Chapter Sixty-Six: The Golden House, pt II

They stumbled their way to the baths, Mirhan casually humming an unknown tune as they went. The colorful ceramic tilework boasted lively creatures: birds in flight, leaping deer with dogs in pursuit. A diverting diorama for a bathing emperor…or, in this case, for an interloping Tolmish prince.

The others began stripping down—Cemil had no reason to be shy after all, having intimate knowledge of everyone here, Osmund realized with another jealous twinge. The three men piled up their clothing without fanfare. Sakina hesitated a moment with a towel bundled to her chest. She seemed to be determinedly not looking in Cemil’s direction. Osmund pretended not to notice, and not to care.

This room, unlike the expansive public bathhouse found on the grounds, had an inlaid tub in the center. It all became less awkward once they were settled beneath the warm water.

“Heaven,” Mirhan sighed, lids closing. Sakina gave a fluttering laugh.

“I thought mystics didn’t believe in attaining heaven before the death of the body.”

“Whoever told you that is a liar. The heavens are perfectly within reach when certain conditions are achieved.”

“With the aid of hallucinogens,” Cemil supplied, grinning.

Mirhan opened an eye. To Osmund he drawled, “Do you see how these wealthy children are so spiritually bereft?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were a servant, weren’t you?” The man stuck one foot out of the water and wiggled his toes. Even intoxicated, he pronounced every word carefully. “I bet you never forgot what it was like, eating from Cemil’s table for the first time. I was eight years old before I knew hot water. And do you know what I thought? ‘Ah…heaven does exist down here for us mortals.’ It’s just that I had never tasted it before.”

Despite having grown up in a castle, Osmund believed he knew his meaning. Hadn’t he spent every single day of his early exile longing for the luxuries he’d always taken for granted? “I thought the Empire had free baths and kitchens.”

Cemil hummed and leaned back in the tub. “There are many small villages scattered across the countryside. Facilities require…upkeep. People take care of each other, as neighbors do.”

“And, when they can’t, there’s always the option of sending their children to work in a traveler’s lodge run by a mystic order,” Mirhan explained. Osmund wondered if that was a trace of bitterness, though it was well-concealed. “I found out at an early age that devotees have many ways of seeing heaven. Equal in number to plots in their garden, believe it or not.” This was evidently another joke about hallucinogens.

Osmund sidled along the square bath’s rim, trying to relax and surrender to the heat, muscle by muscle, but he could not seem to get comfortable. “What kind of person did you serve, Osmund?” Sakina asked him suddenly.

“He doesn’t like to speak of it,” Cemil reminded her, butting in.

“It’s alright.” Osmund studied the ornamented ceiling rather than the faces around him, mind floating, and said, “He was a noble. A big man, and he beat me.”

It was his father he remembered as he continued painting the picture for them. “He was loud and rude, with no respect for others. His favorite sport was the hunt, though he had his dogs do the work of it for him. He lacked patience for learning of any kind, and still expected to be treated like some all-knowing master. To him, I was a possession. Something like a horse, and he treated his horses terribly.”

The words had come from a place of surprising calm. “This world is better off without him,” Sakina declared, looking incensed on his behalf.

“It is,” Osmund agreed, and for the first time a noticeable tremble entered his voice. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Three pairs of eyes bored into him, making him feel raw and exposed. Mirhan’s stare was unashamedly interested. “Yet you grieve for him.”

“I knew him all my life,” Osmund countered, shifting in the warm water again. “What do you expect? When you think about it, everything in life is a little sad, isn’t it? You can’t even feel happiness without sadness, too, thinking of how a good thing will end one day, or change so much you won’t recognize it.”

“In that case, why be happy at all?” Mirhan challenged. “After all, one day you’ll be food for the worms, and none of it will have mattered.”

“Leave him be, Mirhan.” An edge had entered Cemil’s voice.

But Sakina had taken up the banner. “Surely, Osmund, there must be something that makes you purely happy. Enough to forget the rest.”

Osmund answered without missing a single beat. “Riding a horse.”

The others laughed. No, Sakina and Mirhan did, Cemil only had a strange distance in his eye that made Osmund feel he had misstepped.

“That’s no way to live,” Mirhan decided. Mischief enlivened his features. “Life doesn’t occur in the future. It’s in the here and now, nothing else. Let me show you.”

Osmund went rigid as the other man drifted close in the water, closer, so close, until he was practically straddling the Tolmishman’s lap, hiking one thigh over his knees. “What are you…”

Mirhan lazily gazed over his shoulder; Osmund, too, dared to look at Cemil. He was overseeing the spectacle with the interest of someone starved, a possessive fire in his eye…but he didn’t raise his voice to object. He was waiting. Watching.

“Well, Cemil?” Mirhan called. “Do I have your blessing?”

The Meskato prince’s reply was even and controlled, but Osmund could hear the familiar undertone, the same that made him shiver when spoken into his ear in the dark. “If it’s what he wishes.”

Mirhan rolled his hips. “Trust me,” he purred as the man beneath him gasped, “it is.”

Swallowing, Osmund raised one hand just above the water line, placing it absently on Mirhan’s bare back. His eyes were still locked with Cemil’s, and he could see the Meskato prince’s tiny intake of breath, as if it were his skin Osmund was touching so delicately.

Somewhere, Sakina’s sigh. “You troublemaker, Mirhan.” She sounded bothered in more ways than one.

The fox-faced man needed no further encouragement. He leaned in close, letting the soft puffs of his breath brush over Osmund’s face, and then—he was pressing their lips together.

Osmund hummed into the strange kiss. His mind was occupied with the sensation accompanying each new point of contact, each unexpected slide of friction. It was the heat. It was the steam. Above all, it was the knowledge of that burning stare. Cemil was watching him. Even with his eyes closed and his mind lost, he felt it on him like a touch.

Splash. Water bobbed around Osmund’s waist as Mirhan rose up on his knees out of the water, no doubt giving the others behind them a show in the process. One hand went to Osmund’s shoulder, and the other snaked below, positioning himself. Osmund shuddered with the realization; it had been a long time since anyone had asked for him like this.

“That face,” the man above said, his soft feminine lips curved in a slanting smile. “You are kind of cute from this angle.”

Then, he sank down.

“Ah,” Mirhan breathed out, eyelids fluttering, his expression melting into one of rapture. “That’s it.”

He moved like no partner Osmund had ever known, his head tilted skyward, back curled in a dancer’s arc as he set his own pace. A realization struck Osmund in that moment, looking upon the other man’s features, his quivering throat, the shape of his nose.

The truth was that Mirhan wasn’t exceptionally beautiful. Not the way Cemil was, or Sakina. But he was confident. He was certain. And he moved through the world like he belonged in it. Oh, how he moved!

This interlude was soon over. Cemil had appeared at his side, and Osmund forgot everything—and everyone—else. “Look at me,” the Meskato prince commanded softly, and Osmund turned towards him as he would the light of the sun, surrendering his mouth for a kiss. He was barely aware of Mirhan climbing off; Cemil filled his world, touching him anywhere he could reach.

Nearby, he heard laughter, quiet voices. A pattering, as of feet on tiles. Osmund barely registered the others’ flight from the bath before the world went spinning, the air leaving his lungs in a gasp, and his upper half landed prone against the wet ceramic, dripping from the water. Face down against the floor, he struggled to right himself, but felt the weight of Cemil’s body pressing him down. Grinding against the pool’s edge was the only relief he could manage from this vulnerable state.

 “Let me face you,” he slurred. He twisted his back to wind an arm around Cemil’s shoulders, messily kissing that lovely mouth, then moaning brokenly into it as their bodies began to join beneath the water. Yes, sang instinct and the last threads of his consciousness together. More, more, yes.

They weren’t interrupting anything by the time they made it back to the bedroom; Sakina and Mirhan were out cold beneath the sheets. She had made an attempt to throw something on, but he hadn’t bothered with the effort.

They sat a while gulping down cold water—Osmund felt a mighty headache coming on from the heat and exertion, not to mention the tobacco—before settling into the remaining mattress. The Meskato prince got surprisingly snuggly, resting his head on Osmund’s chest.

“I’m not crushing you?” he murmured.

“Not at all,” Osmund lied. (It was a little harder to breathe this way, but he wouldn’t have had him move for anything.) “You aren’t so much bigger than me.”

Cemil repositioned his head a few times. Osmund wondered if he could hear his heartbeat, or was even seeking it out. The resulting flutter in his ribcage produced a small chuckle, confirming the theory.

The room sank into silence but for the soft snores from the other bed. In the darkness, Osmund’s troublesome thoughts struggled free from the torpor of drugs and sex. He knew they couldn’t pretend away the day’s events—the emperor’s arrival, and everything that came with it—after the sun rose, no matter how pristine a sanctuary the Golden House was.

The minutes slid one by one into oblivion, and he had started to drift off when Cemil, apparently awake, said quietly,

“Was that okay tonight?”

Osmund’s eyes dragged open again. “…Yes,” he managed. “I think so…mm. And you?”

“I’m going to think about you with him.”

“It was you I was with, that whole time.” He gently prodded the other’s bare shoulder. “I’m surprised you wanted to see it.”

Cemil went very quiet. Osmund blinked down at his shape in the dark. “Cemil…why didn’t you stop us?”

“I don’t know.” That tremulous uncertainty was so odd, so out of place in him. “I was curious how it would feel.”

Another few moments passed in the smothering dark, neither of them daring to sleep or to speak, before finally Cemil asked,

“You’ll come with me to the palace? At the end, when it’s done. You’ll stay?”

Osmund’s lips formed around the automatic yes. But when he tried to voice it, it would not come. His place was with Cemil, but now he was hit with an impossible contradiction: no matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine a life for himself cloistered in the Inner Gardens of the palace, waiting endlessly for his turn in a rotation. Every day, waiting.

“Of course.” It was, he realized with no small amount of shame, easier to sound certain in the dark. “Yes. I’ll be with you. Always.”