by Jane Kindred
Their eyes had done their speaking these seven days, and must continue to. Ra’s desire was painfully obvious in his own, and hers stared back a silent complicity. He wanted to see within the veil, but she didn’t remove it, and he would not. He coaxed her down against the cushions and stared, no idea what he should do. Her breasts rose and fell with her anticipating breath. He reached his hand out and placed it over her heart, pressing his fingers together over the thin fabric. The firm circle of her breast was thunderous. He must touch her, see something of her.
Audacious, he slipped his hand into the collar of her dress and nudged it down, his hand alight with tiny whorls of sensation. She breathed in sharply, rising up to meet him, and he lowered his mouth, compelled, onto the peak of her flesh. She moved beneath him, her skin taut and bobbing against his tongue, making tiny sounds of ecstasy. Frantic, he unfastened the ties of her dress and unveiled her body, and was nearly overcome at the sight of her. He fell forward to her chest, trying to contain himself, alarmed by what he felt. She arched her throat and teased her body with the soft caress of his hair draping her. He would die of this surge of adrenaline, this quickened flow of blood. He released himself from his garment and let the innervated flesh touch the skin of her stomach. He feared her reaction; feared his own. Would she allow this? Could he dare? He could not think beyond the moment, to consequence.
Except for this presumptive touch, he tried to hold himself away, but she moved her body so that he slipped down between her legs, and the inky eyes were insistent, urging him on. He leaped into her without considering her virginity, and she made a sharp sound, stifled immediately, her eyes springing with moisture. He cursed himself for his stupidity, but the velvet strength of her flesh against his distracted him from practical considerations. He too gave unbidden release to a cry, and feared the attention of the bearers and the templars, but the pace of the procession didn’t slow.
He melded with her, trying to absorb her, to get closer, as though they could be one body, thundering forward on instinct. She rose up toward him in the same pursuit, midnight eyes always on his until he clenched his own shut in response to the jolt that was rushing through him. He flooded her, shooting forward on a tide of indescribable pleasure, and she shook beneath him, muffling her gasps in his hair. Undone, he fell forward once more, resting against her bosom, his hands touching her face through the veil.
Through the commotion of disconnected sound in his ears, he heard the singing of the welcome at the temple square. Ra rose to his elbows in dismay. She would have to be put back together. They couldn’t be discovered. He tried to cover her, catching his fingers in her ties, and she took this over with deft fingers. He was still inside her, and he didn’t want to be separated from her, but there was no time for this irrational indulgence. He’d hurt her at the onset, and he didn’t want to do so now. He touched her tender sex with his fingers, stroking her to ease himself out, almost driving them both once more into delirium.
She thrust her skirt into place, eyes fixed on him, asking what he meant to do now, whether she would suffer for this. There was no other way to get her out but to hope for the miracle that had allowed her in. He peered between the gauze at the rear of the litter, caught by the eyes of the litter-bearer who’d stumbled, his broad shoulder red from the weight of his burden. This man knew, they all four must know what their Meer had done; the weight and motion had been borne by them. The bearer nodded and indicated the space between himself and his companion. This one too was complicit.
Ra wasted no time in lowering his lover between them to the street. A drape trailing behind the box covered her until she ducked beneath the litter and emerged on the side, kissing the tassels as though she’d been supplicating there. They were outside the steps, and Ra was carried up and away from her, watching through his peephole until he could no longer see her eyes.
Once inside the temple and returned to his throne, he dismissed the templars and ordered the fumbling litter-bearer to stay behind, apparently to rebuke him personally, a terrible humiliation. They were left alone.
“What is your name?” Ra looked ahead toward the dying light and not to his side where the servant stood at attention.
“I am Merit, your holiness.”
“I want to know, Merit.” Ra’s face turned red with embarrassment for the first time in his long adulthood. “Did you stumble on purpose?”
“On purpose, my liege?” The man didn’t flinch. “I would never deliberately offend you. It is my duty to hold you up, and I will do so to my death.”
Ra looked at him then, and received communication from the eyes of yet another commoner. “You are true to your name,” said Ra. “I would like you beside me as chief attendant. Inform the prelate that I have enlisted you, and send him to see me.”
Merit bowed low and went to the great arch.
“And Merit.” Ra looked ahead once more, and his voice faltered. “Find her name.”
“It is done, my liege.”
Merit brought him first the name of Ahr, a worker in the market who bundled leaves for a tea merchant, and then Ahr herself, secreted from her master’s house in the night. Ra hadn’t meant to go near her again, had only wanted to know her name.
“Are you here of your own will?” he asked her.
“Of course,” was her reply, and at the sound of her voice, he’d abandoned his dais and drunk her intoxicant. He would taste her, every part of her, as often as he could before sunrise.
When she wasn’t before him, he resolved each time to let her alone, to return to the honor of his duty to Rhyman, but when he brought her to the temple each time to tell her, he would smell her and lose all reason. He knew every part of her except her face, a mystery he couldn’t penetrate, for it was hers to lower the veil, and she did not. Sometimes he kissed her through it, desperate; but her body was his substitute for her lips, and he kissed her breasts for hours and her sex until she was weak. His blankets, his clothes, and his hair smelled indelibly of her. He didn’t think about the future of this treasonous alliance. He couldn’t think about it. He would not.
Fate intervened, and Ra was forced to do without her while his attendant was ill with a fever. He counted Merit as his only friend, and Ra’s impatience at the separation from Ahr was soon overshadowed by worry for his friend as the fever wore on. He was afraid he would lose not only Ahr to distance, but also Merit to the more final parting of death.
Merit was out of danger after several days, but weakened by the illness, and convalesced throughout the summer’s turn to autumn. Ra began to feel responsible for Merit’s illness, guilty for his anxiousness to see Ahr despite Merit’s state, and culpable for the strain he’d put on Merit with the secrecy of his clandestine affair. He punished himself with putting Ahr out of his mind. He must leave them both alone and cease demanding their complicity in treason. He must be the Meer of Rhyman.
Merit returned to duty, and Ra didn’t send for Ahr, allowing no opportunity for his servant to question him. A feast day was coming, and Ra must concentrate, retrain himself to hear the single sounds from chaos, gather his strength for what the aristocratic petitioners might ask of him. Conjury exhausted, and the sorts of boons requested by the upper castes would drain him of all his stores of strength. He meditated, pushing away the scent of Ahr in his memory, ignoring his body when it sprang to arousal at an unbidden thought of her. He fooled himself after several weeks into believing his madness for her had passed, that Ahr was forgotten.
Merit, once again, was the instrument of his distraction. He came to Ra one morning with a folded paper, and Ra stared at the small rectangle on his table fearfully. The hint of bergamot was hovering over it. He stilled his pulse and opened it. Ahr had written one word: Father. Ra’s heart began to hammer and his stomach lurched. He’d known it, of course; it had been the only possible outcome, the one thing foreseeable even to a simpleton. Wives intent on conception did not receive su
ch attention from their husbands as Ra had spent on Ahr, had spent in Ahr. There had been no regard for the time of moon when she’d come to him. He’d lavished his seed on her. Meer seed. He swallowed and waved Merit away with a nod.
Merit paused. “Your reply, my liege?”
“No reply.”
By ignoring it, Ra imagined the child would never be born. If he didn’t acknowledge, it couldn’t be happening. He was trapped in an impossible place that offered no solution but this insane logic. Meer children were not conceived, not in more than a century; and Meer did not beget them in the wombs of ordinary women. This hadn’t happened. It would not be.
Negation was far less effective than creation. What was, was.
The maiden Ahr was discovered in her fallen state by early winter, when gossips in the market began to note the disappearance of her waist. Strangers assumed she’d bedded the master of the house in which she worked, and her master assumed he’d harbored a whore. Ahr held her tongue about her lover, going about her business in the virgin’s veil despite the scorn of passersby, and sent regular entreaties to the temple, always the one word that said all. The entreaties were ignored.
It was a feast day that brought Ahr to him at last. Food arrived at the temple, offerings of the most elaborate kinds, extravagant, revolting. He would need this prodigal array of sustenance to expend the energy they sought of him. Ra spent the day fasting in a ritual bath, prepared by a dozen attendants who washed him and poured oil into his hair and braided it with a thousand gold trinkets. He was painted then in gold grease, rubbed into every part of his skin while he stood naked. He was their golden god come down to hear their prayers.
Among the throng, Ahr came to him, wrestling her way through the affronted aristocracy, a blue blaze of color over a portentous belly startling them into giving way. There were gasps and laughter and condemning looks for the deflowered woman who dared to wear the veil as though she were a virgin, refuting her obvious state by wearing color instead of matron’s black. She managed to reach the front, the coveted spot where petitioners might be heard if there were not too many before them. The sun was close to setting, and the Meer would soon be deaf to them, having chosen whom he would bless, to listen no more. He would retreat into the temple’s interior and gorge himself on the obscene feast, and then he would conjure, and someone would receive his boon.
She stood before him, not bowing, not chanting her request. The crowd was aghast. She must be insane. She spoke to him, low and earnest, but he didn’t acknowledge her. The rumors that the Meer had impregnated her began to buzz throughout the temple steps. They waited for an act that would give him away as an ordinary man and mark the strange woman with the stain of treason. She implored him. He ignored her. She went mad and touched him, clawing at him, screaming at him, beating at his chest. For some inexplicable reason, the chief attendant didn’t set his men on her, didn’t have her beaten or arrested. The lunatic cursed him as she was led away, and petitioners shrank from her. MeerRa stood. The sun had fallen. The day was over.
Ra was alone in his temple. Even the servants to the Meer could not be present for this ritual. He paced the banquet-laden room, unable to eat. How he’d wanted to give in to her! She hadn’t known, or hadn’t cared, what peril she was in.
The stripe of blood she’d drawn from his throat in her fury cut a dark path through the gold and he stared at it in the mirrors that surrounded him. He’d created this ornate room, the gold he wore, for the people’s pleasure. He fattened their calves and increased the yield of their grain so they could ply him with this bribery. He wouldn’t eat. He would not please anyone this feast day. But he must, and so he circled the room.
For the first time in his reign, he considered flight: to leave the temple where he’d spent his interminable adult life, to leave Rhyman and responsibility. He could find Ahr and spirit her away; he—his plans deflated as he realized how little he knew of the world. How did one find a citizen in Rhyman? How did such people live? He could conjure goods for survival, but he couldn’t conjure sense, nor Ahr.
Ra sat defeated before the banquet table, ill at the sight of so much food. He didn’t want to be this foolish idol, made indolent on the gluttony of his subjects. He slammed his fists into the piles of food. So they wanted him to gorge himself? Then he would gorge himself. He was good for nothing else.
Ra began to devour the feast with an ugly fury, climbing the overladen table like a hunter cornering its prey. He consumed the flesh meant to replenish some cattleman’s herd, the wine offered that a vintner’s fruit might be more abundant, the breads and cakes provided by the harvesters of wheat, the creams and cheeses from the dairies—all of their blood-soaked bribery. He was sickened on it all, but he wouldn’t allow himself to vomit. He continued to punish himself with the food until he was dizzy and racked with pain.
Ra stumbled from the table and surveyed the wreckage of his plundering. Over the carnage of devoured food, he saw his reflection echoed to infinity in the gilded mirrors surrounding him. He pursued it, pressing against the glass and breathing hotly over his own hot breath fogging back at him. He was a repulsive, golden, bloated monster; a grotesque, painted puppet who couldn’t speak his own mind for obligation to his flatterers. He made ghoulish faces at himself, taunting the devil in the mirror with his face still pressed to the other’s. Had he no obligation to himself? No obligation to Ahr? He pressed his tongue against the tongue and licked over the glass, following the lewd companion that wouldn’t leave him.
Then, with a sudden burst of fury, he slapped his hands against the monster’s hands with a force that shattered the mirror beneath his palms. He ground his palms in the glass and watched the blood ooze through the glittering shards and golden grease. He opened his mouth and shouted at his now-cracked ogre, and the shout became a wild scream that tore through the room and shattered his image in mirror after mirror in a deadly spray of hurtling glass about him, but not touching the one that leered at him.
“Destroy!” he shrieked at himself, but the glass before him remained cracked only by the damage he’d done with his hands. He couldn’t destroy that over which he had no power.
Ra dropped to his knees among the glitter of a thousand needles of glass. The monster in the mirror had begun to drip red, clownish tears from its wavering face. Ahr had only asked one thing of him, the acknowledgment of his child, and he was impotent, after all, to give it to her.
He was neglecting his sacred duty with this indulgent self-pity. He must listen to the wisdom of the Meeric Ages in his head. He must answer a petition. He stared at the golden Meer who had the power to create, but not the power to rule himself. He would answer a petition. He would give the petitioner what she asked for. He lifted his eyes to the eyes of the Meer. “The child is mine,” he said. His words could not be taken back.
Ra touched his fingertips to the dark head of the baby, careful not wake her. As once he’d touched her mother’s fingers to assure him of her reality, he now took the same assurance from this touch. RaNa was real, and she’d come to him in his sepulchral temple. The templars had looked the other way at his indiscretion.
He couldn’t think of Ahr and how she must have mourned at her privation. He would be true now to his station, committing no more offenses of indecency. Though it was as well Ahr didn’t pursue RaNa to the temple, for at the sight of her he would have fallen at her feet and succumbed once more to his interdicted desire.
Ra watched his daughter in this clandestine fashion as she grew from infant to child. Her natural questing and exuberance was curbed and coached from her through the tutelage of her servants and the templars. She learned that she mustn’t conjure toys and comforts at her fancy. RaNa was tamed, and filled with the knowledge and custom of the Meer, and learned to adopt the deportment that was expected of her.
By the age of seven, she was considered old enough to rule Rhyman at her father’s side. The templars were be
side themselves with pride at having not only one Meer in Rhyman, but two. They would be prosperous beyond any province in the Delta, where elsewhere the Meer were waning.
RaNa’s teachers and caretakers were no longer needed; only her handmaiden would remain in attendance on her at the temple. Ra found himself alone with his daughter for the first time in the child’s life. RaNa was polite, and revered him as the Great Meer to whom she was secondary, but didn’t seek his attention as a father. It wasn’t within the vast realm of knowledge with which she’d been instilled.
Ra recalled little of his own parents. In the days when he’d been conceived, Meer of neighboring provinces came together for brief unions to produce a child, and the child was raised in the temple of its mother to rule by her side. His mother was a vague, grand image of strength and splendor. He couldn’t remember her having spoken to him. Ra resolved that this would no longer be the case for his child.
On an early spring morning, he found RaNa meditating by a pool of water. Her small body was a still, marble replica of a child. Ra sat down beside her, and she looked up at him slowly as though she’d been sleeping. She was to bow in his presence, despite her Meerity, but they were both already seated on the ground. RaNa leaned her head and chest over her lap in an attempt at obeisance, but Ra lifted her chin and looked at her. She stared back with mild curiosity. He didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t know what fathers said to daughters. Her eyes were dark, intent eyes—a color between blue and black, indigo ink.
“Do you like the temple?” he blurted.
RaNa was startled at the sound of his voice, her face a canvas reflecting the image of a thousand delicate birds flying up at the sound of footfall. “Like?”