Cadmar came down the stairs, looking composed and extraordinarily complacent. “Listen, Cadmar,” Clement began, planning to excuse herself from the trip upstairs.
But he clasped her hand jovially, saying, “That woman has talent! I’ve paid her for us both, so don’t pay her again.”
It was hopeless. While waiting to be summoned, Clement diverted him with the pornographic cards. She decided she would go upstairs, sit by the courtesan’s fire, and let herself be entertained for half an hour by empty‑headed conversation. Cadmar would never know his money had been wasted. The servant came to fetch her, and at the top of the stairs Clement stepped through an open door that was quietly closed behind her.
She smelled flowers, very delicate and faint, and her eye sought out the source: violets, she saw, and daffodils–homely, early‑blooming flowers tucked into crystal vases. The room was warm, lamplit, painted coral pink so that Clement felt intimately embraced though the woman who was to entertain her sat on the far side of the room beside a quiet fire, with a piece of needlework in her hand. The big bed lay demurely shadowed, though its covers were folded back to advertise the pristine whiteness of the sheets.
Clement could smell not even a hint of old sex. It was a neat trick, she thought, as though she were watching a magician at a fair. The courtesan, eyebrow raised, gazed at her with some amusement. “Lieutenant‑General, I understand you’re here against your will. The general gave me some rather strict orders, however.”
“Fortunately, he is not your general.”
“Yes, it is fortunate.” The courtesan smiled, her hands busy making stitches that only a close observer might realize were haphazard. “Do come in and sit by the fire. I will not throw myself on you, I assure you.”
Clement walked across soft carpets and sat, and the chair embraced her. The courtesan served her a hot drink, sweet and milky, gently spiced. Clement sipped and felt her stomach settle, finally. This comfortable, intimate room was not what she had expected. That she hungered for this comfort, this quiet, she also had not expected. Oh, she was weary of being who she was! “Call me Clement,” she said desperately.
“Clement, I am Alrin.”
The courtesan was not young; nor was she intimidatingly beautiful. The loose silk robe she wore outlined in folds of light and darkness a heavy thigh, a lush breast, a body as comfortable as the chair in which she now curled, setting aside her fancywork and smiling as though she had a secret. She and Clement spoke of commonplace things: the town, the weather. Clement felt as if she had entered a different world, where all was mundane and not even a prickle of violence and politics could be felt. To leave the embrace of the soft green chair and enter the embrace of slippery silk and lightly perfumed skin was not so hard to do. It happened. Alrin made it happen by waiting and hinting and smiling that secret smile. Eventually, the pristine bed was put to use.
The homely flowers of spring bloomed in every crack where a bit of earth might be shoved atop a bulb. The barren garrison’s snowdrifts were replaced by drifts of flowers that the occasional Shaftali visitor had no little cause to wonder at. The soldiers could coax a flower to bloom anywhere, and would sooner risk injury than step on even the edge of a flowerbed. Clement supposed there was something contradictory about the Sainnite love of flowers; certainly, the Shaftali found it peculiar. Clement’s mother had filled her coat pockets with bulbs on the way to becoming a refugee. Clement went to the garden every day to watch her mother’s flowers bloom.
Now it was summer, and as the last of the spring blossoms shriveled in the warmth, Clement’s sudden romance with Alrin abruptly failed. “You’ve gotten gloomy again,” commented Gilly one warm day, as the two of them were making the final plans for Cadmar’s annual tour of the garrisons.
She grunted discouragingly, but the ugly man had set his pen aside. “Are we now strangers, you and I?”
“That’s an odd remark,” she said.
“It’s you who have gotten odd, friend.”
“Well.” She sighed. “I notice that Alrin’s belly has gotten round, and now I hear that half a dozen officers are bidding against each other to be named the baby’s father.”
Gilly raised his eyebrows. “You were pretending she’s not what she is?”
“Don’t make fun of me. I’ve seen your foolishness often enough.”
“I can’t deny it. So you’ll visit her no more?”
“It was a waste of money.”
“By your gods, I’d pay for it myself! A waste of money it was not!”
Clement muttered, “So all it takes to make me happy is an hour with a trull? I can hardly be proud of that.”
That night she went late to bed, not because she was up carousing, but because with warm weather came the war, and death, and the cursed duty roster. She lay awake, of course, uncomfortable on her lumpy mattress, which wanted re‑stuffing. She had propped the windows open to the moonless night, and a little bat flew in on the trail of a moth, and flapped around the room a couple of times, practically soundless but for a dry rustle like leather in a breeze, and a squeak so shrill it was little more than a scratching in the ears. Perhaps she actually slept, for when she saw a dandelion pod of fire explode against the stars, she thought it was a dream.
She stared at it, bedazzled, mystified, too astonished to feel afraid. Surely it was a sign from the gods, perhaps a sign directed only to her, a promise that her life’s purpose soon would be revealed. The fire faded, leaving a glowing trail behind. And now she heard a sound: an animal whine that became a scream the like of which she had only ever heard on the battlefield. In a few wild steps, she stood naked at the window, watching a soldier below dance a madman’s dance as his arm and shoulder burned like fatwood.
Getting dressed took only a moment. To run down the stairs to Cadmar’s quarters took another. But Cadmar was already gone: while Clement sought enlightenment, he had already realized that the garrison was under attack, and he was ahead of her, out of the building already, where the fire falling from the sky could burn him alive. “Gilly!” she bellowed, running full tilt down the hall to pound on his door. “Wake up, damn you!” She heard the muffled murmur of his drugged voice, and left him to save himself. He was no soldier, but he knew how to keep out of harm’s way.
She ran out the door and found the burned soldier moaning, charred, scarcely conscious where he had been dragged into the shelter of the eaves. The sky exploded with fire. All across the garrison there were shouts: alarmed, astonished, and terrified. She shook the burned soldier brutally and shouted, “Was it the general who helped you? Which way did he go?”
The man said something, and perhaps he thought it was intelligible, but to Clement it meant nothing. She left him and ran down the nearest road, toward the rising shouts and the glow of fire now burning the rooftops. As she ran, she heard a captain blow his horn in the distance, signaling his disordered company to follow him into battle. Cadmar would chase that sound like a hound chases a rabbit– and just as mindlessly, she thought grimly. She ran after him, her pistols unloaded and her saber banging on her leg, with the sky exploding overhead and the garrison erupting below, and as she ran she cursed Cadmar, and cursed even louder at the beauty of the deadly explosions that filled the sky.
She reached a chaotic knot of soldiers who seemed to be trying to fight the fire that threatened to burn their barracks down, though the flames were mostly out of reach of the water they tossed at it. She found their captain and shouted at him to give up and find the source of the explosives instead, but he gave her a dazed look as though he had lost his mind or thought she had lost hers. He shouted that he had not seen Cadmar, which meant nothing.