Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘That’s not the news I heard. I heard you killed Lord Thilak.’

  ‘He was dying too!’

  ‘Really? And what was he dying of?’

  She had no answer to that. Her cheeks paled but she raised her head haughtily to stare him down. His chest clenched like a fist, so tight he wasn’t sure he could breathe.

  ‘What do you intend to do?’ she asked. ‘I’d rather you kill me than send me back.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill you. The first time I saw you, I knew there was some bond between us. I know you felt it too. Why else would you save me?’

  She didn’t reply but her face told him he’d struck his mark.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I know what this is. When I was a child, my father took us to read the omens at the Feathered Lake. There were so many birds there, more than a man could count, and a thousand different kinds. Some were tiny, no bigger than my thumb, with wings that moved so fast you couldn’t see them. Others had beaks sharper than a dagger, or throats deeper than a sack. There were long legs and short legs and blue and green and red and every colour you could imagine.

  ‘It was spring then, the mating season, and I didn’t see how it was possible the birds could find their proper partners, not in all that confusion. But then I realised they were singing, each bird a different song. And that was how they found each other: like called to like. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes.’ She rubbed her hands down her arms, as if to comfort herself. ‘But I never killed from choice.’

  ‘Not yet. Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t like it.’

  She looked away. There was a moment of silence and then she whispered, ‘I felt close to them. When I killed them. I felt so close to both of them.’

  ‘And you had all the power. A third son and a woman aren’t so different in Ashanesland. I know what it’s like to be weak, to be at someone else’s mercy. People tell us that’s how it’s meant to be, but it isn’t. You and I are meant to be strong. I saw how you were when we lay together – how it made you feel. You think killing those people was an accident? It wasn’t. It’s who you are, who we both are. Don’t run away from it. Embrace it.’

  ‘The way you have?’

  ‘Yes. We can be even stronger together than we are apart. We belong together, don’t you feel it? No one else will ever understand you the way that I do. I only want us to do together what we’ve already done apart.’

  Her face was like a mask, impossible to read. ‘And if I refuse?’

  But he couldn’t let her refuse. He knew that he was right, and he would make her see it too. ‘You murdered Lord Thilak,’ he said. ‘You’re a fugitive from the King’s justice with a price on your head. A thousand gold wheels – that money would keep me for my whole life. And why shouldn’t I take it, if you’re going to be foolish? What do I care about a woman too weak to accept what she is? But a woman who killed by my side, my true partner: her I would never betray.’

  28

  Eric was sleeping when Bolli shook him awake and told him he was to be a father. He blinked stupidly at the other man, noticing the way the sun shone through his white shirt to outline his muscles and failing to understand what he’d just been told.

  Bolli shook him again and when that didn’t work he rolled Eric until he fell on to the cold floor. ‘You’ve done it, you lucky sod,’ Bolli said. ‘You’ve only gone and got one of them in the family way.’

  ‘Pregnant?’ Eric said. ‘But how?’

  Bolli just raised an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Pregnant.’ Eric didn’t know why he was finding it so hard to take in. He’d been told all along that this was what the husbands were for. But in all his time in Salvation he hadn’t seen a single child. He’d managed to put the thought of them from his mind. It wasn’t as though he was used to fathering children being a possible consequence of his bed-sports.

  ‘Well?’ Bolli said. ‘Will you ever get up? You’re late for your classes and there’s to be a celebration tonight.’

  Eric’s heart, which had sunk at the mention of learning, rose a little at the mention of a party. The Servants weren’t the most joyful bunch, but surely even they would drink a glass or two at the happy news. He rose to his feet and faced Bolli, allowing his furs to fall away so that he was bollock naked in front of the other man.

  ‘We could start the celebration right now,’ he suggested, looking meaningfully down at his prick, which obliged him by stirring to half-mast.

  Bolli’s face hardened. ‘I’ve told you to stop that, Eric. I mean it.’

  ‘If a boy can’t enjoy a roll in the hay with another boy on a day like this, when can he?’ He stepped up to the other man and pressed a hand against his pale chest. ‘It ain’t as if anyone has to know. It’s just a bit of fun between friends.’

  Bolli stared at him a moment and Eric’s pulse sped. Then Bolli turned on his heel without a word and left the room.

  Eric sighed and sank back to the hard block of his bed. It was worth a try, wasn’t it? But now he knew he ought to be getting to his lessons. Today he was due to learn Mizhara’s teachings on orchard-planting, about which she’d apparently had very strong opinions. He couldn’t summon the energy, though. The Servants would let him off this one day, wouldn’t they?

  He sighed again and rifled through his clothes. The Servants wouldn’t let him off. That wasn’t the way they were. He picked a blue shirt that had started to soften pleasantly with use and was just pulling it on when Bolli returned. He’d brought Abejide and Gwyn with him, the two so alike with their blue eyes and tightly curled hair they might have been twins.

  ‘Now that’s more like it,’ Eric said. ‘Why wait till later to start the party?’

  Bolli didn’t smile. ‘I warned you, Eric,’ he growled. Then, before Eric really understood what was going on, the other two had grabbed his shoulders and forced him to the bed while Bolli took firm hold of his legs. Eric’s guts clenched in sudden terror as he saw that Bolli’s other hand held a cane.

  ‘Try not to scream too loud,’ Bolli said. ‘You don’t want us telling the Servants what this is about.’

  He couldn’t help screaming, though. The agony was searing as Bolli brought the cane down across the soles of his feet. He did it again and a third time and then Eric lost count as he screamed and sobbed and struggled uselessly to get free. The pain was so all-consuming that when it ended, he didn’t realise for a moment. Then he just curled into a ball and hugged himself, shivering and wondering what came next. Bolli touched his shoulder and he flinched away.

  ‘It’s over, Eric,’ Bolli said. ‘Don’t make us do it again.’

  Eric stayed curled up and weeping for a long time after the other men left.

  He kept away from his morning classes and no one came looking for him, but at lunchtime hunger and a sort of wounded pride made him limp to the long hall for his food. The place was hushed beneath its dome of crystalline ice. Outside a snowstorm was raging, turning the sunlight a strange muffled white, but long hearths filled with sweet-smelling pear-tree wood kept it warm inside. It was warm enough to melt any ice, yet the walls stayed as solid as ever. If Eric had cared enough, he would have asked one of the Servants how that could be.

  The husbands all sat together at one bench. He thought of eating with the Servants, but they had their set places and he was forced to take his too, at the end of the long table beside Oskar. The other man looked questioningly at him and Eric looked away. He didn’t know how many of the husbands had been involved in what was done to him, but he answered Oskar’s attempts at conversation with grunts and was soon left to eat his reindeer and red berries in peace.

  He would have gone back to his room afterwards, but one of the Servants approached him. The other husbands melted away as she drew him aside. Though he’d given up trying to tell the women apart, he thought this might be one of his particular wives. She had a small black spot above her right eyebrow and a very thin nose.

  ‘You’re
to be congratulated,’ she said.

  He managed a weak smile. ‘Thanks. I did my best.’

  She looked momentarily puzzled. It was more expression than any of the Servants normally wore. ‘You’re to be congratulated,’ she repeated slowly, ‘tonight. There will be a ceremony in the hall of Mizhara’s departure where you will thank her for the gift of fertility. Hours of prayer will give voice to our devotion.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eric muttered. ‘Of course they will.’

  He should have guessed that the Servants’ idea of a celebration didn’t involve anything resembling fun. They filled the great cold room, rank after rank of them, their faces showing nothing but love for their goddess, and Eric had to stand in the middle of them and pretend to be pleased. His feet were in agony and the pain screamed louder with every second he spent standing. The other husbands watched from the sidelines. Eric couldn’t bear to look at them.

  As the long hours of the ceremony dragged on, he found himself thinking about Lahiru. Lahiru had been a molly every bit as much as Eric, but he’d taken a wife and she’d had children and then he’d been trapped. Eric almost smiled as he remembered Yo-Yo and the way only she in all of Smallwood hadn’t seemed to judge him. But she might as well have been an iron shackle round Lahiru’s wrist. She and her brothers were what had bound Eric’s lover to a life he hated. Without them, he would have been free to give up that life and join Eric at Smiler’s Fair.

  Children were a shackle and now Eric was to have his own. Maybe the Servants were right: that wasn’t something to sing and dance about.

  When the ceremony was finally over he limped back to his room. The sun hadn’t set, of course, but it rested at its lowest point, red and swollen on the horizon, and Salvation would be sleeping.

  Eric still had the backpack Radek had given him. Once he’d stuffed his sleeping fur inside there wasn’t room for much else, but it wasn’t as if he’d be needing to change his clothes. He had some jewellery, though: a gold chain set with small emeralds and two diamond-studded rings. They’d be worth a pretty penny when he returned to civilisation and he stuffed them at the bottom of his pack. Now all he needed was food.

  The corridors were deserted as he crept through them. The Servants slept when they were told and woke when Mizhara said they should, but the husbands might still be about. Eric could hear his own heartbeat in his ears as he paused at every junction to listen. He heard nothing, though, except the deep hum of the machine beneath their feet.

  He’d found the kitchens on one of his wanderings. The pans hung neatly on their hooks, more metal than he’d ever seen in one place, and the fire was tamped down to a soft glow. The red of the slaughtered meat looked stark against the white ice. The golden sun pears were more tempting, but they wouldn’t last long. He’d gone hungry often enough to know that meat was what his body needed most. He chose some big, fatty cuts of it, but then realised he had nothing to wrap them in. The one spare shirt he’d packed would have to do.

  Then he was ready to leave. Was he really going to do it? His feet hurt from the caning and he hadn’t even started walking yet. But he’d be walking through snow and that was soft, wasn’t it? He tried not to think about how long he’d have to walk for. Rii had flown a terrible great distance to get here. But Rii had also promised him that he’d return home. She’d said that he’d betray the Servants and it seemed likely this was what she’d meant. She might have been able to fly him back herself, but he didn’t dare ask her. When he imagined taking a ride on her back that no one knew about he couldn’t help thinking it would end with his blood in her belly and his corpse dropped in the sea.

  It didn’t matter – he was going to do it. He’d always managed before. He’d walked away from the Moon Forest and found Smiler’s Fair. And he’d walked away from Smiler’s Fair to find Lahiru. He was like a cat. He’d always twist to land on his feet.

  He crept to Salvation’s gate, as tense as he’d ever been. He could smell the fresh meat in his pack and little droplets of blood fell from it to the pristine ice. Anyone he came across couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing. But he saw no one, and then he was at the entrance. He hesitated only a moment before taking a step through it to the vast and cold emptiness beyond.

  It took an awfully long time for Salvation to disappear from the horizon behind him. He hadn’t realised how big the place was until he was trying to escape it. He’d walked through the pear-tree orchard two hours ago and now there was only the ice.

  From inside the city the ice had seemed featureless. He hadn’t realised it was a landscape all its own, riven by deep crevasses and shaped into tall and twisted peaks. The snow wasn’t as easy on his injured feet as he’d hoped. It pulled at his legs, tiring them almost beyond enduring, and the maze-like gulleys forced him to take a step back for every two steps forward.

  It was beautiful, though. The ice wasn’t white; it was every shade of blue. And there were birds here where he hadn’t thought anything could live: squat flightless things that honked indignantly as he walked past. He’d brought his warmest gloves and a thick fur scarf to wrap round his face, but he found that he didn’t need it; the constant sun blazed down and it was almost pleasant. He realised he was smiling. It felt good to be free.

  The fall of night was so abrupt and shocking that for a moment he could only stand and gasp. The sun hadn’t moved across the horizon and set; it was simply gone from the sky. All the heat went with it and Eric clutched his furs round him and shivered. In the sudden darkness he could see nothing but the brilliance of the stars above, clearer than they’d ever been.

  A hard shudder racked his body but his mind sharpened. He’d seen the machine that kept the sun always in the sky; he should have realised that its magic only extended so far, or the whole world would have been in perpetual sunlight. He’d felt the same strange transition when he came to Salvation, only he hadn’t understood it then. To find the light again, he only needed to turn round. But if he turned round he’d never escape.

  He had his sleeping furs in his pack. He wrapped himself in them, then wound his scarf twice round his face and put on a pair of mittens over his gloves. He was still colder than he’d ever been, but perhaps moving would warm him up. At least it had numbed the pain in his feet; he could barely feel them. He drew in a deep, painful breath and walked on. The night could only last so long, and then the sun would rise in its natural way and he’d be warm again.

  In the darkness, time ceased to have meaning. The stars remained constant above him and the snow beneath his feet never changed. Beyond that, he could see nothing. The cold seeped into every bone and sinew and deeper still, into his mind itself. Thinking was as much of an effort as walking, but eventually he remembered his food and stopped to pull the raw lump of meat from his pack. It was solid ice and he’d brought no way to make fire. There was nothing to burn, anyway, but he couldn’t afford to be fussy. As he walked, he tore off chunks of frozen meat and allowed them to melt in his mouth before forcing himself to swallow them down half-chewed. The flavour might have made him gag, but the cold had killed everything except a faint smell of blood.

  The frozen meat quickly became unbearable. He felt that one more bite might shatter his teeth. He meant to put the remains of the steak back in his pack, but his fingers fumbled inside their mittens and he found himself dropping it to the ice. He knew he should pick it up, yet his feet kept on walking and he didn’t have the will to stop them. He could no longer entirely remember where he was going, only that it was important for him to get there.

  An uncounted number of steps later he realised that it was growing warmer. He tried to smile, and managed to twitch his lips through the stiffness of his face. The sun must be rising. He knew that was a good thing. But as he walked on, step after step, the dark remained as stubbornly impenetrable as ever while the warmth increased.

  He stopped and forced himself to think. It was very hard. His mind kept wandering to more pleasant things. He remembered the first time he’d met La
hiru, when his Ashane lover had spotted him across Winelake Square. He felt the heat of Lahiru’s arms around him, the wet press of his lips against Eric’s cheek. But that wasn’t a kiss, was it? It was a snowflake. It was snowing – so why did he feel warm?

  He’d turned round before his mind made the decision to do it. Some small part of him knew that the warmth was a bad thing and his growing sleepiness even worse. And the sun hadn’t risen. He didn’t know how long he’d been walking but it felt like a hundred hours. Dawn should surely have come. He couldn’t go on into endless darkness. He’d never find what he was looking for, whatever it was. He could no longer quite remember.

  The journey back felt easy. He was almost running, each step as effortless as flying on Rii’s back. Except, why was he on his knees? And now the snow was all around him, as soft and welcoming as down. He let himself sink into it and closed his eyes. There was nothing to see, anyway. The world behind his eyelids was pleasanter.

  It was the smell of mouldy cinnamon that woke him: overpowering and rank. His eyes opened to darkness. There was no light. Or perhaps a vast shape was blotting out the stars above. Something touched his forehead and he flinched away, but it was only a hand. It swept his hair from his eyes and a voice kept saying his name, but his mouth wouldn’t move to reply. He closed his eyes again and sighed, letting himself sink back into the restful warmth.

  It took him a long time to return to consciousness. In the end, it was the pain that banished his exhaustion. His fingers and toes burned with an evil fire and his head throbbed in time to the beat of his heart. He saw light through his closed lids, though, and felt a sweaty heat very different from the drowsy warmth that, he now realised, had taken him close to death.

  When he opened his eyes, he knew at once that he was back in Salvation. He was in his own room, on his own bed. He groaned and tried to wipe the sweat from his brow but his hand was too big and clumsy. There were bandages wound round it. He stared at them stupidly, trying to remember when he’d injured himself. It was as he pulled the furs aside to see more bandages covering his feet that he realised he wasn’t alone.