Thrones of Desire

by Mitzi Szereto

It was already dawn when the woman came into his room at the top of the house, where early sunlight hemmed the windows in ruby. She closed the door softly and slipped into his bed, the old mattress creaking with her solid weight. She was naked beneath her black silk robe.

  “My name is Tamar,” she whispered, her breath hot on his ear. One warm hand pressed across his lips, and he smelled metal on her fingertips, gunpowder beneath her nails. Her other hand traced a slow line down his throat, across his muscled chest and firm abdomen, and curved around him down below. He swallowed a gasp. Her grip was hard, her strokes rough and demanding. Soon her mouth replaced her hand, the tip of her tongue unbearably harsh against the most delicate skin.

  Rahab gasped again, breath catching in his throat like something solid, and she rewarded him by taking him deeper, her fingers stroking and caressing and tormenting. There was something indescribably wonderful about her rawness, her inexperience. He came with a moan and Tamar hesitated, unsure whether to swallow. He looked down at her, meeting her dark golden eyes, and she swallowed with a smile that chilled his blood.

  She slid up beside him, resting her forehead against his temple. Her hands were stroking his hair, stroking his cheek, as though she wanted to make her touch on him visible to the world. He could barely hear her speaking over the pounding of his pulse. “It’s morning,” she was saying. “I have to return to camp.”

  “Take me with you.”

  He turned his face to hers and saw her firm lips tighten in uncertainty. A glistening pearl drop still clung to the corner of her mouth, and he brushed it away with his thumb.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Rahab, I—”

  He silenced her protest with a kiss, deep and lingering. Her mouth tasted of wine and salt and him. “Then stay here. For as long as you can.”

  They stayed in his house for three days and three nights.

  The second time he welcomed the Golden People, it was the same man but a different woman. He knew at once that she would not desire him. She was brighter and harder than the others, and the walls inside her were older, more fiercely maintained.

  “I am here to thank you,” she said, though she seemed too proud to be thankful. “In the days you kept Achan and Tamar in your house, the soldiers searched for them in the city. Your hospitality saved their lives, and for that you have my gratitude.”

  The word “soldiers” brought dim memories to his mind; damp alleys, cold hands, biting rings. Rahab hated the soldiers of Jericho and was pleased to know the Golden People were their enemies.

  “I have another favor to ask of you,” the woman said. He had begun to think of her as the Leader, for clearly she was one. He did not realize until later, much later, that the Golden People were soldiers, too.

  All soldiers want the same thing from whores.

  Rahab fingers the cord around his neck. He remembers the Leader’s words as she slipped it over his head: This is how we will know you. He wonders at that. Among the shimmering twilight-people of Jericho, his dark eyes, plain clothes, the strands of silver in his dark hair make him conspicuous. The Leader must be blind indeed if she needs a chain, the mark of a prisoner, to find her allies.

  Jericho’s key hides inside his open collar, cold against his skin. It was not hard to find. He smiles to remember the girl, daughter of Jericho’s gate-master, who answered his card at one of the extravagant park-side restaurants where caged birds sang in the smoky rooms and anything at all could be negotiated.

  “Who will be there?” she had asked, leaning over Rahab’s table.

  He laughed and ran his fingers through her brittle hair. “Everybody,” he said. “Anyone worth meeting. Though I do have a small price—a token of worthiness, if you like.”

  She blushed prettily. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, sounding uncertain.

  Very gently, Rahab wrapped an arm around the girl’s waist and drew her down to her knees. “Completely ridiculous,” he said. “But worth it, I promise you.” He gave her a quick kiss, sweet and fleeting.

  The girl was the first guest to arrive, holding the city key in her pocket.

  One of the glistening birds detaches herself from the flock and flutters toward Rahab in the corner. Sweat makes her white shirt stick to her back and the silky skin between her breasts. Her braids unravel around her black mask, little stands of sunlight beside the night sky.

  “I think I’ve danced enough for the evening,” Rahab says, as she perches herself on the arm of his chair. He takes her hand and kisses it, tasting salt and spilled wine.

  The woman tightens her fingers on his. “So have I,” she says. “Come upstairs.”

  Rahab raises his eyebrows, glancing at the other guests. The Golden Woman laughs and pulls him to his feet. He follows her up the winding staircase, her laughter ringing in his ears.

  He pulls her into the first bedroom they come to. Its walls are smooth and dark blue, its floorboards bare. Cobalt and silver fabrics hang over a wide bed. The Golden Woman ignores it, leaning against a wall and dragging Rahab toward her by the red cord around his neck.

  “This is it?” she asks, fingering the iron key.

  “Yes,” Rahab says.

  She finds the clasp and slides the key from its cord. One hand lifts her cigarette case from her pocket and tucks the key inside while her other tangles up through Rahab’s hair. She finds the wire that holds his mask in place and breaks it with a flick of her finger.

  “You’ve very beautiful,” she says as the gray silk floats to the floor. “Somehow I didn’t expect that.”

  Her skin tastes like hot metal beneath his tongue.

  Before the Golden People came, Rahab would walk along the walls of Jericho in the cool hours before dawn, watching the lights waken or die in the city below. Jericho, city of the moon, city of twilight, city of stone shadows and arabesques. It seemed fragile enough to crush between his fingers.

  It is only the walls that defend Jericho. Not the soldiers, slipping into alleyways with the cheapest of whores. Not the gates, whose key can be bought with a kiss. Jericho prides itself on the ceremonial beauty of its warriors in their dark uniforms, the masterful workmanship of its gates, but it does not look at its walls. Its walls were not made to be looked at.

  Before the Golden People, Rahab was like the twilight city, fragile and dark and undefended. It is dangerous in Jericho to be secretive, to let others see that you have secrets. The treasure precious enough to hide is the only treasure worth stealing, the saying goes in Jericho, and this is a city of thieves.

  Rahab wonders if the Golden People have heard this. They are so eager to rip down the walls of Jericho, to get at the sweet treasure inside. But without its walls, Jericho is nothing.

  The Golden Woman leaves her mask on.

  The rest comes off in a rush of white silk and silver ribbon, clutching and tearing, the rich fabric drifting to the floor like snowfall. Her body is lean and hard like Tamar’s, her skin tanned deep brown, almost darker than the small red-tinged nipples that stiffen beneath his tongue. He wonders, for a moment, if the Leader’s body is like this. He is not sure if it is that thought or the masked woman’s deft caressing hand that makes him hard.

  He carries the masked woman to the bed. They hardly make it. She twists in his arms and pushes him flat across the pillows, sheathing him in her moist heat with a harsh moan. She clutches his hips, her fingernails biting. Their pounding makes the whole bed shake and creak.

  The masked woman’s climax ripples through her, tearing a gasp from her soft lips. Rahab rolls on top of her and buries his face in the curve of her throat. She wraps her legs around his waist, drawing him deeper, and he comes a moment later. They collapse across each other, gasping for breath.

  The masked woman whispers something.

  “What?” Rahab can barely lift his head. She shifts beneath him until his head is pillowed on her breasts, and he can hear the words echoing through her skin.

  “Tamar asked me to tell you,” she says, “that her tent i
s the blue and gold one at the edge of camp. If you still want to leave Jericho. If you think you can.”

  He looks up at her, but her face behind the black velvet mask is as smooth and unreadable as her voice. She presses a dry kiss on his forehead. A moment later she rises to dress, drapes the city key around her neck and is gone.

  After the Golden Woman returns to the ball, Rahab remains in the bedroom, smoking at the foot of the bed. It is one of the Golden Woman’s cigarettes, and it has her taste, dry and sweet.

  His mask is on the floor near the doorway. He closes his eyes, feeling again the roughness of the Golden Woman’s fingertips along his cheek, the fragile skin of his eyelid. How safe she had seemed behind her mask, how impenetrable, until the velvety sigh broke from her throat.

  It is not good, he thinks, for the Golden People to wear masks. It leaves them unguarded. Undefended. Conquerable.

  He looks at his pocket watch, lying open-faced on the pillow. She has been gone for half an hour—enough time to leave his house, to go down to the edge of the city and the gates, to slip Jericho’s key to the Leader. Enough time to build the fires within the city that will bring down the walls.

  Rahab grinds the fire from his cigarette and goes down to the ballroom to join the birds.

  Some of the Golden People are like the sharpest knives, the knives that cut so deep and so smoothly that there is no pain. The Leader is not one of them.

  “Jericho will fall,” she said the day she gave Rahab the scarlet cord. She seemed so hard, so certain, as if her knowledge came from the gods themselves. “The question is whether you will help us break it, or if you will fall with the rest.”

  “Do you not trust me?” he asked.

  “I trust you.” The Leader smiled quickly, brutally. “You’re good at what you do, Rahab. And you know where your best interest lies.”

  “Whores are known for keeping secrets,” the Golden Man murmured.

  “You forget, Achan, that we are in Jericho,” the Leader said. “You can have secrets here, but you can’t hide the fact that you have them.”

  When her back was turned, Rahab caught Achan by the wrist. He let his long nails sink into the soft flesh. “A good whore knows how to be conquered,” he hissed.

  “Or how to pretend to be,” Achan said.

  In the ballroom, the birds are reeling drunkenly, stumbling over each other’s gowns and landing in laughing tangles on the carpet. The gate-master’s daughter is lying on a couch, her head in the lap of an eminent composer, while an actor and playwright disappear for a moment into the shadows beneath the stairs. Rahab keeps his distance, leaning against the door frame. The damp-lilac smell of the room is making him sick.

  The composer stands and goes to the organ. She smiles at her audience and begins to play one of her celebrated themes. The notes sound wet and deflated, but the audience laughs and applauds.

  Rahab pushes his way out onto the ballroom balcony. The night air is bitingly cold, and the sound of high-pitched laugher and the scent of lilac follow him out. A spidery silver bridge runs from one corner of the balcony to his own house across the street. The house where the Leader promised that he would be safe.

  With a last spiteful glance at the guests in the rented house, Rahab crosses the bridge.

  Three hours after midnight, the drums begin.

  For seven days the Golden People have marched around the walls. Some in Jericho believe they are doing it on the orders of gods; others say they mean to be frightening. And they are frightening, silent and gleaming in the brutal sun.

  But Rahab knows the truth; the Golden People have been digging beneath the walls. And tonight, when the Leader slips through the city gates, she will find the fires that have been kindled along walls where the tunnels end. She will pour something on the fires, something that smells of sulfur and saltpeter.

  The drums are like the marching—a distraction. It is fire and earth that will break the walls of Jericho.

  And when the walls have fallen, the slaughter will begin. The Golden People with their swords and with their knives will break down the doors and shatter the windows and crush the bridges and bring down the roofs, and the streets where fruit vendors gathered and pretty girls walked will soon run with blood. Rahab imagines the sticky red trails staining the walls of the rented house, imagines corpses piled on the wide beds. He thinks of the gate-master’s daughter, too much of a child yet to carry a knife.

  Anyone in his house will be spared, the Leader promised. But there is no one in Jericho that Rahab wishes to save.

  Four hours after midnight, in the first veiled light of morning, the walls come down.

  When it is over, the Leader comes to Rahab’s house. She carries no sword, but her clothes and hair and the bare skin of her hands are drenched in blood. There is a long streak of it beneath her left eye, like a scarlet tear.

  Rahab holds his hand out to her, and to his surprise she takes it and kisses it. “Jericho is yours,” he says, with a smile calculated to melt a woman’s bones.

  Her other hand slips to his knee. He feels the awful heat of her skin through the fabric of his trousers. “Yes,” she says. Only that.

  Rahab tightens his grip on her wrist, tightens it until it must hurt her, though she is good at hiding her pain. He is not used to asking for things—to begging, for there is no uglier or more accurate word for what he is about to do—and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. The Leader is not a child to trick, a girl to entice, a lover to demand things of. Her face when she looks at him is like a wall of stone.

  “I want to fight for you,” Rahab says finally. “Wherever you go next, whoever waits for you there, I want to go with you.”

  “You are not a soldier,” she says.

  “Then I will become one.”

  The Leader smiles, and suddenly the walls in her eyes are down, and he sees the naked thing behind them, bloody and starved. “Let me give you a secret, Rahab. I’m not a soldier, either.”

  He opens his mouth, but she lifts her bloody hand from his knee and presses it over his lips. “I took Jericho, yes. I leveled her walls. But what I want—what I desire, yes, more than I’ve desired any man—is to raise those walls again. I want a home, Rahab. I want a city for my sons and daughters. I want to live my life behind walls.”

  He tries to stand, but she drops to the floor and wrenches him down beside her, envelopes him in the smell of blood.

  When she is asleep, he carries her up the stairs to his bed. Her hands have left finger-trails of blood on his skin, and his lips have left smooth red circles on her shoulders and neck. When he lies down beside her on the white sheets, their bodies leave bloody stains.

  The Leader sleeps deeply and still as stone. Rahab traces the firm muscles of her shoulder, her hard waist, the solid curve of her hip, and thinks of what Jericho will make of her. She has been hardened by wind and sun and rain, the cold and the heat, the brutal light of day. She built walls within her because she had no walls without.

  She will become soft in Jericho if she raises the walls again. Soft and sweet and drunken, mellow in her desires, vulnerable in her beauty. He imagines her as one of the girls on the bridges, her face hidden behind a mask, her soul naked. The thought makes him sick.

  She was supposed to free him from Jericho. She cannot become trapped here herself.

  He kisses her neck, and when she does not stir, he whispers into her ear.

  “Cursed be the man who raises the walls of Jericho,” he says. “He shall lay her foundation in the grave of his firstborn, and in the grave of his youngest shall he set her gates.”

  He kisses her again. “You are meant to break walls, Hoshea, not to raise them.”

  Tamar is waiting for him at the Golden People’s camp, smelling of coriander and cardamom and the ashes in her hearth. Her children play in the dust outside her gold-and-cobalt tent, building fortresses of pebbles and leaves and kicking them down again. They stop when they see him coming. By the time he reaches the ten
t, Tamar has a cup of tea and a plate of spice cakes set out for him on the low table.

  “She tells us we are to leave,” she says. “She says the gods told her that the city is cursed and we are to take nothing from it. But you will come with us, won’t you?”

  He looks down at the paper-thin cup in his hands, at the tea leaves crusting the surface like a sharp-edged moon. “Do you want me to?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Tamar says. Only that.

  But it is enough.

  THE LAST SACRIFICE

  Zander Vyne

  The cursed statue had stood in my valley long before even the Druids vanished. It might have crumbled into harmless myth had it not been for the last sacrifice, for all those who came before had walked into death’s lair.

  I could blame her for everything that happened, but blame is a very human fixation, one they value far too much.

  Only time will tell how anyone’s story will end, no matter the choices they make. Mine is no different.

  I did what I could. My role will have little impact on the outcome. Still, the world is on fire and, though it is not my fault, man will blame me. They always blame the dragon.

  The casting of lots decided which girl would become an offering for the basilisk, but never before had the name of a princess been chosen.

  The King and Queen, not having the power to stop the ritual sacrifice, grieved her loss alone, for the people of the Haven cheered when the crier read their daughter’s name. Most almost certainly suspected, as I had, that royals’ names were not entered into the lottery.

  Princess Aerten—unlike her parents and all the girls who had been sacrificed before her—had not shed tears, begged for mercy or screamed in terror over her fate. “You need not bind me with chains. I go gladly, giving my life so another may live,” she said when the Scarlet Knights made to seize her.