Susurrus on Mars Read online

  He picks up the towel from the bench, unfurls and drapes it over his arm. Finds himself the object of Jaq’s twinkly eye.

  Jaq—who’s just chucked his doublet on the bench, yanked the drawstring to his britches loose to let them drop, and stepped awkwardly out to balance with arms, prise off his plimsolls with his toes—stands naked, cradling his scooped up togs. He shoves them in his locker, smiling schtum.

  Margaritifer Pilsener on top, a couple popped out of the clutch, one each for now—It’s not an Erehwynan sauna without beer, he says—then it’s lockers closed and they’re ready. Jaq picks up his own towel, flips it over his shoulder.

  This way.

  •

  A SHRUB OR small tree of yellowish-white wood called Commiphora myrrha grows her thick trunk to around five metres tall cursed by Aphrodite for scorning her suitors to fall in lust with her father Cinyras of Cyprus back when her name was Myrrha from a Semitic root meaning bitter because she was so wrought and despairing to the point of suicide her trunk swollen to store water as succulent as she is short to suffer drought for long stints of her nine months trudge through the palms of swelteringArabia the fields of Panchaea and all because her nurse halted her hanging and hairless throughout with flaky bark of silvery blue-grey whitish or ruddy hue peeling papery to a photosynthetic green underbark Myrrha coerced the woman with threats of successful suicide to help her consummate incestuous desire during the Festival of Ceres when no women were to be touched by men for nine days as she produces numerous knotted spiny branches and orthogonal branchlets stiff and spreading each ending in a spine as sharp as her father’s sword she fled from all the way to Sabaea with him hot on her heels on her twigs sparse single leaves small and even minute at times on petioles short or long from a millimetre to a centimetre arranged irregular or alternate often tri-foliolate pinnately compound with two tiny leaflets at the base of the main where the nurse found Cinyras drunk in his bed and offered a maiden keen to step in for his wife a girl of Myrrha’s age she said when he asked of leaves grey-green and chartaceous with three or four weak main veins slightly tooth-letted at the apex lateral smooth as the touch of her sneaking into his bed in utter darkness for a fistful of nights maybe six to forty millimetres long and three to twenty millimetres wide and as variable in shape as in size maybe spathulate lanceolate or elliptic maybe attenuate cuneate rounded or truncate at the base maybe apically rounded or acute as the desire to know her identity that led Cinyras to light a lamp one night to find that in autumn the leaves turn yellow before they fall to their knees in Sabaea where the gods took pity on her clustered panicles of tiny inconspicuous flowers dioecious with male flowers usually precocious three to four millimetres long and on a very short stalk a four-toothed calyx at its base her smooth brown ovate fruit two to four millimetres long she wept on her knees an aromatic oleoresin yellowish clear or opaque from bark that was split once after her metamorphosis to deliver Adonis sweet as her sap used with natron by the Egyptians in embalming used as medicine or perfume or incense used in the Ketoret during the time of the Tabernacle and the First and Second Temple periods offered on the altar of incense and brought by the Magi as a gift for the infant Yeshua

  •

  AFTER THE COOL slip-slap of wet soles on white tile as they padded through, shaking limbs still drippling fresh from the showers, the pool room’s chlorine scent and rippled blue light, the sauna is a crib that snuggles them to the warmth of its welcome, a crib in clean-edged cedar cladding and air soft with the aroma of malted grain, tinged with camphor and forests. Incense in a Nordic church of steam, its altar the stove, its few worshippers sat on the half dozen tiers of bench that line the starboard and larboard walls: a couple of old men on the top right tier, in the corner closest to the door; to the left, a family sat two up, two down on middle tiers; a group of three women back left, top tier. No intros in the sauna, just polite nods.

  Jaq twists his Margaritifer open as he ushers Puk in, pulls the door shut sharpish. He takes a slug and guides the Earther to a seat across from the family, spreads his towel. Puk lays his own towel down beside and sets to sit, halts to dither unsure when Jaq instead heads to the back of the room, beckons a follow-me to the stove, where the Erehwhynan drips the tiniest splash on the coals. Nods for Puk to follow suit.

  Not too much, says Jaq. It’s just—that’s it—just custom.

  Jaq’s sizzle and Puk’s hiss thicken the scent ever so slightly, malted barley and hops.

  It smells like baking bread, whispers Puk as they take their seats. Nifty.

  He sips his beer, inhales the wavelet of perfumed heat. Jaq leans back to bask; already the warmth is kneading flesh, steeping bone.

  Time stretches, shift softening in the quietude to glide its stint. From tick to tick. To slickening of skin. To trickle of beaded sweat. Down back.

  Sometimes dull and blunt are the wrong terms for low shift; this is one of those times.

  Löyly? says one of the women after a while not measured in minutes, palm proffering the wooden water bucket and ladle down by the stove.

  With a look to Jaq for his lead, Puk adds his nod to everyone else’s, watches the woman clamber down. She dips the ladle, picks up a jug sat on the lowest bench and drips a little liquid onto the water before pouring it on the coals. Oil of Erehwyna. Its extracts and essences waft on the wave of heat that comes now, softly fierce, brutally cozy. Musks and resins in a wash of breathtaking ardour. Myrrh. Frankincense.

  •

  BROUGHT BY THE Magi as a gift for the infant Yeshua and used in the Ketoret during the time of the Tabernacle and the First and Second Temple periods offered on the altar of incense she is the incense of all incenses in her name even frankincense made from her pale yellow resin with the slightest greenish tint stickier than gum but may be chewed like such in Ayurvedic medicine to treat arthritis heal wounds strengthen women’s hormone systems and purify the air of germs by burning to cleanse one’s house with her psychoactive smoke every day for good health and relief of depression her aroma symbolising life itself her resin blended with oils in Judaic Christian and Islamic faiths to anoint newborns and novices to a new spiritual phase loved by the sun god Helios she was known as Persian princess Leukothoe buried in sand by her father when he learned of the affair oh but her lover transformed her to the tree Boswellia sacra with her compound leaves and odd number of leaflets covered with a fine down when first sprouted and growing opposite one another along branches bearing her tiny yellowish white flowers gathered in axillary clusters composed of five petals ten stamens and a cup with five teeth afterward bearing a fruit which is a capsule of about one centimetre long but most of all bearing this milky ichor that coagulates in contact with air and can be charred and ground into kohl by the Egyptians for black eyeliner produced when the small deciduous tree reaches eight to ten years old and a height of two to eight metres with one or more trunks with a bulbous disk-like swelling at the base that will anchor her during the most savage storms so she may grow not just in rocky soil or gravel but in desolate regions directly out of solid rock as a hardy survivor whose tears with their more fragrant aroma are considered superior extracted via a small shallow cut on her trunk or branch or by easily removing a section of her bark with the texture of paper to drain this resin for collection by hand the tapping done two or three times a year with the highest quantities of aromatic terpene and diterpen and sesquiterpene to be found in those most precious tears of the final tap

  •

  A STRETCH OF slow relish, supine on the top tier, Jaq pillows his head in fingerlaced hands, crooks one leg up, slips the other long, toes pointed. Puk smoothes his towel on the bench below and settles, skims sweat from his arm with a slick of hand, a flick. Slippage coheres to ticklish beads all over his body, rivulets down the small of his back, his flanks; a runnel from jugular notch down sternum halts to regather before trickling down to navel. The whole experience is as sensual as the Sybarite’s rose petal bed that Johnson detailed in his dictionary, yet
simple as Spartan living, Scandinavian light. He glances over his shoulder at Jaq’s laze, the naked form graced to nude. And not remotely lewd, to be honest.

  Even with the sauna to themselves now, Puk savvies why Jaq said, on the way, that hanker wouldn’t enter into it, no matter if the place was crammed shoulder to shoulder with Erehwyna’s buffest braves, sat thigh to thigh, along each bench, on every bench, flesh pressing flesh, even so’s Puk was sat with Jaq’s knees spread to pincer his shoulders and some stud below betwixt his own. Heat high enough to scald if it wasn’t too hot for steam to condense, don’t be gulled, Jaq said, by Tempe casters orgying in their bathhouse brothels over tumblespace. Those aren’t real saunas, not Erehwynan saunas. Sure, every Erehwynan kidster, lass or lad, at some point fancies to fuck in the steam; they glean sharpish it’s more slog than jape.

  True enough, the heat saps all yen to languid abstraction. Puk ekes the last drips of his pilsener, sits the empty down at his side.

  He hadn’t expected debauchery, to be fair, but he did daydream the flirtations of ancient Athenian baths, athletes oiled from the gymnasia and palaestrae, sprucing for symposia. He fancied latter-day ephebes scrubbing down with cleansing sands, splashing hot water over their bodies, showering under the maws of marble lions, flicking water at each other. Exiting dark vaulted steam baths for a cooling plunge, for a lounge on the tiered steps of circular pools, for a massage with aromatic oils. That is, as the interworld tells him, as he blathered to Jaq last night in the tabac on Boulevard Hovendaal where they met a carousal of Jaq’s cadres for tabac and beer, how homo hankers gleaned their potentials in those days, dinting with glances.

  Or in the annual kissing contest at the tomb of Diocles, he said, where all the boychiks vied to see whose smooch was superior.

  Shim had dumped beer glasses full to jauping on the table then, betwixt them, noogied Jaq’s head and whispered sly in his ear, dodged his shove away with a laugh. Volutes of smoke caught the low light in their crowded booth. Jaq looked back at him, his gold eyes keen. You were saying?

  Athens, said Puk. They savvied how to do courtship in Athens. A suitor would sleep all night on the steps of his beloved’s house, just to show his commitment. Nifty, huh?

  Jaq leaned over to sip his beer without lifting, shrugged.

  I’d do that, he said.

  He looked up, backhand wiping a dribble from his chin, and the moment spun, unfolding to a sky.

  It still is, in the snug now of the sauna, is still unfolding as Puk leans back, stretches his arms along the bench above, to soak.

  I’ve been thinking, says Jaq.

  He turns his head, his fire opal eyes.

  And? says Puk.

  •

  AND... I GIVE up, says Ana. You’re impossible.

  I’ll spot you the trust, says Renart. That you know what you’re talking about. But I’m afraid I just can’t see sentience without shift.

  Fair enough, she concedes. Most people can’t.

  She lifts the ochoko to sip, but finds it long since empty of all but coffee silt, sets it back down on the table by the vase of hyacinths from the other night, the walnut bowl replenished with apples. Shrouded bread on a board. A scramble of coins. The mirror is hung above now, a rack of a dozen wine flasks in its place, where the table nestles the back wall of the room. Perched on her stool, back to the armchairs of evening, Ana twiddles a stray honey dipper as Renart, toddling in the kitchen area, dumps the macchinetta on the stove, rummages jars on the counter, cabinets above. Returns with bowls and jars—which jogs a call for the hour, a dint in her nous.

  Shitsack! she says. I didn’t realise. I should go.

  He’s already back at the counter, bringing a breadknife in one hand, a jar in the other.

  Except, she says, you’re about to tell me that would be a heinous insult, right?

  He laughs and lays the knife on the table, twists the cork from the jar.

  Actually, it would be rude of me to hold you now. That said, if you’re feeling at all peckish...

  •

  SHE IS A small drab drupe in Ana’s hand, one to two and half centimetres in diameter, grey-green, picked last season from an orchard cultivar of Harmakhis and so fleshier than the fruit of her wilder selves. Within her flesh is a pit, within the pit a span of shifts to come, an evergreen tree or shrub, short and squat, her gnarled trunk seldom over eight to fifteen metres tall, her leaves arranged opposite and decussate, narrow and lanceolate, four to ten centimetres long, one to three centimetres wide, silvery-green, racemose panicles springing from their axils, the flowers small and white, fragrant and feathery, with four sepals and petals, two stamens and bifid stigma. Within the tree is her ancient history, shift of the past, her name as a maiden dear to Athena, Moria.

  When Athena and Poseidon bickered for dominion of Athens, it was her death that won the contest set by Zeus, the city staked as prize for the deity who produced the greatest gift for humans. While the god of the sea conjured the horse from wash of waves, wise and flashing-eyed Athena transformed her dying Moria to the sacred Olea europaea, planted her in the rock of the Acropolis, in her sanctuary. She was to become the most important tree of the whole region’s horticulture. Her leaves crowned victors at the Olympics. Her oil was used for skin and hair, for lamps to light the night, for cooking. With just a little balsamic vinegar, as Renart drizzles now into the bowl where she is also, she can make fresh bread transcend its own perfection.

  In the Linear B syllabic script of Mycenaea, she had another name, e-ra-wa or elaiva, from which is derived her more common monicker: olive.

  •

  JAQ SETS THE Harmakhis olives down on the treehouse floor, unruckles an edge of the quilt for the bread and cheese, which he lays down, unwraps. Then the wine, which he wedges betwixt crossed legs and groin while he twists the corkscrew in, latches and levers it to a happy pop. Then slumps shoulders in sudden realisation, bites back the fricative of a fuckwit.

  I forgot the cups, he mumbles.

  Puk, with Apple Mouse in one hand nibbling at apple core in the other, shrugs.

  We can glug from the flask, like barbarians. It’ll add savour: lashings of blackcurrant, butter, bitumen, and the slightest hint of Jaq slobber.

  Delicious. Hang on, I have a fancy.

  Jaq fences a private corral in his own interworld domain, dints Puk the entry, and gets the backdint in his nous as Puk slips in.

  A private cast? says Puk. Sordid, I hope.

  Husht, says Jaq. I need to concentrate.

  He holds his hand up in a shallow scoop, as a beggar staring at the insult of a button for alms. Snapshots so the image, cut off at the wrist, hangs in the air as he drops his hand and calls a lathe method; the curve of hand rotated three hundred and sixty degrees blends into a bowl: a rim of fingertips hooped with keratin of fingernails; inside, the negative space shaped by a palm’s turning through time. Ridges of interphalangeal joints and metacarpophalangeal knuckles run round the exterior, but Jaq smoothes these with a focused shift of stancer skill—he could carve a perfect circle with his toe, blindfolded. A few more strokes of shift and the simwork might be some Tibetan singing bowl of carnelian flesh.

  Nifty, says Puk. I’m not clicking how we drink with it though.

  Husht.

  Jaq gleans an image of yellow-fruited ivy from a botany interface, patinas the keratin hoop with it. Flicks the whole aside to call from a personal library: Ana snapped candid on the night of her first visit in a smiling glance, head turning to a comment, one eyebrow raised. He raids a stock of Renart to construct a rivalry of two suitors, render her shift of gaze a look from this to that. A little dress-up interface for kidsters and he has two peplos-clad Renarts vying to serenade Puk’s sister, one with lyre, the other with pipes. He capsules the tableaux, stows it larboard. A snapshot of himself stood on the basalt rock below, aged to infirmity, accoutred with net, becomes an old fisherman—also capsuled, also stowed. One of Puk sat in the sauna—

  Hey, when did
you... ?

  I’m always recording.

  —becomes a kidster perched on a drystone wall, guarding a vineyard, fiddling asphodels into a weavework cage for crickets. Two sleekit foxes nail this tableaux—a tod skulking the vines, a vixen pitting her wits against the kidster’s satchel, unnoticed. Jaq plucks the bowl back into play, sets it turning as he sizes and styles each scene, skims the view he wants, applies it to the vessel. When he’s done, afloat in the air betwixt Martian and Earther, the bowl is not perhaps a faithful facsimile of a black-figure kalyx but it’s true in spirit.

  Straight out of Theocritus, says Puk.

  Sod all use for drinking, say Jaq, but it’s the thought that counts, ouais?

  By the end of their stint in the andreion of the treehouse, if they’re to cleave to the archaic protocols of the kidnapping, Jaq should have given his kleinos: a drinking cup; military attire; an ox. The last may require a dunt and shoogle into the symbolic, a nudge of leeway, but here and now he can and does conjure this first shift of friendship, romance even, to something beyond. He capsules the simulacrum and sends it, collapses the corral, then it’s just the two of them in the treehouse, sat crosslegged face-to-face. Just them and Apple, who Puk sets down in the nest of his togs as Jaq passes him the flask of Kasei red.