Kitabı oku: «The House of Sacrifice», sayfa 6

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.

Anyway. He bagged everything up, shouldered it. The whole camp was stirring, busying itself for the march.

‘Finally getting off, then,’ Naillil said cheerfully. A woman he knew, made her money doing the soldiers’ washing and sewing. She’d been with the army since Ith, way back. Longer than Tobias, in fact, technically. When Naillil started following the army, Tobias was still labouring under the impression he could do something else with his life.

Tobias nodded. ‘Finally.’ Had to say something more, really, somehow. Speak, Tobias! Don’t mumble at her and walk off.

Rovi said in his horrible dead voice, ‘Maybe King Marith’s hangover was really crippling him?’

Tobias shuddered. All this time and you’d think he’d have got used to Rovi’s voice and he never did and never would if he lived a thousand years and heard it every day.

Naillil said, ‘Rovi!’ Pretending shock.

‘Four days, we were all sitting around, after Lord Fiolt’s birthday. Ander almost had to sack itself.’ Dust puffing out of Rovi’s rotting toothless scar-tissue mouth. Smell like when you dredged the bottom of a pond after a sheep fell in. Rovi had been a goatherd. Thirty years man and boy tending his flocks in the highlands of Illyr, until the Army of Amrath turned up. Rovi had got stabbed in the chest and the gut and the neck during the battle of Ethalden. Rovi had ended up face down in the river Jaxertane, sunk in the mud and the filth for three days. Only somehow Rovi … hadn’t died. Kind of. Naillil had found him when she went to wash some shirts out. ‘Helpful for carrying my wash bags,’ she’d said once, and Tobias really wasn’t sure whether she meant something dirty by that or not. Really, really, really hoped not.

‘Here we go,’ said Rovi.

‘Here we go.’

Trumpets rang. Strange gathering sound of an army beginning to march. Tramp of feet and clatter of horses’ hooves. A rhythm to it, a music.

All day marching, through the mountains, beside the river that rushed down fast and wild and cold. The mountain slopes were covered with fruit trees, rich in birds and deer and wild goats. The sunlight came down through the leaves thick and golden, dappled the light, bathed their skin green. The men laughed and sang as they marched. A green tunnel, they were marching through, like being a child forcing your way through hedgerows, unable to see the sky, parting the leaves like parting the water of the sea. Then the path would rise, the trees would thin out, the sky would explode huge above them, deep joyous blue. The mountain peaks would appear then, and even in the warm damp growing heat, on the highest peaks of the mountains, there was snow. Marching on soft green grass, green bushes crusted with purple flowers, sweating in the sunlight, dazzled by the light and the blue of the sky. Then the path would dip again, the trees would close in around them, green soft damp cool heat. Felt different. Sounded different. The air tasted different in the mouth.

The fruit on the trees was poisonous, the camp followers had been warned. If you ate it, you’d swell up and sweat and die. When they stopped that night the trees had great knotted roots and twisting branches reaching almost to the ground. Hiding the world around them. Huge waxy pink and red flowers that attracted more insects than you’d believe possible. There were birds in the trees eating the insects, they had brilliant red feathers with black undersides to their wings. Tamas birds. They shrieked and called, sounded like they were speaking.

A whole village of camp followers setting down for the night. Endless babble of women warning their children against eating the poison fruit, smell of food cooking, smell of sweaty bodies, smell of human excrement. The sun was just setting. Warm and red like a healing wound.

Naillil was cooking stew. Asked Tobias if he’d like to join her and Rovi in having some.

‘Uh … Yeah.’ Paused. He could sit downwind of Rovi. And the stew smelled good. ‘Thank you.’

‘Want to help me wring out some shirts, afterwards?’

‘Uh … No.’ Paused. ‘Okay, then. Just this once.’

Tobias the bastard-hard sellsword! Hell yeah! Eased off his boots. Gods, his leg was bloody killing him this evening. Bad enough to make him forget about the pain in his arm and his ribs. When they’d eaten, Naillil called him over; he bent down over a pot of warm water, sank his hands in. Lifted the wet cloth up, water running back down into the wash-pot, the heavy feel of the wet cloth, solid and satisfying, the smell of the warm water in the warm air, the smell of the wet cloth. Twisted the shirt up to wring out the water, flicked it out with a good loud noise to get the creasing out. Water sprayed on his own clothes.

‘You’re good at this,’ Naillil said. She sounded surprised. Made a noncommittal secretly pleased nothing sound in his throat in answer, wrung out another shirt and enjoyed the feel of twisting the wet cloth. Naillil said, ‘Want to help me soap the next load, as well?’

Raeta the gestmet’s voice, weary: Not much else you can do with your life, I’m guessing, except kill? Tobias flicked the shirt out with a snap. Showered water over Naillil, who swore at him and laughed. Rovi sort of laughed.

From somewhere far off in the trees, a voice screamed.

Naillil looked up. Tobias looked up.

A howl in the air. A great gust of hot wind. More voices shouting. Screaming.

‘The dragon! The dragon!’ The sky lit up crimson. Fire blazing across the sky. ‘The dragon!’ a voice screamed. ‘The dragon!’

It came rushing over them, green and silver, huge as thinking, writhing and twisting and tearing at itself, swimming in the flames. Spewing out fire. Again. Again. Again. Again.

Soldiers came tramping towards them. Armed. Began killing them. Killing women. Killing children. The trail of lives that followed where the army led. Their women. Their children. Killing them.

Run.

Just run.

Tobias was gasping, wheezing, limping. His leg shrieking in pain and his arm shrieking and his heart and his ribs. Rovi next to him staggering, gasping, rot stink coming off him. Almost fell. Teeth gritted with pain. Up the slope of the mountain, towards … something. Nothing. Just run. Good rich black earth clinging sucking to his boots. Streams of people. Soldiers. Panic. Naillil shouted, ‘Look.’ A dark little cleft in the rocks, a cave, could hardly see it in the night and it looked like a wound in the hillside and it stank of blood like everything everywhere they had been. They scrambled up to it, crouched into it, sat in the dark, like sitting inside a wound. Stone walls close around them. Tobias gasping and sobbing in pain. Trying to gasp loud enough to drown out Rovi wheezing his horrible broken dead bad-water breath.

‘It will be over soon,’ said Naillil. ‘Few hours, at most.’

‘Yeah. Few hours. Like last time.’

‘She’ll stop it. Or Lord Fiolt will.’

Noises in the night. Wing beats. Voices shouting. Then horsemen passing very near them, riding hard. Trumpet calls. Then silence.

They emerged from the cave in the first light of morning. Voices crying. Footsteps on loose pebbles, jangle of bronze. A soldier’s voice shouting commands.

‘Line up there! We’re marching now.’

The slope of the mountain fell away very steeply beneath them, they must have scrambled up it climbing, Tobias could barely remember except that it had hurt. In the valley beneath them, a column of soldiers was marching off south. Staring straight ahead, everything neat and tidy, armour polished, red crests to their helmets very bright. They marched past in silence. Another column, spearmen with long sarriss, a raw red banner at the head of their files. It hung limp in the still air. Further up the slope, very near them, a party of horsemen. The smell of the horses was strong and pleasant.

There were great burn marks across the mountain. The fruit trees were burned away, rocks smashed up. The earth bare and black and dead. Figures picked their way across a wasteland of black ash.

A woman was standing a short distance from them. A dead baby in her arms. Her face and body were streaked with blood. Further down the slope a dead child lay sprawled, flies buzzing over it. A dead woman lay near it, her arms thrown out towards it. There were flies everywhere.

Oh Thalia, Tobias thought. Oh Thalia, girl.

‘She’s lost four pregnancies now,’ said Naillil. ‘Four pregnancies in four years.’ Naillil’s hands folded over her stomach. ‘You could almost pity her.’

She must have heard the sound Tobias was trying not to make. ‘I said almost,’ she said.

They began to walk slowly down the burned slope. Following the way the horsemen had gone. Tobias groaned in pain, rubbed at his arm. ‘Any chance any of our stuff survived, you reckon?’ One of the pointless things they said. Survivors coming together, the old hands who knew what to do to avoid the soldiers on the bad nights. Pedlars began to shout that they had cloths and blankets and cookpots for sale, cheap and best quality, lined up waiting for those who had lost everything overnight. The woman holding the dead baby began walking behind them. After perhaps an hour she grew calmer. Dropped the baby’s body. Walked on and walked on.