A Taste of Honey Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Anna S. Thank you for opening my eyes to new dimensions of thought, feeling, and art.

  Part One

  The little dark songbirds will come again;

  though not exactly those that paused in flight,

  captivated by your beauty and my happiness,

  and learned both our names—those

  shall never come again.

  Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

  Backlit in the bright doorway, a silhouette shouted into the nighttime street: “Hey beautiful,” and the foreign soldier called again. “Hey!”

  Aqib glanced over his shoulder. A man should glimpse, shouldn’t he, when some lovely woman is walking just behind? But no one followed nearby on the boulevard.

  “No—” Resplendent in his breastplate, the Daluçan soldier walked out into the dappled moonlight under the border trees. “—You, man. So beautiful!”

  Startled, Aqib laughed. Girls of marriageable age, and their aunty-brokers, often told him so these days, but never yet a man. Far more than either his sister or brother, Aqib resembled their mother, closely reprising her exotic features. Always-Walking-People from the north tended to smallness of frame and stature—and from them his aquiline nose, and a glossy excess of hair no scissors had ever yet checked. Freed just this morning from braids, the heavy tangle of it billowed around his head like ram’s wool.

  “Vale, Dalucianus,” he said, hailing the soldier with words from beyond the sea, and then strode on with a wave. But the soldier called back, “No, wait up!” so Aqib halted in the road, the cat beside him, crouching on her haunches while the soldier approached.

  For a full season, the king’s heralds had cried through the City’s streets just how all Olorumi, whether of the Blood or salt of the earth, were to treat with the embassy from Daluz once the foreigners arrived: rendering the Daluçans every honor, and offending none of them, on any account. Aqib had heard these things, of course, from his own father: “I know you shall be gracious at the fêtes, my boy, always warm and forthcoming; for I do not doubt that you will be called upon to give some performance for them. And to any Daluçan you meet in passing, extend the utmost courtesy, that they should know only comfort, only welcome, here in Great Olorum. Have I spoken clearly, Aqib-sa?”

  “Oh, you have, Papa,” Aqib had said. “Yes, Master Sadiqi!”

  The soldier met him eye to eye. So, a man of only middling height; but he wasn’t slightly built, nor with a bird’s bones. The Daluçan was broad-shouldered and stout-muscled as Aqib’s own brother, and male cousins: warriors all. And when the soldier emerged from leaf-shadows under the bordering trees, into the clarity mid-boulevard, the features of his face showed unweathered and young. Like the lyric, his head was “a night without stars,” which was to say, without a single pale strand compromising the darkness of his hair. Aqib guessed that he and this soldier were of an age, more or less: past a half-man’s initiation at fifteen years old, not yet come to a full-man’s at twenty-five.

  “Servus, pulchre! I’m—” Then the soldier saw, properly, the animal crouched beside Aqib. He jumped back with a yelp. “Whoa, that ain’t no dog!”

  “No.” Aqib patted the cat’s head. She leaned against him, pressing her fuzzy skull to his hand. “She’s the favorite cat of the prince, who is Blessèd among Olorumi,” said Aqib. All day she’d run hard, and taken down two antelope, and gorged herself. Now she was in drowsy sweet temper. “Her name is Sabah.”

  “I thought that was a big dog.” The soldier drew near again. “So, they just let you walk free around the City with your long skinny lion?”

  “Cheetah,” Aqib said; “and she belongs to the Blest, not to me. It’s my responsibility to take her down to the Royal Park to run and hunt when the prince is too much occupied. But there’s no cause for worry, believe me. Sabah’s used to people. I sat right beside her dam, the morning Sabah came to light in the Royal Menagerie. I know she will not hurt you.”

  “Not ’less you sic her on me,” the soldier said insistently. “I’d be shit outta luck then, if you said, ‘Go on, girl. Get that soldier-man right there. Eat him up!’”

  Aqib was shocked. “I would never do such a thing.” And he lay a hand of emphatic reassurance on the soldier’s arm.

  . . . belatedly realizing the man had only been making fun. Still, Aqib’s expression or tone of voice—the touch?—caused the soldier to look at him no longer mockingly, but with some friendlier feeling. The soldier’s forearm was crisscrossed by weapons’ scars. Aqib felt thews hard and articulate as carved teakwood; sweat-damp, downed with fine hair . . . It seemed almost as if that smile and gaze invited Aqib to leave it put when he withdrew his hand.

  “So you take care of the Blest’s cat, huh?” the soldier said. “Does that make you somebody important?”

  “No. Well, yes—perhaps so. I am a fourth-order Cousin of the Blood, and my father is Master of Beasts and the Hunt for the king. And now I hope you will excuse me, but I really ought to have got Sabah back to the Menagerie already.”

  “Care if I walk with you? The rest of the Embassy’s up at the palace thataway. And I hardly ever seen such a beautiful”—the soldier grinned, eyetooth missing just where some scar nicked his upper lip—“night as this.”

  Gallant, this soldier from Daluz! And he really was quite handsome, too, in a wildly foreign sort of way; probably full of exciting stories. “Of course you may accompany us,” Aqib said; and as they began walking together, he thoughtlessly quoted the lay of Saintly Canon spoken by a royal daughter when, at her moment of greatest danger, her Sainted paladin makes a timely appearance: “‘We were all alone, and so do greet you with a glad heart; for the protection of a strong man tells, when perils of the lonely night threaten.’” Absurd thing to say! Aqib ducked his head. Why was his tongue so foolish?

  The Daluçan whooped with laughter. “No threats and dangers here in Olorum, that I can see,” he said. “Guess what? Back home in Terra-de-Luce, we got gangs of bandits running loose right in the city streets. Anyhow, I left my gladium back at the palace. But you have that big knife on your belt there. You watch out for us.”

  “Oh, no, Dalucianus!” Aqib said. “This? It’s only a bush-knife: for the hunt, butchering prey, field mercy, and so forth. I am no warrior”—the old upset began to trouble Aqib’s voice, wrack his countenance, and he had to calm himself—“though my brother is, and my cousins are. I myself cannot show even one war scar. So, whatever perils we face, salvation will not come from me.” Aqib looked over the soldier who walked beside him. Here was every inch a warrior!

  Some arrowpoint had once clipped the soldier’s forehead, leaving a pale gouge in the dark arc of his left brow. The Daluçan’s undertunic and gleaming breastplate left his arms bare: both countlessly scored by scratches, a few new-red, many long healed. Down his right forearm, however, a knotty length of cicatrix, the remnants of a dreadful wound, snaked from elbow to wrist. It had plainly been won in the thick of battle, and the sight of this badge of manhood, so bravely borne, put Aqib quite into his place: a
mere boy. It acted as a sort of rebuke, even; for Aqib’s own flesh was entirely undecorated from head to toe. Nothing on him was—to use the soldier’s term—so beautiful. Abashed, Aqib tore his gaze from the scar.

  The soldier was looking at him strangely. “I forgot about that. How you Olorumi admire wounds, like they’re the mark of a man. Well, nobody looks at ’em that way where I come from. . . . Hey, what’s your name? Oh, ‘Aqib’—I like that! Where I come from, Aqib, the thing we love is smooth unmarked skin, like yours.” While he spoke, the soldier frowned and rubbed self-consciously at the old scar on his right arm, as if such proof of heroism could in any way be shameful.

  They’d misunderstood each other somehow, Aqib realized. Without intending it, he’d offered the Daluçan some offense. He couldn’t think what next to say safely.

  “Now looky there.” It was the soldier who spoke first. “See those flowers and glow bugs? That’s sure ’nough pretty!”

  Indeed it was. And one could, in all safety, bang on about the weather forever. “The season of Long Rains draws nigh,” Aqib explained. “For you can see that the moonflowers are coming into blossom. And those, properly speaking, are called night-bees.”

  Alongside the boulevard, there was a whole length of hedge round some rich merchant’s compound blooming. Night-bees swarmed over the huge blowsy flowers, white phosphoresced in the moonlight. As drafts cause candle-wicks to brighten, so did the glimmering of the night-bees flare while they drank nectar, then dim at liftoff to the next blossom.

  Sabah stopped to drink at a public fountain. They must drink from the clean water in the upper basins, Aqib explained; for poor folk bathed and laundered clothes in the lower pool. The Daluçan ducked his whole head under the downward cascade. When he came up, he said, “You don’t wear a man’s robes, Aqib.” The soldier’s wet hair had slicked down otterishly to contours of his skull. “Why’s that?”

  “Oh, I prefer boy’s clothes,” Aqib said, and played out one long tendril from the flat soaked pelt atop the Daluçan’s head. The soldier stilled for this examination with a bemused smile. “Though as a Cousin of the Blood, I may wear majority’s robes at any age.” Aqib, however, persisted in the shirt and trousers of a youth. “My father hasn’t chosen a wife for me yet, so there’s still a little time to do as I please.”

  “Yeah?” the soldier said. “I thought you Olorumi picked your own husband or wife.”

  “It often happens that way,” Aqib said. Sabah now jumped in the fountain to wallow. “My father and my brother both married for love. But my mother wasn’t of the Blood, so that marriage greatly lowered our family’s standing. Master Sadiqi wants a second-order Cousin for me, at least. Some woman who can lift us high at court again.”

  “And what about you? There must be a girl you care for better than the rest. Who’s the prettiest one?”

  “Ehn.” Aqib waved a vague hand. He bent his head and cupped up drinking water from the fountain’s higher basin.

  The soldier gave a crack of laughter, as if at some good joke.

  Aqib looked up, startled. Well, all the daughters of the court who vied for him were very pretty, he explained. Everyone told him so!

  This only made the soldier laugh the more hearty. “Most men, Aqib, don’t need somebody else to explain which woman’s beautiful!”

  Chilling words to Aqib, even a little frightening; for manhood’s ways had often tripped him up, and his errors provoked harsh correction. But he saw and heard nothing cruel, nothing angry, in the Daluçan’s laughter. You can feel when someone takes delight in you, and Aqib felt that, so it seemed all right. He relaxed and smiled again. However Master Sadiqi chose, Aqib explained, he would be content to do his duty. Sabah jumped from the fountain and shook herself with a drenching spatter. They walked on, Aqib chattering about the weather.

  Nights before the Long Rains opened, a very sweet and particular breeze blew in the spell between dusk and morning. Those airs refreshed, much cooler than the normal swelter. They bore scents so ripe, of fecundity and flowers, that Olorumi named these winds green. Just such a green wind was blowing now. Could Dalucianus not feel the freshness, smell it? “It’s certain the Long Rains will open in much less than one month,” Aqib said. “Yes. For you can see—right there, see?—that heaven is clouding over already.”

  “It ain’t.” The soldier said, looking up. “I hardly seen a sky so bright with stars.”

  Nor did the firmament lack for brightness, but Aqib put an arm round the soldier and turned him about—west—pointing out where obscurities in heaven’s lower strata had blotted black tracts across the night’s starry prospect. “Now do you see? Those are the first wet clouds of the Long Rains, gathering in the upper airs.”

  At first the soldier nodded, staring where the finger pointed, and then quietly looked to Aqib, who felt his face flush, and the breath catch in his throat. How close they stood! He’d thought Daluçans touched as freely as Olorumi; but some fraught quality arose from the arm he’d put about the soldier. It was so hard to tell another people’s mores! Aqib let his arm fall away.

  To win back to the lighter mood of before, Aqib began to speak of his siblings, his father, the folk of his household.

  The Daluçan said, “So your father picked you then—not your brother, not your sister—to be his heir? Even though you’re the baby.”

  “Oh!” Aqib had never quite conceived of the matter in this manner. “Well, I wouldn’t say . . . It’s better to say, I think, that only one of us had aptitude and vocation, both. My brother lacks the . . . rapport, I suppose you could say, to work well with animals. All he cares for, anyway, is to make a distinguished career in the armies. My sister . . . ? Ha! Our great-grandmother built the Menagerie, but my sister is a very exquisite sort of woman. She abhors mess. Papa had hoped she might pursue medicine and help out at the Menagerie, but Sister absolutely refused. Nothing but the cleanliest of womanly arts for her! Physicals and mathematicals, and so forth.” Aqib made the shooing motion males employ for mysteries belonging to the female sex.

  “Physics and maths,” said the Daluçan.

  “Mmm, yes,” Aqib said, and then, marveling, turned to the soldier. “Your knowledge of my language is remarkably broad: even the girl words! But your accent, your manner of speech is”—low-rent, uncouth—“interesting. Who taught you to speak Olorumi?”

  “This sailor I knew, who used to ship on a freighter of your king’s argosy. Dude could hardly speak two words of Daluçan, so I learned your guys’ talk off him.”

  To acknowledge some value of “learned,” Aqib nodded attentively.

  “We were . . . friends, for a couple years,” the soldier said and looked away. Sabah licked the fingers of the hand the Daluçan extended to her. Then the cat turned to sniff some beast’s dung left in the road. “I kept asking him to settle with me in Daluz, but he loved voyaging and the sea way more than . . . Anyway, he sailed off one day and never came back. Later on, I heard that his ship went down in a storm, out in the Uttermost East.” The soldier glanced at Aqib, glanced away again.

  Aqib didn’t quite understand the depth of feeling here, but he spoke the cliché, the formula phrase: “It is hard—it hurts us very deeply, doesn’t it?—to lose those whom we love most.”

  “Yes.” The soldier looked at Aqib with sudden respect, as if they now shared an understanding. “It was real hard. Nothing ever hurt me worse. But that’s how I got asked to come on the embassy—because I know your guys’ talk so good. Me, I’m just a centurion of the cavalry, but the others are all semidivini knights. Most of them, though, hardly speak a word of Olorumi.”

  “That’s of no matter.” Aqib waved off this concern. “We all, every Cousin of the court, speaks excellent Daluçan.”

  The soldier grinned. “Not really, Aqib. You palace-types think your talk is so good, but . . . Like ‘vale’ means farewell, so you should of said ‘salve’ for hello. And when you’re talking right at somebody, it’s ‘Daluciane,’ not ‘Dalucianus.�
� Understand?”

  Aqib’s face stiffened with embarrassment, but his manners didn’t fail. “Yes,” he said evenly. “Thank you. I shall remember.”

  Drawn by gulf buffalo, a night wagon trundled past them: its benches brimming over with men and women, burly or sinewy, who stank and sang, drunk. Obviously they were all poor laborers, momentarily rich—lately back from a season’s work across-bayou on the gods’ estates. Riff-raff!

  “I see you’d sooner go on foot,” said the soldier merrily. The merriment owing to the vast disdain, Aqib realized, showing plain upon his face.

  Although high born, one needn’t go round haughtily seeming so; Aqib quickly fixed his expression. “Of course it’s wonderful that the gods employ so many from Olorum on their estates. The food those menials grow, and the wealth they bring back cross-bayou to the Kingdom, has helped to make us Olorumi the richest and most prosperous of the world’s peoples”—true, but was that quite the politic thing to say, Aqib?—“though, naturally, the wonders of Daluz, your nation’s prowess at war, for instance, and the storied loveliness of your cities, have no match upon the sphere.”

  The soldier laughed. “We’re for sure no courtiers, us two! Aqib, it really ain’t no need for you to get all mealy-mouth on my account.” It was such a nice laugh. Just as I do, Aqib thought, he lacks the forked or silver tongue necessary at court. Plain speech won’t offend him.

  Wishing to test this insight, and with his usual precipitation of thought into action, Aqib said provocatively:

  “You are aware the negotiations on this side of the bayou, between us mortals of Daluz and Olorum, are not the ones of true import?” Watching askance for reaction, Aqib flicked away a night-bee that lit upon the soldier’s head, creeping in his hair. “Careful; they pinch.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, I know,” the soldier said peaceably. “Ours is just the little business—your wootz and diamonds, our Pax Daluciana and war arts.” The soldier obliged with good humor as Aqib’s fingers satisfied their curiosity in his now-dry hair. “But over there cross-bayou, our gods are talking to yours about the big stuff. You know what the gods want, right?”