Magic Banquet

by A. E. Marling

  Solin took the meat in hand, then ate it. He chewed, his eyes growing wider and wider until they were all whites.

  “What’s it like?” she asked. “What are you seeing?”

  He rolled onto his back, clutching his head. He moaned, in pain or wonder.

  “Is the knowledge terrible?” Aja clasped his hand. His tattoo design had sharp edges, but it felt smooth like normal skin. “I shouldn’t have told you to eat it.”

  The Chef said, “He bit off a vast topic, but he’ll digest it soon enough.”

  Aja held Solin’s hand between her two gnarled ones. The pouch with the Plum of Beauty pressed against the blade of her hipbone. She could take the fruit, eat it before he regained his senses, but she didn’t. Stealing was wrong. Besides, what good is beauty to me now?

  The Chef offered the salmon to the swordsman. He asked for something she couldn’t hear, but the Chef spoke loud enough.

  “This is the Salmon of Knowledge, not prophecy. You can’t ask to know the future.”

  In front of Aja, Solin’s eyes stopped rolling. He focused on her. His hand pulled out of hers.

  “Was it that awful?” she asked. “I’m sorry I chose dragons for you.”

  “It was…it was wings and clouds and swimming up waterfalls, sleeping mountains and deep thoughts, a voice of thunder, a temple of gold, breaking claws and shedding scales, anger that burns cities, so many women dead, the taste of them—Aaah! I must forget that. I mustn’t know.”

  He swayed upright and gulped from his cup.

  Aja startled at the voice of the Chef. “What secret will you eat?”

  Sixth Course, Part II:

  Found and Lost

  The Salmon of Knowledge hovered in front of Aja on a dark-grained board. Bands of white fat rippled through the orange-glazed flesh. The steaming knowledge made her feel warm all over and woozy.

  She glanced at Solin, but his traumatic taste of the salmon only proved its power. The fish would reveal her mother.

  “I see you’ve chosen,” the Chef said. “Guide my hand.”

  Aja frowned as she rested her fingers on his. She had no idea where in the fish the knowledge lay. Blinking, she looked again, and yes, her thumb was smaller than the Chef’s pinkie.

  His hand drifted under her touch. His knife angled toward the salmon’s upturned snout.

  “The right cheek.” The Chef scooped out a pad of flesh with a flick of his knife. “This is a knowingness of the feminine. Hmmm…The portion may be too large.”

  “I want to know my mother.” Aja covered her mouth. She had spoken loudly.

  “The knowledge of mothers, then.” The knife flashed across the board, cutting a sliver of meat from the cheek. So small, it disappeared when the Chef lifted it closer.

  “Permit me.” He angled the blade between her lips.

  Her face twitched, but she didn’t turn away. When he flipped the knife, she held in a scream. Heat spread over her tongue, not from a bloody gash, but from the salmon morsel that had dropped into her mouth.

  Swallowing blacked out all sight of the Chef, Solin, and the dining hall. Aja plunged into memories that were not hers.

  A woman sang her baby to sleep. A mother laughed and leaped when her girl took her first steps. The wobbly children brought such joy to life, and they babbled so much truth. A blind mother was led by the tiny hand of her daughter. What a blessing to belong to a family, and what grief. Another mother cried over an empty cradle.

  Other animals were also mothers. A lioness growled among the reeds, hoisting her cub by the nape of its neck. Eagles squawked over grey-speckled eggs in cliff nests. A djinn mother breathed a spark to life on her rippling palm.

  All the mothers of all creatures of all time.

  Too much. Too much. Aja’s mind was being ripped apart. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t help. If only she could cough out the bit of salmon. But where was it? Where was she? She had lost all sense of her own body in the flood of memories.

  Aja focused on her own mother. Neera, her name was Neera. She smiled down at her newborn daughter with the last of her strength. Her beautiful eyes of dusk black drooped, then closed. Would Aja have to watch her mother die?

  She lived, not as a queen but as a queenly woman. She wore a wealth of amulets, and anklets jangled with every step. On her face, makeup was art. She hid stretch marks from her pregnancy under fine fabrics given by her suitors.

  Sorrow lodged in Aja’s throat when she saw her mother had no patience for children. Sleepless nights broke her smiles into scowls. One day, baby Aja had made a mess, and her mother knocked her down with the heel of a foot.

  “Don’t kick the baby,” Father said.

  “She kicked first, inside me,” Mother said. “The ungrateful pox rat.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.” Her father was a shadow, a smear, a fragment of memory. “Babies can’t speak, but they understand.”

  “This one can’t. Look at those idiot eyes.”

  The baby wailed. The cry reverberated in Aja, louder, harsher, a high screech that shattered. Her mother hadn’t cared. Aja tried to shield her eyes. Make it stop.

  More visions of her mother forced themselves on Aja. An empty bed, a shadow on the door. Of leaving, of never coming back.

  Her mother should’ve died. That would’ve hurt less. But she lived. She reappeared in Oasis City, married to a wealthy man, mother to his child. He had servants to tend to Neera’s new babies, and she thought about them little and Aja even less, a merest flicker of curiosity.

  “I hate you! I wish I’d never known you.” Aja shouted it across the years and miles. “You left us.”

  Her anger tore apart the panorama of mothers. Aja batted away scenes of women kissing fathers, of bouncing their babies, of happy families. She swam through the knowledge back to her real body.

  She gasped, found herself sprawled among silk-tasseled pillows, on a silver-embroidered rug, in a candle-glowing ballroom. She pushed herself up. Her elbows popped. Sliding her fingers over the carpet, she found the smoothness of a polished cup. She lifted it.

  The djinn tipped the amphora, and from its tunnel neck sluiced darkness. Or, perhaps, the water only looked black because the cup was made of ebony. Aja didn’t hesitate. The river water tasted of nothing. Aja couldn’t remember it being hot or cold, only that it quenched.

  Aja thought of the time her mother had kicked her, and she washed the memory away. She drowned everything of Neera. Aja had been happier hoping.

  “Goodbye, Mother.” She lifted her cup to celebrate the blissful absence of pain gone.

  She tilted her head. What had been her mother’s name? Aja was free of it.

  Chewing the thin flap of her lip, she was bothered by a half-thought tickling her skull. Had she lost something else, too, a memory she had held dear? Whatever it was had been swept away in the flood of forgetting.

  Ember-hued nail beds caught Aja’s eye. She blinked up at the djinn.

  “You’re a mother,” Aja said. An aftertaste of salmon stuck in the back of her throat as memories streamed across her mind unbidden. The water hadn’t made her forget them all. “Your son was like a candle flame. You played hide and seek between the stars and the sand dunes. He’d change into a baby jumping spider, or a green rock, or a breeze.”

  The djinn did not show surprise on her face as a human might. Steam rose from the amphora she held, and her eyes sparked.

  “One day your son went too far, into the city, to hide as a lamp flame—”

  “Do you know of him?” The djinn gripped Aja with unseen hands of wind, hoisting her to eye level. “Did you see what he’s become? Does he burn brightly?”

  The son had been trapped in a brass lamp. A man had threatened to drown him, and the djinn had promised to serve the owner of the lamp to save her son. He had been let go. Once the mother djinn parted from the smaller flame, the knowledge ended.

  “I’m sorry.” Aja’s eyes burned from the nearness of the djinn. “I don’t know. I
’m so sorry. It’s only….”

  The djinn released Aja with a gust. “What?”

  “I’d like to think my parents did something so brave for me. I never knew them.”

  Aja frowned. She had boasted to other children in the past about her father, as if she had known him. Had she been lying? She tried to remember something, anything about either parent. Darkness flowed through her.

  Her cup was half empty with Water of Oblivion. Aja wondered if she had drank from that. She must have. She had destroyed the memories of her parents. Why? Oh, why had she done it?

  Her knuckles hurt when she rested her head in her hands. She was adrift, without past or future. She must’ve purged memories of her family out of disgust, or spite, but even so she wanted them back. Aja would’ve traded her last bracelet—even her last day alive—to know.

  She had eaten the salmon and gained the knowledge of every mother in the world except for the one who mattered most. The Chef tricked me. Aja quivered and ached all over. Every course, it’s only gotten worse.

  Leaving would mean dying of old age, but better that than staying. Only doom remained for her here in this hall of splendor. Aja vowed not to eat another crumb at the Banquet.

  And then she smelled the next course.

  Side Dish:

  THE LORD’S TALE

  I was born into ambition, fed a steady diet of impatience, and taught only to be reckless when it suited my desires. I learned well. Before reaching my age of majority I had ruined my family’s good name. I succeeded in losing everything. Only then could I find true power.

  Now I rule over nowhere and everywhere. I am the regret between the cobwebs of a deserted house. I am the creek in the floorboards behind you. I am the friend you glimpse at night who turns out to be a stranger. I am the unknown and the eerily familiar. I am the green-mirror flash of eyes in the darkness from a black tomcat. I am the fire that burns so beautifully across the city. I am the priceless ring cut from the hand of a dead king. I am doom. I am delight. I am gone with the dawn.

  You cannot live without me. Why would you want to? The only thing man fears more than death is boredom. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come to this Banquet. These masterful delicacies were not made by my hand, but the Chef belongs to me.

  I have a plan, a dark dream, a vision for a future lit by twilight. The lands could have many such Banquets. Not all as ambitious, perhaps. They might not serve food. But be assured, their fare would be as decadent.

  With the help of this toothsome young lady, Ryn, I could make it so. But let’s not talk of business tonight. Drink like there is no tomorrow. Eat because there is nothing truer than pleasure. Only in revelry can we for a screaming moment forget that a human life amounts to nothing, and after death, oblivion awaits.

  Now, who’s hungry?

  Seventh Course:

  TAOTIE DUMPLINGS

  SERVED WITH FOX-BLESSED CASHEW MILK

  An aroma of ginger and rapture billowed from the kitchen. So strong, the scent felt like bathing in fresh noodles, with salty sauce, chives, and meat chunks. It smelled close to pork but tastier, crisper, deeper with flavors of duck, and higher in fluttering sighs. The perfume of food hollowed out Aja and filled her with hunger.

  Beside Aja, Janny sniffed so loudly and long it sounded like a muffled scream. She smiled as if her pain from the apple seed were forgotten. “Well, slather me with lard and slide me naked over ice! Just bring me to the end of that smell rainbow.”

  In the swordsman’s arms, the empress moaned. Her fingers twitched, and her wide lips parted.

  “A scent strong enough to bring back the dead,” the lord said.

  “She’s not dead.” The swordsman glared at him.

  Aja also stared at the lord. The sickles of his brows climbed in the first expression she had seen on him that night. He stood, watching the kitchen stairway.

  She asked him, “Do you know what’s being served?”

  “Only that it’s the first food I’ve smelled in years.”

  Golems marched from the stairwell. They didn’t carry platters but only painted-silk partitions. Aja’s heart skipped a beat. Where was the food? The golems arranged the six screens behind the guests.

  Janny swung a leg around a partition painted with a white tiger stalking in bamboo. She shimmied a shoulder out from her orange and green dress. “Guess it’s not a real meal unless someone gets naked.”

  “What do you mean?” Aja asked.

  Janny tapped a partition. “Janny knows what these are for. Stripping down to your buxoms.”

  Undressing sounded like an awful idea to Aja. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this, all shriveled and spotty.

  “Wait.” The djinn flew down to the carpet, bottles of jade spinning around her. Each floated toward a guest. “Spread this salamander unguent over your bodies.”

  Aja lifted the gemstone container to her nose and winced. “Why?”

  “Because it’ll block your pores and tastes foul,” the djinn said.

  The swordsman scratched his stubbly beard. “Those sound like the opposite of reasons.”

  “It’d be scent vandalism,” the lord said, “with this olfactory melody in the air.”

  “The Chef requests you do this before he serves the next course.” The djinn’s hair stormed red. “I can understand how unsettling it must be for you to touch your own squishy flesh.”

  The lord, Janny, and Solin hurried behind their screens. Aja hesitated. Would she have to trust the unguent? She wouldn’t, if she could only find the strength to resist this course.

  Thinking of anything else might help. Her gaze meandered up to the flocks of hanging lamps. Any of those might be the one binding the djinn.

  “You don’t like serving us,” Aja said to the woman of fire and wind.

  The djinn turned her blue-flame eyes on Aja.

  “I wish you didn’t have to. You’d rather be searching for your son. You are a good mother.”

  “A pity,” the djinn said, “that wishes don’t light fires.”

  Aja thought she likely wouldn’t be any friendlier than the djinn if someone had enslaved her and forced her to serve a strange people. “I was rude, wasn’t I? When we first met, and I asked what you were. I should’ve asked your name.”

  “Nothing’s as rude as having to wear this body,” the djinn said.

  “My name is Aja.”

  “So it is.” The djinn floated away, then drifted back, and the fire in her softened to a warmth. She touched Aja’s jade bottle. “Don’t neglect to rub that over every inch.”

  Aja had asked for a name and received what sounded like good advice. She would do just that and be ready for the next course. Hopping upward, her knees creaked, pain stabbed, and her balance was lost. Oh, no!

  She fell into the arms of the swordsman. His stomach thundered in her ear.

  “Would you watch the empress?” The swordsman whisked Aja beside the prone girl. Giving Aja no time to speak, he snatched up his own unguent. “Won’t be long,” he said. “Just shout if anyone tries to touch her.”

  He glanced toward the crutch propped against one screen, before dashing behind his own partition.

  Aja found herself above Nephrynthian, ruler of the Oasis Empire, a girl who would transcend death into godhood. Her chin was sticky with orange juice. Her head seemed too small for her body, and her chest too still for someone living.

  “He shouldn’t have left you,” Aja said. “But I can’t blame him with that smell.”

  Two slices of orange were unattended on a platter. Aja picked one up. It drifted toward her parted lips, but she forced it back to the empress and squeezed its juice in her mouth.

  Aja used her robe to dab the wetness from the empress’s face. Even the orange stains were precious, so Aja tipped Ryn’s head up and tried to rub it into her mouth. Most of the juice ended up on the empress’s lips. A grey tongue slid out to lick them, perhaps by reflex.

  Good. She lived.

  Setting the em
press’s head down, Aja withdrew her hand from beneath the shawl. Her dry skin snagged on something, and rubbing her fingers together, Aja felt a hair. The empress’s hair.

  Aja could not see the hair between her fingers. Did she truly hold one? She lifted her hand to her face, and the hair brushed against her cheek.

  She would swear it had been an accident. The hair must’ve ended in her grip by chance. Or had some part of Aja wanted to see if she could do it? To steal something of the empress’s. It was an odd, twisty feeling. That flimsy strand of hair would make Aja a traitor and a hero. She had only to give it to Solin.

  It seemed so unimportant to her now. The empress clung to life, and Aja had aged to the brink of death. Honors would do her no good. What did she care for any of that? She was ravenous.

  Glancing up, she met the gaze of Solin. He peered out from behind his partition. His eyes were of golden sorrow.

  Aja clutched the hair against her chest. She shouldn’t have taken it, but now she couldn’t drop it. Solin might see where it landed.

  The empress’s swordsman scrambled back onto the carpet. He thanked Aja, helped her on her way to her own screen. Light shone through a painting of a waterfall going down a mountain valley into a pool of koi fish. Aja didn’t know if she should drop the hair now. Instead she rotated her brass bracelet and pinned the hair in its latch. That clasp had caught and held her own hairs many a time.

  Another sniff of cooking aroma, and Aja hurried to cover herself with the glop from the jade bottle. Her stiff fingers could only move so fast. Her arms could only reach so far. She would never be ready in time, and all was lost. Then she spotted a man of clay, a golem.

  She was naked and shriveled, and the golem’s glass eyes stung her. Still she asked the creature of pottery for help. The cold blocks of its hands smeared the unguent over her back. The golem followed her requests in silence. It had no mouth, no opening on its face except a pinhole at the center of its forehead.

  “Did we miss any spots?” Aja asked. Even if the golem didn’t have a mouth, it could point anywhere not coated with unguent.