She had taken the hem of her shawl and was daubing at her eyes with it. “No, I’m through. I don’t know why it happened.” Her words were still muffled. As much as she took consolation from him, she wished that he would leave her time alone, until her thoughts were clearer. She wanted to pause before her shrine to the elephant-headed Ghanesh and ask his aid in clarifying her thoughts.
Saint-Germain released her. “I will go to my laboratory. If you should decide you want to see me, my servant will bring me word of it.”
“Your servant? How?”
He looked down at her. “Send word to your slaves that you wish for certain books of poetry, ones that you do not have readily to hand. Rogerio spends part of every evening in their quarters, and tonight I promise you he will be there until midnight. If you make such a request, he will hear it and understand. And if you should prefer that I keep away…”—he shrugged sadly—“I would prefer to be with you, but not against your will.”
“Rachura, the Brahmin who serves my brother, would tell you that will itself is only another manifestation of Maya, and that all is nothing but the turning of the Wheel.” When had she turned away from the great teaching? she asked herself. Her brother had said that she was setting her will above that of her family when she came to live in this house. Rachura predicted then that she would not stay long in such isolation, but time had proved him wrong. There had been a scholar from Aleppo who had visited her once and read to her from the various scriptures and commentaries of the West as well as from Islamic texts. That visit had been brief and for some months thereafter Padmiri had had to endure her brother’s displeasure.
Saint-Germain could see that her thoughts were drifting, and so he waited before he spoke again. “It may be only the turning of the Wheel, but there are times you must choose. If the choice is nothing but illusion, does it matter? You will still have to decide. Rachura deplores the successes of the Sultan Shams-ud-din Iletmish, and claims that the encroachment of his forces insults the gods. If there is only the Wheel, how may the gods be insulted?” His voice was kind, and his dark, compelling eyes were warm. “Padmiri, Padmiri, do as you wish to do.”
Her laughter was not easy to hear. “How simple it sounds,” she said to him, moving a few steps away. “No, no, don’t argue with me. Let me decide for myself. If you speak again…”
Saint-Germain bowed slightly, watching her with concern. He had paid the price of delitescence too often to wish a further alienation on her, and he was aware that he could use all his compelling strength to dismiss her uncertainties—yet that seemed to be an unconscionable intrusion. All her life, Padmiri had been cheated of her will. Any coercion he used would tarnish him in her eyes, and ultimately poison their association. His eyes did not leave her as she reached the end of the terrace where the musicians had been and looked back at him.
“Let me have time to myself, Saint-Germain,” she said. “I will let you know my decision.” She put her hand on the latch of the nearest door. “I will try not to keep you waiting too long.”
Saint-Germain neither moved nor spoke, but his dark eyes held hers with such intensity that it seemed he touched her.
Padmiri had barely stepped into the terrace room and closed the door when Bhatin appeared beside her. She was startled to see him and might have demanded what he was doing there when he abased himself and spoke.
“When the musicians came in and you did not, there were those of us who were concerned. I was coming to see if you required my aid, mistress. There is danger attendant on that foreigner. The scorpions show that this is true.” He stood up, his oddly youthful face impassive.
“Yes, the scorpions,” Padmiri said, and could not entirely suppress a grue. No one had been able to explain the scorpions, and Saint-Germain had asked her that an issue not be made of it. She was not convinced that she would not be wise to beat the truth out of her slaves, and only the certainty that Saint-Germain would condemn such tactics prevented her from ordering a general flogging.
“He should be sent away, mistress,” Bhatin murmured, his eyes respectfully averted.
Until a moment before Padmiri had thought that this might be the best course, but now she said, “He has been commended to me as a guest by my brother, the Rajah. He is a man of wide learning and experience. As it is unlikely that I will be allowed to travel, I am determined to listen to all he tells me of other lands.” She rarely used her most regal manner, but she did now. Her head was high and her dark eyes glittered. “If I should hear of any insolence offered to him, it will be the worse for you and the rest of this household.”
Bhatin crossed his hands on his breast. “It is your right to do so, mistress. We are yours to do with as you see fit.” It was true: they both knew it, but he had never acknowledged this aloud.
“Yes,” she declared. “Because I live in seclusion, I am sometimes lax. But I have not forgotten my rights, Bhatin.” The warning was clear, and she used it to end their speech. She went past him into the hall that led to her quarters, and did not look back to see whether or not Bhatin followed her.
It was almost midnight when she sent word to the slaves’ quarters that she wanted the volumes of Bengali philosophical rhymes. She had sat by herself in the intervening hours, mustering arguments for and against seeing Saint-Germain. In the end, it was not her intellect but her isolation that won.
Saint-Germain came into her room through a tall window some two stories above the ground: he was a shape, a darkness against the stars, and then he stepped into the soft light of the oil lamps and became himself again. “I had almost lost hope,” he said to Padmiri as he approached her.
She stopped him with a gesture. “And I.” As befitted her rank, she wore a robe of thin muslin that did not provide enough warmth on this chill night. Her long hair was plaited and bound up with strands of silken cord. “I have been pondering,” she went on, indicating that he should be seated. “I was remembering my mother and her immolation, and I have realized that I have followed her example, which was what I wanted least to do.”
“Padmiri, you need not—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“Rather than give myself to a husband and the anonymity of a wife’s estate, I have banished myself and surrendered to scholarship what I might have given to children. There is no escape from the turning of the Wheel, but complete extinguishing of self. Those who have taken the teachings of Buddha say that they relinquish all desire, including the desire to be free of desire, and then they are one with the god. I can’t do that. How much I have lost, thinking that I gained!” Her hands covered her face but she did not weep.
Saint-Germain rose and went to her. “Scholarship is not the same thing as a funeral pyre.” One small hand pressed her to him, the other loosened the silk that held her hair so that the long plaits fell down her back, reaching the top of her hip.
“I am nothing. I am less than my eunuch Bhatin!” Her hands dug fiercely into his shoulders and she trembled as she spoke.
“No, Padmiri, no.” The scent of her perfumed hair was in his nostrils, and the fragrance of her flesh.
“What have I? What?” She looked up at him and her face was tragic.
“Life, Padmiri.”
She saw the ancient despair in his eyes and could not mock it. Life seemed paltry to her, and without meaning, but she was unable to say so with those penetrating dark eyes on her. Slowly her hands relaxed and dropped to her sides. To fill the silence, she said, “I’m … distraught.”
His lips brushed her brow. “Be calm, cherished one. Do not torment yourself for this.” He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them, the backs and then the palms.
Within her, a welcome, familiar warmth ignited, filling her with a restless lassitude. She admitted, if only to herself, that she had made her decision when she sent for the books, and these last protestations were nothing more than the deprecatory lessons she had been taught all through her life. And compared to the joy his first touch promised her, they were nothi
ng. “Wait, Saint-Germain,” she murmured, then chuckled wistfully. “When I was younger, it did not matter where I loved, but now, I would prefer the comfort of my bed.” She moved back a few steps and reached to draw the curtains around her low bed aside.
Saint-Germain’s hand fell over hers, and he held the curtains parted for her. He waited until she had knelt on the blankets before stepping into the tentlike enclosure of the bed and kneeling beside Padmiri, not quite touching her.
“I’m cold,” she said, her hands chafing her bare arms, though she knew it was not the frosty night that brought the frisson to her skin. “Warm me…” Her holy books had advised her that this was a night to kiss and fondle the right side of the body, and to adorn the flank of the beloved with patterns of bites like passing clouds, to lie still with legs entwined like climbing plants. Padmiri’s last two lovers had been punctilious in observing these dicta, but Saint-Germain was not constrained by such instructions. His hands, light and fondly persuasive, were sliding lightly over the thin fabric of her robe, and the heat they brought came from within her.
As he moved on his knees, Saint-Germain was able to lift the edge of the bedcover and draw it up. “Lie back, Padmiri,” he whispered, and as she bent, he lifted her robe from her, then lay beside her in the sweet-scented gloom.
The bedcover was smooth on her skin, but his hands and lips fired her with the onset of her passion. His loosely curling dark hair brushed her breasts, her abdomen. Padmiri’s breath came faster and once she made a soft sound like the cry of a night bird. There had never been instructions in scripture for the riot in her soul—how she wanted to touch him, show him the full extent of her gratitude. But he was clothed. A little wildly, she wondered how much hair grew on his body, and where? Were his nipples taut as hers? He was male: surely he must want to have her fingers ready for him … for what? For the demands her flesh was eager to answer? Then the questions were gone and there was only the reality of his mouth and his seeking hands.
The bedcovers trembled and surged and once the hangings billowed as Padmiri flung her head back, caught now in a rising tide that consumed her with rapture. Perhaps she called his name when her amazingly sustained release began, and perhaps it was that she was no longer aware of anything but him and her ecstasy.
A letter from Mei Hsu-Mo to Nai Yung-Ya and the Nestorian Christian Church of Lan-Chow. The ship carrying this letter and a cargo of pepper and cotton sank in a squall six days out of port.
In the fortnight of the Bright Frosts, though I have not seen such here, near the end of the Year of the Tiger, the Fifteenth Year of the Sixty-fifth Cycle, the one thousand two hundred eighteenth year of Our Lord, to the Pope Nai Yung-Ya and the congregation of Lan-Chow.
I have been in Pu-Na for some weeks now, and have made contact with a trader from the city he calls Constantinople, which we know as Ki-Sz’-Da-Ni. He speaks a little of the language of Pu-Na, and I have learned it a little, so we have been able to discuss a few matters. This man, who is called Hemedoris, has said that he might be able to provide passage to Egypt, and from there I would be able to find my way to his home, even as he will. I am not eager to travel with this man, for though he claims to be a Christian, he has neither wives nor concubines, as a good Christian should, but cohabits with the lowest prostitutes, which he says is a sin and which he says that he confesses on his return to Christian countries so that he may be absolved. It is as we have been told, I am discovering, and the Christians in the West have chosen quite a different path, if this man is any example, though I most earnestly pray he is not.
There have been rumors again about the predations of the Mongols. Everywhere one hears of this atrocity and that disaster. May God preserve you from them! I do not know how it may be possible for these appalling men to be in China one day and in Persia the next, but apparently this has happened. Even the sailors I have spoken with fear them and say that they believe it is only a matter of time before the Mongols will ride their demon horses over the sea to plunder ships on the water. This may yet come to pass, though we have been taught that it is only those versed in the ways of God who may stand on the waters and not be wet.
I was fortunate in my companion on the road, a man of some years, and a distinguished Buddhist teacher. We spoke a great deal of our faiths and I am certain that each of us was well-pleased by the understanding we have gained. I see that it is possible for those who follow the teaching of Siddhartha to be in accord with good Christians on many important matters. He, I must tell you, has warned me of this Hemedoris, for he has heard of those who seize upon travelers and sell them into slavery. It would be an easy thing for this Hemedoris to do, as I am so far from home and there are none to guide me, or who await me at the end of my journey. I must assure you that I am taking his advice very much to heart, for it would not please me to have this venture end so poorly. I have also explained to Hemedoris that I am not willing to pay him with my body, however much he may agree to do for me if I should accept his bargains. Be assured that I will take no pleasure with this person, as that would be insulting to this mission and our faith.
It is fairly dry at this time, the rains coming through the summer. Here it is damp, and when my brother died, the air was steaming, so hot and wet it had become. There are fresh breezes off the sea, which take away some of the particular scent of this place. I have been told that in the north it is often very cold and the worst of the rains are spent before they reach the mountains, so that this enveloping heat touches them less. I did not think that I could learn to long for the sight of snow, but so it is. Humble frost would be a delightful thing to me this morning, for although we are near the dark of the year, yet there is a fruit tree bending over the roof of this inn, and I can hear birds singing and chattering nearby.
Sadly, the money which was provided us, and which seemed so lavish an amount when we set out, is now gone, and I am somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. I have done a little fine needlework for the innkeeper, and he is willing to pay me for this and supply me with my passage money when I leave here, but what I will do after that, I have not yet considered. I have prayed for guidance and for fortitude, and there is comfort in prayer, though, as yet, no solution. I have still two pendants of my brother’s which I know could be sold for a considerable sum, but I am loath to part with them. It would be dishonorable to treat his things in so shabby a way. If there is absolutely no other recourse but prostitution, then I will sell the pendants, and offer recompense to his memory when I arrive in Constantinople, at the great church there.
It is not my intention to make a claim upon the congregation, but if it should happen that it must be done, I will send you word and ask for what assistance you may provide. Doubtless, the distances being now so great, it will be longer than a year before any aid might be provided, yet I fear that I must prepare you for that possibility. Had my brother lived, and had our companion not revealed himself unworthy of the name Christian, there would be no need for me, or any of us, to make such requests of you. I am alone now, and in this world, that can be most unpleasant. Forgive me for this unseemly petition, but do not turn away from my need because it is not appropriate for me to address you thus. Think of your wives and daughters, and imagine what their plight could be in this place, were they as alone as I am. I have not the money to return to you, and I promised my brother that I would press on and finish what we have begun. I do not intend to change that, or to renege on my word, but I would be more confident in my task if I did not have the specters of starvation and degradation as company in my thoughts.
There is a legend here that the Apostle Thomas preached here and was buried not too great a distance from this place. I have asked to see the burial place, but everyone indicates a different direction and a different hill or mound for him, so I will not be too hasty in assuming that the legend is true. I have been told that there were Christians here for some time, and that there are a few still, but no one knows precisely where they are, or how to find them. It would
please me to see another Christian besides Hemedoris, yet I doubt that it will be possible for me to find these people, if they do exist. I fear that it is simply another legend, and that there may have been Christians here once, but now they are vanished. I have been assured that everyone in Constantinople is Christian, even the Emperor himself. Doubtless, when I reach that city, I will be among friends again and the fears that haunt me in the night will not harass me in that city.
You are always in my prayers and thoughts, and if it is fated that we will not see one another in this life, I will greet you in the Gardens of Paradise, which, I tell you most sincerely, Pu-Na is not.
Mei Hsu-Mo
sister of Mei Sa-Fong
in Pu-Na
7
Rachura had been reading from scripture, but Dantinusha now waved him into silence. Here, where the sun lanced through the half-open shutters, it was warm enough, but the wind was cold and where the shadows fell, the heat was leeched away.
“I have a few new verses—minor things, but you might find them intriguing,” Jaminya said to the Rajah. “Melancholy is not useful in a ruler.”
Ordinarily this bantering tone would evoke a smile from Dantinusha, and he would have given the poet his attention. Today, however, his mouth tightened with distaste. “I wish for silence. If that is not acceptable to you, then leave.”
Taken aback, Jaminya retired to a corner of the room and made a show of examining a scroll with critical eyes. His thoughts were far away and he was only remotely aware of the script in front of him. Fear had sunk its claws into his chest and he was striving to master it. He twisted the ends of his mustaches, trying to appear nonchalant.
Rachura had got to his feet and went to stand before the Rajah’s throne. It was unacceptable for him to feel distress and so his demeanor was restrained and he called the chill that went through him a breeze instead of alarm. “I will withdraw, if the Rajah permits this.”
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