Moths to a Flame

by Sarah Ash

  Lai stared, open-mouthed.

  Her white breasts were painted with whorls, stars and flowers: indigo, henna and gold.

  ‘Oh, Melmeth, Lai Dhar was like a madman, he tore off my gown and threw me to the ground in spite of my protests, my tears—’ She flung herself to her knees before him, still strategically blocking his way to the door. Dishevelled hair, tear-flooded eyes, she looked the very picture of ravished virtue.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ he asked defeatedly.

  She smiled.

  ‘What do you think?’ She swiftly turned the ornate key in the lock. ‘There. Now no one can disturb us.’

  She took Lai’s hand and drew him towards the couch. The little dog came cringing out from underneath and slunk off towards its silklined basket.

  ‘You must learn to be more subtle, Lai. You must play the courtier’s part with a better grace.’

  He said nothing, crossing his arms on his chest, still angry with her for her deceits, her play-acting.

  ‘Be patient. I am sure Melmeth will keep his word …’

  ‘And meanwhile you twist me around your little finger like a silken thread.’

  ‘You really are angry with me, aren’t you! How can I sweeten your mood? Wine?’

  He shook his head. He wanted to keep a clear mind this time.

  ‘Why don’t you try one of these.’ She held out an open silver box; a delicious honeyed fragrance wafted out.

  ‘What are they?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Little sweetmeats. Let’s indulge ourselves.’ She popped one into her mouth. ‘Mmm … they are so good. Try.’ She selected another and held it up to his lips. ‘What’s the matter now? Afraid I’ll poison you?’

  Reluctantly he opened his mouth like a child forced to take bitter medicine and let her place the sweetmeat on his tongue.

  As he began to chew, the sweetmeat released a luscious sweetness, the almondine savour of wild apricots. He could even see the colour of the apricots as the taste melted in his mouth: soft, fragrant ochre, stained with darker flesh at the heart of the stone …

  ‘Another?’ She slid another one into his mouth before he could refuse, darker than the dark heart of the rose, scented with subtle driftspice … an all-pervading spice, a stimulating, sensuous spice that set the blood burning …

  She slid onto the couch beside him, pressing close to his body. Her perfume was so strong, a shaded spicemarket in the sultry summer’s heat. When she spoke, she seemed to breathe spices over him.

  ‘Don’t you like what I have done?’

  ‘The – the flowers?’

  ‘There are more.’ A low, shuddering laugh, daring him to find them.

  Head reeling, he set the glass down. There was something he must remember. A reason he had come. But … what was it? She was undoing the fastenings on his shirt, deft fingers pulling at the lacing of his breeches. Mustn’t forget—

  ‘Did you see them last night? Did you hear them?’

  The room wavered drunkenly before his eyes; dazzle of light, dazzle of ambergold hair.

  The moths, Lai. Weren’t they magical? That music …’

  ‘W–wait.’ His tongue would not work its way around the words. ‘You – saw the moths too?’

  ‘Better than saw.’ That low laugh again. ‘I was walking in the gardens with Lerillys. And I had such a terrible headache … nothing would relieve it. Then they came fluttering down, settling a while on the tamarisks above our heads. The air was full of the dust from their wings. It was – sweet on the tongue. And when they flew away, the tamarisk leaves were powdered with the dust, sparkling like stardust. Can you imagine it, Lai? So sweet to the taste. And my head had stopped aching, it felt so clear, so clean—’

  ‘You tasted the dust?’ Lai said thickly.

  ‘It cured my headache.’

  Crimson mouth pouting now, a sulky moue. Indulged, spoilt childwoman; he didn’t know whether to despise or pity her.

  ‘What was wrong with that? What do you know of these things anyway?’

  ‘It … could have poisoned you.’ Panic rising inside him. She was disappearing in a dazzle of moonlight, silver aura gilding the gold.

  Her voice came to him remotely from within the dazzle.

  ‘Then by that token you are poisoned too, Lai Dhar. I had my kitchenboy sprinkle some of the dust on the sweets. Good, isn’t it, so very, very good?’

  Constellation upon constellation above her head, the painted stars collided, burst, spun about the vaulted ceiling.

  ‘Do you know … the exquisites are devising names for the drug even now? Moongrains, starsparkle, boskhdust and other such pretty titles … They say it can reveal your most secret desires.’

  ‘N–no—’

  ‘Who am I, Lai?’ She was caressing him, kissing him. She tasted of allspice.

  He blinked. There was something wrong with his sight. Her face wavered, precious oil spilt in water, rainbow iridescence.

  Her hair – soft russet, bright with threads of copper. Thin dusting of freckles on her little nose. Eyes of that same dream-hazed, sentient blue as his own. Laili’s mouth on his own, inflamed, incestuous kisses, Laili’s arms around his body—

  ‘Clodolë – stop this!’ He forced her hands away.

  ‘Don’t you like it? But perhaps none of these are anywhere near your most secret desires.’

  ‘Be yourself! Be you!’

  Glimmer of moonsilver … Laili’s likeness dispersed in swirls of night-mist … yet behind her another woman stood in shadow … Slowly She raised Her head until, with sudden recognition, he knew Her. Light streamed from Her in cold rivulets. Her face in its archaic pallor was unendurably beautiful; Her eyes, darker than a moonless night, lit upon him, their expression remote yet tender. Slowly, Her arms opened to him …

  And a voice whispered in his head. ‘Isn’t this what you have always desired, Lai, the ultimate union, to be One with the Goddess?’

  The moon went out. She had gone.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he cried to Clodolë. ‘Why?’

  And then the boskh blurred all senses and he no longer knew where he was or greatly cared.

  They lay naked on the edge of a great cliff. Below, far below, breakers pounded against the rocks, spray rising in salty clouds.

  ‘I don’t want this, Clodolë—’

  ‘You don’t know what you want, do you?’ She shouted back at him over the roar of the waves. ‘But I know what I want!’ She was weeping. ‘I want a child!’

  She writhed up to meet him – and in that moment their minds touched, opened, and he saw horrors, oh Goddess, appalling horrors within the secret sealed chambers of her mind, horrors that made him scream for release—

  An attic corridor along which he runs, opening door after door only to see in each bare room a bier and on each bier the waxen corpse of a malformed foetus, lying puddled in a mess of blood and afterbirth.

  ‘Let me out! Let me out of here!’

  The walls crumble away.

  No release. Still locked within each other, they are falling, falling over the cliff-edge to oblivion—

  ‘Goddess – help me—’

  Mist of saltspray, crash of heaving breakers,

  ‘We’ll be smashed on the rocks, smashed and broken open—’

  They cleave the waves. Down. Powerful sea currents rack his body, the pulse of the deep waters, the enclosing, suffocating darkness—

  ‘Goddess …’

  Beached, he rolls gasping onto his back on the sand …

  Clodolë was staring down at him through the golden mermaid-strands of her hair. Her eyes seemed larger than ever, the cloudy dark of deep sea waters.

  I thought I was drowning.’ He tried to sit up, only to collapse again – not on damp sand but on the hard boards of the floor. Dull light sullied the walls. The night was ebbing fast.

  ‘I had no idea the boskh would affect you so … so drastically …’ She was naked. Had he torn her clothes off? Had his fingers left
those marks on her soft flesh? The sweet scent from the moist tangle of golden hair between her bruised thighs nauseated him now. He wished she would leave him alone.

  ‘What – hour is it?’

  ‘Near dawn.’

  He struggled up onto one elbow.

  ‘You mean we’ve – we’ve been—’

  ‘Fucking all that time?’ she said crudely. ‘Yes. A whole night. Impressive?’ She seemed upset. ‘Who else could give you that, Lai?’

  ‘Listen.’ He caught her by the wrist, pulling her close. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again. No more boskh.’

  ‘I lavish my most precious possession upon you and you complain!’

  He began to search around for his clothes.

  ‘Are you leaving me?’

  ‘It’s day.’ He went to the window, pulling open the painted shutters.

  ‘Close them!’ She hissed with pain, pressing her knuckles to her eyes to protect them from the sunlight. ‘Close them, close them!’

  Her agony was so palpable, so intense that, shocked, he banged them shut again. In the halflight, she knelt, shuddering in the aftershock.

  ‘Are you all right? Clodolë!’

  ‘White needles – in my head—’ She rocked to and fro. ‘A little more … will stop the pain …’ She fumbled blindly with one hand for the silver box.

  ‘A little more will only make it worse!’

  ‘P–please—’ She raised her head; her dazzled eyes streamed with tears, a cloudburst.

  Pity overcame him. She was not play-acting now. He found the box and took it to her; she stuffed two, three, four sweetmeats into her mouth, chewing till the saliva dribbled out of one corner of her mouth.

  ‘You’re addicted.’

  Brittle-bright notes shimmered in the dawn air. The tarkenhorns were blowing for dawn watch, rousing the city from sleep.

  He heard her sigh.

  ‘Mmm … s’better now … so much better …’

  She lay back on the silken cushions, her eyes vague, wandering, fixing on some distant point.

  ‘Come, Lai … join me …’ One white finger beckoned lazily.

  He shook his head. He had to get out, had to get air, fresh air—

  The dawnlight pierced his brain like sheet lightning. He grasped at the wall of the tower, teetering on the vertiginous rim, as the morning spun dizzily in front of him.

  ‘Your most secret desires …’

  He had glimpsed Her, in that one fleeting moment of transcendence, as he had once seen Her within the secret silence of the Grove.

  And now he had abused the sacred substance, he had used it for his own sensual gratification … and She had withdrawn, leaving him but a drear aftertaste …

  A void had opened up within him, a great and desolate emptiness …

  CHAPTER 11

  The light of the Undying Flame flickered palely in the Shrine of Memizhon; Ophar narrowed his eyes, wondering if the veiled woman who knelt before the flame was more shadow than substance, the revenant of some long-dead Arkhys …

  As he approached, she looked around, startled.

  ‘My lady Arkhys,’ he said, surprised. Her face was pale, her eyes blurred with tears, her hair usually so immaculately dressed, escaping in wisps from under the loose hood. ‘What is wrong?’

  She shook her head and turned her face away from him, as though ashamed.

  ‘My lady,’ he said as kindly as he could. Kindness was not an emotion he permitted himself to indulge in, yet her distress moved him. He had always felt a certain tenderness for Clodolë since the day he had first seen her, a girl whose hair seemed kissed with the tawny warmth of the sun. ‘Tell me what is troubling you.’

  ‘If only I could, Ophar.’ Her voice, stifled with tears, was a whisper of its usual self, a shadow-whisper. And then she turned from him as another bout of weeping overcame her and she covered her face in her hands. ‘Ohh … she must have cast a spell over him …’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Why else would he have rejected me, Ophar?’

  ‘Are we discussing your royal consort?’ Ophar said carefully.

  ‘She is from Ael Lahi. Have you seen her, Ophar? They say she bears a crescent mark on her brow that marks her as a servant of their goddess. She’s a moon-worshipper. What kind of moonmagic has she worked on Melmeth to drive him from me?’

  ‘The Arkhan has had these little infatuations before, lady … They last a short while and then he tires of his latest conquest and returns to you, his one, true love.’

  She gave a bitter little laugh.

  ‘Maybe in the past. But this time … no. He is under a spell. An Aelahim enchantment. I truly believe he intends to put me aside in favour of this pagan slave woman.’

  ‘But what makes you so sure?’

  ‘The night of Mithiel’s Day, she was seen at her open window. Playing a flute and singing, chanting strange hymns to the moon. Worshipping her pagan goddess on the day sacred to the god! And – is this not more than a coincidence, Ophar? – the very next night, these moonmoths appeared in the city. Suppose,’ and Clodolë knelt up, clutching at his hands, ‘suppose this is all part of her subtle witchcraft, designed to bend Melmeth to her own desires and turn him away from the ways of his forefathers, the Way of the Flame?’

  Ophar stared above her dishevelled head into the heart of the flame. Was it his imagining – or did it seem to burn less brightly?

  ‘But the moonmoths. Are you suggesting she summoned them? And for what purpose?’

  ‘The dust on their wings, Ophar.’ Clodolë’s eyes had darkened as she spoke, her voice low, breathing secrets. ‘It is a powerful aphrodisiac.’

  ‘So you believe this Aelahim woman is practising black arts – to seduce the Arkhan?’

  ‘It must be so.’ Clodolë raised her tear-streaked face to his. ‘Oh, Ophar I am so afraid – so very afraid—’

  He patted her hand in a tentative attempt at consolation.

  ‘Take heart, daughter. You were right to come to me. There is more to this than I had realised. Aelahim witchcraft … and here in our midst, a canker eating away at the heart of Myn-Dhiel … it must be stopped.’

  ‘Qaffë for my lord’s favourite. Spiced with cinnamon and dark honey. Why – what’s up, sweeting? Not feeling well?’

  The aromatic smell of the qaffë in the little porcelain bowl made Laili’s over-sensitive stomach churn. She lay back on the silken pillows, turning away her face, waving one hand.

  ‘So pale, little one.’ Sarilla’s fingers stroked her brow. ‘I hope you are not sickening. They say the marsh fever’s rife in the city again. There’s even talk of plague. Ouf …’ she fanned herself languidly with her silk fan. ‘This heat …’

  ‘I’m just a little tired. I’ll be all right, Sarilla …’

  ‘Perhaps you should sit here by the open window. Let me help you …’

  ‘I’m not an invalid. I can manage quite well myself!’

  Laili leaned on the sill, taking in breaths of fresh air; already the roof tiles and spires were shimmering in the first golden heat of the day.

  ‘Laili,’ Sarilla said slyly. ‘How long is it now?’

  Laili started. ‘How long?’

  ‘Since you conceived? Oh, come now, you can confide in me. Did you think I hadn’t noticed? Green-faced in the morning, turning away your favourite sweetmeats … I’ve already had to get the seamstress to let out the bodice on your white silk gown.’

  The turret room was spinning round, Laili felt herself falling, falling …

  Sarilla caught her and helped her into a chair, forcing her head onto her knees, stroking the back of her neck.

  ‘You are in danger, sweeting. You know that, don’t you? I won’t tell a living soul. You can trust me, Laili. But – how long will it be before others notice?’

  Laili spent the day in an agitation of indecision; unable to concentrate on her usual tasks. Her fingers slipped as she twisted Sarilla’s hair into the elaborate jewelled and feathered construc
tion the Torella favoured. Even the aromatic flower oils she had been mixing to perfume Sarilla’s rooms made her feel queasy.

  When should she tell Melmeth? He had been so preoccupied of late …

  But when he came to her chamber, he smiled on her, stroked her hair and when he kissed her, his breath tasted strangely sweet.

  ‘I’ve missed you so, chaeryn.’

  Chaeryn. Beloved. Laili’s heart sang in silence to hear him call her that name again; in the last days, he had not once called her his beloved and she had begun to fear that his affections were straying elsewhere. Sarilla had warned her enough times.

  ‘Laili,’ he said, staring intently into her face, ‘I think your Goddess has spoken to me.’

  Laili gazed back into his eyes. The delicate rivergreen of the iris was dominated by wildly dilated, swollen pupils … the eyes of the initiate who has ingested drugs to seek the trance-state in which the voice of the Goddess may be heard.

  ‘What did She say?’

  He let go of her and went to the open casement to gaze out at the stars, each movement erratic, restless.

  ‘It was more vision than speech …’ His voice drifted back to her, dream-laden. ‘And a songthread weaving through it, so ravishing it tore the heart to hear it – I tried to remember the notes when the dream faded but they were beyond my skills to recapture …’

  ‘And the vision, my lord?’

  ‘A dreaming place where I felt at peace. Even as I wandered there amongst the whispering trees, the path led me away and when I tried to find my way back, I couldn’t, every turning led me into twisted brambles and foul mires.’ He seized her hands, crushing them between his own. ‘Help me find that place again, Laili. And that music. It wreathes around my head, it won’t let me rest, it won’t let me sleep …’

  She raised one hand to stroke his forehead; it was hot, hot as firestones.

  ‘If we were on Ael Lahi, I would say that the Goddess had called you to the Grove, my lord. But here in Perysse I would be accused of talking heresy. Heresy against your god.’