Aqib sat up, panicked. Lucrio!
He said, “Fetch a house runner,” and slapped aside the solicitous hands. The runner was dispatched to speak a message in such terse, obscure terms no one might understand but the man meant to. (Regretting the night before, promising the one to come.) Aqib groped the breakfast tray while his other hand sought to block the rising sun. His fingertips found a little bundle of leaves and pinched it up. Sour freshness rinsed his foul breath away, scrubbed his coated tongue. Light became light, not daggers in his eyes. The pounding of his head calmed.
[tenth day, morning]
Near noon, Aqib fed the bears properly with groundnuts and greens. Then he spoiled them with some honeycomb, dearly bought off a ragged bush-forager, who came by the Menagerie to hock choice scavengeries whenever short the coins a drunkard needed. The sister bears gobbled up each her half of honeycomb—the greedy guts!—and then each sister wanted a hand from which to lick away all the sticky leftovers. Aqib held out his palms. Tropical sun had faded the bears’ rich color to pinkish at muzzle, crown, and a wide swath all down their backs from neck to stubby tail. Otherwise their short coats were deeply russet. Now the rigors of training were behind them, and the performance done, the bears’ nervous appetite and sad reluctance again became a desire only for play—and to eat. Aqib giggled, the coarse tongues tickling his fingers. The fence creaked as someone leaned against it. Aqib glanced over his shoulder and saw a vision. He blinked and stared: but the vision stood there still. Lucrio had appeared at the boundary of the bears’ enclosure.
Oh yes, of course—he must have entered the Menagerie by the secret way.
“That was nice,” Lucrio called from the fence, “the way you got your bears up and dancing the other day.” His hair clipped and beard trimmed, since the night before last; Lucrio wore the full battle dress of a tricenturion, only the plumed helmet lacking. “With just some talk, and waving your hand a little. I liked that a lot! All the bears I seen dance back home, in Terra-de-Luce, what they do is jam some iron up the bear’s nose, then put a chain on it. Just a-pulling and a-yanking: that’s how they make those poor bears stand up and dance.”
“No, no, no,” Aqib said, aghast. “Oh, I could never treat my ladies that way! We parley, we practice—I give them treats.” Aqib crouched and roughly scratched a bear’s side; she lay down and writhed ecstatically. “Though our bears of Summer aren’t, I’m sad to say, the most fearsomely clever creatures. The bears of this continent do seem rather stupid, I’m afraid. Do you know—when I was just a boy—one of your countrymen came to Olorum with a bear from the Lands of Winter? Such a big, brown, lovely fellow that was! The handler and his bear gave a grand performance at the Sovereign House (and His Holiest Majesty has been just mad for bears, ever since!). But before the show could happen, the king required my father, Master Sadiqi, to take charge of the Daluçan bear’s recovery. After the long voyage here, I’m afraid the poor dear was in the sorriest state . . .” And the handler—a horribly brutal man!—had never done the bear any good, either . . . but Aqib left that part out. “Oh, from the first, Lucrio, I was so struck by the quick wits of your Winterland bears. How apt that creature was, how bright!”
“Aqib-sa,” Lucrio cried, “carissime puer. Do you know what? You just go running off at the mouth whenever you’re worried.” Lucrio’s eyes rendered such a fond regard, one felt abashed meeting it. “Why not tell me what’s got you so scared, then?”
Well, everything, my love. “I’m sure I don’t what you mean,” Aqib said. “Now that my brother knows he must bear our secret in silence, we’ve nothing to . . .” Aqib assayed a shrug of nonchalance. But enough of this calling back and forth over the fence! He stood, wiped hands on his trousers, and left the bears’ enclosure. From the fence’s gate, he gestured Lucrio to follow. “Let’s see whether we we can’t find some spot where the menials won’t spy on us.” His gaze flitted about as if reluctant to meet the brown eyes of his lover. “Come on.”
Lucrio came. “And that sure was something,” he said, following, “seeing your dance last night.”
“No.” Aqib looked back at him. “I never saw you there! But, no, Lucrio; that just isn’t possible. You can’t have been among the men, or I would have seen you.”
“No, baby—upstairs,” Lucrio said. “The Most High would never let us infidels onto the Sainted floor. But from upstairs in the gallery, a few of us Daluçans got to watch.”
“Oh, the gallery, of course! I’d forgot all about that,” Aqib said. “Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever been up there?”
“We watched from upstairs, yeah.” Lucrio’s fingertips traced the curve of Aqib’s ear, the nape of his neck. “You were something else. Dancing like you had no bones at all, just beautiful. With your hips wobbling, and arms all loose, on rhythm with the drums. Some of the Olorumi ladies cried, watching you. And I saw one girl pass out. Even the stuck-up princess, who just came back from away, was eating you up with her eyes. But it scared me too—scared me bad, watching you. You were waaaaaay far gone.” Lucrio had now taken Aqib’s hand, thumb tracing his knuckles. “What was in those gourds they kept putting up to your mouth? I thought it would kill me when I saw you fall down like that. I thought you were dead! But our god-born knights wouldn’t let me come down to you. The Corporal picked you up, and I guess he must of carried you home. At least he was gentle.” Lucrio said this last with grudging fairmindedness.
All raddled and tattered like old cloth, Aqib’s memory of the night before had whole events torn out of it. “I scarcely recall the benediction,” he confessed. “Although I’m very sorry to have worried you.” Behind them the big bull trumpeted, seeing Aqib so nearby: wishing him to visit. But now wasn’t the time. He and Lucrio had stopped by the ’efantopia, and were somehow standing hand in hand, face to face. Here in broad daylight, where any eyes could see, Aqib had specifically meant to keep some distance between them. If anyone were to witness them thus—together—exaggerated rumor would spread with the speed of a thunderbolt. “You should not have come here, Lucrio,” Aqib forced himself to say firmly. “Did you not understand the message my runner sent?”
“Yeah, I understood,” Lucrio said. His fingertips seemed in thrall to the shape of Aqib’s ear, tracing round and round again. “Fell asleep last night waiting for you, but this morning that runner from your place woke me up.”
Aqib reached up, took grasp of the hand, and pulled it down. “Then you know that I shall come to you tonight at the fondac, as always.”
“As always?” Lucrio looked at him strangely. “I’m gone from the fondac already, Aqib. The knights of the Tower ordered whole Embassy back to our rooms at the Sovereign House. But tonight doesn’t matter; I don’t care about that. What about tomorrow night? I keep waiting and waiting for you to say something, but the Embassy is shipping out on tomorrow’s tide. Then all us Daluçans will be gone for good, ’member?”
Slapped to wakefulness, a sleeper jerks upright just so, slack-jawed and goggling. Aqib suffered such a rude awakening then, because he hadn’t remembered. He’d made himself forget. These last ten days, he’d never looked further than the night ahead. Keeping to the shorter view had been trick of perspective: tonight, and tonight, and tonight being feats of wild daring, each singly, within reach of his courage. Better to forget tomorrow; better, when climbing a slope of loose gravel swarming with snakes and scorpions, to fix your eyes on the very next footfall—even if that means the cliff ahead must come as a surprise.
Seeing revelation appall Aqib’s face, Lucrio pulled him in close. “Did you know: all of our unmarried knights except for one took a wife here in Olorum?” They stood close enough that these whispers seemed prelude to a kiss. “And even our great god Serra—she took the son of the Most High’s brother for her man.”
“Yes,” Aqib said. “I’d heard.”
“Well, something I bet you didn’t hear: one semidivinus fell hard for some rich merchant’s heir. After him and the boy’d been sneaki
ng around six, seven, eight nights—just like we done—three months back, the boy had to run for his life to the Sovereign House, for safety-from-men. The boy’s been staying there with his knight ever since. Not setting foot outside once—and can’t, either, until we all ship out tomorrow. Or his right of sanctuary is revoked. You heard about that?”
“No,” Aqib said.
“We’ll see our son gutted with knives, and bled out like a stuck pig making mud of dust, before we let him run off to a life without Saints. That’s what the boy’s clan patricians said before the king and court.”
“That should have raised the greatest scandal,” Aqib said. “I wonder how no word of it has come to me?”
“Somebody didn’t want you hearing about it,” Lucrio said. “This is why Daluz wanted terms-for-love writ into the embassy treaty, or else we never would of come. The Olorumi king had to say it plain: any Daluçan could plight troth with any Olorumi—anybody at all—if older than first initiation and not married yet.”
Aqib thought he saw where this was going. “No, Lucrio; I think not. It can well be imagined that His Holiest Majesty might allow some Daluçan to take a willing woman to wife, but men with men, boys—”
“Whichever, Aqib: we made it clear in the treaty. It’s all writ down. Us Daluçans, we love too hard. We want to spend our whole life with the one we fall for. So, won’t you come away with me to Terra-de-Luce tomorrow? I would stay here if I could, I swear I would. But it’s another fifteen years on my tour, and Olorum’s no place for two men together anyway. So please, Aqib. Please come with me.”
It seemed the time of manageable quantities was done, and everything would now rush toward the crisis point. No and yes were equally impossible to say Instead of either, Aqib said with anguished insight, “Tell me, Lucrio: did you come here only to meet some Olorumi boy? Only to teach him your . . . modus amandi Dalucianus, turning his face from the Saints, so that his people and family would spurn him forever?” Aqib saw that he could never be content in Olorum anymore. Where then was home? “You came here,” Aqib cried out, “and did this to me, Lucrio?”
After a long time quiet, Lucrio said weakly, “Not only for that. There were a lot of reasons, Aqib . . .” He mumbled a few of them: career, wealth, adventure. But obviously it was all a hedge against the true answer: yes. “Are you sorry then? Do you want me to go away now? Do you wish we never met at all?”
No! Oh no. Nonono. “No, Lucrio.” Aqib spoke despairingly, holding tightly to him—to what and whom else, now? “But weren’t there any boys in Daluz? Even one or two very pretty ones?”
Lucrio gave a sad crack of laughter. “Yeah, I guess some of them might of been pretty to somebody else,” he said, “but for me, I needed to cross the whole mare magnum to find the one I was looking for.”
“Racuhzin?” said some young woman, a menial appearing there beside them.
Aqib and Lucrio squeaked and leapt violently apart, in just the way no one ever does except lovers caught by surprise.
“What?” Aqib said, or rather shrieked.
Gaze flicking between foreign and familiar, the girl said, “You said come and get you, Racuhzin, when we was ready to clean out the ground crocs’ pen. It’s just that, without you keep the monsters off us, how can we get the croc shit out?”
A reasonable point. “Mm, yes,” Aqib said, neatening his clothes with nervous hands. “Indeed. Well, Jellaby, you may go and tell everyone that we shall see to the ground crocs’ pen after siesta, all right? Say to them as well that the Reverend Master’s son isn’t to be disturbed right now, for any reason. Now, away with you. Go on.”
Taking her own sweet time, Jellaby backed up with luxuriously slow steps—relishing the view, the lovely scandal of it all. When she did finally face about and rush off, clearly it was neither fear nor obedience that sped her, but thrilling news.
“Aw, shit,” Lucrio said. “Don’t that smell like the Devil farting upwind.”
“Trouble, yes,” said Aqib. “Since Jellaby lies down with the Corporal whenever his wife is unwilling or with child, soon all Olorum—menial and Cousin—shall know the business of Aqib bmg Sadiqi. And know, too, with whom he transacts it.” Aqib sighed tiredly and sat in the shade under the ’efantopia’s fence.
Lucrio crouched on his haunches. “Daluçan law won’t let us marry,” he said, “of course not. But what men do—men together—is have the older one adopt the younger one like a son, see . . .”
“We’re of the same age, Lucrio! You haven’t reached second initiation yet either, have you?”
“No. But I am older: nearly twenty-two . . .”
“A couple of years! Hardly so old that you may claim to be my father.”
“My age ain’t the point, Aqib! The whole adoption’s just . . .” and here Lucrio groped for some word in Olorumi.
Aqib, knees drawn up and forehead resting on them, looked up. “Pro forma,” he said.
“Yeah! Pro forma. But it’s just as good as marrying. Everything I have goes to you, and Daluçan law would protect you. And the whole world would know—Imperial Terra-de-Luce, anyway—what’s between us. Take this back.” Lucrio tossed something across to Aqib, who caught it. “Vows and papers and the rest can happen later. But if you’ll have me, put that on.”
It was the heavy signet ring of tarnished silver, its tourmaline seal a carved fish-shape. The thing was made for such hands as Lucrio’s—mannishly thick-fingered—and would slip free at once from any of Aqib’s effete digits. He turned it over in his hand. “When my father and the king were boys,” Aqib said, “and all during their youth, they were the best of friends. Master Sadiqi might have married the king’s sister, but he married my mother for love, instead. The Saints took my mother, who was foreign, the very same day I came to light. I know that you, Lucrio, may deem it harsh for me to say so, but for my sister and brother and me, Mother’s greatest legacy has been to birth us into the fourth order of Cousins—nearly nobodies—rather than into the second, almost princes. And by custom, low-order Cousins are debarred from the court’s inmost circle, from close intimacy with the king. So, Papa’s ill-starred marriage also cost him—or made very difficult—the great friendship of his youth. My sister hasn’t married yet, but no marriage of hers can lift our family up, or bring us any lower. She will take her status to her husband’s family. And my brother?” Aqib joggled the ring from hand to hand, staring at it. “The Corporal met a kind-hearted girl, beautiful of face, lovely of figure. And quite young, my brother married her. He does love his wife very much; but she too is only a Cousin of the fourth order.”
“So they want you to marry some high girl, then?” Lucrio said. “A princess?”
“Yes. If I marry well and before my sister does, all her prospects are made the brighter. And the Corporal . . .” Aqib made a face: showing what, exactly? Love of family, ancient pain, hero-worship, and terrible pain all over again—this succession flitted through Aqib’s heart and across his face. “I regret, Lucrio, that you’ve never seen the Corporal at his best. But sometimes he has been wonderfully kind to me. He’s been the best brother anyone could have wished for. Sad to say—and a great difference, I know, from your Daluçan meritocracy—advancement in the armies of Olorum owes mostly to one’s status among the cousinry, and very little to a warrior’s native capacities. Truly, the Corporal is a lion at war, a master of every martial art: he deserves to make a great career in the armies. But he never will—indeed cannot—unless I thicken the family’s blood with a good marriage.”
While listening, Lucrio shook his head slowly, then with increasing vehemence. “That’s what the Corporal must of told you, Aqib. But listen. I spent this whole last season with the Olorumi armies, and I met plenty of captains, high captains, and even one marshal who came up out of the undercity: no sort of Cousin at all. And your brother? He ain’t no lion at war—a nasty bully is what he is! Just because he’s always ready to hurt somebody weaker, don’t believe he knows one damn thing about war-arts. You s
aw us fight at the fondac, didn’t you? Me tossing him around like nothing? You saw that. The stupid way he charged in with that spear! Do you know I never once saw your brother with the Olorumi soldiers—the serious ones—when I was teaching our Daluçan manu aperta? And the pathetic way he fights hand-to-hand, the Corporal don’t know shit about your Kapoway style, either!” Almost spitting with scorn, Lucrio said: “Calling hisself ‘the Corporal.’ By now, his sorry ass should be Captain, if he was any good!” Lucrio did spit then, off to the side. “Which he ain’t.”
This tirade hit Aqib not unlike a blow to the belly. It hurt cruelly to hear one he loved speak so ill of another equally loved. Aqib grabbed fistfuls of his pants’ loose material to still his trembling hands. “The Corporal may not be the most excellent of men,” he said, “or even of soldiers. I only know that I love my brother. That’s all I know, Lucrio. Master Sadiqi my father, however, truly is the best and kindest man in Olorum. That I be born alive, his beloved wife had to die. Yet my father has only ever shown me gentle forbearance. Can’t you see, Lucrio? I’m only a small-game hunter, and no sort of warrior at all. But still I shall become Master of Beasts and the Hunt after my father. Why? Because Master Sadiqi chose to pass all the secrets of his mastery on to me. He is everything good, in one person.” Resolve entered Aqib’s voice as he spoke. He extended a hand to Lucrio, the ring held out. “I cannot sail away with you and the Daluçans.” As one does to shore up weak conviction, Aqib shook his head as spoke. “To abandon my family, my father: it would be the worst sort of betrayal. I cannot do it, Lucrio. I’m sorry.”
Lucrio reached and closed Aqib’s hand around the ring. “Your papa,” Lucrio said in a crude tone, making an ugly face, “—is he wicked or just a fool, Aqib?”
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