She opened her mouth and shook her head suddenly. Now she looked nervous.
‘Here.’ He took out his coin-pouch from the purse sewn into his belt and held it out to her. ‘Take a look.’
When she shook her head again he quickly and efficiently snatched up her hand, closed it around the pouch and then released both. She was left holding the small but heavy bag in her palm.
‘Count it,’ he suggested. ‘There’s enough there to buy you many acres of good land. Herds of cattle. Or for a dowry.’ He smiled again as she stared down at her hand. ‘For a good, kind husband who will look after your family.’
‘We don’t do this,’ she whispered weakly.
‘You could buy medicine, tonight, for your father. You asked the gods for help. This is it.’
She hesitated then, tempted by a wealth she could never have imagined. And in that moment she was lost.
‘All I want is a few minutes of your time,’ Veraine said, the epitome of reasonableness. ‘It really won’t take long at all. You’ll hardly notice a thing.’
The Sajaal maiden seemed to have gone into some sort of shock. She could neither let go of the purse nor reply to him. He took a step closer.
‘Do you want it?’
She nodded, barely; the twitch of a chin.
He placed his hands round her waist and put her back against a stone pillar. ‘Clever girl,’ he said.
She shut her eyes as he pressed up against her. He didn’t mind that. She felt tiny and delicate against his body, and he had to stoop to lift up her skirt and get his hand on her bare skin. He ran it roughly up between her thighs and located the join at the top, the hair and the faint dampness of her slit. She was going to be painfully dry and tight. Suddenly he had a raging, uncontrollable erection. He removed his hand from her groin to loosen his own clothes, then took her hand – the one without the money in it – and wrapped her cold fingers around his hard, hot flesh.
‘Never held one of these before?’ he breathed. ‘Like it?’
Her face was all screwed up. He rubbed her unresisting hand up and down his cock and it was wonderful and obscene and wonderful because it was obscene. He was going to come very quickly, he knew; the pressure wave of lust and frustration and vile anger was too powerful to hold back for long. He pulled her hand off his cock and spat into her palm, then used it to smear the saliva over his swollen glans, lubricating the thick plug of flesh. Then he lifted her against the pillar.
‘Shh. It’s not going to hurt,’ he lied.
He lowered her onto his hips and shoved himself hard and deep into her. She tried to cry out, but he already had one hand clapped over her mouth, while the other supported her weight, and only a muffled noise leaked through.
‘Shut up,’ he whispered, as he thrust over and over into her flesh. ‘I’m paying for this.’
He spent in a wave of loathing darker than any Yamani demon-god. Then he released the girl and stepped away. She held herself up against the pillar, skirt rumpled and eyes closed, but she did not make any noise and she did not move. One would, indeed, hardly notice a thing had changed, except for the scalding tears that coated her cheeks.
‘Just don’t expect your next trick to pay so well,’ Veraine told her. He walked away, back towards the Outer Temple.
Halfway across the open space the nausea hit him. It washed over in wave after wave, until by the time he reached the front steps his self-disgust was a physical thing that doubled him over and hammered blow upon blow into his stomach. He caught desperately at the stones as he began to vomit. He couldn’t stop. Acid bitterness erupted from him and even when his belly was empty he kept heaving, as if he were trying to eject his entire body.
Dimly he heard the sound of someone calling his name. He looked up at last, half-blind with tears, and saw an Irolian scout staring down at him, his hands still tangled in the reins of a sweat-soaked pony.
‘General Veraine!’ the man cried. ‘You must close the gates! Prepare the men! The Horse-eaters are less than a day’s ride from here!’
7 I Saw Smoke and Gold
There were men up on the Citadel wall already as the Malia Shai ascended the new mud-brick steps by the gate; priests in yellow, workers in drab homespun and, she saw, Irolian soldiers who had to a man wrapped their white army tunics about with Yamani cloaks. Rasa Belit was not there, otherwise there would have been an ostentatious welcome; instead the priests in their gossiping huddle did not notice her, and the workers drafted in from the lower city did not recognise her without her ritual regalia. That did not matter to her. What did matter was that Veraine was there, his smoky hair visible among a knot of his officers, so she made sure that she walked away from them along the battlements.
She leaned against the wall and stared out over the roofs of Mulhanabin, into the desert beyond. There a second city had sprung up; a sprawling suburb of tents that surrounded three sides of the hill: the Horse-eater army. This morning it was still, the bustle of pitching camp over and done with, the first probing assault upon the city gate thrown back. The standard ultimatum had been issued – surrender at once, or every inhabitant would be butchered when the city fell – and duly ignored. Siege had been laid, and now the waiting had begun. The twisted bodies of prisoners staked out by the Horse-eaters for the education of the besieged had long ceased to twitch. Only lone figures and the thin smoke of dung fires moved among the tents. The Malia Shai could see many horses tethered between the felt walls, and a few dogs nosing about. The Horse-eaters had brought everything they possessed with them, including their families and livestock, and their sheer numbers put the annual pilgrim influx to shame. She had not imagined that there were so many people in the world.
The morning sun caught on bright gold discs raised high over the tents. Standards of some kind, she guessed. The Horse-eaters were supposed to worship the sun.
She turned her head as a man approached her, then realised it was General Veraine. She had deliberately avoided going near him, but now he came up to her and nodded. She noted the shadows blotched under his eyes, the stubble on his chin starting to resemble a beard.
‘Malia Shai.’
‘General Veraine.’ She looked at the brown cloak wrapped around his shoulders. ‘Has army uniform changed then?’ she asked, after waiting for him to break the skin of silence between them.
He smiled awkwardly and jerked his head towards the besieging army. ‘A precaution. If we’re lucky, priestess, the Horse-eaters don’t know anything about an Irolian presence here. I would like to keep them in ignorance as long as possible. They can’t shoot us from there, but they can see us.’ He glanced about them. ‘I came over to apologise.’
‘For what?’ She watched as he leaned back against the wall, thinking that he did not even move or stand in the same way as a priest, that there was a litheness and a power in his unconscious motions that confounded her experience. He was alien to her closed temple world.
‘I was rude to you. I was at fault. I’m most sincerely sorry.’ He kept his voice low; workmen were passing frequently.
‘You were perturbed by the Drought Ceremony,’ she said. ‘I knew it would happen. You weren’t adequately warned.’
He looked away from her, obviously uneasy. ‘Well, maybe. I’d made some rather foolish assumptions about you, priestess. I was wrong, and I don’t think any warning would have made a difference. I learned a hard lesson.’
‘Oh. What did you learn?’
She thought she saw him flinch almost imperceptibly.
‘That I’m not in any position to expect perfection of others.’
She mulled this over. ‘Well, it’s my purpose to strive for perfection,’ she said slowly. ‘But not by Irolian standards.’
‘We all have faults and failings, priestess. We’re human.’
‘No,’ she said gently. ‘I am not.’
He frowned at her, but did not answer. She was not used to being looked at as she was by him. Most people who encountered her saw the mask, the
robes, the title, or never raised their eyes above their own feet, and there was a glazed look to their expressions as if she were not really there. With Veraine, almost uniquely, she felt that he really saw her.
‘You don’t believe in me, do you?’ she asked. It was a hard question to shape. ‘My divinity, I mean. You think that when I take a man’s life it’s because I’m an evil Yamani woman.’
‘I think that you do it because that’s what you’ve been taught to do.’
‘Then that must make me a stupid Yamani woman instead.’
‘No,’ he answered, ‘you’re not stupid.’
She shook her head, bemused and a little disturbed. She had never encountered disbelief before. ‘I wish I could show you, so you’d understand. I am the goddess Malia. I was there at the creation of the universe. I remember it! Can you understand that? I remember the first human beings, and the great Flood, and the Battle of the Sky-Mountain. I remember the hero Gidindhi, and his quest against the tiger-lords. I was there to help him.’
‘I suspect,’ Veraine said, very slowly, ‘that what you remember are the stories you’ve been told since you were a baby.’
She recognised the sour taste in her mouth as frustration. ‘In Mulhanabin there are thousands and thousands of people who believe in me. They are praying to me right now to save them from – that.’ She indicated the Horse-eater army below.
‘Can you hear them?’
‘They whisper at the back of my head, without cease.’
‘Hmm. Will you answer them?’
‘Maybe. I cannot act from fear, or pity. I must act out of my own nature.’
He snorted. ‘Well, you certainly are just as useful to your worshippers as any other god.’
‘So, are you trying to be apologetic or rude right now?’
‘No.’ He looked away again. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’ There was an ant crawling on the wall. ‘See that insect?’ Veraine asked. ‘Suppose it was to worship me. How would I know? How would I hear its prayers? Why would I care what it wanted?’ He stubbed out the small life with the tip of one finger, then looked her in the eye. ‘I think the gods must be like that to us; they have no interest in our life or our death. The gods are high up in heaven and they can’t hear us.’
She was dismayed. ‘How can you pray to them, then?’
‘I don’t, I’m afraid. So we do have one thing in common, priestess.’
There was a pause before she concluded, ‘I think you must be very lonely.’
Some expression flickered across his face, but she had no chance to recognise it. Suddenly everything changed. The Yamani workman shuffling past at that moment had shrugged off his basket of clay and lurched in towards them. There was a flailing of limbs and a dull flash of light. The Malia Shai did not have time to react, but Veraine did; throwing up his arm and twisting to the side. The two men met. The Malia Shai just made out Veraine trying to seize the workman, then the skirmish bundled into her and she was knocked to the floor. By the time she got to her feet the Irolian was leaning out over the wall, staring down onto the roofscape below.
‘Shit!’ he said.
There was blood running down his left arm. She stepped to his side. A crumpled figure lay forty feet below them, unmoving.
‘Now the bastard can’t talk,’ Veraine snarled. ‘Shit!’
‘Your arm,’ she said. He did not seem to have noticed that he was wounded, but at her words he looked round and clapped his hand over his shoulder with a grunt of dismay. The bright blood pulsed up between his fingers.
‘Sit down,’ she ordered and pushed him to the floor.
‘He had a knife,’ Veraine said.
She tore off her headcloth, wadded one end into a pad and forced it under his fingers, against the wound. As quickly and tightly as she could she bound the loose end over the top. There was another cut across his chest, but it seemed to be bleeding a lot less.
‘You all right?’ she asked, her fingers dragging at the knot.
‘Wonderful,’ he replied. There was something strange about his voice. She looked up into his face and found he was staring at her, eyes burning.
Pounding feet broke their solitude. Suddenly there were Irolian soldiers everywhere, and priests reaching in to drag her away.
‘Get the surgeon,’ Veraine grunted to his men. Her last glimpse of his face before she was hustled away to safety told her that his lips were going blue with shock.
Veraine lay in his bed, propped up by a mound of cushions and with one leg drawn up, and tried to ignore the discomfort. He was not in a good mood: angry with himself for allowing the assassin to get past his guard and angry that he should be incapacitated just when the Horse-eaters had arrived, when he had to be seen to be in command of the situation. And the wound had got to the stage that with every beat of his heart a pulse of pain would run down all the way to his fingertips and up the side of his skull, so that he sat with jaw clenched. But the army surgeon, after flushing the cuts out with brandy and stitching them with horsehair, had warned him that his best chance for a speedy recovery lay in resting as much as possible right now.
His tunic had been cut away and pulled down, baring him to the waist. The bandages shone against his skin.
He dozed off for a while, wallowing through an uncomfortable sleep in pursuit of an old memory; riding the horses on his father’s estate at dawn, before the grooms came out to chase him off.
He woke suddenly, and saw the Malia Shai was sitting on the edge of the bed next to him. For a moment he was confused; this was the second time she had managed to sneak into his room without him hearing – how did she manage it? Then he remembered: no, the first time had only been a dream.
‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said.
She sat so close he might have swept his good arm around her. He could smell the incense on her clothes. His stomach tightened with dismay. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said roughly.
‘I came to bring you this salve.’ She lifted up a small pot with a wax seal. ‘It’s made from a desert plant; I thought your doctors might not have any. The priests use it to cleanse and heal their wounds after they are emasculated. It works well.’ She paused. Her hair was wrapped away from sight again, her eyes calm. He might almost have imagined that fire in them as she had kneeled over him on the Citadel wall. ‘Next time your cuts are dressed, get them to put this on too.’
‘Were there guards on the door?’ he demanded, but he kept his voice as low as possible.
‘Yes. Two. They’re protecting you now.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘They let me in. They must think I’m an unlikely assassin.’
There was a hint of humour in her voice, but he shook his head, not listening, and told her, ‘Get out of here.’
She stared at him and put the pot down on the floor. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong?’ he repeated. ‘You’re here alone with me in my bedroom. And you walked past two witnesses to get here!’
‘So?’
He hissed with exasperation. ‘Well, I don’t know what it means among the Yamani when a woman goes into a man’s chamber, but to an Irolian that has only one interpretation.’
She blinked slowly. ‘What does it matter what your guards think?’
Somewhere deep inside he was disappointed. He might have been hoping for a blush or a smile or a flash of alarm – anything that acknowledged the possibility of sexual contact between them. It made him brutal. ‘What about Rasa Belit?’ he asked. ‘How long will it take for him to hear? Get out of this room!’
She wasn’t impressed. ‘Don’t be foolish. You’re hurt. And I’m the Malia Shai – I don’t indulge in carnal lusts.’
If he had not been so angry and frustrated he might have shrugged off the unintended slight. Instead he growled, ‘Well that must be very nice for you, priestess. Congratulations. Unfortunately I’m made of weaker flesh and for my comfort you really should leave.’
Her mouth sagged a little. �
��What do you mean?’ Her breath was sweet; warm and close enough to drive him mad.
He fixed her gaze with his own. The last shreds of discretion were falling from him like leaves scorched by the desert sun.
‘Do you really want to know? I’ll explain exactly what I mean, Malia Shai, if you like.’ He kept his voice low, but he spoke with punishing precision. ‘I mean that your presence here now is giving me a most painful hard-on. My cock is up so rigid right now that you could use it as a battering ram. I mean that I can’t think of you without wanting you, and I can’t go a single hour without thinking of you.’
His voice was tight.
‘I look at your lips and I want to see them wrapped around my prick. I want your breasts in my hands and I want your nipples between my teeth. I want to feel you move beneath me as I fuck you slowly from one end of the night to the other. I want to cover you like a stallion covers a mare. I want to hear the noises you make as you come.’
He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry.
‘When you walk towards me I’m obsessed with your mouth and your breasts; when you walk away from me I’m overwhelmed with thoughts of your arse. The turn of your head makes me sweat. I want you to sit on my face and drown me. I want to fill every hole you have, I want to fill you so full of my spend that it runs out of you in rivers, and I want to make you scream and weep and beg me never to stop.’
He shuddered to a halt, every muscle clenched, and concluded bitterly, ‘Does that clear up any misunderstanding between us?’
She stared, her face as blank as her goddess mask. ‘That’s . . . nonsense,’ she whispered.
He grabbed her hand and forced his fingers between hers, spreading the palm. ‘You don’t believe me?’ he grinned, his lips stretched with pain. He laid her small, cool palm on the centre of his chest, feeling his heartbeat hammer up into her bones. He was feverish. He dragged that hand slowly down his naked skin, over the hard breastbone, over the burning slab of his belly, through the first flecks of hair beneath his navel. The pain of his wound was throbbing through his veins, and every pulse was making his cock jump and thicken. She was not fighting him, but he could feel the tension in her arm. He forced her hand over the top of his belt, through the folds of linen, round the wall of his upraised thigh and finally, firmly, pressed it onto the thick curve of his cock. Hidden as it was under the tatters of his tunic, to her touch as to his it was undeniably erect and struggling for freedom. It heaved under her hand, pressing the cloth against her bare skin.
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