And that’s …still nothing new to anyone else here.
Ahmed was staring at the second guard, very pointedly standing in the road sipping his chai. The second guard was ignoring them all, looking back and forth along the road,scanning down the switchbacks for any dust-bursts that might indicate approaching, hidden footsteps.
And… I’ll still use it, today,Faraj decided, stroking Sahar’s side gently.I can’t change that here, now, sitting in the middle of the road. Tomorrow I’ll start working on a better solution.
4
The Flock of Aunties are Pecking
ASHAR
From the easternmost tower of the Imperial fortress, the great deep-voiced bell rang to mark the end of the dawn’s prayers for the God-Emperor, at least for those who worshiped Him. On most days, Ashar would have had time to start simmering down a pot of sugar and flowers for the day’skarkadehorchameli ki sharbatbefore the first bath-customers arrived at his doorstep.
Today, Hamda-khala and Geeta-auntie and Ishta-auntie were all trying to elbow past each other into the entryway before the prayer bell’s echo had even faded from the air. Ashar scrambled to his feet to make a proper bow.
“Welcome to the?—”
“Apriest,young man?” Hamda-khala asked, before he’d even finished.
“I don’t think he’s aproperpriest,” Ishta-auntie said. “That accent of his! Be careful,beta, we’d hate for you to be taken in by?—”
“Are you saying His Reverence Shai Vishal is not aproperpriest?” Hamda-khala said, bristling, because she was Imperial enough to be proud of both her own noble lineage and Shai Vishal’s. (She was just notquiteImperial enough for dawnprayers to the God-Emperor to take precedence over the earliest pouncing upon the morning’s gossip-brew.)
“Shai Vishal is an entirely proper priest,” Geeta-auntie said. “Thatman was not at all proper foryou, sweetie.”
“Oh, I know,” Ashar admitted.
“So much older than you, and so fat, and surely he didn’t have two coins to rub together,” Geeta-auntie continued, determined to get her say in.
“Wait, what?” Ishta-auntie said, because shedidlisten. Ishta-auntie was the one he’d need to watch out for, really.
“I know it’s not proper for me to be so public about my affections,” Ashar told her.
(It also wasn’t proper to flirt with long-married aunties, of course, but sometimes desperate times led to desperate measures.)
He gave them his most brilliant smile and a smoldering glance through lowered lashes, wishing for a moment that he’d taken the chance to borrow a few strokes of eye-lining kohl from Kalyani’s cosmetics. But even without the kohl, all three of them looked a bit staggered by the heat of his best-practiced smolder. (Hira hastily groomed her shoulder to keep herself from sneeze-giggles.)
With a languid stretch that let the collar of his bathrobe slip off his shoulder, Ashar told them, “I’ve never been much good at propriety, you know.”
“Oh my,” Geeta-auntie squeaked.
“Ohhh my,”Ishta-auntie said, grinning. She really was the one to watch out for.
Geeta-auntie was not the sharpest blade in the kitchen. She was entirely earnest, but not the best practiced at understanding implications. The other aunties had come dressed for social combat, with their brightest hair-scarves and brassiest jewelry;Geeta-auntie had come in her bathrobe, with her favorite scrub-brush, ready for a bath.
“If you must prefer men like that,beta, if somehow you prefer them poor and fat and religious, then why not our sweet Shai Madhur?” Geeta-auntie asked fretfully. “Madhur may not have two coins to rub together, none of Upaja’s priests do, but that other one isn’t even Basteti! He must have come for the Greater Convocation, he won’t even be here more than a fortnight! And if Shai Vishal has any heart at all, he’ll make young Madhur the next High Priest someday, and then?—”
Ashar saw the precise moment she realized the rest of that sentence was leading towardsand then the House of Jasmines would be given to Upaja’s priesthood instead of one of our daughters or granddaughters, because she stopped abruptly, eyes widening.
With his mildest curiosity, Ashar said, “And then?”
(Hira lost her battle with the sneeze-giggles, and busied herself in scratching at the ledger book with one of the claws that was not the reed-tipped pen.)
“Oh, but he works such long hours, you wouldn’t have much time together,” Geeta-auntie backtracked hastily. “Not when he works in the mornings and you work, er… at different times.”
“But that is quite a wise arrangement,” Ashar said, smiling, because if he didn’t smile he would start laughing at the consternation on their faces. “I could bring him meals that he didn’t have to cook for himself. We could enjoy the baths together when his work was done, even if my own was not.”
“You need awife, boy,” Hamda-khala said sternly, before the aunties could lose the steering of the situation any further.
