Lips Touch: Three Times (6 page)

She stared at him, and at the periphery of her vision something
glinted. It was the little silver knife, still impaled in the rind of the
cheese.
Knife,
she thought. Her fingers twitched, wanting to reach for
it, as some kind of knowing skimmed the glassy surface of her mind. All the
omens of the day, the swirl of swan feathers, the grave of dead grass, her
grandmother's blade still rimed with the frost of the underworld, all her
memories of warnings, they coalesced into a simple understanding: Deep in her veins
ran the admonition never to eat fruit out of season. It was late autumn; all
orchards were bare, and no peach trafficked in from a far hemisphere could
smell so sweet. Surely only one orchard could have ripened it.

With that, Kizzy knew. A goblin had her soul on the end of his
fishing line, ready to reel it in. She knew. But now, in the fugue of
wanting,
of
almost having,
filled with the musk and the spice of that wine
and that chocolate, her hip still warm from Jack Husk's head, the knowing was
as insubstantial as words written on water. Every trace of it vanished as soon
as it was written, leaving only the

54

reflection of Jack Husk's too-perfect beauty. It was an imaginary
beauty dreamed up just to please her, and it did. It did. It pleased and drugged
her. Her eyelids were heavy but her soul was light as gossamer, a spiders web
in a wind, anchored only by a single thread.

Kizzy
knew,
but she willfully
unknew
it, and the
plangent voices of the dead were lost to the drum of her hot blood and the
tingle of her ready lips. She wanted to taste and be tasted.

She didn't reach for the knife. Heavily and hypnotically, with her
soul flattening itself back like the ears of a hissing cat, Kizzy leaned in and
drank of Jack Husk's full, moist mouth, and his red, red lips were hungry
against hers, drinking her in return. Their eyes closed. Fingers clutched at
collars and hair, at the picnic blanket, at the grass. And as they sank down,
pinning their shadows beneath them, the horizon tipped on its side, and slowly,
thickly, hour by hour, the day spilled out and ebbed away.

It was Kizzy's first kiss, and maybe it was her last, and it was
delicious.

55

[ILLUSTRATION: The knife in the woman's hands.]

56

57

[ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man.]

SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE

58

[ILLUSTRATION: Three men walking.]

59

[ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man walking.]

60

[ILLUSTRATION: Birds flying.]

61

[ILLUSTRATION: A woman in a cemetery.]

62

[ILLUSTRATION: A tree and a woman going down stairs.

63

64

65

[ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a bottle.]

66

[ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a baby and other kids walking.]

67

[ILLUSTRATION: A old woman holding a baby.]

68

[ILLUSTRATION: A teapot and cups.]

69

SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE

Kissing can ruin lives. Lips touch, sometimes teeth clash.

New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed
girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild, like a
little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and
let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves.

She might, and she might not.

A particular demon in India rather hoped that she would.

This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the
girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and
shadows reeled out on kite strings. It begins underneath India, on the cusp of
the last century when the British were still riding elephants with maharajas
and skirmishing on the arid frontiers of the empire.

The story begins in Hell.

70

ONE The Demon & the Old Bitch

Down in Hell, the Englishwoman known around Jaipur as "the
old bitch" was taking tea with a demon. She was silver-haired,
straight-backed, and thin-lipped, with a stare that could shoot laughter from the
air like game birds. She was not at all liked by her countrymen, but even they
would have been shocked to see her here.

"Come to the point," she told the demon impatiently.

If he looked faintly human, it was because once upon a time he had
been. He was little and ancient, with a moon-round face as withered as old
apple peel, half of it colored red like a wine stain. "Remember, my
dear," he replied with a genial smile, "a handful may survive
naturally. Earthquakes are full of surprises. Children still alive, like buried
treasure? It makes the spirit soar to see them pulled out into the
sunlight."

"Indeed," she said.

There had been an earthquake in Kashmir. She had sent her shadow
out to see it, and it had slipped among the ruins of villages, relaying the devastation
back to her through its dulled senses. Shadows have no ears, so she couldn't
hear the lamentations of the survivors, which was as she preferred. She said,
"You will give me

71

the children, Vasudev. You know there's no arguing with me on this
matter."

"Estella, you wouldn't deprive me of the pleasure of our
negotiations, would you? They're what I
live
for."

"You haven't been
alive
for a thousand years. If you
were, you might take less pleasure in bartering for children's souls."

"Do you think so? I scarcely remember what it was like, being
alive. I recall certain ...
appetites.
The sight of a woman's navel
could drive me mad. Children, though? I have absolutely no memory of caring
anything about them." He poured tea out into chipped cups and added sugar
and cream to his own.

Estella took hers and sipped it black, replying bitterly, "I
well believe that." It was Vasudev's particular way with children that
accounted for her being here at all, a lone living human descending each day
into Hell.

There was a tonic the demons brewed to keep their ancient flesh
whole when they passed through the flames. More than fifty herbs and barks went
into it, along with the mixed waters of sacred rivers. Once, many years ago,
Vasudev had forgotten to drink his daily dose and he'd been burned passing
through the Fire. Half his face had remained this vivid crimson ever since, and
when he went up into the living world, children
stared
at him. And while
he had never been overly disposed to spare their souls before, he began to
become downright perverse about it, culling the young at every opportunity.
Even when some more likely candidate might be lying by -- an ailing grandparent
flush with memories of a long life, for example -- he would take the child
instead, every time.

Yama, the Lord of Hell, had seen that some balance was called

72

for, and he had appointed Estella to parley on behalf of the
children. For more than forty years now she had served as Ambassador to Hell.

She calmly sipped her tea and said, "Ten."
"Ten?" Vasudev chuckled. "How sentimental of you. What would
people say? They'd call it a miracle." "A miracle never hurt
anyone."

He thought it over. "Ten children clambering out of the
rubble, white with the dust of their ruined village. Those great dark eyes of
theirs ... No. It's too many. It's too
rosy.
The little beasts will come
to
expect
to survive. I'll give you five. Or, if you're game," he
said, his small eyes glinting, "we can spice things up with a little
curse."

"I despise your curses," Estella said with a shudder,
then added, after a pause, "Eight."

"Eight?" Vasudev scoffed. "No, I don't think so.
Not today. You can have five, or you can let me have some fun."

Estella felt a weight settle on her heart. Vasudev got in these
peevish moods sometimes, and she knew he would dig in his heels now, and
tomorrow, and the next day, until he had his fun, and she never knew what form
his "fun" might take. He might give her a few extra children in the
bargain, but only on the condition they grow forked tails, or never fall in
love, or wake screaming every night for the rest of their lives. He had endless
imagination for curses.

Wearily, wearily, Estella asked, "What do you have in
mind?"

Vasudev laughed and swung his little legs in his chair. His feet
didn't quite reach the ground. "I'll tell you what I have in mind. You can
have your ten Kashmiri brats ...
for free ..."

"Free?"
Estella repeated. No soul was ever free.
Every child she saved she purchased in trade. It was her own dark work to
select

73

those who would die in their place, and she had an ever-changing
list of the wicked from whom to choose. High up on it now were a slave trader
in the Aravalli Hills and a captain in Calcutta who had kicked his groom to
death because his horse threw a shoe. Heart attack, drowning, a fall from a
horse, they would meet such ends as that. Estella always dealt sudden deaths,
even to those who most deserved lingering ones.

This was the office she had performed since she was a young widow
and had found her way down to Hell on her own, like Orpheus of myth. Unlike
Orpheus, though, who had charmed his way past the three-headed dog and
enchanted Persephone with his lyre, Estella had had no music at her fingertips
with which to win Yama's sympathy. He had
not
given her her young
husband to guide back up to the world. Instead, he had given her this job to
do. It was an ugly job -- earthquakes, floods, pestilence, murder, souls
slipping always through her fingers -- and her resentful demon counterpart took
every opportunity to make it uglier.

"No, really," he insisted.
"Free!
Ten
children shall survive and no one shall die in trade for it! All you have to do
is deliver a curse I've been dreaming up. The Political Agent's wife, the
songbird, you know the one? She's had another brat and the christening is
tonight. Were you invited? No? Well, that oughtn't stop you. Here is what I
want you to do ..."

He told her his idea.

Estella blanched. "No!" she said at once, appalled.
"No?
No
⁷
. All right then, how about this? I'll give
you
all
of them. Every child in that village!" "Every ...
?"

"Every last brat will live! How can you say no to that?"

74

She couldn't say no, as well he knew. She would have nightmares
over this curse for the rest of her life, and Vasudev knew that too, and that
was his favorite thing about it. After a long, miserable silence, Estella
nodded.

Vasudev chuckled and chortled and went off whistling, leaving
Estella to her work. Still pale, she took a flask from her pocket and drank
down her daily dose of the tonic Vasudev delivered to her, lest she too be
burned passing through the Fire. Then she walked slowly into it. When she
reemerged some time later, she carried the souls of two babies in her arms and
the older children walked behind her in a row like ducklings. Silently, they
followed her out of Hell.

And far away in the mountains of Kashmir, the rescuers, on the
very verge of giving up, unearthed a pocket of air and pulled twenty-two
children out of the rubble alive.

It was a miracle.

75

TWO The Curse

A t the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies
of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of. It was generally
agreed that she had been in India too long. It had "gotten to her."
She spoke the native tongue, and not just Hindustani but also Rajasthani and a
touch of Gujarati, and she had even been heard to haggle once in Persian! It
suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India
into her very mouth and
tasted
it, like a lover's fingers. It was
indecent.

And if that wasn't bad enough, she ate mangoes in the bazaar with
the natives, juice dribbling down her chin, and was said to imbibe a tonic
prepared for her daily by a dreadful little man with a burn scar over half his
face. She touched beggars and had even been seen carrying rag-swaddled infants
home with her in her arms. It was rumored that her handsome factotum had been
one such baby, which in itself bespoke a lifetime in this land -- a lifetime of
rescued beggar babes grown to manhood.

He was always at her side, lordly as a raja and unsmiling as an
assassin, with a dangerous gleam in his eye and odd bulges about his tailored
suits that hinted at concealed knives. Plenty of whispers went round town about
him -- that he could speak with tigers, that he had a forked tail he wore
tucked down one trouser leg (the left),

76

that he had been seen crossing a street without his shadow, and
that he would do anything for the old bitch. Even the most shameless of gossips
can inadvertently hit upon truths. He
would do
anything for her, and had
done, many times.