Land of the Beautiful Dead
- Автор: Smith R. Lee
- Год: 2019
- Язык: английский
- Год: Independently Published
- ISBN: 9781798923528
- Жанр: Любовно-фантастические романы
Электронная книга - «Land of the Beautiful Dead». Краткое содержание книги:
“And we all indulge my father’s preferences, even if we don’t always dare to look directly at them. Not that I’m an expert on his more libidinous fancies. I dare say you’ll be able to inform me on that subject soon enough, but for now, it is enough for both of us to know only that he would like you clean.” She gestured invitingly at the bath.
Lan looked at it. It was more clean water than she’d ever seen in one place, enough to buy all the peaches in Norwood…and all its people besides.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Batuuli signal her handmaidens, but she didn’t wait for them to force her into the bath. She walked in on her own. It was warm, uncomfortably so. That was okay. It should hurt a little. It should burn. Lan stood and watched her skin turn a scalded pink with a feeling that was almost pride, at least until the handmaidens stepped down into the bath with her. Also naked but impervious to the heat, they scooped up water in pitchers that probably were only ever used for this purpose and poured it out again over her head, her back, her breasts. ‘No one will ever drink this water now,’ she thought, watching the water discolor around her, and then, even more unsettled, thought, ‘This water was never for drinking.’
“You’re not enjoying this,” Lady Batuuli observed.
“I’m not used to it.”
“They’re never used to it, the warmbloods he favors, however briefly, although they always try to pretend otherwise. I’ve seen hundreds of them by now, in all their paints and costumes, laughing along with those who laugh at them. You’re the first I’ve seen who looks as if she knows she’s being mocked,” she added in a musing way. “But then, you’re the first I’ve ever had to prepare for him. Perhaps they’ve all shown their doubts when they’re naked and vulnerable.”
Now sponges were brought, lightly rubbed along Lan’s limbs, and where they passed, they left an unpleasant slick of soft, fragrant foam. Soap? Maybe, but nothing like the cakes of soap in Norwood, made from wood ashes and rendered fat, that left the skin it abraded chapped and tender…and not very clean, either.
“Why did he send you to me?” Lady Batuuli asked. “Did he tell you?”
“Only that he thought it would amuse you.”
“Amuse me? What does he imagine I’ll do with you? Surely he would have sent you to my brother if he thought you needed training.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re hardly the best judge. Serafina there—” One of the handmaidens dipped an uncertain bow in answer to Lady Batuuli’s impatient wave. “—thinks she has a clever tongue for woman’s pleasures, but even at her best, she’s tedious and distracting…and I am rarely so fortunate as to have her best.”
The handmaiden said nothing, but her hands clenched as she scrubbed Lan’s thigh.
“You may think me a jade, like my dear brother, but I’m not. I’m practically an ascetic.” Lady Batuuli lay down on the bench, lacing her hands over her flat belly and studying the ceiling. “I can prove it, if you like.”
“That you’re an ascetic?”
“That Serafina licks quim rather less well than a donkey might. And after all, you should be washed everywhere.”
“No. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Batuuli mimicked. “Such manners. ‘Lord Azrael,’ you called him. Please and thank you and all the while demanding redress to your mortal outrage.” She turned her head to look at Lan, smirking. “You don’t really think he’ll give in, do you?”
“He hasn’t thrown me out.”
“And you think that means what, exactly?” Batuuli looked back at the ceiling. “He will never give you what you want. Never. But he will let you think you can convince him for as long as you can bear his weight upon your back. And afterwards, why, you’ll always have a place in Haven. He throws none of his toys away while there’s still some fun to be had from them. And he’s not a jade either.” She was quiet for a while, then said, softly, “He savors his amusements.”
The handmaidens drained the bath, but kept her standing in its center so they could cover her body with sticky paper and rip it off again in strips, beginning at her ankles and working their way up. They took away more than just the paper, Lan saw, leaving her legs as hairless and smooth as a child’s. They didn’t stop at her thighs, either, but positioned her with her legs wide apart to get at her pubis also, then her underarms and finally even her forearms, which was embarrassingly unnecessary in Lan’s opinion, since the few hairs there were not at all obvious to the eye. She thought it was over when they put the papers and sticky-pot away, but they only ran a fresh bath. This time, Lan was forced to sit, submerged to her neck, while her hair was carefully cleaned and combed. Lan kept it sensibly short and wouldn’t have thought it needed more than a pull or two on each side, but it still took two handmaidens and a ritual procession of soaps, cremes and oils, each of which had to be worked in just so before being rinsed entirely away. All this long while, Lady Batuuli lay motionless, like a corpse laid out for burial, back when people still did that sort of thing. The quiet, the whiteness and the water all combined to gnaw at Lan until she just had to say something, even something stupid, just to end it.
“Would he grant you a request, if you made one?”
All six handmaidens stopped for a moment to stare at her, but Lady Batuuli merely said, “Perhaps,” in that same low, unmoving way. “But take no hope from that, for I will not ask him anything. Not even my own favors and never yours.”
“Why not?”
“I have nothing of my own in this life. Not my home, my family, not even my name…only my hate. And if that is to be my only possession, he can have it, as I am his possession. He can have it all and I hope he chokes on every swallow. Tell me…” Batuuli rolled onto her side, reaching down to trail her hand along the bath’s lip, testing the warmth of the water. “Does he know I hate him?”
“Yes.”
“How fearless you must be,” Batuuli remarked. “Not a quality I imagine would attract him. So he knows I hate him…and still he keeps me. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You answer like one of my servants now. Not so fearless.”
“He loves his Children.”
“Ha! A thousand lies there are in those four words! Do you believe it? Truly?”
“Yes.”
Batuuli’s twisted smile faded into a frown. She sat up, her fingers curled around the edge of her bench until the knuckles paled. “Then you are a fool. He loves nothing. It was only his whim that raised us back to this…this thing that is not life…and if I understood what it was that made him choose me, I would change it, destroy it, force him to send me back into the darkness from which he stole me.”
Lan opened her mouth, but one of the handmaidens chose that moment to pour water over her head and by the time she’d finished spitting it out and clearing her eyes, she knew better than to say what she’d been thinking.
Batuuli was watching. Her eyes were half-closed, which made them seem as if they had no whites at all, were only empty sockets. “You were about to mention my looks, I think,” she murmured. “That he chose me for my beauty. I believe I saw the word obviously hovering about your head.”
Lan shrugged and admitted it with a nod.
“Am I very beautiful then?”
Her handmaidens murmured appreciative affirmation, but Lan only said, puzzled, “You know you are.”
“Yes. I do. And I know that I could mar this face until I was forced to go, as he does, masked. But to what possible end? I could make myself a grotesque, a gargoyle…and he would only mend me and go on…as if I had done nothing.”
“What do you mean, mend you?”