Rosewater Cookies
“So what are weddings like where you’re from?” Mikhi asked when she and Khatu came the next day.
“I’ve never been to one,” Lill admitted.
The night before, Lill and Halza had been moved to Tirtu’s house, where they were installed in a chamber on the second storey, smaller and darker than the round infirmary, with a window that looked out onto one of the fruit trees near the well yard—in fact, it was the tree that Lill had climbed into when Halza was dragged into the yard, and dropped out of to take Tirtu hostage.
Tirtu’s house was the one directly across the path from Vanu’s front door.
It was the house where Lill had heard people fucking when he first explored the village. Tirtu, of course, lived alone.
Mikhi plopped down a cushion on the floor between the two beds, which had been brought over from the infirmary, and sat down on it. Khatu remained standing behind her. He was doing a better job of interpreting this time.
“That dress you were wearing when you came over the wall—that was a bridal dress?”
“Yes, I guess so. And the headdress, I know they wear that.”
“We’ll try to fix it. My sister Susami and Na Gurti are both good at stuff like that.”
“Halza might know more about weddings,” Lill said. “He’s downstairs taking a bath. I can ask him later if you want.”
Mikhi shrugged. “I don’t think it matters. Do you?”
“Yes, I do!” Khatu protested. “You’ve got to have a—”
“Not talking to you, Khatu.”
“Oh, sorry, right.” He cleared his throat and translated for Lill: “I don’t think it matters, do you?” He grimaced.
“No,” said Lill to Mikhi. “I don’t care what it’s like. Just have it however you usually do.”
She nodded approvingly. He twisted the gold ring on the middle finger of his left hand, wondering whether he should have tried to sound more particular or more knowledgeable.
She didn’t care, but Khatu seemed to have opinions.
Would the others think it strange—suspicious, even—if Lill didn’t express any desires about the wedding?
When Vanu’s daughter was gone and Halza returned to the room, he raised the subject.
“They’re asking what weddings are like in Akramarra, and I didn’t have any intell—any experience. Have you been to a wedding before?”
Halza’s eyebrows rose most of the way to his hairline. “Of course, several. Have you not?”
“No,” said Lill, and didn’t offer an explanation. He wasn’t concerned with seeming plausible to Halza.
“Well. That’s surprising. What did she want to know? You should have asked me. You know I’m—I was—to be married myself this summer.”
“Yes, I recall that. I’m sure you still will be.” He meant that, but it didn’t sound particularly sympathetic, because it wasn’t. Halza’s chances of living to be married were as good as they’d ever been since he climbed the ladder after Lill, and much better than they’d been yesterday.
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“What’s something I might want to have at my wedding? What do brides usually want?”
Halza gave him an incredulous look. “Not to be locked up and forced to marry a monster?”
Lill slapped his pallet angrily. “We’re not locked up—they put us in here to keep us safe from those idiots and their father.
And I’m not being forced.” Marrying Vanu was part of the mission; he wouldn’t be completing the whole thing if he left out that part.
And now that nobody was being thrown over walls, the mission was back on.
“I mean a wedding thing. Uh … food? Or music?” Surely they had such things at weddings.
“Yes,” said Halza, still looking like he didn’t understand the question. “You could ask for some food that you like, I guess, or music—but I don’t know that they’d be able to get anything for you, even if they were willing. We are trapped in a mountain stronghold with no way in or out … ”
Lill rubbed his eyes irritably. “I realize that. But they’re asking what lowland weddings are like, and I want to tell them something helpful.”
“Oh. Rosewater cookies,” said Halza after a moment. “They could probably make those. They’re what the bride’s mother is supposed to bring when she goes to invite the neighbours to the feast—but of course that’s not happening here … ”
“I’ll just say they’re for the wedding. What else?”
“I suppose technically you’re betrothed now, because of that ring—not that that was done right at all, but they might be insulted if we said they should do it over.
You don’t have a dowry, so you don’t need the dowry-boxes or to do the Silver Night procession …
But there should still be a procession for the wedding morning.
It all depends where the wedding is going to be held.
I mean, it should start at the bride’s house and go to the groom’s, but as you don’t live here—perhaps they mean for it to start in this house?
I wonder if they’ll want someone to act in place of your father. I could do it. “
Lill shook his head. “I don’t think you should volunteer. You never know what the bride’s father might be expected to do up here.”
“Ugh. I never thought of that. Maybe all the wedding guests gather around and hit him with sticks.”
“You’d be lucky if it was just sticks.”
Halza laughed ruefully. “How do you do it, Lill? How do you keep calm in the face of all this?”
Lill thought of the way he had run frantically away from the round house the first day he’d woken up there, how he’d been ambushed by Barda and panicked when Vanu pounced on him in the well yard the day before. Was that “keeping calm”?
Maybe that was how it looked from the outside. That was good; Lill wasn’t about to reveal the deep wells of fear inside him to anyone.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m resigned to my fate, like those soldiers said.”
“Right. For your family. Holy God, I hope my mother’s all right. She won’t have started to worry about me yet—I sometimes take an extra day coming down the mountain.”
“Many of the usual rituals are not appropriate, you see,” Padunu explained, settling himself comfortably against the cushions on Vanu’s seating platform as if he planned to stay a while. “Considering that they are, of course, aimed at securing the fruitfulness of the union.”
Vanu considered whether this was meant to be a joke that he should smile at, or a serious thing he was expected to be concerned about. Padunu didn’t have a sense of humour that he’d ever noticed, so it was probably serious. He gave the shaman a blank look.
“Couldn’t you say that it’s, um, happiness or something?” Mikhi wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “You know, they’re not going to have kids, but they could produce … you know. A happy life. Together.”
Padunu was giving her a pained look, which Vanu found disappointing, since he’d thought her idea was clever.
“Essentially you are suggesting a metaphorical interpretation of sacred ritual. That smacks of some of the heresies of the Zashians.”
“Is that … a bad thing?”
Padunu looked around as if for someone who might appreciate how foolish a question this was. Vanu was not that person.
The shaman sighed. “Yes. Heresy is a bad thing. Or so the Zashians believe. We do not subscribe to any of the doctrines of the Zashians, so whether they are heretical or not is of no concern to us.”
At least he talked to Mikhi, instead of ignoring her the way Faru and sometimes even Tirtu did, and he looked directly at her when speaking to her and used a loud, carrying voice, although that was just the way he talked to everyone.
“Can you leave some of the rituals out?” Vanu asked.
“I will have to.” Padunu spoke as if he was being generous and this would inconvenience him greatly.
Maybe it was true; Vanu didn’t, of course, know anything about how shamans operated.
“I wanted you to be aware of the reason, lest you felt that anything was lacking. I will of course consult with the bride to determine whether there are any … ” He paused to search for a word with the air of someone who smelled something bad.
“Any suitable rites from his homeland which may be incorporated. The whole thing is highly irregular.”
“Rose … biscuits,” said Mikhi. “When I took them their lunch, they said there should be some kind of biscuits made with roses at the wedding. I forgot to tell you,” she added apologetically to Vanu.
“And something you’re supposed to do to the door of the house with …
spices? Tirtu was interpreting for me, and he didn’t know the word. ”
“I doubt there is any ritual significance to biscuits,” said Padunu, looking as if the bad smell had gotten worse. “Even in Akramarra. The spices may be another matter, of course, and I will have to inquire into it.”
“Tell your sisters and Gurti about the biscuits,” Vanu told Mikhi. “That is a job for them.”
He toyed with the piece of leather thong in his hands.
It was the knotted remains of the one that had snapped in the boy’s hair when he took Tirtu hostage.
It was one of Vanu’s, a scrap of soft red leather that he’d used to tie back his hair for years.
The boy must have taken it from the basket by Vanu’s bed.
“Can you find out his name?” he asked Mikhi suddenly.
“Can you—” she started to translate the question for Padunu.
Vanu cut her off with a gesture. “Not him. You. Please.”
“I did,” she signed back. “Sort of. He said it, but I couldn’t catch what it was. It’s something very short.”
“Would you care to enlighten me?” said Padunu haughtily, watching all this hand language.
“Da wants to know his bride’s name,” said Mikhi before Vanu could stop her.
The shaman raised an eyebrow. “That is generally advisable. I will make inquiries.”
There was a tradition in the Order that the Grandmaster, when appointed to his post, could choose to release himself from one of the strict rules that bound the other members.
White Viper, of course, had released himself from the law of celibacy and taken a wife.
Black Viper, his successor, had chosen to expand the Grandmaster’s residence, building himself a Zashian-style pavilion and filling it with expensive things.
Red Asp had only been in his post for a few years, but he had not released himself from any of the rules.
Neither did Master Dumuz when he became Yellow Adder.
He made a speech about it in front of the assembly, explaining that he had always thought it a bad custom and didn’t intend to follow it.
No one was surprised; that was what Master Dumuz was like.
“By rights you shouldn’t exist at all, but you certainly shouldn’t be here,” Master Dumuz had said when Lill was six or seven. “Your mother insulted the Order by sending you to us. At least we can be sure you’ll never amount to anything.”
Lill got used to sentences beginning, “You’ll never …
” Sometimes they ended with helpful advice, as when the wrestling-master told him, “You’ll never be a wrestler, but if you concentrate on your speed and technique, you’ll be able to get yourself out of trouble.
” Or even praise: “You’ll never intimidate on the battlefield,” the master of stealth-craft said once, “but you have the skill to be an excellent spy.”
Dumuz was the knife-master, and Lill had always, for as long as he could remember, been able to throw a knife and hit a target.
Since this apparently wasn’t enough, he had practiced furiously, driving himself as hard at knives as he did at the arts that he found most difficult—even harder.
He was consistently the best in his training cohort, but it was never enough to make Master Dumuz fully approve of him.
Then in the spring of 714 according to the Zashian calendar, two years after Master Dumuz became Yellow Adder, he summoned Lill to his pavilion.
This had never happened before, and Lill came expecting punishment, though he was not aware of anything he had done wrong. But there was bound to be something.
Master Dumuz was living in Black Viper’s pavilion, which looked the same on the outside as the other buildings of the Order, austere and white-painted.
Inside, the rooms were filled with a jumble of disused luxuries.
Inlaid tables were pushed into corners, brightly coloured rugs from the southern provinces rolled up and propped against dusty Western-style couches.
It was very different from the other glimpses Lill had got of luxury, when he had attended Master Hadda on a visit to the king’s court at Rataxa, and the few fragments of memory that he had of his life before coming to the Order.
Lill had to venture cautiously through several rooms before he found Master Dumuz, who was standing staring out a window.
“Sit, sit,” Master Dumuz said, waving vaguely around the room, which contained an assortment of chairs and a couch. “No, not there—on the couch. Here, you’d better have a drink.” He poured something from a clay jug into a silver cup and thrust it unceremoniously at Lill.
In the days when Dumuz had been just the knife master, with a cell in the main dormitory of the training hall, he used sometimes to send for Lill in order to berate him about things. He’d never offered him anything to drink.
The Grandmaster stood glaring at Lill for a moment before he spoke.
“I’ll grant that you have skill,” he said finally. Lill flinched physically, startled. Master Dumuz had never praised him so highly before. It almost didn’t matter that it was followed by a list of ways in which he fell short.
And then something even stranger: “If you were a girl, I’d marry you and get sons on you.” Master Dumuz had never said anything like that, either. And then he laughed.
Lill gulped from his cup. It was wine, which he’d only tasted once before, that time at Rataxa.
Fleetingly he wondered why Master Dumuz had wine, since he presumably didn’t drink it himself.
It was strong and not pleasant-tasting, startlingly different from the court wine at Rataxa, but he resisted the urge to wince.
He finished the rest of the cup quickly.
“Of course you shouldn’t be here,” the Grandmaster was saying, now returning to his more familiar theme. “You’ve never belonged here. Your kind of looks in a man are like … like a horse talking. Against nature.”
Lill sat and listened to Master Dumuz talk.
He’d never really disagreed with any of the things Master Dumuz said about him; why would he?
It was clearly true that to be girlish, to have a certain appearance, a certain way of walking or laughing, was a disgrace for a boy—for a young man, as he now was.
It was true that he was small and weak compared to the other trainees.
It was true that they only kept him at the Order because of who his grandfather had been.
He was beginning to feel strange. The world had become slippery and shiny around the edges. He was glad Master Dumuz had told him to sit on the couch, because he needed to lie down quite suddenly.