by Sarah Ash
‘My head is burning and your hands are so cool. You are like a still forest pool, Laili, deep, unfathomable … I want to drown myself in your dark waters …’
He was babbling, as though delirious. But he was her lord and she loved him, so she surrendered to his desires, letting him drown again and again until, exhausted, he gave a sigh and slept in her arms.
Lai opened his door. A folded paper had been pushed underneath. Heart beating faster, he unfolded it, clumsy in his haste. There was no scarlet seal this time. Just a few untidily scribbled words:
Be at Sulirrian’s gazebo tonight. Unarmed. Wakenight. Please. L.
So it had come to this. Melmeth had tired of her, had cast her aside. Why else would her note have been so urgent – yet so oblique?
Lai went to the carved chest of cherrywood in which he kept what little money he possessed; he counted it out, coin by coin. Would it be enough to buy them both passage home?
Arkhan Sulirrian the Visionary had built his gazebo in the highest part of the Sassistri Gardens where the ground dropped steeply away, overlooking the winding river and the weather-vaned turrets of the barracks beneath. High on the brow of the hill stood the gazebo’s slender structure: twisted columns of serpentine white marble supporting a fragile dome whose ceiling was inlaid with a golden-glass mosaic.
Occasional wafts of faint music and laughter drifted upwards from roof gardens and open casements, embellishing the mellow silence of the warm summer’s night.
But all Lai could think of was Laili – alone, abandoned. Stale, used goods that had lost their novelty …
The milkwhite columns of the gazebo shimmered faintly in the moon’s chaste light. A glimpse of movement caught his eye, a swirl of shadowed draperies.
‘Laili?’ he called uncertainly.
‘In here.’ Her voice was muffled.
He hurried up the steps and entered the gazebo.
She was waiting in the furthest corner, her veiled face averted, as though ashamed to look at him.
‘Laili,’ he said gently. She did not move, she just stood there. ‘It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.’ He reached her, put his hands on her shoulders, turned her to face him, raising her veil—
‘Clodolë!’ He drew back, stumbling in his confusion.
She was smiling, evidently well pleased with her little deception.
‘You really thought I was Laili, didn’t you?’
Now that he had recovered from the initial shock, he was angry. So angry he could not speak.
She stroked one finger down his cheek.
‘You’ve been neglecting me, Lai.’ Her crimson-stained lips pouted. ‘I don’t like to be neglected.’
‘And I don’t like this play-acting,’ Lai burst out. ‘This pretence. What do you want of me?’
She gave a little laugh.
‘What do I want? Now who’s play-acting? Playing the fool?’ She slid her hands onto his shoulders, fingering the sombre cloth of his jacket.
‘I don’t think we have anything more to say to each other.’
‘There are ways of communication other than conversation …’ Her fingertips worked their way down to unbutton his shirt.
He caught her hands in his.
‘Who are you, Clodolë? And do you know who I am? Or doesn’t it matter as long as my prick is in good working order?’
She snatched her hands away.
‘You just don’t begin to understand, do you?’ he said in a whisper. ‘There’s more to life than Myn-Dhiel. You’re sated. Sated with meaningless, mindless pleasures. Look. Down there.’ He pointed to the rooftops of Perysse far below. ‘Your city. Teeming with life. Teeming with hunger and misery. When have you ever troubled yourself to find out how your people live?’
‘You call it my city. It is Melmeth’s city.’
‘But there’s so much good you could do, Clodolë. There are children, starving homeless children in those tortuous streets who desperately need your help.’
For a moment, he saw her hesitate and a fleeting look of longing softened her bee-brown eyes. And then the look vanished and her gaze hardened again.
‘An Arkhys does not concern herself with the common people.’
‘These common people – have you ever troubled yourself to go and see how they live? How they scrape some kind of existence together from one long day to the next? Babies abandoned on rubbish tips, left to the rats, emaciated children thieving scraps, selling their bodies for—’
She hit him across the face; hard.
‘How dare you preach at me!’
‘You don’t want to know, do you?’ He could taste blood; her rings had grazed his lip.
‘They live their lives as they please. If you’re so concerned about them, little priest, little lapsed priest, why aren’t you down there distributing soup?’
Her words stung. Little priest. How had she found out? Or had the Torella put it about the palace that her Aelahim slaves had been members of a barbaric religious order, sworn to chastity … and therefore all the more delightful a conquest?
‘Escort me back to Myn-Dhiel.’
He hesitated.
‘What point is there in staying here? You were right; we have nothing to say to each other.’
They descended the winding path without speaking.
‘Where are they tonight?’ she said after a while. ‘The moonmoths?’
‘They have a brief lifespan. And the moon is waning …’
He heard her give a little sigh. In her moonpale silks she seemed to have become a creature of the night, her eyes dark and huge, her drifting hair more white than gold. A trick of the fading moonlight? He didn’t know, he only knew that she looked eerily, ethereally beautiful, a woman of moonshine and shadows.
‘Lai,’ she said in a whisper. ‘You’re so passionate about the issues you care about. I love that passion in you. Can we not forget our differences – for one more night?’
She drew closer to him, one fingertip touching his swollen lip where her ring had drawn blood.
‘I hurt you. Let me kiss it better.’
She drew closer still, lifting her pale face to his.
‘No,’ he said although he longed to let her kiss him. ‘I won’t play your games any more, Clodolë.’
She stared up at him.
‘Games. You think this is a game?’ Her voice hardened. ‘Then let me remind you that the welfare of one who is dear to you depends largely on whether I still find you pleasing company or no …’
‘You’re threatening me!’ he said, astonished.
‘I’ve put up with Melmeth’s infatuations in the past. But I am losing my patience with this one. Oh, you know who I’m talking about, don’t you? Disappoint me once more – and she will suffer.’ She gathered up her skirts and went running down the path in between the trees.
‘Clodolë–wait!’
She turned and faced him, her eyes blazing like a cat’s in a last gleam of moonlight.
‘Wait? For what? If I want a sermon, I can go to the priests of Mithiel.’
He watched as she crossed the velvet-grassed bank and disappeared into Myn-Dhiel by one of the secret Memizhon doors.
‘I could have loved you, Clodolë,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps that was what you really wanted of me … love? And there was a time when I thought … before …’
Before she had threatened Laili.
Starflecks, now green, now blue, now pure white ice glittered in the cloudless dark above his head.
There were stars on the vaulted roof of her bedchamber, gilded stars, a feeble imitation of these brilliant pulsations of light.
A sham. Like your protestations to me, Clodolë. Like all the promises of the House of Memizhon – empty.
Little street sparrows, their dark eyes dulled with hunger, the ragged children crept out from noisome alleys and doorways, their hands upraised to Lai, silently begging.
If you’re so concerned about them, little priest …
They must have sm
elt the delicious odour emanating from the basket of fresh-baked bread he had bought.
He began to tear the loaves up into chunks – and suddenly he was almost knocked off his feet as the children surged around him, clawing for the bread.
‘There’s plenty—’ he cried. A tiny boy was knocked face-down into the mud; Lai scooped him up and thrust a piece of bread into his hand. When he turned back to the basket, it was empty and the children had fled.
He picked up the basket and shook the last crumbs out onto the cobbles, smiling wryly. What had he hoped to achieve with one basket of bread? He would have to return tomorrow … and the next day and the next … Then, maybe, they might come to trust him …
A plumed palanquin came swaying towards Lai across the crowded square, its bare-chested bearers grunting in the heat.
As it passed Lai, the curtains parted and a ringed hand let drop a scarlet muskrose at his feet. A waft of an opulent perfume stirred a memory of another hot day a year ago at the slave market by the Ylliri Fountain, a painful memory he had tried to forget …
The palanquin passed on without slowing its pace towards the palace. Could the unseen passenger be the Torella Sarilla?
Puzzled, Lai knelt to retrieve the rose. As he lifted it, he saw that a wafer-thin paper had been inserted amongst its ruched petals. He stepped back into a shadowed doorway to read the message:
Be in the Sassistri Gardens near the grove of silver myrrh at wakenight.
Just those laconic words. No signature. Lai’s heart beat faster, a soaring wingbeat in his chest. Was all the waiting over – were they to be reunited at last?
The shrine of Ala Sassistri, mistress of the Arkhan Sulaimon, was still a favoured place for lovers’ trysts. Here, where the grieving Arkhan had scattered the ashes of his dead beloved, a grove of rustling myrrh-trees and sombre incense cedars had been planted. And on the shrine of pale marble, the bleak, bleached taint of mourning, hung wind-harps, their unearthly, thready timbres troubling the grove’s quiet when the sky darkened with storm clouds.
No breeze stirred the plangent strings of the wind-harps as Lai entered the odiferous grove; the summered nightscent of the whispering leaves, some crushed underfoot in the dank soil, was rich and bitter as pyre-spices.
She was by the shrine. A still figure, her loose robe pale as the funerary marble, her bright hair veiled in gossamer.
Lai hesitated. This revenant, frail moon-phantasm of Ala Sassistri … this could not be Laili.
Staying within the cover of the grove, he edged forwards. His foot pressed on a concealed twig, the tiny crack tweaking the warm air.
‘Who’s – who’s there?’
The voice. He knew it. Still he dared not go any further, fearing some obscure Memizhonian subterfuge.
‘Lai?’
‘I’m here. Are you alone?’
She nodded her head. Still she did not move. He ventured out from the myrrh-trees, crossing the moonsilvered grass towards her.
‘Why?’ asked Lai. ‘Why tonight? Why here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are they watching us? There must be a catch.’
She put out one hand towards him, fingers feverishly feeling for his face, touching, informing.
‘What have they done to you, Laili?’
‘Listen.’ She pulled his head close to hers. ‘You must believe me. I am well. I am cared-for. I want for nothing … You must be content with that.’
‘Content! When I cannot see you, cannot even speak your name aloud for fear that—’
‘Hush.’ She sealed his lips with her fingertips. ‘I know. You risked your life for me in the arena, for my freedom. You cannot yet understand what I am saying to you. That – in a way – I am happy.’
For a moment Lai could not believe what he was hearing.
‘They’ve made you say this. They’ve threatened you as they threatened me.’
Gently she shook her head.
‘I want you to be happy too. If only you would stay at court. Then you would still be near at hand—’
‘Stay! In this dissolute travesty Melmeth calls a court! And what would I do to maintain my position? Kill a few more slaves in the arena?’ He saw her shake her head. ‘Have you ever left Myn-Dhiel, Laili? Up here, surrounded by pleasure gardens and fountains, it’s so easy to forget the city beneath, the starving children, the shaven-headed slaves toiling in the dye works—’
‘You judge Melmeth too harshly … he is a good man at heart.’
‘A good man who enjoys watching his slaves fight to the death for sport?’
‘Lai.’ She took his hand in hers. ‘You are so … so changed. So bitter.’
‘I can’t live with what I have done. Every night I … I find myself back in the arena, my feet slipping on the bloodied sand. Every night I wake shouting out aloud in terror. I can’t stay here, Laili. I have to go back to the Grove. Only there will I find some kind of peace of mind—’
‘Then this is where our ways part, Lai. Because I can never go with you now.’ There was a sudden shiver in her voice.
‘Why? Because you’re Melmeth’s concubine?’ He tipped her face up, each word a sharp sliver of bamboo slid under fingernails. ‘Violating one of the adept – that must have appealed to him.’
‘No! It was not like that!’
‘Just like them to choose this grove for our meeting-place … dedicated to fragrant Sassistri, Sulaimon’s whore. And how did she die? She was poisoned by his jealous Arkhys.’ He snatched away his hand. ‘He’ll keep you locked away in some secret chamber until he tires of you, until this game goes stale … then you’ll receive a pretty gift from Clodolë: gloves or a scented pomander. Laced with her most virulent poison.’
‘No, Lai!’
‘Come with me. No one will notice if we slip away. And there’s bound to be a spice barque in port that’s heading back to the isles—’
‘You still don’t understand, you’re not listening to me! I don’t want to go.’
‘You – don’t want to?’
‘What would be the point of returning to Ael Lahi? To hear the singing, to ache to be part of it … yet to be barred from the Grove, always on the outside.’
‘They would understand. You were taken by force—’
‘Force …’ An enigmatic little smile flitted across her lips, brief as a moonshadow. ‘I have come to love him. And he loves me.’
‘And when it is no longer politic for him to love you?’
‘I bear his child, Lai.’
‘His – his child.’
Stunned, Lai could only stare at her.
‘Now do you understand?’
Melmeth’s seed, Melmeth’s heir. Oh yes, he understood only too well. She could never go with him now to Ael Lahi. He would return alone.
‘It was selfish of me to want you to stay here. Of course you must go. Remember – a part of me will be always with you.’
‘And a part of me here with you,’ he said, his voice breaking.
‘Lai, oh Lai.’ She wound her arms around him and pressed her cheek to his. For a moment he hid his face in her hair, letting himself drown in the memory of that lost closeness, that time when they thought as one, acted as one. She kissed his forehead, brief brush of rose-velvet lips.
‘If ever you need me, Laili—’
It sounded so foolish, so empty. When you are the beloved of the Arkhan of Ar-Khendye you need no one. And yet …
Danger …
The chill of presentiment drenched him as it had done once before, that distant twilit evening when the gilded slave-galley rounded the headland.
He looked back. She was still standing there. When he looked again, there was nothing but moonlight.
CHAPTER 12
Moonlight filtered into the first chamber of the mausoleum of the House of Memizhon. A faint red eye of flame glimmered from an alcove where the wakelight burned incessantly. Like a film of greying powdersnow, dust lay on the crumbling sarcophagi, drifted across the
flagged floor. Melmeth stood still, still as the painted stone statues that stared at him from every niche in the vaulted chamber. Behind each effigy were neatly piled mouldering skulls and bones; wherever he looked, hollowed sockets of darkness stared at him, yellowed teeth-stubs grinned.
And all around stood the ancient ancestral effigies, lifesize, some still draped in rotting fragments of ceremonial garments; their staring eyes glinted in the moonlight.
Melmeth ventured a step towards the nearest statue.
For one sickening moment he was convinced the stiff figure was mummified human flesh. The hair appeared to be real hair, matted and spider-webbed with age. But on closer inspection, the hideous sunken face was sculpted yellowing wax; the glazed eyes were precious stones. Emeralds, perhaps … their chill, dead glint terrified Melmeth as the moonlight animated them, until they appeared to stare directly, accusingly at him.
‘Lord Melmeth.’
‘Who’s there?’ Melmeth whispered. His throat was suddenly dry, choked with dust. Had someone followed him? Or was the sepulchral voice issuing from one of the antique sarcophagi?
‘Did I startle you?’ A man moved into the silvered path of moonlight, a gaunt old man, his priest’s vestments darker than shadow. In his hands he held a glass cruse of sacred oil, red as blood. Ophar. ‘I’ve come to perform my nightly duties. But what has drawn you to the mausoleum at so late an hour?’
Melmeth took in a slow, steadying breath, a breath that tasted of mould and decay.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘here lies the greatness of the House of Memizhon, crumbling quietly and inexorably to dust. Each Arkhan, each tyrant of Ar-Khendye, reduced to a neat stack of bones.’
Ophar nodded his head. Moving to the wakelight, he carefully replenished the sacred oil and replaced the guttering wick. A breath of cinnamon and bitter myrrh wafted through the chamber.
‘And what will they say of me when I am dust?’ Melmeth swept one finger along the dust clogging the carven legend below the figure, peering at the ancient letters. ‘What will I have left behind me? What will they call me? Melmeth the Weak? No. I’ve decided that things must change – and I must change them.’