Divine Torment

by Janine Ashbless

  All three men looked automatically into the sunset sky. There was no sign of any cloud from here, in the courtyard, but that morning the first grey clots had appeared briefly over the hills to the north, before being boiled away by the climbing sun.

  ‘Maybe, General,’ Rumayn said.

  Veraine watched the pilgrims, dressed in their finest even when this was only rags, their hands cupped and full of grain in offering to their goddess. Men and women, young and old, some singing, most chattering, passed in a pageant of dark eyes and bright clothes. There were, however, no children among them; children and pregnant or nursing women were forbidden in the temple of She Who Makes the Womb a Desert.

  ‘I hear there is sickness down in the city,’ Veraine said.

  ‘There is always sickness among the pilgrims,’ Rumayn replied. ‘Every year. The priests told me. It’s called the Kiss of Malia.’

  Veraine’s face did not betray the thought that rose unbidden into his mind.

  ‘To die of the plague here is supposed to release you from many incarnations,’ Rumayn added cheerfully.

  ‘As long as it hasn’t appeared among the Host,’ Veraine said.

  ‘No, sir,’ Loy reassured him. The rugged soldier looked ill at ease in his dress uniform, the fringed tunic somehow too clean and smooth. Veraine’s version included a white, pleated overmantle. Neither man wore armour, though both carried swords at their sides. Veraine never went anywhere in Mulhanabin without his sword.

  ‘I think they’ve stopped,’ Rumayn observed, nodding at the pilgrims. The flow seemed to have choked.

  ‘The Temple must be full by now,’ said Loy. ‘I thought it was a slow year.’

  ‘This is. In normal years pilgrims are regularly crushed to death in the streets, according to the priests.’

  Loy cracked a smile at this thought. Then he added, ‘It’s probably too full for us, sir. Maybe we shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘We wait for the priest, Commander.’

  ‘Perhaps we should take the girl’s advice, General,’ Rumayn suggested. ‘She should know.’

  Veraine pulled in a long breath through his teeth but said nothing. He was only too aware of the Malia Shai’s warning and it troubled him more than he would ever admit to his subordinates.

  She had come to him days ago, in the middle of the evening meal he had been sharing with his command staff. All the higher officers had been there, sprawled upon the cushions of the headquarters room, goblets of wine at their elbows and bowls of food balanced on the brocade before them. Loy and Rumayn, the four captains including Sron their senior, the chief of surgeons, the master engineer, the tesserius who was responsible for paperwork and the procurement of supplies, Arioc and the eight other junior officers of good birth who were learning their vocation; all had been deep in their cups and loud with belligerent good humour.

  Then the door had opened and she had walked straight into the centre of the room. Silence had fallen like a stone. Only the Malia Shai could have stood in front of those men without a trace of self-consciousness, and only she could have failed to discern the hostility of their regard. She was like a cat walking into a kennel full of war-hounds. Veraine had been on his feet and in front of her before he even realised what he was doing. It had looked to the other men as if he were blocking her way; but only he had been aware of quite how strong his instinct to protect her was.

  ‘What can I help you with, Malia Shai?’ he had asked in Yamani, spreading his hands. If he could have shielded her bodily from the gaze of his men, he would have.

  She had stared up at him, her face a mask of inscrutable purpose as she said, ‘Do you like me?’

  Veraine had felt the ground lurch under his feet. He had dimly heard Rumayn splutter into his wine as his own throat sought for an answer and found nothing. He had no idea what the Malia Shai could possibly mean by asking a question like that in public. From any other woman the inquiry could have had only one purpose, but it would have been posed in private, not in front of a coterie of men, of whom several were undoubtedly following at least the gist of the conversation.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ he had said at last.

  She had frowned. ‘You don’t like Rasa Belit. Do you like me?’

  Veraine had felt relief wash over him then. It had been a child’s question, not a woman’s. ‘Well, yes, I like you,’ he had admitted awkwardly.

  ‘Rasa Belit is thinking of asking you to view the Drought Ceremony. If he does, say no.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You like me now. You will not like me after the Drought Ceremony.’

  Veraine had tried to wet dry lips. ‘He has already asked me, Malia Shai. I’ve accepted. I can’t change my mind now.’

  She had not argued with him, or looked upset, but only turned slowly away. He had not tried to stop her leaving, only stood perplexed and frowning while all around him the officers of the Eighth Host muttered and sniggered.

  ‘I wonder what . . .?’ Rumayn had begun, but then had caught the General’s eye and thought better of it.

  Now, in the courtyard, moments from the great ceremony, the Irolian adviser did manage to ask, ‘I wonder what she meant? It must have been something bad to bring her to warn you, General.’

  ‘Well, we’re about to find out,’ Veraine replied. ‘Here’s the priest.’

  A yellow-robed priest wielding a wooden rattle finished beating his way clear of the crowd in the doorway and approached their small group. He bowed. ‘General Veraine, please follow me to the Garbhagria.’

  With some trepidation, the three obeyed.

  I am armed and ready for war. Blood sings as it boils in my veins, and my hair stands out like the tail of a peacock. All around me the gods cower, afraid of what they have created almost as much as they fear the enemy I will now face in their name. I look upon them with unrestrained amusement, and when I laugh my tongue lolls past my tusks and down upon my naked breasts. My belly is tight with curbed power. I raise the weapons in each of my many hands, weapons the gods have gifted to me. I wield the earth-shattering thunderbolt and the sword that is death, the spear of pestilence and the flame that burns the impure, the drum whose beat sloughs flesh from bone and the flute whose note dissolves the marrow. I am ready. as they have willed it. I will face the demon Sorol Sek who has chosen to challenge the gods, who would try to destroy the firm and ordered Earth. I will defeat him in all his polymorphous, writhing shapes, as the mewling deities of the cosmos cannot. I will devour him and I will drink his blood. I am rage. I am destruction incarnate. They have brought me into being to defend the earth, they have armed me for this fight and gifted me with their strength, and my appetite will not be sated until I have consumed the demon that is Chaos. Fire runs in my veins. My yoni is wet for the pleasure of slaughter. I am Malia, the goddess above all gods, the salvation of the universe, the devourer of worlds.

  The Innermost Temple, the womb-house, the forbidden heart of Mulhanabin behind the ancient doors – it pulsed with the beat of humanity, with their shuffling feet, their swaying shoulders, their softly clapping hands. The priest forced a path through the pressed crowd and Veraine followed directly behind him into a vast nave thick with incense and sweat. Somewhere a clutch of musicians were pounding drums and blowing conches, the howling sound of which ululated endlessly without melody or direction. Pilgrims pulled back reluctantly on either side to permit them to pass, turning to see who could be pushing; a few faces looked angry but most just stared.

  They made their way with painful slowness to the left-hand side of the hall and then climbed upstairs, further into the crowd that teetered over them like the curve of a wave. There was a stone box or pavilion, its carved wall only waist-high, halfway up the flank of the room, and into that the three soldiers were urged. It gave them some space, though no privacy and nowhere to sit. Perhaps it had been originally constructed for royalty. Veraine laid his hands on the top of the low wall and looked up and down the hall.

  The Gha
rbagria was, as he had been told, a single great room, with tiers of steps rising on either side of the central floor. That floor was kept clear of pilgrims by a perimeter wall of priests armed with staves, although the press of devotees near the door threatened to buckle their line. The walls were carved in horizontal tiers, too, rising to a barrel-shaped roof which the torchlight barely revealed. In the centre of the room were a large altar and a brazier. The altar was heaped up and overflowing with grain and flowers, the offerings of those pilgrims lucky enough to have been able to get close to it. At the far end of the chamber was another flight of stairs, much steeper, at the top of which gold curtains screened off what seemed to be a room-within-a-room, like an enormous sculpted jewellery box.

  ‘This stinks,’ Loy said softly from his far right.

  Every tier of the public stands was crammed with the sweating, jostling worshippers of the goddess, most of them wailing softly to the beat of the throbbing drums. Veraine looked down at a field of dark heads and up at the rising cliff of brightly clad bodies opposite. Outnumbered and cut off from escape – not a good situation, his soldier’s mind nagged him, although the advice was now pointless. He automatically calculated the distance to the open floor and how fast he could climb over the shoulders of the suppliants to get there.

  ‘Just try to look dignified,’ Rumayn offered facetiously.

  ‘There’s Rasa Belit,’ Veraine said, jerking his chin to point. The high priest was circling the wall of his underlings, thrusting his hands through into the crowd. The people on the other side were heaping his cupped hands with more offerings, so that he could turn and throw them onto the altar. Gemstones flashed among the wheat-seed as they fell. Most merely fed the slithering waterfall of grain spilling into a pool upon the floor.

  ‘So what happens now?’ Loy asked the adviser sandwiched between him and the General.

  ‘I have no idea. No one’s seen the Drought Ceremony before, as far as I know.’

  ‘Well they had better hurry up about it,’ Veraine said grimly. ‘There are no windows in here and if it takes too long we’re all going to suffocate.’

  The Yamani seemed to be in no hurry, though the temperature built and the air in their lungs became wet and heavy. Rasa Belit grabbed handful after handful to throw on the heaped altar and the people sang louder and louder the distended syllables of their song, of which the Irolians could make out very little other than the word ‘Malia’. The music tightened round Veraine’s forehead like a ligature. The wall of noise seemed to be building to some kind of climax, though it was in the end impossible to discern what sign it was that made Rasa Belit drop the last offering at his own feet and swing to face the stairs, arms raised high. The musicians fell instantly silent and a great hush gripped the crowd by the throat.

  The high priest filled his lungs with wet air and began an invocation and, even in this crowded chamber which should have smothered his voice, the deep mournful chant resonated through the hall.

  ‘Come, come in haste, oh goddess, with thy locks bedraggled; Thou who hast three eyes, whose skin is dark, whose clothes are stained with blood, who hast rings in thy ears, who hast a thousand hands, who ridest upon a monster and wieldest in thy hands tridents, clubs, lances and shields. ‘Come in haste, Thou who devourest thy children!’

  At this signal the two priests by the curtain swept back the golden cloth to reveal the dais within.

  The crowd gave a great, prolonged cry of acclamation, which fell away into a sudden and bottomless silence.

  ‘Shuga’s balls!’ said Rumayn with feeling.

  From their vantage point they had an excellent view of the whole hall. Behind the curtain on a throne as wide as a bed the Malia Shai sat cross-legged. Her legs were bare, though the rest of her seemed to be clad in armour. Veraine knew it was her. He knew the set of her shoulders and the shape of her jaw, though a spiked mask from which the dark pits of eyes stared out covered the rest of her face from the nose up. Oddly enough her hair, in the Yamani symbol of female intimacy permitted only to lovers and husbands, was unbound and streamed down across her shoulders.

  Veraine felt his heart turn over. Her hair in the torchlight was the colour of rosewood.

  It was only a dream! he told himself, his hands tightening on the stone. How did I know?

  Slowly the Malia Shai uncoiled herself and stood upon the throne. She moved with a strange insectile grace. There was absolute silence from the throng, although the musicians lurched into a new tune, more complex and somehow more aggressive. It soon became apparent that she was wearing a skirt of the finest chain mail, though this was slashed to the waist on both sides to leave her movements unrestricted. There were elaborate vambraces on her forearms, yet her feet were bare. This was fantasist’s armour – ritual and symbolic rather than practical. Her bronze body armour, like her mask, emphasised the contours of breasts and waist and hips beneath while at the same time transforming them into something threatening and terrible. Veraine felt his mouth go dry. The unarmoured parts of her skin were painted in swirling calligraphy. She moved with the jagged, swaying steps of a praying mantis, arms spread wide and legs akimbo. The strain on her thighs must have been terrible. The silver chain mail sparkled and swung between them.

  Slowly, to the clashing and squealing of tortured musical instruments, the Malia Shai descended the steps to the floor area. There she suddenly stretched, reaching over her shoulders to the two crossed swords sheathed there and flourishing them in the flaring torchlight. She began to dance. It was not the slow measured dance of a Yamani temple priestess, though it was just as stylised in its way; it was the stamping, kicking display of the warrior possessed, all whipping legs and slashing blades that whirled within inches of her audience’s faces. She leaped her own blades over and over, crouched and spun and clashed her weapons on the stone so that metal shrieked and sparks sprang. Veraine was astonished and impressed and appalled all at once. And the audience hung on her every movement.

  The General felt the boiling heat of the air seep from his lungs into his blood and flow inexorably to his groin. The pounding rhythm of the alien music and the writhing gyrations of the woman he wanted, the sheen of sweat visible on her naked thighs, all these were conspiring to make him hard, even as his stomach tightened with revulsion. His balls felt as heavy as lead slingshot. This was nothing like what he had expected from the Malia Shai. It was a travesty of the serene calm she had presented on every occasion of their meeting, and he could hardly believe that it was her beneath that demonic armour. But that did not stop his cock thickening as he watched her twist on serpentine hips.

  So intent was he on devouring every moment of the Malia Shai’s performance that it took a sudden exclamation from Rumayn to make him realise that another actor had entered the stage below.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the military adviser, very low, very fast. ‘No, no, no.’

  He jerked his gaze away and saw that from somewhere the priests had produced a man and laid him across the altar, his belly stretched tight as his back was arched over the mound of grain. Four of them were holding his limbs, though he did not seem to be resisting. He had only the simplest of fouta loincloths wrapped around his wiry body.

  Veraine opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. He felt a wave of cold wash over him. Rumayn was staring at him, wide eyed.

  ‘They can’t do this, General!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Veraine said hoarsely. ‘Don’t make a sound. You don’t have to watch.’ He saw the Malia Shai leap and fall to a crouch like a tiger, the swords dashed to the ground. One of the blades shattered and a vicious shard flew across the floor into the crowd. Any cries of pain from them were drowned in the dull roar from thousands of throats as the dance froze in a moment of perfect stillness – perfect but for the heaving of her chest as she fought to draw enough air into her lungs. And now she was close enough that he could see that her breastplate was an elaborate filigree cage through which the sheen of her bare skin could be glimpsed, and d
esire and horror were at bloody war inside him.

  She was facing the man on the altar, staring straight up between his splayed legs.

  Veraine felt as though some great cold snake had coiled itself around his chest under the ribcage and was forcing its way up his throat, choking him. It tightened further when the Malia Shai stood and climbed up onto the altar between the man’s thighs. She pulled the fouta off him with a single derisive jerk, then kneeled across his hips.

  Veraine could feel that all the colour had run out of his face.

  The priestess laid her hands on the man’s bare chest and caressed the length of his torso. He was staring up at her, vacant of all expression. He’s been drugged, the General thought, though his own mind seemed to be moving through a sluggish mass of half-frozen ice.

  Her hand brushed her chainmail skirt aside from his belly and reached down into the hidden space between them, where his groin met hers. Veraine saw the muscles tighten in her arm.

  The man screamed. It was a savage, guttural sound that wrenched a strange ululating wail from the audience. He bucked against the restraining grip of the four priests. Veraine watched what the Malia Shai did, glassy-eyed. He could not have looked away if his life had depended upon it, though his jaw ached from the pressure of his teeth grinding together and cold sweat was running down his temples.

  Even after she finished the man beneath her would not stop screaming. She reached round to the small of her back, where a short, broad-bladed knife was sheathed among the plates of her armour. She slid herself further up his body to get the right angle and placed the tip of the blade on his breastbone.

  Veraine managed to look to his right at his companions. Loy’s face had set like mortar in the heavy, closed expression of a soldier who has seen more atrocities than he can remember. But Rumayn had turned ashy, was swaying, and looked as if he was going to faint.

  ‘Look at the floor,’ Veraine said. His voice seemed to him to come from very far away. ‘If you fall I will kill you myself.’