• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 478 0

in the same mellow voice he had used to recite poetry, only he spoke it more softly, and he did not try to hide his emotion when his face trembled or his lips shook. His hands held her face in his, and she felt like a bird’s egg: small and safe and about to be born. Her hands raced all over his body, taking him in through her fingertips. She explored daringly at first, and then, somewhat gingerly. She was unsure. But when she reached down, filled with trepidation, to where she had expected to find an absence, she was met with a presence that both overjoyed and shocked her. Here was the beginning of the future she had sensed. This was something she could not have invented.

He was not what she expected a eunuch to be. At first, she did not ask questions. She merely enjoyed the results of her misapprehension, and left it at that. But later, as they lay side by side in the Rose Pavilion, flower petals strewn across their blankets and crushed underneath them, a thorny stem captured in her long hair, she wondered aloud why he had not been treated like the others. She knew what happened to eunuchs. She knew that some of them were castrated before puberty, and that others, those who were taken later, usually in battle or in the slave trade, those were mutilated completely. A doctor in the palace checked the men every year, to make sure that nothing had grown back. It was considered essential to the eunuchs’ purpose—the guarding and protecting of women—that they be uninterested in their charges, and therefore trustworthy. They also held many other positions of power within the palace, but the black eunuchs’ chief responsibility was to watch over the harem. How could he have escaped the fate of the others? How had he maintained his manhood?

He smiled when she asked him, as if holding back a laugh. “Before I tell you,” he said, “I want to know if it would have made a difference.”

She thought for a moment. Then she said, “I fell in love with you when you grabbed my arm in the carriage. I didn’t know it then, but I did. And I assumed you were like the others, so that answers your question. But am I happy I was wrong? Yes.”

He explained that when he was captured they had brutalized his testicles, but he had run away before they could do anything more. They had found him, and brought him to the palace, but when they took him before the Kizlar Agha, the Chief of the Eunuchs, the man had been so taken with the new charge’s beauty that he had instantly given him the name Hyacinth and declared that he would be his personal attendant. As soon as Hyacinth was alone with him, he told the Kizlar Agha that if he castrated him completely he would kill himself, and the Agha, already half in love with the boy, had acquiesced.

“Then why did he send you to take care of the women?”

“Once he realized that I would never return his feelings, he only wanted to make sure that I wasn’t around the men. He was more jealous of them than of the women.”

They both smiled when he said this, because the idea so completely contradicted their present state. Then they saw that the first pink lights of sunset were streaming into the kiosk and they knew that their time was ending.

“What was your real name?” she asked.

“Subbaharan,” he said.

She had trouble pronouncing it, and it sounded to her like the name of someone unhappy, someone doomed. She touched his long eyelashes with her fingertips and said, “I like Hyacinth.”

2005

It was dim in the room but Milo’s eyes shone. They always seemed to reflect what little light there was. His face was close to hers and he was studying her, preparing to ask a question.

What did you do before this?

His tone of voice told her that this was the time when she could no longer avoid talking about herself. She pushed her hair behind her ear. She closed her eyes and opened them and took a breath.

I was a dancer. And then I wasn’t.

What happened?

She tilted her head. She looked away and then back at him.

I had an injury.

What happened?

I lost someone very close to me. I was upset. I threw myself into dancing and then