I do know Kali slept in the kitchens that night, her round chin propped upon one hand and her other dimpled fist still wrapped around a cleaver, as whoever could endure it carried on the laborious scrubbing of bowl, dish, pot, pan, stick, spoon, tongs. I know because I woke at the moment the entire seething temple-anthill sighed to itself, a mass of its inhabitants sliding into slumber after collective gorging.
That night, upon the dark of the moon, I could move as I pleased. I wish it had been Haza’s voice that roused me, a silver thread pulled through my ears, but it was not.
Instead, what pulled me from unconsciousness was the smacking of a copper-bottom staff in the beggar’s courtyard, where the emaciated lay in the sun to die in increasing numbers each afternoon no matter how many feasts the monks shared with those less fortunate.
* * *
My brother’s cell was empty. Torchlight dappled the far end of the stone hall, and I passed dream-slowly through shadows painted by dying sputters. A faltering, fading chain of light passed me from one flicker of darkness to the next, a black rosette blooming behind me as they sighed and dozed off into their final rest.
Each little darkness held a faint click, as of a pebble dropped.
The inner courtyards were high and almost cool, stone stubbornly resisting the sun’s showering heat. I saw the chambers of the god-mysteries, the shimmer of halls that should have held even on this holy night a minimum of chanting brothers on sweetgrass-stuffed cushions repeating the sacred name – an exercise for the invisible parts of a monk that temple style does not train – but were eerily empty. The scriptorium where chisel and brush, stone and woven fiber, colorful pebble and dyes ground from kitchen herb were arranged to tell sacred histories was merely another kind of kitchen.
It was in the very inmost of courtyards I found the monks, and at first I thought I was watching a great carcass lifted in the stone butchering-room while the knives were readied. It was hung by the heels, but the shape was wrong.
I knew then, but I did not want to know. Instead I stared, every hair long or short on my own body attempting to rise.
The Abbot was not sleeping. His bony limbs, painted, streaked, and splattered red-black, were draped in long strips sewn roughly together with tendon, an inelegant coat. The flap of the scalp bounced, with a healthy short black stubble that said it had grown from one full moon past another to the dark face of the night’s great lamp.
“I am HE! I am HE!” the old Abbot yelled drunkenly, and those among his senior attendants who were not feast-sotted took up the cry, the name of the Flayed God. The dry-dust drought was all through me, and lightning crackled far away over the forest’s many green breasts.
The film over the Abbot’s eyes was gone.
I did not cower. I did not tremble at the misuse of the Flayed God’s name. I was not struck mad, or dumb, or blinded myself; the blasphemy did not move me. It was my brother’s body I stared at, each joint and curve glistening.
Spread over the inmost altar of the great temple, his blood still steamed.
* * *
Some few monks fled that night. Exhausted temple servants were simply glad of the quiet. Much brackish laundry water was drawn from our failing well for the next few days, monks hurrying to and fro with frowning faces and strange, terrified gleams to their gazes. The laundry was full of strange things, but the feast had been large. A tray was taken to Haza’s cell as usual, and returned untouched, which was not unusual.
When I woke in the hottest part of afternoon, dried mud had crumbled between my toes. It was not the dust of the courtyards or the yellow fine grit of garden dirt. It was thick, and red, like the sluggish shrunken river cradling the city. The dry air, however, erased it of its glue.
And who looked at a kitchen-bird’s bare feet, or even an undercook’s, as I was from that morning? Those of us who had endured were promoted, each given a paring-knife to be kept in our belts, and allowed to wear our hair in braids.
Kali’s temper grew somber, and she brought a clutch of new birdlings from the market’s seething. Town and city held many starving castoffs that dry, hungry year.
For, though the crops were in peril and the forest had turned brittle, the next celebration was the Dry Moon Feast in a scant few handful of days. It was to be the time Haza was brought out of seclusion and installed as the new Abbot… unless there was a miracle.
And rumor now whispered that the Abbot could see.
* * *
A paring knife, its bright blade thinned by repeated sharpening. A tinge of red river mud upon the doorstep of an unused butchering room. A bolt of rich soft cloth filched from a storeroom. A small sickle-shaped sharpness, cutting deep to separate muscle from bone, a cut I had seen repeated so often with bigger knives.
A bundle lowered into a well, and a market-fetcher bribed to bring a further measure of thick river clay.
A thinning to Kali’s lips as she listened to the gossip. A glance at her undercooks, hunching their shoulders and bending double to their work. A salting. A seasoning.
A special dish for a feast.
* * *
Two or three of the kitchen staff vanished, perhaps wiser in reading rumor than the others. There were rumblings like the breath of distant dry lightning, a slight uncomfortable pressure when gazes met.
Or perhaps those who left between the two feasts merely had family in the fields, where a nervous, thirsty famine stalked. The rains still had not come, though the clouds massed over forest, temple, city, and the broken plains beyond. Or perhaps they had kin in the market where goods were becoming scarcer and a new temple lottery announced, this time for goods instead of sons.
A messenger came from the governor of the province and was shown a refectory of somber, sparse-eating monks before a serene, beaming Abbot. The messenger, godbird feathers fluttering uneasily on his headdress, left crease-browed before a meal could be made in his honor, barely pausing to scatter the requisite handful of coins in the beggars’ courtyard. The beggars had little use for the money, though some from whom the last scraps had not yet been pressed scrabbled for the gleams.
The Dry Moon Feast leapt for us, but the governor coming to witness its holiness was delayed. A fire had reached across his route, the forest swallowed by a beast of flame.
* * *
When the full moon rose at sunset feastday, it was a dull glaring eye through smoke. I left the kitchen and came across Old Vril in scant shade near the herb-garden wall, gazing intently at me just as he did in my thin nervous dreams.
“Listen, old uncle.” I thrust a few leaf-wrapped scraps into his hands. “Do not eat the leavings tonight. This instead, do you understand?”
He grinned, the simple fool with patchwork yellow teeth, and bobbed his head as if he did not. I longed to shake him, or kick him.
“Nothing else,” I said impatiently. The longer I tarried instead of returning at a run with pungent leaves and long thin flexible spears of woody spice, the more chance of being seen. “Just this.”
He bobbed again, and smacked his staff on the courtyard stone. I almost ran away, and it was during that hot afternoon that several of the kitchen staff first began to clutch their stomachs and moan, for the well-water had a foul taste and the river-water carried uphill in jars did, too.
The malady avoided Kali as all else did, yet the round-faced kitchen-queen was snappish, striding through the chaos, sending great plates staggering out the door. And I?