Liavek 6 Page 6

  Struggling silently to keep from vomiting, She did not hear Foral Yatt leave his bedchamber until he was standing just beside Her.

  "There. Was that so bad?"

  Startled by his voice, Rawra Chin moved one hand so that only half of Her face remained concealed, and opened Her eyes. She was looking down at the floor, and She could see nothing of Foral Yatt above the knee without moving Her head, which seemed an unendurable prospect.

  His feet were as white as the flesh of almonds.

  Fixed to each of the toenails was a tiny mirror. Suspended beneath the surface of ten miniature, glittering pools, Rawra Chin's reflections stared back at Her, insects drowning in quicksilver.

  Rising unsteadily from Her seat and pushing past Foral Yatt, Rawra Chin staggered to that chamber set aside for bathing and the performance of one's toilet. Lava rose in Her throat, flooding Her mouth, and She was sobbing as She emptied Herself noisily into a chipped and yellowed handbasin. Drained, She gagged upon emptiness until the convulsions in Her gut subsided, and then raised Her head to look at the room about Her through a quivering lens of tears.

  Something caught Her eye, a green blur twinkling from atop the chest where Foral Yatt kept his soaps and perfumes and oils. Rawra Chin wiped Her eyes with the blunt edge of one hand and tried to focus upon the distracting blot of emerald. It was a fixed point on which to anchor Her perceptions, still reeling in the wake of Her nausea. Gradually, the object swam into definition against the damp gloom of the washroom.

  Tiny glass sockets stared at Her, unblinking. Behind them, within the translucent green brainpan, unguessable dreams marinated within cerebral juices that smelled of licorice.

  Rawra Chin stared at the skull full of poison. It stared back at Her, its gaze concealing nothing.

  Time passed in the House Without Clocks.

  •

  On the eighteenth night following Her arrival, Rawra Chin fell to the darkness. That which had only licked and tasted Her now distended its jaws and took Her at a bite.

  She was drunk, although it would have happened had this not been the case. Miserable over the dinner table, She had taken an excess of wine in the hope of numbing the pangs of self-loathing. The alcohol served only to muddy Her anxieties, making them slippery, more difficult to apprehend. She stood framed in the open doorway with one hand upon the pale yellow wood, looking out at the deserted courtyard, drinking great ragged lungfuls of autumn air. It did nothing to still the buzzing that droned inside Her head, a dismal hive somewhere between her ears.

  Gazing at the indifferent black flagstones, She understood that She must leave. Leave Foral Yatt. Leave at once and return to the soothing babble of Her wardrobe boys, the comforting dreariness of committing endless lines to Her memory. If She did not go immediately, She would be trapped forever, crushed beneath the hulking farm wagon of circumstance, screaming for someone to brush away the flies. If She did not go immediately…

  From the chambers behind Her, Foral Yatt called Her name.

  She looked up from the flagstones and there, on the opposite side of that wide obsidian pond, there reared the archway, with Liavek beyond it.

  A note of mounting impatience discernible in his voice, Foral Yatt called again.

  She turned and walked back into the house, closing the pale yellow door behind Her.

  •

  He was in the bedchamber, as had become customary since the evening when Rawra Chin had been called upon to service Donna Blerot, Her first knowledge of a woman. She supposed that Foral Yatt had summoned Her to order a repetition of that occasion, and for an instant She savored a fantasy of refusal, but for not longer than that.

  "My love? Would you light the lantern for me? It is so dark in here."

  Foral Yatt's voice, altering since Rawra Chin's arrival in that place, had moved into another stage of its metamorphosis. Softened to a deep velvet, it seduced rather than commanded.

  Her fingers struggled with the flint for a second before the tinder caught, and then She lifted the flame to the wick of the lantern. A bubble of sulfurous yellow light expanded and contracted within the chamber, wavering until the flame grew still and its light clear. Rawra Chin turned from the lamp, white-hot maggots engraved upon Her retinas by the brilliance She had brought into being.

  Foral Yatt lay upon his side on top of the patchwork counterpane, supporting himself upon one elbow, fingertips lost in the tight blond curls at his temples. A wide band of blue cosmetic color ran in a diagonal line across his face, overlaying the left side of his brow, sweeping down across the left eye, the bridge of the nose, the right cheek. A narrower band of red, little more than a single brushstroke, followed its upper edge over the ridges and hollows of his smooth, sculpted features, terminating beneath the right ear.

  He was wearing one of Her costumes.

  It was a gown, long and violet, gathered in extravagant ruffs at the shoulders so that the arms were bare. The collar was high, reaching to the point just above the bulge in Foral Yatt's throat, and below that the material was solid and opaque until it reached a demarcation line just beneath the breastbone. From there, the dress seemed to have been slashed into long strips that trailed down to the ankles, every second violet ribbon having been cut away and replaced by a panel of coral pink twine, knotted into snowflake patterns through which the skin beneath was visible. There were mirrors upon his toes and fingers.

  Entering through a chink in the wall with a sound like a child blowing across the neck of a narrow jar, a breeze disturbed the perfumed air and caused the lantern flame to stutter. For a moment, armies of light and shadow rushed back and forth in quick-fire border disputes. The shadows gathered within Foral Yatt's eye sockets seemed to flow across his cheek like an overspill of tar before shrinking back to pool beneath the overhang of his brow. He smiled up at Her through lips fastidiously stained a rich indigo.

  "I had to come back. I couldn't just leave you here."

  The second word in each sentence was stressed in a lush and affected manner, so that even as Rawra Chin struggled to make sense of the actor's words, so too was She striving to identify that quirk of inflection, maddeningly familiar and yet beyond the grasp of her recall.

  "But … what do you mean? You haven't been anywhere. You…"

  Rawra Chin could feel something bearing down upon Her, coming toward Her with a hideous speed that froze the will and made evasion unthinkable. It was like stories She had heard concerning eclipses when men would see the giant moon shadow rushing toward them across the land, a vast planet of darkness rolling over the tiny fields and pastures with a speed that was only comparable to itself. Standing there in the scented chamber, She understood their terror. The shadow-world was almost upon Her. Another moment and She would be crushed beneath its endless, inescapable mass. From the bed, Foral Yatt spoke again. The pattern of emphasis within his speech continued to dance just beyond the fringes of recognition, mocking and unattainable.

  "I left you. Don't you remember? I left you because it was so important to me that people should know my name. I know it must have seemed unfair to you, but you were only ordinary, and I am a special creature. I have something rare in me, a unique charm that men have not words to describe, and though I loved you deeply, deeply, it was my duty to expose the treasure that I am to the world and all its people. Surely this is not beyond your comprehension?"

  Quite suddenly, Rawra Chin knew where She had heard the voice that Foral Yatt was using. The dark planet crashed upon Her, and She was lost.

  "But all of that is done with now. Now, people everywhere know my name and are drawn like moths to the fire within me, whose nature only I can put a name to. Now I am complete, and I am free to love you once more. I adore you. I worship you. I love you, love you more than anything in the world save for celebrity. But…"

  The parody was unspeakably vicious, undeniably accurate. Having identified the voice, Rawra Chin could do nothing more than accept the cruel mirror-image of the face that accompanied it. Nai
led by the black weight of a phantom moon, She could only watch as Foral Yatt exposed all the conceits, the inanities, the small evasions that were the components of Her existence. The young man lounged upon the bed, touching a shimmering constellation of fingertips to the blue of his lower lip in a pantomime of anxiety and indecision. Looking up at Rawra Chin, his long lashes flashed an urgent semaphore pleading for sympathy while his jaw trembled beneath the burden of the words unspoken in the mouth above. Finally, when he had drawn out his melodramatic hesitation to the snapping-point of absurdity, the words spilled out in a breathless cascade.

  "…but do you still love me?"

  He paused, blinking twice.

  "Despite what I did to you?"

  In one corner of the room the idiot child began to blow across the slender neck of its jar, and the patterns of light and shade within the chamber convulsed. Rawra Chin, adrift upon a lurching ocean of nightmare, heard a voice speak in the distance.

  "Is there a lizard asleep within the ball?"

  The voice was so deep and masculine that She assumed it must belong to Foral Yatt, except that Foral Yatt's voice wasn't like that anymore. Whose, then, could it be? When the answer came, Her senses were too brutalized to ring with more than the dullest peal of despair. It was Her voice. Of course it was Her voice.

  On the bed, Foral Yatt smiled and flopped languidly onto his back. The smile he wore belonged to Foral Yatt rather than to his grotesque and pointed lampoon of Rawra Chin, but when he spoke it was with Her accents.

  "Perhaps I am a ball. Perhaps the unfathomable quality that men perceive in me is a lizard, coiled within me, its material reality questionable, its effects upon the mind undisputed."

  Their eyes were locked, their awareness of each other fixed in that moment of mutual understanding that has always existed between snakes and rabbits. Licking his indigo lips, Foral Yatt luxuriated in the taste of the long instant preceding the stroke of grace.

  "Shall I tell you the name of my lizard? Shall I tell you the name of that thing that makes me vulnerable, makes me loved, worshiped, celebrated?"

  Knowing the answer already, Rawra Chin shook Her head violently from side to side, but was unable to make the slightest sound.

  "Guilt."

  There. It had been said. He knew. The lantern flame quivered. The shadows charged and then fell back, regrouping for their next assault.

  "You see, it is vital to what I am. It is the hurt that drives me, and without it I am nothing. Oh, my love, I feel so ashamed of all the misery that I have brought you."

  Standing at the foot of the bed, swaying, the wine of their evening repast now bitter in Her belly, Rawra Chin became confused as the layers of meaning began to fold in upon each other, blossoming into new shapes like a toy of artfully creased paper. Was Foral Yatt describing feelings of his own or mimicking those agonies that he perceived in Her? Did he genuinely feel remorse for the venomous charade that he had perpetrated? At the center of the fear and confusion that tore through Rawra Chin like a hurricane, a nugget of resentment began to form, cold and bright in the still heart of the cyclone.

  How dare he apologize? How dare he plead for understanding after this insufferable pageant of debasement? The anger grew within Rawra Chin as She gazed icily down at the figure upon the bed, the yielding and defenseless line of the body beneath the slatted violet gown gradually becoming as infuriating as the wheedling of that unbearable little-girl voice.

  "Can you forgive me? Oh, my love, you seem so stern. How thoughtless I was to injure you in such a dreadful, careless fashion."

  Foral Yatt sat up and reached toward Rawra Chin with imploring arms, pale as they emerged like swans' necks from the ruffs at the actor's shoulders. His eyes pleaded for release from the apparent agonies of self-flagellation that he was enduring, and his blue lips mouthed inaudible half-words of explanation and apology, puckering as if for a kiss of absolution.

  With as much force as She could muster, Rawra Chin struck him across the mouth with the back of Her hand, smearing the blue lip dye over his cheek and Her knuckle.

  The dry smack of the blow and the bark of pain from the actor rebounded back at them from the cold stone of the walls. Foral Yatt fell back, covering his face and rolling onto his side so that he lay curled upon the patchwork with his back to Rawra Chin.

  Struck suddenly by the sight of his curving spine, visible through the disheveled violet fringes of his gown, Rawra Chin found that the anger in Her heart was matched by a sudden pressure at Her loins as a burgeoning erection reared against the restricting hide of Her ash-gray breeches. On the bed, Foral Yatt nursed his mouth and began to weep. Almost of their own volition, fingers that felt suddenly numb and overlarge moved toward the knot in Her rope belt, where it pressed in a hard fist of hemp against Rawra Chin's stomach.

  She raped him twice, brutally, and there was no pleasure in it.

  When it was done, She understood the damage that She had done to Herself and began to sob noiselessly, in the way that men do, sitting there upon the edge of the counterpane with Her shoulders shuddering in silence. Foral Yatt lay on the bed behind her, staring at the far wall. Rawra Chin's seed had dried in a small, irregular oval on the plucked alabaster flesh above his right knee, a tight puckering of the skin beneath the thin, clear varnish. He picked at it absently with mirrored nails and said nothing.

  The wick of the lantern grew shorter, until finally it guttered and died. Thus could the passage of hours be measured, there in the House Without Clocks.

  •

  "I had no right. No right to treat you like that…"

  "Please. It doesn't matter."

  "Will you stay? Will you stay here with me?"

  "I can't."

  "But … what am I to do if you go? There is no reason for you to leave."

  "There's my work. My work and my career."

  "But what about me? You're leaving me trapped here, don't you see? I'll never get away now. Please. I'll do anything you want, but don't leave me here."

  "You should have thought of that before you took your revenge."

  "Oh, please, I said that I was sorry. Can't you think of what we were to each other and forgive me?"

  "It's too late, my love. It's far too late."

  "I won't let you go. I won't let us be separated again."

  "Please. I don't want a scene. What happened last time was so embarrassing."

  "Oh, don't worry. Don't worry. I won't make any fuss at all."

  "Good. Now, I must send one of the House-waifs to order my carriage for the morning and arrange to have my wardrobe moved back to the lodging house."

  "Won't you leave me anything? Please. Let me keep the violet gown."

  "No."

  "Don't you see what you're doing to me? You're taking away everything! How has this happened?"

  "Don't be naive. We are in the City of Luck."

  "Here, you speak to me of luck? I am no longer sure that luck exists. Is there luck, or is there only circumstance without form or pattern, a senseless wave that obliterates all before it?"

  "Is there a lizard asleep within the ball?"

  •

  Seated upon her balcony, absently chewing the anemic blue flowers she had plucked from her window garden, Som-Som regarded the courtyard of the House Without Clocks.

  A carriage had arrived outside the curving walls with the first shafts of dawn, some short while ago. The half-masked woman had realized that Rawra Chin must be leaving the House to return to Her fabulous existence in the world beyond its seven variegated portals.

  Since Rawra Chin had originally spoken of Her stay at the House in terms of months rather than weeks, Som-Som supposed that it was the dark undercurrents flowing between Her and Foral Yatt that had prompted this unannounced departure. She wondered if the performer would call upon her to say goodbye before She left, and felt a pang of sadness at the thought of their separation.

  Countering this regret, there was a tremendous relief. Som-Som was glad th
at Rawra Chin had not allowed Herself to become a prisoner of the terrible gravity that the House possessed, and for this reason alone she hoped that luck would take the performer far beyond those walls that curved like gray, embracing arms.

  The sound of the pale yellow door opening was jewel-sharp in the silent morning, and Som-Som leaned out from her balcony a little to watch the elegant, crimson-bandaged figure step out onto the cold black flagstones, where the chill of the night had left a faint dusting of frost.

  To Som-Som, who had not enjoyed the perception of depth since her ninth year, it seemed that a self-propelling droplet of blood had leaked from a pale yellow gash in the skin of the House to roll across the frost-flecked black disk of the courtyard, trickling slowly toward the arch on the opposite side. Occasionally, a two-dimensional white hand would become visible, depending upon the perspective, a cream petal bobbing briefly to the surface of the red blot before vanishing again.

  As the bead of crimson progressed across the yard, it became something that a person without her affliction would recognize as a human being. The figure paused at a point halfway across the courtyard and turned, tilting back its head to gaze directly at Som-Som, as if it had been aware of the half-masked woman's scrutiny since first setting foot outside the pale yellow door. From out of the redness, a face swam into view.

  Foral Yatt stared up into Som-Som's eyes, both the one that blinked and the one that could not.

  His expression seemed furtive for an instant, tinged with a guilt that Som-Som found disturbingly familiar, and then he smiled. Long seconds passed unrecorded while their eyes remained locked, and then he turned and continued across the wide circle of jet, passing out through the high stone archway.