“What am I supposed to wear then?”
“Oh, I’m apparently happy to find something appropriately prurient for you. Or rather, Ariel is. Go on,” she said, waving, and one of her handmaidens went. “You needn’t fear being forced to go naked through the halls, assuming you stay on for any length of time. My father likes to dress his dolls.”
Lan tried hard not to react to that—it was just a word, wasn’t it? Words didn’t matter—but she must have because Batuuli’s smile grew teeth.
“And we all indulge my father’s preferences, even if we don’t always dare to look directly at them. Not that I’m an expert on his more libidinous fancies. I dare say you’ll be able to inform me on that subject soon enough, but for now, it is enough for both of us to know only that he would like you clean.” She gestured invitingly at the bath.
Lan looked at it. It was more clean water than she’d ever seen in one place, enough to buy all the peaches in Norwood…and all its people besides.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Batuuli signal her handmaidens, but she didn’t wait for them to force her into the bath. She walked in on her own. It was warm, uncomfortably so. That was okay. It should hurt a little. It should burn. Lan stood and watched her skin turn a scalded pink with a feeling that was almost pride, at least until the handmaidens stepped down into the bath with her. Also naked but impervious to the heat, they scooped up water in pitchers that probably were only ever used for this purpose and poured it out again over her head, her back, her breasts. ‘No one will ever drink this water now,’ she thought, watching the water discolor around her, and then, even more unsettled, thought, ‘This water was never for drinking.’
“You’re not enjoying this,” Lady Batuuli observed.
“I’m not used to it.”
“They’re never used to it, the warmbloods he favors, however briefly, although they always try to pretend otherwise. I’ve seen hundreds of them by now, in all their paints and costumes, laughing along with those who laugh at them. You’re the first I’ve seen who looks as if she knows she’s being mocked,” she added in a musing way. “But then, you’re the first I’ve ever had to prepare for him. Perhaps they’ve all shown their doubts when they’re naked and vulnerable.”
Now sponges were brought, lightly rubbed along Lan’s limbs, and where they passed, they left an unpleasant slick of soft, fragrant foam. Soap? Maybe, but nothing like the cakes of soap in Norwood, made from wood ashes and rendered fat, that left the skin it abraded chapped and tender…and not very clean, either.
“Why did he send you to me?” Lady Batuuli asked. “Did he tell you?”
“Only that he thought it would amuse you.”
“Amuse me? What does he imagine I’ll do with you? Surely he would have sent you to my brother if he thought you needed training.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re hardly the best judge. Serafina there—” One of the handmaidens dipped an uncertain bow in answer to Lady Batuuli’s impatient wave. “—thinks she has a clever tongue for woman’s pleasures, but even at her best, she’s tedious and distracting…and I am rarely so fortunate as to have her best.”
The handmaiden said nothing, but her hands clenched as she scrubbed Lan’s thigh.
“You may think me a jade, like my dear brother, but I’m not. I’m practically an ascetic.” Lady Batuuli lay down on the bench, lacing her hands over her flat belly and studying the ceiling. “I can prove it, if you like.”
“That you’re an ascetic?”
“That Serafina licks quim rather less well than a donkey might. And after all, you should be washed everywhere.”
“No. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Batuuli mimicked. “Such manners. ‘Lord Azrael,’ you called him. Please and thank you and all the while demanding redress to your mortal outrage.” She turned her head to look at Lan, smirking. “You don’t really think he’ll give in, do you?”
“He hasn’t thrown me out.”
“And you think that means what, exactly?” Batuuli looked back at the ceiling. “He will never give you what you want. Never. But he will let you think you can convince him for as long as you can bear his weight upon your back. And afterwards, why, you’ll always have a place in Haven. He throws none of his toys away while there’s still some fun to be had from them. And he’s not a jade either.” She was quiet for a while, then said, softly, “He savors his amusements.”
The handmaidens drained the bath, but kept her standing in its center so they could cover her body with sticky paper and rip it off again in strips, beginning at her ankles and working their way up. They took away more than just the paper, Lan saw, leaving her legs as hairless and smooth as a child’s. They didn’t stop at her thighs, either, but positioned her with her legs wide apart to get at her pubis also, then her underarms and finally even her forearms, which was embarrassingly unnecessary in Lan’s opinion, since the few hairs there were not at all obvious to the eye. She thought it was over when they put the papers and sticky-pot away, but they only ran a fresh bath. This time, Lan was forced to sit, submerged to her neck, while her hair was carefully cleaned and combed. Lan kept it sensibly short and wouldn’t have thought it needed more than a pull or two on each side, but it still took two handmaidens and a ritual procession of soaps, cremes and oils, each of which had to be worked in just so before being rinsed entirely away. All this long while, Lady Batuuli lay motionless, like a corpse laid out for burial, back when people still did that sort of thing. The quiet, the whiteness and the water all combined to gnaw at Lan until she just had to say something, even something stupid, just to end it.
“Would he grant you a request, if you made one?”
All six handmaidens stopped for a moment to stare at her, but Lady Batuuli merely said, “Perhaps,” in that same low, unmoving way. “But take no hope from that, for I will not ask him anything. Not even my own favors and never yours.”
“Why not?”
“I have nothing of my own in this life. Not my home, my family, not even my name…only my hate. And if that is to be my only possession, he can have it, as I am his possession. He can have it all and I hope he chokes on every swallow. Tell me…” Batuuli rolled onto her side, reaching down to trail her hand along the bath’s lip, testing the warmth of the water. “Does he know I hate him?”
“Yes.”
“How fearless you must be,” Batuuli remarked. “Not a quality I imagine would attract him. So he knows I hate him…and still he keeps me. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You answer like one of my servants now. Not so fearless.”
“He loves his Children.”
“Ha! A thousand lies there are in those four words! Do you believe it? Truly?”
“Yes.”
Batuuli’s twisted smile faded into a frown. She sat up, her fingers curled around the edge of her bench until the knuckles paled. “Then you are a fool. He loves nothing. It was only his whim that raised us back to this…this thing that is not life…and if I understood what it was that made him choose me, I would change it, destroy it, force him to send me back into the darkness from which he stole me.”
Lan opened her mouth, but one of the handmaidens chose that moment to pour water over her head and by the time she’d finished spitting it out and clearing her eyes, she knew better than to say what she’d been thinking.
Batuuli was watching. Her eyes were half-closed, which made them seem as if they had no whites at all, were only empty sockets. “You were about to mention my looks, I think,” she murmured. “That he chose me for my beauty. I believe I saw the word obviously hovering about your head.”
Lan shrugged and admitted it with a nod.
“Am I very beautiful then?”
Her handmaidens murmured appreciative affirmation, but Lan only said, puzzled, “You know you are.”
“Yes. I do. And I know that I could mar this face until I was forced to go, as he does, masked. But to what possible end? I could make
myself a grotesque, a gargoyle…and he would only mend me and go on…as if I had done nothing.”
“What do you mean, mend you?”
“Just what I say. Dead flesh is no more than clay in Father’s hands. With a touch, he can take away even the worst of wounds.” Batuuli rolled her gaze toward Lan and smiled. “So why, you wonder, does he choose to wear his own in so dramatic a fashion? But he is not dead. I don’t know what he is, but he’s not dead. He has no choice but to live with his scars. It upsets him,” she added with bitter pleasure. “Sometimes I think I should cut myself, just to see what it would do to him. Do you know Tehya?”
“I saw her.”
“And there is a difference, isn’t there? If it comes to that, I don’t suppose anyone knows Tehya. Anyway, she mutilates herself now and then,” Batuuli said with a wave to dismiss her other words. “But he mends her. And she knows he will, so I don’t know why she does it. It isn’t for pleasure and it isn’t out of loathing. It’s almost…almost a kind of speech with her. As if she’s saying something only he can hear, except she does it with knives instead of words.”
“Is she mad?” Lan asked, thinking of the woman she’d seen alone at her table in the dining hall, her eerie stillness and piercing stare.
“Oh, we’re all mad here.” Batuuli smiled, glancing over at her, then sighed and shook her head. “Wasted. You can’t even read, can you?”
She said it like it was an accusation, like that was something just anyone should be able to do. “What does that matter?” Lan asked defensively.
“Not a bit, to me. It’s Father who will become bored with you.”
The handmaidens finished with Lan’s hair and stood her up. The bath was drained. A final pitcher water was poured over her, this one shockingly cold, but she was wrapped so quickly in soft cloth afterwards that she didn’t even have time to shiver. She stood and dripped as the handmaidens dried her, her arms out like a scarecrow’s so as not to impede their work. One last pass of a hooked knife took away any errant hair the waxing had missed and then there was lotion to soothe her raw skin. Three pairs of hands moved over her, invading every secret while Batuuli watched.
“Do I look any better?” Lan asked, when the silence and that stare grew too heavy.
Batuuli roused, seemingly sincerely confused. “Than what?”
Lan blushed. “Than I did when I walked in.”
“Oh.” Batuuli looked her over with an arched brow and a dubious frown. “You’ll do for what he wants. I doubt he even cares what you look like. He’s only bathed you to make you grateful.”
“He doesn’t need to do that,” Lan muttered, looking down at herself. She had thought she might see one of those women from the old magazines, pictures of which could still be traded for a bottle of clean water or a bowl of soup, no matter how faded or torn, especially pictures of a body as naked as hers. Instead, she saw a farmer’s body—all weathered skin and muscular limbs, stocky and awkward and banded with sunless white over pink. “I’m grateful enough.”
“So is he, if the truth be known. Oh look, I’ve shocked them,” she said as her handmaidens all glanced at her together. “That doesn’t happen very often anymore. But it’s true, you know. He raised us up to be his children only because he never thought to raise us up to be his whores. Then the war, the hungering dead, his Haven…and that woman. The bloodstains weren’t yet washed from the floors and there she was. ‘Spare me, my lord,’” Batuuli said, now in a piping, lowland voice, “‘and I’ll be yours.’ Ha. Nothing suspicious in that, is there? But he took her. He was trembling when he led her through the gate. Trembling. Can you imagine? How many thousands of years he’s lived, how many ages of the Earth, and never known a woman? God, it must have been like fucking a baboon.”
The three handmaidens withdrew and the other three came forward, each one with a different gown—one black, one blue and one deep red.
“Which one should I wear?” Lan asked.
“I hardly think it matters. You won’t be in it long. He took the first one right there in the foyer—no, not the black, it makes you look like a corpse. He has enough of those to look at—and all of us in the rooms beyond, pretending not to hear him grunting and thumping about. And of course it ended badly,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “He was so eager to get stuck in that he never stopped to think she might have something to stick in him. Not that it did any good. He can’t be killed. In the stories, the ogre always has a weakness, the dragon that one soft scale, but not Father. She did it all for nothing.”
“Why do you hate him?” Lan asked bluntly, lifting her legs one at a time so the shoes that accompanied the dress could be fit, if they could even be called shoes. They were no more than cloth covers for her feet, glittering with golden thread and black crystals, but thin enough that she could feel the grooves between the tiles through them.
“Why should I not?”
“No, really. Look around. He—” Lan sputtered as the blue gown was dropped over her head. When she’d thrashed her arms through the sleeves and could see again, Batuuli was watching her with her beautiful, poisonous smile. “He’s given you everything,” Lan insisted, undaunted. “Do you even know what you have here? Do you have any idea what it’s like outside of Haven?”
“Whatever you think he’s taken from you, he’s taken more from me. Far more.” Batuuli smile thinned, took on edges, but her voice did not reflect them. Her words were soft, like the fabric clinging to Lan’s clean, sweetly-scented body. “I had a life once. A home. Family, friends, maybe lovers. He denied me all. He raised me without memory. He gave me the only name I know, taught me the only languages I speak. It is this creature, this thief of life, I must call father, knowing nothing of what he took from me, only that he took it. Tighter,” she told the handmaiden lacing Lan’s bodice, so that Lan’s next breath was a cough of surprise. “But I did love him once, you know,” Batuuli went on. “Do you know why?”
She was waiting, so Lan had to answer, even if it was just a wild, breathless shake of her head.
“Because I had to. Because he had made himself our whole world and we knew no better. For a time. Tell me, were you happy in Norwood?” she asked. “Were you happy tending your trees in the ruins of the world?”
Lan said nothing. The handmaidens draped her neck with delicate chains and pinned down her unruly hair with glittering combs.
Batuuli nodded as if Lan had answered. “Because you knew no better. It was only after you saw what you had lost that you thought to miss it. Why should it be different for me? Because I have this?” She waved contemptuously at the white room swallowing them. “This fine cage? These beautiful fetters? You think because I have these things, I do not deserve to grieve for what I’ve lost? Or hate him who took it?” Batuuli waited while Lan’s face was painted, then uttered a short, sharp laugh and said, “Well? Answer! Or are you like all my father’s dogs, who must be told what to think?”
“I think you only hate him because he lets you,” said Lan and Batuuli’s smile vanished. “And I think you stay because beneath all that hate, you know you used to love him and of all the things you’ve lost, that’s the thing you miss most. That’s what I think.”
Lady Batuuli’s chin lifted. Gracefully, she rose and came three light, quick steps forward, stopping close enough that they could have kissed. “You can think what you like, but you would do well to mind what you say.” Each word puffed against Lan’s lips; Batuuli’s breath was cold and tasted vaguely of wine. “Your time will come and go, warmblood. I am eternal. And I can make your suffering last years.”
“You asked,” Lan reminded her.
Batuuli’s dead eyes narrowed. A moment later, she smiled. “So I did. But it appears you are ready for my father’s bed, so we really have nothing more to talk about, do we?” Without waiting for an answer, without turning her head, she said, “Celestine.”
A handmaiden fidgeted forward. “My lady.”
“Take my father’s whore wherever it is whores
wait until they are summoned for use.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Lady Batuuli swept away, her handmaidens bowing around her. Lan followed, but when she reached the door, caught only a glimpse of Batuuli’s veils as she disappeared deeper into her many rooms. Only the flayed and mutilated pikemen were there to watch Lan pass by and neither of them spoke.
* * *
So it was back to the Red Room to wait. And wait. And wait. There was nothing to do except stare out the window, where she could watch either the bruise-yellow clouds rolling across the sky or the guards patrolling the palace grounds. From her high vantage, she could see all the way to Haven’s high walls, but there was no movement in the distant streets. All the essential work that should have been necessary to keep a city this size alive had been reduced to light maintenance now that the dead had it. Azrael may have his grand feasts, but the rest of Haven’s residents had no need to eat and therefore no need to cook, farm, raise livestock or run markets. Under his rule, there was no trade and so no economy—no corporations, no banks, no future markets to invest in or past yields to analyze. She wasn’t even certain they still used money in Haven. There was no illness; they needed no hospitals. His was the only law; there was no parliament, no barristers, no police. Newspapers and television had limped on for a while after the ascension, but one by one, that had stopped and now there was no radio, no movies, no magazines. Lan wondered if the dead were bored or if they even noticed they had nothing to do. Waiting here, it was all too easy to imagine them, thousands of them, standing motionless in their clean, bright homes, staring out windows or at walls or just into space, passing time without measuring it until they were needed.
She could not be so patient or so still. Pacing like a penned goat that senses slaughter, she went back and forth from the window, where she stood and imagined the non-workings of Haven’s citizens, to the bed, where she forced herself to sit and keep her hands off her dress or her hair. She tried to think about Azrael, to plan out her words or at least decide which of her limited store of sexual favors was likeliest to win his approval, but her thoughts had a way of drifting back to Batuuli’s chambers.
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 10
