‘Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. We live. We die. For these things, we are grateful. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things—’
Marith twisted in her arms. Don’t pray for me. Don’t you dare pray for me. Don’t you know what I am, by now? Things screamed in the distance. Shadows crawling in his eyes and in his skin. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill us all. But she held him and murmured her prayers in a voice like candle flames.
Seserenthelae aus perhalish. Night comes. We survive. Her voice, and her heart, and the light, no longer burning. The light, shining out of her. He began to weep. Long, gentle sobs, like a child.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
You will say I am a fool.
He is beautiful. God’s knives, he is beautiful. Beautiful like nothing else in the world. And because of that, you will think me a fool, an innocent running from a prison, throwing herself into his arms because he is a man and a prince and as beautiful as the moon. You think me a stupid girl, love-struck and love-blind, clinging to poems and dreams.
I want to live, I decided after Ausa. I want to live and I will live. I would have lived in the Temple, I suppose, as much as I was able. It had a peace of a kind, and a power of a kind for me. Lived with gardens of flowers, and little children playing, and a thousand candles burning and the Great Hymn to the rising sun. Lived with the knife, and the Small Chamber, and the slaves waiting there with no names and no voices left to speak. Lived with Ausa, and Tolneurn, and Demmy. My guilt. My demons. Are they any worse than his? But as I conjured up the fear and the dark I saw something, a chance, a freedom, a world beyond.
So many dead men I have seen. And the Temple slaves, the priestesses, the worshippers, those who claim to serve the Temple and its God but who prostrate themselves before the fear of death and the fear of life. He need have no fear, of living or dying. He need fear nothing. He is so beautiful. So living. So filled with life. He blazes with it, sharp and terrible and alive. He is like the knife in the Temple, the blade shining in the dark.
I can see us both, in the dark, shining. Crowned in silver. Throned in gold. Radiant with light. Not a bad thing to see, surely?
But still, you will say I am a fool.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
They arrived at last at a small village, the last tiny forgotten vestige of Empire trade routes before the desert gave way slowly to the plains of Immish. Another five or six days’ hard ride, Tobias reckoned, and they should be safely across the border. The road they had taken was more direct than the route in, but no less empty and inhospitable. They had passed a few scattered dwellings, even the occasional ruined caravan inn. They had not stopped at any of them, Tobias urging caution. He seemed almost to flinch at the wind, now.
That afternoon, however, they had come upon the village, clustered around a small brackish oasis, caught up in the midst of some local celebration. Tobias, again, advised that they hurry on past, but the smell of food and wine, the sounds of laughter, music and song, made the other men pause. Thalia looked frightened, and wanted to go on, but Marith for once ignored her. She’d have to get used to noise and company and crowds.
Rooms were engaged, the horses stabled, dusty water heated for baths. Thalia put on the yellow dress, tight fitted to her body with full, swirling skirts, vulgar and cheap but pretty enough on her and flattering her luminous dark skin. It left her arms bare, so she wore a scarf of fine pale silk, embroidered in gold and pink flowers like a summer meadow, wrapped around her left forearm. Her hair hung down her back, long and straight like a fall of dark water. Her dress was cut low. Her eyes were nervous and brilliant. No one would look at her arms.
In the village square crowds had gathered in the sunset, hot and noisy with shouts and singing, pitch-soaked torches making shadows dance. Music struck up, couples dancing. Thalia had never seen dancing, was at first frightened by the whirling bodies and stamping feet. She looked around her, wide-eyed at the chaos swirling around them. The dancers leapt in circles, spinning and running, bending arms and heads in suddenly jagged twists and turns. They understand the brevity of life, here, Marith thought. How alone we all are beneath the vastness of the desert sky. He had been born and bred on an island, spent his life among men who sailed out on the pitiless sea. The same desperate clinging to life, knowing it was nothing, could be crushed out at any moment, nothing left. So they danced it out in the dust.
The music was stamping feet and drums and piping flutes that rose and fell in coils. It was familiar to Thalia, he felt her body sway a little to the rhythms, recognizing the beats and counter-beats, the pauses and sudden changes in tempo that sounded strange to his ears. Deliciously erotic, but something under it frightened him. How foreign she was to him. Knowing things he did not. One song within which he could just about make out the words ‘sun’ and ‘darkness’ made her shiver in his arms. ‘It is like—’ she began, then stopped and closed her mouth on the words. Marith shivered in turn. Like a song from her Temple. He had not thought, though he should have, that she would feel any regret at the leaving of it. He loved her. She had no right to feel nostalgia, or regret.
‘We should go back to the inn,’ he said in a little while. The air was heavy with the smell of drink; it was searing hot from the torches but also bitterly cold. The atmosphere growing thicker and wilder. Men leered at Thalia; Marith stared at them and they drew back. This was all a mistake, he thought. We shouldn’t have stopped here. This isn’t her place, or mine. She was so far above this mummery, whilst he … He watched the weaving figures, twisting in a long spiralling pattern of stamping feet around the square, dancing and shouting and singing while the darkness ate at them. You will all die, his mind whispered. This brightness is only the surface. Beneath is the darkness: you will all die.
‘Come and dance with me,’ Thalia said suddenly.
Marith started. ‘Dance?’
‘Yes, dance. I’d like to. That’s why we stopped here, isn’t it? I thought you probably enjoyed this sort of thing.’ She smiled at him almost archly. ‘From what little I know, most young men seem to.’
‘I do … I did … I mean …’
‘Rate seems to be.’ Rate was holding a large mug of something in one hand and a kebab in the other, eyeing a remarkably well-built young woman dancing in front of him. His face was lit with a vast grin.