In earlier days he would have simply demanded his freedom, uttered something wicked, something cutting, knowing that her shriek or her slap, when it came, would grant him license to do almost anything, be it flee, further injure, or feast upon the comic profundity of her remorse. Little boys were supposed to be pompous and hurtful. Something never failed to balk within her when he played the perfect son. This was Mimara’s great lesson ere he had finally driven her away: that the children most flawed were the children most loved.
But since Thelli had come to him with her threat, an aura of delicacy had poisoned everything he now said. He had become loathe to contradict her in the old way, fearing what might happen were his accursed sister to reveal his secrets. It would break Mother no matter what, learning that her beloved son was no different than her husband, that he too possessed the Strength she thought accursed and inhuman.
So now he played along with her spasms, making of them what he could. He lay soaking in her warmth and fussing adoration, dozing in amniotic serenity, the heat of two bodies clasped between the same silken folds. And yet, more and more it seemed he could feel the Four-Horned Brother abiding in the nethers below, like a rat scratching at the backside of his thought. She kissed his ear, whispered that it was morning. She lifted the hand she had clasped, drew it up for a better view. Mothers are prone to inspect their children with the same thoughtless propriety with which they inspect themselves. He at last turned his head toward her, wondered at the paleness of his skin between her brown hands.
“This is how you spend your days,” she murmured with faux disapproval, “a Prince-Imperial grubbing in the gardens …”
Suddenly he noticed the black crescents beneath his nails, the faint lines of ingrained dirt. Why her observation should trouble him he did not know. He regularly smeared himself with soil to convince her of this very thing.
“I have fun, Momma.”
“You are indulged …” her voice began, only to trail into vapour, the papyrus whisk of the shears in the still-warm Meneanor breeze. She bolted upright, calling out for her body-slaves.
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.