by Luana Saitta
in Issue 149, June 2024
“Perhaps this might be of interest to my lord?”
The merchant’s blotched and emaciated hands revealed a small chest, ornately decorated with gold filigree and what appeared to be the simulated impressions of leaf veins on its dark jade surface.
“A box. She’s probably got a few of those, peddler.”
Tamer Ibn Rawad Al-Wazir stifled a yawn. He’d come to this uncouth part of town in search of a gift in courtship of the princess Kawtar bint Muhammad bint… well, many bints. What mattered was that she was a daughter of the sultan. A lesser one, to be sure, but one had to start somewhere in their social climbing.
The shopkeep’s thin lips curled into a smirk, the muscles in his face creaking like a leather strap tightening over a wooden pole.
“Not… one such as this.”
His bony fingers playing around the rectangular prism manipulated a hidden mechanism and the top panel receded. Tamer leaned forward in a sudden onset of mild fascination. No lid had popped open. No clicking sound had been heard. The top-most surface of the little box had simply vanished.
Out of the darkness unfurled a stem like a little finger, softly swaying in the wind – odd, that. This incense-reeking coffin of a shop had about as much fresh air blowing through it as the dankest ale-pits Amunaja had to offer.
“Yes, take a good look, my lord.”
A little bud at the top of the stem bloomed, revealing the most delicate-looking beginnings of coral. A flower kept in a box, blooming on command? Besides the incontestable beauty of the thing itself, he liked the message it would send a future wife. He heard a rustle to his back; his bodyguard Zeynep stirring.
The brawny plainswoman leaning in the doorframe had been ill-disposed toward this clandestine moon-lit outing ever since he took up the idea. She was certain his father’s seat on the city council – not to mention his family’s ample real estate holdings dockside – would ensure his advances towards the old man’s daughter would be taken well seriously. What need was there to impress the girl with foreign trinkets? She liked it not.
She misliked the reedy salesman as well; between the skulls of creatures she could only half-place lining the highest shelves and the jars of oddly-colored liquids holding up gibbous, moldering tomes on the others, she felt near as uncomfortable as when she was bidden to accompany her master to the red light district.
“Do you have an opinion, Zeynep?” the young lord inquired over his shoulder.
Zeynep raised her hands briefly, then returned her arms to their usual crossed position, accompanied by a soft, derisive snort.
“I thought not.”
Tamer turned back to the merchant, seemingly bolstered by his bodyguard’s disapproval. The would-be flower had retreated back into the bud, which had curled gracefully, almost bashfully down.
“What say you to a hundred dinar, old man?”
A ragged exhalation from behind brown teeth indicated the merchant’s assent. Zeynep liked it not.
***
“O most exalted sultan, lord of Amunaja, pray lend your ear but a moment to one of your humblest sons, that he may delight and enrich this already joyous occasion.”
Whiffs of rosewater and jasmine filled the banquet hall as dancing-girls, jesters and musicians capered and pranced about. A jet of flame from a painted fire-breather startled Zeynep, whose back was against the palace wall as she surveyed the scene.
Her master had managed to take center stage at the feast, producing the ornate little flowerbox amid murmuring dinner guests seated at the long tables. He was wearing a rather incongruous breastplate, obsidian inlay tracing two rearing stallions as if he were some battle-hardened charioteer rather than a landlord’s third son scheming to marry a sultan’s twelfth daughter. The pipes and drums had halted to let Tamer speak.
The sultan nodded. Whether that signified assent or drowsiness, Zeynep could not tell. It was an open secret the sultan was no longer all there. She could spy the princess Kawtar a few seats down the long table, a vision in azure and gold, taking little bites of the stuffed dates. Their eyes briefly met. Zeynep instinctively turned down her gaze, as was proper when facing a highborn. And yet… did she spy a smirk playing around the princess’ lips, a mischievous gleam in her amber eyes
“I, Tamer ibn Rawad al-Wazir, present my liege with a gift from the darkest jungles of Vennid, in the hopes that it may enrapture him… as well as the beautiful flower that is the princess Kawtar.”
Excited, just south of scandalized, mutterings from the crowd. What was this upstart thinking?
Soon murmurs turned to gasps as the little seedling did its dance. Zeynep was amused at Tamer’s inventing an exotic provenance for this little sideshow. She supposed the darkest jungles of Vennid spoke more to the highborn imagination than smelly lower city junk shops.
“My lord. Behold a flower as beautiful, as precious, as your radiant daughter.”
He stepped closer to the feasting table. “May I offer it in humble a—OW!”
The bud had attached itself to the ball of the youth’s thumb. Awkward silence – a few titters.
Tamer shook his hand nervously, trying to get the thing off. “…in humble supp–“
Tamer’s upper arm convulsed, the flower pulling at it with eldritch strength.
“I…”
The bottom of the box cracked and split. A cluster of dripping roots revealed itself, enveloping Tamer’s hand.
Titters turned to gasps. Things happened quickly then. For every pull the flower made at Tamer’s flesh, it grew. An inch. A span. A foot. For every spurt of the awful plant’s growth, Tamer diminished. It took but a few seconds for the ambitious youngling to be wrapped wholly in knotted vines, and but a few more for the demoniac union to merely suggest the shape of what was once a man. The top half of the torso had bulked up so that the legs barely supported it anymore. A sickening crunch as those legs broke into half a dozen wooden stems, tendrils searching the marble floors in a vain attempt at taking root in this man-made soil, splashing around in a watery blood-puddle.
Screams of terror as the dinner guests fell over themselves trying to leave the dining hall. Performers dropped their tambourines and lutes as they ran. Palace guards encircled the thing, spears raised.
Zeynep was torn. Her mandate as a bodyguard had essentially just expired. Should she join the nobles in flight, or the guardsmen in battle?
The thing that was her master sprouted half a dozen branches that immediately found their way to the fighting men. Two of them got their bellies pierced, the others had to wrestle not to have their spears taken from them by the green serpents.
One of the vines snaked its way to the main table, where Kawtar stood frozen in fear. One of the dead men’s rolling spears came to a stop right in front of Zeynep’s feet. That was that choice made.
She charged the demon with a war cry of the plainsfolk, hitting it dead center in what had become a giant coral-and- pink blossom, its petals undulating under their own power.
Nothing happened.
Two spears were snapped and guardsmen throttled. A shriek as the princess was grabbed by the ankle and dragged across the table. Zeynep saw the girl pick up a goblet and toss it at the monster. A knife. A dish. The tentacle lifted her up bodily, as the bloom opened entirely like a giant cauldron, leaving little doubt as to what the creature’s intentions were.
As Zeynep focused her attention back to getting the spearhead free of the verdant bulk, she caught a glimpse of the princess making a final futile attempt at tossing something at the demon, grabbed from the pile of performers’ trinkets.
“Get up here!” she called, that amber gaze piercing at her once again.
Zeynep’s biceps bulged and sweat ran down her face as she gave the spear a final, superhuman twist and pull. Freedom!
She wasted no time and with a great heave of her mighty thews climbed to the edge of the great bulbous man-bloom. She planted her sandaled feet as firmly as she could upon the rim of the thing’s head and looked down in the awful vortex of its pulsating innards.
She saw a remnant of her master – the obsidian breastpiece half-hidden under Tamer’s reconfigured innards, now a foul hybrid with the demoniac chalice.
“The fire-oil!”
Zeynep understood, and moved quick like a panther, striking the obsidian like a madwoman trying to catch a spark on flint.
It took but two strikes for ignition to occur, coating the inside of the beast’s mouth with a liquid virago.
A new shriek joined the din, an ululation from beyond the outer veil, as the man-bloom toppled and fell, its great bulk aflame.
It was all Zeynep could do to throw her own bulk in the other direction, pushing the plummeting princess away as best she could. They landed next to each other on the palace floor.
The surviving palace guards were frantically unleashing the frustrations of their earlier impotence, having regained their weapons from the clutches of the now-burning creature.
Zeynep lifted herself on one elbow, and saw that Kawtar had done the same across from her. She did not avert her gaze this time.
The sound of hands clapping. “Not part of the show, dad.” Kawtar called, never breaking eye contact with Zeynep. The applause stopped. That amber gaze… Zeynep liked it.
***
When a contingent of city guard, with Zeynep as their guide, was dispatched to the little shop of rarities the bloom had come from, they found a desiccated husk of dead wood in the shape of a man on the chair behind the counter. She could swear its cracked brown teeth were grinning.
©June 2024, Luana Saitta
Luana Saitta is a Belgian-Italian speculative fiction enthusiast who’s co-authored the self-published non-fiction works Memories from Monster Island and Turtle Talkin’. She has had several pieces featured in Fangoria magazine and co-hosts the Defend Your Trash Movie podcast. This is her first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
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