by Nisi Shawl
The lover rides away and the boy comes up the moonlit garden toward the house. Stumbling dreamily, still he cuts no figure but a dancer’s. Savary gets up, holding the bowl. The sons of other mothers are fumbling at first love, safely, with local boys and girls. Hers is virtuoso of the best troupe in Sea-john, and snaps brusque fingers at musicians twice his age during performance. He’s off giving shows, most nights, at some palace in the Kingdom. Savary makes her way downstairs into the candlelit interior.
Her wife and husband have long since gone to bed. They made their peace years ago in the household war; they came to terms. Not Savary! The young will post headlong down perilous roads, dreaming they’re on the way to adventure, en route to love: someone must tell them, No, wait, you’ve turned wrong. Nothing lies down that way but heartbreak and disaster. Jahs says, But, my love, his new friends are those same fils-de-roi who buy a yacht from me. That boat, Savary—a whim of theirs!—keeps our family well for a year. If the boy runs away, he can go to the shelter of some palace. What can we offer a virtuoso? His family’s love, just our love, and a room in the house where he was born. Better not to fuss and fight, better to keep the boy near us, surely?
Well, yes, Savary agrees. But….
A son too talented and too headstrong isn’t a problem of temporal power, upon which her immortal husband could, perhaps, work an easy miracle. Rather it’s a problem of the sort all souls suffer passing through the vale of tears, before which Redamas is as helpless as any mortal. Still, Savary pleads to him: But, you, Redy—can’t you do something?
I’m just a god, Redamas says, not God.
Savary stows the berries in the cold cellar at the back of the pantry. By now, the boy is in the kitchen too, reaching down a cup from the shelves of fancy-glass. He looks over the table’s vast clutter, and underneath, searching for the palm wine jar. Which is right beside Savary in the pantry; she picks it up.
There’s almost nothing of his father in him, so much of her: brown and tender of skin too, and with his shirt gaping open beau-boy-style she sees a red-violet narrative of hands and teeth scrawled across his neck and torso. Not for the first time Savary thinks, my little boy’s the one they’re calling “El Supremo?” If only he were strapping like his sister, six-foot something. If only his papa’s divinity had come down to him too—no worries then! Somewhere abroad, his sister’s hunting a beast with the fell name Assassin of Cities. But Maman has no worries there. You have only to see the god whom you birthed smack aside thunderbolts, rout dragons, to thereafter save the worrying for your mortal child.
He looks his age: the baby softness long gone, no mannish thickening yet. Sixteen.
“Weren’t you supposed to give a show for some big muckety-muck tomorrow?” Savary steps from the pantry shadows, into the candle-bright kitchen. “Since when can you dance, all eaten up like that, in front of the Kingdom’s uptight nobility?” She gestures at the lewd bounty of his bruises.
“Oh, Maman!” The boy jumps and squeaks, a charming flutter. “You scared me.” He comes to hug her and Savary’s own arm takes him in tenderly, at once. How else? He smells of costly soap, sandalwood and rose attar; a light odor of horses, also expensive. He kisses her cheek and they part. Quick as crime, his hands do up his shirt laces, hiding the bulk of purple evidence. “Of course I’ll be in a robe and mask, Maman! We’re performing devotions to the Saints out-of-doors. Nothing hootchie en chambre.”
She offers; he takes the jar.
Savary follows him to the table where the cup waits—her eyes on the lovebites above his collar. It’s just too much! “But why would you want some awful man from over there? And worse, a kingson!”
“Oh, Maeqal’s not royal issue, Maman.” Complicated jewelry, some new thing, hangs about his neck. One chain, fingerthick, entwined by others, hairsbreadth fine. Not silver: the metal glints whiter and more matte.
“No?” Savary frowns. “I thought he was one of the Old Man’s half-thousand.”
The boy hums a negative. “And the King only ever had 114 sons, really. A good third of those”—speaking lightly, he jiggles loose the jar’s stopper —“were lost to the wars and fratricides. Maeqal’s neither son nor grandson. Exceedingly wonderful to me, of course: but he’s nobody up at Court.”
His eloquent hands, this temperate tone, the sheer mildness of him make it difficult for Savary to recall the conflict, to retain it. You can almost see how one small boy comes and goes in safety among absolute powers.
“Well, anyway,” Savary says, feeling obscurely finessed. “I thought we’d agreed on an early evening, just this once.” She strokes a hand across the blades of his back. “I thought you weren’t going over to the Kingdom tonight.” His shirt’s such fine stuff—light as linen, soft as silk.
“Oh….” He looks, surprised, over his shoulder. “I didn’t! The troupe only ran through a couple new songs, then we did the early show at Blue Moon. A short set. It was fun, just playing around for once, goofing off.” Nowadays the boy’s too brazen to bother about lying. He’ll commit his mischief upfront, and make nice apologies afterwards, as necessary. Even so, a staggering sum of hours remains unaccounted for, in this version of events. Late afternoon, all the evening, very deep into night; rose will tint the skies, soon enough.
Savary’s temper frays again. “Then how is it you’re falling up in here so long after midnight bells?”
He grins. To some less happily married woman, it would doubtless seem a smile of general joy, not specifically fucked-out bliss. “Maeqal showed up at the Blue Moon for the show,” the boy says. “And we…chilled for a while, afterwards.”
Savary’s not ready for such a smile on the face of her younger child, the baby. Bitterly she says, “Just how old is that kingson of yours, anyway?”
The boy grimaces. “Oh, Maman—Cook’s let the palm wine go again. You really ought to speak with him. This is almost vinegar!”
“Boy, I asked you a question.”
He gives her his full attention. “First cousin of the Royal Blood, Thrice-removed, Twice-returned on the Matrilineal Line, His Excellency, Maeqal son of Oaqim lacks something for thirty, I believe.” His left hand signs “approximately” while the right tips fancy-glass to his lips. “Twenty-eight years old?” The boy makes another face. “Twenty-nine? You’ll remember they count birthdays differently in the Kingdom, but one year more or less, I always forget.”
A year less. Savary stops herself from saying so, because of course he already knows. This is just more of that bafflement—decorative, feigned—lately adorning his speech.
She tries some rhetoric of her own. “Oh, the Saints must weep for his poor lady wife! What can she be thinking, I wonder, with her man creeping over here to Sea-john all the time, spending late-nights with scrumptious young virtuosi?” With a start, Savary realizes they’ve switched to the language of the Kingdom. After all this time, it trips off her son’s tongue with an ease surpassing her own, and she was born there, he up here, in the hills.
“Aréienne hasn’t danced in two years. She’s writing a song-cycle, her knees hurt, and very soon now she’ll have her baby. And La Pablo fell in love, and sailed away with the ambassador from Kidan. So if Maeqal wants a virtuoso, he must come to me. And scrumptious, Maman? Thank you! There’s no lady wife as yet, either. I wouldn’t have a married man. But you, Maeqal’s father, and all his clan patricians, are remarkably in accord—that noblemen his age should be married, that his run of freedom is getting long and needs to end. Before they muttered, but now his family is shouting: exile, disinheritance, excommunication, they say, if Maeqal fails to marry before the next Long Rains.”
“There! You see?” Savary cries. “That’s what they do over in the Kingdom. Up here, we Johnnys love who we want. Can’t you see what comes of messing around with some kingson?”
“Kingcousin only, Maman. A minor one.” He’s blasé, or just tired, but anyway deflects her every word with suave hands and chatter. “Now his children, they will be born ‘Full
First,’ if Maeqal’s mother can fix a wife for him out of the daughters of the Royal Concubinage.” He sips, making faces.
Johnnys treat one another tenderly. But over in the Kingdom you went for blood in any conflict—more so with the ones you loved. After all this time in Sea-john, Savary still cannot pull her blows enough. “So will you be marrying him too, then?” She sneers. “You and this king’s-daughter?”
One day, maddened by remorse, she will rant at her wife, describing how the boy looks at her now, and Jahs will say, “No, my love, no. He wouldn’t want that…” but Savary never does forgive herself for the hurt she causes, his look of betrayal.
“If anyone, Maman, I thought you….” The boy stops. He begins again, without tremolo. “Can we not try to be kind to each other? You know perfectly well they marry one man, one woman, in the Kingdom.”
She wants to make her son see, to choose more wisely; not to hurt him. In a rush, Savary says, “Whatever happened to that wonderful Johnny boy you used to run around with? The carpenter from the boatyard? Oh, you two were lovely together! Kéké was his name, I think. Why not—”
She cuts herself off. For it seems her big mouth has hit on some name that had better been left unspoken. Her son’s face wrings with such suffering as who could want for her own child, and Savary’s at a loss to respond because she’s one of those who have only ever won in love, gained and gained, and never lost. She says, “Oh, sweetheart,” and repeats that as she strokes circles on his back.
“I can’t talk—” His voice clots with emotion. “—about Kéké. I really wish you wouldn’t, Maman, please.” He sets his cup on the table, and briskly recovers nonchalance—or its semblance. “Tomorrow’s a big day for us, and I’m very tired. It’s our first show for the Queen Mother herself, at the Royal Pavilion.” On his face, Savary sees resolve, finality. “So, if you’ll excuse me?” Not actually waiting on any sign from her, the boy gently brushes by to take the stairs to his room.
Savary watches him up. She suffers a strange, fey moment: catching a glimpse of the here-and-now as it shall one day be in memory, most details worn away, but a few deeply etched, suffused with the poignancy that accrues to long years of regret. A lifetime’s worth. Remember? He wore his shirt a la beaux boys. And the diamonds in his ears!—big as your thumbnail. The presentiment of loss goes swiftly as it came. The noisy old wood lies quiet under his feet: something in just where or how he knows to step. The little truant used to escape just so on nights past, out to forbidden busking on the waterfront.
Savary very nearly rushes upstairs to plead with him. We love you. Stay. But, no…he’ll sleep here, and they can talk later in the morning. That’s soon enough. She pinches dark the bank of candles, then goes to join her wife and man.
φ
[So many nights]
Oh yeah. You all best watch out for that one there.
What mess you talking, old woman?
No, no, old mother. This here is the sweetest boy.
Yeah! He never give no trouble. Mind his maman real nice.
Keep your eye out is what I’m saying. Oh, all you are just stupid. Look at him. See? See there? The boy, so young, dancing like that! What age he got, three years? Not four yet, no. The reggaezzi coming forth to take this one away, sure ’nough. Sooner or later, wait and see.
Reggaezzi! Why even speak such?
Take back dat cuss, old witch!
Don’t you know this boy belong to Savary and Jahs? That the papa of him is the dark god from across-bayou, so tall, so black, so strong? Family live nice and proper on Dolorosa. You don’t want to be cursing this boy!
It’s no curse of mine, you idiots. A hand lay on him already, when he was born and the Song filled his heart—
Hurry, go and get Jahs. Run, quick inside. Tell her a witch come for her pickney!
Jahs Jahs Jahs! A witch in the yard! Come forth to snatch the baby!
Oh, come quick, Jahs! Hurry.
φ
Among the workers of the boatyard were a very old man and his daughter, who was only old. One or the other of them sometimes made lunch and siesta stretch a long long time playing the drums. Those were the best days! He wriggled and squirmed until Jahs set him down, or he’d yank and beg until she said, Well, go on then, letting him loose from her skirts to run out into the front yard and dance with the workers. Jahs always ate her lunch standing up, never lay out for a nap under the bearded cypress, and she rarely could be coaxed away to dance even for just a little while. But she would let him go.
He liked the old daughter on drums just fine. She had brilliant technique and played hot exciting rhythms that hit the mas despacio with perfect timing to keep a dancer going fast, yet always able to catch breath too. He loved the old man’s touch! Deep sly tricks complicated the playing. Those beats evolved on the subtlest schedule, and no mind could anticipate them. To catch the old man’s riddims needed utter surrender to hips and feet and shoulders such that time and the world became sublime irrelevancies, and the only thing real was the rapturous pulse of the body thoughtless, just feeling, pure motion. The old man was very very old, though, and mustn’t be bothered, let him nap, boy; he’s earned a little rest, hasn’t he? Today, for once, the old man played.
φ
Such a fearsome racket! Why all you in an uproar out here? What is going on?
Jahs, dis old woman right here, dis one. She said reggaezzi coming for yo little boy.
Yes. She said it would please her very well if they carried off your son to Mevilla right now, today, to live with witches and demons and flowers forever.
I heard her too. I heard everyting. Dat’s exactly what she said.
But, old mother, why would you say such a thing? The reggaezzi! Baby, come here now; that’s enough dancing. Come to Maman. Don’t you hear me calling? Come, boy. Come!
Fíjese. You see, Senyora Jahs? The boy is lost to the Song. He’s faraway where you cannot touch him. The place where reggaezzi go. You cut his hair nice and neat—it is not shaggy and long. You feed him; the boy is pretty and fat—not thin from always eating smoke. He looks like people, like us—not covered all over in green lights. But he is one of them already, almost. Um reggaezzo.
Stop your playing, old man! Are you stupid? A witch in the yard, reggaezzi, and my son—and you there are playing just like nothing. Stop I say! Stop!
Ah, but you see? The drummer stops and it makes no difference. Still the boy dances! How does he hear, how can he know? Where does the Song come from?
Please, cariño. Maman has you now. It’s all right; wake up. Please wake up.
φ
[Many nights]
Just before the Long Rains fall, some nights blow so cold no one dreams of going out without a poncho, but other nights the sea doesn’t breathe at all, and the heat is like standing before the oven open at full fire. This night is one of those latter, so nobody wants much dinner. Before going to bed, Cook sets out only a bowl of leaves, a plate of fruit. Batalha crosses her arms and lays her head on the table, after just two bites from her mango. The grownfolk hardly eat, they drink palm wine, and Savary and Redamas and Jahs begin to laugh. Savary complains, I’m just getting too stringy and tough, going up and down these hills. Soon there will nothing tender and soft on me, and my loves won’t want me anymore. Papa says, Oh girl, please: you know you fat. But she jumps up from the table and lifts her thin cotton skirt a little, moving her foot, so the muscle jumps and bulges in her calf: There—you see? Ma Jahs leans far over and slaps Ma Savary on the bottom. Girl, you don’t see all that jiggle? That’s jelly! They laugh, and me too. Savary says, You know, it’s so blazing hot tonight we ought to take up some long pillows and sleep on the roof. So that’s what we do.
Redamas carries up Batalha and lays her on a long pillow. Jahs whispers in Savary’s ear and makes her happy. She giggles. Nearby in the flower court of the Tswani embassy, the circle tonight is drumming some very strange rhythms, from a country I don’t know the name of. The beats make a big
sound, powerful, they want nothing to do with fine dancing, they want jumps, cartwheels, flips—Boy! Savary shouts. How many times I told you! Do not be doing that tumbling on this roof! Come away from the edge there. Back away I say!
And so then it is only the fine dancing I can do after all, not the steps the drumming really calls for. Jahs wants to know why, lately, Batalha is so tired all the time that she falls asleep this early, when before you could hardly make her go to bed before the dawn comes. Savary and Redamas, they look at each other, and Papa says Batalha no longer is content to learn only the knife, that she wants more than to come every full and new moon to militia practice. What she wants is for Redamas to train her, too, with the six full-timers paid out the Johnny-fund. So everyday Batalha doesn’t go anymore to help manage the orphanage with Savary, but instead comes to train with Redamas and the soldiers: spear, archery, open hand, a hard run up the steepest slope of the Mother, and now they’ve just got some horses too, so….
“But the girl is only eleven years old!” Jahs says.
“Well, you can talk to her, then.” Savary throws up her hands. “But, me, I am all done arguing with Batalha. Anyway, she’s not like the baby there. This one is her Papa’s daughter—a giant like you, Redy. Bigger than some of those men-soldiers already. So I don’t see what harm it can do. Batalha was sending me mad with all that energy of hers; now she just sleeps. I say it’s good for her.”
Inside the air didn’t move, but up here, every now and then a breeze stirs off the ocean far downhill. Even so, the night is close and hot for so much dancing. I go back to where they are sitting and pour three thirsty cups of water from the jar. Redamas touches my head.
