A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “Fairest one, I would see thee draped in gold and jewels, wearing robes of bright-colored silk. I would hear thee play thy pipe until the moons fall from the sky and the stars go out, until the ocean rises and swallows up the land. What payment wouldst thou have for thy playing? Ask for anything, and it is thine.” (And then the feeling passed, and my tongue was my own again.)

  “I could not ask for anything of worth, my lord,” Aitiu said.

  “Then do not ask—command me, I am thine.”

  “Kiss me,” said Aitiu. (Cradling his face in both hands, I turned Orfeo’s mouth up to mine. He sighed, yearning a little. “I’ll be late,” he whispered. “I really shouldn’t—”

  “Tell them it’s my fault. You can say I wouldn’t be denied.”

  “Gods. Gods. Keep going.” He bit again at my neck, and I turned my head aside to give him space to work, wanting the bruise, wanting, wanting.)

  But Nerelen, overcome with love, knew too well how fragile mortals are, so when he obeyed it was with great care and delicacy and softness, though he strained and ached to devour him whole, to bring the wildness and wilderness upon him, to leave him as limp and lightheaded as a drunkard.

  “It wasn’t just that I recognized you,” Aitiu said. “I could feel your eyes on me as if you were already touching me. I was driven to distraction thinking of what I’d have to do to make you come to me. You should have waited until tomorrow—I had a lovely plan.”

  “Thou needst no plans, fairest one. Thou art temptation itself.” (“So are you,” Orfeo growled, and another chill ran down my spine, another moment of drifting as if I were in a small boat at sea, the waves rushing beneath me. Another breath, and the echo of the breath, the rise and ebb of the tide running through me, and Orfeo went a little wild himself, as if Nerelen had brought the wilderness upon him. And I? I only turned my eyes to the corner of the room. Empty.328)

  “And yet you show such restraint, such gentlemanly comportment, as if I were some delicate thing with hesitations about the matter of being ravished,” Aitiu said, lying back in the grass and pulling Nerelen over him. “I’d not imagined a god would be so shy.”

  Nerelen bit him sharply, pinning him still with mere power. “This? This, thou fox? If thou canst feel my eyes upon thee, then perhaps I ought only look at thee.” (I laced my fingers with Orfeo’s again and pushed his hands above his head, holding them down in the rumpled bedclothes; he made a soft sound and squirmed beneath me, his eyes wide and dark. “Keep going,” he breathed. “I’d listen to this all day.”)

  “My lord,” Aitiu gasped.

  “What wouldst thou have done tomorrow when thou felt my eye fall upon thee?”

  “I have been told,” Aitiu said breathlessly, “that in the old days, those who knew your mysteries would drench themselves in wine and go walking in the forest. I would have done that, and called and called for you, and begged you to come to me, and when you came, I would have run and made you hunt me.” (“Fuck,” breathed Orfeo. He shivered, and his hands clenched in mine.)

  “Thou knowest, then, the appetites of the gods.”

  It was a warning, but Aitiu did not hear it as such. “Not all the gods,” he said, his eyes dark, his voice low. “But you, yes. For years, I have wondered, taking my flock to this meadow, if you might come to me. I have wished for nothing else.”

  “Thou dost not wish to be hunted like prey,” said Nerelen, but he whispered it as a man whispers a secret he hopes to hear disavowed.

  (I lowered my lips to the edge of Orfeo’s ear and whispered:) “I do, if it is yours.”

  (Orfeo yanked against my grasp, twisting his wrists. “Ylfing, come on, yes, fuck.” I laughed and held tight, my blood singing, my skin prickling like someone running their nails down my spine.

  There was a moment, looking down at him, watching and laughing breathlessly—for less than a heartbeat, for less than a blink, I thought he was someone else. Only briefly. It was like the flicker of a candle-flame, there and gone, and I felt like I’d just caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye, something I wouldn’t have seen at all unless I had happened to look down right at that moment. And then it was nothing, it was just Orfeo, warm and present and very much himself, laughing and cursing me in turns.)329

  * * *

  323. Huh. I haven’t heard this one before. At least, not this version. Good for you. I knew you’d have a new story for me sooner or later. (By the way, it’s nearly four o’clock in the morning, and I’m too tired to work up the outrage to castigate you for writing this one down—I’ve already done that a few times already, so just do me a favor and take it as read, would you? You know the script.)

  324. Ugh, enough of your personal life. I’m not interested!

  325. Well, now I have a motherfucking dilemma. Skip the oversharing about your sex life, or stay for the new story?

  326. I think I’ll just try not to read the parentheticals. . . .

  327. Wait. There’s that pattern again. I don’t get to skip over the parentheticals, do I? (And as long as I’m commenting on the parentheticals anyway—you made this up? Gods witness my suffering; it is too early in the morning for this and I’m not drunk enough to deal with it. Why are you making up a story about Nerelen, a god that doesn’t belong to you? I’d show mercy on myself and go take a walk, but I don’t want to still be reading this when dawn breaks. I shall content myself with rubbing my temples and sighing loudly until Arenza asks me what’s wrong again. For the hundredth time.)

  328. Um . . .

  329. And here it is again, the pattern. Except . . . every other time you had a prickly feeling, you were near one of the stars-in-the-marsh. Maybe I’m wrong, then, and this is just your brain playing tricks on you. In any case, this isn’t much like you. All the other times you’ve taken Orfeo to bed, you got all coy and oblique about it, and thank the gods for that. Shit, wait, no—I was a few pages farther on and I just remembered something and came back: You still have that star-in-the-marsh in your room, don’t you? And it was directly above you.

  FORTY-SEVEN330

  I leaned down and kissed him once more, then let his wrists go and climbed out of bed. “You’re going to be late,” I said, grinning. “And your clothes are all mussed up. You’d better run.”

  “Oh, don’t you dare.” He sat up, incredulous, still laughing. “Ylfing, come back here this instant.”331

  “Better not. I don’t know how I could live with myself if I made you late,” I said, blinking and putting on a most innocent face. I picked up my own clothes from the floor and began to dress.

  “Ylfing!” He pushed himself up and swayed to his feet, lightheaded as a drunkard, I noticed, pleased. He tried to grab for me, and I danced back out of his grasp.

  “Later, later! Run, sweetheart! You’ll be late!”

  “More like unkindest one, not fairest one,” he grumbled. We both heard the clock ring the hour, and he groaned, an entirely different note now. “Shit.”

  “Off you go!” I said cheerfully.

  He groaned again and sat to pull on his stockings and shoes. “I don’t even get to hear the end of the story?”

  “They have amazing sex, and Aitiu begs for Nerelen to whisk him away to the divine lands, and offers to look after the flocks of the gods, and to play his pipe for Nerelen whenever he likes. Offers to play Nerelen’s pipe too,” I added wickedly, and dodged the pillow Orfeo promptly flung at me. “Aitiu’s suitors arrive to try to rescue him, but their plots are foiled and they’re sent off empty-handed. Other than them, everyone lives happily unto the fading of the stars and rising of the oceans.”332

  Orfeo grumbled, and stood up to fix his hair in the mirror. “Baciami,” he said when he finished, turning to me, and I obliged, giving him one more teasing kiss that made his breath stutter. “The story was good,” he murmured. “Even if the teller is unnecessarily cruel.” He drew back, looking at me with his head tilted a little. “You know, I’ve never seen you like this,” he said. “I wouldn’t
have thought you’d—well. It’s not what I would ever have expected from you. But I’m glad to be surprised, and—”

  “You’re going to be late,” I said.

  He caught me just once more, pressed me to the wall beside the door, kissed me so lightly I barely felt his lips. “But later, you said? When I don’t have anywhere to be? Because I want.”

  “Later,” I agreed, and then I pushed him out of the room.

  And it wasn’t until a few minutes afterwards, when I was combing my hair in the mirror, when his words started chafing at me: Not what he would ever have expected of me.333

  That was not at all how I told the story when I made it up, years ago—it was much more chaste then, more about romance than sex.

  I don’t know what came over me, telling the story that way.

  And then writing it down! Gods! Should I get rid of this? All I would have to do is press it against my burning face right now and I bet it’d burst into flames.

  And then there’s all the rest of it. The echoing of my breath, the whisper of something that passed from Orfeo and then not to me, but through me, like I was a conduit of . . . whatever that was. Orfeo said it wasn’t him, that he wouldn’t nudge me. I believe him.

  I’m not sure

  Perhaps I shouldn’t

  Are you there?334

  Oh, to the desert with this, and with me. I’m being foolish. Never mind.335

  * * *

  330. No, dammit, no! Again? Again you grow bored in the middle of things?

  331. Listen to Orfeo! Finish the story! Why do you always do this? At least I’m not the only one suffering.

  332. This doesn’t count!!

  333. There, see. Orfeo noticed that something was odd too. Which, if I believe your account, proves that it wasn’t just in your head. Not just a dream, so that knocks Reason out, and leaves only Faith or Prank. I am neither drunk enough nor sober enough to deal with this.

  334. Fucking hell, stop screwing with my head like this. You know what, fine! You’ve driven me to it! Either you’re far more of a cunning little bastard than anyone gave you credit for and you’re making your point seem sincere—performing hesitation for my benefit by crossing out your own false starts is both elegant and effective, well done— or . . . No, I’m not going to legitimize it by writing it down. Look what terrible habits you’ve led me to.

  335. Oh gods, what hour is it now? Is it too early for a cup of tea? (Perhaps, under the circumstances, I should stop swearing by “gods.”)

  FORTY-EIGHT

  As I was writing earlier, a couple hours after Orfeo left, a proper tempest blew up out of nowhere, and it rattled all the shutters on the windows, howled around the corners, slammed torrents of rain into the roof and the walls. It was loud enough and strong enough to be unsettling, and when the lightning started flashing, the thunder was immediate. No delay at all—those bolts were right on top of us.

  I gathered up my papers from my room in the attic and stashed them in a box in Orfeo’s room to be safe, just in case the shingles on the roof came loose and started leaking, and then I went downstairs. The inn’s public room was all but deserted—almost all the guests had left for the day, and it was still too early for the patrons who came only to eat and drink. “Anyone about?” I called.

  Mevrouw Basisi stuck her head out of the kitchen door in surprise. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  “Come into the kitchen. Keep us company,” she said, waving me in. By the time I crossed the room and came to the doorway of the kitchen, she was already busy at the cutting board. The inn’s cook, Stasyn, stood at the hearth, already raking coals into a pile, ready for a pan atop them. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Seems like you’re going to tell me,” I said, eying her knife as it blurred its way through a pair of small onions until they were tiny, tiny cubes.

  “Almost everything has onions in it,” Stasyn said sagely. “That’s where the tasty comes from.”

  “Tell us what you want to eat—anything,” Mevrouw Basisi said.

  I sat at the little table at the back of the kitchen by the door, well out of their way. “Not anything, surely,” I said with a laugh.

  They shot me an identical look. “Anything,” Basisi said grimly, setting her knife to one side and leaning on the counter. “Do you think she’s just a cook?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’ve been all over,” Stasyn said, scraping the onions from the board into the pan. “You think you’ve tasted all the foods there are.”

  “Oh, definitely not all of them,” I said, some of the old Hrefni perspective taking me over. “Only a lot.” I’ve tried to break the habit of looking at the world like this. No one else quite understands what I mean. They think I’m being arrogant; in most places, it’s politer to demur, at least nominally, rather than to admit to your real skills. But I was distracted still, thinking of that thing I’m not writing about.336

  “You’ve noticed that we have the best inn in the city. I’ve met people from everywhere. They’re all homesick. They’re all here because they come from somewhere else, and they only stay until they get to go back. I have everyone’s mother’s recipes for everyone’s favorite dish. So when I say anything . . .”

  “We don’t mess about, not in here,” Basisi finished, grimly.

  I bit back a smile and thought of how much I would have liked to introduce them to Lanh Chau. “I don’t want to trouble you. I’d be fine with whatever’s easy.”

  “Answer the question. Is it so hard to just pick something?”

  Yes. I made myself smile and cast around for some memory of food that wasn’t tainted by my master leaning over and muttering under his breath to me about the economic significance of some ingredient, or the historical reasons for the presence of one grain over another . . . “There was, um . . . I was in Avaris once, and I had this . . . it was like eggs baked in a little dish with cream and butter and herbs?”

  “Shirred eggs,” Stasyn nodded. “What else? Young heerchen like you, you can’t eat just eggs. Come on.” She snapped her fingers at me. “You’re holding out on me. Everyone’s mother’s recipe, I said. You’re from far off; you’ll tell me something new.”

  “You can’t make it, though; you don’t have the things for it,” I said impatiently.

  “But I can get ’em,” she replied, stubborn. “Or a damn close approximation, after some trial and error.”

  I cracked. “Fine. Smoked salmon,” I said. “This bony silver fish called a seolfring, which you cook by laying it out flat, like a pinned butterfly, on a pine board in the bottom of a clay pot that you bury in the ashes of a banked fire the night before, so it’s warm and tender in the morning.”

  “Too late to bake you a fish overnight, so we’ll have to try that another time. What else? I can usually take a stab at drinks, too.”

  “An infusion of young pine needles in water. Creamed onions on bread. Beorcswete, which is really just hot milk and birch syrup—but it’s for children—”

  “I don’t believe in some foods being only for children,” Stasyn said thoughtfully. As I’d spoken, she had found a pair of small bowls and smeared butter on their insides, adding a splash of cream, a shaving of sharp white cheese, and a cracked egg into each one, topped with salt and pepper and herbs, just as I’d said. She set them on the hearth, and covered them with an iron pot that always lived by the fire, hot and ready. “Everybody eats. If you want it, I’m certainly not going to smirk about childishness, or whatever is the problem.”

  “I don’t know that we have birch syrup,” Basisi mused. “We have some smoked fish, though, and herrings. Won’t be quite the same, but it’ll do for short notice.”

  “I’ve got it. Sit down, put your feet up, Basi,” Stasyn chided, flapping her hand towards the other chair at the table. She set another pan to heat on the fire, and fetched out the smoked fish from the larder. “Creamed onions—what is this flavored with?�
��

  “Salt, and . . . um, there was an herb. . . . It only grew wild in the forest; it was called eorðmistel, I think? But sage would be close enough, if you have it.”

  “If I have sage,” Stasyn scoffed.

  “What do you do when someone asks for something you don’t know how to make?”

  She shot me another look. “I’m the best chef in the city. When that happens, I make them describe it for me—creamed onions on bread, I daresay I don’t need much more information than that. I find out what the ingredients are, and I find out how it makes them feel when they eat it. I find out whether it’s peasant food or noble food, what time of year people eat it, whether it’s eaten for festivals and holy days.” Stasyn threw the diced onions into the pan with a knob of butter and a generous pour of cream, and they sizzled loud, filling the kitchen a moment later with a smell that made my stomach pang with hunger—it’s amazing how good plain onions frying in fat smells.

  “What for? Why all the rest of it besides the ingredients?”

  “Because in addition to being the best chef in the city,” she said, “I’m also a businesswoman. I know the prices of things; I know when they’re in season. I know where food comes from, where spices come from. All of this is important. People who aren’t chefs, they’ll tell you all about a dish, but they don’t really know what’s in it. They don’t know how it works. Suppose that nice young man of yours is pining away for some Pezian dish I’ve never heard of, and when he tells me about it, I try to make it. If I make it like a Heyrlandtsche dish, he’s going to be disappointed. So when I cook a Pezian dish, I cook like a Pezian—olive oil, not butter. Hardly ever use lemon, compared to us. A mind-boggling variety of pastas. Stewed tomatoes in everything, because Pezians are rakes and lushes. Oregano, thyme, pepper . . .” She shrugged. “Everything is a little different. Even the way I chop the onions. It’s a science.”