On her huge throne, the golden statue of the goddess watched, her face serene, her hands held up in the ancient gestures that mean ‘Fear not,’ and ‘I will hear your prayer’. This was the greatest statue of Malia in all the Eternal Empire, and here she was beautiful. At the top of the steps to the throne sat the goddess in human form, cross-legged, her hands held in the same signs. Veraine’s heart jumped painfully and the blood began to pound in his loins.
He walked the length of the hall, through the supplicants, to the bottom of the stairs. He expected resistance or at least some reaction to his presence and held his sword in readiness, but he was disconcerted to find that not even the priests seemed to recognise that he was intruding. The multitude were dull-eyed with sorrow or locked in private worlds of suffering and prayer; no one spared him more than a glance. It was as if he had somehow become invisible and he stalked among them like a ghost. At the bottom of the stairs he paused, apprehension and desire at war within him.
The Malia Shai was wearing a robe of red silk that left her arms bare. He knew those slender arms well, and the long hair that curled over her shoulders. But her face was masked. The mask was blue enamel, shaped like a skull, and pocked with red jewels for sores.
Behind the mask, he saw her eyelids flutter. Her arms fell to her sides.
He put one foot on the stairs and began to climb. The Malia Shai uncoiled herself. By the time he reached the top she was standing, waiting for him, her eyes wide behind the holes in the enamel. He could see her pointed chin and her full mouth, but the upper part of her face was made grotesque by the Plague Mask, and he couldn’t look at it. When she put her hands out as if to touch him, he simply fell forward on his knees, the sword clattering to the floor.
She stepped up and put her arms around him, and he buried his face between her breasts, breathing in her scent in great gasps, his arms tight around her waist, his shoulders shaking. Relief and exhaustion and joy were tearing at his entrails, washing through him like a hot wave, stinging in his eyes. She clasped his head, raking her fingers across his scalp.
‘They told me you were dead!’ she moaned. ‘They said you were dead!’
He shook his head, bruising her breasts through the silk with his lips. ‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Not quite. Not yet.’
She spoke his name, several times, as if calling him back from some other world. The fact that they could be seen by everyone in the hall was not of the slightest concern to either of them. Then Veraine sat back on his heels, pulling her down on top of him so that she straddled his lap. They stared into each other’s eyes.
‘What happened?’ he asked. Her weight on his thighs was almost nothing, he thought.
‘They had me immured,’ she answered. She was trembling, just as she had when he’d first held her after the earthquake, though this time it wasn’t from cold. ‘But then Rasa Belit died, and they came to get me out. They were so frightened of what they’d done! The priests have been struck down. And the people of the city. They’re dying. The plague is everywhere.’
‘I saw.’ She was so slender, so fragile in his arms that he felt she might break if he held her too tightly.
‘Lots of people have fled the city. Your – your soldiers. They’ve gone. Did you know?’
‘Yes, I know.’ He pulled her in close to him, so that her sex nested on his.
‘They were afraid. I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘I only cursed Rasa Belit. That was all.’
He shook his head. ‘There was sickness in the city already. It wasn’t you.’
For the first time, her gaze dropped from his. He reached up and touched her lips with his fingers. He wanted to see her face. ‘Take the mask off,’ he said gently.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘Take it off,’ he repeated, his tone more urgent.
Her body stiffened in his hands. ‘No!’ she cried, though her voice was kept so low that no one else could have heard the pain in it. ‘I can’t. I’m the Malia Shai.’
He was shaken by her refusal. There was no room for negotiation in her tone, and though she was not pulling away from him, she held herself rigid in his arms as if her body was rejecting his touch. He felt his own throat tightening. He looked at her lips, the only part of her face he could bear to focus on. He hated the mask, its ugliness and everything it represented, but he wanted to kiss those lips. The pressure of her thighs around his and the heat of her mound upon his groin was something like torture.
He surrendered to it at last and pulled her mouth against his. The hard surface of the mask pressed on his skin but he didn’t have to look at it, he simply closed his eyes and let the sweet heat of her kiss flood through his veins. He did not want the murderous goddess of pain, he wanted the passionate woman who had broken every taboo to come to his bed, driven by a carnal hunger so fierce that she had risked everything for him. He wanted her fire and her courage and her shuddering, unrelenting need. And if he had to accept her goddess in order to possess that other side of her, then he would.
She seemed to melt in his arms, her body flowing against his, her mouth moist and tender and easily teased open. Her arms tightened on his shoulders. He was peripherally aware for a moment of the hall and their audience behind him, but her lips and tongue and waist and hips at once demanded all his attention, especially as she rocked against him, and the tumescence that had stirred at his crotch the moment he laid eyes on her kicked undeniably awake.
Everyone in the hall who was conscious and not blinded by their own grief must be watching by now; the priests and the people alike. They must be watching their living deity being tightly clasped by this stranger, and yet there was no outcry or audible movement.
‘Oh yes,’ he whispered, his lips not leaving hers.
The silk robe she wore was gossamer-fine, allowing his hands to explore the length of her back almost as if she had been naked, from the fuzz at her nape to the splayed globes of her buttocks. As he cupped those beautiful curves he felt her jerk and tremble. His kisses possessed her mouth. He slipped one hand up between their two bodies to take a nipple captive, wishing that he had a dozen arms like a Yamani god so that he could caress every bit of her at once.
She moaned softly, the sound fluttering in her throat and buzzing against his tongue. She was so responsive that he was unable to resist – and that groan banished all caution from him. He could feel the heat and a suggestion of moisture seeping into his crotch through their clothes. He wanted to know more. He pinched her nipple until it was erect and as fat as a tree-bud between his fingers, then abandoned it in order to reach down beneath the edge of her dress, finding her bare thigh and pushing his hand up its entire length. She shuddered again as he reached the stretched skin at her taut groin and her mouth grew slack under his. He saw through the mask her eyelids flutter closed.
He knew then that he had her at his mercy. There comes a moment of arousal for every woman when she loses her hold on caution and all rational thought drowns in a tide of sensation. The ego falls away, all self-consciousness is lost, and it is as if she becomes possessed by some burning elemental spirit. Veraine felt that change wash over the Malia Shai and knew that he could do anything he wanted with her. This was a goddess he knew how to evoke, one that he was very familiar with.
His thumb brushed her fleece as his hand sought her mound, and she writhed her hips from side to side in instinctive response. From beneath his cock was pressing up, into her softness, into the hollow of her sex. He twisted his wrist and slid his fingers under her, cupping her mons, his knuckles pressing down hard on his own throbbing flesh. He found her sex-lips swollen and hot and between them a welling moisture, as slippery as melted butter, as rich as cream. The perfume of her arousal was driving him mad.
‘Oh,’ she breathed.
He needed to fuck her. It might have been possible to satisfy her with his hand, but his need for her was like a wound that could not be ignored. He had to plough her, he had to get ins
ide her, he had to feel her sweet cunt wrapped around him again as he came, or the wound would kill him. And the presence of all those witnesses to their copulation only made it imperative.
He pulled out his hand just far enough to be able to pull at the cords of his trousers. The Malia Shai’s eyes, wide and melting and drugged with desire, stared into his. He wanted to throw her down on her back and take her deep and hard, but some half-rational part of him warned that nothing so indecorous would be tolerated by their audience. At the moment she was on top of him and they were both all but silent, hardly moving unless you looked closely. Those observing might interpret their embrace, intense and intimate for all that it was public, as the ultimate rite of worship; and, Veraine thought, they might not be wrong.
His trousers gaped open, the cloth damp with her juices. He lifted her hips momentarily, long enough to free his prick and slip its thirsty head into the wetness promised, then pulled her weight back down on him so that the length of his meat slid into her depths. She arched and quivered in his grip, her breasts shaking under their silk, then he kissed her hard, holding her so tight that she could not struggle, pushing her hips down so that every last inch of his shaft was sheathed in her purse. She bit his bruised lips painfully, but when he finally slackened his grasp she didn’t pull away. They were both gasping as their lips parted.
Veraine knew then that he was going to come very quickly. Like a boy on his first lay, he thought with disgust, but he also knew that this time he had little choice. He was so aroused, so tense, and their situation so dangerous that he was on the edge of losing control already. Now that he was in her, he didn’t dare move.
Instead, the Malia Shai moved for him; not her hips or her thighs, but tightening her inner muscles, squeezing his swollen cock deep inside her. Veraine arched, fighting back the first waves of orgasm, gritting his teeth.
‘Hold still!’ he gasped. He slipped his hand between them and sought out the tiny pebble of her clitoris, finding it stiff and erect and slick with the wetness of her invaded sex. ‘Now,’ he told her, as his thumb circled the nubbin of flesh.
She whimpered. That sound, the animal helplessness of it, made him harder than he thought any man could be, and it steeled him to resist his own pleasure – long enough at any rate to play her like some sacred musical instrument until it sent her tumbling over the edge of orgasm. He watched her eyes close, her lips tremble, her throat fill with the unvoiced cry, the flush rise in her face. He loved to make her come, and he loved to watch.
She’s mine, he thought.
Then her eyes, unfocused in the trance of ecstasy, met his again and her wet cleft clenched deliberately around his pole like a fist and it was enough to strip the last rags of control from him and thrust him into his own fire. Veraine lurched up, lifting her on his braced thighs, his head thrown back as he poured himself out in gouts. Only when his own merciless rip tide had ebbed did he realise that she – clinging to his shoulders with her nails, her hips twisting under his hands – was still coming.
It took a long time for the last pulses of her climax to drain from her body. She came back to herself to find her forehead resting on his shoulder, her arms slung loosely around his neck, the taste of his sweat and his skin salty in her mouth. Weakly, she raised her head. Somewhere in the depths of her last orgasm she had begun to cry, and now tears were trickling down from under her mask and wetting her cheeks. Veraine was staring at her in wonder. He caught a tear on his hand. His other arm still supported her shaking frame.
She tried to smile at him but failed, and the dark concern in his eyes was not assuaged. He looked haggard and brutal and so beautiful that her heart turned over in her breast just with looking at him. He took her face and laid it against his, their bodies so close that she could feel his heartbeat racing against hers.
‘Come with me,’ he whispered, his breath like feathers on her cheek. ‘We can’t stay in this city. Let me take you away.’
‘Where to?’
‘Back over the Amal Bhad,’ he said. ‘We might even catch the Eighth Host at the river.’
She had a sudden momentary vision of what life in the Empire would mean for her; he the exalted general, she the trophy of battle. No matter how well she was treated, that was what she would be; a trophy for the Irolians, a shame to the Yamani people.
She stroked his face and regretfully murmured, ‘No.’
Veraine pulled in a deep breath then, but he didn’t hesitate. ‘Then we’ll go somewhere else. North. Or west. We can see what the Horse-eaters have left of the Twenty Kingdoms. Anywhere. I don’t care. Just . . .’ The words were catching in his throat. ‘Just please come with me,’ he concluded.
The Malia Shai felt as if something thorn-sharp and infinitely sweet had been driven straight into her breast. She was astounded that Veraine would offer her this, and appalled that he could need her as badly as he did. As badly as she needed him.
She wound her fingers in his hair.
She didn’t have to think about what might befall them, about what it would mean to the city she had lived in all her life, or to the temple that had raised her. She knew she had failed her great task in this incarnation, but she was still Malia, and the goddess acts according to her nature. ‘If you want me, then, yes,’ she told him.
He pulled back so that he could look her in the eyes, as if he did not believe her words alone, as if he had to read it in her face too. She nodded and tried again to smile, with greater success this time.
‘We need to leave at once,’ he said hoarsely. He looked stunned. ‘We have to get to high ground before the Rains make the plain impassable. We need food, and beasts to ride –’
‘I know.’ She stood up, easing herself gently from him, the silk robe falling back demurely into place as she rose from his thighs. Only the way the sheer silk clung to her hot skin betrayed her recent wantonness. Then she faced the hall.
Everyone in it was turned towards them, watching, as silent as the dead lying at their feet. She cleared her throat. The hall was designed to enhance the acoustics of anyone speaking from the raised dais, so when she began to address them her words fell clear through the air.
‘Listen to me, all of you; priests and pilgrims and people,’ she said. ‘I am the Malia Shai, the voice of the goddess! Hear what I’m telling you. Take the words and spread them among my people!
‘I am leaving Mulhanabin. I will go out into the world and live there. And when I die in time and am reborn, it will not be here in the city. It will be among the people. Perhaps you will find me, and bring me to my home. Perhaps not. I will live among you as your daughter, as your sister, as your wife. And this will continue until I have completed the cycles of rebirth and am cleansed of human passion, and that will be the end of this age of woe. Because I tell you, you cannot conquer the world by hiding from it. The battle against evil is fought within the human heart.
‘I still have a long way to go. A great journey. We all do.’
She swallowed despite her dry throat and turned to seek out Veraine. He had tidied himself away and now rose from his knees, retrieving his sword.
She took one step down the great flight and, at that signal, everyone still capable of movement on the floor of the Throne Room went to their knees and bowed forward, resting their heads upon the floor. She looked at the ranks of submissive shoulders and realised that it would be for the last time in this life. She reached up and slipped off the Plague Mask.
‘The Rains have come; the plague is ended,’ she told them. A low groan swept through the hall from every throat. She let the mask fall onto the top step.
Then she led the way down and through the prostrated ranks of her worshippers, Veraine stepping like a shadow just behind her. By the time they reached the door his hand was on her waist.
Just a few corridors down she stopped and turned to him. They were in front of a latticed window, and she could see that the rain had stopped for a moment and that the sun was shining through a gap in the cloud
s, striking brilliant light off the steaming puddles everywhere.
‘What do we do?’ she asked, putting her hand on his bare chest, suddenly lost. ‘What do we do?’
He pulled her up against him. ‘Anything,’ he promised her, his kisses hot on her lips, on her throat. ‘Anything we want.’
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Copyright © Janine Ashbless 2002
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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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