Night Flower, Page 3

  The persimmon vendor coughed too loudly.

  Esladas also took in the way everyone was looking at them in obvious disapproval, and he tensed, as if it had suddenly occurred to him that he was Saroese and she Efean.

  * * *

  Esladas realized he should have been paying attention to his surroundings. A sting in the air let him know how much the nearby eavesdroppers—Saroese and Efeans alike—disapproved of their innocent conversation.

  In his hometown he would never have spoken so freely to a girl, but never would a girl have spoken to him as carelessly as this one did, as if it never occurred to her that such behavior might be unacceptable.

  “Domon, a word, if it pleases you.” The persimmon vendor’s Saroese was heavily accented but otherwise very clear. “The girl is not for sale.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You think the girl is for sale, for sex.” She indicated the coin he had placed in her vendor’s bowl.

  Anger tipped him forward onto his toes, like at the start of a footrace, only this was anger fueled by embarrassment. It was outrageous to accuse him of such base intentions, and Kiya of such improper behavior, but to shout was his father’s way. He took in and let out a breath before replying as calmly as he could manage. “The coin is for the persimmon. I was only talking to her, but perhaps for a man and woman to speak in public is not allowed. I intended no disrespect to your customs. I am a newcomer to Efea.”

  “My thanks, Domon, for your gracious reply,” she repeated in a patient voice, with an undercurrent that tasted to him like his own feelings of annoyance when he could not respond to one of his father’s manifest injustices. She was sweating, visibly nervous, as she continued. “We do not sell our girls here in Efea. Do you understand me?”

  “I have no such thoughts, not of her and not of me!”

  She flinched back from his sharp tone, and he quickly raised both hands palms out to show he meant no harm.

  After a hesitation she went on. “I speak only because I do not wish for you to have in your mind the wrong idea about this girl. She speaks to you freely because among our people women and men may speak to each other. I know it is different among you Saroese. She is new to the city and has not yet learned the manners of your people.”

  Kiya was listening intently, trying to pick out understanding from an exchange she clearly could not comprehend except that it had taken a fractious tone. When she caught his eye she smiled in an encouraging way as if to let him know the frowning passersby meant nothing to her.

  If they meant nothing to her, then they meant nothing to him either. If it was not forbidden, then why should he not speak to her?

  “You are a newcomer too?” he asked. “So am I. I only arrived in Saryenia yesterday.”

  She turned to the vendor for translation. The woman’s frown deepened. Only after a magnificent show of reluctance did she repeat his words to Kiya in Efean. He studied Kiya’s face as she listened, the way her mouth parted slightly, clipped up to the right, and then stretched into a sweet smile as she heard the whole.

  At once she turned back to him, alight with eagerness. She tapped her chest, reached out so close that he held his breath waiting for her fingers to brush his arm, but she carefully did not touch him. Words spilled from her mouth in a lilting burst.

  The vendor’s expression grew heavier, her eyes half closing. “The girl wishes to tell you that she too is a newcomer to the city.”

  “As if the gods willed it that we should meet!”

  The girl opened her palms like a basket toward him. “I am Kiya. You are Esladas. Persimmon. Tray. Basket. Knife. We trade Saroese and Efean. Yes?”

  “Yes!” How could he possibly say anything else?

  “I see nothing but ill fortune from this meeting, Domon,” said the vendor in a voice that yanked him back to earth.

  “Why would it be ill fortune?”

  The vendor grasped a persimmon and thrust it toward him, distress so palpable in her shaking hand that he took a startled step back, for he had never in his life witnessed a woman speak with open disrespect to a man in public.

  “Here, take this, Domon. Take all you want. Just go and leave her alone.”

  Shaken, he retreated without taking the fruit. He knew better than this. He needed to gather more information before he blithely charged in because of a beautiful smile. Women weren’t to be accosted; they were meant to be protected from predatory males. He walked away rather than subject Kiya to further public indignity.

  “Esladas. You buy persimmon!”

  He glanced back to see her striding after him, holding out a persimmon of a staggeringly rich orange color. It took all his courage to take the fruit out of her hand. The touch of skin came as a shock, but he wasn’t sure she felt it as anything at all. Probably interacting with men was unexceptional to her, bringing home to him how he truly knew nothing of Efea except that it was a kingdom where a lowborn man might hope to make his fortune. That was all he had ever focused on: that he would leave the barren future offered in his hometown and travel to a place where opportunity beckoned.

  Why not take a risk tonight? The most she could do was say no.

  “Do you want to share?” he said, with a gesture he hoped would convey his meaning.

  “Thank you,” she said in Saroese, although he was quickly coming to realize she knew only a few paltry words and could not really understand the same phrases spoken back at her yet.

  She pulled a tiny knife from its sheath at her belt, drawing his gaze down the front of her gauzy dress. Embarrassed, he quickly looked up to her face so he wouldn’t seem to be staring at the generous shape of her curves, the mystery of a woman’s body that he had been told over and over again was to be enjoyed only with a marriage contract between families, something he could never afford.

  She took the persimmon from him and neatly cut it into slices, and they stood side by side in the shade, leaning against a wall, and savored its delicate sweetness together. He took a bite and glanced at her, and she lifted an eyebrow with a question, to which he replied with a noise of gratification. Beyond the simple pleasure he took in the honeyed taste of the fruit—far beyond that—her presence made each moment shatteringly intense.

  Her beauty astounded him because it was more than the shape of her eyes, her ravishing mouth, the cloud of hair like a goddess’s halo of power. A statue could look so, carved in an image of perfection, but a statue was stone, and she was so utterly, brilliantly, energetically alive.

  For once in his life he was content just to be somewhere, not to be striving and thinking and planning for what he hoped would come to pass, but to revel in the place where he was right now.

  When they finished, she pointed back toward the persimmon stall amid the lamps and awnings. “We trade words? Yes?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Yes.

  In a daze he walked back to the boardinghouse, getting lost twice, and when he arrived it was to find his friends already finished with supper and getting ready for bed.

  “Where’d you go?” Cahas demanded. “We have to get up before dawn to make our first day of drill.”

  “Where did I go?” Esladas repeated, as if he had forgotten how to understand his own language.

  “Did you get lost?”

  He pulled a hand over the stubble of his recently shorn hair. “No. I didn’t get lost. I’m home now. I’m home.”

  * * *

  Wenru would be frantic if she wasn’t at Dame Marayam’s household when he got back from work. She hurried to the persimmon stall.

  “I wasn’t trying to cheat him, you know,” said the old woman as Kiya strode up. “It’s just those Saroese men think they can take anything they want. You’re new here so I think it best to warn you.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Honored Lady.” She was in too fine a mood to be irritated by yet another display of people telling her what she ought to be doing and not doing. That moment when their hands had brushed still warmed her
skin. The way he had said, “Mmmm” as he’d savored the persimmon flesh had flowed right down into her bones. “I did not want the foreigner to think you had cheated him, that’s all. If the Saroese are so likely to judge us Efeans harshly, we mustn’t give them any excuse.”

  “Well, my thanks then,” said the old woman, eyeing her with a skeptical grimace. “Even I could not help but notice that he was a fine-looking lad, for a Saroese man. Girls can get stars in their eyes when a handsome young man pays attention to them, and some lads take advantage of that.”

  “I know how to handle young men,” Kiya snapped. Why did everyone feel obliged to give her advice over and over and over again? “I’ve handled enough in my time.”

  The vendor chuckled. “Yes, you are old and experienced indeed. Listen. In Saroese eyes, he is a Patron and you are a Commoner. To such a man you can never be anything more than a treat, something to be gobbled up and then forgotten. Tread carefully.”

  Kiya saw that the brilliant plan she had just come up with was running off the road, so she steered it back. “How late do you sit out here into the night, Honored Lady? Probably you have been working all day already. It would be better for you to not work so hard.”

  By the deep lines around her eyes and the set of her jaw Kiya could tell that sitting pained her and that she was tired. “Kind of you to say so, but here I am.”

  “Just so! That’s why I have a proposition for you.”

  The vendor laughed. “What might that be?”

  “Hire me. Then you can rest, and I will sell all your produce. Watch!”

  She stepped behind the table and scanned the people scurrying through the market. Catching the eyes of a pair of Efean men—one young and one old—she beamed so brightly that they actually halted in their tracks and then, embarrassed, strolled over trying to pretend they had meant to walk this way all the time.

  “Surely you do not have all the fruit you need for your family,” she said to them in the most incredulous voice she could muster. “Honored Sir! Imagine the joy of your loved ones—the children especially—as they savor these ripe and delicious persimmons!”

  Laughing, they allowed Kiya to persuade them.

  As they walked away looking pleased and a little shamefaced, with ten of the persimmons, the old woman said, “You are an impressive flirt.”

  “I have lots of practice. There’s nothing else to do in my village. Your persimmons are so very delicious that it is a shame to see them go uneaten. What do you say to my proposal?”

  “Dear child, I cannot afford to pay you.”

  “I already have a place to sleep and food to eat. What I need is to learn how people act in the city, and how to speak Saroese. You teach me these things, and I will help you sell your fruit as payment.”

  The woman wavered.

  “You would be helping me, Honored Lady. In truth, I would be obliged to you if you would help me in this small way, just until I learn enough to find a paying job.”

  “You mustn’t smile at Saroese men as you just did at our Efean brothers, though, for it will get us both into trouble,” she said, acquiescing abruptly. “I will do all the bargaining with Saroese men. You may deal with everyone else. But do you need permission from your people? You aren’t alone here in the city. I saw you with a man yesterday.”

  “Yes, my uncle. But I’m sixteen now, old enough to make my own decisions. My thanks, Honored Lady! How may I call you? I am Kiya, as you have already heard me say.”

  “If our arrangement is to prosper, you may as well call me Aunt Amayat. Ah! Here comes my son at last. I’ll introduce you.”

  Her son was weary and suspicious and he grilled Kiya thoroughly to content himself that she did not harbor a malign intent to defraud his mother. In the end, of course, she convinced him, but by the time she arrived at the butterfly fountain it was very late. When she entered through the gate she found Dame Marayam trying to calm down Uncle Wenru as he paced around the courtyard.

  “Kiya! Where were you?” He shook her. “I did not give you permission to run off without telling anyone where you were going. Anything could have happened to you! I was so worried!”

  She pulled out of his grasp and addressed Dame Marayam. “My apologies, Honored Dame. I should have left word that I decided to go out to look for work. Which I’ve found.”

  “You got work? By yourself? Your mother made me promise to arrange it for you.” Wenru shook his head, then laughed. “Which I suppose is why you took matters into your own hands.”

  “Thank you for understanding, Uncle. I’m sorry my absence worried you. I meant to be back sooner.”

  “I thought we had settled matters between us, that you would assist me in my walking tours and sit beside me as people bring their complaints to me,” objected the dame with a frail look of disappointment. It stabbed Kiya in the heart, until she thought of how her mother’s rules and advice commanded her life, how Kiya was expected to come back from her adventurous year in Saryenia ready to manage the family’s large household under her mother’s supervision.

  She thought, distractingly, of Esladas.

  “I begged for a chance to come to Saryenia partly to see the city and mostly to get out from under my mother’s rule, as Wenru can tell you,” she said, remembering the dame’s words about truth-telling. “For a chance to guide my own life even if only for a year. I will help you as often as I am able, Honored Dame. But I need to walk my own path for now. I mean no disrespect.”

  Wenru patted her on the shoulder. “Well said, Kiya.”

  Marayam gave her a thoughtful look. “Yes, I can see there is more to you than your pleasing smile and outwardly compliant manners may reveal to a less observant person. Very well. I am here if you need advice and when you change your mind.”

  I won’t change my mind. “My thanks, Honored Dame.”

  * * *

  “Where do you run off to after training every day?” Cahas asked as he and the rest of the Firebirds washed in the refreshingly cold water of the bathhouse. “You never stay and roll the dice with us, or go drinking at the tavern around the corner after supper.”

  “I like to see a bit of the city,” Esladas said as he toweled himself dry.

  “Why bother?” asked Beros. “If we pass these two months of drill, we’ll be shipped out to the desert for a tour of duty. Six months of thirst and poisonous snakes and nothing to see but sand and sky. I don’t know why I listened to you.…”

  His twin piped up. “Beros saw a scorpion the other day and he screamed and jumped onto a chair even though the foul creature was halfway across the room.”

  “I did not! That was you!” They scuffled, play-fighting.

  Esladas wasn’t really listening. He had one spare calf-length vest—his festival tunic with a ribbon-trimmed hem and fancy embroidered buttonholes—which he kept scrupulously clean and neatly folded. After he dressed he stepped into the light to check his face in his cheap bronze mirror.

  Cahas laughed. “You look like you’re going courting, the way you primp and preen. Good Goat! Are you blushing?”

  “Must be a woman involved,” said Beros, and Geros said, “Can’t be. The innkeeper keeps her daughters well guarded. Respectable Saroese women won’t look at lowly foot soldiers like us. But there are other kinds of women.”

  Esladas broke in before the conversation descended into a crudity he did not want to hear. “I plan to succeed in the army, not just be a lowly foot soldier all my life. Officers do not slouch about in laborers’ clothes. They dress and behave as highborn men. So I’m practicing.”

  “For when you become Captain Esladas someday?” Cahas snorted. “That’s a bit rich even for me to believe. Men of our low birth do not become captains, not even in Efea.”

  “Maybe not, but I will become a sergeant in time, mark my words.”

  As he left the boardinghouse it was difficult not to break into a run. Six days of basic drill had left him sore but energized. The sergeants in charge of their training were h
ard but fair, and he was good at the exercises and weapons handling. The first week had gone well: he’d finished it at the head of the cohort of forty new recruits that included his friends, and he intended to keep that position as training continued.

  Tomorrow was the mandated Rest Day, observed across the city, and the innkeeper had told him that the night market opened earlier than usual. He threaded his way through the late-afternoon shoppers and all thought of the army fled as he paused and, from a distance, studied Kiya at the persimmon stall where she was enjoying an animated conversation with several Efean shoppers.

  She was as tall as he was—that had startled him at first—and she certainly hadn’t the delicacy of stature for which poets commonly praised women: delicate eyebrows, delicate fingers, delicate flowers. There was nothing delicate or modest about her at all. She did not act as a Saroese woman would have, lowering her gaze, stepping back to defer to men, expecting a tongue-lashing or worse if she was impertinent enough to raise a challenge. When she gesticulated with her arms she wasn’t afraid to take up space. Never would he grow tired of watching the constant fluttering shifts of expression across her face, her grave listening nod, her eye rolls, her sideways glances that hid a moment’s annoyance, the way she smiled at him as if the sun had just come out after a month of cloudy days.

  She looked up as if his gaze, even across the distance, was a touch. By the time he reached the stall her customers had gathered up their purchases and left.

  “Greetings of the afternoon, Esladas,” Kiya said.

  “Greetings of the afternoon, Kiya.”

  With a wink meant only for him she indicated the empty baskets. “All gone,” she said in her delightfully fragmented Saroese, the bits and bobs of words and phrases she was picking up and stitching together. Then she flipped over a scrap of cloth to reveal one last persimmon, kept especially for him.

  He laughed, flooded with a sense of lightness and joy. But before he blurted out the words he had come to say he prudently glanced past her. Amayat—Esladas had learned that he should address her as “Honored Lady”—did not look pleased when, each early evening, Esladas showed up to “trade words” and, always, to buy a persimmon. One a day was more than he could afford because he already paid for two meals a day at the boardinghouse. Yet it gave him the excuse he needed to linger. Right now, however, Amayat dozed at the back of the stall in a hammock slung up between two posts.