19 -- Lesser Baths, Mail and Washing the Streets

This morning, before I conceived the plan to take Raikas out to dinner, I’d sat in the middle of my bed, my knees pulled up to my chin. Binshala was just putting my breakfast tray down, trying to be discrete because she wasn’t supposed to be serving me during Jitz.

“Binshala?”

“Yes, Sp… Minis?”

She came over and pulled the ends of my hair out of my mouth. “Don’t do that, kid. You’ll shorten it.”

“If I were a prince in a story, and I disappeared… Would you want me to write you, and let you know I was all right, if I could wherever I was?” I looked at my nurse’s wrinkled face almost straight on because my bed was that high. She wasn’t as round or soft as… she was slender and her silver hair was always firmly pinned into a coil on her head, her eyes were actually an odd silver gray that hid her expressions behind the impression of coldness. I think that was one reason my father chose her, but her heart was warmer than her look and her hands felt good when she brushed my hair or washed me. She was a fixture in my life, like the furniture or my Mahid.

“You mean, like the mythical lost prince? Your duty would be to let your country know immediately, of course. But, Minis, if – as unlikely as that is – you should disappear, I would certainly wish that you would let me know you were alive, that you were safe.” She raised one hand as if to smooth my hair, hesitated, and drew it back. “Why ever would you wonder such a thing?”

I wanted her to stroke my hair with that hand, instead of smoothing the bedclothes as she was doing now. “Just a thought. I read something in a story and the hero didn’t write his family and they were mad at him.”

“I see. As well they should be. I wouldn’t say he was a very good hero.”

I nodded, and wondered if Raikas had already tried to write his family. She looked at me, clearly wondering what was going through my mind.

**

Up in my rooms there was little sign of the servants and there were only the two of us in the cool, echoing stone chambers. “Phew. This is the last time this year I don’t have someone all over me.”

He reminded me I was going to show him the faibalitz floor, but it wasn't the season to play so it was pretty boring, just the seats and the smooth steel bowl and the team banners hung all around the walls. Two of the polishing slaves got up from their work and made their obeisances.

I sat and fidgetted a bit while he took a close look at the steel, and ran his hands along its shining smoothness. It wasn't a flat floor actually, but a bowl. That made the games more interesting.

I pulled my clothes off and dropped them all along the hallway. “Lad!” Raikas called me back.

“Aren’t you worried someone is going to step on your clothes?”

“No. Someone will pick it up. It’s their job.”

He shrugged and followed me through the Grand platinum doors, just stopping for a moment to look up the patterns in the black wood. Just inside, there was a second set of doors made out of glass, to keep the moisture in.

The Lesser baths are both smaller and much plainer than the Great Baths for my Father. My columns were smooth blue/green marble. The Great Baths had white and gold columns with gold top and bottom and the bath was cut in half by a glass wall to an open-air bath. My baths were more like an underground grotto full of plants and a waterfall, with slits of windows high up to look like cracks in a cave ceiling.

“The small bath off to the right is cold, the swimming bath is deep in the middle there and cool. And that’s the hot bath over there. Don’t worry about the bubbles, it's not really boiling.”

I ran naked through the cascade splashing along the one wall before it plunged into the swimming bath. Then I bounced across the blue marble floor and down to sit on the stairs in the swimming bath, splashing in the warm water. “Come on in!” Then I thought that he might be afraid of water like my Father. “Oh. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If you don’t like…” Raikas already had his new clothing off and neatly folded onto one of the chaises.

Before I could reassure him he ran, favouring his mostly healed leg only slightly, leapt up and hurtled into the bath coiled up to make a huge splash like a catapult ball. I covered up my head with my arms and giggled, a little scared. Surely he could swim or he wouldn’t have jumped into the deep part like that. He came up spouting water and pushing water out of his hair with both hands, somehow staying up in the water to do it.

I jumped up and down on the wide stairs, splashing and giggling both. My hair coiled around my arms and legs as I bounced up and down and caught me so I slipped and went under. I thrashed around trying to get uncoiled, trying to reach the step with my feet, trying to stand up.

Raikas caught me by the elbow, hauled me up and let me cough and breathe. “Oops,” I said at last.

“You don’t know how to swim?”

“Umm, no. Not many people do. And Father doesn’t approve.”

“He doesn’t?”

I pulled my hair off my legs and arms so I wasn’t tangled any more. “No, he’s afraid of water. When he bathes, he has attendants holding onto his arms and legs and is in an invalid sling so he cannot slip.” I got up on the shallower step to be safe. “He threatens them with death if he feels they might let him go too deep, too fast.”

“Hmmm. You don’t look too frightened of water.” Raikas was so comfortable, even all wet. It didn’t faze him at all.

“Not really.”

“All right, then try this.” He tugged me towards himself and my feet left the step. I clutched onto his arms. “No, you don’t need to tighten up like that. I won’t drop you. Here, lie backwards and I’ll hold you up. Let your arms and legs trail like… wet hair.”

“You think I should?” I asked. I lay back, stiff and sinking. He had me firm under my neck and shoulders and I didn’t go under.

“It’s a good idea. Loosen up, Minis. You can do it.”

He showed me how to float on my back and then how to hold my breath and float face down. Though he made me promise not to do that to any of the servants, because they might die on the spot, if they thought I’d drowned. I even managed a paddle in the shallow water for a few arm-lengths all by myself.

“I’m cold. Let’s go into the hot bath.”

“You go. I’d like to swim a little. This bath is almost too warm already.”

It was almost too warm? What did he swim in, ice? I got into the hot bubbling water with a sigh of relief, rested my chin on my arms and watched him in the swimming bath. He was like one of the myths of fish-men, though my own experience made me think the paintings of them with long hair were probably wrong. They’d have short, curly hair like Raikas’s.

I imagined his kids, if he had any. It seemed like he was used to kids. He was young enough they’d all be little and have curly black hair like him and those chocolate dark eyes. And his wife. I tried to imagine long curly black hair on a woman and thought I might be imagining it well. If he had a lover he’d probably look the same, too. And they’d all be worried. Maybe a mom or a dad too.

“Raikas?”

He shook the water out of his ears and two strokes brought him over to the other side of the wall between the swimming bath and the hot one. He mimicked my posture across from me. “Yes, Minis?”

“Have you written home to let your family know that you’re alive? Enslaved but alive?”

I couldn’t read the look on his face, but he didn’t answer me right away. Perhaps he hadn’t thought he could. “If you write it here, tonight, I can slip it into the mail in the Marble Palace and no one will know its from you… since you won’t tell anyone your name I guess you don’t want anyone to know who you are.”

Wet hair is odd to nibble on, the first mouthful is full of water. He studied the marble under his tanned arms, still not saying anything. “Like your country mother said and you explained. ‘Not your responsibility, not your shame.’”

He signed his hand down sign for no. “Boru, no. I was thinking… no one will question where the letter is from?”

“Post goes all over the world from here. If it were mailed from the office in the city it would be opened and read because it’s going outside the Empire. But from here… there’s stuff going out all the time to the ambassadors and others. No one looks.”

He surged up and over the wall, catching me both by surprise and in a hug. He kissed my hands and pressed them to his forehead. “Thank you, lad.”

I pointed out the linen robes and he threw one on and I led him back to my sitting room.

“There’s a desk in that little alcove there, pens, paper, envelopes. Write your letter and address it as you want.”

Raikas sat down at the desk where I’d left all the letter writing materials. He looked down at the pen and then around the desktop. “Where is the ink well?”

“Oh, it’s inside the pen. Just pull the hat off the pen and start writing.”

He took a moment to examine it from all angles, curious as a boy. When he started writing his letter it was fast.

I went off to read while he wrote, not wanting to hang over his shoulder. I curled up in my big reading chair under my lamps, listening to the scratch of nib on paper. When he was done he came over to where I sat, staring at the page, not really reading it. “All done?” I asked, looking up.

“I’m finished.” He went down on a knee to bring his eyes level with mine. “Here it is.”

I put my book down and took the packet from him. He took my hands again and pressed them to his forehead. I looked away, embarrassed. 

“Wait here, I’ll slip it into the right office, and it will be safely done, before people come back from holiday and notice it hasn’t been there all week.” I slipped out of the chair. “I’ll be right back.”

It took me a few minutes to traverse the shortest way down to the administrative side of the Marble Palace and slid his letter packet into the half-full cubby of letters to go outside the Empire, right into the middle.

**

By that time it was late enough that the last sun was just on the Rim and I took Raikas out to my tiny balcony, set into the wall so it wasn’t easy to see from outside, where we could see the Washing of the Streets.

“Once the washing is done, I can send you back to the Mezem, but it will be a regular carry chair because the water makes things too slippery for the express chairs.”

“I’m not worried, lad.”

We still both wore the robes and I sat with my feet tucked up under me, looking out onto the Square from my angle on the world. I had not had any of the lamps lit so that our eyes would see the spectacle un-dazzled.

To our right we could just see the Presentation Balcony with the banner of Arko floating gently above it. The cliff waterfall, just showing at the curve beyond the Marble Palace, was a tiny silver thread against the darker stone. The sun was cut exactly in half and the torches around the rim flared to life, ten evenly spaced, big enough to rival the sun itself. Those torches would burn blue and gold and tall as five men, until my Father came out to pour the libation at the start of the new day at middle night. 

The bright, breathy notes of the Rim signals sounded over the city, like the voices of large flutes. I said. “Here it comes.”

“Here what comes?” Raikas turned to me and I waved to draw his attention to the waterfall.

The rumble came to us on a moist breeze, a thunder shivering the stone under us. The Great Gate, at the top of the cliff, glittered open and the tiny thread became ten streams, forming together to make a shimmering cataract, pouring down to pound and scrub and foam the city clean in a way that all the people scrubbing just couldn’t. Raikas watched, his lips just open slightly as the river, rather than being forced underground to move our lifts and raise our fountains and feed our taps and garderobes and drive our Press, was allowed to follow its course over the edge.

The streets were normally cleansed this way once every eight day or so but this time it was still in daylight, and both longer and more forceful than any other time. The reservoir on top of the cliff would be emptied and cleansed this way. People floated candle boats down their streets, after the first rush of water cleared away the last detritus of Jitzmitthra, and they began to glitter, every one.

In the dark alcove of my balcony, where no one could see, Raikas put his arm around me, I glanced up at him as he did and realized that it was just something he didn’t even think about. I leaned into his side, feeling completely safe and enclosed by his strong arm, and we watched fire and water flow down from the cliff into the lake.