|| LORD OF VERTIGO, THE HAWK HERMIT OF THE HEIGHTS, TRACES A SIGN THAT INSTANTLY VANISHES INTO LIGHT, INTO AIR. STUBBORNLY, FROM DAWN TO DUSK, HE REPEATS IT. ||
A hawk circles lazily in the too-blue, too-bright sky. The silhouette looks cut even as it rotates; the midday sun behind it leaves the bird backlit, more an absence of sky than a presence of predator. Corradh's observation of the hawk requires no more energy than the lazy flight, circling, circling. Then the hawk is gone.
Mourning pigeons return from whatever alcoves they had hidden in, and the garden erupts into vivacious noise. The birds chatter and the fountain bubbles and all is as it should be.
Corradh rests there, in that noisy garden, having seen the hawk and now watching the pigeons in their dances and nest-tending. They bathe in the ornate fountain at the garden’s center. He is laid out on a bed of silks, behind a white linen curtain that drifts ever so slightly with the breeze. Everything in this world is beautifully contained, beautifully organised; every angle, from the agave plants to the cacti, draws his eyes back to the fountain at the centre of the garden courtyard.
The west wing of the Ieshan estate is his favourite; it always seems quieter there, less refined. The expensive tastes of his siblings had manifested elsewhere in their villa; the expansive library, containing works from scholars of all Courts and even a few foreign documents; the swimming quarters with it’s exquisite mosaics; the wine cellar, of all tastes; the larger, more articulately made gardens of the North and South wings respectfully. This garden, this courtyard seemed an afterthought in the construction of their villa; small, secreted away, and so Corradh since childhood has made it his own.
He rises from his bed of rich red silks and navigates through the garden's bold desert sage and palo verde, the Indian paintbrush and desert marigold. There are Medjool trees in one corner, and they are bursting with their fruit. He pulls several dates from the tree. Corradh pits them. The caramel flavour and rich sticky texture work in his mouth, against teeth designed for different appetites. The act is merely a guise. He has heard the linen curtains of the patio rustle, and knows he is longer alone.
Perhaps it was his walk across the yellow marble courtyard, that made the birds so silent. He does not think so.
Silence comes in the bird’s stead. Corradh looks over one supple shoulder; in the bright light, his rosettes are bold and abysmal all the same. He eats another date with the indolence of a great cat; slow; savoury. No one can chase him from this kill.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Pilate?” The hawk circles again, above, in the too-blue, too-bright sky.
walking round always mad reputation, leave a pretty girl sad reputation / this that what-we-do don't tell your mom shit, this that red cup all on the lawn shit / got a fresh cut straight out the salon bitch
In my dreams it’s always cold outside. In my dreams, I step out the door and into a desert capped with snow as it was on my birthday three years ago, when all the gods went mad. The rough-and-tumble protests of the streets drowned out by the soft rushing of wind, the shifting ripple of palm fronds not another layer of sound so much as a blanket over all the others, and my scales clinking against one another, rattled by the cold.
In my dreams there is no sound except the breeze and the kiss it makes against the cobblestones, stirring up sand and a fine layer of unnatural frost.
This is when I feel most rested. I know hazily I am asleep, but I stand with my eyes half-opened in the gray streets, the ringing in my head temporarily vanquished, my heart a soft thing, for once, chained to the bottom of the chest. All around me the world is empty. And for the first time in my life I am alone, alone, alone.
But every day I wake up to a world that is hot and busy and loud. Whether I have been dreaming or not, I am inevitably startled from sleep by one of my siblings practicing their instruments, or the servants banging pots and pans, or the song the gardeners sing as they pull up weeds. Our property is luxurious but not peaceful; it never has been; the Ieshans were always known for throwing the best parties. After five unfortunate years alive I have come to accept where there is gold, there cannot also be peace. And so I must shake off the dream-frost and head into the noise.
Today I am supposed to meet with a new silks merchant, but he will not arrive for a few hours (and even that is assuming he shows up on time). I have time to waste. The sun is blazing high and hot today, a fierce white eye that seems to bake the sand into glass and the leaves of our plants into charcoal, so I leave my cloak folded neatly on my desk and slip downstairs unadorned. A few servants give me quizzical looks; the rest of them know better, or simply don’t care. Maybe that’s the same thing.
Breakfast has already been served and cleaned—why the hell have I woken up so late?—but I don’t have the patience to wait for anything to be prepared, nor do I want to deal with the prodding questions and hovering of whoever it is that would serve it. Instead I slip from the too-tight embrace of the mansion out into the relative freedom of the courtyard, walking unhurriedly but with purpose toward the west wing. It is the least-planned corner of our estate, and for that reason perhaps the most perfect. There is always some pleasure to be found, I think, in its solitude and secret nature, a small square blocked off by linen curtains and over-populated with desert sage and marigold that bloom and multiply like bruises. I am sweating by the time I duck through the curtains, the sun sinking into me like fangs.
Oh. Speaking of.
I come to a slow stop.
Corradh has always been one of our strangest. But one of our most beautiful, too, and next to me I think he may have inherited the most of our mother—the dark skin, the thick hair, the hard and glowing eyes. (Solis only knows where the teeth came from.)
When he hears me coming, he does not turn his body toward me but insolently shifts his head over his shoulder, meeting my gaze without stopping the movement of his mouth, an unforgivably arduous process of chewing and pretending to swallow. I glance at the tree whose shade he stands under—dates. For fuck’s sake, I want to say.
My own brother asks me, to what do I owe the pleasure? and for a moment, the briefest moment, less a heartbeat than a flash of lightning, I feel—jilted. Sort of—gutted. My stomach sinks. I blink one, then twice, bewildered. Heat is building in my cheeks and across the back of my neck, though thankfully it doesn’t show up on my skin. For a moment nausea rises in me; then I come to my senses, and my lips twist up in a blue kind of smile.
“That’s a waste of time,” I point out softly, “And a waste of your teeth. Why not keep them sharp?’
Although, I think, if he does—he could certainly use them against me.
|| LORD OF VERTIGO, THE HAWK HERMIT OF THE HEIGHTS, TRACES A SIGN THAT INSTANTLY VANISHES INTO LIGHT, INTO AIR. STUBBORNLY, FROM DAWN TO DUSK, HE REPEATS IT. ||
Looking at his brother, Corradh cannot deny they both should have been gods.
His lips upturn into a smile, wet with the sweet nectar of the broken fig. His lips upturn just enough the teeth show.
Pilate could have been the demigod of treachery and Corradh… well.
Corradh says with a too-bright, too-sharp smile (all so much alike, to the too-bright, too-blue, cut-from-a-fantasy type of sky): “Brother, is pleasure ever a waste of time? Besides, my teeth will never dull.”
The casual arrogance with which Corradh speaks could easily be a lie; but the way he shows the fangs so gleefully seems to contest it. Then the smile is gone, and Corradh is nothing save inky black skin and even darker rosettes. A perfect ringlet of hair falls between his eyes as he tosses Pilate a handful of figs.
Corradh should stay where he stands, dappled in the shade of the fig tree. He glances with those deep, gem-bright eyes at his brother and thinks again, we should have been gods.
So Corradh pursues his earlier line of thought, stepping from the shade toward his brother and his nest of snakes. “Pilate, if we were to be gods, what gods would we be?” The question emerges whimsical and lighthearted, nearly boyish. But Corradh is boyish only in the way anarchy refuses to mature into something better planned. Like civil war.
Perhaps that it, Corradh thinks. Perhaps I ought to be the god of nothing at all.
walking round always mad reputation, leave a pretty girl sad reputation / this that what-we-do don't tell your mom shit, this that red cup all on the lawn shit / got a fresh cut straight out the salon bitch
Corradh is handsome in the way of a predator, though I think most of us are: me with my snakes, Adonai with his killing horn; even Hagar, if you care to look at her close enough and find the way her pupils lie in dark reptilian slits.
But he does it better than all of us. More subtle, more savage. A slick black panther only slightly reworked. As kids I often begged him to open his mouth, let me poke around in the dark and wonder what he could kill with those teeth. If he would ever use them against me—if he would ever be willing to use them for my benefit. Looking at him now, the same thoughts cross my mind.
Do you love me? Do you love me enough to kill for me?
That is the only kind of love that matters, I think.
When he grins, it looks… wrong. Deeply. Wrong in a way that only began to bother me when I grew up and understood what he was—wrong like a fairytale illustration cut-and-pasted into a Lovecraftian horror. Pretty like a blood spatter or the ivory shine of a visible bone.
My teeth will never dull, he says; and I smile with just my lips, wryly, not because I know he is right but because I wish, knowing it will never happen, he would be wrong.
I catch his clump of figs easily. They are ripe to the point of bursting, and when I grasp them the invisible pressure cracks one open, spilling golden syrup onto the tile at my feet. I watch a host of seeds seep into the grout, patterned like ants. The unscathed ones, I let gently roll to the ground at my feet; the broken one I pop into my mouth and begin to chew, slowly and then thoughtfully as my brother asks his question.
Some part of me is about to laugh. Some part of me wants to say: we are gods. We have gold, and power, and the bodies of animals. We have power over Solterra’s mortals; and the shrines, and the sacrifices. Is that not godly?
Instead I pretend to think a moment longer, then answer. “If we were gods, you would lord over the entrance of the underworld, and eat the souls too sinful to be saved.” I spit the fig’s stem onto the ground at my feet. And when I look up at him, I grin half-heartless: “And I would be the god who led them to sin while they were still living.”
07-17-2020, 01:17 AM - This post was last modified: 07-17-2020, 01:17 AM by Pilate
