He wished he’d been drinking the arrack and not simply emptying it out piecemeal into his sharp-elbowed neighbor’s cup. He wished the dancer would finish and the poet would hurry up and begin his salon. But although the poet had entered some time ago, his acolytes had been arriving in straggling batches, their expressions hunted.
The three women who usually attended him had crept by, ushered through the room by a man who glared at anyone who gave them too long a glance. A few men in heavy shawls, dripping from rain, had turned up and pushed through the crowd to the corridor that led to the cramped back rooms of the brothel. But there were no young scribes yet—no men with tonsured hair and bound manuscripts under their arms, fingers stained with ink, ready to copy the poet’s words.
The poet wouldn’t begin until they were all here. He never did.
So Rao waited. And pretended to drink. And watched the courtesan spin.
Rao only knew something was amiss when the brothel madam entered the hall and waved one bracelet-laden arm at the musicians, ordering them silent. The music ended in an abrupt, discordant stumble of reed flutes and cymbals, as one musician after the other raised his hands awkwardly before him at her urging.
The courtesan whirled to a stop with a smooth turn of her heels against the emerald-tiled floor. The folds of her skirt rustled to stillness. Her braid looped itself artfully around her throat. Without missing a beat—even though there was no longer any rhythm to guide her—she clasped her hands before her and bowed, ending the dance.
Rao could only be quietly impressed. To perform with grace before a crowd of drunk old lechers was a hard enough task. To end a six-stage Ahiranyi traditional dance in its third step was even harder, for a woman who valued her art. And this woman—who had danced in the hall three nights in a row, each night swirling her way through a blatantly seditious piece intended to venerate the yaksa spirits seasoned with just enough flashes of hip and ankle to please the customers—clearly valued her art very highly indeed.
“I’m afraid that is all for tonight, my lords,” the madam said apologetically, as her girls crossed the room and drew heavy brocade curtains across the perforated screen walls of the hall. The sounds of the city were immediately blotted out. The faint sweetness of the night breeze was replaced by the scent of sweating men, pipe smoke, perfumed oil, and lantern fumes. “The soldiers are walking again tonight.”
There was a startled murmur from the crowd. The soldiers never closed the brothels. The pleasure houses were the reason Parijatdvipans came to Ahiranya at all. It had always been considered more licentious than any other part of the empire. The Ahiranyi did not guard their women’s purity as carefully. In the past they had even allowed their men to marry men, and their women to marry women. When Rao had still been a boy, he and his friends—other young nobles of Parijatdvipa’s city-states, all of them—had managed to get hold of a contraband copy of the banned Ahiranyi religious poetry, the Birch Bark Mantras. They’d laughed and joked, mocking the text and each other to hide their embarrassment as they read explicit tales of lewdness alongside tracts where the yaksa conquered nation after nation, bathing them in blood.
It was only since his arrival in Ahiranya, where passages from the Birch Bark Mantras were painted on walls and recited by poets who used the brothels as cover to disseminate their politics, that he had come to understand that what he and his friends had blushed over as lewdness was a source of faith and defiance to the Ahiranyi, who joined stories of seductive beings of flower and flesh, of two men lying together, and of world-conquering glory on the same lyrical breath.
The rumblings of discontent that had started to echo through the crowd died quickly, as confusion gave way to caution and fear. Men clambered to their feet. Began to leave. If the brothel was closing, then something terrible had happened. Better to be somewhere safe than wait to hear from the soldiers directly what had occurred.
Rao remained where he was for a moment. The brothel madam stood, watching the men go. She looked calm enough, but as the curtains were closing he’d seen the tightness around her eyes. The sweat dotting her upper lip.
She was afraid.
Maybe the fact that she allowed her girls to dance subversively and rented her rooms to Ahiranyi poets was enough of a reason for her to be frightened. But Rao had a feeling that the fear on her face was too real, too immediate to simply be abstract.
He should have left then. But Rao was one of the nameless faith, and he understood the sacred power of instinct—the way a body’s knowing could be a gift from the nameless, a prophecy written in the thud of the heart or the ice of fear winding down a spine. He felt it then: a kind of foreboding. Not quite fear. Not quite curiosity.