Chapter 4
The Flock of Aunties are Pecking
ASHAR
From the easternmost tower of the Imperial fortress, the great deep-voiced bell rang to mark the end of the dawn’s prayers for the God-Emperor, at least for those who worshiped Him.
On most days, Ashar would have had time to start simmering down a pot of sugar and flowers for the day’s karkadeh or chameli ki sharbat before the first bath-customers arrived at his doorstep.
Today, Hamda-khala and Geeta-auntie and Ishta-auntie were all trying to elbow past each other into the entryway before the prayer bell’s echo had even faded from the air. Ashar scrambled to his feet to make a proper bow.
“Welcome to the—”
“A priest, young man?” Hamda-khala asked, before he’d even finished.
“I don’t think he’s a proper priest,” Ishta-auntie said. “That accent of his! Be careful, beta, we’d hate for you to be taken in by—”
“Are you saying His Reverence Shai Vishal is not a proper priest?” Hamda-khala said, bristling, because she was Imperial enough to be proud of both her own noble lineage and Shai Vishal’s.
(She was just not quite Imperial enough for dawn prayers to the God-Emperor to take precedence over the earliest pouncing upon the morning’s gossip-brew.)
“Shai Vishal is an entirely proper priest,” Geeta-auntie said. “That man was not at all proper for you, sweetie.”
“Oh, I know,” Ashar admitted.
“So much older than you, and so fat, and surely he didn’t have two coins to rub together,” Geeta-auntie continued, determined to get her say in.
“Wait, what?” Ishta-auntie said, because she did listen. Ishta-auntie was the one he’d need to watch out for, really.
“I know it’s not proper for me to be so public about my affections,” Ashar told her.
(It also wasn’t proper to flirt with long-married aunties, of course, but sometimes desperate times led to desperate measures.)
He gave them his most brilliant smile and a smoldering glance through lowered lashes, wishing for a moment that he’d taken the chance to borrow a few strokes of eye-lining kohl from Kalyani’s cosmetics.
But even without the kohl, all three of them looked a bit staggered by the heat of his best-practiced smolder.
(Hira hastily groomed her shoulder to keep herself from sneeze-giggles.)
With a languid stretch that let the collar of his bathrobe slip off his shoulder, Ashar told them, “I’ve never been much good at propriety, you know.”
“Oh my,” Geeta-auntie squeaked.
“Ohhh my,” Ishta-auntie said, grinning. She really was the one to watch out for.
Geeta-auntie was not the sharpest blade in the kitchen.
She was entirely earnest, but not the best practiced at understanding implications.
The other aunties had come dressed for social combat, with their brightest hair-scarves and brassiest jewelry; Geeta-auntie had come in her bathrobe, with her favorite scrub-brush, ready for a bath.
“If you must prefer men like that, beta, if somehow you prefer them poor and fat and religious, then why not our sweet Shai Madhur?” Geeta-auntie asked fretfully.
“Madhur may not have two coins to rub together, none of Upaja’s priests do, but that other one isn’t even Basteti!
He must have come for the Greater Convocation, he won’t even be here more than a fortnight!
And if Shai Vishal has any heart at all, he’ll make young Madhur the next High Priest someday, and then—”
Ashar saw the precise moment she realized the rest of that sentence was leading towards and then the House of Jasmines would be given to Upaja’s priesthood instead of one of our daughters or granddaughters, because she stopped abruptly, eyes widening.
With his mildest curiosity, Ashar said, “And then?”
(Hira lost her battle with the sneeze-giggles, and busied herself in scratching at the ledger book with one of the claws that was not the reed-tipped pen.)
“Oh, but he works such long hours, you wouldn’t have much time together,” Geeta-auntie backtracked hastily. “Not when he works in the mornings and you work, er… at different times.”
“But that is quite a wise arrangement,” Ashar said, smiling, because if he didn’t smile he would start laughing at the consternation on their faces. “I could bring him meals that he didn’t have to cook for himself. We could enjoy the baths together when his work was done, even if my own was not.”
“You need a wife, boy,” Hamda-khala said sternly, before the aunties could lose the steering of the situation any further.
The temptation was overwhelming. He truly couldn’t help himself. (He had, possibly, spent too long around Hira’s very feline sense of mischief.)
“Why?” Ashar asked, blinking at them.
Geeta-auntie gasped.
Ishta-auntie proved yet again that she was the one to watch out for.
“Because if you marry one of my daughters,” she said promptly, “I’ll keep the rest of them from pestering you about their daughters for the next ten years.”
“Ishta!” Hamda-khala hissed through her teeth.
“After ten years I make no guarantees about pestering for grandchildren, of course,” Ishta-auntie said, because any haggled bargain was more tempting with a touch of honesty.
“Oh, obviously,” Ashar said, with his most wide-eyed expression; he knew he was not very good at feigning innocent, but wide-eyed often covered for it. “But, Ishta-auntie, do you think Shai Madhur would consider my hand, if I were so bold as to offer?”
“Of course not,” Hamda-khala said firmly. “You are a fallen man of shamefully loose morals, and Shai Madhur is much too pure for you.”
“But then surely I have also fallen too far from grace for your daughters’ consideration.” With a hand pressed to his heart like one of the marketplace singers, Ashar said, “Alas, what a tragedy.”
Geeta-auntie, who was both desperate to steer the conversation away from her misstep about Shai Madhur and also sometimes too honest for anyone’s good, said, “Oh, that’s all right, beta. Hamda-khala says that Ishta-auntie’s girl Safaa has entertained half the Catsprowl already.”
Hamda-khala and Ishta-auntie both choked at the same moment.
Ashar realized he couldn’t possibly leave the three of them unsupervised in one of the baths, for fear one of them might try to wring the other’s neck and call it a slip in the water.
If they got into an auntie catfight outside his door, then it was someone else’s problem, but inside?
Ashar didn’t want to have to answer questions from Imperial authorities under a truth-binding geas this morning in particular.
The beads and bells jangled again as Fathuna-khala, who probably had made her dawn prayers to the God-Emperor before hurrying over to catch the gossip, elbowed her way into the entryway and kicked her street-shoes off with a clatter.
“What is this I hear about you and some fat old priest dandling kittens on his knee?” Fathuna-khala demanded, both hands on her hips. “You know none of Upaja’s keep a single daniq to their names! You’ve always been more sensible than that, boy. What on earth did he promise you?”
Ashar couldn’t help smiling at the memory. “He promised me kittens.”
“Kittens,” Hamda-khala scoffed, dusting her hands together to brush the idea away. “Give me ten minutes and an old fish-head and I’ll bring you kittens.”
“We know all of Upaja’s priests who are properly sworn at the Temple, beta,” Geeta-auntie said with great concern. “If this one isn’t a fraud, he’s a mendicant. You can do better!”
“But not Shai Madhur, who is too pure for my sinful hands to stain,” Ashar said, counting on his fingertips, “and not Shai Vishal, who is too stern and somber to be swayed by my seductions. Although Shai Nanda has been both a mother and a caravanserai cook! And she makes the most marvelous cheese…”
“What is it with you and these priests, honestly?” Fathuna-khala groaned. “You need a wife!”
“Shai Nanda is at least a woman?” Geeta-auntie pointed out.
“She’s much too old!” Hamda-khala protested. “You need a fertile young wife like my daughter Oma—”
“But how do you know she is fertile if she’s not given you any grandchildren at all yet?” Ashar asked, with his chin propped in his hand, so that he could hastily hide a grin if he lost control of his expression.
The shocked silence was so profound that the sound of the wandering karkadeh seller’s sales-song drifted through the jali from two alleys away.
Then all the aunties exploded into clucking and flapping at once, like a flock of outraged pigeons.
Hira nudged his thoughts with a very feline Did you have to? Really? Did you really have to?
If they’re squawking at me, they’re not squawking at Kalyani, Ashar replied. Besides. Tell me you could have resisted that much mischief. I’ve seen you pounce.
She did walk into that one, Hira admitted, ears and whiskers twitching. But they’re so LOUD.
Kalyani cracked the door of the Camellia Room open, took in the ruckus, rolled her eye, and very firmly closed the door again. Ashar supposed he couldn’t blame her, but there was clearly no hope of rescue from that direction.
Now the aunties were getting into physical attributes like child-bearing hips and bountiful bosoms and whose daughters did or did not offer the necessary embodiments of fertility, combined with whether they were rumored to have tested out that fertility yet.
Ashar felt as though he would need to find a bath that would let him scour all the way from his toes to the inside of his head.
And also he might owe apologies to the honor and dignity of every unmarried woman between eighteen and forty in the entire Catsprowl by the time the aunties stopped dickering.
They were not winding down, either. Hamda-khala and Fathuna-khala were both raising their voices, Geeta-auntie was flapping about like a panicked hen facing a stewpot, and Ishta-auntie was much too clearly filing away tidbits of commentary for later pointed sharpening of who-said-whats.