by Alex Jeffers
April 1, 2018 Volume 8 No 6
The Tale of the Ive-ojan-akhar’s Death
by Alex Jeffers
1.
The child’s ayah said it was high spirits, a paroxysm of affection, but the truth was simple: the envoy’s daughter killed my dog.
She wanted Ìsho the moment she saw him, his flat nose and panting pink tongue and goggle eyes poking out of my sleeve. I was deliberately too dense to take the hint and make a gift of my dear companion to a spoiled child. Given my position, however, I could not refuse to permit her to play with him. I told her and told her Ìsho was delicate, that she should not urge him to run too hard or squeeze him as if he were a stuffed toy. She killed him.
I am not a man who weeps often. I did not weep when the ayah came running to tell me Ìsho had, he said, taken ill. I continued stoic when I came upon the child in the mission’s garden berating the corpse of my dog for not getting to his feet and frolicking with her. Lifting Ìsho’s minuscule weight from the puddle of vomit and urine soaking into the grass, I made sure he was dead, tucked him into my sleeve where he belonged, and told the wretched poppet, really quite steadily, Ìsho would not be able to play with her anymore.
“Why not?” she demanded.
“I am sorry to say Ìsho has died. Do you know what that means?”
By this time the envoy had been summoned so I need not deal with his daughter’s tantrum, merely witness it and his craven response. Of course, once the child was led away I had no choice but to accept the father’s condescending apologies (he regained his aplomb with unnatural speed), the rather large gift, the two days’ leave from my duties. My heart burning hot with resentment that nearly overmastered my grief, I bowed my way out of the mission and carried my dead dog to the little temple of Jù, where the priestesses of that small god who loves our dumb companions promised to burn his body with all honor and send many prayers up with his smoke. I resolved my next dog would be a mastiff.
I had disliked the envoy since his arrival in the Celestial Realm. The mission’s chargé d’affaires, an often clever woman who had been outre-mer nearly as long as I, sent me downriver to Oesei on the Turquoise Gulf to meet him. Having read the same dispatches, I understood her cleverness led her to believe we would be sympathetic, the envoy travelling with his inamorato and I. (I do not believe he loved the man so much as the man’s rank.) When, descending from the Fejz clipper, he saw awaiting him on the dock a kè-torantin dressed in Haisner brocade robes, I recognized the moment he understood who I was—what I was. I might be distressingly useful, he was thinking, but gone too native to be trusted.
The only protocols he deemed valid were those of our empress’s court in distant Sjolussa. The inamorato was introduced with all his titles, inherited and conferred. The daughter was not introduced at all, although of course I knew about her and observed her in his train holding her ayah’s hand. I expect neither envoy nor inamorato sired the child, a pretty blonde poppet who resembled either only in general ways—I expect they bought her as one might purchase a pet.
After Jù’s temple, I walked the long way home. Through the noisy confusion of the songbird market, past the cricket market, along the bank of the wide, slow Carnelian River with its endless traffic of mighty junques and barges and trade vessels of every seafaring nation in the world. Every nation granted a mission in the capital, that is. Willows trailed their leaves like the Kandadal’s ribbons in the silty water. An itinerant godseller had set up her booth among the trees as if awaiting me. She was surprised by a kè-torantin attired in Haisner fashion who spoke her language, recognized her deities, saints, tutelary spirits. In among her stock I discovered a small cast-bronze idol of Jù in his aspect as a flat-faced sleeve dog, nearly forgot to haggle her down to a fair price. That would have meant bad luck, something I required no more of.
Clutching the idol in my hand, I turned back to the streets of crowded Bhekai. I had not for some years resided in the foreigners’ cantonment. At the gate of the White Peonies vicinage the old grandfather nodded me through politely and I went on to Blue Lamp Street where I rented my small house. The blue lamps mark it as a street of actors and other theatre people, although my nearest neighbors were a scholar and a small bureaucrat.
Inside the door, I removed street shoes and outer robe. I called my servant’s name. My compatriots at the mission were quite sure Shàu was my catamite but it wasn’t so. Shàu had been in my service enough years he was no longer a boy but I could not but remember that he was a boy, an orphan, in equal measure terrified of and fascinated by the kè-torantin who had purchased his contract from an aunt with too many children of her own. I would not, could not, ask of him services outside the terms if they were anything I desired. In any event, now he was grown he had no doubts about preferring the whores of the red houses over those of the yellow.
“Shàu,” I said when he came, “sorrowful news: Ìsho has died. I have given his body to Jù. The house will be quiet and dull without him. Please, this robe is soiled and I do not wish to wear it again.”
Tears had welled up in his eyes but he knew the proprieties as well as I. “Ìsho was a good dog, nen-kè,” he murmured. “Jù will welcome him.” He took the robe from my hands. Whether he burned it or laundered and sold it mattered little to me. I believed him sufficiently sensible to do the latter.
“Now I wish to be alone, undisturbed, for a time. Until dark, I think. You needn’t hurry dinner.” I paused. I had already thought it through but Shàu never liked me doing him favors. “In fact, if it wouldn’t wreck your plans, go to Old An’s for noodles. I have a hankering for noodles. You know what I like.”
“Nen-kè.” Mister Ivory. Shàu came up with the title himself, long ago. “Shall I bring you tea?”
“No, thank you, nothing for now.”
I was about to turn away when I saw the tear escape the cage of his eyelashes and roll down his cheek. “Shàu,” I said, “here, take this.” I pressed the small idol of pug-nosed Jù into his hand. Looking over his head—I did not wish to see another tear—I said, “The house will not be ready to welcome another dog for…some time. And yet it will be lonely without our Ìsho. Go—go to the market before An’s. A songbird, a chameleon, a goldfish in a bowl, a cricket in a cage—whatever you choose. Two, buy two.”
I blundered through the door into the garden. The envoy’s daughter had made my servant cry. She killed my dog and made Shàu weep. I walked to the plum tree at the back of the garden, pressed my brow to its trunk, and tightened my eyelids against tears of my own. The idol of Jù had left marks on my palm that took many minutes to fade.
In my garden it was past the season for peonies but the roses Shàu tended were in bloom. Once my eyes had dried I broke a few fragrant yellow blossoms off their bush—tearing the skin of my hands on their thorns—and carried them indoors. At the entrance to my still chamber I hesitated. One is not meant to come agitated before the Kandadal—one is meant to discover tranquility in the Kandadal’s presence. Paradoxes, paradoxes.
I went in. I laid the roses down on the stone altar among the rotted or dried-out relics of previous offerings. The Kandadal’s said to have approved gifts of flowers yet to prefer they not be placed in water to preserve their beauty a moment longer. If decay upsets me I should endeavor to learn why it upsets me, or accept the upset’s value, or offer him unfading blossoms of colored paper or silk. Or all three. So much I fail to comprehend—so much I am intended not to comprehend.
Walled on two sides with mortared brick, the still chamber was cool. Folding my legs, I settled on the earthen floor before the altar, looked into the Kandadal’s eyes. My idol is varnished wood, one
of the jolly young Kandadals, grinning to show his strong, crooked teeth, his eyes crinkled to slits. In the dusk of the unwindowed, unlit chamber the brown glass inset within the slits did not glint. Like myself the Kandadal was a foreigner. Scholars say he never visited Haisn, his philosophies brought in the train of the Owe-ejan-akhar’s daughter centuries after the mortal Kandadal’s decease. The vale of Sfothem, his native place, is nearer Bhekai than to Sjolussa but the people who live there, I’m assured, resemble me more than they do natives of central and northern Haisn, having narrow high-bridged noses and round eyes, the men hirsute more often than not.
The Kandadal is not a god (at any rate he denied being a god) yet he is venerated as if he were. He suggested there are no gods at all, no purpose or design in the universe, yet encouraged his followers to revere the gods and beliefs of all peoples in every nation of all the world. My nation, the people to which I was born, recognizes no gods as such. What the Kandadal would make of our ancient beliefs and customs I can’t imagine. I respect the nameless, numberless virtues and excellences honored in my country but their authority has always been recognized to be parochial—they do not travel: in Haisn they could not protect or aid me.
So much I will never make sense of. I gazed into my Kandadal’s eyes. He is a plump, merry, moon-faced Haisner, handsome and beautiful and, even now, very strange to me. “I want the envoy’s daughter to die,” I told him. Children are forever dying. The envoy could acquire a new one as easily as the last. “I want to kill her as she killed my dog.”
You want her to die, the Kandadal replied. (He did not reply.) You want to kill her.
“She is useless in the world, a monster. Evil.”
A useless, evil monster.
“I do not wish to meet her or her father again.”
Of course my savings were already sufficient, even without the addition of the envoy’s bribe, to buy passage back to Sjolussa. But I had little prospect of a position in that tightly wound city I hardly knew anymore, hardly cared to know—if I wished to leave Bhekai and Haisn. I did not. I wished the laws of the Celestial Realm allowed me to earn my living in some other manner than employment in the Sjolussene mission. But if Haisners—if the child Immortal in the Palace Invisible (may She forever prosper) and Her court and magistracy—if they trusted foreigners they would not be Haisners and I would doubtless not like them so well. They call us kè-torantin, automatons fashioned of ivory, and believe us not fully (if at all) human. It was likewise forbidden for me to work in the mission of another foreign nation than my own, if any would have me.
We argued, the Kandadal and I. (I argued with myself.) Time did not pass. The still chamber became dark, the air thick with the fragrances of roses, mold, and rot. Shàu tapped at the door frame. “Nen-kè. I have brought noodles from Old An’s.”
“Yes, thank you, Shàu,” I said without turning. “A moment longer.”
My servant retreated—I assumed he did—and I prostrated myself full length on the floor before the Kandadal’s altar. He did not like one to be rigid, invariable, to make irrevocable decisions or to find conclusions. Rising to my knees, I kissed the Kandadal’s cool brow, and then I withdrew from his presence.
The panels of the dining chamber’s window were folded open to the dusky garden. Flame guttered in an iron lamp by the window and danced on the wick of a smaller lamp on the low table. Near the lamp sat a porcelain bowl I did not recognize, glazed blue-black without, white within. It was not a bowl for noodles: filled nearly to the brim with clear water, it housed an elegant fish the length of my index finger, swimming in endless, listless circles. Its ancestors were doubtless gold but this variety’s scales and flowing fins were brocaded in splotches of scarlet, black, silver-blue, and white. I watched the enervated prisoner explore a cell that could provide no surprises and when Shàu brought my noodles I said, “She will not survive long in so small a bowl.”
“No, nen-kè,” he said, placing a smaller bowl before me. “I put the other in the great tub the previous tenants left in the garden. But I thought….”
“It was a kind thought, Shàu. She is very lovely.” Not as lovely as Ìsho, I did not say. Not a dog—not a friend, a companion, merely an ornament to admire. “Thank you. After we’ve eaten we’ll take her to join her sister.”
Watching the fish make its unceasing rounds, I ate fat noodles in savory broth with slivers of pork, onion, salt-dried cherry. Cross-legged in the corner, Shàu slurped from his own bowl. His noodles’ accompaniment would be different, for Shàu liked the incendiary cuisines of southeastern Haisn where the Celestial Realm’s uncertain borders bleed into Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge—the Sjolussene protectorates Aveng and U—and where the Immortal’s subjects speak languages She does not comprehend. Those heavily spiced dishes with their chilis and gingers and vinegars, subtleties difficult to discern under the burn, gave me indigestion so Shàu never served them unless I asked.
I continued holding my bowl after I finished, waiting for Shàu—he would interrupt his own meal if I set it down—watching the fish. I did not wish to be alone in my head all night, dreaming up vengeances and punishments for the envoy’s daughter. At length I said, “I will visit the yellow house this evening, Shàu.” I turned to look at the young man in the dim corner. “You may go to the red house if you like.” He understood I was granting permission to use household monies to ease his grief and ducked his head.
We took the brocade fish to join its fellow. The glazed ceramic barrel in a shaded corner of the garden was made to contain goldfish although I had not previously used it for the purpose. Shàu would have scoured it clean while I was with the Kandadal, carried bucket after bucket of fresh water from the well. The previous occupants of the house had also left an eccentric weathered stone eroded into fantastic spires and grottos for the fishes’ entertainment. When Shàu tipped the smaller bowl and water began to spill into the larger a glint of yellow-orange appeared in the depths as a perfectly ordinary goldfish nosed out of a cranny to investigate. I felt a pang of disappointment that Shàu had chosen the common, doubtless cheaper fish for himself—then reflected, admiringly, he must have pocketed the difference.
Poured into its new home, the brocade fish swam in startled circles near the surface while its new companion withdrew again into hiding. I touched Shàu’s shoulder in gratitude as he peered into the water, and then I withdrew myself.
On the barge forging upriver from Oesei I had endeavored to take the new envoy’s measure. He, it was clear, had already taken mine so far as he wished to take it. We sat under a waxed-silk awning, he upright and stiff on a subcontinental-style chair I had made sure would be aboard, I cross-legged on a rice-straw mat. He disdained my tea, drinking instead a tisane of dried flowers and herbs brought in his baggage from Sjolussa.
Studying the envoy’s polished leather boots with their pewter buttons, I answered questions about his predecessor’s contracts and negotiations. These I learned were unambitious. I discovered I was not to venture opinions or advice concerning the goods Haisner merchants might wish to import from the west. Their wishes were of no consequence. Goods were the least of what he planned to offer. Had I, he asked without wishing an answer, ever visited Kyrland—that islanded nation with its two grand capitals, Girrow in the south, Ocseddin in the north?
I had not, as doubtless he knew. As well as I knew of his own immediately previous position in the embassy at Girrow. The two realms were not then at odds: rather, allied to frustrate the ambitions of the Great King whose subcontinental dominions lay between Sjolussa and the Kyrlander home islands.
After hearing considerable apostrophes to Kyrlander energy, invention, industry, I understood the envoy’s intentions. He meant to import knowledge. I was aware of Sjolussene bounties paid to Kyrlander engineers and inventors—I had read in out-of-date gazettes of the wondrous transformations in my homeland: streets and residences illuminated by piped coal-gas, vast manufactories powered by steam, the iron road
s and heliographic systems drawing the metropolitan empire’s towns and cities nearer the capital. It seemed not to have occurred to the man that similar innovations, installed in the Celestial Realm, might strengthen the Immortal’s government—that She would henceforth have less use for foreign goods or the foreigners themselves She despised.
Before leaving my house I donned garments a decade out of fashion I had purchased on my last home leave. The whores at Lìm’s Yellow House enjoyed the novel challenge of getting me out of them. For myself, I felt confined and in a peculiar way exposed, for subcontinental men’s fashions fitted more closely than Haisner to the body. Small as he was, Ìsho would never fit into the sleeve of a Sjolussene coat. Buttoned leather boots pinched my feet.
I called “I am going” into the shadows of the house and went out. At the vicinage gate the neighborhood grandfather on duty smirked, knowing the import of my costume and late departure, and wished me a joyful evening.
My way led toward the river, a broad avenue lined on either side by the whitewashed brick walls of residential vicinages like my own, noodle shops, book shops, apothecaries, fortune tellers, shrines of strictly local gods, small groceries. Naphtha lanterns mounted on the corners of boundary walls lit the street. Soon enough I heard music clanging and banging and whining from Turtle Market ahead. I do not know how long it is since Turtle Market sold turtles. Centuries, I expect.
The street became crowded. Inside the market gate competing red houses stood on either side, touts at the scarlet lacquer doors yelling into the throng—promises, blandishments, compliments, threats. The left-hand tout I knew, as she was sometimes posted at the door of Lìm’s other, yellow, establishment on the far side of the market. She called my name, humorously promising diversion and delight. I nodded, smiled, replied, “Not tonight,” and went on, murmuring under my breath a prayer to the manifold gods of venery that Shàu find comfort if he chose to visit one of the capital’s red houses, Lìm’s in Turtle Market or another.
