by Sam Meekings
‘I cannot pretend I am not revolted and dismayed by your past. Yet even the murderers in the gaols and the heretics the Pope has condemned to the stake are visited by a priest that they might recant and turn to Jesus Christ, blessed be his name. I stand by my most Holy duty. I will not leave you to Hell for all eternity while you might still be persuaded to ask for forgiveness.’
His dry, blistered lips curl up into the kind of curious smile of which I have learnt to be suspicious.
‘Do not worry, I shall tell you everything. And I have reason to hope that, before my tale is finished, you will not only understand the necessity of these deeds, but also come to work with me, continuing the vital work of the Order once I am gone.’
As his eyes are pressed tight closed, a translucent slime gluing the pale lids together, he cannot see my affronted look. I purse my lips, and feel for my rosary. Lovari lets out a pained moan which, to spare my brother’s feelings, I pretend not to hear.
‘You must forgive me, brother. I can no longer feel my legs and my heart does whirligigs in my chest. The sickness is staking claim to my senses, and if I am to fight I must gather my strength. I will try to sleep, and pray I can regain a little strength to finish my story. Please, return after your midday meal and I will tell you all you must know.’
‘As you wish. You must rest. I will come back soon and you can resume your confession then.’
Lovari does not respond. The restless wind is stirring through the sand. I hear my brother snoring before I have even got to my feet. He whimpers, struggles beneath his clammy blankets. And so I tuck another of the animal skins up around his neck, noticing as I do that a clump of his fine brown hair has fallen from his head. I slip it into the long sleeve of my habit and leave my companion to his fevered dreams, for some of us still have work to attend to.
The Whorehouse of a Thousand Sighs
PART 3 · 76–75 BCE
Spring raced straight on into autumn without a break. But regardless of the weather, I still often found myself waking up flushed and disorientated, my dreams weighing down on me like one of the rougher guests. They were always the same, ending when the tips of my feet began to lift from the ground as I beat my wings.
What Silk had said had bothered me, so instead of spending too much time with Boy in the days, I left him to Claws’ hungry eyes and busied myself helping the soldier. After securing herself a few more silver coins from the soldier’s rapidly diminishing collection, the Empress had called in a favour with a local carpenter and asked him to fashion a pair of wooden walking sticks, so I was soon helping the soldier hobble round the small hut. I would help him sit up and pull him up onto his good leg, letting him lean on me while he found his balance. It was slow and difficult, and more than once we toppled over together onto the floor, our bodies suddenly knotted together, giggling.
‘It won’t be long and you can get going again. I expect you’ll be glad to see the back of this awful place,’ I said as we paced slowly around the room, the walking sticks scraping against the floor.
He looked up at me briefly, but didn’t reply.
‘I guess you’re not going to let me have a peek in that special box of yours before you go? I’ve always wondered what the whole world looks like.’
He smiled.
‘I thought not. And you can’t tell me where you’re going either, I know. But tell me this, please, just to stop me worrying, because I can’t help thinking that you’re not going to be able to get very far, nor too quickly, hopping along on just one leg. So how do you know whoever is after you won’t find you again?’
He stopped, leaning on the curved stick, and I squeezed his arm.
‘I will disappear.’
‘What?’
‘I will disappear. I must.’
‘Oh, it’s that easy is it, just disappearing into thin air?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps the birds will help me.’
‘Is that some kind of joke? It’s not funny.’
‘No, I’m serious. They ought to help me. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be stuck lugging this thing through the middle of nowhere.’
‘So the box has got something to do with birds?’
He didn’t reply. Perhaps he had already said more than he wanted me to know. But right then I got that queasy feeling in my stomach, the one I always got when I thought about the crows in my father’s stories or the feathers pricking though my skin in my wretched dreams. I used to wonder why birds couldn’t just keep to the sky and leave the earth to us. But now I find myself thinking something different: why can’t we keep our dreams to the present, to what we already have, instead of grasping at the future, the sky, the impossible?
He gestured to the pile of straw and I helped lower him down until he was lying on his side. Then I checked the stump again: it was a gaudy red, the hardened skin almost smothered over. When I looked up the soldier’s eyes were closed and, although I couldn’t be sure whether he was really asleep, I threw a rug over him and bolted the door behind me.
It seemed silly to me, caring about a box more than you care about yourself. If I’d lost my leg – or any other part of me for that matter – because of some hunk of wood, I’d probably have set fire to the thing. Silk thought it was filled with enough money to make you forget the bits that have fallen off your body, but I was becoming less sure. To leave your home and know that you may never return – well, money alone isn’t going to convince you to do that. If you can’t spend it on your family and your friends and other little things to show off with in front of your enemies, well, what’s the point of it? And the further west you went, the harder it would be to trade with those Han coins. No, perhaps he really was protecting something more important. Perhaps it truly was the whole world in there, which would mean we were inside his box too. But wouldn’t that mean it would also contain another soldier with another box with another world inside and —
‘Just drink it up and it’ll all be over in no time!’ I heard the Empress screech, interrupting my wandering thoughts.
‘No!’ Claws shouted, and there was the sound of stomping feet.
I was halfway down the trail between the courtyards at that point, so I bunched up the bottom of my robe and ran down to find Tiger and Silk near the gate, holding onto Boy. In the middle of the courtyard the Empress stood with her hands on her colossal hips, her teeth clenched into a snarl. She seemed to be so angry that she couldn’t move. Claws was now nowhere to be seen and everyone else had wisely got out of the range of her fury. At her feet was a spreading pool of bubbling green liquid.
‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.
‘Claws just disobeyed the Empress. I’ve never seen anyone do that before,’ Silk said. ‘I don’t know which one of them is more angry.’
‘Over a drink?’ I asked.
Tiger raised her eyebrows. ‘You remember we joked that Claws was getting fat, and laughed about how she should cut down on the nang, well …’
‘No! But surely she’s too old,’ I said.
‘I guess not.’
‘What are you talking about? I don’t understand,’ Boy whined, and the three of us turned to hush him together.
‘Who do you think she got it from?’
‘Could have been anyone, we were so busy once the ice melted, remember?’
‘But she can’t really want to —’
‘It looks like she does.’
Our whispers quickly petered out when we saw Claws emerge from our room. I mean, we all knew she hoarded the gifts guests gave her under the rugs and straw in her corner, but none of us could believe how much she had balanced in her arms. It was difficult to see her face beneath all the little trinkets and glinting rings and ribbons and silks and leathers and wine skins and tiny jewels and coins and bits of cloth she was carrying. It was all that remained from night after night of carefully crafted smiles and faked groans. She dumped it in a pile on the ground in front of the Empress.
‘Go on then, take it. Take it a
ll. I only saved it for you. Take it and let me go!’
Instead of shouting back, however, the Empress seemed suddenly to grow calm. Her arms dropped to her side and she slowly shook her head, then smiled, showing her brown teeth.
‘I’m afraid it’s not enough.’
‘What do you mean? I’ve given you more than ten summers, plus all of this – it’s got to be worth a fortune! You could buy another girl if you traded all this stuff. Don’t try to fool me.’
‘For you alone, maybe it’s enough. You have grown so old and fat that few of our guests want to go near you anymore. But you forget that you took my girl’s eye. And for that, you owe me more.’
Claws’ mouth opened but no sound came out.
‘I’ll leave you now, and you will put all of this mess away. Then I’ll return with another cup of the medicine, and you will drink it. Do you understand?’
Claws just stood there, a tear snaking down her blotchy cheeks. The Empress turned and went back to her room. Claws didn’t move from the spot, though she did begin to shake as she choked back her sobs. As soon as she noticed us looking at her, though, she let out a little cry and ran to our room, leaving all her carefully saved gifts sprawled across the floor.
‘Do you think we should collect it all up and bring it to her?’ I asked.
‘No. Leave her. She won’t want to be seen like this. She’ll come and get it when she’s good and ready and she’s gotten rid of that crazy idea of keeping the baby,’ Silk said.
‘I knew it,’ Tiger said quietly. ‘I told you all long ago, but you did not believe me.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Silk asked.
‘She’ll never let us go. Not while we live and breathe and there’s still a chance, however small, that someone will want to lie with us in the dark. I don’t know what happened to Lotus and Feather, but it seems to me there’s only one way you get out of here, and when that happens it doesn’t matter how much silver you have.’
‘No, she said it wasn’t enough. She just wanted more to cover costs. She wasn’t saying Claws can’t leave, she was only saying Claws can’t leave just yet,’ Silk said.
This sounded feeble even to me, but I nodded because I wanted Boy to believe it.
‘You’re only supposed to be blind in one eye, Silk.’ Tiger replied. ‘However much you offer, it’s never going to be enough.’
Tiger walked away shaking her head, and Silk stormed off in the other direction. Boy looked up at me expectantly, and I waited for him to ask me what everyone was going on about. I tried to think fast, and I had almost worked out a particularly convoluted lie to explain away all the shouting and arguments when he spoke.
‘Do you want to play?’
I smiled, then chased him out past the gate to the track between the two courtyards.
We spent the afternoon pretending to be adventurers discovering strange new lands. Boy seemed more interested in tearing up wildflowers from the slope than finding out what had happened earlier, and that suited me fine. How was I supposed to explain to him that he might be trapped here forever without even the tiniest hope of escape? Even the silly stories I made up to lull him to sleep had endings, and nine times out of ten they were of the happy kind. If you don’t have an ending, a finishing line in sight that makes you push onward, then how are you supposed to make sense of the race itself? If you never see the sun go down, how are you going to be certain that it’ll rise again when the cocks crow?
But he didn’t ask, so I didn’t have to lie. When he crept into my room later that night, once I was sure the other girls were all asleep I found myself whispering the story of the crows to him. I told him that humans and crows had lived side by side once, the birds tilling the earth with their long beaks while people sowed seeds. I explained that a group of people soon asked the crows to help them find light to guide them at night as well as in the day, so that they would be safe from the terrors of the vast darkness. The crows agreed and they flew higher than they had ever flown before and began to peck at the tattered cloth of the sky. They ripped whole chunks from the blackness and light poured through, and that’s where the stars came from. But where they tore the holes in the sky, they saw through to the future, to the end of the world.
The crows returned bitter, angry, driven mad by what they had seen. From that day on they fed only on death; they became monstrous and vindictive, and enemies of humans, for they had been given the most terrible knowledge of how the world would finally come to be destroyed. I told Boy that this was why even today you cannot trust a crow, that they are unlucky and a bad omen, because they come close to us only to tell us that something bad will soon happen, to share the horrifying knowledge that they cannot bear. I told him all the things I could remember my father mumbling in the midday heat of his drunkenness, and when I heard Boy’s little whistle snores I kept talking: because if you don’t speak of things, sometimes they get lost so deep that when you really need them the words are buried beyond your reach.
It was a good night’s sleep, untroubled by either guests or dreams, and the next morning was a lazy, jokey one, with Boy helping Silk and me to brush the camels’ ragged coats. It wasn’t until almost lunchtime that anyone realised that we hadn’t seen Claws all morning.
Our first thought was to check with the cook, but he hadn’t seen her either. The soldier was sound asleep in his hut and the other was empty. Could she really have run away, we asked each other. Where would she have gone? It was only when we got back to the courtyard that Silk spotted the thin trail of inky blood dribbling out from the first guestroom.
Silk got there first, pushing back the loose piece of cloth covering the entrance and darting inside. The rest of us just stood rooted to the spot, too scared to venture in for fear of what we might see. I expected to hear a scream, some kind of terrible sobs or wails, but nothing came. Finally I couldn’t bear the silence anymore.
The smell hit me straightaway: ripe and sour, cloying, dank. The room was a mess. The beautiful cushions, the ornate rugs, all were stained the darkest red. Silk was kneeling in one of the pools of sticky blood, and as I moved closer I could hear her whispering to Claws as you might to a child just woken from a nightmare, trying to coax her best and oldest friend – who had teased her and humiliated her and fought her and blinded her and in the end had ignored her altogether – to open her eyes, just a little, to take her hand, to do something, anything at all, to show her it was not too late.
‘She’s done this just to piss off the Empress,’ Tiger whispered, and I turned to see she had followed me in.
I couldn’t believe that. Claws was lying on a pile of cushions with her eyes pressed closed and her face clenched up into a snarl.Her spirit might have left her, but her anger remained. Her right hand still held the curved knife she must have used to cut her stomach open. The horizontal gash just under her belly button sprawled open obscenely, the blood from the mess of broken purple coils poking out only just beginning to dry. Flies were already buzzing the wound. Not only had she drawn the knife deep across her belly, but she also seemed to have rattled it around in there before the last spasms of death took hold. There were tattered bloody ribbons, strange puffy crimson tubes, squelchy round sacs that looked like cooked aubergine, and slivers and blobs of heavenknowswhat. The whole room stank like meat left out in the sun too long. I covered my mouth with my hand to stop myself from retching and squatted down to take a closer look.
‘You won’t find it,’ Tiger said.
‘What?’
‘The baby. Too small, and buried too deep. She took it with her.’
‘Then at least they’re together.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Us? Nothing. It’s none of our business. It’s the Empress’s guestroom. Let her deal with it. Claws knew what she was doing, she knew what she wanted and she finally had the nerve to do something about it. We can’t begrudge her that.’
‘But we can’t just leave he
r like this. It wouldn’t be right.’
Tiger raised her eyebrows. ‘What’s right got to do with it? We left right and wrong behind when we got carried through that gate out there. All that’s here now are shitty memories and a jumble of bones. We don’t need to bother ourselves with that. The real Claws disappeared a long time ago.’
Tiger shook her head and left. Was this her usual bitter anger at the world around her or something else, something closer to her heart? I wasn’t sure. But I didn’t feel right about just leaving Claws to the mercy of the Empress. I fetched the mop and set about getting rid of some of the blood. Silk soon joined me, getting over her sobs and sniffles to bind one of Claws’ old robes around her bloody midriff until the gaping sprawl was completely covered. We thumbed her eyelids down and, when everything else was done, we decided to wash and comb and plait her long dark hair one last time. It was only then that we called the others, and Boy and the cook and Tall and Homely came in and looked at her and nodded, and then went back to their business.
The only exception was the Empress. As soon as the cook told her the news, she retired to her room and stayed in there all day, not even sounding her little bell, and so it was left to us to imagine whether it was anger, annoyance, guilt, sorrow or just plain squeamishness that kept her from venturing in to see what had become of her eldest worker.
‘We should get some of her treasure for ourselves,’ Boy said, nudging my arm as the four of us shared an early dinner in the cook’s courtyard.
‘Huh. And risk a beating from the Empress. She’ll be in a foul-enough mood as it is. Even you’re not that brave, Boy,’ I said.
‘I guess the Empress will get everything after all then,’ Silk muttered.
‘What’s it like? Being dead?’ Boy asked, and I saw Silk look at me nervously.