The House of Sacrifice

‘We’ll go round and round Irlast killing and burning, round and round and round and round. Pay them to rebuild, so we can sack them again! Rebuild them ourselves then tear them down! I’ve got all the money in the world now, after all. What else is there to bloody do?’

‘Stop,’ said Thalia. ‘Marith.’

He laughed and sat down and thought he would break down sobbing. ‘What else is there to bloody do?’

Silence.

‘Let’s go for a swim, Osen,’ said Alleen at last. ‘They’ve caught us a feast of fish for dinner, come and swim while they cook it.’

They slept that night on great rafts floating on the water, like waterlilies, a thing that the people who had once lived there were said to have done. It was pleasant enough.

They marched on south down the coast. Issykol he drowned in a storm. Ranene the weather hand’s masterwork: black sky, black sea with white waves, rain so heavy it bruised the skin. The earth turned to liquid. The earth and the sky and the sea and the wind and the rain blurred into one howling, screaming maelstrom. This was what the world was like before sea and sky became separate, at the dawning of all things before sea and sky and land were formed. The soldiers huddled in dug-out shelters. The storm downed them. The storm buried them. The storm ripped them away screaming into the air. Marith stood out in it, face thrown back, arms raised to the wind.

‘Like rainfall, like storms in the desert, drowning, engendering,

Soaking the parched earth and washing away all that survives there.’

The Song of the Red Year. The storm drowns all to recreate it. Only through death can the world be remade. Beautiful. Like all illusions. The wind tore at his hair, the rain poured over him, the force of it almost overpowering him. The waves shattered cliff tops. The wind tore down buildings, uprooted trees. Like a child bored while his mother tends her garden, and he plucks leaves, breaks off flowers, snaps fresh green stems. The world was mud and ruin. Dead bodies floated on the mud. Broken stonework. The remains of houses. The remains of ships. The city drowned and gone.

The storm died. Clear pale sky.

The joy of it faded in Marith. Ranene crouched at his feet, exhausted.

‘It … is done,’ said Ranene, wheezing out tired breath.

‘Good. Well done. We’ll have a feast tonight and you’ll have the place of honour.’

Turned away from the ruin before him, his eyes already fixed south on the ashes of the forests, the high mountain peaks.

‘Then tomorrow we’ll march on. Khotan. The Mountains of Pain.’ Thinking, thinking, how to destroy them. ‘Turain. Pen Amrean. Allene.’

Sorlost.

The dragons circled overhead. Like gulls. Circling in the clear washed liquid sky. They are laughing, he thought. They were wise beyond all imagining, all the wisdom in the world was there in their eyes. Thus they knew. Valim’s voice, cursing him: You are my king. Always. I wish now that I had done these things.

Thalia stared at the mud with big sad mother’s eyes. He’d played in the puddles with Ti and once he’d pushed Ti over and Ti had pulled him down after him, they’d got soaked through, ruined their clothes, their nursemaid had been whipped, their mother had scolded them.

On. On.

Chapter Nine

The storm passes, the sun comes out, and the earth is shining. I had forgotten what it feels like in the warmth of the south. Damp heat, lush with growing, not the dry deserts of my other life. We go riding together, away from the columns marching. Up into the mountains, feel the spray from the river where it comes down in a waterfall over a gorge, sends up rainbows, there is snow up there on the highest peaks, the ground is mossy, soft as silk pillows, the high meadows are so rich in flowers the gold of their petals shines on the skin. We find a lake up there, clear as mirrors, the birds of the mountain are reflected in it, Marith smiles and says it is almost as blue as my eyes. ‘Our child must have your eyes,’ he tells me. ‘Your eyes, and your skin, and my hair.’ The Mountains of Pain, the mountains are called. They are sharp as blades. But I cannot see pain in them. They are beautiful. Not a place for men, no, very few live here, if one goes too high into the mountains one’s breath is said to come heavy, the head feels dizzy, in the snow at the heights a man can sicken and die. But they are not things of pain. The name is from a story, I am told, a woman, a princess of Turain with black skin and silver hair, very beautiful, and her heart was broken, and she raised up the mountains so that she might live alone there, in solitude. Her pain, alone.

Yellow cranes fly up from the south to build their nests in the mountain heights. Wild goats with horns as sharp as sarriss points; mountain eagles; grey wildcats that have no shadow as they hunt in the dusk. Walnut trees. Peach trees. Rose trees. Trout and perch in the rivers. Gellas fowl. Wild peacocks. Meadows like a carpet unfurled, cloth laid out in a market place. In the valleys the earth is good, golden woodlands, fields basking in the sun and watered by streams from the mountain heights, the crops grow up so fast here that the mountain people can gather three harvests a year; in the gardens the trees are so heavy with fruit that it does not need to be bought and sold, one can simply reach out to take. Here, in the warmth, we rest the soldiers, load ourselves with supplies, let the horses rest and fatten. The dragons are gone into the mountains. Weary, after the great labours they have done for us. We settle ourselves in the foothills, build a city of soldiers’ tents. The men of the mountains come to do us honour, kneel before us, crown us with silver, offer up gifts of animal skins and sweetwood and wine and fruit. ‘Dragon King’, they call Marith. He smiles radiant at that. They call me ‘Queen of Flowers’. We hold feast days and games, the Army of Amrath parades, dances, sings songs, stages races and mock fights. The winners are crowned as we are with flowers and gold. There are weddings, celebrations of births and birthdays, commemorations of our dead. Osen talks of writing a book, a history of our conquests, until Alleen Durith laughs him out of it.

‘What will we do, when we have conquered the world?’ I say to Marith. ‘We will do this. Celebrate and enjoy ourselves, fill the world with music and dancing and poems. Pass all this beauty on to our children and their children after them.’

Marith tries to smile. ‘We have sacked all the great cities of the world, Thalia. Killed all the poets and the musicians who live in them.’

‘As you said, we will rebuild them. More beautiful than before. Never mind offering your soldiers a farm each: every soldier in the Army of Amrath can hold court in a palace in a great city, with retainers and painters and poets.’

He rubs his eyes. But I lived for twenty years in one building, I fasted, I killed, I knelt in the darkness with a knife in my hand, I knelt in the blinding light for days without sleep. If there is nothing else for our armies to do … yes, we can sack them again and again. If there is nothing else for us to do.

The child is growing so strong inside me, I feel her swimming within me, moving like a fish. Soon she will be born. Sometimes now she kicks so strongly Marith can feel it, if he puts his hand on my belly. ‘Quickly, quickly!’ I call to him, and he puts his hand where I show him. ‘I feel it!’ he cries. The wonder of it, each time, he laughs and shouts like a child himself, for pure longing joy. ‘My daughter,’ he says to it, he kisses my belly where it lies. The baby kicks and wriggles within me, as if she too is delighted by it.

I say to him, ‘We won’t have time to conquer any more of the world, when we have our children to bring up.’

I want my child to grow up happy and contented. Never to know hunger or helplessness. I want to give her a rich good life, far better than my own. I want her to have everything, wealth, status, for her life to be free from want, from sorrow, from grief. I want her life to be perfect. I would put my child’s life above others’ lives, I would do anything for this child inside me. Is this also a bad thing?

No one, I am certain, has thought or done such a thing before. You, I am sure, have never thought these things.

In the blazing light and heat of the south we celebrate Sunreturn. ‘Year’s Renewal,’ I say; Marith says with a laugh, ‘You heathen, it’s called Sunreturn.’ ‘There is no need for it to return,’ I say back to him, ‘you barbarian, look – the days are no shorter, the sun has not gone.’ He shakes his head, ‘True, true. But in my empire, Sunreturn is its right name.’ Indeed: such an absurd joke to us in the city of Sorlost the city of the dawn, that the people of the north should fear the death of the sun, this fool’s idea that the sun is so fragile. Sunreturn and Sun’s Height, what a strange joke! Yet I find that I miss the long days of the north. In Illyr, the summer days were so long I would go to bed sometimes when the sun was still golden, the light in the air as I lay waiting for sleep would be comforting. Like sleeping wrapped in light. I would fall asleep to the sound of birdsong; wake in the morning to a world already brilliant with light.

On the feast day the fires of the camp from the mountain are like stars; the air rings with song; the servants are garlanded with hyacinths, they have spread the floor of our tent with rose petals, Osen Fiolt brings us crowns of white blossom, caught and frozen, alive, cold with frost. A new gown is waiting for me, rosy silk so fine it looks as though I am wearing the dawn sky. A necklace of spun gold flowers, delicate as breath. There is music and singing. Silver bells ringing in the air above our heads. We drink perfumed yellow wine out of diamond cups. Poets tell of his triumphs, the beauty of his battles: The Deeds of the New King; The Ruin of Tyrenae; The Fall of Tereen. Osen Fiolt raises his cup in a toast to us. As the others join him, gold and silver stars begin to fall from the ceiling of the tent. Outside, in the warm summer darkness, the soldiers dance in their costumes of branches and bones and ribbons, run and leap with burning torches to light up the night. ‘Luck! Luck!’ their voices shout. Inside me, I feel the child kick. Alleen’s servant girl begins to sing, her voice sweet and soft as honey, warm, rich. A man beside her accompanies her on an ivory flute. She claps her hands, stamps her feet as she sings, a fast rhythm, joyful. She has the heavy accent of Illyr; I think, from the words I can understand, that she is singing of Amrath and Eltheia, how much He loved her and she loved Him. Dansa Arual gets to her feet, begins to dance. Alleen Durith joins her, and Osen Fiolt, soon almost everyone is dancing. Marith sits and watches beside me, until Dansa Arual grabs his hands and I tell him to join them. The tent smells of crushed flowers, rose petals kicked up by dancing feet.

In the grey light of the next morning, a pain grips my belly. I see the sun rise, I lie awake in the first light with the sounds of revelry around me. I begin to bleed.

When the sun sets in the evening, my child is dead.

Marith sits at my bedside, and we both knew that this would happen, and we both scream with grief. The greatest pain a human heart can endure, I am told, to lose a child, and I believe it. Marith’s voice, calling the shadows, his eyes are dragon eyes: ‘No. No. Please. Please. Just let her live.’ I hold her, for a little while. She moved, once, after she was born, her mouth opened, her eyes opened, she opened and closed the fingers of her hands, balled them into fists. Marith says that she did. Swears that she did. She is very cold in my arms, but very soft. She has tiny fingers all wrinkled up. She has tiny fingernails. Her ears are like tiny shells, she has fine black hair almost like feathers all over her head. Her skin is red-brown. Like apples. Her eyes are closed and I cannot bear to know what colour her eyes are. Her eyelashes are long and black. She has a smell on her like blood and like the sweat of a clean body after running, and like something else that I cannot describe and will never forget and already forget.

They say that an unborn child’s heartbeat sounds like horses’ hooves galloping. A healer woman came to our tent once, pressed her head to my belly, listened, drummed her fingers on a stone to beat out the sound of my child’s heart. ‘It is strong, your child,’ she told us. ‘Listen. It sounds like your army racing into battle, My Lady Queen, My Lord King.’ But that child died inside me, unformed, a little smear of dark blood. It was not strong. We were camped in Cen Elora, then, when my last child died. The great pine forests that grow on the shore of the Closed Sea. The floor of our tent was soft, from being pitched on pine mast, the air smelled of resin and wood smoke, the flames of our campfires would flicker up suddenly green and blue. The woods were very silent, empty of birds or animals. The streams in the woodlands were very clear, dark and empty also. There is something in the pine needles, in the resin from the trees, Marith said, that makes the water unpleasant for creatures to live in. The stream beds were fine gravel; one night our tent was pitched beside a deep pool, delicious for bathing. Purple iris grew up beside it, ringing it like a garland. We ate venison roasted over pinewood, fragrant with pinesmoke. My last child died the next day. We marched on three days later, I was still bleeding, horses’ hooves drummed on the earth. One of my guardsmen brought me the skin of a marten, made into a scarf. That evening they paraded before my wagon, red banners and trumpets, drum beats, hoof beats. ‘Hail to the queen! Hail to the queen!’ They did not know how to comfort me and they were trying to comfort me. Again, now, they will try to comfort me.

They take her away. My dead child. Someone takes her, wraps her in red cloth. I cannot bear the feel of my arms where I was holding her. She weighed nothing at all and they take her and it feels as though I was holding a great weight that is gone. Like I am looking around having been holding something that I have forgotten, panicked, what was it that I have dropped? Her face was perfect. Like a painting of a child’s face. Already I cannot remember it, what she looked like, what she smelled like. My hands smell of her but I cannot remember it, name it, her scent.

I weep. Marith weeps and howls. We cannot make any human sound.

But admit it: somewhere, deep down, you think that we deserve this. You believe we deserve this.

PART TWO

Chapter Ten

Tobias the bastard-hard sellsword failed fucking assassin waste of bloody space

The camp of the Army of Amrath, the scourge of the world, the conquerors, the bloodletters, the plague-bringers, the despoilers of all that lives, somehow in some complicated way kind of his friends

‘More porridge? It’s calling your names, lads …’

‘It’s calling out for something, certainly.’

‘So put it out of its misery and finish it, won’t you?’

‘Its misery? What about my misery having to eat it?’

‘Mercy, mercy, I’ll do anything, mercy! Just don’t offer me any more of that porridge, please!’

‘I’ll have another bowl, if it’s going.’

‘Ah, gods, hear that? Clews wants another bowl. Make sure you’re marching well upwind, yeah?’

‘Better out than in, man. Better out than in.’

‘That goes for the porridge, too.’

‘Piss off, man. You want to be the cook, you can be the bloody cook.’

‘That was my damned bag you just dripped porridge on!’

A troop of fresh new soldier boys finishing up their breakfast, their armour so new and shiny, their faces so young and ardent; it was positively freakish, to see them beside the old hands.

Tobias sat and watched them for a bit. Kind of pleasure/pain in it. Like probing a wound with a fingernail. Seemed to be becoming more and more of a masochist in his old age.

Regrets? I’ve had a few. But if I could fix one moment in all my life … Warp and weft of it, backwards and forwards, some company of an evening, two hot meals a day, the odd barrel of strong drink. Him and Geth and Skie, the lads with their innocent killer’s faces, playing dice and arguing and ignoring him and Geth and Skie when they ordered them to stop arsing around and polish their kit and then get some sleep. The Free Company of the Sword, a troop of bastard-hard sellswords and lonely blokes with no other job prospects. An old name, if not a famous one. Well-known in certain select political circles. Specialized in stabbing people in the back. Skie the commander-in-chief, thinker, broker, scariest hardest hardman Tobias had ever met. Tobias and Geth the squad commanders, hard-bitten, respected, maybe even kind of father figures to the squad boys, certainly both agreed they felt guilty when they stabbed the squad boys in the back. To be fair to Tobias, the clients did pay a lot more if the job included stabbing the squad boys in the back. ‘It’s good here,’ one of the squad boys had said to him, ‘don’t you think?’

Recruited some new boys. And one of them was Marith pissing Altrersyr may his godsdamned kingly dick rot off with pox. Decided it would be a great idea to stab Skie and Geth in the back and strike out on his own, Commander-in-Chief Tobias, build up a new troop around him, be his own man, do his own thing. Or just retire, drink beer, find himself a woman, keep her well enough she’d grit her teeth and ignore him getting fat and sweaty and farting all night.

Yes. Well. The best laid plans and all that, if ifs and buts were pots and pans, etc etc to the bitter clichéd end. Think it would be fair to say things didn’t entirely go quite to plan there, yup.

Four years, Tobias the bastard-hard sellsword had been floating around following in the Army of Amrath’s wake. His leg hurt where he’d once jumped out of a bloody window. His arm hurt, where Marith shitting Altrersyr had once stabbed him. His ribs hurt, his knees hurt, his frigging arse somehow hurt, hair was grey and thinning, his gut hung over his belt-buckle and he did indeed fart all night. ‘We can kill him, we can stop him, we can … we can do something. Right?’ And lonely. One man, stumbling along.

There had been others, once: Raeta, Landra. Friends. Raeta was … not human. Antlers. Claws. Wings. Green leaves, wet earth. Life god wild god thing. ‘I am his death, Tobias,’ Raeta had whispered. ‘I am his death, I will follow him and follow him, I will destroy him.’ Raeta the life god was four years dead. Landra Relast had finally fucked off two years back. ‘We have to destroy him, we have to kill him, I will find a way to destroy him, I will, I swear it.’ She had sounded the voice of reason. But there had been something in her face that made him glad, still, that she had gone off alone. Her eyes were like a wild dog’s eyes. Running her hands over a knife blade, whispering her father’s name and her brother’s name, promising them vengeance. Sometimes thought of her and shivered, right down inside his manhood. Raeta … Landra … Gods and monsters … ‘It’s worse than he is,’ Landra had cried out once, before Raeta died. And he might almost understand that, thinking of Raeta’s eyes, dying. Thinking of Landra’s eyes in the last days before she left him. ‘Kill him. Kill him.’ Grinding her teeth whispering it in her sleep. Wild dog’s eyes, wild dog’s moaning howling, ‘We have to kill him.’ So bloody empty, she’d looked. ‘I will be his death, Tobias. I will end this. I will stop him.’ Thank the gods he himself was old and sore and ached.

Gods. Shivered now. Anyway. They’re gone, like rainfall. Don’t think of them. Four years, Tobias the bastard-hard sellsword been floating around old and sore and farting, marching up and down behind the army. ‘I’ll think of something, right? Okay?’ I’m not complicit in this shit that’s happening here. I’m a hero, me. I’m following him around because one day, one day, when he’s old and sick and abandoned and ruined and his army’s left him and he’s nothing, I’ll still fuck up and fail to kill him. If Landra’s a wild dog, I’m just a fucking dog too. I’m walking here in the darkness in his footsteps forever. Following him because there’s nothing else. This is all there is of the world. The fire burning hot and light and there is no heat and there is no light. I can’t kill him. Terrified to even think of killing him. But I’m alive. Just about.

‘Gods and demons, look at that, Clews has finished the whole of his second bowl.’

‘Clews, man, your insides must be made of bronze.’

‘Iron, Turney, mate. My insides are made of iron.’

‘So … your insides are rusting away, then? That would explain a lot.’

‘Petros, mate, you see this empty bowl …?’

‘I see it, Clews. I’m thinking of giving you a special medal, in fact, for emptying it.’

‘Oh yeah? Oh yeah?’ The whole company turned to Clews, who in turn turned to Turney. Ooooh. There going to be a fight?

They were getting bored. Arrived ready and eager, ‘March like all hells, lads, no slacking now, got a war to fight,’ halfway across the whole of Irlast, ‘you’ll be men, soon, laddies, real men, you just need to bloody get there,’ and now they were waiting around in a mountain valley in the middle of nowhere, five days now just sitting here, no slaughter no looting no torture no rape. Okay, so Sunreturn had been fun and games, if a bit weird here in the south, they could use a day afterwards to rest, yes, but now it was over lads like these needed to get on. The latrine trenches were filled to overflowing, apart from anything else.

Rumour going round that the queen was ill. That was why they were hanging around. Obvious what ‘ill’ means, in a pregnant woman. Nobody dared say it. But.

Don’t. Just don’t.

The lads’ squad commander turned up, bawled at them to get themselves sorted out, they were marching in an hour or so, look at the bloody state of them, thought he’d told them twice already to polish their bloody kit. The lads shuffled up grumbling, faffing around in time-honoured fashion with random bits of stuff.

‘And get that bloody cookpot cleaned up. It stinks. Looks less like food, more like someone sneezed in it. Cleaned. Now. You, Petros.’

‘Me?’

‘Chuck it away, mate,’ Clews said. ‘We’ll be in Turain, soon. Famous for their metalwork, they are, the people of Turain.’ They’d never even heard of Turain before yesterday, Tobias thought. No idea where it is. Don’t think they’re even pronouncing it right. Good King Marith could just be making these places up.

The lads got themselves sorted, Petros humming Why We March like it was a love song, Turney having lost half his equipment, Clews regretting out loud having to march on two full bowls of the porridge.

‘Turain, here we come!’

‘Woop woop!’

Tobias wandered off. Gods. Fucking gods. Tears in his eyes.

We were all that bloody innocent, once.

His own belongings were the basic definition of basic. A blanket. A cookpot. A couple of spare shirts and leggings. A spare pair of boots. The blanket was silk velvet, a stunning deep emerald green with a pattern of silver flowers, seed pearls crusted around the edge. The cookpot was copper and had an enamelled handle in the shape of a peacock, its tail fan spreading across the side of the pot. The shirts, leggings and boots must have been made for a prince. Several princes, as none of them matched. The Army of Amrath and the second army of camp followers following it marched around looking like peacocks themselves, resplendent, dazzling, a riot of colour, nothing fitting with anything else, nothing quite fitting the body it was draped on. There’d been excited chatter in the camp about Turain’s fashions and craft traditions for days now, everyone working out what they might want to get their hands on, putting in early orders with the soldiers, haggling over prices. Vultures. Though Tobias wouldn’t mind a new coat, if one happened to turn up.