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I served this tea not long ago to the newest wife, with her fifth child already at the breast. She sprouts children like berries, this one. She is very beautiful in her white veils, and her black eyes are so deep they seem to have no pupils at all. Her hair falls past her waist in long black curls, and it shines most curiously in the candlelight, like the skin of a salamander. She fixed those depthless eyes on me as she sipped my father’s tea, holding her golden cup with both hands.
“I am sorry for you,” she said, and her voice moved against me like a stone crushing millet. “But if you would not waste to less than an old brown leaf in this place, come to my bedchamber on the third day of the new moon.” She set down her cup and put her hands to my face, the light in them terrible and wonderful, like a judgment, like a promise. I was weeping before I knew it, the nearness of her bright and awful and endless. “I swore to him not to incite the harem,” she murmured, “but an odalisque is not a wife, and I can see the leaf your father placed in you, glowing still. Because of it we are sisters, and I cannot abide a sister’s suffering. Tell the eunuch who keeps you that Zmeya commands you to attend her.”
She kissed my cheek, gentle as a thrush singing.
THE TALE
OF THE EUNUCH
AND THE
ODALISQUE,
CONTINUED
“YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND,” IMMACOLATA SAID. “For you, this is a pleasant world, no different from an open pasture speckled with sheep and horses. But we are not sheep, and we are not horses, and we did not ask to be shepherded, nor corralled for the use of the biggest bull.”
Her last words stung like a crop—had I not done the penance of a hulking bull? I hung my head.
“I will take you to Zmeya’s chamber.”
Immacolata seized my hands and her hair brushed against my arms. Her red silk rustled against me. “Come with me! There are better things in the world than this, I swear it. Why would a eunuch care so to deliver bound women to an intact man? You owe him nothing—come away with me! I have watched you; you have watched me. Let us not pretend otherwise.” She cupped my face in her hand. “I know you are Gaselli, yet you have never hurt us, never.”
I tried to protest that this was no act of chivalry, but she stopped my mouth with a copper-ringed hand, cheap baubles empty of stones and thrown away by other women, which left green bands on her fingers. Before my widening eyes, she turned one of the pronged rings inward and pressed it into her neck so that blood welled bright as her veils and trickled into her collarbone. I did not understand—but she pressed my face to her neck. I opened my mouth to assure her again that I did not want her flesh, and her blood slipped between my lips.
She tasted like tea. Of all the dancing women in their shawls, she alone tasted sweet.
I took her gift, and her hand. When she walked with me to the great harem door, the bells at her ankles sang—and no one marked our passing from that place.
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
“I TOOK HER TO ZMEYA’S CHAMBER, AND IT IS true what they say, that Zmeya was a great snake beneath her woman’s skin, but we did not trouble ourselves much about it, I being half gazelle and Immacolata being all tea bush. Deliverance was as simple as an open window. We went into the wild together, Immacolata and I.”
Oubliette’s eyes were wide. “What happened to her? Why is she not with you now?”
Taglio grinned his feral grin and danced a lazy step or two. “The first tale is free, the second must earn its way in the world.”
“We have nothing to give you, I’m afraid,” I said sorrowfully. “You must see us as we are—poor in all things save blackberries and road dust.”
“That is a tragedy true, my young master,” the eunuch said with a sigh.
“Where are you headed?” I asked.
“Over hill and dale and mountain, river and desert and possibly those blighted hills and dales again—to Ajanabh, where we have heard artists of our caliber are welcomed,” thrummed the Manticore’s voice. Grotteschi’s warm, spiced tone seeped into me, and I shivered. Oubliette and I exchanged looks. Perhaps we had not done with cities.
“We cannot pay you for a song or a scene, but if you would accept company, we would travel with you,” I said nervously, overexcited as a groom.
Taglio frowned. “Much as we might enjoy little ones, they are expensive to maintain.”
I breathed deeply. “We cannot pay for trifles, for songs and bells and flutes, but if you will take us in, that is a great enough thing to pay for.”
Oubliette gripped my arm. “What are you doing?” she hissed. But I smiled at her, a smile I hoped promised games and warm afternoons and songs with new friends, and no more dank barracks, no more paper blankets. I tweaked her tail a bit, as I did when she was
