His menials brought fruit to him. He ate. The menials drew a bath, and he wallowed awhile in cool water. They closed the shutters; he lay down for siesta. When his eyes opened, he rose and the menials had laid out for him, not morning cotton, nor evening linen, but formal imported black silks. He went to join his daughter in the mathematicon.
Tawny light streamed through the glass of the casements, the top half of one door thrown open to birdsong in the garden. The slate floor, etched over entirely with sigils and formulae, remained unchanged. The long stone table, however, was no longer monstrously cluttered. Just a codex or two—Lucretia’s—lay lonely on a single shelf, though once codices had packed the shelves from floor to ceiling on three walls. By the table, his daughter sat on her mother’s stool. She too had dressed in a nobleman’s formal robes—hers colored womanly, a deep, drenched shade of blue.
At the table, Lucretia leaned on an elbow, hand propping chin, and started from deep thought when Aqib shut the door behind him. Blinking, she looked up and said, “Papa . . . ?” when in the middle of the floor, the Blessèd Femysade appeared.
Father and daughter gave a little cry. They always did.
She seemed wholly present, there, in the flesh. But Aqib knew this for an image, and that he shouldn’t attempt to touch. His hand would only enter the facsimile and vanish from sight, yet feel nothing of what was seen, as when one dips a hand into some bright reflection floating on the water.
“Sit here with me, you two,” said the Blessèd Femysade. “On the floor.” As she waved, Aqib and Lucretia took the indicated pillows at either side.
The Blessèd Femysade had only some dozen years on him, but those twelve years looked thrice as many now. She’d grown bony and frail, with her gray hair blanching white from the rigors of strange disciplines that empowered the mind to the body’s detriment. She swam inside her Ashëan gown, huddling as if chilled under a heavy, rich brocade shawl.
Fret her not—the Blessèd Femysade would have no chatter, no tears. When she’d spoken her piece, a gaunt hand would gesture first to daughter and next to husband (or other way around) and then some few measured words were permitted.
“We had thought,” she said, “to wait until the last days of my mortality, by such time as I would have learned and mastered more; but it appears that cerebral capacity in the short-lived declines precipitously as we age: so it is best to fix us in Discorporation, we mortals, at the mature prime of life, which I am swiftly leaving.”
If one’s wife is in the room, but one does not touch her, it may seem the truth of her existence is chiefly known by way of vision—seeing her there. But, no. In fact her body releases dim heat, and one feels that. Zephyrs rise whenever she gestures, and her gown rustles with each movement, and some moist warm air brushes one’s cheek as she speaks. The sound of her breathing comes faintly to one’s ears. And though the nearest thing to inaudible, still subtly reassuring, the throb of her living heart can be heard. How eerie, then, that all this was absent with the hollow grammy.
She gave Aqib a little sign. He drew breath, and hesitated. The Blessèd Femysade did not care to have the wrong thing said, or any of her difficult argot misspoken. She could be so frighteningly short-tempered these days, it was hard to remember her as ever laughing, kind, patient with him.
“Will you still be able to visit us?” he asked her; then hurriedly: “not as yourself, of course, not in the flesh I mean, but as a ghost—I beg your pardon!—I mean to say, as a Discorporate Intelligence? Like this hollow grammy?” The Blest sighed, as when Aqib was being especially stupid.
“Say ‘hologram,’ Papa.”
“Like this hologram?”
“Have I not already made plain to you, husband, how very few children of Ashê, even pedigree exemplars of the genotype, retain the aetheric adaptation to self-cohere when Discorporate? Be assured that I, little mortal witch that I am, lie well outside the selection coefficient. Post-mortem, the bounds of the purissime will almost entirely delimit my actions.”
Tentatively, as one feels a way through thorny thickets, Aqib asked, “Does that mean . . . very rarely? That we shall see you perhaps not every year, now?”
But Aqib had exhausted her patience. The Blest answered with flat crispness. “My Discorporation will remain stable into the proximate psionosphere: therefore onieric communion is not out of the question, but neither to be looked for, as I shall be much-engaged and, at no time, perceptible to gross human sensoria.”
Not a word of that understood, none. Aqib looked helplessly to his daughter—finding her crying in the softest possible way. His own eyes began to sting. “No, Papa.” Lucretia shook her head. “The Blessèd Femysade means no.” And Lucretia would know, for Aqib had very conscientiously sent his daughter to study feminine arts with the ladies of the Sovereign House. By now she could spit at you all manner of womanish this-and-that.
“I wish you both would be mindful of the extraordinary and unprecedented honor my Discorporation represents. Rarely do the Ashëans concede true immortality even to the best of their own. Never before have they allowed one of the short-lived to Discorporate. Now, the continuance of my work need not be tied to this body’s survival”—no longer weeping so softly, Lucretia made a quickly stifled noise. “And you, girl!—your father, yes—but you, Lucretia, I would have expected to behave in a more seemly and reasonable manner.”
“Mama,” Lucretia said, “I only wish that I could see you one more time before you die.”
“You are seeing me now. Talk sense, child.”
“I mean, to embrace you, Mama. That you were here—”
“Enough, Lucretia!” The hologram of the Blessèd Femysade chopped its hand downward on the bias. “My one charge to you was to make no assault upon the equanimity necessary for a savant to avail herself of the numinals and cerebrics. You know very well—both of you—that emotionalism is contraindicated for the attainment of mens altissima. Yet still you attack my equilibrium with histrionics! If there is time before the Discorporation, I shall come to you perhaps once more, and then we may speak a little again: only supposing I find you both in better mind. These tears! For now . . .” The image vanished.
Neither as hologram nor otherwise did they ever see the Blessèd Femysade again. Much too small to hold her properly—when had Lucretia got so big?—Aqib nonetheless held his daughter as best he could while sobs wracked her.
What had the memory of his portly, lovely wife to do with this cruel, starved creature Femysade had become? Nothing about the latter recalled the former. During siesta, she’d used to lie naked with Aqib in the sheets, and they would kick their feet together, talking lazily . . . but those moments were many years gone. Such sweetness wouldn’t come again.
Who could forget the scandal they’d raised in the Sovereign House, early on—going round always arm in arm, heads leaning together and whispering like dear close friends, as women do together, or men with one another? The whole court, shocked, had supposed they must be lying down only as sisters do, giggling into the small hours, and telling stories to each other at siesta, but hardly doing such things as could conceive a child: right up until Lucretia began to swell her mother’s belly. And though Aqib had only wanted to make love very rarely, and then would turn to his wife ravenous for her, the Blessèd Femysade had never minded either the hunger or the wait. Had he cared for her? Certainly he had! But all that was done now. It was put away for good. Aqib could love no one who hurt his daughter so much. An untimely thought invaded his reverie. Suppose—
Just suppose, down some distant forking of life’s road, on a much more joyful path than this, Aqib-who’d-chosen-differently lay beside Lucrio, who would have skipped the afternoon session at Senate only to lie abed with him, chatting intimately, both of them sweaty in the aftermath of love. Did all possibilities include that one too, somewhere?
Lucretia, catching her breath, managed to speak between hitches and gasps. “But you, Papa,” she said, “I only wish you wouldn’t always
be so alone. You’re not an old man yet—not at all—and neither king nor Cousins would fault you for taking a lover. Why not find yourself some woman to . . . ?”
He let her go and crossed to the half-open casement door. “Master Aqib?” Lucretia said, startled by this abruptness. He ignored her. The sun westered in a red course through clouds over the bayou’s far shore, where the gods lived and Femysade would die. Sultry and indifferent, the evening was gathering. Aqib closed his eyes.
A thousand birds, each one a soloist, sang the vespers to him, and backing the birds another choir of one billion: the dry season cicada. Below in the courtyard, a boy—his nephew—threw a stick, and a puppy barked as she went bounding after it. Above in the vault, a silver falcon plunged toward earth, shrieking pre-victory. Aqib was privy to all this secret music, and even his most dogged, irresolvable anguish flagged and fell away in the face of the world’s raw beauty. His teeth let go of his bitten lip. His aching hands eased their grip on the sill, no longer clenched so hard lest he tremble. Or wail. He opened his eyes and a few wet blinks sufficed to clear away the blurriness. This could be borne and he would bear it. Aqib drew a long shuddering breath. Life had some worth and meaning. It truly did.
[ninth day]
At midday the Corporal would go up to the Sovereign House garrison and take his meal at the refectory there, among the champions, the warriors, the men. Most days, Aqib would have his tiffin brought down to him from home, and would sit in the shady quarter of the Menagerie’s sunny front court, and often take his siesta there too, among the menials.
He’d winkled out the tiniest tin of gravy from his tray, and was happily pouring it over the biggest tin, though still quite small, of corn, when the pale shade darkened all of a sudden. He looked up, and sharply back down, in dread. The Corporal loomed over him, then sat.
“Aqib-sa,” said his brother, not in the usual tones. Startled, Aqib looked over: the Corporal was smiling, his tone wistfully affectionate. “I wonder, baby brother,” he said, “whether you remember that day we first took you down to the sea . . . ?” And the Corporal began to give a vivid résumé.
Of course Aqib remembered that day! He could remember nothing much before that day, the ocean, and his brother. Diversely blue, those waters had been so much vaster than the ones he’d known theretofore in the tub where Nurse bathed him, and the waters had needed no hand to smack them before making white splashes. The sea shallows were transparent, the depths aqua and turquoise, and distances very dark, like dusk in the east or western dawn. Foam lapped shyly toward his toes, but always demurred and withdrew without wetting them. So Aqib came down closer. He squatted to taste. How foul it was! And waves came back swamping over him, the carnivorous waters dragging him off hungrily. He screamed, and Brother—just as one prays in extremity that the Saints shall do—came and bore him up aloft, to safety. Aqib clung to his brother’s neck, bawling. Papa said, “Give me the baby,” and Sister said, No, to her. But Aqib wouldn’t let go. He wanted Brother. Taqiri was the savior, Taqiri the one who had been there. All this while, Brother was patting Aqib’s back. “Oh, you’re all right now, aren’t you?” He kissed Aqib’s cheek. “I’ve got you, haven’t I?” Saying such kind things, his brother had walked them higher onto golden sand.
Rapt, his dinner forgotten, Aqib listened. He hugged himself and looked down. Smiling, he felt his mood warm with deep fraternity, eternal forgiveness.
Such moments of perfect goodness had come again, now and then, over the years while he grew up. At times his brother was so kind Aqib glimpsed the contours of a different childhood altogether: happier and shown the way, with a best friend and ally, his brother as the wise one who’d already blazed a trail from baby to boyhood to man, and knew all the hidden pitfalls, and knew the safe way through. Aqib never did, though, hit on a way to . . . earn that better brother. If pure good fortune sometimes brought him, Aqib’s own many failings inevitably drove him off. You wouldn’t think torment and salvation could reside in a single figure.
“So, Aqib-sa, what becomes of the family without you?” the Corporal said gently. “If the king calls Master Sadiqi friend, even so, Papa’s star at court is much come down since he married our Sainted mother. And, me—you know I must go north and fight on the plains, or else never make a name for myself. But they’ll never raise a fourth-order Cousin to high captain, and never give me the command of one of those plains-forts, unless you thicken our blood. I need you, and Sister needs you, and Papa does too. Don’t you remember when . . . ?”
. . . another tale from better days. The sweetest sort of grace came over the Corporal on rare occasions, and at such times they were able to be friends, he and his brother. They were close. Aqib hardly suffered hunger pangs in comparison to more red-blooded men, but a warrior could not be skimping his victuals, if he wanted to keep up his stamina and strength. Therefore Aqib passed over his dinner to his brother, who fell on it. The Corporal sat with Aqib there in the Menagerie’s shade, companionably among the menials, and they both took siesta there too, curled up on a blanket in the grass.
The mood lingered when they awoke. And so they went out walking together through the boulevards and byways of Olorum—walking prodigiously far, too, even to the River’s bank, and down the eastern bayou shore. They talked freely all the while, as they hadn’t in years, or perhaps never before.
Seaside and after dark, among the shanties of the southwestern undercity, they stopped for supper at some tumbledown fondac made of driftwood and palm fronds. The back porch was only a few strides across pale sand to the dark waves, moonwashed and musical. And there wasn’t meat in the long-cook-gravy brought out to them, neither pork nor buffalo, but pink langoustine and flaking fish: delicious. Afterwards, Brother put them on a wagon going back northeast, home to the overcity, for a little rest before prayers. Jounced on the crowded wagon, in the vinegar musk of workers’ sweat, the Corporal told Aqib that, just two days back, His Holiest Majesty’s favorite child had come home from abroad. And so, to celebrate the advent of the Blessèd Femysade, the king had called High Prayer: for men and women to worship together tonight. It would fall to the men’s lay priesthood to dance the benediction. “Won’t you stand with your fellows tonight?” asked the Corporal. “How you dance, Brother! There’s such an anointing to it.”
Aqib hesitated. He rarely danced anymore at prayers. Lay priests wore a thin white shift, which strenuous dance soaked to nothingness, such that the fine fit bodies (his own among them) stood entirely revealed . . . In that sweaty crush of dancers—lifting, being lifted—Aqib had begun to doubt whether his thoughts were quite, at all times, where they should be. Lately when they called on him to take part, he’d begged off. And yet, the forbidden no longer stalked him from all quarters. To have surrendered singularly and in full, it seemed, meant he could be safe on other fronts. Only one man could sway him now. So Aqib said, “All right, I will dance tonight.” After rest, he put on a lay priest’s shift beneath his robe.
Midnight bells rang as they hastened to the Sovereign House. Orange lamplight spilled through frets of the carved wood doors, and everyone was afoot, clapping and stamping; the women singing, tonight. He followed his father and brother into the north of the prayer hall, those rich, high voices on the south just finishing the Call-to-Worship. Disloyally to his sex, Aqib much preferred a woman’s voice in song. The Cousins seated in the north wore black vestments, every one. There were only bright gowns to the partition’s south, weltering colors according to the arcane praxes of women. Brother found them space to put down their prayer mats. The Call ended. The cousinry sat. In the moment before prayers began, he heard the Corporal murmur an answer: “Yes, my baby brother will dance tonight,” and Aqib looked down at his hands, smiling, when men smacked his back and shoulders. Soon a southern murmur arose beyond the fretted partition, as news spread also to the women. And prayers began. Cousins kneeling toward the east, the deep and light voices joined in unison chant, men from memory, women (who couldn’t hol
d so much Recitature in smaller minds) using the crutch of paper, of literacy. His Holiest Majesty led them through a full lay of the Canon. When the king gave the sign, drummers began to beat benedictory rhythms and Aqib cast off his robe. He went upfront to the chancel with the other lay priests. It felt so good to do one thing well! How wonderful to feel oneself approved of . . .
Two of the men and another boy were better dancers than Aqib: crisper in their movements, executing stance and step with a clarity Aqib couldn’t match. One man, particularly, was mighty in the turns and jumps. It was nothing for that one to add twice the power of the others to the basic steps, his handstands one-handed, his cartwheels full flips. Though these three Cousins were clearly better dancers, everyone preferred Aqib. Sainted drums were man, or so the Olorumi said, while Sainted dance was woman. One mounted the other, latter submitting to former; and therefore in the dancing of certain women, one saw self-abandonment to the Saints man or boy could never match. The female might give herself up to Saintliness with a holy passion nothing to do with pure technique or raw strength. A sacred thing, and seeing it, the congregation would cry out, “The Saints are coming down! Bring Them—dance, dance!” Such anointment fell only to a few women, to a couple rare girls . . . and to Aqib. The aunty-brokers of marriage rated him so highly only half for his pretty face and manner. The other half owed to this: what the southern Cousins saw whenever worship mingled at High Prayer, and it was men’s turn to dance the benediction, and Aqib danced among them—never best, but brightest.
Cups of water, sips of spirits infused with potent herbs, were held to his lips and tipped in. And once the drums began they never did stop, that Aqib knew of. Rapture grasps one thing fully and discards the rest. There was just dance for him. The next morning, he woke in his father’s house, in his own bed: to the whispering of his chamber attendant. Here are bush tea and the fruits you like to eat, Young Master. Here is water for bathing, and a clean shirt and trousers to wear. Will the Young Master have something for his head, if it’s paining him?
A Taste of Honey Page 7
