Chapter 9 The High Priest’s Penance #3
“True enough.” Asharan looked into his basket of sugared bites and silken pouches, and offered a fragile smile.
“If it is not entirely too late, I would offer your priests succor and defense against the wheedling? Also if it is not terribly impious, because it is known that you do not keep coin upon you, and these could be mistaken for coinpurses, couldn’t they?
I fear that I was not thinking of the theology of it.
I thought that Shai Madhur would be appreciated as he always should have been, and that you and your priesthood would benefit from the children joyfully appreciating your generosity everywhere they see you.
But… saying that aloud in front of your eyes, your Reverence, and knowing that you are so reserved in yourself?
I should have asked your permission first, shouldn’t I.
Now I realize that.” He rubbed at his chest again, and said, “Shame is dreadful. And I don’t know how to mend it. ”
“There are many worse rumors you could have chosen to spread of us,” Shai Vishal said. “If you had had it put about that we cook rats in the community cauldrons, or that we took treats from children, rather than giving the treats away. But why were we even in your thoughts to begin with?”
Asharan bit his lip.
Several pieces fell into place at once.
I will not kiss and tell, not even to the High Priest, Asharan had told him. And he had spent a night with a lover whom he had wished to claim as a lover and not a client before the eyes of the neighborhood. And then he had needed to disguise that lover, before returning him to his home.
And he had chosen to disguise that lover as a mendicant priest of Upaja.
If nothing else, that suggested that Asharan’s chosen lover shared the ample figure that people expected priests of Upaja to share.
And that made a terrible amount of sense out of the otherwise inexplicable notes Shai Vishal had received from both the God-Emperor’s brother and his hajib, Irfan al-Sadiq.
He hadn’t taken the time to read the notes in detail.
They’d arrived just after the lunch rush had ebbed from a flood to a stream, so he’d been occupied with chopping and measuring and directing the new mendicants where to find which ingredients in the storerooms in order to replenish the cauldrons that Shai Madhur and Shai Nanda were busily stirring and ladling from.
He’d skimmed just enough to understand that some matter of Imperial theology demanded his personal discretion but the city was not about to flood or burn.
His Highness would surely have come in person, if his foresights had suggested the city were about to flood or burn.
And so, once Vishal had fed the Imperial courier a snack and finished the chopping and grinding and returned to his chamber to change his wrap from the spice-smudged one he’d worn in the Temple kitchen, he had simply shoved the notes into his desk drawer to deal with after his shift.
Shai Vishal blinked, passed a hand over his beard, and thanked Upaja’s mercy for the dozenth time that his beard lent such concealment to his expressions when he could not afford to show that he was startled, or that he had realized something he could not be seen to have realized.
He could not possibly let it cross his face that he suspected the God-Emperor’s sweet, shy, kind, and notably fat brother had spent the night in a Catsprowl bath-house with a charming and impulsive courtesan who had done his best to send him safely home in the morning without being recognized as the God-Emperor’s brother along the way.
Still, the diplomatically-worded hysteria in the hajib’s missive seemed to have had something to do not with bath-house intimacies but with cats? He would have to read much more closely.
No wonder Asharan was overwhelmed, if he was surrounded by half the gossips of the Catsprowl and couldn’t let any of them notice his lover’s name, even while he needed to be clear in that lover’s welcome — and not only for his Highness’ uncertainties.
It would have lent his Highness protection to be seen as a poor and mendicant priest with bonds both to a priesthood and a man of the neighborhood, not to be seen as the God-Emperor’s wealthy brother who could be seized and ransomed.
And all of that was before the courtiers learned that Asharan—
No. The courtiers could not be permitted to learn that Asharan was the man intimately involved with the God-Emperor’s brother.
Shai Vishal had never met someone with Asharan’s keen interpersonal instincts who also had such an utter lack of political instincts.
That comparison of a charming cat taking a tumble from a window ledge and pretending that he’d entirely meant it seemed more and more apt.
Asharan had begun squirming in the face of Shai Vishal’s silence. But he held his own stillness stubbornly close. Even if it was not the same discretion that priests learned, courtesans also learned that a word never spoken could not be used against anyone.
Shai Vishal realized as well, I can’t tell him that I’ve guessed.
He needs more polishing to keep this secret as close as he must. I would shatter his confidence to have guessed just from his silence and his choice of our priesthood and two letters that he doesn’t know I have.
He has no reason to trust me with his Highness’s name.
And if he were the least bit more politically savvy, he would realize there are a thousand reasons NOT to trust the High Priest of a rival religion with a heartfelt confession of his own misplaced guilt.
Not within a thousand miles of incriminating sexual evidence about the God-Emperor’s brother’s inclinations.
Especially not when that evidence illuminates his Highness’ inclinations toward both magically and physically charming Basteti men, rather than marriageable Imperial heiresses who would consolidate the power of the throne.
Then, unhappily, Shai Vishal realized, I can use this, if I need to.
I may need to use this.
Merciful Lord Upaja, I pray I never need to use this.
But if I must, I will still place feeding my people above a shahzada’s reputation. Even if the shahzada himself is the one who has warned us of the next flood or the next famine. He can live with shame, whether or not it should have been a shame, but our people will not live without food.
Something about his face must have said enough of that, to a man as sensitive to others’ emotions as Asharan.
“I will not apologize for who I am,” Asharan said, and his fingers were fretting at a loose thread of his indigo-embroidered cuffs. “I will not apologize for who I love.”
“I would never ask you to,” Shai Vishal told him.
“Then what penance will you put to me?”
“What penance do you feel you should serve for choosing to embrace a man of a generous figure who could plausibly be mistaken for a priest of our order?”
The young man bit his lip again, head bent as though he had heard a rebuke somehow.
“That was not a trick question,” Shai Vishal murmured. “But I would have your answer.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to ask,” Asharan said plaintively. “I won’t regret that we shared that night, but at the least I should have thought to ask if your order inclines toward celibacy before I set the neighborhood abuzz with such intimate gossip.”
Shai Vishal’s brows quirked. “You have met Shai Nanda, have you not?”
“Shai Nanda is her own inimitable force of nature.”
“Well, true enough.”
“And I don’t know how to mend that I didn’t ask, that I didn’t have time to ask, that I made assumptions I oughtn’t have made, about your preferences, your priesthood… what penance could suit an oversight I can’t change?”
Under other circumstances I would charge him with declaring the truth, Shai Vishal thought, and twenty years ago I might have charged him with that regardless.
But that young and righteous firebrand I once was would not have understood that his instincts served him as well as they could…
or that I would give away too valuable a piece of leverage if he were to proclaim that truth in the marketplace.
Instead, Shai Vishal said, “What penance would soothe your heartache?”
Asharan slumped sideways with all the expressiveness of the young, dramatic, and flexible, face buried in both hands on the mashrabiya’s sitting pillows.
It would be much too impious to consider the implications of that flexibility, Shai Vishal told himself firmly.
And much too forward to ask him to pose for an illumination of a holy figure in the throes of despair, when the dilemma here was an ache of the penitent’s soul rather than of the artist’s.
The young man mumbled something into the palms of his hands and the mashrabiya’s sitting pillow.
“Once more, and more clearly, please.”
“…I have no right to ask your forgiveness now, when it was already done so thoughtlessly.”
“It was not done thoughtlessly,” Shai Vishal said.
Asharan looked up at him with startlement in those vivid jade-bright eyes.
“You have already told me of the patterns behind your thoughts. You thought your neighbors should see that you found your lover worthy of desire, worthy of celebration. You thought the community should consider our priesthood in a similar light. Our priests’ intimate desires are not often kindly discussed when the community wits and jesters have their say.
How many of your matchmaking aunties were appalled that you were intimate with a man whose fellow priests are all so notoriously poor and fat? ”
Asharan bit his lip again, averting his eyes.
“Yes, we hear those comments too. That is not your fault,” Shai Vishal said.
“But Shai Madhur is still so young that he feels their teasing barbs more sharply than those of us who are longer accustomed to it. For his sake alone I would bless your instinct toward a gossip that finds our priesthood worthy of desire without mockery.”