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Courtyard — La Perle Noire
The courtyard is a narrow rectangle reaching far from the noise and bustle of the Grand Plaza, girded up and down and on all four sides by gracious white marble colonnades in the Hellenic style so favoured by the architects of Marsilikos. Orange trees in terracotta pots stand beside each column, perfuming the air.
In the downstairs colonnade the dark wooden tables are of an ordinary height, and surrounded by chairs save where sofas are set against the walls. White marble steps climb from either side of the doors, into the upper colonnade where tables crouch low upon a cushion-strewn, tiled floor. The orderly and geometric patterns of the tiles pick up the teal-blue and yellow-gold of the upholstery and cushions, toy with them, and augment their hues with cinnabar, azure, and rose.
The middle of the marble floor is left empty around a rectangular pool, too shallow for bathing, tiled in a blue to echo the sky above. A two-tiered bronze seahorse fountain rises from it; on even the warmest Eisandine summer days the water cascading therefrom and flowing slowly through the pool lends an impression of coolness, as well as obfuscating conversation beneath its own murmur. Morning finds seasonal flowers adrift upon the surface of the water; towards evening candles are launched in gleaming glass dishes to illuminate the dusk.
Wet weather closes the courtyard, for the marble becomes treacherous.
Dusk has brought at last a measure of cool to the city of Marsilikos and lured all manner of its denizens out to play, beneath an evening sky so much gentler than the sunshine. The courtyard of La Perle Noire is open another hour yet, perhaps, for the pleasure of those bold kahve-drinkers willing to risk — or indeed to revel in? — a sleepless summer night, though the candles afloat in the fountain are burning low and flickering out one by one, and the door to the Grand Plaza will soon be barred against any fresh influx of thirsty patrons.
Odile sits beneath the colonnade with her back to the wall and her last cup of the day in front of her, an elaborately-wrought copper vessel from La Perle’s finest set. There’s nothing but powder and a suggestion of painted peacock feathers remaining in the dish which once held a generous portion of rose-flavoured Ephesian delight; even her glass of water, painted with what would be the flowers of the season if one were in Constantinopolis, has been depleted more than is her usual custom. She’s just sipping her kahve now, slowly, measuring these last moments of pleasure and claiming them one by one, whilst the courtyard’s other habituées come and go beneath the direct, curious, unhesitating sapphire-blue gaze of her Shahrizai eyes.
—
Swirling in to the courtyard of La Perle Noire is one who has not been found there before. The beautiful and petite redhead with the completed Rose Sauvage marque showed off proudly on her back would not look out of place, even with her backless green dress tied behind her neck, were it not for the wide and eager eyes that betray her as an overeager tourist of this new pleasure. She walks on slippered feet and folds her hand together as she enters, a broad smile on her face.
—
The red rose marque and the red hair form together so vivid and pleasing a composition, especially when played upon by the light of those candle-flames bobbing upon the waters of the fountain, that Clara’s own eyes exploring the unfamiliar courtyard have a discreet echo in Odile’s exploring the young courtesan’s gown and the figure beneath it. As luck would have it one of the house’s perfumed young waiters bends then to inquire solicitously in Hellene if there is anything he might bring to the despoina. Odile has an answer ready upon her lips.
And so, just as Clara is on the point of claiming a table for herself, the waiter approaches: “Please, my lady,” for every patron of La Perle is ‘my lady’ or ‘my lord’, even if beyond its walls she might be a ‘mademoiselle’, “the lady asks if you will sit with her.”
He gestures to Odile, a slightly sunkissed Shahrizai whose lineage is yet apparent in her physiognomy, and whose gown of forget-me-not blue silk is strikingly modest for the Eisandine summer — high-backed and long-sleeved, edged with a collar of golden lace which just kisses the hollow of her slender throat. A pair of black silk gloves lies discarded next to her cup of kahve and her empty dish. She is waiting serenely, looking straight at Clara.
—
Clara blinks a little bit owlishly as the waiter comes up to her, but then when she is pointed toward the lady who gives her the invitation she points a high wattage smile at the woman's direction. "Of course!" Clara says happily, allowing the waiter to bring her over to the woman who has given her such a delightful opportunity. When she comes over to the blue clad woman she gives a deep curtsy, perfect in form and grace. "My lady," she greets. "Thank you for the invitation, it would be my pleasure. I'm Clara Valliers nó Rose Sauvage."
—
Closer to, the shadows behind certain of the courtyard’s marble pillars turn out to contain lean, watchful, dark-clad guards, whereas Odile’s lace collar (as she inclines subtly forward, watching Clara with a cool blue gaze that never veers from her as she approaches, curtseys, introduces herself) becomes a blaze of golden light. Each of the exotic flowers woven in amongst its pattern of locks and keys and chains, is unique. It only grows more intricate the longer one looks — an almost unimaginably costly adornment upon a gown otherwise so unassuming.
“How do you do, Mademoiselle Clara,” she purrs, in a mezzo-soprano coloured not by the Kusheline accent that must be familiar to any daughter of the Rose Sauvage, but by an altogether more foreign lilt. She sounds almost like one of the Ephesians who work here. “I am Odile Shahrizai de Cantacuzène,” she adds simply. “Won’t you sit? I have ordered kahve for you,” she explains, the same waiter having already disappeared upon her second errand, “to wet your throat as you explain to me the nature of that beautiful rose marque…” Her voice lifts as if upon a question, but there’s a hint of a command in it, too, as if — Clara having obeyed her whim once — she naturally expects their relations to continue just so.
—
"A pleasure to meet you, Lady Odile," Clara responds politely after she is introduced, and then smiles. "Of course," she answers to the question of if she will sit. She moves to do so when it is offered that she should, the young woman falling in to the habit of obedience with the ease of one long practiced in to it. "I appreciate the ordering as well; as you might have guessed I am rather new to this lovely place, and I wouldn't know where to start. Oh!" She grins. "It means I am a full courtesan of the Rose Sauvage, and specifically a Red Rose. Which would mean a Valerian, in the Capital."
—
“Ah,” Odile breathes out, lightly and without any accompanying evidence of surprise in her voice or in her eyes. One might suspect her of already knowing, or at least guessing, the nature of what she saw inked into Clara’s lovely bare back. “And have you not had Ephesian kahve before? I imagine you’ll find it much to your taste,” she muses, “the bitter and the sweet, melting together in a single sip… But are you prepared for a sleepless night?” she teases.
Just then the waiter returns with a heavy tray, bows more to Odile than to Clara, and sets down before the courtesan a fresh and frothy cup of kahve and its traditional accoutrements of chilled spring water and what the d’Angelines have begun to call Ephesian delight. (It’s rose-flavoured.) The elaborate vessels match, and their arrangement mirrors, those in front of Odile.
—
"I have not!" Clara confesses. "Despite living in the city since I joined the Salon, I'd never had a chance to come. I didn't think of it after I got my marque, until the mood struck me today," she confesses. She laughs at that. "Is it something that will keep me up? I confess to knowing very little about it, although I had heard it did have stimulating qualities." She looks over as the waiter comes over, raising her eyebrows at the water and the delights. "Is there a ceremony to the preparation and consumption?"
—
“There can be,” murmurs Odile, “but in a coffee-house the custom is simply to partake as one wishes, in the best company one can find… Go on,” she encourages softly, and her painted red lips broaden into a glorious smile that shows her bright and even white teeth. “Taste it.” And, knowing full well it has been brought to her table too swiftly to have cooled at all, she watches Clara in the serenely smiling anticipation of seeing a Valerian burn her tongue.
—
Clara nods at that, reaching for the cup and bringing it to her lips. She doesn't wait and smell it, because that would be cheating; she is going right for the experience, grabbing life by the throat. She takes a sip, wincing from the heat…and then gasping, sputtering at the intensity of it. She grips the table, her eyes wide at the sudden powerful experience; it is very strong, and somehow both powerfully sweet and bitter and cinnamon-y. "Oh Companions," she sputters.
—
<FS3> Odile rolls Perception: Success. (8 1 2 2 2 5 6 5 5 6 6)
Opposite her, Odile’s smile never wavers. But the creases about her eyes deepen as she watches Clara contend with the coffee, and takes private pleasure in the watching— and so, despite the softness of her cheeks and the brilliant youthfulness of her smile, perhaps she appears a handful of years more mature now than she might have done before.
“A sip of water,” she suggests sympathetically, nodding to the glass, “to soothe your tongue—?” And she lifts her own cup to her lips and takes a plentiful draught of kahve cooler, though no less rich. It has no perceptible effect upon her at all, other than to leave upon her upper lip a faint trace of its foam, which she flicks away with the tip of her own tongue.
—
The hand that reaches quickly for the water is a little less controlled than she would like, a little bit less elegant than she has been trained. But it is a very human pratfall, to suddenly need a bit of relief. She takes it and does take a quick draught of it, gasping as it cleanses some of the heat and none of the taste. But it lets her pants, her eyes still wide as she considers it.
"When…" she begins, sipping water again. "When you're being tested for the Red Roses or Valerian House, they make you eat an intensely painful cinnamon candy. As a 7 or 8 year old. If you hate it, you're not in. If you love watching others do it, you're a Thorn or Mandrake. If you hate it but also love it, you're a Red Rose." She looks at the Kahve. "This…might be similar."
—
“Yes,” says Odile pleasantly, “I thought it might be.” She drinks again, leaving only the bitterest dregs in her own copper cup, and sets it down in a gesture she completes by reaching for her gloves. Her wedding ring, worn upon her left hand and so previously secreted in her lap, catches the candlelight: the stone set in its golden band is a sapphire the size and shape and colour of her own irises, as if she had a third eye and wore it as an ornament. “We’ll meet here again,” she adds in the same mild and conversational tone, as she turns that great spherical gem towards her palm and begins to ease her fingers gently into black silk.
—
Clara swallows again with nothing in her mouth, working on getting through to the point where she can take a second sip. She reaches out for it, but then pauses as she looks up at the other woman—noting the wedding ring, and the honking size of it. At the lady's words she gives a broad smile in response, blushing slightly. "I hope so, my lady. I have the feeling that there are many delights to be found here that I am just beginning to…explore."
—
Watching Clara flush as redheads are so wont to do, Odile dons her gloves — without haste, without a fumble, without even looking down, she fits each manicured finger with its red-lacquered nail perfectly into its thin silken sheath, and then each bouquet of golden keys through its appointed buttonhole over the pulse in each of her wrists. It’s a practiced ceremony, which she leaves Clara waiting through till its end before she speaks again.
“Finish while it’s hot,” she advises, smoothing one hand over the other as she rises. “Lukewarm kahve is an abomination,” and her black silk fingertips dance lightly over Clara’s bare shoulder as she steps past the courtesan’s chair and her shadows converge upon her.