Between uncertain faces. Beneath damp sheets.
'Who is that?'
'My mother…'
'Mother?'
'Pay her no heed.'
'But I will!'
'No… Please… Heed this instead.'
Four different men visited the girl, but they seemed one and same creature in Esmenet's ears. The same half-hearted flatteries, carnal witticisms. The same nostril-pinching intakes of breath. The same moans and giggles. The same rasp of grinding hair. The same cries. The same liquid drumbeat.
Only the stench varied.
And it repelled her, even as her inner thighs grew slick. It shamed her. To conjure the miracle of intimacy, to become one breathless creature while still wearing the skin of strangers.
She coupled with them anew that afternoon, all the men she had known as a harlot. She saw them skulking in from the open streets, their eyes clouded with need, offering silver instead of wooing, proving, loving. She laughed as she teased, gagged as she choked, huddled beneath the apish rage of the impotent, gasped beneath the slow stir of the beautiful. She gloated over coins, dreamed of the food she would buy, the cloth.
She wept for the loss of her Empire.
There was a lull after the fourth man departed. The clatter and shout of the street climbed through the unshuttered windows, rang with the stark clarity of plastered walls and tiled floors. A man with a cracked voice bellowed, boasting the curative power of his sulphured cider. A dog snarled and barked, obviously old and frightened.
Esmenet finally turned from the wall, her bladder so full she could scarce contain herself. Even after all this time, the room was a mystery to her. It was far larger than any room Esmenet had been able to afford in Sumna, but then, for all her beauty, she had not been an outlander like Naree, and Sumna had never seen the wealth that had concentrated in Momemn since Kellhus's rise to power. Two windows looked onto the sun-drenched facade of the tenement across the street-one housing more prostitutes, she realized, glimpsing two pale-skinned Norsirai girls sitting on sills. The far window illuminated a small scullery: a water basin upon a wooden counter, a standing amphorae, pottery-stacked shelves, and various herbs hanging to dry. The near window showered light across Naree's bed, which was a broad, extravagant affair constructed of black-lacquered mahogany. Esmenet's cot was set parallel to the bed on the far side of the door.
The girl lay naked across the tangled covers, staring from the ridge of her pillow. The fugitive Empress of the Three Seas gazed back with numb urgency. She knew the exhaustion in Naree's eyes, the dull throb of her sex, the faint pinch of seed drying across bare skin, the peculiar sense of having survived. She knew the disjoint chorus that was the girl's soul: the voice counting coins, the voice fending against despair, the voice flinching from the fact of what had just happened-and the voice urging her to betray her Empress.
Naree was broken-that much was certain. Even the priestesses of Gierra, who sold themselves with the sanction of god and temple, were broken. To sell intimacy is to be turned inside out, to make a cloak of your heart, so that others might be warmed. A soul could only be inverted so many times before it all became confused, inside and outside.
Broken. Esmenet could see the cracks floating in her watery gaze. The only real question was one of how. Selling peaches did not so much rob a soul of trust or dignity or compassion as it robbed these words of their common meaning. Naree believed in trust, jealously guarded her dignity, felt compassion-but in ways utterly peculiar to her.
'I need to pee,' Esmenet finally said.
'Sorry-sorry-sorry!' the girl cried, leaping from her bed. She ran to the screen that flanked her settee. She pulled back one of the faded embroidered panels and, with a mummer's flourish, revealed a white porcelain chamber pot. Esmenet thanked her sheepishly.
'Nareeee!' an accented voice cried from out-of-doors-one of the Galeoth girls hanging her thighs from a window opposite. 'Nareeee! Who dat you hat wit you?'
'Mind your own sheets!' the Nilnameshi girl cried, hastening to close the shutters on the near window.
The whore cackled the way Esmenet had heard countless times before. 'Brooshing rugs, eh?'
Fairly in a terror, Naree explained how they all kept their windows unshuttered when attending to their custom-for safety.
'I know,' Esmenet said. 'I used to do the same.'
Suddenly she realized the impossibility of her circumstance. Naree, like most people of hale heart, knew all her neighbours and was known by them. Esmenet knew first-hand the way city-dwellers roped themselves into small tribes and villages, caring for one another, envying, spying, hating.
More shutters clattered and the room darkened while she attended to her bladder. When she stepped from behind the screen she found Naree in the gloom, still naked, sitting cross-legged on her bed weeping. Without thinking she took the girl's slender shoulders in her arms, pulled her into a mother's embrace.
'Shush,' the Holy Empress said.
She thought of the famine, the way Mimara had seemed to retreat further into her bones with every passing day. She thought of the way she had torn in two, walking with her to the slavers in the harbour. The hum of disbelief. The goad of numb necessity. The little fingers clasping hers in anxious trust.
And she wished, with a violence that rolled her eyes, that she had simply held on to those bones, folded them within the squalid circle of her own… and died with her only daughter. Mimara.
The one thing unsold.
'I understand.'
How long had it been since she had kept company with her past?
Esmenet sat with the girl until the glaring white lines that etched the shutters paled to grey. Naree did not know her age, only that five years had passed since her flowering. She had been raised a yitarissa, a ritual harem- slave popular among the Nilnameshi caste-nobility. Her owner had possessed estates both in Invishi, where they wintered, and in the Hinayati Mountains, where they spent the plague months of summer. She had loved him fiercely. Apparently he was a gentle, caring man, one who lavished her with gifts to atone for the inevitable injuries he inflicted on her. The great catastrophe in her life-her year zero-came with her first bleeding. Rather than sell her to a brothel, as was the fate of most yitarissa, her owner set her free. Almost immediately she became the mistress of another caste-noble, a trade representative who had been sent to Momemn almost four years ago. He was the one who had purchased the yellow room and its sumptuous furnishings. Naree loved him as well, but when his year-long tenure expired, he simply moved his wife and household back to Invishi without saying a word.
She began selling herself almost immediately.
Esmenet found herself listening with two souls: the one, the old whore, almost contemptuous of the cozened luxury that had characterized so much of the girl's life; the other, the aging mother, horrified at the way she had been used and cast away, only to be used and cast away again.
'I want to help you!' the girl cried. 'Imma, he… he… I…'
Thus is cruelty always explained away. A life of suffering. A life where simple survival seems an unaccountable risk. A life too damaged to countenance heroism.
Esmenet tried to imagine what she would have done those years had one of her customers come to her with a fugitive of any description-let alone the Empress of the Three Seas. She wanted to think she would be fearless, generous, but she knew that she would do what Fate demanded all prostitutes do: betray in the name of survival.
Only Akka could have coaxed such a risk from her, she realized.
Only love.
Suddenly she understood the girl's torment. Naree loved Imhailas. She had made him the sum of her simple hopes. Were he just another man, she would have resorted to the grim, guarded manner that prostitutes typically use to distance people they were forced to hurt. But he was not. And he had come to her demanding a mortal favour.
People had died-people were dying — because of her, Anasurimbor Esmenet. From this moment on, she
