“I can’t stand it,” he whispered back. “It’s a cage.”
“It’s only for a short while,” I soothed. “Then you’ll be abbot. I’ll cook for you every night.”
“I can’t stand it,” he repeated. “You have to get me out.”
“Where would we go?” I did not bother to recite the punishment for a monk fleeing his fate. Boiling in oil was good to make savory puffballs, but not so good for a young man. “How would we live?”
“The forest. I’ll cut wood.”
I shook my head at his child’s stubbornness, though I was his younger sister. “Just a little while, Haza. Then you’ll be the Flayed God’s chosen one. It won’t be so bad.”
“You don’t understand.” But he subsided. Always, he was the first to flame and likewise cool, my brother. “I’m worried about you. Are you eating?”
Now he asked. “Of course. I mix the drink.” I could not say its name, being a mere girl, but he could.
“______.” He named the drink with a sigh. There was a gleam of his dark eyes at the grate. “He doesn’t speak to me, Ghani. The God is mute.”
“They say the drink makes him speak.” I listened for the sound of the guard at the far end of the hall. That fat monk’s breathing had not changed, and I decided I could stay a few more moments. “Or lets you listen. Shall I bring you some?”
“Maybe.” He didn’t say what we both knew – that if I was caught, it wouldn’t be just a whipping, for either of us.
But what else could I do?
* * *
I was still a child, and foolish. Kali noticed my measurements were for more than the beaten-silver cups required. She let me skim a miser’s portion into a flask when my enemy, the slipfingered tattling girl, added too much distillation to a glazed fowl and a jet of flame spurted high.
My enemy also screamed and dropped the pan, the idiot, for I had loosened the wood-slats upon the handle just enough for hot metal to slide between them and bite her hand. The distraction succeeded better than I hoped, but that night on my way to the soilhouse the kitchen-goddess rose from a pool of deep shadow without even a frond-rustle and caught me by the throat.
Dragged into a patch of hot light from the moon’s scabbed face, my neck under her fingers, she thrust her nose almost into my mouth, sniffing deeply. Then, squeezing as I kicked, blackflowers blooming at the edges of my vision, she studied me, her eyes like coals before the white ash covers them – dark, and hot enough to burn, two black-glass eggs.
“Little thief,” she hissed softly, and all the bushes rustled uneasily. Sweating brought no relief in the drought, but many trees attempted it, weeping resins to be scraped carefully free and used for flavor, for incense – and for other things. “But I see, it is not for you.”
I twisted and tried again to strike. Her fingers relaxed, and I drew in oven-hot air through my bruised breathpipe.
“The little quickfinger has a beloved. Which one is he? A young monk, I hope; the old ones are too selfish.” She cackled, but softly, and gave me a rough but good-natured shake. “If you had not the hands, birdling, I would put you in the ovens. No man is worth this.”
I opened my mouth to say he was my brother, and remembered myself just in time. She stripped the flask from my chest-wrapping and shook her head.
“At least you are not overly stupid.” She tch-tch’d her tongue, and dragged me to the well. I thought she meant to throw me in, but she merely dumped the sacred drink in, tossed the flask after it, and shoved me towards the soilhouse. “Cry in there, if you must. Tomorrow it’s back to mixing.” Her brow clouded just as the moon did, and hot thunder roiled in the distance.
Some thought it was a sign the Flayed God was pleased, and would bring the rains. But the dry lightning did not strike the earth, and there was no relief.
* * *
There was to be a feast at the dark of the moon, and Kali made me her pet. Even my enemy did not begrudge that high position, because it meant fetching, chopping, grinding at the furious pace of the kitchen-queen herself. My pallet was moved to the doorway of her cubicle in case she called during the night, and I had to hold the lantern in the soilhouse while she pissed at midnight, when lightning played over the far-off forest. Despite all that, I managed to visit Haza twice before the great secret, sacred feast.
I brought him a flask both times, but it was not the sacred drink. It was its cousin, without the pungent froth and the additives that make it holy. But my brother, not yet senior enough to know the taste of the sacred drink, thanked me in a quiet, begging voice like our father’s the night he brought his new supple-spined wife home.
“I dreamed last night,” he said the second time. “I think it was the God. He told me to be brave. Isn’t that good?”
My head was sweetmush for the elderly who cannot chew, exhaustion making the world a painted wall of bright shallow colors. “You are brave,” I whispered back, and passed through the leaf-wrapped meat I had done my best to prepare in clay like we used to.
It was fowl scraps, not squirrel, but I do not think he noticed.
* * *
Three nights later was the dark of the moon. The feast was indeed solemn, but the kitchen became a mountain with fire in its bowels and all the birds, undercooks, scrubbers, and slicers jostling egg-rocks in its throat. Several kitchen-birds fainted in the inferno, were dragged outside and splashed with brackish water before being treated to vigorous rubbing and thin yeasty sourdrink to get them upon their feet again. One undercook, enthusiastic, sliced half his finger into a basket of rolled fritters in oil, and his piercing howl was swallowed in the din.
There was no longer a girl named Ghani. There was only the food dancing under fingertips, the flame coiling around my wrists, the painted world-wall spinning like a bright round toy I had seen in a pedlar’s basket once and cried for, knowing we were too poor to afford it but yearning still.
I collapsed as the last round of savory flowers left the kitchen’s second doors, but by then most of Kali’s large-eyed kitchen brood had as well, and we were carried into our dormitory for sleep or death, we knew not which. Perhaps it was Kali herself who tucked me into her own narrow, sweet-smelling bed with its musk-tinge of old woman.
I do know Kali slept in the kitchens that night, her round chin propped upon one hand and her other dimpled fist still wrapped around a cleaver, as whoever could endure it carried on the laborious scrubbing of bowl, dish, pot, pan, stick, spoon, tongs. I know because I woke at the moment the entire seething temple-anthill sighed to itself, a mass of its inhabitants sliding into slumber after collective gorging.
That night, upon the dark of the moon, I could move as I pleased. I wish it had been Haza’s voice that roused me, a silver thread pulled through my ears, but it was not.
Instead, what pulled me from unconsciousness was the smacking of a copper-bottom staff in the beggar’s courtyard, where the emaciated lay in the sun to die in increasing numbers each afternoon no matter how many feasts the monks shared with those less fortunate.
* * *
My brother’s cell was empty. Torchlight dappled the far end of the stone hall, and I passed dream-slowly through shadows painted by dying sputters. A faltering, fading chain of light passed me from one flicker of darkness to the next, a black rosette blooming behind me as they sighed and dozed off into their final rest.
Each little darkness held a faint click, as of a pebble dropped.
The inner courtyards were high and almost cool, stone stubbornly resisting the sun’s showering heat. I saw the chambers of the god-mysteries, the shimmer of halls that should have held even on this holy night a minimum of chanting brothers on sweetgrass-stuffed cushions repeating the sacred name – an exercise for the invisible parts of a monk that temple style does not train – but were eerily empty. The scriptorium where chisel and brush, stone and woven fiber, colorful pebble and dyes ground from kitchen herb were arranged to tell sacred histories was merely another kind of kitchen.
It w
as in the very inmost of courtyards I found the monks, and at first I thought I was watching a great carcass lifted in the stone butchering-room while the knives were readied. It was hung by the heels, but the shape was wrong.
I knew then, but I did not want to know. Instead I stared, every hair long or short on my own body attempting to rise.
The Abbot was not sleeping. His bony limbs, painted, streaked, and splattered red-black, were draped in long strips sewn roughly together with tendon, an inelegant coat. The flap of the scalp bounced, with a healthy short black stubble that said it had grown from one full moon past another to the dark face of the night’s great lamp.
“I am HE! I am HE!” the old Abbot yelled drunkenly, and those among his senior attendants who were not feast-sotted took up the cry, the name of the Flayed God. The dry-dust drought was all through me, and lightning crackled far away over the forest’s many green breasts.
The film over the Abbot’s eyes was gone.
I did not cower. I did not tremble at the misuse of the Flayed God’s name. I was not struck mad, or dumb, or blinded myself; the blasphemy did not move me. It was my brother’s body I stared at, each joint and curve glistening.
Spread over the inmost altar of the great temple, his blood still steamed.
* * *
Some few monks fled that night. Exhausted temple servants were simply glad of the quiet. Much brackish laundry water was drawn from our failing well for the next few days, monks hurrying to and fro with frowning faces and strange, terrified gleams to their gazes. The laundry was full of strange things, but the feast had been large. A tray was taken to Haza’s cell as usual, and returned untouched, which was not unusual.
When I woke in the hottest part of afternoon, dried mud had crumbled between my toes. It was not the dust of the courtyards or the yellow fine grit of garden dirt. It was thick, and red, like the sluggish shrunken river cradling the city. The dry air, however, erased it of its glue.
And who looked at a kitchen-bird’s bare feet, or even an undercook’s, as I was from that morning? Those of us who had endured were promoted, each given a paring-knife to be kept in our belts, and allowed to wear our hair in braids.
Kali’s temper grew somber, and she brought a clutch of new birdlings from the market’s seething. Town and city held many starving castoffs that dry, hungry year.
For, though the crops were in peril and the forest had turned brittle, the next celebration was the Dry Moon Feast in a scant few handful of days. It was to be the time Haza was brought out of seclusion and installed as the new Abbot… unless there was a miracle.
And rumor now whispered that the Abbot could see.
* * *
A paring knife, its bright blade thinned by repeated sharpening. A tinge of red river mud upon the doorstep of an unused butchering room. A bolt of rich soft cloth filched from a storeroom. A small sickle-shaped sharpness, cutting deep to separate muscle from bone, a cut I had seen repeated so often with bigger knives.
A bundle lowered into a well, and a market-fetcher bribed to bring a further measure of thick river clay.
A thinning to Kali’s lips as she listened to the gossip. A glance at her undercooks, hunching their shoulders and bending double to their work. A salting. A seasoning.
A special dish for a feast.
* * *
Two or three of the kitchen staff vanished, perhaps wiser in reading rumor than the others. There were rumblings like the breath of distant dry lightning, a slight uncomfortable pressure when gazes met.
Or perhaps those who left between the two feasts merely had family in the fields, where a nervous, thirsty famine stalked. The rains still had not come, though the clouds massed over forest, temple, city, and the broken plains beyond. Or perhaps they had kin in the market where goods were becoming scarcer and a new temple lottery announced, this time for goods instead of sons.
A messenger came from the governor of the province and was shown a refectory of somber, sparse-eating monks before a serene, beaming Abbot. The messenger, godbird feathers fluttering uneasily on his headdress, left crease-browed before a meal could be made in his honor, barely pausing to scatter the requisite handful of coins in the beggars’ courtyard. The beggars had little use for the money, though some from whom the last scraps had not yet been pressed scrabbled for the gleams.
The Dry Moon Feast leapt for us, but the governor coming to witness its holiness was delayed. A fire had reached across his route, the forest swallowed by a beast of flame.
* * *
When the full moon rose at sunset feastday, it was a dull glaring eye through smoke. I left the kitchen and came across Old Vril in scant shade near the herb-garden wall, gazing intently at me just as he did in my thin nervous dreams.
“Listen, old uncle.” I thrust a few leaf-wrapped scraps into his hands. “Do not eat the leavings tonight. This instead, do you understand?”
He grinned, the simple fool with patchwork yellow teeth, and bobbed his head as if he did not. I longed to shake him, or kick him.
“Nothing else,” I said impatiently. The longer I tarried instead of returning at a run with pungent leaves and long thin flexible spears of woody spice, the more chance of being seen. “Just this.”
He bobbed again, and smacked his staff on the courtyard stone. I almost ran away, and it was during that hot afternoon that several of the kitchen staff first began to clutch their stomachs and moan, for the well-water had a foul taste and the river-water carried uphill in jars did, too.
The malady avoided Kali as all else did, yet the round-faced kitchen-queen was snappish, striding through the chaos, sending great plates staggering out the door. And I?
I mixed the sacred spice-drink as Kali taught me. I poured it into the beaten-silver cups. I was Kali’s pet undercook and had a hand in everything for the Moon Feast: the smallest roast clay-robed as the peasants cooked it and so, tender-succulent; the vegetables; the flatbread; the piled yellow grain. Loud was the merriment that night in the temple of the Flayed God. The wine was called for often, and the sacred drink in cups of beaten silver upon great round gleaming trays.
The Abbot, relieved and renewed, drank deepest of all.
* * *
At dawn I lifted my bundle – just as small as when I left the forest, though a little less shoddy – to my back. I slipped from the undercooks’ dormitory with the quiet of one trained in the Flower Style, and edged through the small postern by the closed great doors, a monk who had bemoaned guard duty last night drowsing empty-bellied but safe in the tiny gatehouse.
Outside the temple walls, I drew in a deep, smoke-freighted breath. But there was a chiming sound, and there was Old Vril, his teeth not so drunken-leaning and a new copper boot clasping the bottom of his staff. Beside him, Kali shook her round black head, clicking her tongue as if I was late returning from the soilhouse or clumsy with my paring-knife.
“Ah, there she is.” Old Vril spun his staff upon its new copper toe, and the ragged feathers – once from godbirds, but now draggled and smoke-tinged – fluttered. “Quick of finger and sharp of eye. Little one, little one, what will you do now?”
My throat had gone dry under Kali’s glare. “All I can do is cook,” I managed.
Old Vril laughed, a dry whistling sound, and his staff tip-tapped closer. He pressed something round and hard into my sweating left palm, and Kali made another impatient sound, beckoning. She pushed a fold of her flounced skirt into my free hand. “Hold tight,” she snapped as the beggar turned away, his form stretching like softened glue-starch in broth. “I travel quickly, little bird.”
In the distance, the city gates opened for the governor’s men, brazen horns given breath not their own. The thing in my left hand was a pale, smooth, egg-shaped stone, seen through a wavering of saltwater as my eyes filled.
Far away in the forest, the drought broke with a crashing of thunder.
* * *
Steam-smoke rose from the forest, flames beaten into tatters by rising wind and fal
ling water. The governor of the province, arriving late to the festival, found the great white temple of the Flayed God eerily silent. There were no beggars in the courtyard with its often-fouled fountain, its spire now bone-dry. The kitchen was deserted, the great fires low embers or cold ashes. Even the head cook, a round black-haired beldam much whispered of in the Great Market, was gone.
Most of the servants and kitchen-birds had fled by noon, the sun a red eye and queer yellow-green light filling the temple, and when the governor’s men broke open the holy doors to the great refectory they found monks frozen in attitudes of feasting, platters piled with choice delicacies strangely avoided by banks and wedges of gem-bright flies. The Abbot, in his pale but unbleached robes, sat at the great table, eyes wide open and staring, stone-stiff, stone-still.
Those who stole bits of the roasts, the grains, the piled, drought-scorched fruits were safe. Those porters and undercooks who stole sips of fragrant wine or, in one case, an entire merrymaking jug intended for their betters, were likewise safe. But soft perfumed flesh roasted in river clay can mix strangely with spiced alcohol, and both can mix with odd resins added to a frothing, spicy, bitter drink. Some of those mixtures may petrify flesh while keeping mind, soul, and breath – though only a trickle of each – trapped within a body’s congealing borders.
The governor and his men will burn those inert bodies, not knowing what might be clawing for release from their cooling, recalcitrant meat, and Haza will be avenged. And I?
Oh, I am not worried.
As the kitchen-goddess says, there is always work for a cook.
HATED
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
The first inkling Michael Everett Townsend had that something was wrong was when his wife slapped him hard around the face.
She had never slapped his face before. Michael hadn’t been expecting the blow. He was carrying a glass of milk, and it shot out of his hand, spattering them both. The glass was cheap and just bounced on the rug, but he jumped back in shock and stepped on it, cracking the thing into shards, one of which pierced his bare foot. Gasping in pain, he dropped down on the edge of the bed just as the blood began to pour freely from his wounded sole. Instead of the sympathy he expected to receive, however, his wife gave a scream of rage and a mighty shove, and tipped him onto the floor. Then she began looking for a knife.
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