Magic Banquet (4 page)

Side Dish:

AJA’S TALE

My life got better once I met Hyena.

He was a street cat. Everyone called him
Hyena because he was the fiercest tabby you’d ever seen. His ear
was notched, and one of his fangs had fallen out from a fight with
a dog. His yowl could scare a camel.

Hyena caught anything that moved. Lizards,
rats, even songbirds. Sorry to say it, but it’s true. He could
catch as many cockroaches as he wanted. Just sat all quiet, waited
until they scuttled near enough. Then one pounce, and gone! That’s
how I learned to nab them.

Maybe I shouldn’t talk about roaches in a
place with a silver-stitched rug. They are horrible to eat. All
greasy, and their legs stick in your teeth. But eat enough of them,
and you won’t starve. You won’t feel tired all the time. You can do
things like stay awake in city school. Work carrying bricks for the
builders.

That’s how I earned the coin for my jewelry.
I didn’t steal them. I never steal.

I could have lots of times. Hyena taught me
to be quiet and quick. When I caught a pair of tasty crickets, I
shared one with Hyena.

Then I was never alone. I had Hyena. He
wasn’t all scratch and spit. His tummy was white and fluffy. His
coat wasn’t an ugly brown with black spots but a sleek smoothness.
I could pet him for hours. He always found the best crannies to
sleep during the hottest hours of day. His purr rumbled against my
chest, and I didn’t have to worry about anything.

He slowed down over the years. Lost more of
his teeth. Got stinkier. When he stopped being able to move too
well, I brought him a cup of camel’s milk every night.

Hyena was a good cat. I miss him most often
when I wake up, and he’s not there.

Second Course:

CHIMERA STEW

SERVED WITH WORLD’S END MEAD

Heat trickled down Aja’s throat. It burned
away her numbness, spreading outward from her chest in a blissful
wave of awakening.

A bowl was pressed to her lips, and a hand
tilted back her head. She swallowed, tasting a broth of spice and
vigor. She spluttered and gasped.

A man held her. Not the swordsman, not the
lord.
The cripple
. An amber amulet dangled from his neck
against her cheek. His eyes were a similar hue, like honey but
darkened by sorrow or anger.

He did not return her gaze. Setting her
down, he tucked his amulet back under his white tunic. He lifted
himself onto his crutches. His hands were tattooed with geometric
figures, six-sided marks. Aja couldn’t say what they meant.

A shadow fell over him and her. The Chef
leaned in and gripped her arm. His touch was like hot grease
dripping on her flesh. Those same hands had torn the wings off
faeries.

“You were right to come to the Banquet.” The
Chef pinched her arm as if testing the meat. “Your skin is too dry.
You’re starved of experience. You must eat more of life.”

When he let her go, an oily handprint
remained on her arm. She rubbed it off with her skirt. Then she
glanced at the swordsman dabbing the empress’s mouth with an
embroidered napkin. Maybe Aja should’ve used one of those.

The guest with the crutches stood, his bad
leg dangling and bent to the side. The cripple rasped while he
spoke to the Chef. “How’d you get ash from the Tree of Life?”

The answer burst from the djinn. “I burned
it.”

A flame licked from her smiling lips. She
set spoons beside bowls.

“Not to worry,” the Chef said. “Only one
branch of the Tree of Life was harvested. I wasted none of its
ash.”

The guest with crutches shook his head and
muttered. “‘Then a man came to the garden, and his name was
Strife.’”

Aja’s brow wrinkled at that.

The Chef brandished a spoon. It looked as
small as a rat bone in his hand. “Always eat mindfully. Some call
it dining etiquette. I call it ritual.”

Aja found her spoon. She picked it up by the
wide end. She had never had the chance to use one, but spoons
seemed close enough to a well’s water ladle.

The Chef swept his spoon over the bowls and
the carpet. “Each entrée must be eaten with care and respect.
You’ll find no dishes greater in all the lands.”

The silver embroidery in the carpet shifted
and snaked into new patterns. Now a string of mountains wove
beneath Aja. She pulled in her feet to see a newly grown glittering
pine forest.

“They’re beautiful,” Aja said. “So
beautiful.”

She slid her pillow over the carpet’s
mountain range. Moving just herself and her bowl was exhausting.
Her arms and legs shook. When she spilled a few drops of stew, they
floated back up to dive into her bowl.

“Did you see that?” Aja asked the empress.
“The carpet transformed.”

“Mmhmmhmm.” The empress made an agreeing
noise between sips and swallows of stew.

The Chef was still speaking. “…in every land
you’ll find a chimera. A combination of all manner of beasts, from
dog to dragon. They have but one thing in common, balance.”

The empress hadn’t glanced up. Maybe she
hadn’t heard Aja, or seen her. The empress might’ve just made a
yummy noise for the stew. Aja was afraid she had to do something or
she would never really be friends with the empress.

“Look,” Aja jangled her glazed bracelets. “I
think the orange is the prettiest. What do you think?”

“So good,” the empress said, trying another
spoonful of stew. She hadn’t noticed Aja or her clay bracelets. And
why would the empress? She would have gold ones.

Her face hot, Aja moved to the guest with
the crutches. He had saved her with the stew broth. Maybe he would
talk with her. If only the Chef would shut his trap.

“I seek balance in my cooking,” the Chef
said, “and you must find it in your eating. This is a stew of one
animal. Do not eat too much of any variety of its meat, especially
if you have an affinity for it.”

The swordsman frowned at his bowl. “What
does that mean?”

“Your pardon, I must prepare the next
course.” The Chef thumped down the stairs toward the fires of the
kitchen. “Rapturous dining to everyone.”

Aja glanced at the guest with the crutches
beside her. She tapped her fingers over two of her bracelets, pink
and orange. “I wanted to thank you for the stew. For your help, I
mean.”

He nodded, laying his crutches between them.
He hadn’t glanced up from his bowl.

No one seemed interested. People never
wanted to talk to Aja on the streets. But she was as much a guest
here as any. She would eat the same stew. Then they’d have
something to speak about.

The stew smelled exciting. She dipped her
spoon, and a morsel of meat seemed to swim into it. Tasting carried
her far from the Banquet. Another place, another being. She was a
snake sidewinding over the desert. The sands kissed her with heat.
Her flexible body skimmed over the hot surface.

Aja swallowed away the vision. Her shoulders
shivered. Had that been an aftershock of the oracle truffle? For a
moment, she had been a snake. Chills slithered over her.

She hated snakes. An asp bit her once, and
her leg had swollen to the size of a gourd. Strangers had carried
her in a wheelbarrow to a free hospital.

In her spoon glistened two pieces of pale
meat. More snake. She fished in the stew for something darker but
always came up with serpent.

“Does the snake want me to eat it?” Aja
asked.

None of the guests replied. They closed
their eyes to savor the stew. A few spoke amongst themselves. Aja
supposed she would have to eat more before they’d accept her.

Her spoon caught meat with a golden hue,
along with only a sliver of snake. She ate them both. The taste
pulled her into another vision. A warmth of the sun spread over her
back. The green and dry scent of the savannah filled her nostrils
as she loped after a zebra. She was a lioness. Dust plumed from her
powerful footfalls. She leaped, claws extended, but the zebra
pivoted in a flash of black and white. It would get away.

Her tail lashed out and bit the zebra. Not a
proud lion’s tail but the speckled brown length of an asp.
I’m a
monster.
She bore down on the zebra with her two sets of fangs.
Thrills of conquest raced through her.
And I’m strong.

She shuddered back to reality. Her human leg
throbbed, the left one, the one the asp had bitten long ago. She
massaged below the knee. Her fingers touched a coldness. Two
diamond-shaped scales appeared on her ankle, where the fangs had
once pierced her. She looked away. The oracle truffle had to be
still making her see things.

Her eyes fell on the crippled leg of the
guest next to her. The skin of that limb had withered to leather,
and it clung to the bone. The shrunken foot was contorted backward
in a pose of agony. Aja winced, then tried to hide it by eating
another spoonful of stew.

For an instant, she was again a snake. Her
skin tingled with coolness. She gulped, and the vision passed.

The cripple hid his bad leg with a pillow.
He held his palms up, tattoos downward. The pose looked awkward to
Aja, but he maintained it even when picking bits of stew with his
spoon. He held it in a fist, like he was about to stab someone. Aja
had to try twice before she could speak to him.

“What do they mean?” Aja kept her voice low.
“Your tattoos.”

He pressed his knuckles into the flesh of
his good leg. “Can’t be proud of them. I cover them most days, but
she wanted my hands clear for the Banquet.”

He nodded at the djinn. She was slipping a
weird helmet over her red hair. The metal cap had silvery wings.
Would it fly off her head?

Aja had a secret to tell him. “She’s a
djinn, you know.”

His own grey-flecked hair reached long
enough to curtain his face. He ate out of sight. She liked how he
did not slurp. Her father would have been about his age.

“I’m Aja,” she said to fight back the
silence.

How she wished he would speak with her. Then
it would be like Aja belonged. Families talked while they ate.
Anyone peeping into the warehouse might guess that the cripple was
the father. Old Janny would be the mother. Aja and the empress were
sisters, of course, and the swordsman, their older brother. The
lord, he could be the uncle no one liked.

Too bad the warehouse’s windows were all
shuttered. No one would see Aja with her maybe-family, like she had
watched so many others through grates and glass. Spying wasn’t like
stealing. It didn’t hurt anyone.

The cripple who wasn’t her father said, “I
was named Solin.”

Aja took another spoonful, tasted snake. She
spat it out. Then all the guests turned on her with
You-Don’t-Belong faces. Fine. No more spitting.

Her conversation with Solin would die if she
didn’t keep at it. “Can I see your tattoos? I promise to like
them.”

“Tattoos!” The empress hopped over her stew
bowl. She spun on one foot, tipped, and straightened her balance.
“Who has tattoos?”

Her voice rang with such eager spirit that
Aja had to answer. “Solin does, on the backs of his hands.”

“I love tattoos. They’re shade that never
goes away.” The empress grabbed his hand and tried to turn it over
to see.

Solin snapped his arm away. The empress
teetered backward, hands swinging over her head in the beginning of
a fall.

He bounded up on one leg and a crutch,
catching the empress before she landed in stew. He was no cripple.
Aja didn’t think she ever moved so fast, even with two legs. With
Solin’s hand on the empress’s shoulder, his six-sided tattoo stood
out for all to see. It looked like a honeycomb filled with
black.

Six sides. Six pillows. Six guests. By
tomorrow, there would only be five.

Stew spluttered from the swordsman’s mouth.
The liquid arced back into the rim of the saucer below his bowl. A
spoon flipped from his hand into darkness.

The swordsman shouldn’t have spit. He had
just given Aja a funny look for doing the same thing. She could
only guess the sight of the tattoo had shocked him that much.

He yanked his sword over his shoulder.
“That’s the mark of—Stop, let go of her.”

Solin released the empress and kicked his
second crutch into his hand. Brass-shod wood poles scraped on the
floor as he turned to face the drawn scimitar.

The swordsman stepped in front of the
empress. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” she said.

“Did he take anything from you?”

“He wouldn’t.” The empress skirted around
the swordsman and said, “He’s kind, and he’d make a great dancer.
Solin, won’t you dance with me?”

It might not be polite to ask a man on
crutches to dance. Or to point at him with the curving razor of a
scimitar. Aja lifted her hand to try to get them to stop, but she
drew it back, touching her lips.

“Don’t feel sorry for him,” the swordsman
said. “He probably ruined his own leg. He’s a hexer.”

Solin said nothing to deny it.

Aja’s eyes widened. She had heard of hexers,
evil men from a distant land. To think that she might’ve eaten a
meal beside one and never known.

Old Janny cursed under her breath. The lord
didn’t look surprised.

Solin crouched on one leg, crutches splayed
ahead of him like the pose of an insect ready to spring.

“Ryn,” the swordsman said, “this is going to
get messy. Leave with Janny.”

The empress tugged on the swordsman’s arm.
She said, “Don’t.”

Aja had to stop the fight. It was like
seeing her father arguing with her brother. She only had a spoon,
and the men had weapons. She couldn’t help. Maybe she shouldn’t.
Solin had saved her, but he was a hexer. An itchiness zigzagged up
from her ankle, over her belly, down arms, to blister her fingers.
The spoon fell from her hand.

The swordsman lunged.

Three notes of song exploded from beneath
the empress’s veil. The first stole all the room’s air. Aja could
not breathe. The second sound leapt out of the first, ascending
with the brilliance of droplets thrown into the sunshine. The
singing made the scimitar seem a flimsy, pointless thing. What good
could a weapon ever do? The third sound jolted the guests back to
life.