by Lisa Cach
My loins throbbed and swelled at the thought and I shut my eyes as if to deny it.
Tanwen laughed. “You are Phanne!”
I shrugged sheepishly and opened my eyes. “I do love a good cock.”
Tanwen howled.
This lusting that had started for Maerlin, it was only tied to our shared talents, surely. It had nothing to do with him as a person. He was too warped, too cold to love me, or me him.
“There’s no sating our appetites,” Tanwen said. “Our curse, and our blessing.”
“Maerlin told me that you could teach me to see into the minds of past lovers.”
She touched her chest in surprise, her mouth going round. “You don’t know how? You mean you’ve been having sex just for the fun of it?”
I shrugged.
“Nimia, Nimia, Nimia.” She shook her head and sighed. “What a waste. It’s a very good thing you’ve come to us; you’ve got to put all that man-seed to use.”
“Maerlin doesn’t know how to do it and can’t teach me; I guess it doesn’t work for a man.”
“It’s the man’s seed inside your womb that does it. It becomes a part of you. So much so that I’ve even heard of Phanne women giving birth to children who look like a lover they had years earlier, instead of their present man.”
I imagined giving birth to a child who bore the face of Sygarius, and felt my stomach turn. It would be a ghost of the past coming back to haunt me. “Then you’re never free of your old lovers!” I said in horror.
“And they’re never free of you—which is the great gift of Phanne women. The more men you sleep with, from the farthest reaches of the world, the more eyes you have, the more ears. If you could sleep with men of high enough power, just think! The secrets you would know, the fates you could change. Sleep with a general, and forever have access to his battle strategies. Sleep with a king, and know whether he planned to betray a treaty or wage war on a friend. Even a soldier or trader or merchant knows information that someone, somewhere, would pay good coin for.”
I looked around the wealth-filled room in speculation.
Tanwen crossed her arms over her belly, looking pleased with herself. “You didn’t think this all came from fucking, did you? What a lot of work that would be.”
“I thought the acolytes took on that duty.”
She snorted. “The acolytes are for the lower ranks, and as far as that goes, they just manage to earn their keep. I try to teach them to anticipate a man’s wants and secret wishes, but they’re not Phanne. They don’t have an instinct for creative sex.”
“I imagine they’re mostly poor girls, with nowhere else to go. This can’t have been their first choice of a way to live.”
“Outcasts, victims of evil men, horny girls who got into trouble, widows, escaped slaves.” Tanwen shrugged. “Each one has her tale of woe, but they’re safe here, and they know they’re not common prostitutes. I see you looking at me like I’m spouting nonsense, but it’s true. They’re acolytes, serving powers beyond their understanding. Each sexual act is part of a ritual; it’s a form of worship. They know that their participation in the banquets matters.”
“How so?”
“For the prophecies, of course.”
I raised a brow in question.
“You’ll see, tomorrow night. A group of Britons are coming, a dozen or so men. One of them is getting married soon, and this trip is their daring celebration of his last days of freedom.” She rolled her eyes. “They think they’re so wild, so naughty. I was hoping you’d take part.”
My first instinct was to protest. Twelve strange, drunk men intent on taking every woman within reach, believing they had paid for the right to do so? I’d be too vulnerable. If Tanwen had plans that boded me no good, she might choose that time to act.
“We’ll find a comely boy with a nice thick cock and use him to teach you how to contact a former lover. It’s good to start with someone whose seed is fresh, and his mind close at hand.”
“A thick cock, you say?” I said, and gave a comic leer to hide my anxiety. I tried to persuade myself that if I only had to deal with one of these Britons, maybe there wouldn’t be so much danger. I could keep control of myself, and him. If Tanwen intended to lay a trap for me, better to spring it while I was expecting it, than to be taken unawares.
“Thick as you want it. Though I can’t guarantee that ‘comely’ will be paired with ‘thick.’ ”
“Comely is as comely does,” I said. “And I’ll make sure he comes the way I want him to.” I was glad Terix wasn’t here to scold me, and say that I was more intrigued by the promise of riding a new mentula than by learning how to contact ex-lovers.
Tanwen grinned and rubbed her hands together, a gleam in her eye. “I am so looking forward to this. Nothing will be the same afterward. Nothing.” She saw me staring and laughed, slapping me lightly on the knee. “For you, I mean. Same old cocks with their small village stories, for me.”
“Are the men from Fort Seiont?” It was the closest town I knew of.
She waved her hand toward the east. “Farther inland. The reputation of my college of delights has reached all the way to Londinium, although tomorrow’s leading old boar, Druce, grunts around a den much closer to us. It’s one of his sons who is getting married.”
Druce! The man Maerlin had said was at odds with Ambrosius Aurelianus’s plans for an all-Briton alliance. It had been while passing through Druce’s lands that Maerlin had killed the robbers.
This banquet had seemed risky.
Now it had the potential to be deadly.
“Do you know him?” she asked, examining my face. “You look worried.”
“Never seen him.” I forced a smile, and gestured at my clothes. “I’m thinking what a mess I look. I have no gowns suited to a banquet.”
“It’s not really a banquet, Nimia.”
“I have no gowns suited for that, either.”
“I’ve never known them to be needed.” She laughed at her own joke. “Though a meal always tastes better when it’s presented prettily, doesn’t it? We’ll see what we can find to serve you up in.”
“I thought I was to be the diner, not the meal.” I stuck out my lower lip. “You promised me fresh cock.”
Tanwen hooted and I laughed along with her, hoping that she’d forget the look on my face when I heard Druce’s name.
It was sometime later that I escaped from Tanwen’s lair, dressed now in cast-off silks, my body perfumed with scents that made me want to sneeze, my hair braided, coiled, and pinned into a neck-straining arrangement atop my head. Silver leaves trembled on elaborate hair forks, sticking out on either side of my head. Tanwen had dressed me up as if I were her doll, and called in acolytes to make alterations to the deep blue gown I now wore. They had stayed behind to work on three more outfits, Tanwen insisting that the jewel-toned colors didn’t suit her.
The lapis blue did suit me: it called out shimmering echoes of its color in the gloss of my black hair. Tanwen’s mirror had shown a far different creature than the dowdy child who’d stepped in front of it earlier in the day. She’d made me look . . . magical.
Her intent, perhaps: make me appear like a fellow sorceress, to impress the acolytes and her guests. And of course she was trying to curry favor and win me as her ally.
Sygarius had once told me that bribes always work, even when the bribe recipient thinks he’s tricking the bribe giver. Once you accept a bribe you feel beholden to the giver, whether you are conscious of it or not.
I was going to be sorry to free myself from the bondage: it was the prettiest, softest garment I’d ever owned.
As I moved down the corridor, I caught a whisper of sound. I stopped, head cocked.
Someone was weeping, and trying hard to hide it. The sobs came in fragments with silence between, creating a strange sensation in my ears. It was as
if I held them plugged with my fingertips, and then opened them at random instants, just long enough for half a breath of crying to penetrate before they were jammed shut again.
I followed the notes of sound, curious. They led me to a doorway with a curtain pulled across it. I pulled the edge aside and peered in.
Gray light seeped through the closed shutters, casting the cold little room into hues of charcoal. The only color came from an orange hint of dying coals in the brazier. For a long moment there was no sound at all and I thought I had the wrong room, but then: a brief pressure on my ears, and a wet, gulping breath.
“Hello?” I said softly, staring at the dark lump that must be someone lying curled on her bed. As I stared, looking for movement, my eyes shifted of their volition, sliding off the girl and landing on the shadowy wall above. I blinked and looked at her again, and could see nothing except a pile of furs and bedclothes. I must have been mistaken, seeing someone there.
I was about to let the curtain drop when a mist of white caught the corner of my vision. “Una?”
“What do you want?” she said, her voice soggy. I caught the motion of her hands wiping her face. She was under the pile of furs, her head in the darkest corner of the room.
“May I come in?”
“As you wish.”
I slipped through the curtain as Una sat up, leaning against the wall at the head of the bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. She snuffled. I wasn’t sure how she’d react to a hug or my getting too close, so instead I found the basket of wood by the brazier and stirred up the fire, coaxing it back to life with bits of kindling while giving Una a chance to grow accustomed to my presence. The flames cast a welcome light, turning Una’s face from the white of snow to the warmth of amber.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“Those are my mother’s clothes,” she said.
“A gift from her.” I pulled loose the silver forks, and coiled braids fell down over my shoulders. I sighed and massaged my scalp.
“She doesn’t let me touch her things.”
“That must make you want to do it all the more.” I held out one of the forks to her.
Una took it, and slanted me a sly look. “I go through her things whenever I want, and she never catches me.” She swirled the fork between her fingers, making the leaves dance. “I could catch a raven with this. They can’t resist shiny things.”
“What would you do with it, once you had it? I don’t imagine ravens taste very good.”
She thought a moment, then grinned. “I’d set it loose in the great hall during one of the banquets. I could catch a whole flock of ravens, and send them flying through the air while those men are having their cocks sucked and bouncing their white butts and groaning. They’d scream like little girls and think themselves cursed and never come back.”
“You don’t like the banquets.”
“I don’t like the men. They’re loud, and they smell bad and make a mess. They act like they own the hall, and everyone in it. Mother tells me to stay away unless I want one of them between my thighs, but no one knows I’m there; everyone’s too busy putting their faces in each other’s crotches to notice. So I watch, and think about how easy it would be to slit the men’s throats, one by one.” She looked at me, checking for my reaction. “Wouldn’t Mother be angry then?”
Una was of an age with Daella, and I couldn’t help but compare them. Daella, so brave and loyal and strong, and devoted to learning how to heal her fellow human beings. Then Una, who felt five years younger than Daella, and had both a small child’s ignorance of her own cruelty, and a petulant need for attention, good or bad. How different would each have been, I wondered, if forced to grow up in each other’s shoes?
An image sprang to mind, of Maerlin coldly laying waste to the robbers along the road. Then I saw Tanwen, forcing her brother to lie with her. Selling secrets. Using the acolytes for her own profit. With the blood of Maerlin and Tanwen in her veins, perhaps there had never been any path for Una beyond the one she was treading.
“Do you want your mother to be angry with you?” I asked.
“It’s funny when she is. She turns red and breaks things. She’s boring the rest of the time, fussing with her hair or making the acolytes lick her while she dozes on her bed.” Una made a face. “She must taste like pee.”
I grimaced as I realized exactly where the acolytes were licking Tanwen. “She lets you watch?”
“She doesn’t notice me.”
“Sounds like people don’t notice you a lot of the time. It surprises me.”
“Why?”
“You’re quite beautiful. People—both men and women—usually notice beautiful girls.”
Her eyes narrowed, and I felt her withdrawing, her walls going up. “Why are you lying to me? I know what I look like. I’m white like a maggot. A fish belly.”
“Frost on a bright winter morning,” I countered. “Snow in the moonlight. Or at this moment, a summer cloud reflecting the glow of the sunset.”
Her lips were pressed tight together in denial, but I could see in her eyes the reluctant wish for more.
“Sunlight reflecting off the water,” I said. “The petals of a lily when it first opens, and its perfume fills the air. Shall I talk about your eyes now? I have heard about the ice atop the mountains. They say that when you get close, you see that it is blue: a blue more pure than the sky, but buried deep inside the ice. You want to touch it, but it’s forever out of reach. Those who have seen it say that the memory of that blue will haunt you to the end of your days.”
Una’s nostrils flared, and she blinked. She worked her lower lip between her teeth, then burst out: “That’s the same thing Ligeia said about my eyes. I was only nine, but I remember.”
A shiver ran through me, and I tried to hide my shock, and the nearly overwhelming need to grab her shoulders and shake her until she told me everything she could about my mother. “Then it must be true, if we both thought it.”
“You remind me of her. You talk to me.”
Was that all it took? What a sorry life the girl must lead. “My mother would have asked you why you were crying. Would you have answered her?”
She shrugged one shoulder.
“Can you tell me?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not to you, anyway. You’ll leave just like she did, so why would you care?”
My lips parted and I caught my breath. You’ll leave. Not, you’ll die. Confirmation that Tanwen and Akantha had lied, as we suspected. My mother was not dead: she’d left.
“From what I remember of my mother, I think she must have had a very good reason for going,” I said carefully.
“It didn’t sound like a good reason. Who cares about finding a labyrinth?”
A shock went through me. I had a labyrinth tattooed over my genitals; I wore a gold necklace that copied its design, with a gold and garnet bee in the center; and in the market of Tolosa I’d met a Syrian merchant who had, on an island in the Internal Sea, narrowly escaped being sacrificed in the heart of a labyrinth.
Una went on: “Why would you want to find something that you’re meant to get lost in? Ligeia told me some of the stories about it, like the Minotaur and Ariadne. But she said those were later tales, and the truth was much different, and that we the Phanne were at the heart of ‘the labyrinth’s hive.’ That we’d built it, and only we could use its powers.”
Hive. Bees. The golden swarm that swept me up when I accessed my powers. I was afraid to speak; afraid to halt the flow of words from Una’s lips.
Her mouth twisted. “We the Phanne. Do you see any tattoos on me?” She shoved up her sleeves and stuck out a bare leg. “Mother wouldn’t give me any. She said I have no power, so am not really Phanne, and can’t have tattoos. I’m not a Briton or a Pict or a Saxon or one of the Irish, either. I have no tribe. Not that I want one. I’d rather watch out for myse
lf.”
“You were born of Phanne parents. You are Phanne. The tattoos and powers do not decide it.”
“I don’t want to be Phanne. I don’t want to do what my mother does, letting men do those things to her.”
“What do you want?”
She shrugged again. “Not this.” She gestured vaguely at the world around her. “I hate this. I hate everyone here.”
“You must love your mother,” I said softly. “You almost killed Maerlin, trying to protect her.”
Her eyes welled with tears, her face pinching and her nose turning red. She heaved in a ragged breath, and began to sob.
I reached for her, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her head to my shoulder. She was stiff and awkward in my hold, her hands pushing against me, and then suddenly they were clinging to me, her arms tight around my waist, her tears seeping through the dark blue gown to my skin.
Part of her forehead touched the bare skin of my neck, but there was none of the sensation I had gotten from Maerlin, Tanwen, and Akantha. She felt like any normal person . . .
And then she didn’t.
It was a flicker, a tick of sensation against my skin, and then gone. I stroked her pale hair and closed my eyes, going inside myself and focusing on that point of contact between us. Listening. Sensing. Laying myself open, in hopes of catching another whisper of Una.
There. A feeling like an icicle running down my neck, then gone again. I tried to follow it, tried to feel my way into her, and could not.
“Una, what is it that has upset you so? Please tell me.”
“Why? You can’t change it.”
“Unhappiness is so much worse when you have no one to tell it to. It takes on a life of its own, and eats at you. Problems get smaller when you take them out of your head and put them in the open space between you and a friend.”
She lifted her head from my shoulder and pushed back, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t have any friends.”
