Traveler of the Blue Road
Part 4 - Confrontation
Chapter 5 - Voices Crying Out
The bathhouse of the guest palace was called Afal Ran. When his attendants guided Chagum there for the first time, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The place didn’t look like a bathing area; it was almost large enough to be a receiving hall. The floor was dotted with richly embroidered cushions stuffed with something soft like cotton. Ten young women were reclining on these cushions. They rose when Chagum entered, but kept their eyes cast down.
Were all these women bath attendants? There were dressed in white in Yogo-style dresses and sashes. Their face coverings were held in place by white headbands. Chagum couldn’t see their eyes or noses, only their mouths. Their attire reminded him somewhat of the bath attendants he’d had in in the imperial palace in Kosenkyo, but all of those attendants had been boys.
The women’s clothing was made of a thinner material than he was used to seeing. The bath attendants in New Yogo had a graceful and courteous way of speaking and moving that these women did not imitate. The entire scene was familiar, but unsettling in its differences.
Baths were sacred in New Yogo for their purifying effects on the body and mind. Chagum liked them because baths were a source of quiet, relatively private time.
The women’s movements were entirely silent. As soon as they stood up from their cushions, the music of some unfamiliar stringed instrument started playing a subdued and relaxing melody. When Chagum looked up, he saw the tiniest sliver of space like a window carved into the incredibly high ceiling. That must be where the music was coming from.
The women walked as quietly as the wind. They removed Chagum’s clothes a piece at a time. They smelled like sweetly aromatic wakura flowers. The touch of their hands was so light that Chagum barely felt them.
When Chagum was stripped all the way down to his undergarments, one of the women tugged on a thin sleeve and guided him through a huge enameled doorway. The next room was warm with steam. It was a bit more difficult to breathe, and even harder to see anything. Chagum started sweating almost immediately. This room was much smaller and narrower than the previous one. There were no windows or clear openings for ventilation except for the door, so the room was dim. Another door shaped like an arch loomed hugely like a gaping maw on the other side of the room; the little illumination that filtered into this room came from there.
The woman who had led Chagum into the steam room suddenly touched his shoulder. In the space of an instant, the other women hovering in the steam room’s doorway vanished from sight as if they’d melted into the mist. Chagum looked away from the woman, frowning. Her wet clothes were practically transparent.
“Is the bath through there?” Chagum asked, pointing to the archway on the other side of the room. “If it is, I don’t need any more help. I’ll go in myself.”
The woman maintained her grip on Chagum’s shoulder and stepped closer. Her hand slid down to his chest in a soft caress. Chagum looked at her face; he could only see her lips because of the face covering.
She was smiling.
The instant Chagum realized this, he pushed her hand off his chest and stepped back. He was enraged, but he didn’t yell. Shock made his heart jump to his throat. Chagum set his jaw and let his anger show clearly in his expression.
He walked toward the next room alone; he hoped the baths were there. None of the bath attendants followed him.
The room on the other side of the large archway was lit by a golden glow. It was another enormous space; the ceiling was domed and full of tiny, uniform holes that looked a little like stars in a night sky. Steam filled the air in here, too, but it was thinner; Chagum had no difficulty breathing. The quality of the light from above revealed that it was close to sunset.
There was only one bath in this room, but it was large enough to fit a hundred bathers easily. The tub and the walls were patterned with seashells that gleamed softly in the low light. The bath was full of hot water.
Chagum’s nerves were raw, but being able to take deep breaths helped ease some of his lingering outrage. He removed the rest of his clothes, rinsed himself off with warm water from a bucket, then slid into the enormous bath. The water was hotter and somehow softer than he was expecting. The soles of his feet felt like they were being supported by pillows. When he looked down, he saw a fine layer of tiny bubbles forming over his feet and calves. The bottom of the tub felt very strange; the bubbles were so thick that he couldn’t see what it was made of. Maybe something had been done to the floor so that people wouldn’t slip and fall.
Chagum ducked his head underwater. When he surfaced, something at the edge of the tub caught his eye. It looked like a simple bar of soap at first glance, but when he looked again, he noticed that it had been carved with an intricate pattern of red flowers. It was hard to believe that something so delicate and fine could be handmade. The soap sculpture would be destroyed as it was used. As Chagum traced the carved edges of the soap with his hands, he realized that the pattern on the soap matched the pattern carved into the edge of the tub perfectly. The carving was so fine and delicate that it must have been done with tools as fine and precise as a sewing needle.
Chagum looked around the room in awe. Now that his eyes were used to the steam and the gloom, he could tell that the walls and even the ceiling were decorated the same way as the tub and the soap. How many people had it taken to create everything in this single room?
Chagum suspected that this palace had been built more recently than the imperial palace in Kosenkyo. Its hugeness and the intricacy of its design and building must have required countless workers, engineers, architects and artisans. He wondered how long it would take for all of the people who lived and worked in the Second Palace to accomplish such a feat.
The Talsh empire had resources beyond Chagum’s wildest imaginings. As he stared at the bathroom’s walls, he remembered the woman who’d smiled at him. The Talsh clearly considered him naïve and immature; easy to sway or seduce. He couldn’t shake the sense that the woman had been mocking him in some way.
Chagum knew that it was customary for Yogoese princes to take women to their beds at the age of seventeen, even women who weren’t their wives, but Chagum considered such a practice degrading. Did the Talsh usually welcome foreign guests in this way? When Prince Raul learned that he’d refused the woman, he’d probably laugh at him for being too young or too prudish.
I don’t really care. I am who I am.
Chagum rested his head against the edge of the bathtub. The steam sparkled and glinted in the air. As his eyes adjusted to the early evening light, he saw that there was gold embedded in the walls as well.
It’s only natural to be stunned by all this wealth. Talsh definitely isn’t boring.
He remembered the cries of grief and pain that he’d heard on his journey to Rahan. He could almost hear them now, echoing deafeningly in the vast room like the roar of a raging stream. He closed his eyes and wrapped himself in the sound as if it were a shroud.
Chagum stretched out completely in the bath with his eyes still closed. He wanted to fight—suddenly, more than anything else, that was what Chagum wanted to do. He knew that he was only one person, but there was something strong and unbroken at the core of himself. The more threatened he felt, the stronger he became.
He was the Crown Prince of a small nation that had never known war. Prince Raul probably outmatched him in every way.
But even so, power wasn’t the arbiter of everything. There was more than one way to measure a person’s strength. Chagum was essentially a prince without a country at the moment, but he had still sailed over the ocean and crossed mountains to come here. He might have been bodily kidnapped, but no one could take away his dignity or his belief in himself. He wasn’t even wearing the clothes that usually proclaimed his rank right now. He was himself, naked, bare—and strong.
Even if he was forced to bow before the Talsh to prevent New Yogo’s destruction, his essential self would remain unbroken and unbowed.
Chagum opened his eyes and stood up so fast that he splashed water everywhere.
What an odd chapter.
ReplyDeleteAnd I thought that exorcism in the anime which looked suspiciously like a birth scene was creepy.
Not odd at all when you look at who's pulling the strings (Kurz) and how he's manipulating both Hugo and Chagum, both of which he fails to understand. Read in the same context as "Rain in the Imperial Capital" it makes perfect sense. Kurz is trying to seduce (very clumsily!) Chagum to the Talsh cause. It also highlights the fact that Chagum's growing up, which will get a lot more emphasis in the epilogue; in Yogoese society, he's already an adult.
DeleteThere's also good foreshadowing here with the water (which is always strongly linked to Chagum) and what he intends to do later. I don't find it weird at all, though the attempted assault was definitely upsetting.
I actually liked the birth scene in the anime, since the egg really was symbolic of maturation in the books and it showed Balsa and Tanda as parents, in more than one way. :) But birth is kinda gross if you take a closer look at it.