“I’m just here for a bath,” I said, a little uncomfortable under the intensity of their stares. They were the naked ones, and yet I felt the most exposed in their moments of silence and perusal.
One dark-haired woman shook her head and tsked. “You do not plan to go to the festival like that, do you?” She asked it as if it would be a form of sacrilege. Sacrilege to my grandmother was falling asleep in the chapel. Apparently to Sylvian women, it was dressing like a dirty man. I hadn’t figured out my own definition yet.
“I don’t know anything about a festival,” I said, still standing in the doorway.
A different woman smiled. “Oh, you have visited at the perfect time then!” She clapped her hands. The sound of dangling chains came from behind me, and I turned to see a slave girl enter the room. Shackles came down from a metal ring around her neck and attached to an iron cuff on each wrist. She brought in a pot of whatever the women were pouring on their legs.
Alger didn’t have slavery, but I knew it existed. Whatever king ruled this city must have allowed it and, considering his welcoming committee, he must not have been a very good king. Every region of Alyria was governed by one of the seven kings, and thankfully Alger had a kind one.
“Come! Don’t be shy!” one woman said. I began to undress and left the cloth over my cuffs while I looked around to see whether anyone noticed the oddity. If they did, they didn’t show it. I sighed when I entered the baths. It was the perfect temperature, a cool contrast against the hot air.
An older woman handed me a bar of soap with a suspicious smile, and I hesitated for a moment before I accepted it. I ran the soap down my arm, and when the smell hit my nose, I almost dropped it.
What the hell?
It smelled rotten as if it was made of dead animals and bile. I couldn’t help but grimace while the lady watched me with a toothy smile. A suspicious toothy smile.
Was this some kind of jest they played on visitors? Or was it a custom of theirs? I didn’t know, but
as the lady nudged my hand in an encouraging gesture, I realized there was no way for me to refuse. I didn’t want to end up on one of the empty rocks out there. Or for them to notice their missing prisoners while I was here.
My stomach rebelled as I scrubbed my body with it and vowed I would wash it off if I had to come in here while everyone was at the festival. While I pointlessly washed my body with rotten soap, I realized that the women were pulling the hair off their legs . . . and everywhere else on their bodies. Sylvia was a strange city. As far as I knew, only prostitutes did it in Alger. So, my mother . . . I supposed.
When one of the women insisted I have it done, I cringed at the idea. But now I felt like the hairy farm girl from Alger as I looked over their smooth skin. My hair was blond everywhere, so it wasn’t as if it was that noticeable, but the women sure looked at it as though it was. I had a nervous pit in my stomach about losing more hair, but this was an adventure, and I wanted to try new things. Be someone else. So I agreed.
They tsked while they looked me over and then tortured me. It wasn’t terribly uncomfortable when they ripped the hair off my legs; that came next when they ripped the hair off between my legs. I was cursing myself for agreeing to do this while I watched the old lady who gave me the soap disappear out of the bathhouse. It didn’t take an alchemist to realize she was up to no good. I sniffed my arm, and low and behold it had a slight smell of rotting corpses.
Wonderful.
When the torture was over, I was completely hairless besides the hair on my head. A woman rubbed some balm on my smooth skin, and I hoped it would cover up the stench of the soap. I was about to put my dirty clothes back on when a woman offered me their standard white clothes.
It felt like the further I got on this trip, the littler my clothes got as well. I was going to accept them, but I paused just enough so I could tell my grandmother I thought really hard about it. And I did . . . sort of.
I didn’t want to wear my dirty clothes, and I was sure I would blend in better wearing their ensemble than a pair of shortened pants.
“You should come to the festival with me!” the woman said excitedly while I accepted the clothes and slipped them on. I didn’t know whether I should be out in the city, but I really wanted to see the festival.
“Okay.” I smiled. I was here for the rest of the day; I might as well enjoy it. I walked back to the inn with the feeling that men were going to start propositioning me for carnal acts. Never had I worn such little clothes, and it felt as if my grandmother was going to pop out around the corner and scold me. But nobody paid me any mind; the women buzzed by with their baskets of laundry and the children squealed as they ran by me.
The woman had said she would come by the inn later, and I decided to take a nap before. The bed was so soft against my newly smooth skin that I was out within minutes of lying down.
I woke to the clank of chains. A slave girl was setting down a tray of food on the table next to the bed, and I thanked her before she left. The sun was beginning to set when I heard a soft knock on the door. The woman from the baths came in as though this had been her room her entire life.
“I realized I never told you my name before. You can call me Rosa,” she said.
“Calamity,” I replied, waiting for confusion to cloud her face, but she only smiled as she seemed to be thinking for a moment.
“I shall call you Amity, okay?”
I smiled and nodded. Some of the neighborhood girls had called me that, while others called me Cal. Calamity was a mouthful, so I hadn’t complained.
“Amity, do you have a lover?”
I almost choked on my food, not expecting the personal question. It was appropriate to talk openly about lovers here? Or to even have them?
“No,” I said, but it came out like a question.
“Is that a definite no?” she asked.