‘Why? Why should you want to be feared? Or hated?’ Thalia frowned. ‘You almost sound as though you enjoy it.’
‘I don’t enjoy it. I just don’t care. Everyone fears and hates me. Or rather, everyone fears and hates my name. What I am. You feared me too, a little, at first. Admit it. I saw your face when I told you who I am.’ He sighed, rubbed hard at his eyes. ‘I’ve read something about your Temple. I know what it means, your Lord of Living and Dying. Why you do what you do. Did what you did. I don’t understand it, but I know what it means. You make things live. Keep the balance. You bring life to the living, and death to those who need to die. Which is not something anyone can say about many members of my family.’ He closed his eyes and murmured, half to himself, half to Thalia:
‘Like rainfall, like storms in the desert, drowning, engendering,
Soaking the parched earth and washing away all that survives there.
Is that how it goes? I never understood Gyste’s obsession with rain until I saw it rain in the desert, drowning one half of the world and giving new life to the other.’
‘You’ve read The Song of the Red Year?’
‘Oh, I’ve read most things worth reading. Occasionally even whilst sober. Particularly when they’re about impossibly beautiful women. I always preferred The Silver Tree, though, until I met you, which I’m told is very bad taste.’
‘I’ve never read it. The Silver Tree.’
‘No? Good. Far too filthy for your holy mind to comprehend.’ Marith stretched himself out on the hard ground, his head in her lap. ‘I’ll demonstrate bits of it later, if you like.’
They were still for a while, Thalia stroking her fingers through his beautiful shining hair, looking down at his face and then up at the stars. She had never seen so many stars. The Dragon’s Mouth winked at her. His star, she thought. A bat flew past overhead, squeaking faintly, almost inaudible. What did it eat, out here? A fox called and made her start. The men at the fire started too, then laughed.
‘What if they kill us in our sleep?’ Thalia said suddenly.
Marith, who had been half-asleep, dozing and almost purring like a cat, opened his eyes in confusion. ‘What? Who? Why?’
‘The … the men. Your … companions.’ She didn’t like using their names. They frightened her, more now than ever. ‘They could just kill us both and ride off and no one would ever know.’
‘Them? They wouldn’t kill me, beautiful girl. They wouldn’t dare.’ Marith sat up and shook dust from his coat. ‘They know I would kill them first. Selling me back to my uncle is about the only thing they can do to salvage anything and start afresh.’
He stood up, pulling her up with him. ‘We should go to bed. We have a very long ride ahead of us tomorrow. And I have some poetry to enlighten you about first, beautiful girl.’
The next day passed in similar fashion, and the next, and the next, on and on into a blur of dry barren hills and vast dusty skies. Thalia’s fear of the men accompanying them subsided, as they all seemed to relax in each other’s company again, relationships shifting and changing. After his first cold hauteur, Marith softened a little, helping with some of the work, exchanging brief words with the other men. He was happier for it, Thalia could see, less preoccupied with the idea of what he was or what he should be, more contented in himself as a man doing and being, alive beneath the great curve of the sky.
He even seemed to enjoy gathering scrub for the fire or fetching water, gazing around at the wide landscape with something like peace in his eyes. Riding his horse he loved. He would sometimes give the horse its head and ride it as fast as it could go into the dun hills, wheeling back in a great circle to rejoin them, shouting and waving his sword.
‘You’ll ride it to death,’ Tobias muttered at him, ‘it’s a bloody farm horse, not a war charger. And there’s not enough water for you to go tearing off and making it thirstier than it needs to be.’
Marith spurred the horse into a gallop and brought it back in a cloud of dust, made it rear up and snort. ‘She’s a lovely horse,’ he said. ‘She enjoys it. I think I might call her Fire.’ He smiled at Thalia, switching to Literan. ‘Or God’s Knife.’
He tried to teach Thalia to ride it, one evening when they stopped early because they had found a good-sized stream, flowing over rocks with clean water free of dust, bordered with low trees and delft grass blooming pink. She laughed and almost fell off several times and he gave up, promising her a pretty white palfrey when they reached Ith.
The number of things he’d promised her when they reached Ith, Thalia thought, she’d need a palace of her own to house them in.
As his manner softened he seemed, curiously, more of a lord than ever, treating the other men with the easy confidence of a man unafraid of them or himself. At night, weary after a long day riding in the heat, he sat under the stars and told her about Ith, which he had visited before several times as a boy, and his home on the White Isles, where it rained half the summer and snowed white and pure in the wintertime. He described the high moors, like and unalike to the wastes they were riding through, barren yet filled with life; the forests, which seemed to her to be like vast gardens; the sea, which she could not begin to understand no matter how he tried to evoke it for her. Like the idea of snow, and frost, and bitter cold rain, it was a mystery to her that he could not unravel, and he could only smile and say, ‘You’ll see, beautiful girl.’ They made love in the cramped bed in the back of the little carriage, giggling and trying to be silent as Rate, Tobias and Alxine snored outside. He recited the whole of The Silver Tree to her in solemn whispers, and The Song of the Red Year, cupping her face in his hand and telling her she was far more beautiful than Manora. He even knew a couple of the poems written about Thalia herself, which he intoned half mocking, half overcome with astonishment that he held the subject in his arms as he spoke. The darkness Thalia had first seen in him retreated, leaving him clean and pure and cold.
He did not talk of Sorlost, and nor did she ask. And in his sleep he whimpered, and thrashed about, and tore at his eyes and his mouth.
And then one night, when they had been journeying for twenty days and were in the midst of the great desert, she summoned up her courage and asked him the thing she must know.
‘Why did your father disinherit you?’ she said simply. ‘Why are you here? What did you do?’