Blood and Lotuses Read online

  But there was no way to help.

  “We’re leaving,” Anchali said frantically.

  “No, we’re staying. We owe that much to her.” Thanom’s voice was distant, trapped in another place and time. Anchali had a queasy suspicion that his her was not the poor woman about to die. Covered by the press of the crowd, Thanom squeezed her hand quickly, then let it go.

  Much as she knew they both needed that comfort, Anchali didn’t dare to grip Thanom’s hand and refuse to let go, not in front of a crowd maddened by blood and misplaced religious fervor, but as the horror of the events progressed, she used the press of the crowd to get as close to him as she dared, drawing support from his presence and hoping he could do the same. Her hand retained the warmth of his.

  With every muscle in her body, with every bit of her spirit, Anchali wanted to flee the scene. But Thanom was right. It was fitting that someone mark and mourn and honor these grisly deaths properly, should send the dying on their way with proper prayers, not the travesties the cultists would spew.

  So they stayed.

  Stayed as the woman’s taut belly was slit open, the half-developed child pulled out and strangled before the mother was granted the mercy of her own death.

  Stayed as the crowd cheered.

  Stayed as they were led in prayer from the execution platform by two of the executioners.

  One of the executioners had a sweet, strong voice, a voice that projected well over the crowd as if she was used to public speaking.

  Anchali knew that voice. It was Iana.

  And she had been the one who castrated and killed Emjaroen. Anchali wouldn’t have thought the old Chosen would even have had the muscle to lift a sword, let alone to cut off a man’s head, but whatever possessed her must have granted her strength.

  It was only after the prayers that Thanom would allow her—or more likely would allow himself—to slip away.

  They ended up near where the great river met the harbor—not the rough dockside neighborhood, but in the mudflats near the estuary. Here, despite all the detritus of the city that wound up in the river, the beauty of Pichitra and Jananya’s creation still triumphed: open sky, golden sky, moving water, egrets and flamingos. Isolated, hidden by reeds and trees from passersby, they felt safe to take off the stifling veils and sweat-drenched robes, leaving only the clothes they wore underneath.

  And here, Thanom finally broke his silence on the ghosts Anchali had sensed in his heart.

  Chapter 7

  “Sua…” Thanom took a ragged breath that almost, but not quite, choked back a sob. “That’s what they did to Sua. Only now it’s all within the law.”

  Anchali ached to say something, anything, that could ease his pain, but she knew there were no such words.

  And she wasn’t sure that if she opened her mouth, she wouldn’t start to scream and be unable to stop.

  “At first, the mobs were just going after whores and their customers, just roughing them up and trying to scare them into changing their ways,” he continued. “The rest of us, at that point, mostly wondered how they thought the whores should earn their rice instead of by whoring, seeing that there’s so little better work to be had if you can’t move crates on the docks, but a lot of the customers the mobs targeted were the sort you were happy enough to see run out of the neighborhood. At first, that was all there was to it.”

  He paused for a few heartbeats, obviously collecting himself. “Then they started attacking courting couples, or anyone who wouldn’t wear the robes. Still just roughing up, at first, but it got worse pretty fast. Killings started. The city was getting ugly. And then the Negus got pulled in and started following Iana, and all the violence became legal. I tried to get Sua to leave town, but she was a stubborn thing—bad as you, but louder about it. Said the city had gone crazy before with rioting or such and it always settled down fast enough, and besides, she was too close to her time to travel too far. Maybe after the baby came, she said.

  “They caught her on the street, a big group. If there’d been fewer people, maybe she’d have been able to fight them, even slowed as she was with the child, or get away. Some of the neighbors tried to get her out. One was killed, too, in the end. The other ran to get me. She’d curled up in a ball, the neighbor said, shouted something like couldn’t they see she was pregnant and whatever they thought she’d done, it wasn’t the baby’s fault. The last thing the neighbor heard before he bolted was, ‘Jananya said no more children!’”

  Anchali knew how the story must end. She’d known it in her heart as soon as Thanom had gripped her hand at the execution. She didn’t need to hear the words. But Thanom needed to speak them.

  “I was too late. I came as fast as I could, but I was too late. Blood everywhere. It wasn’t like today: horrible, but controlled, like a butcher killing a pig. Sua was…cut up. You could tell they’d taken joy in it. They’d torn the baby apart like a pack of wild dogs. Then they made the mistake of turning on me.”

  His eyes had an unholy gleam as he said that. The image came into Anchali’s head with disturbing vividness: Thanom cutting through the mob, a dance of death that only a few of his opponents tried to resist, as if dying that way would earn them some kind of special favor in the eyes of Jananya. A woman’s corpse, horribly mutilated. Scraps of bloodied flesh that only Thanom’s story let her recognize as an unborn child. A blur that might have been another body—the neighbor, she realized, a blur because Thanom had scarcely noticed it at the time.

  She was seeing it all through Thanom’s eyes, through a crimson haze of madness, a blind battle-fury like that the Chosen of the Red God could invoke. She couldn’t see his face. But if she could, she knew there would be nothing there but death.

  And then a wave of his emotions poured over her and washed her away.

  She hadn’t been seeking them. If she’d had any sense, she’d have shielded better against them, but he’d been so contained, even after witnessing the deaths today. Now the containment had broken like a dam under the pressure of monsoon rains, and she was drowning. Rage, grief, deep guilt, love, more rage, and still more rage, at himself as well the cultists. He hated himself for being alive, for not knowing how to single-handedly take down a tyranny fueled by black sorcery.

  For daring to imagine, just for an instant, that there might still be something for him besides bitter memory, vengeance, and a longed-for ending.

  She was trained to handle other people’s emotions, but this was too much for her. Too long pent-up, too bitter, too strong.

  Too close to her. He was still holding something back and that was enough to hint why he was starting to get flashes of painful hope.

  All she’d been holding in herself—fear, grief for her city, horror and shock and the deep hurt of her mentor’s death and her own helplessness in the face of evil—burst forth, another, smaller dam breaking, mingling with Thanom’s bitter waters.

  For all that Thanom had been through, all he had relived that day, Anchali was the first to start crying. Broken as he was, he still, tried, awkwardly, to comfort her, until he, too, gave way to terrible, healing tears.

  Once that last dam broke, Anchali swam through her own feelings, and took the weeping warrior in her arms, and began the spiritual healing she was trained to do, calling upon the goddess’s store of warmth, love, and compassion so seeds of hope and joy might grow again in his heart.

  Anchali tried to resist her own instinct, at first, when it told her Thanom needed more than that.

  It seemed too self-serving, too close to what she wanted and needed for herself. And perhaps at first it was. At first she was just a woman, frightened and sad and needing to cling to someone, hungrily kissing a man she desired, pushing aside sack-like woolen garments, laying him back into the muddy bank. Taking simple joy in touching a hard, lean body she’d been admiring from a distance since she’d met Thanom, and joy in his shy caresses and in his kisses, tentative at first, but soon warming, becoming needy and open and full of long, aching need.
Joy in his hands and lips on her skin, and hers on his, in the way his cock felt sliding between her legs, not entering yet, but teasing them both.

  Holding Thanom, being held by Thanom, opened a door inside Anchali’s heart, the door that she’d shut when she was first enrolled in the courtesan-guild school, and then locked when she was chosen by the goddess. Behind that door were all her hopes of loving and being loved by one special person as well sharing Pichitra’s love with all the world. It had been closed so long she’d forgotten it was even there.

  But it burst open now, and when it did, everything changed.

  Bird-cries and the whispers of the river wove together into a tapestry of music. The air glittered around Anchali and Thanom, a subtle glitter, but one Anchali could see even with her eyelids weighted by pleasure so strong she could scarcely keep her eyes open. The more fetid smells of the city eased away, and a fragrance of lotuses and roses and musk surrounded them instead.

  The lust and need pooling in Anchali’s sex flamed up her spine, filling her body with a brilliant warmth that, even though she could not see it, she knew was white light. White light burst out the crown of her head and rained down like the first warm showers after a long drought, bathing her and Thanom. She hadn’t realized how filthy she felt after witnessing the executions, how dirty her spirit seemed, but now all that washed away, all that pain and horror, and was carried back to the purifying earth. The soft spiritual rain washed over Thanom, too, and she swore she could feel some of his pain and guilt washing away, feel his spirit easing and softening even as his touch became more possessive, his kisses and caresses more deliciously demanding, his cock harder.

  She raised her hips, lowered herself onto Thanom.

  The universe reconfigured itself, or at least something inside Anchali did, a part that had always been holding back, afraid.

  She wasn’t afraid anymore.

  She knew how to heal Thanom. She knew how to heal herself.

  And she had a pretty good idea how to heal her beloved, broken city.

  People called sex “Pichitra’s gift,” meaning that sometimes the act of making love could be a channel to bring the Goddess into the mortal world. Anchali had known saying for years—she was a Chosen of Pichitra, after all—but this was the first time in all her years as both courtesan and Chosen that she’d felt the true potential of Pichitra’s gift.

  Not just a soothing of loneliness, a brief connection between bodies and spirits that could, with luck, become something deeper.

  True magic.

  As they moved together, Anchali gathered up the force of their pleasure and sent it back into him as healing, as hope, as a reason to live. It was lovemaking, it was a prayer, it was taking all the broken pieces of both their spirits and reassembling them into a beautiful mosaic.

  It was magic granted by Pichitra.

  I love you, she thought fiercely, over and over as she rode him. But she never said it aloud because what this act was, in some ways, was Thanom giving himself permission to hear those words eventually, from some woman’s lips, whether or not those lips were hers; her giving herself permission to say those words to a man, and hear them, and believe.

  She hoped it would be Thanom. Hoped they’d both live long enough to reach the point where they could speak the words out loud.

  Somehow, she sensed the words were echoing in Thanom, too, though even with the magic he wasn’t ready to say or hear them.

  Tears glazed their faces as first Anchali, then Thanom, shattered in climax, burying their faces against each other so they didn’t cry out and alert someone they were there.

  But they shed no tears afterward, as they lay together in the mud. Dirt, sweat, and tears streaked their skin, and insects, drawn to their salt sweat, stung them. But that didn’t matter. They had been shattered by pleasure, then put back together by it. Anchali knew she wasn’t heart-whole yet, still mourning the city of her childhood and the lives lost. Thanom’s pain, too, must linger.

  But they had both taken a first step toward healing.

  Thanom started to say something, but Anchali cut him off with a kiss at the first hint of anxiety in his voice. “Don’t say it. Don’t say anything, not now. That was healing and prayer, my dear, and we both needed it. Your Goddess and mine both understand that—and so does Sua.”

  And when he tried to speak of it later, she silenced him with kisses until he found better things to do than speak of grief and uncertainty.

  Chapter 8

  They stayed on the river bank as long as they could, making love and talking of everything except fighting the evil that had taken over Dakura, and then talking of how they could possibly fight it, then making love again.

  Finally, though, the sun dipped red and huge on the western horizon. Soon it would be dark—dusk was short in this tropical place—and Dakura under Iana’s rule had a strict curfew. Reluctantly, they washed each other, allowing themselves only a little playful distraction, put their ugly robes back on, and headed back to the heart of the city to find an inn.

  Only to discover there were no more inns in Dakura. Travelers stayed at the temples of Jananya, or with friends in the city, or uneasily on the street, hoping that no one would decide they were vagrants of dubious character—who, not surprisingly, didn’t meet pleasant fates in Dakura of late.

  “We should go back to the riverbank and sleep there.” Thanom’s voice was a tense whisper that Anchali had to strain to hear him. “We’ll be eaten alive by mosquitoes, but the mosquitoes will keep us safe. And that way we won’t be separated. I don’t feel right about sending you off alone into the women’s quarters in the temple. It’s safer if we stay together.”

  “The Goddess is with me,” she said, because the power and magic Pichitra had granted still vibrated in her bones and her womb. “She’s with us. More than she always is, I mean. I can sense it. Going to the temple is the right path. Somewhere in the temple are the answers we seek.” She laughed softly. “Not that I imagine the Goddess will point them out to me. That kind of organization is Jananya’s way, not Pichitra’s—and I wouldn’t trust an inspiration from Jananya that came to us in this city, not now. She’s still out there, but I’m not sure we can hear Her properly over the dark magic.”

  “It’s safer if we stay together.” He looked down at the dirty street, and admitted, “I want to keep you near me. Want to sleep next to you and wake up touching you.”

  To Anchali, her ears and her spirit made keen by the power of the goddess, it sounded a lot like I love you. Anchali said, “Sadly, being separated is part of the reason the Lord Commander wanted me here,” and he could almost hear her rueful smile under the veiling. “I can go places a man cannot—and I imagine the temple library was always Iana’s domain. She loved books once, or so Emjaroen said.”

  Silently, Thanom nodded. Unhappiness poured off him, but she didn’t try to reassure him again.

  The power of the goddess might fill her and give her confidence, but that didn’t mean she was happy about being separated from Thanom.

  *

  Unsurprisingly, they were grilled with questions when they arrived at the temple of Jananya. Thanom, talking to a hulk of a man who, even under his concealing robes, looked like a dock rat, was terse, saying only that he and his wife needed a place for the night and maybe longer. Anchali heard those words and spun a tale from there. Pulled aside to speak to one female Chosen and someone she thought was a laywoman, let her voice slip into a less educated accent and wrap around the lies with a storyteller’s artistry. She’d always been good at spinning tales, but now Pichitra’s power infused her words so they carried the ring of conviction, even though they were pure fabrication.

  She claimed she had married Thanom several years before and had moved with him to a country town where he’d inherited a small shop. “And we lived there together until Jananya said there would be no more marriage,” she added, with just the right mixture of acceptance and regret. “But I’m happier now. We’re getting a
long better now as friends, praise Jananya, than we did for the last months when we lived as man and wife. We lost four babies in five years, babies that came before their time and never drew breath, and that’s hard. He blamed me. I blamed him. We both blamed ourselves, though we knew that it truly wasn’t anyone’s fault. It eased our hearts when we began to hear the revelations. We realized it was actually a sign of Jananya’s favor that we couldn’t bring more children into a wicked world. So we decided to come back here, to find our proper way.”

  She then whispered, “It’s harder for him, you know. Me, I don’t miss making love—kind of lost the heart for it thinking it might just lead to another child who wouldn’t live—but he needs to…well, buck up his courage if he’s going to take the final vow. He’s a quiet man, always was, and won’t speak of it, but I know he’s scared and grieving. We both are, I guess, but we women can admit our pain and fear to our friends, and that eases the worst of it.”

  At that, the laywoman nodded. Anchali guessed at a wry, sad smile underneath the veil; certainly the woman’s voice was warm and sympathetic as she said, “Welcome, then. It’s a blessing that you and he are still close in your hearts and have come to Jananya together.”

  “So often people don’t understand Jananya doesn’t want to destroy love,” the Chosen said, her voice fervent. “She wants to make it stronger by purifying it of the distractions of the flesh, so you can be truly friends, truly joined in spirit. It really is good to see a couple who grasp this as you and your husband do.” She sounded excited, like a true Chosen of Jananya should sound when a student grasped an esoteric, difficult concept; so pleased that Anchali half-expected the woman to hug her.

  The next words out of the Chosen’s mouth, though, were in a cold, flat tone. It was the same voice, but the mood was so abruptly different it seemed to be coming from a different person. “Do not be alone together until you have both taken final vows. Flesh is weak, and it is far worse to sin when you know better than to sin in ignorance.”