But I did not. I mixed the sacred drink, learning its foam and its froth as I absorbed the Flower Style and other kitchen-arts. When you are a blank sheet, everything leaves a mark.
When a night came that I wasn’t deadly exhausted and the passage to the soilhouse was deserted, I slipped from my pallet and stole through the temple’s familiar wilderness, dodging drowsy door-guard monks and climbing hand over hand along a balcony much more solid and easily navigable than bending, cracking branches.
Everything is easier when you nibble all day in the kitchens, a mouse in a block of starch. The only danger is growing too sleek-heavy, but the Flower Style provides for that. We soften but do not grow truly corpulent, we who stir and chop and bake.
“Haza,” I whispered through the grating in the middle of the heavy door. “Haza, it’s me.”
After a short while there was another rustle, and Haza’s fingers, bathed and scented, came through the holes. “Ghani?”
“You must eat.” I pressed my lips to his knuckles. His own mouth, breath redolent of expensive spice, touched mine; he rubbed his chin – softer, with oil worked into the skin, no trace of stubble yet – against my fingertips. “Everyone is worried.”
“I can’t stand it,” he whispered back. “It’s a cage.”
“It’s only for a short while,” I soothed. “Then you’ll be abbot. I’ll cook for you every night.”
“I can’t stand it,” he repeated. “You have to get me out.”
“Where would we go?” I did not bother to recite the punishment for a monk fleeing his fate. Boiling in oil was good to make savory puffballs, but not so good for a young man. “How would we live?”
“The forest. I’ll cut wood.”
I shook my head at his child’s stubbornness, though I was his younger sister. “Just a little while, Haza. Then you’ll be the Flayed God’s chosen one. It won’t be so bad.”
“You don’t understand.” But he subsided. Always, he was the first to flame and likewise cool, my brother. “I’m worried about you. Are you eating?”
Now he asked. “Of course. I mix the drink.” I could not say its name, being a mere girl, but he could.
“______.” He named the drink with a sigh. There was a gleam of his dark eyes at the grate. “He doesn’t speak to me, Ghani. The God is mute.”
“They say the drink makes him speak.” I listened for the sound of the guard at the far end of the hall. That fat monk’s breathing had not changed, and I decided I could stay a few more moments. “Or lets you listen. Shall I bring you some?”
“Maybe.” He didn’t say what we both knew – that if I was caught, it wouldn’t be just a whipping, for either of us.
But what else could I do?
* * *
I was still a child, and foolish. Kali noticed my measurements were for more than the beaten-silver cups required. She let me skim a miser’s portion into a flask when my enemy, the slipfingered tattling girl, added too much distillation to a glazed fowl and a jet of flame spurted high.
My enemy also screamed and dropped the pan, the idiot, for I had loosened the wood-slats upon the handle just enough for hot metal to slide between them and bite her hand. The distraction succeeded better than I hoped, but that night on my way to the soilhouse the kitchen-goddess rose from a pool of deep shadow without even a frond-rustle and caught me by the throat.
Dragged into a patch of hot light from the moon’s scabbed face, my neck under her fingers, she thrust her nose almost into my mouth, sniffing deeply. Then, squeezing as I kicked, blackflowers blooming at the edges of my vision, she studied me, her eyes like coals before the white ash covers them – dark, and hot enough to burn, two black-glass eggs.
“Little thief,” she hissed softly, and all the bushes rustled uneasily. Sweating brought no relief in the drought, but many trees attempted it, weeping resins to be scraped carefully free and used for flavor, for incense – and for other things. “But I see, it is not for you.”
I twisted and tried again to strike. Her fingers relaxed, and I drew in oven-hot air through my bruised breathpipe.
“The little quickfinger has a beloved. Which one is he? A young monk, I hope; the old ones are too selfish.” She cackled, but softly, and gave me a rough but good-natured shake. “If you had not the hands, birdling, I would put you in the ovens. No man is worth this.”
I opened my mouth to say he was my brother, and remembered myself just in time. She stripped the flask from my chest-wrapping and shook her head.
“At least you are not overly stupid.” She tch-tch’d her tongue, and dragged me to the well. I thought she meant to throw me in, but she merely dumped the sacred drink in, tossed the flask after it, and shoved me towards the soilhouse. “Cry in there, if you must. Tomorrow it’s back to mixing.” Her brow clouded just as the moon did, and hot thunder roiled in the distance.
Some thought it was a sign the Flayed God was pleased, and would bring the rains. But the dry lightning did not strike the earth, and there was no relief.
* * *
There was to be a feast at the dark of the moon, and Kali made me her pet. Even my enemy did not begrudge that high position, because it meant fetching, chopping, grinding at the furious pace of the kitchen-queen herself. My pallet was moved to the doorway of her cubicle in case she called during the night, and I had to hold the lantern in the soilhouse while she pissed at midnight, when lightning played over the far-off forest. Despite all that, I managed to visit Haza twice before the great secret, sacred feast.
I brought him a flask both times, but it was not the sacred drink. It was its cousin, without the pungent froth and the additives that make it holy. But my brother, not yet senior enough to know the taste of the sacred drink, thanked me in a quiet, begging voice like our father’s the night he brought his new supple-spined wife home.
“I dreamed last night,” he said the second time. “I think it was the God. He told me to be brave. Isn’t that good?”
My head was sweetmush for the elderly who cannot chew, exhaustion making the world a painted wall of bright shallow colors. “You are brave,” I whispered back, and passed through the leaf-wrapped meat I had done my best to prepare in clay like we used to.
It was fowl scraps, not squirrel, but I do not think he noticed.
* * *
Three nights later was the dark of the moon. The feast was indeed solemn, but the kitchen became a mountain with fire in its bowels and all the birds, undercooks, scrubbers, and slicers jostling egg-rocks in its throat. Several kitchen-birds fainted in the inferno, were dragged outside and splashed with brackish water before being treated to vigorous rubbing and thin yeasty sourdrink to get them upon their feet again. One undercook, enthusiastic, sliced half his finger into a basket of rolled fritters in oil, and his piercing howl was swallowed in the din.
There was no longer a girl named Ghani. There was only the food dancing under fingertips, the flame coiling around my wrists, the painted world-wall spinning like a bright round toy I had seen in a pedlar’s basket once and cried for, knowing we were too poor to afford it but yearning still.
I collapsed as the last round of savory flowers left the kitchen’s second doors, but by then most of Kali’s large-eyed kitchen brood had as well, and we were carried into our dormitory for sleep or death, we knew not which. Perhaps it was Kali herself who tucked me into her own narrow, sweet-smelling bed with its musk-tinge of old woman.