Salt, Sand, and Blood

by MarQuese Liddle

  What would Father think of me working in a place like this? Adam mused at the price of the pastor’s disappointment. He didn’t even know how much a demidrake was or how many he’d need or if there was an apothecary who sold the medicine that could treat Magdalynn. Again, he scanned the ledger and its mysterious script and felt as though he was about to make a deal with the Devil. “I don’t know,” he answered; and so Hassan sweetened the deal: three demidrakes, a basket of bread, and a private room for the girl to stay in while the pastor’s son served—if he signed right then. The Messah froze, quill in hand. He wanted to trust the Tsaazaari merchant. Hassan had only been kind to him, warm and honest, and there were the tapestries walling of his office—Adam began to wonder if they weren’t a holy omen. “Hallowed are those who walk amongst the dark, in the shadow of doubt, and pass through its valley.” He scratched his name onto the ledger and felt a weight lift off his soul.

  Not long after, a pack of servants were summoned and given instructions in Tsaazaari—to groom him, the Messah was led to believe by a glaring Mistress Ashaya. Her bitterness unnerved him, as did the servant women’s grins as they took Magdalynn to her room and hurried him down to and through the common room, into a special corner of the kitchens where their tools laid shining. They were bottles of oil and ointment and fragrant salts, combs and brushes, sheers, razors, and a polished copper tub the steam from which wafted thick with lavender. Just the scent of it relaxed Adam so that he almost didn’t notice the servants trying to strip off his weatherworn clothes. Almost, but then he felt the prick of their fingernails graze the surface of his skin and flinched. For an instant was returned to the smuggler’s cabin—to jaundiced claws and a wormy grin—then he called his consciousness back from that waking nightmare. Eyes in the present, he sought out an anchor, something to drown his fears in an ocean of experience.

  He looked to the servant women and smiled thinking how any one of them could have been his mother. They were passed their prime, the beginnings of wrinkles showing in the creases of their cheeks and where their bosoms showed behind low collared robes. He must have seemed half a babe to them; his own mother had not been so old when he’d known her. Adam tried to recall the contours of her face, the color of her eyes, the shape of her hair. It was too long ago—he had been too young. Suddenly, it dawned on him.

  He apologized to the women and disrobed on his own, then climbed into the tub pink with sunburn as he was with embarrassment. As he eased into the water, his skin flushed deeper, but beneath the blush he saw something that had eluded him until that moment—that he had become a man grown. His limbs were no longer the reeds they were in Babylon. There was strength in them now, thew and muscle; and on his chin and lip were the buddings of beard, blonde and wispy, yet enough to want a blade. That, the servants gave him, and as the razor skimmed across his face, Adam felt his heart beat braver. He let out a groan of relief. The devil dancing on his back had left him in peace, if only for the moment. And so, beaming, he sat upright in the tub and relished the hands working balm into his blisters, combing his hair and cropping it about his eyebrows and earlobes.

  Too early, it was over. They rushed the Messah out from the tub and rubbed him down with towels and cinnamon oil, shrouded his form in sheer cerulean silk. It was a skirt like he saw the girl servers wear, long and flowing, and with it the servant women laid on his shoulders a featherlight scarf. The pastor’s son chuckled looking over himself. They’ve wrapped me in a singer’s gown! he laughed as he imagined how his friends would react. Adnihilo would never let it go if he found out.

  Somewhere else in the kitchens clattered a platter on a countertop—the prelude to a voice imperious. Adam spun about at her command, saw Mistress Ashaya’s contemptuous face scrutinizing him as he scrutinized the steaming plate of buttered flatbread, seasoned meatballs, and a fist-sized dollop of hummus. The Messah’s stomach rumbled. It must have been loud enough for the mistress to hear, for she paused midsentence before Adam noticed she’d been talking at all. “Are you listening?” Ashaya asked, clicking her tongue. “You didn’t hear a thing, did you? Eat then, if you’re so hungry, but I’m only going to say it once more.”

  “Wait,” begged Adam while gorging himself, “before you start, can the rest of this be brought up to Mags’s room?”

  Ashaya clenched her teeth, her temper fuming, the flush red enough to show through her dark Tsaazaari skin. “I swear, if it weren’t for the law of good King Solomon, I’d have you bound and left out for the Black Beast to swallow.” She uttered some Tsaazaari curse. “Hassan wants me to teach you for the first few hours, before the big spenders arrive tonight. I can’t. I won’t. I have my own work to do, and I’m not letting you ruin my reputation with our wealthiest patron!…What?” she asked, gasping, choking down her frustration as the pastor’s son stared back at her, baffled. Then the mistress continued, “Fine! It’s true! It’s not your fault that Hassan is a shortsighted buffoon. But I have a right to be angry! I’m the one who has to clean up after his disasters, so I don’t need you going and making more work.” Adam nodded, and Ashaya clicked her tongue. “Lying Messah, you understand nothing. Look at you, gawking there like a newborn child. You’re a server now. Learn how to smile and to remember the orders to tell the cooks. It’s not difficult. Keep their cups full. Sit with them, sit on them, whatever they ask of you. Let no one leave unhappy. Do you understand now?”

  The Messah nodded again, understanding only that he was being thrown to the wolves as the mistress rushed him barefoot from the kitchens and into the common room. The human-maze chamber had transformed from when he left it last. The music was dead, the odors stagnant, the tables and cushions vacant aside from a few wasted parties and the artifacts left from previous revelers. It was an excavation, Adam surveyed, by young treasure hunters clad in cerulean blue, of cups and bowls, of plates and bottles. This, he could do. This, his training in the parish of Babylon had prepared him for—countless hours of toil the mornings after holyday feasts, sweeping the sanctuary, scouring the trenchers and scrubbing the plates, rearranging the great tables. This was nothing compared to his father’s chores, thought the pastor’s son as he joined in with the rest of the servers; and for the first hour, all was well.

  Then came the encroach of evening, and with the descent of the desert sun fell hordes of hedonic prospectors. They flooded the doors like a contingent of soldiers, regular and organized, as if every patron recognized his place and her favorite server. The same could be said for the workers as well. Their movements, their expressions, their disdainful glances toward Adam all spelled the same message—that this was their domain, that he was an invader—and as the room became saturated with foreign blood ordering foreign fare in foreign tongues, the Messah became suddenly aware that he was the foreign one—and he wasn’t the only soul to notice.

  Out of the corner of his eye, in a corner of the common room sectioned off by screens and screened in smoke, he caught a salacious eye peaking and noticed it noticing him, a sinful grin on its master’s lips. Not a second passed before she called to him, a raspy, “Messah!” to which he answered, frightened and eager to receive his instruction. Yet he didn’t. The four patrons—two grizzled Tsaazaari men, fat and sweaty in Mephistine silks, and their respective women, the sinful grinner with black lips, crown braids, and crow’s-feet, and her Gautaman friend painted pale as a doll whose hair hung long and dark as jet—needed nothing from him. Their table was already overflowed by whole flagons of sweet-scented red and pungent rice wine, and a dish for each reveler: skewered bits of lamb and fowl, cuts of beef wrapped in grape leaves, white custard and cucumber, and a big bowl of orange curried rice.

  “Looks like Hassan’s finally bought himself a golden cock,” coughed one of the men with a pipe in his mouth. His three companions laughed. Adam blushed, and the Tsaazaari woman commented,

  “Forgive my husband. He’s jealous because his Hibernis girl quit, so now he’s stuck clutching his manhood like an Iisah virgin.” T
here was another round of guffaws, the husband excluded. Then the woman spoke again, “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. A year, I think.”

  “Waiting for me?” the Messah blurted.

  She smiled, her deep brown eyes sinking into a shadowy lining. “Sit down. I’ll tell you all about it.” As directed, the pastor’s son sat where the woman patted a cushion between her and the Gautaman, and no later than he did, the other men stood and muttered something in Tsaazaari. The women replied likewise, waving happily to their men as they climbed the open stairwell, the pains of loneliness lingering in the dark woman’s fingertips—till she turned her attention back to Adam.

  Sweat gathered at the Messah’s palms. He felt his breath shorten, his heart jump at the slightest touch on his sunburnt shoulders against the women either side of him. “Shall I go and fetch more wine?” he spoke, obtusely. Only after did he look and see that the flagons were nearly full. “I mean, are you want for anything? Or—”

  “What’s your name, Messah?”

  Adam opened his mouth, got as far as “My,” when a pair of bare legs wound around his waist. He froze. The Gautaman woman braced herself behind him, draping her hair over his shoulders, placing her face next to his. Pressed against him, she felt like nothing but bones under her robe—like a revenant of the woman whose heart he had pierced in the dark of Venicci’s cabin.

  “Michael?” guessed the Tsaazaari woman before introducing herself. “I am Yasmine. And I see you’ve met Raharu—or should I say she’s met you?” The Gautaman woman giggled as Yasmine continued, asking the Messah where he was from. “God’s Grasp? or maybe Pareo?”

  “Caethborough, a small village southeast of Castle Aestas,” he answered, excited and terrified. This was not a bath with old women. The naked toes playing about his thighs were supple, the nails sharp. They grabbed and pinched at his sheer silk skirt. He could feel himself rise beneath the thin fabric and knew that they could see it too, that he was a sinner just like them. Yet the feeling seemed deeper, of a breadth and depth beyond mere desire, like something lurking below the surface—a shadowed serpent waiting to emerge. “And my name is Adam, not Michael. I was born in Nuw Gard, but most my life I grew up in Babylon. My father was the pastor there.”

  Yasmine gasped, “You came here all the way from Iisah ’s sister tribe? How? And why come to Najmah Janoob? What could a Messah want so badly to risk the Black Beast?” Her questions were endless, but Adam answered as best that he could. “It’s a long story,” he warned them, pouring cups of wine for himself and Yasmine, lighting her hashish pipe while Raharu warmed an opium lamp. It was hours later by the time he finished. Their flagons were empty, their pipes cold. Raharu slept curled like a cat on her cushion while Yasmine sat awake, alert, and enraptured, leaning forward as to catch every word of the Messah’s journey. As he finished, she dabbed at the inky black tears on her cheeks and said, “And now you’re here, a believer in a brothel half a world away from home. All for her, for this Magdalynn.”

  Adam nodded, his head light from hashish fumes. “Yes. It’s part of His plan. I don’t understand how it fits together, but I know He wants me to get Mags back to her family. These things that happen along the way, they’re too much to be a coincidence. He must be testing me, making sure I’m ready for…something. Something big, bigger than me, bigger than the church. It’s got to be as big the world. I think the walls around the Bridge of Babylon are truly coming down, and what happens after…I’ll get to see Father again, and my mother, and the whole congregation.”

  “I hope that’s true,” replied Yasmine, retrieving a small pile of silver from her purse and pressing it into Adam hands. A dozen thick Mephistine coins. “And I hope you can find the medicine for Magdalynn. You’ll be a good man for her, I know. I’d loved to have you when I was her age. And who knows? Maybe you’ll come back tomorrow and make me young again, if just for an hour.”

  Slowed by a mixture of innocence and hashish smoke, it took a moment for the Messah to process her suggestion, and he never fully understood. For on the cusp of comprehension, the boom of authority cut through the music and clamor and conversation. The wrath of the mistress. She jerked aside one of the privacy screens and would have screamed had she not seen Yasmine sitting with him. But that which did not escape her mouth showed full in her throat, blood vessels bulging, tendons taught as rope ready to snap under the pressure building flush in her face. “There you are,” she seethed quietly. Her demeanor softened as she addressed Yasmine, then snapped hard like the crack of a whip. “Come here, quickly, now Messah. You’ve ruined enough of the good lady’s time.”

  “Hardly,” replied Yasmine, winking to Adam as the mistress extracted him, Ashaya whispering a hundred bitter curses while dragging Adam into the kitchens.

  Out of view of the customers, she laid into him, spraying in his face, “How dare you! You did not say the girl has the Black Devil! And now she shows! If it spreads, the whole house will need to be burned. You must go!” She thrust his sword, his ragged clothes and a tiny purse into his chest—dropped them for him to catch. “There, your payment, double for broken contract as is the law of good Solomon. I will tell Hassan. Now you go! Get the girl and go, and tell no one you were here.” She muttered under her breath in Tsaazaari. Adam thought he heard Yasmine’s name, but he could not even keep up with what the mistress was telling him.

  “You’re throwing us out?” he asked, half a slur, his tongue numbed from the wine. Mistress Ashaya’s answer was a frustrated groan and two hands hitting, shoving, slapping, and scratching to get him moving. And he was off, one minute climbing the stairs, the next staring out into the Tsaazaar’s utter darkness, the only light from the hostel windows, the only warmth from the bundle of skin and bones in his arms. And the mistress was right. The Devil had finally revealed himself in the tips of Magdalynn’s fingers and toes, and her nose and lips. They’d blackened like the desert night. There was not much time.

  Adam donned his worn linens and strapped on his sword. Money in hand, the girl cradled in his arms, he ventured forth into the darkness between pools of light from the lanterns within the warehouse and about the barracks and in the hands of the guard—a pair of watchmen patrolling. They seemed amiable as Adam approached, till they were close enough to see Magdalynn and rebuke them like cockroaches. They spat guttural tones, brandishing their swords, they routed the two out of the center street and into the labyrinth of pitch dark pavilions. There was a howling from the north like that of a wolf. The moon broke through. The Messah’s eyes adjusted to the outlines of tents, their flaps tied shut, the snores of the dwellers like the chirping of locusts. Torment. The pastor’s son still had the sheer scarf and skirt, so he wrapped up the girl and wandered until he came across another patrolman. An hour passed, another howl from the north. Not a single soul of the guard to be found. He could see the twin towers—which set, he didn’t know—but it was his only sense of direction. So that’s the way he went, and he stumbled upon the west end of the outpost where the pavilions took on an aspect of dark.

  Hand-shaped amulets hung at every door flap, staring at him with their lifeless glass eyes; and beside them hung glowing bottles painted with the face a crowned, bearded man: King Solomon, and in his mouth, behind the glass, squirmed luminescent worms. Their wriggling made the Messah’s wine-belly sick, but they were not the worst of it. The tents themselves wreaked of urine, spice, animals, and decay—and that was those whose flaps were closed. There was one among the pavilions which stood agape. It sighed with the wind, its breath of sweaty cloth and acrid pitch. In its threshold, a tattered hag, faceless and formless under hair and dirty smock. She glared at him evilly, fanning herself with a palm of woven grass.

  “The Messah has come,” the old woman grunted, almost unintelligible, so thick was her accent. “It is told, the Messah will come.”

  Adam gushed at once, “You speak Messaii? Help me, please. My friend is sick, she needs medicine!”

  “Come, then.” u
ttered the hag as she retreated inside her tent. The pastor’s son followed from the desert cool into a miserable swelter, a dim and dingy room illumed by a single lamp—the glint of half a hundred jars flickering in reflection. Their contents: blood-red roots, dried grasses, the shrunken heads of cats and hounds, powdered elephant tusks, human hands and teeth and eyes, wilted petals, and hashish mounds. At the center sat the hag glowering with malevolence, her body skeletal in the light, her skin like ancient parchment. From her toothless maw she hawked a wad of herbs into a brass coffer.

  “You’re an apothecary, right?” Adam blurted. His heart swelled, “I didn’t know if—can you make the medicine? Magdalynn, my friend, she’s sick.”

  The old woman snorted. “It is too late for medicine. I smell death, the Black Devil,” rapped the syllables like the skittering of a spider or the scurrying of rat feet on the sheets of a sleeping child.

  The Messah shuddered and uncovered the girl to make sure she was still breathing. She was, but only faintly, and bulges were forming under her arms and on her thighs. And the hag did not lie, the girl was swathed in the rank of decay. Adam covered her again, unwanting to see, then he begged the old woman—noticed her eying his purse. “Please, I’ll pay whatever you want. Is there anything you can do?”

  Blood red gums grinned at him. “Yes, but the cost is much.”

  “Anything.”

  “Fifty,” the hag said.

  Adam counted out his coin, uncertain how much what he had was worth. “Fifty demidrakes?” he asked.

  “No, stupid Messah. Fifty drakes. Three hundred demidrakes.”

  “Three hundred,” he repeated, unwilling to believe his ears. If his count was correct, between Hassan’s payment and what he got from Yasmine, he had just more than a quarter but only one day to make up the rest. So he showed her the contents of his purse. “This is all I have.”