The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(157)

So it was Kelmomas found himself pouting in a steaming bronze tub, listening to his mother expound upon what he decided were the whorish virtues of cleanliness. The water greyed almost immediately for his filth, but he settled as deep into it as he could given the freshness of the air. He groused: the fools had set the tub upon the landing immediately before the unshuttered portico. It was autumn. Mother knelt on a pillow beside him, joking and cajoling. She had dismissed the slaves, searching, he knew, for some dregs of normalcy in the ritual of mother bathing child.

Theliopa appeared just after she wetted his hair, her mazed, lace-finned gowns zipping as much as swishing. She stood on the threshold, an explosion of grey and violet fabric, her hair a kinked halo of flax, haphazardly pinned with gaudy broaches. Her skull, the boy thought, seemed particularly indiscreet today.

If she attached any significance to his presence, she betrayed no sign whatsoever.

“General Iskaul,” the sallow girl said. “He-he has arrived, Mother.”

Mother was already standing, drying her hands. “Good,” she replied, her voice and manner transformed. “Thelli will finish bathing you while I prepare,” she said in reply to his questioning eyes.

“Nooo!” he began to protest, but his mother was already barging past his sister, calling for her slaves as she hastened to her wardrobe.

He sat rigid and dripping, gazing at his approaching sister through wisps of steam.

“Iskaul has come-come with the Twenty-ninth from Galeoth,” Theliopa explained kneeling on Mother’s pillow. She was forced to crush her gown against the copper-gleaming tub, such was its hooped girth, but despite the obvious amount of effort she had invested in its manufacture, she seemed to care not at all.

He could only glare at her.

Not here, the secret voice warned. Anywhere but here.

She has to die sometime!

“You have been plotting my murder,” his pale sister said while taking inventory of the soaps and scents arrayed on the floor beside her. “You-you can scarcely ponder-ponder anything else.”

“Why would you assu—?” he began protesting, only to have more water dumped over his head.

“I care-care not at all,” she continued, pouring a bowl of orange-scented soap powder across his scalp, “what you think or what-what you do.”

She began kneading it into a lather. Her fingers were neither cruel nor soothing—simply efficient.

“I forgot …” he replied, resenting every nod of his head. “You don’t care about anything.”

She worked her way from his forehead, back along his crown, her fingernails nipping his scalp.

“I have many-many cares,” she said. “But they are light, like Father’s. They leave no tracks in the snow.”

She bundled the hair about the back of his neck, squeezed, then began working her way forward, this time along the sides of his head, moving toward his temples.

“Inrilatas could make you cry,” Kelmomas recalled.

Her fingers paused. A spasm of some kind plucked at the slack muscles of her face.

“I’m surprised you remember.”

She ceased ministering to his hair, turned back to Mother’s accoutrements.

“I remember.”

She raised and wetted a small, rose-coloured sponge, then, using the soap congealed across his scalp, she began washing his face with gentle, even tender strokes.

“Inrilatas was-was the strongest of all of us,” she said upon a spastic blink. “The most-most cruel.”

“Stronger than me?”

“Far stronger.”

Lying bitch!

“How so?”

“He saw too deeply.”

“Too deeply,” the boy repeated. “What kind of answer is that?”

Theliopa shrugged. “The more you know a soul-soul, the less of a soul-soul it becomes. For Inrilatas, we-we were little more-more than beetles, scuttling around and about-about, blind-blind. So long as we remain blind to those blindnesses, our souls and our worlds remain whole-whole. As soon as we see-see them, we see that we are nothing more-more than beetles.”

Kelmomas looked at her uncomprehendingly. “The more you know a thing,” he said, frowning, “the more real it becomes.”

“Only if it was real to begin with.”

“Pfah,” he sneered.

“And yet you do the very thing he did.”

“Which is?”

“Make-make toys of the souls about you.”

The boy caught his breath, such was the force of his insight.

“So that was what Inrilatas did? Made you his toy?”

“Even now-now,” she said on her damned stammer, “this is what youyou attempt to do.”

“So I’m a beetle too!”

She paused to draw the sponge across his chin. The water was becoming tepid.

“A beetle that eats beetles.”

He mulled these words while she laboured to cleanse his throat and neck, particularly about the divot between his collarbones. It struck him as an epic and beautiful thing, that brother and sister could discuss the grounds that would see one murder the other … like a tale from the Chronicle of the Tusk.

“Why did he call you Sranc?” he asked without warning.

Another facial seizure.

Kelmomas smirked when she said nothing. There was only one beetle here.