The Seclusion, Qinnitan quickly discovered, was not a building, or even a group of buildings, but something vastly larger, a walled city within the autarch’s immense palace, sandstone brick buildings set in carefully husbanded grounds, most with shrines and scented gardens at their centers, all connected by hundreds of covered walkways that provided much-needed shade, so that one of the Seclusions residents could travel from one side to the other, a journey that might take the best part of an hour, without ever feeling the direct touch of the harsh Xandian sun on her skin. It truly was a city all by itself, home not just to the autarch’s hundreds of wives, but to the army of people necessary to care for them, thousands of maids, cooks, gardeners, and petty bureaucrats, and not a single one of them a man.
None were men in the conventional sense, but there were certainly many hundreds of people within the Seclusion’s great high walls who had been born with at least the basic elements of masculinity, but who simply had not, for one reason or another, managed to hang onto all of them.
The Seclusion took up a sizable section of the autarch’s gigantic Orchard Palace, just as the palace itself took up a large portion of Great Xis, Mother of Cities In truth, the Seclusion’s share was proportionately larger than other sections of the ancient and monstrous sprawl of buildings formally known as Palace of the Flowering Spring Orchard, because those who lived and worked in other parts of the great palace could share gardens and dining halls and kitchens, but the Seclusion must be kept separate and protected, and so each function had to be carefully reproduced within its walls and staffed only with women or Favored.
If the Seclusion was a small city, the Favored were its priests and governors. Because of the famous sacrifice of Habbili, son of Nushash, Xis had always been a kingdom in which the castrated were held in some esteem— it was almost as established a route to the corridors of power as the priesthood In fact, the Favored ruled not just the Seclusion, but many of the bureaucracies of the Orchard Palace, so that the more daring soldiers of the autarch’s army sometimes sourly joked—in private, of course—that real men weren’t wanted in most of the palace, and would only be welcomed in the one place they were absolutely barred, the Seclusion. The actual truth was that many ordinary men who still wore their stones held positions of influence throughout the autarch’s court, like Pimmmon Vash, the paramount minister. The Favored as a group were some of the autarch’s mightiest subordinates, but they were by no means all-powerful. They had to struggle, as did everyone else in the Orchard Palace, for every fleck of attention from the God-King Sulepis, from whom all power and glory radiated like the sun’s light. But in the metaphorical darkness of the Seclusion, that country of women in which women held no nominal power—although the more important of the autarch’s wives were powers unto themselves— the Favored ruled virtually without rivals.
The Favored of the Seclusion, perhaps in deference to a tradition no one could now remember (or perhaps for other, less exalted reasons) considered themselves women, not tremendously different from those over whom they watched, and made the traditional attributes of womanhood their own, although exaggerated into parody they were almost all extremely excitable, romantic, vengeful, fickle. And of course the wives and their born-female servants had their own complicated webs of influence and intrigue as well. Altogether, walking into the Seclusion was like entering a magical cave out of a story, a place strung with invisible strands and snares, full of beautiful things guarded by deadly traps.
Qinnitan’s own role in the place was confusing from the first, and within days of entering she had begun to long for the certainty of her old life, for her uncomplicated role as one of the youngest and thus lowest of the low among the Hive Sisters. All the autarch’s wives and wives-to-be—and it was hard to tell sometimes what the difference in status meant, since he so seldom visited any of them—were of infinitely greater importance than any of the Seclusion’s servants, and yet the hundredth wife, let alone new-minted Qinnitan who was something closer to the thousandth, had to wait weeks for even the briefest appointment to see Cusy, the immensely fat chief of the Seclusion’s Favored—the Eunuch Queen, as she was sometimes laughingly called in the Orchard Palace. But nobody in the Seclusion would ever have laughed at old Cusy to her face Of all the denizens of that place, only Arimone, the autarch’s paramount wife—a flinty, beautiful young woman known as the Evening Star, who was the autarch’s cousin and had been the wife of the last older brother Sulepis had murdered to clear his path to the throne—would have stood up to Cusy without a great deal of consideration. Since Arimone lived almost as removed from the Seclusion as the autarch himself (she had her own little palace and grounds nesded at one end of the vast compound like the inmost chamber of a nautilus, and no one, not even the other high-ranking wives, came there without an invitation) there was nobody to challenge the Eunuch Queen’s authority.
Qinnitan had the fantastic luck—or so it seemed at the time—to be taken under the wing of Luian, one of Cusy’s deputies, a motherly Favored (at least in size and demeanor, since she was not particularly old) who took an unexpected interest in the new wife and within days of Qinnitan’s arrival invited her to come to her chambers and drink tea.
Qinnitan was treated to the promised tea, along with powdered Sania figs and several kinds of sweet breads, in a tented, cushion-strewn room in Luian’s chambers. The meal was accompanied by a gale of gossip and other useful information about the Seclusion, but it was only at the end of the meal that Luian explained why her eye had lit on Qinnitan.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?' she said as Qinnitan bent to kiss her hand in farewell. Qinnitan had been caught by the fact of Luian’s large hands, one of the few things now that betrayed her beginnings as a man, and so she did not for a moment understand the question.
“Recognize you?” Qinnitan said when the import finally sank in.
“Yes, darling girl You don’t think I lavish my time on every little queen that comes through the door of the Seclusion, do you?” Luian patted her chest as if the idea gave her breathing problems; her jewelry rattled. “My goodness, we have had two already this month from Krace, which is practically the moon. I was shocked to hear they even spoke a human language. No, my sweetness, I asked for you because we grew up in the same neighborhood.”
“Behind Cat’s Eye Street?”
“Yes, my darling! I remember you when you could barely walk, but I see you don’t remember me.” Qinnitan shook her head. “I… I must admit I don’t, Favored Luian.”
“Just Luian, dear, please. But of course I was different then. Big and clumsy, studying to be a priest. You see, that’s what I thought I would be until I was Favored, and then I lost my taste for it. I even went to your father once for advice. I used to walk up and down the alleys between Cat’s Eye and Feather Cape Row, reciting the four hundred Nushash prayers, or trying to…”
Qinnitan let go of Luian’s hand and stood up. “Oh! Dudon! You’re Dudon! I remember you!”
The Favored waved her fingers languidly. “Sssshh, that name! That was years ago. I hate that name these days—ungainly, unhappy creature. I am much more beautiful now, am I not?” She smiled as if to mock herself, but there was something other than self-mockery involved in the question. Qinnitan looked at the person before her—it was a little harder to think of Luian as female now, after the recollection of her former self—discreetly examined the broad features, the thick makeup, the large hands covered in rings, and said, “You are very beautiful now, of course.”
“Of course.” Luian laughed, pleased.”Yes, and you have learned your first lesson.
“But I meant it sincerely.”
“And that is the second lesson—say everything sincerely. Goodness, you
“Why is that, Luian?”
“Because for some reason the Golden One has ordered that you must be schooled by Panhyssir’s priests. But I will keep a close eye on you and you will come to take tea with me often, if you would like.”
“Oh, yes, Luian.” Qinnitan wasn’t quite certain what she’d done to rate such attention, but she wasn’t going to turn her back on it. Having a link to one of the Favored, especially an important one like Luian, could make a world of difference in one’s accommodations, in the skill and tact of one’s assigned servants, in any number of things up to and including the continuing favor of the autarch himself. “Yes, I would like that very much.” She
