The Tower of Living and Dying

by Anna Smith Spark

  And then gold shadows. Birdsong. Cool of the dawn dew over the searing dragon heat. The bird thing, wing beats soft as cobwebs. Singing its song to the pain and joy of being alive. The sudden, terrible memory in Tobias of childhood, lying in his bed watching the dawn break in the quiet beautiful hopeful wholeness of the world.

  The dragon screamed. Hovering. Reluctant. Looked almost like it might be going to fly away. Some have worshipped dragons, Tobias thought. But they can be tamed. They aren’t gods. They can be harmed. Killed.

  The god thing waited, circling. Calling. The dragon hissed and snorted flame.

  They closed.

  Like all the powers of life and darkness dancing. The sky lit up in splendour. A thousand suns rising, and a thousand shining silver moons. The very air filled with the clash of swords meeting. The ring of metal rising higher than the circles of the stars. All men long to see dragons. Dream of wonders. Hope deep down in the depths of their souls to see wonders blaze and burn and die. We worship the sky and the trees and the earth and the sea and the rocks we walk on. We dream of light and shadows and the glory of something far greater, the old wild powers of the world. Gods and demons parading. The secret things we cannot see that fly somewhere far beyond our human eyes. And there, there in bright magnificence, wrestling together, blinding beauty, dazzling to the mind. Dragons and gods and demons. Singing and crying and weeping as they fought. Bleeding light and darkness. Tearing great holes in the fabric of the human world.

  The triumph of life. There! Glory! Tobias almost, almost believed himself a good man, just for seeing that. Seeing it winning. Kill the death things! The enemy! Life will triumph over darkness! Life! Life!

  The dragon flew away screaming. Wounded. Took its pain out on the men around it. The earth of the plains. The clouds of the sky.

  The last of the shadows rushed at the god thing. Were torn to pieces. Scattered. Burned up in flames like silk cloth.

  Life!

  Marith came up on his stallion. Cloak oozing blood behind him. Eyes like knife wounds. Bright white light shimmering off the blade of his sword.

  The god thing blazing in the sky in glory. This tiny man on his tiny horse with his tiny sword. White light and golden rainbows. Life! Life!

  Come on and die, thought Tobias. Vile little shit Marith Altrersyr. Just die. Men can’t kill you, maybe. Raeta couldn’t kill you. But that …

  The god thing dived. Blazing golden. Pure pure perfect perfect life and hope.

  Marith killed it down with one blow.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Even from half a mile away on the hillside, Tobias felt the look in the boy’s eyes as the god thing fell. His voice rang across the battlefield calling his men to fight for him. The battle cry raised by a thousand eager voices. “Death! Death! Death!”

  Battle redoubled. The dragon swept back, fire blazing from its mouth. More shadows dragged themselves in its wake through the rents it made in the sky. The Illyians died by the thousands. Turned even on each other. The world a blazing mass of white light.

  “Why we march and why we die,

  And what life means … it’s all a lie.

  Death! Death! Death!”

  So loud it blocked out Tobias’s breathing. Put his hands to his eyes and screamed. White light and golden rainbows. Trumpets sounding victory. The currents of slaughter calmed. The dragon lumbered forward, came down resting at Marith’s feet. Men’s voices cheered to the heavens. The sun burst through the rain wet sky.

  Never go up against a drink- and drug-addled death-obsessed invulnerable demon with a pet dragon. Old secret sellsword’s wisdom, that.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  He comes back in triumph. His eyes dance with bright joy. He kneels at my feet in his filthy armour, holds out his filthy sword. “Thalia Altrersyr, Queen of Illyr. Eltheia come again. I swear it. I’ll build you a temple on the foundations of Ethalden, with walls of pure gold.” I kiss him and his mouth tastes bloody. He holds me and his hands are dripping with blood.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I should not have been angry with you. I should not have doubted you. I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

  I cannot speak. Such horror, kneeling here before me.

  But he is safe and unharmed. I am safe and unharmed. Another battle has been fought and we have won.

  He has the few surviving Illyians paraded before us. Orders them to get down on their faces prostrate at our feet. We move the camp to the other side of the river. A fine, flat plain with rich soil: Marith says he might think of founding a town here in memory of this day. The bones and bodies of the Illyians are piled up to make a tower, a marker of our victory. We bury our army’s fallen. Heroes, Marith calls them. The conquerors of Illyr. The hallowed dead.

  A party of Illyians comes in to do him homage. Not soldiers: they have old men and children with them, gifts of livestock, fruit, wheat, wine, gems. They throw themselves on his mercy, beg him to forgive them. “Spare them,” I beg him. “Please.”

  “I should make an example,” he says sadly. “I would spare them. But I can’t.”

  “More of them will surrender, don’t you think? If they see you can be kind.”

  “I don’t want them to surrender, beloved,” he says. “We need to destroy them all, if we are to take Illyr.”

  That night I lie awake and look at him sleeping. So beautiful. Beautiful as the stars and the sky and the moon. “Carin,” he whispers. “Thalia … Carin … Father … Ti … Please. Help me.” The moonlight shines white on his white body. Like he is made of white silver. Mage glass. He shines in the dark like the blade of a knife. The shadows crawl outside the walls of my wagon. I hear overhead the beat of the dragon’s wings.

  We have come so far. Done so much, he and I.

  This is war. What did I think that he would do?

  I am as guilty in this as he is.

  PART SIX

  THE TEMPLE

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Concerning the outbreak of deeping fever in Sorlost, a thousand explanations were given. The God’s anger at the turmoil in the city. The God’s anger at the elopement of the High Priestess Thalia with the Altrersyr Demon King of the White Isles. The God’s anger at the idiot blasphemers who believed such a patiently absurd lie.

  As far as Orhan could see, however, the explanation was glaringly obvious. Cam Tardein’s first act as Nithque had been to rescind every restriction on travellers from Chathe. The hatha addicts and the rose oil merchants and the High Lords had all been delighted. March Verneth’s death, it would seem, had not been entirely in vain.

  Orhan occasionally wondered: all I did, all my crimes, and they brought about my dismissal as Nithque over a travel ban?

  From the Street of the South and Yellow Birds Square, the disease spread like flood water. The Gold Quarter. The Bloody Echoes. The Dead Harbour. Starlight By The Gateways. The Street of Bones and Longing. The Court of Evening Sorrows. The Court of the Broken Knife. The air rang with screaming. Bodies piled up in alleys and doors. People running mad to escape watching their children dying. Fighting to drink at the fountains to cool their fevered heat. Death stench began to permeate even the seclusion of private gardens. The rich locked themselves away and burned mint and lavender and sysius berries. The poor staggered about with rags clutched over their mouths.

  For the first few days, bizarrely, predictably, the city had seemed entirely unconcerned. People were reported dying. But not real people. Not like real people were really dying of something real. They themselves wouldn’t get sick and die. All lies, anyway. Another attempt by someone to cause alarm. Someone would start saying next it was caused by the ex-Nithque, or the dead High Priestess, or the dead Altrersyr king.

  Then panic. Cam Tardein ordered the Emperor’s soldiers out onto the streets to board up plague houses. A man fell down in a pool of his filth in the Court of the Fountain, cursing Great Tanis and the Emperor as he died. A woman killed her three children in the Grey Square on the steps of the Great
Temple, screaming she would rather cut their throats than see them take sick.

  People crowded into the Temple. Trampled the children’s bloodstains under foot. Lit candles scented with herbs and spices. Gave offerings of jewellery. Said endless begging prayers.

  The price of lavender and sysius berries and mint leaves doubled. Good candles cost a silver dhol each. People began to hoard bread.

  The numbers dying started subsiding. The God had answered their prayers! The Sekemleth Empire would stand against any dangers. The Lord of Living and Dying protected them. The Asekemlene Emperor loved his subjects. What was mere illness, beside the power and wealth of the Golden Empire of the Eternal City of Sorlost?

  The gates were barred to Chathean travellers. The price of lavender and sysius berries and mint leaves halved.

  The disease flared up again. More savagely than before. Rumour had it that half the population of Fair Flowers were dead or dying. Children wandered the streets crying for their parents. The bakers’ shops and food stalls began to close.

  Lord Caltren took sick. So did Samneon Magreth. The Emperor ordered all the doors of his palace locked.

  Everyone knew the villages of western Chathe had been the centre of the last outbreak. So anyone from Chathe was sought out and hunted down and killed.

  Everyone knew the villages of western Chathe were the chief producers of hatha. So hatha eaters were sought out and hunted down and killed.

  As the days went on, this came to mean anyone with a funny accent or funny clothing, or anyone who was seen publicly rubbing their eyes.

  The price of lavender and sysius berries and mint leaves trebled. Good candles cost five dhol. Even the wealthy began to run short of bread.

  A fire started in a boarded-up house on the Street of the Butchered Horse. The whole street was burned to ashes before it could be put out. Rumour had it that the dying had fought back the bucket chains to hurl themselves into the flames.

  Ameretha Ventuel took sick. Samneon Magreth died.

  Lavender and sysius berries and mint leaves were traded for family heirlooms, sexual favours, food. Good candles cost a talent each. People fought in the street for bread.

  Bil shut herself in her bedroom with the baby. Ordered servants wearing gloves and silk masks to leave food in covered dishes outside the door. She would eat only milk curds, fresh mint leaves and raw gilla fowl eggs. Burned lavender oil day and night. The cost would be crippling Orhan, were he not certain it would all end very soon when they both died. Through the door he heard the muffled sound of her crying. He wept himself, when he thought of the baby kicking its pathetic legs in its clout cloths, that would die before it had really been alive. The smell of it. The odd inhuman sounds it made, that tore his heart to pieces with love. It seemed so … unfair.

  Such an absurd word to use. Like every other word in his vocabulary. Language was pointless in the face of such endless disasters. “Dead.” “Unfair.” “Sad.” “Hurt.”

  Ah, Orhan, you grow too bitter. Don’t you know that bitterness is bad for the blood? You need to keep happy and smiling. That will help you keep your health. Burn lavender flowers and sysius berries. Repeat the chant of Semethest. Bind to your chest the ashes of peacock chest feathers dipped in honey. Smile. Keep your pecker up. Live in hope any of this rubbish actually works.

  It would be nice if Darath could survive somehow, he thought to himself occasionally, when he and Darath weren’t arguing again. And Bil. His sister. The useless lump of his sister’s son.

  Tam Rhyl’s family would probably survive, it occurred to him, since they were safely tucked up in isolated starving poverty in rural Immish forbidden to leave their house. The irony was biting. Tam’s death ultimately not in vain. Tam might, Orhan thought in his most generous moments, have been happy to see it end this way for them. His death saving his children’s lives.

  Or not.

  “Let’s run away to Immish,” Darath said that evening. They sat in Darath’s splendid bathing chamber, trying not to breathe on each other even as they kissed.

  “We’d never make it.” Streams of people crowded the gates each day, running away to Immish. The desert dwellers killed them, or just the desert; if they made it through to Immish, the Great Council had placed armed guards on the roads and in the border towns. Sensible safe precautions, when he’d insisted on the same thing for anyone coming into Sorlost from Chathe.

  “We could bribe the Immish soldiers. For a sack of diamonds a man, they might close their eyes.”

  “I suppose we could …” The idea astonished him. Run away.

  “Just the two of us. Buy a house somewhere in Alborn. We could.”

  “We can’t. What would it look like, to the city? The two of us leaving? What about Bil, and Bil’s child, and Elis, and everyone?” Bondsmen. Servants. Hundreds of lives tied to their own. “It would panic people beyond anything, the two of us leaving, the Lord of the Rising Sun and the Lord of All That Flowers and Fades. There’d be utter panic. Where would we go, anyway? We couldn’t just go and live somewhere else.” Orhan thought: I’m the Lord of the Rising Sun, Servant and Counsellor of the Emperor, Warden of Immish and the Bitter Sea, the custodian of the House of the East, the former Nithque of the Sekemleth Empire of the Eternal Golden City of Sorlost. I can’t just leave and go and live somewhere else.

  “Change your name,” said Darath. “Stop being all that. Darath and Orhan, two men living together with nothing but a lot of money to their lack of a name.”

  “But …”

  “Fuck the city,” said Darath suddenly. Irritably. Orhan looked at him in astonishment. “Fuck Elis and Bil and her baby and everyone and everything, who’ll probably all die in agony anyway pretty soon. The Emperor publicly humiliated you, Orhan. You saved his eternal life and he showed you no gratitude at all. Eloise Verneth wants to kill you. The city either laughs at you or wants her to succeed. You almost destroyed the both of us thinking it was for the good of the Empire. The Empire ignored you. So fuck it. Leave them to it. Come away with me. Leave.”

  We could. We really could. Orhan’s head spun at it. Be two people living in a house together not having to think about the wider world. Darath and Orhan. Read and write poetry and talk and go food shopping together and just … not care.

  The baby, he thought then. My son. I …

  I’m sorry, he thought, to the baby. If you’d had a chance to live, I would have loved you so much.

  “We’d have to go soon,” he said slowly. “Today, even. Cam’s finally said to be considering closing the gates.”

  Darath’s turn to look astonished. Sat bolt upright, splashing water. “What?”

  “You’re surprised?” God’s knives, the look on Darath’s face was almost comical.

  Breakdown of words again.

  “Closing the gates?”

  “Yes. Closing the gates. Obviously.”

  “Obviously? Obviously?”

  “He should have done it days ago. I’d have done it the day the plague first broke.”

  Darath stared at him. Trying to see he was joking, perhaps. “But … We’d be sealed in. To die. The whole city. Would die.”

  “Yes. As you said yourself. We’ll all die in agony pretty soon.”

  “But … The whole city? The whole city? You … you callous bastard, Orhan.”

  Darath really hadn’t thought it. How could he still be so naive? That’s what power is, Darath, thought Orhan. What I almost destroyed us both for. Choosing who lives and who dies and why and when and how. Buying and selling people’s lives. Hoping it’s worth it. Knowing it’s probably not. “Yes. The whole city. But not the whole world. Tam Rhyl, for the good of the city. The city, for the good of the Empire. The Empire, for the good of Irlast.”

  Darath’s face still look horrified. Shocked. Could feel them coming on to arguing again. Anything they said to each other now always ended up going wrong.

  “An apple, for five cimma fruit! A cake, for a cup of wine! God’s knives, Orhan! Wh
ere does it end? All of Irlast for …?”

  For you, Darath. For Bil’s child. For myself. Like we all would. All Irlast, for a few more brief moments of my life.

  “Stop it, Darath. Please.”

  “Your whore died,” said Darath.

  “What?”

  “Your beautiful beautiful filthy whore. He died.”

  Like a knife blade. His hands twisting the wound in Tam’s belly, squeezing out every drop of pain. “I know.”

  “Heartbroken, are you?”

  “I …”

  “I paid a man a talent to bury him. With a wreath of copperstem round his beautiful beautiful filthy neck. A talent, for a dead whore.”

  Orhan got up. “I think I should go now, Darath.”

  “Run away, then,” said Darath. “You callous, cheating, cowardly bastard.” Got up too. The two of the facing each other, dripping wet, stark naked, warm sweet scented oiled twilight dark with birds cooing and fluttering in their cages in the walls. Absurd.

  Had to get dressed before he could go. Further absurdity. Orhan stood in the dressing room damp and sticky, holding out his arms while a body servant wrapped his clothes around him. Sticking to his skin. Just go back, he kept thinking, just go back into the bath chamber and tell him you’re sorry again, like you always do. In the corridor he heard splashing from the shade pool. Darath trying to show him how well he could be happy alone.

  The onyx gates of the House of Flowers opened smoothly and silently before him. Carved huge petals of precious stone. The last heat of the sun clung to their surface, butterflies and flies resting enjoying the warmth. Green lizards with red legs eating the flies. Every time he left, now, he imagined it was for the last time.

  The gates swung closed again. Sealing themselves. Crowd of flies rising buzzing, then settled back to bask on the hot stone. There were a lot of flies, now, in Sorlost. Big and fat. The city of Tyrenae was reported a fly-blown wasteland. Flies buzzing in clouds over the White Isles and Ith. Flies flies flies eating the ruin of the world.