Andrea le Scorier lies atop her
scaffolding beneath the arch of the northwest chancel's ceiling, her
bare arm crusted to the elbow with paint. She is unmasked, an
unthinkable prospect outside the walls of Resplendent Orchid, and
dressed only in plain black robes. Above her a painting is taking
shape, a fresco depicting the Three Gods and their Lesser Emanations,
the thousandfold avatars of their desires and dreams. Monkey, the
burning ape with his fiery coat and clever eyes. The Eel Queen,
sleek, beautiful and almost human but for her gills and the hint of
teeth behind her smile. Last the Hollow God, the glass-bottle man.
He's the most challenging, his subtle shades and empty angles.
“Andrea.”
She nearly drops her brush, but
manages merely to slop paint all over her already-stained sleeve.
Twisting her sore neck and rolling onto her side she squints down at
the floor where her twin brother, the Daimyo Claude de Scorier,
stands. She wets her lips, nervous. “What is it, Claude?”
“Come down. We have business to
discuss.”
Andrea scrambles to the scaffold's
edge and swings her legs out over the void, fumbling for the ladder.
She leaves her brush, her paints, and with her own good arm makes the
laborious descent to the chancel's bamboo floor. The chancel echoes,
its tall, narrow windows throwing spears of light over the seasoned
wood. Claude stands at the center of one, haloed from behind like a
fleshly statue of the Machi Living Sun. “What is it?” Andrea
says again. The look in Claude's mismatched eyes, one green, the
other blue, unnerves her. Something is wrong.
He sucks his teeth, his little nervous
tic. “The Red Turbans have disbanded. The Raptor massacred the
rebel army and took Stephane de Pare captive last night at Iron Wind
Field.”
Andrea smiles. “He's won, then.”
“This is a dangerous time for us.”
Claude takes her hand and squeezes it.
“Our uncle is a hero, the savior of
the Empire.” She frees her hand, tucks a few loose hairs back
behind her ear and kisses her brother on the cheek. “You never
know when to be happy.”
Claude snorts. He pulls away. “He
has the loyalty of the army and the love of the commons. The Shogun
is thirty, childless, and prickly. The Senate decays a little more
each day and the Cabals hate each other so much there's no room in
their heart for another grudge. To be a hero is to be feared.”
“Hush, brother,” Andrea says.
“You are too dour.” She smiles to take the sting from her
remonstrance and kisses him again, on the lips this time. He returns
the kiss. His hands undo the sash at her robe's waist with less
difficult than she has undoing it herself, and then his fingers are
in her and she is biting his lip hard enough to make him grunt with
pain.
After, while Claude lies sleeping on
the dusty canvas, Andrea climbs her scaffolding to paint. The Hollow
God comes quickly now, escaping her brush in a rush of blues and
whites, greys in narrow little strokes. He is a man, a vessel, a
temple to himself. Since childhood he has been her confidante more
than any other of the quarrelsome pantheon. She gives him no
definite features, just the suggestion of a transparent face. He
sits hunched and brooding behind the others and in his eyes is
something Andrea had not meant to put there, a look of hollow longing
tempered with regret.
It is hours before she finishes, and
when she climbs down from her scaffolding her back is sore, her arm
stiff with overuse. The stump of the other, that useless knob of
flesh and bone protruding from her left shoulder, aches fiercely.
She thinks sometimes that knotted up within it is every failed idea,
every messy brushstroke and misplaced accent. Outside the windows it
is dark and the cicadas have begun to sing. The servants are
well-practiced at ignoring the Daimyo's business, but even they will
begin looking for him if she does not rouse him soon. She kneels
beside him on the canvas and smooths his fine black hair back from
his brow with her paint-spattered hand. “Wake up, Claude.”
He grunts, stretches, and slumps
forward with his elbows on his knees. He looks sullen as he always
does after they share in one another.
“No sulking, dearest,” Andrea
cautions. “You're ugly when you pout.”
Claude snorts, but he gets to his feet
and smooths his robes. “Ugly, am I?” He kisses her stained
hands, her neck, her ears. “No, no.” His lips brush the fine
hairs on the back of her neck. “You think I'm beautiful.” His
hand slides inside her robe to squeeze her breast.
She laughs and pushes him away with
her shoulder. “Not now,” she says, teasing with her eyes as she
reties her sash. “Daimyo de Roquefort's stewards will be here in
half an hour.”
Claude's expression darkens. “I'd
sooner have them in the moat than here to dine with us.”
“You know this has to happen.”
Andrea feels it too, the wrenching in her gut at the idea of sharing
him, her brother, her other half. Claude, though, lacks her
restraint. She must be strong for him. “Mother is dying and
Resplendent Orchid needs...needs an heir.”
Tears threaten at the corners of his
dark brown eyes. “No. I'll sire no sons but yours.”
Andrea shakes her head, blinking back
her own tears. The ache of the children she'll never give him gnaws
at her like a disease. “You know the Shogun would only have them
drowned.” She kisses him chastely on the cheek and departs the
shrine. In her apartments her dead slaves prepare her for the
evening reception of the Daimyo's stewards. Their cold grey hands
lave her skin with scented oils, braid her hair into an artful knot
held up with skewers of ashwood and steel, dress her first in thick
linen and then in silk patterned with embroidered cherry trees. At
two and thirty she is past marrying age, consigned by her missing arm
to spinsterhood. If not for her brother, no man would ever deign to
touch her, to love her, not when her deformity might carry on to any
children she bore.
Her mask comes last, borne out on a
silken pillow by two dead and wizened dwarfs. They were a gift to
her mother from the late Daimyo le Francois, a great alchemist and an
ardent suitor for Linnea le Scorier's hand after the death of her
third husband, Andrea and Claude's father, Giacomo. Now they serve
Andrea, freaks waiting upon a freak. She holds still as the mask, a
regal and aquiline thing of beaten brass as smooth as water, is
fitted to her face and bound around her head with silken ribbons.
She touches it with her fingers, feels the cold metal as the dwarfs
retreat back into their alcove to carry on decaying into dust.
The stewards come bearing
their mistress's face. Angelique, the youngest daughter of Daimyo de
Roquefort. Plain, Andrea thinks from where she sits on a woven reed
mat, her one hand resting on the warm, dry snout of her dwarf
carnotaur, Vaselias. The horned saurian snorts warm, meat-smelling
breath across her face as together they watch Claude play the
gracious host, exclaiming over every dish brought out by the dead
slaves, complimenting the stewards on their conversation, their
shamisen playing, their singing. He dances with one or two, but all
the while his eyes linger with Andrea even as the Daimyo's daughter's
face spins with him.
Angelique le Roquefort
comes late. She arrives on gallus-back with an escort of her
father's knights, a short woman, her mother's lovely mask covering
her face. The Lady Camilla had been a famous beauty. On the steps
of Resplendent Orchid, Andrea and Claude wait with the stewards and
six of the household deadguard. Andrea's arm aches from painting,
from the familiar rigor of eating one-handed, from sex. How many
more times would they have that? Not many.
"My lord de Scorier," says the woman as two of her men help her to dismount, "your uncle's victory brings great honor to the Shogunate."
"My lady is kind to say so," Claude says, "and my uncle is a bold man, but his victory is not mine."
In a private room the
Daimyo's daughter removes her mask, unlacing it with deft fingers in
the flickering candlelight. The stewards around her bow their heads.
Claude hides his disappointment well, but Andrea can see the sulk
building behind his eyes.
Angelique is plain, she thinks, but
her eyes are a lovely shade of yellow.
