-oil soap.” Turning back to the bureau, she pulled open a drawer to draw out a folded sarong. “Have him burn your present garment. While you are gone, I will—”
“What was it, Mefao? Who was he?”
Holding out the neat package, its green and blue and crimson plaid crisp, she looked away, looked down. She was a small woman, all her people were small, the drape of her own skirt and loose brocade jacket as precise as her movements. “Ekeksengek,” she said again. “The Oily Man. I did not think you … ” It almost seemed to me she was suppressing a kind of mean amusement as she waited for me to accept the sarong. “He is not generally harmful or cruel, but … troubling?”
I was troubled. I took the clean garment from Mefao’s hands, wondering whether it continued clean once it touched the oils on my skin. I asked, “How did he pass the locked door? Is he a demon?”
“A demon?” Stepping away from me, she appeared to ponder. “Nothing so malign or powerful, I think. Perhaps in your terms, a kind of goblin. It would be wise, sir, to cleanse yourself of his traces.”
Troubled, I felt there were words she was not saying which I ought to understand, but I had been here only a short while and I did not trust Mefao to explain if I persisted. Her loyalty was paid for by my elder sister.
So I left without further argument. It was a short walk through the canton’s gardens from my bungalow to the sunken baths. Sunlight and heat punished me for walking too quickly, but the attendant offered a cup of lemon water to refresh me while he sought out the clove-oil soap Mefao advised. Sipping my lemon water, I waited on the stone bench inside the wellhead pavilion.
Laughter rose from below, followed by two persons coming up the stairs. I failed to recognize the man, tall and burly and fair, until he boomed a greeting and recommendation I enjoy the brief respite of the baths’ cool depths. A friendly rival of my sister’s, he was the local commander of the Kevvel Company, which affected military discipline and attire. I had never previously seen the man out of formal kit, under which he must wear severe corsetry still more uncomfortable in this climate than at home in temperate Kevvel. Abashed by the bulk and presence adorned by his kirtled sarong, I made a conventional reply as he and his companion paused for the conventional moment. Then the companion murmured something in her own language that caused the commander to laugh. “She says you stink as pungently as I after a day of labor,” he said, still chuckling, “so bathe well, my friend, bathe well.”
The discourtesy startled me. I glared at the small woman draped and cumbered in layers of brightly patterned and embroidered fabrics until she lowered her eyes and turned her head and preceded her employer out of the pavilion.
The attendant had returned with a lump of pungent soap. At my shoulder, he muttered, “Ladyboy.” I could not distinguish whether his intonation suggested respect or disdain. Startled again, I glanced after her but she was gone. Taking soap and towel, I allowed the man to refill my cup, and then began my descent.
The air grew agreeably cooler with every gallery around the perimeter of the great well, cooler and more damp. Where shards of sunlight fell from above, moss bloomed emerald green on the brick to one side, the marble balustrades to the other. The impacts of my pattens’ soles on the stairs echoed. I continued past the level of the great tank, where one person floated spread eagle in the green water under the stony eyes of the baths’ patrons, fifty-year-dead merchant-adventurers of Trebt, Kevvel, Asana, and other subcontinental nations. Carved in the Avengi heroic style, the figures were recognizable as foreigners only on account of their costumes.
The light became less certain, the echoes more complex, the paving beneath my pattens sloshing with spilled water. I made sure to pass four empty alcoves before entering the fifth. Here I laid folded sarong and towel on the shelf by the entrance, set aside my cup, discarded pattens and soiled garment, before stepping under the runnel of cool water pouring endlessly from its outlet. For long moments I simply shivered as it rinsed the fever from my skin. Then I took up the soap with its nose-burning fragrance, applied it to banishing the oils and fragrances bestowed on me by the Oily Man.
I was sent to the far side of the world because my elder siblings had finally acknowledged they could make no good use of me in Trebt. I faltered at every task they set me, my small household was ineptly managed, I had damaged relations between my family and Rosecq’s, I could not even be married off to any advantage. At nearly the same moment, trade winds blew the annual flotilla home from the Great Eastern Company’s scattered outposts. Our sister Therzin’s dispatch mentioned she was with child and, by the by, the queen on the Jade Stool in Defre-ua-Bodo had grown cool.
An old Great Eastern hand, retired home as a consequence of tropic fever, explained Therzin’s offhand remark. The Avengi queen was known to like surrounding herself with pretty things, pretty people. She had never cared to bear a child of her own because pregnancy was unaesthetic and babies unruly. She was forever pensioning off wives and husbands, ministers and servants, for the offense of ageing. The exotic foreign merchants in the subcontinental canton of her port at Folau fascinated the queen but she seldom cared to see them. Therzin’s rare favor at court had given the Great Eastern Company a minor advantage over the companies of other nations.
Whether Therzin had grown out of her beauty—we had not seen her in ten years—or if it was her
fecundity that gave offense, the fact remained: our advantage was gone. My sisters and brothers looked at one another and then at me. I was young—I was, they agreed, decorative—I was equipped with pretty manners. Perhaps I need not continue a liability.
And so, valuable cargo, I was loaded aboard the company’s roundship Fortune’s Lad along with a chest of gifts for Aveng’s queen, a cedar trunk of handsome clothing for myself, and an elderly, hence expendable, servant. Avengi herself, she was meant both to care for me on the voyage and to stuff what she might of her language into my stupid head. Sadly, I learned little before she perished of a grippe brought aboard at the Asaen entrepôt in the Summer Archipelago. We had not yet passed the northern tropic. The same grippe laid me low for several weeks, not that I wasn’t a poor sailor beforehand. Often and often and often again on that seven-month voyage, in sultry calm and bitter storm, I wished to die.
As ever, I failed to carry through. I had a good notion of the value of the bets against my surviving as far as Folau.
Between his death and my departure, I had attempted not to remember Rosecq. Naturally, good amounts of aqua vitae, genever, and the newly introduced sugar-rum were required to bolster that determination. Aboard Fortune’s Lad such remedies were rationed, the rations too small to serve. Indeed, the little I was permitted served best to further disturb an already uneasy belly. I had brought a cask of tobacco, but that drug’s effect was more vivifying than soothing. I would not learn about hemp or opium until I reached Folau. During dark nights when exile and the rocking of the ship disturbed me, I contemplated the man I loved and the disaster I had made of loving him.
The boy I loved: we were of an age.
The young man I killed.
An idiot, I had brought two tokens to remind me of folly. Shutting myself into the stifling closet of my cabin at night, the fluttering lamp on its chains swaying overhead, I would draw out my keys to open the cedar chest, first, then the small casket of ironwood. I stumbled to the narrow bunk. When I was a drunkard on dry land, opening the casket would unman me, reduce me to tears. At sea, sober, exiled, ill, my reaction was … different.
Always, I opened the diptych first. It was fashioned for travel in the mode of those portable altarpieces that allow you to carry your chapel about in miniature. Latched, it was bound in leather-covered boards like a book of devotions or poems, albeit lacking tooled symbols or words to indicate its contents. Unlatched … unlatched and laid open on my thigh, a pair of painted youths gazed up at me from either leaf. I had liked to imagine their lips met in comradely affection when the thing was closed, but that was when Rosecq and hope still breathed. In any case, the portraits were the work of different artists, in different modes and at different scales, never intended to be bound together any more than Rosecq and I.
On the left, the boy was seen at half length, richly costumed and adorned with gold and gems, his expression at once stern and inviting, for it was meant to demonstrate I was of good and prosperous lineage, healthy and well made: a satisfactory son-in-law. The painter had made four of them. So practiced was he, they could scarcely be told apart. I knew for a fact one of the other copies was enclosed with the dispatch directed to Therzin, which she might send on to the court in Defre-ua-Bodo to encourage an invitation for me to attend the queen.
On the right, a silverpoint and chalk sketch made by the drawing master we shared on an afternoon Rosecq came to the studio directly from weapons practice. Striding through the door, he was unkempt, sweaty, his outer garments unfastened and the collar and front of his shirt unlaced. He was impatient, unwilling to change over so quickly from martial to civil arts—he had never hidden his belief that limning was a frivolous, ungentlemanly skill. Impatient with Rosecq’s humor, our master, who had apprenticed in the ateliers of Katothtet and studied the works of the ancients, joked that an athlete’s artistic worth lay in his person rather than any skill with chalk or brush.
At once, arrogant Rosecq rose from his seat. He threw his velvet coat over the plaster bust of a Katothine emperor we were meant to be drawing and struck a martial pose. The master merely raised his eyebrows—not his chalk. So goaded, Rosecq began to strip off his remaining clothing, swiftly, as if not to permit himself time to consider the impropriety. In scarcely a moment, it almost seemed, he stood before us nude as a stalwart warrior of antiquity.
Not chiselled marble or cast bronze or molded plaster—not chalk on paper or paint on panel or canvas. Our master had set at once to work with stylus and chalk while I gaped dumbfounded. By the incongruity, yes, of the naked haut-bourgeois’s heir inviting our examination and re-creation, by Rosecq’s nearly casual immodesty—by his unexpected beauty. His visage was not handsome. Whereas age-mates teased me for what they called the feminine symmetry and delicacy of my features, Rosecq was both scorned and admired for a face that bypassed masculinity into bestiality, features ill sorted and ill proportioned. Without clothes, though, his profile turned away, he was a young god.
I scrambled up my tools at last and committed several botches. The master, meanwhile, worked swiftly, deftly, tossing each drawing aside as it was done, with an impatient word to Rosecq to alter his stance. One sketch fluttered to the floor near my feet. I scuffed it aside, out of sight. When Rosecq abruptly recollected himself, his dignity, he cursed like a fishmonger and gathered his clothing, disappearing behind a screen. I plucked up the master’s drawing and hid it away.
Rosecq did not return to the master’s studio. Whatever protest he made to his parents, the rumor that whispered around town was obscene. I suppose my brothers heard it and assumed I was a likelier object of the master’s supposed infatuation, for my lessons were halted without explanation. Not many weeks later, I heard the master had left the city. Rosecq strutted a bit but had the wit not to speak of why.
Did I already love him? I believe I did. In certain ways he was clever, in certain ways kind. With animals and small children he was always gentle. Sometimes he was kind to me, seldom cruel, until I gave him no other choice.
Desire, though—I date my desire for him to that afternoon when I devoured the grace and potential of his unclothed body with my eyes.
Setting the diptych aside, I opened the contract. I had paid a good sum for it: to purchase the advocate’s discretion as well as her services. In formal blue-black, black, and red inks, her precise chancellery hand spelled out the terms of affrèrement on fine laid paper, but the traditional vow was inscribed in gold: one bread, one salt; one meat, one wine; one purse, one life until death. Below, my signature was a morass of scratches and blots. I can write legibly enough with my left hand but a sinistral endorsement has never been valid. Rosecq, of course, had signed neither copy—had torn the one to confetti and burned it, then issued the fatal challenge.
One bread, one salt; one meat, one wine; one purse, one life until death.
I folded the paper along old creases that threatened to tear. To the challenged goes the choice of weapons: pistols, for I did not wish to be toyed with as a cat plays with a mouse. I wished to die quickly. My second—an acquaintance to whom I never again spoke—and I met Rosecq and his second well outside the city and the law. Mist from the canals and sodden fields smothered the world as the sun rose, but there was light enough. The seconds examined the pistols, pronounced them sound, loaded and exchanged them, then paced off the field of honor. I could not bring myself to look at Rosecq as I took my place. Alternating formal clauses, the seconds recited the duel’s terms. As was tradition, neither knew the quarrel. As was tradition, Rosecq was offered a final opportunity to demand a different satisfaction, which for an instant he appeared to consider, muttering my name. But then, in turn, the opportunity to abase myself and apologize for the unacknowledged insult was offered me. I said nothing. I could not apologize for loving him. The lanterns were raised. I looked down the length of my arm and pistol barrel into Rosecq’s eyes. The white kerchief dropped. I fired.
Rosecq’s shot went wide. I will forever be tormented, n
ot knowing whether he intended to miss. Whether I intended to strike true. His second would not permit me to attend the crumpled form forty paces distant, so I will never know either whether he had moments or hours to understand I had killed him, or no time at all.
I felt I had scrubbed my skin raw and would never get the stench of cloves out of my nostrils. Eyes closed, I backed up under the flowing spout to rinse the soap away again. The small light behind my eyelids changed. Water rushing past my ears had covered the sounds of approaching feet, wooden pattens clattering on brick. When I burst out of the stream, gasping for heavy air, I was not alone in the alcove.
“Clove?” the Kevveller commander’s companion asked in my language. “You wish the ekeksengek to return?” Leaning casually in the doorway, she regarded me with cool eyes.
The instant I saw her my hands had fallen to cover my sex, as if it might be a novelty to a courtesan. The lump of soap I had dropped skittered across flooded tiles toward her and she neatly kicked it aside.
“Clove is a hot oil, tengs. If you hope to discourage the hot-blooded ekeksengek, what’s required is tungs, cool.” Her hand moved abruptly and something hurtled at me.
Unthinking, I caught it: a small brick of soap that smelled very different when I lifted it to my nose, fresh and vegetal.
“Basil,” she said. “Few of the uncanny beings like the scent.”
I liked it better than the clove, but I shook my head. “My dragoman said—”
“Do you trust your dragoman?”
I did not.
“You have no reason to trust me, either, of course. And no doubt you found the ekeksengek’s attentions … pleasurable.”
“Who are you?”
“One upon whom the Oily Man was set, long ago. Thus I recognized his fragrance on you.” She moved, turned half away. “He was meant to show me I was a proper man.”
I had forgotten what the attendant, up above on the surface of the world, had called her. In uncertain, underground light, I discerned nothing to persuade me she wasn’t a proper woman. But it was the first part of her statement that nagged me. “Set upon you?” I asked.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 27