The shadows lengthened, and the flower wilted in Mara’s hand, poisoned by the salt of her own nervous sweat. Ayaki wakened in his basket. At first content to bat his fat hands at the insects that flitted to feed on the blossoms above his head, he later grew fussy. The time for his midday meal had long passed. Mara tossed the dead flower away and arose. She plucked a ripened fruit from one of the ornamental jomach trees and peeled it for her infant. The boy quieted as he chewed the sweet fibre. Only then did Mara hear the footsteps approaching from behind.
She did not turn around. With Papewaio on guard at the gate to the glade, this would be no assassin. Priests of Chochocan did not enter unasked; gardeners did no work while master or mistress used the glade; and no other could enter without earning a sentence of death. The only person living who could walk these paths at this hour with impunity was the Lord of the Acoma. The fact that he had arrived home from his town house in Sulan-Qu without fanfare told Mara only one thing: he had seen his father, and his disgrace in the eyes of the Warlord and his insult to the house of his birth had caught up with him.
Mara eased the last bit of jomach into Ayaki’s eager mouth. Aware that her hands were shaking, she made a show of blotting her sticky fingers just as Buntokapi reached the far side of the sacred pool.
He stopped on the walk, his sandals showering a fine spray of gravel into the water. Reflections shattered into a thousand fleeing ripples, and the li birds fell silent in the branches overhead. ‘Wife, you are like the pusk adder of the jungles, whose markings are pretty enough to be mistaken for a flower when it lies at rest. But its strike is swift and its bite is fatal.’
Slowly Mara rose. She turned reluctantly, her fingers stained red with jomach juice; and she looked upon the face of her husband.
He had come from town at speed, without his litter of state, for his broad features were whitened with a thin layer of dust from the road. He wore a simple day robe, probably the same he had donned when his father’s knock had roused him from bed; this, too, was filmed with dust, which hid the wine stains that spoiled the embroidery on one cuff. Mara’s gaze followed the knotted cords of his belt, the well-worn leather of his sword, and the slice of muscled chest revealed through the opened collar of his robe. She saw the marks of Teani’s passion still visible on the skin over his collarbone, and the hard set of his lips. Lastly she looked into his eyes, which showed a mixture of thwarted anger, childlike confusion, and longing.
Unaware that in the eyes of her husband she was beautiful and, in a strange way, untouchable, Mara bowed. The only words she could think to utter felt wrong.
Buntokapi stared at her with an intensity that hurt to witness. ‘And like the pusk adder, my wife, your venom stops the heart. You play the Game of the Council with masterful precision. How could you know which face I would wear, the Anasati, whose blood and birth were mine, or the Acoma, whose honour I pledged to preserve with a vow?’
Mara willed her rigid posture to relax. But her voice shook ever so slightly as she said, ‘The Acoma family is ancient in honour. No Lord of that name has ever lived in shame.’
Buntokapi stepped sharply forward, his legs easily spanning the breadth of the ceremonial pool. Towering over the slight form of his wife, he bent and caught her wrists. ‘I could change that, proud woman. At a stroke, I could make the honour of your forebears as dust in the wind.’
Forced to look into his angry eyes, to feel the strength of a man she had not cherished, Mara needed all her will to hold steady. A minute passed heavy with threat. Then the darting play of the insects that fed among the flowers inspired Ayaki to spontaneous laughter. Buntokapi looked down and noticed the weals his handling had left on Mara’s flesh. He blinked in embarrassment and let her go, and it seemed to her as she watched that something vital drained from him. Then he straightened, and a look that she had never known crossed his face.
‘Perhaps I was wrong, the day we married,’ said Buntokapi. ‘Perhaps I am indeed as stupid as you and my father and my brothers believed. But for the sake of my son, I will die bravely as an Acoma.’
Mara bent her head. Suddenly she had to fight to suppress tears. For one brief instant she had perceived the man her husband might have been had he been raised with the love and the care that had all fallen to his elder brothers. The Lord of the Anasati might have done little to foster the potential of this, his third, son; but she had played upon Buntokapi’s inadequacies until she achieved the end she had desired. Mara felt pain within; when she should feel triumph, she instead knew grief. For in this one moment she saw that Buntokapi’s potential for greatness, now glimpsed like the hint of sunlight through clouds, should be wasted so soon in death.
But the poignancy of the moment lasted only a second. Buntokapi caught her arm in the bruising grip of a warrior and pulled her roughly to his side. ‘Come, wife. Fetch our son from his basket. Before the sun sets this day, you shall both see what it takes to die like a Lord of the Acoma.’