by Tom La Farge
But Drytung had had enough. Fear of fatherhood, shame, jealousy? Well, it couldn’t have been a stable arrangement. He had come to the Sacellary to request this posting back to the Expeditionary Force, and the Sacellary had been happy to grant his wish, since he found he was wanting a man of his own to keep him up to date on the war. What came through Stables had lately grown quite sketchy. The Sacellary suspected some husbanding of intelligence by the Domestic of Stables, who was the Middle Bastard. So Drytung went out on a new motorbike with a case of pigeons for the Signals Bandum. He had been back on leave a couple of times, but now he was on the Hook, the Sacellary had just yesterday unrolled one of his reports from a bird’s leg.
“Oh, yes, he’s there all right,” said Root. “But the last time he came he left this piece with me, to see it through the presses. I think it’s pretty good. An engaging portrait, really, of our beloved Domestic.” As soon as he could free himself from paperwork, the Sacellary had himself driven out to Mole Place and plunged beneath the arcade to Wassillis Mole’s.
But before plunging he paused, as was his custom, to take a few breaths of that air and to look around at the low arches and squat pillars. Pamphlets hung from lines in the muted, strangely restless sunlight that milled around the well of Mole Place, Mole Place, archaic, deepest moment of the City! It is, he thought, even older than the volcano. The Mother of Gardens flowed past beyond the screen of hornbeams at the open end, achieving her last huge bend before turning east to Walwira. On the other side loomed Citadel Hill. To the Sacellary, Mole Place was the navel of the City, the manifest terminus of lines of implication that ran away in time to the old Empire and to other, still earlier worlds. Or rather still earlier cities placed just here, lived in unimaginably by beings who wore their humanity in other fashions than today. Looking around, the Sacellary thought that the name Mole Place, its origin lost and a matter of speculative etymology, was apt, very apt indeed, suggesting a burrowing, tunneling animal world now everywhere deep buried by the volcano’s outpourings but here showing just a trace of itself, just here, where books were sold.
Then he plunged and bought his book; but before being driven back to the chancery, he walked across and sat on a stone bench near a fountain. He liked to sit here and read. At one end of the bench there was a pair of shallow depressions just fitted to a reader’s buttocks and thighs, as if over centuries someone (rather short) had sat there and worn the marble away. He fitted himself in the grooves, stretched out his legs, and opened ”Letter from the Field.”
An hour and a half later he raised his eyes from the final page and stared into the evening sky, his mind still occupied with the image he supposed Drytung must have put there. A file of red soldiers marched through moss that lifted grey-green clubs as high as their armpits… it went on from there. At the end of it was a laughing boy whose cleverness had foiled his enemies. The Sacellary didn’t know whether to take this boy, “Hadu,” as Shandimus, but he was sure of the laughing that rang in his mind’s ear.
Then he heard an answering laugh, a woman’s. She approached briskly in evening gown and jewels and saluted. The Corsator Annag of Stables! He could see her motorbike standing by his phaeton, on whose running board his driver sat smoking. Dim of outline, both man and auto were inexplicably freckled with points of light. And the Corsator was also netted with white lozenges all across her person. The Sacellary could not make sense of what he was seeing. Had Drytung’s strong imagination kicked something loose in his aging, business-haunted brain? He fumbled with his glasses, but the Corsator laughed and pointed.
The Sacellary saw it: an iron standard, and a dozen like it stood around the Place, yes, with a cross arm at the top, from which hung brilliant boxes pierced on every side in a geometry of stars. From their interlacement white rays spread clusters of lights across his sleeves as he raised his arms in wonder.
“By-the-God!” he exclaimed. “It’s the Illumination!”
“Just coming on, sir,” confirmed the Corsator. “Look up there.”
He raised his eyes to the volcano looming above the cornices of Mole Place. Backlit now by the setting sun, its flank was a black stair of irregular steps. But suddenly, above it all, the Palace burst into incandescence, and he caught his breath and was about to cry, “Fire!” when the Corsator bared illuminated teeth in a smile. Looking again, he saw that the marble, the glass, the golden roofs, the very trees on the terraces were blazing with such whiteness that the shadows of yews and quinces were burned, spiky and scalloped, into the façades. And the windows went blind in their shining. Then, below the Palace, building after building leapt out in a spectacle of sculptured forms, less brilliant than the Palace but marvels still of gold refulgence and dark amber shadow. The light flowed down the slope of the volcano in rivers that followed the thoroughfares that had till yesterday been runnels of red clay, lacerated ravines echoing with the shrieks of machines and men. A gold haze gathered above the rooflines. Beyond the hornbeams the Mother of Gardens sparkled by night for the very first time.
“Come along, now, sir,” said Annag, reaching a hand to draw him to his feet. “It’s time you changed for dinner! We’re dining, you and I and the Megas Kyr, with Kyr Sevene!”
The Sacellary shook his head, still puzzled with poetry and change; then he remembered Sevene. And then understood: “Sevene! He’s in charge of the electrification! Why, has he planned the power to come on just in time to light his dinner party? What will the Despot say!”
“He’s sending the Despina to the party!” laughed the Corsator as she led him to his phaeton. “You’ll notice, sir, that the Palace is lit brightest.”
He looked up again at its spires and domes, gold and alabaster volumes on the volcano’s highest shoulder. “Oh,” he said, “yes”; but as he climbed inside, he thought, But Mole Place came on first!
14.
At the Kitchen Door
At about the time that Root was leaning on his stick in the Sacellary’s office, eye cocked at the glass filling with what he hoped would be that special vintage, ’Nna was standing in the doorway of the kitchen at Sevene’s, looking out into the lane. The palace behind her had been transformed in the months she had worked there. It was now, as they said, “a work of art”; but the lane was as filthy as ever. Claws and shells, peelings and parings, carcasses, feathers, grease mounded in a midden. Foul puddles spread where the offal ended. Yet the lane was a thoroughfare between the market and a populous neighborhood. On market day, which it was, traffic was nearly continuous. Women bent under baskets, children scampered with a handful of eggs or pouch of tea, men led donkeys with bulging panniers, edging past the mounds where paupers dug. As ’Nna watched, a passing ass relaxed its sphincter, and two girls leapt aside, snatching up the hems of their ragged skirts, and shrilly cursed the animal’s member. It responded by growing to full length and wagging obscenely as it passed. They spat and then furtively touched themselves beneath their skirts.
’Nna touched her breasts. They were sore nearly to the armpits. She had nursed the twins before coming to work, but she never had milk enough for two. She’d left them fretful in the care of a girl she’d known in the army, cashiered for disease; she supposed by now they’d be sucking a rag while her friend plied her trade. But soon she’d get money from Sevene. She and Root would take a better room in the Fondooq, that vast decaying flophouse that had once been a palace like this, under the Empire.
Labbèd, one of Sevene’s slaves, came running down the lane with a large turkey struggling under each arm, and at the same moment the roasting cook, Lhaqq, burst from the doorway, shouldering ’Nna out of the way. He prodded each of the birds while they gobbled. Then Labbèd held them upside down, pinning them with his elbows, while Lhaqq drew a broad knife and cut their throats. The blood splashed and welled around the slave’s feet. A child racing through the puddle spattered red on the wall of the lane. When the fowl had ceased to jerk, the two men took them in to pluck.
’Nna was wai
ting for some ingredients she had sent to market for. Her charge was the sauces. She “painted the dish,” as they said, using strong colors and textures to make each platter an emblem of the host’s power and taste, a compliment to the guests. The guests tonight were Court. The Despina. The Megas Kyr and his mistress. The Sacellary and other princes would be on hand to show Sevene attention at the feast of First Illumination. The slaves she’d sent out had better bring her the mountain honey she’d asked for, sea salt and sweet vinegar, poppy juice, squid ink, saffron pistils. The other, less conventional ingredients for her sauces she had brought down with her from her garden at the farmhouse. She could barely keep her babies fed, but Sevene’s guests would leave tonight with their veins singing, membranes moist, and fancies vivid.
She’d see her designs again, their colors and consistencies, when she returned to the vast dim kitchen and her array of little pots and pans laid out on the tiles beside the braziers reserved to her use. But now the lane was all that she could see, a cloaca that filled her mind with dread. Nothing there was dead or innocent. The dirty, hungry girl dancing in the dust, whose torn shirt showed any passing man the first swelling of a breast; the red dust in the sun’s rays, the smell of spoiling meat, the ram’s split skull on the midden’s peak, blank eggshell thrusting from the orbit of its eye; all these bespoke the world’s blindest, meanest urges, which, to create special dishes for the rich, she must hunt and harness. But she must also escape them. Could that be done?
’Nna thought of her mother. The lane was in Lhool’s world, the world of ’Nna’s childhood. Behind ’Nna, Sevene’s house spread the splendor of its rooms, richer and merrier the farther you went from the lane. ’Nna had looked when no one saw her looking. She had never seen such rooms. Quiet, brilliant, balancing colors, volumes, light and shade, the curved and the straight, everything in those rooms was inert, she knew, and made of the same inert stuff, money. But the idea of them was lively, various in the thinking they suggested, the delights they proposed. One could ride attention and purpose in any direction in rooms like those. They added to life and fed it. Standing at the kitchen door, ’Nna looked at her thin shadow cross the puddle of blood. The power was there in the lane to be hunted, the rooms were only its signs.
A slave sauntered up with a full basket on her head. While ’Nna scolded her laziness and verified the basket’s contents and the money spent, rituals of relative mastery, she noted two women, robed and scarfed, who had come up behind the slave and waited now by the door. “Who are they?” ’Nna muttered, twitching her chin. The slave shrugged. “Asking for you.” One was young and very fair, the other harder to read. The pain in the young one’s eyes was fresh, the older one’s showed only dark intelligence. She met ’Nna’s gaze only briefly but then sharp, knowing, even amused. I have summoned Lhool, ’Nna thought and stiffened. “What have you brought me?” she asked, while the younger stared, then lowered her eyes. “I bring you her,” said the older woman. “Will you step inside,” ’Nna asked after a pause. The nasal singsong, the r’s breaking from deep in a coarse, moist gullet, chimed with her memory of Lhool. I expelled the Word, she thought, but the woman still lives.
She sat them on stools and made tea. She put in a little sheeba, and in place of the ordinary mint she packed the pot with fliyyo, good for colds and sore throats. After her first sip the older one gave her a look. She knew, who better? ’Nna felt her own skin cool, and she drank her tea. She looked from one to the other, and something hardened in her.
“You are related?” she asked. The older woman, smiling, shook her head. The girl kept her eyes downcast and waited. Rough weather had never touched that skin, or only lately. Then the older one stretched out a lean hand and, eyes on ’Nna’s, twitched open the girl’s robe and tugged it down to her elbows. Dazzling skin, large firm breasts — with thumb and finger the brown hand girdled a nipple and ungently expressed milk, a copious welling, then did the same on the other side.
“Where is your baby?” asked ’Nna. The girl raised her eyes. “Dead,” she answered in a voice like heavy rough silk. The old woman leaned and opened ’Nna’s robe. “You have two babies, Kyra, two little hungry ones,” and she flicked ’Nna’s sore breasts. “This one has milk enough, as you can see.”
“Is this what you offer me?” ’Nna asked the girl. She nodded. Then ’Nna set down her glass, leaned, and with as little warning opened the older woman’s robe. There, there were the breasts of a witch, supple, sound, lustrous tawny, daily oiled, the blood inside them swift and hot, the skin between them fragrant and smooth, though the fingers were whorled about the knuckles.
In that other life, before she’d first bled, ’Nna had watched her mother oil her breasts and scorch hair from her groin in anticipation of regimental payday. ’Nna had stood by, measuring powders, grinding and mixing herbs in unguents that those hands had spread in circles, in pastes those fingers, had worked into belly-skin till it was bald as her own. She could remember a face, a strong nose and pupils glittering within forms of eyes traced in black kohl, as now striking and dodging.
’Nna must strike first. “I hire you both,” she declared, and closed the older woman’s robe, motioning to the younger to cover herself. She refilled their glasses and named the sum of their wages. “You accept?” They nodded and drank. ’Nna said, “I will give you names. Your name is Lhool,” she said to the older, who bowed. “You we’ll call Piptiyya.” ’Nna took the name from a word that Root used often in talking about plays. “My babies will grow on your milk and call you Umm’ Piptiyya.” The girl ducked her head. ’Nna rose and they all stood, rearranging their garments in silence. “This is the address,” ’Nna then began, but Lhool shook her head and smiled. “Very well. Then here is money. Rent yourselves the room next to mine and buy food. Feed my babies at once, Umm’ Piptiyya, if they’re awake,” she instructed. “Now go.” They went back out into the lane.
’Nna emptied the basket and set to work, grinding herbs and mixing pastes, dissolving crystals in vinegar, spooning honey, and as she worked, almost unaware of what her hands were doing, she considered the shape of her own story, into which she had just introduced two new characters and named them. She wished to be the author of her story. She had watched Drytung struggling to tame his life in words, up at the farmhouse, before he threw it all up and left for the field. Root’s writing ranged far beyond his own life, but he was the master of the characters he had filled it with and breathed life into, gradually and painfully. Now he had turned to the easier, costlier task of making a theater where his characters could play.
Her story, ’Nna began to see (still chopping, kneading, pinching, stirring, deglazing, drizzling, whisking) might take a form that could occupy a room as delightful as one of Sevene’s, in an unbroken house. Two things she’d have to do, two contrary things: become a figure in Root’s theater and occupy the life-space he could design that would bring her visible and let her send out her voice, her own word, just as she had dreamed at the Wildlife Refuge. The other, master Lhool and Umm’ Piptiyya as the storyteller commands her characters. Diminish Lhool in particular to a limited role in ’Nna’s history, while Piptiyya freed her from her children.
’Nna loved her children, but they were a sign of her shame, of just the shame she had counted on the army to pull her out of, just the shame that Lhool would push her back into, if she let her, and just the shame that Shandimus, her commander and her lover, had proclaimed as a fate she could in no way alter. Who but a cunt, a discharged cunt, would bear twin bastards, not knowing which of her current lovers was the father? Bastards she could not feed but had to leave with a sister-cunt? They must go back to the farmhouse with Umm’ Piptiyya.
She must prove Shandimus a liar. She had not that history he made up for her. She meant to rise, through cooking, through acting, any way she could find she would use to enter the delightful rooms as rightful occupant and leave the lane behind. Shandimus too meant to rise, in the City, in the Court. Well, what coul
d she do about that. Not thwart him—aid him! As she gained influence, use it to promote the fortunes of Shandimus, let him see his dreams grow nearer and realer. What would happen then? Root had told her stories from the old plays that explain what happens to fortunes at their peak. Perhaps she might enlist Shandimus into one of those plays.
So ’Nna worked detail into her plans and her dishes, moving from one to the other and back, while sauces and glazes assumed their true color, consistency, fragrance, savor. Then she moved everything to a larger table to join her work to that of the other cooks. Under her direction now they carved and shaved and pounded, ladled and brushed and spread. Even ’Nna’s rivals murmured in wonder as they licked a little residue from the spoon and watched the dishes form. The dim kitchen echoing their murmurs became a lane for forces and spirits, but turned away from poverty, away from abuse and death, toward rich delight. It became, for as long as a cloud takes to pass across the sun’s face, a room in a healthy world.
Kyr Sevene walked in, four slaves following. “It’s dark in here,” he called out gaily. “Let’s have a little light!” The slaves were carrying iron poles as high as a man, as thick as a sapling. Each branched at the base in a tripod and blossomed at the crest in a cluster of glass flowers. A vine wrapped the trunk of each, but when the slaves had set the strange trees down, they unwound these vines, which were made of black rubber, and ran them to the holes in the tiled floor that all had noticed but none explained. The glass flowers could be turned; the Kyr set the slaves to aiming them at the table where the feast was arrayed. Then he waved the cooks away from it. He pulled out a ticking watch and studied it. The room grew darker still. The Kyr nodded.
Then everyone gasped; some screamed; not ’Nna, she had known those colors were there, though eyes till now had caught no more than hints. But in fancy she had seen them, and now they were revealed in floods of light and fancy had tipped into truth. On every platter streams of sky and fire. Glossy brown stretched over the swelling of a pasty. Sunsets swirled in a soup, a jewel-casket of cut fruits refracted topaz, garnet, emerald glints ringed by ice-magpies mantled in liquid silver. You saw your gawking mirrored in their wings as they bent to peck at the jewels. In the middle of all rose a mountain, a volcano stark and black whose cone gave off a steam of pigeon-flesh, almonds, raisins, cinnamon and honey.