But no. Duty first. Her family must know what she had achieved, and Ixkaab Balam must tell them herself.
Kaab looked around the well-groomed, wide, high-walled street of the Hill. A serving boy was coming toward her, carrying an empty delivery basket and whistling.
“Hey!” Kaab beckoned to him, and, though dubious, he came. “Good day, my friend. I am going to give you a very decent amount of money to take a message for me to Riverside.”
“Riverside!” The boy eyed her and backed away. “That’s no honest place, and I’m an honest man. I ain’t getting involved in no skullduggery.”
“It’s no skullduggery.” Whatever that was. Just her luck, she’d managed to find the one honest man in this city. “It’s a lady,” Kaab improvised swiftly. Sometimes the truth was even more believable than lies. “The mistress of my heart, sick with worry for me. I come up here to serve his lordship”—she nodded at the gates behind her—“and he used me hard.” She’d heard one of the whores at the Maiden’s Fancy saying it last week and marked it for later use. “But I am well, and you must show her this to prove it.” She pulled the spike out of her hair. It was Tullan work, and Tess would recognize it.
Fascinated, the boy stared at the silver spike with its working of jaguars and mecaxochitl flowers. He’d better not steal it. “Why don’t you go tell her yourself?”
Kaab spat—another thing she’d seen the whores do. “Why do you think? I’ve got my living to earn, same like you.”
The boy laughed. “Will she give me a free sample, then, your friend?”
Kaab nearly hit him. But that would not be in character. “Go find out for yourself.” Her Red Tess could handle this punk with both hands behind her back.
“How much?” the boy asked at last. Good, she had hooked him. She counted out some of the Local coins from the purse in her pocket, gave him directions, and saw him off down the Hill.
Xamanek’s light, but it was good to be herself again! Kaab hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the cocksure, capable agent of the service who had left Binkiinha nearly a year ago, on that doomed mission to Tultenco. The mistakes she’d made there had cost lives, and she had thought she, too, was doomed to severity and caution, and the gloom that went with them.
But she had done it right this time, here in this gray city on the other side of the world! And her old self was back—for now, at least. She whistled her way across the Middle City and down to the Promenade along the river, where there were fewer people to stare at her. True, one took her for a lost soul and offered her some coins to get something to eat. . . . Kaab was truly sorry no one tried to attack her as she got near the docks, since she had her obsidian knife tucked away too, and a fight right then would have suited her liver very well. But no one did.
It hadn’t occurred to Kaab that her own people might not take her disheveled state with equanimity.
“Ekchuah guide me, look at you!” Aunt Ixnoom shrieked as Kaab entered the family compound.
“Filthy Xanamwiinik, what have they done to you?” growled Ahaak’s son Ahpuut. “If they’ve offered you insult, I’ll—”
“I’m fine!” Kaab laughed. “Haven’t you ever seen an agent’s return before?”
“What I’ve seen,” Aunt Ixnoom fussed, “is a young lady who went out this morning in her finest amber silk come home looking like a beggar woman.”
“Or worse!” Cousin Ixoen said.
Kaab took the coins from her pocket. “I’ll buy a new gown,” she said, “though I’d rather be done with this silly costume, and be home wearing sensible clothes! Where is my aunt Ixsaabim?”
“Lying down,” Ixoen said. “The child has been kicking inside her, and she needs her rest. Don’t you disturb her now.”
But Aunt Ixnoom looked at her keenly. “No, Ixkaab. You go disturb her. I think that she will want to hear your news.”
It seemed no one would be allowed entrance to Tremontaine House that day.
The guards at the gate were very firm about that, even though Rafe argued and pleaded, and even offered them a bribe of spices from his father’s warehouse, along with extra money he didn’t have.
But the guards held fast. And it wasn’t just him. When, in desperation, Rafe took up a position against a wall on the other side of the street, he watched a nobleman’s carriage being turned away, and then a woman in a sedan chair, and even a perfectly good knife grinder, wheeling his cart from house to house.
The Duke and Duchess Tremontaine were not to be disturbed. There was illness in the house.
Rafe glared at the guards from across the road. They could see him perfectly well, but as long as he did not approach the gates again, they were content not to chase him away.
Will! He shifted his gaze to the upstairs windows, clearly seen over the stone wall and the ironwork gate. Will, I’m here. I promised not to leave you, and I am here, my love.
But what good did that do his lover? What use his standing outside the gate, when he could not take Will in his arms, rock him and pleasure him and tell him everything would be all right? He might as well be on the other side of the world—west across the sea, in Kaab’s country, where the chocolate grew on trees.
Rafe marched deliberately back across the street.
“I may not have made myself clear,” he said. “I am the duke’s personal secretary. He has entrusted urgent business to me.”
“We know what kind of business you have with him. You think the whole house doesn’t know?”
“Fine.” Rafe squared his shoulders, a peculiar thing to do, given what he was about to say. “I’ll do you, then,” he declared. “Each of you in turn.” The guards stared at each other and then at him. “I’ll give to you the same pleasure I give the Duke Tremontaine. Maybe even more.” His mouth was dry. He wasn’t sure how he would summon the spit. He’d give anything for a drink right now. But he would manage. He would have to. Will was in there.
“Well,” the younger guard began, but the older one cuffed the side of his head.
“Well nothing! You think we want to lose our jobs for five minutes’ pleasure?”
“Ten,” Rafe couldn’t help muttering. “At least.” He tried to smile beguilingly. “Let me in the side door. No one will see you open the gates.”
The younger guard wavered. “The money,” Rafe repeated. “And the blow job.”
The older one guffawed. “The likes of you, paying us for the pleasure! I never thought I’d see the day!” Rafe wanted to smack him when he went on relentlessly in the same hilarious vein: “If you’d told me when I got up this morning that some fine young scholar would be offering me money for the chance to lick my balls—”
“Your loss,” Rafe said, with an evenness born of desperation, “if you don’t want it.”
They wanted it, all right; but they didn’t take it, either one of them. And that night, shaking in his bed at the memory, Rafe thought of what strange depths love was driving him to.
Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow the gates will be opened. They cannot keep the world out forever. And they cannot keep me from my love.
And that same night, Ixkaab Balam lay with her sweet lover, Tess, Tess the Hand, and there was no boundary to the bliss that they enjoyed. Stars exploded in their bodies, only to be reborn and explode again. There were long, languorous kisses, and very little sleep.
Kaab felt free. She let Tess roam where she would, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass if she heard herself yelling loud enough to bring the house down. She realized that she had been so bent on showing Tess how very much she desired her, and what a mistress Ixkaab Balam was of the art of love, that she had not let Tess into her own center. Or is it even my center? she thought dizzily. She wasn’t sure she had ever felt anything quite like this before—this was total abandon, with no goal but finding out what could possibly happen next, if she let herself go in the arms—and legs and hands and—Oh, dear Ekchuah, well are you called the Diver—the fingers, the lips, the armpits, the warm, flexible skin, a
nd slippery sweat of someone she trusted utterly.
“Sweetheart?” someone said, and Kaab came up out of darkness enough to realize that the foreign sounds were a word she knew.
“Mmmph?” she managed to say. A warm breast brushed her cheek.
“Sweetheart, what does titechtlatia mean?”
“You burn us up,” Kaab said gruffly. “But it means death. It’s from a poem. ‘Oh giver of life, you are laughing at us. / Even jade breaks, even quetzal feathers rot. / You know us, / You burn us up. / You make us disappear from this earth.’”
“Really? I realize I should have said ‘good morning’ first, but I was afraid I would forget it. And anyway, I think it’s well past noon.” Tess handed her the cup of water she’d been reaching for, and Ixkaab drank.
“It means ‘I am dead without you, bringer of life.’”
“One word, all that?”
“Sort of. It’s implied. Because of the poem.” Kaab started to raise herself on her elbows. “But you don’t want to hear all about someone’s else’s litera—”
“But I do.” Tess licked her eyebrow smooth. “Remember? I said I do. I want to learn about you and your people.”
“Then, yes.” Kaab rolled on top of her, and Tess let out a long sigh. “Here is some poetry.”
But in the middle of a particularly fine verse, there were footsteps on the stairs, a key in the latch, and a voice called, “Hello? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” Tess called back. “We’re doing poetry!”
“Oh my. Welcome to the House of Vice,” said Vincent Applethorpe. “May I come in?”
“Only if you’ve brought some food.”
“I have brought food.”
They pulled the blankets up around themselves and let him sit at the bottom of the bed, laying out a small feast of apples and ripe cheeses, fresh bread and curly new fern heads. The sun was pouring in the window when he drew back the shutters, and Kaab thought what an utterly perfect and delightful place was this Riverside, where moon-breasted women let her into their beds, and a man who taught her the sword also knew enough to know when to make himself scarce.
Micah found herself telling Doctor Goodell everything.
“. . . and Rafe is my friend, so when he asked me to do his calculations of course I said yes and anyway I’d never done those types of equations before . . .”
They were sitting together in a corner of the Unequal Triangle, a tiny University tavern recently cobbled together in the little space between two jutting houses, eating tomato pie and drinking fresh milk from the country, which Richie the tavern keeper got in special for the learned doctor. Micah had forgotten how good fresh milk was. She was growing more and more attached to Doctor Goodell. Not only were his ideas interesting, but he didn’t like the crust on pie, so she got to eat his, too.
“. . . and then my tables were really good, and Rafe was so excited he got all drunk and said the geometry of spheres was going to change the world, but I didn’t have to worry about that, which is good because I don’t want to; I like the world the way it is, don’t you?”
Doctor Goodell nodded. “Most of the time, I do.”
“And anyway you said that the job of mathematics is to understand the world and not to change it. So then I stopped working on my tables because it was taking such a long time but I thought Rafe would be mad and I’d have to explain it to him but he wasn’t mad, he just said not to bother, like it didn’t even matter . . .”
Doctor Goodell shook some crumbs out of his gingery beard. He wasn’t old, but he didn’t like to waste time shaving.
“. . . so now I’m wondering if my calculations were all wrong and that’s why . . . But Rafe is serious about mathematics, even if he isn’t about other things, so he would have told me if I’d gotten it wrong, wouldn’t he?”
His thin white hand patted the back of hers absently. “You’re a good girl,” he said; “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Micah nodded. That’s what Uncle Amos said sometimes, and she always found it comforting. It meant that she didn’t really understand people, but no one was mad and she didn’t have to do anything about it.
“Now,” Doctor Goodell said, “would you like to see a card trick?” He pulled a greasy pack of Constellation cards out of his sleeve.
Micah looked at them dubiously. “Would I have to bet?”
“Oh, no,” Doctor Goodell assured her. “Just watch, and be impressed.”
The day of Ixkaab Balam’s visit to Tremontaine House, Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, forgot to make her husband’s chocolate for him—just the way he liked it, with a faint savor of the Kinwiinik merchants’ spices. More important, she forgot to give him the medicine that usually went with it.
All day long, the duke was agitated. His people could hear him pacing his room, shouting prognostications and warnings—and, plaintively, calling to his wife about the dragon. But without the Duchess Tremontaine’s express permission, they knew they were not to open the door to the duke’s room to anyone for any reason. And the duchess had locked herself in her own rooms, leaving the strictest orders for no one to enter the house or to disturb her by even so much as a rap on her door. Even the maid, Lucinda, was banished to the kitchens.
Finally, though, William, Duke Tremontaine, was quiet—so quiet that the staff was worried enough to convince Duchamp, his oldest, beloved servant, to break the rules and see if their master was still among the living.
His old back stiff and straight, Duchamp raised his great ring of keys and unlocked the door to his master’s rooms.
Duke William lay spread out faceup on his bed. His arms were outstretched, as though fending something off—but his hands were relaxed, as though welcoming it. His chest rose and fell with regular rhythm, and his open shirt revealed a pulse beating gently at his throat.
The duke was a kind man, sensitive and considerate. But he was the highborn son of a great and noble house. Duchamp had never seen him so completely open and defenseless, even as a boy. For a long time, he gazed at his master. The duke’s fair hair was tangled, his chin stubbled—and some of the pinpricks of beard glinted silver. Duke William was not yet forty-five years of age. His life had included a good marriage, a living child, a long pursuit of knowledge indulged in with a substantial library, a host of friends both here and in the country—and, now, at last, an all-consuming passion for a bright, handsome, foolish, and adoring young man. If Duke William did not recover from this illness, his years could be said to have been rich and full. It was not given to everyone to live long enough to know the aches and pains and joys of a venerable age. Some men shone like the sun, and then went out.
Duchamp breathed a blessing on William, Duke Tremontaine. Whether the man recovered or not was in hands other than his.
The duke did not stir—not even when Duchamp combed his hair back from his face, and kissed his brow, and withdrew from the room, closing the door softly behind him.
William was still asleep when the duchess entered the room early the next morning; still sprawled open-armed, as though felled in battle.
For a moment, she considered letting him sleep on. He was so peaceful, so blessedly quiet. She hated always seeing him so agitated, frightened, angry, trying so hard to make himself understood in a world where he was the only one to see what he saw, to know what he knew.
The duchess, too, stroked the fine hair back from his brow. His fair lashes fluttered, and the blue eyes opened on her face.
The duke gave a sleepy smile when he saw her. She couldn’t help smiling back. “William,” she said tenderly.
“You look sad,” he said.
“I am sad. You’ve been very ill, my love.”
“Yes. I know.” Still he lay there, looking up at her, trusting and tranquil. “But I’ve slept long now, and I feel stronger.”
“Good. Shall I make you some chocolate?” She hated to do it, but he seemed to be returning to himself, and that would not do.
“Just water, please. Maybe
later.”
The duchess paused. He seemed so calm, so relaxed and open to her, as he once had been, all the years of their marriage. Could she have him back? Was it possible? Had the medicine she had been administering to keep him from reality been medicine in truth? Could the drug, the fever, have burned the love—maybe even the memory—of Rafe Fenton clean out of him?
Diane allowed herself to take her husband’s hand and kiss it. It was so much finer than Lord Davenant’s hand, long and slender and soft, a scholar’s hand. Davenant’s was stronger, hairier, more masterful, it was true, burning with a heat she enjoyed. But William’s well-known fingers, the little scar on his palm . . . so often this hand had caressed her when she was in distress, or even when she needed to pretend it. This hand had wandered everywhere, coming to know her intimately. . . .
Suddenly the duchess burned for her husband with unexpected, pure, and overwhelming lust.
“William,” she said huskily. Still in her morning dress, she straddled his outspread body. His mouth tasted strange and terrible—was she just imagining it because she knew the scent so well, or had the taste of the drug so permeated him that it infused his very membranes? She kissed him hard, as though to suck it out of him. He responded with fervor, and she hiked up her petticoats, undid his trousers with fevered fingers, guiding him into her and letting him overturn her in a fluster of snowy, lacy ruffles, drive into her, then pull back to tear open her bodice and address her breasts hungrily. Ah! the duchess thought, transported with joy; he is completely and utterly mine!
She wept when she came, perfectly convinced in the moment that all would be as it had been. As the winter had turned to spring, she had redeemed her debts, confronted and defeated the last proofs of her past, corrupted the Dragon Chancellor to her ends, launched a new business venture . . . She had even allowed her beloved husband a midlife fling with a silly boy from his cherished University.
But all that was over now, she thought, lying on his chest in a pool of sweat. She ran her finger along his exquisite collarbone. “William . . .”
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