She smelled a stink of sex and salt and her own unwashed skin. She pushed back against his weight, bore his hands gripping her pelvis, the restrained violence in each jerky thrust. She arched her back so he might finish quickly and this thing would end. His hands bunched at the back of her neck. Barked out the name of his god in Old Fictish – shouted of the hate, and revenge, and the hungry sea.
Miah was careless in what he took, for this was not pleasure, but retribution. Was barely half a minute of graceless rutting that followed, the skin stripping from where her knees abraded against the iron platform before he became rigid, dug his fingers into the meat of her hip, said the name of God once more.
Then his climax, spilled ejaculate hot down her thigh and upon the iron of the platform, a debt partially paid in aequor and blood. Shuddered behind her, reached around in belated acknowledgement of her sacrifice, to press her close to his sweating torso and enclose her breast in his hand.
‘Even the gods hate you,’ he groaned. He wasn’t speaking to her but to Jonah. To his cousin he hated so utterly it swallowed him up. ‘You should have died.’
When he collapsed from effort, Arden pulled away from Miah and stood up. Looked down at the man as he rolled skywards, a red figure in the lamplight, wrecked by orgasm and anguish. Felt her heart harden and turn into stone.
18
She did not sleep
She did not sleep. The platform was too hard, the waves too loud. The man was an awful complication thrown into a life that should have had a singular path … and up until last night had been dying here on this island.
At one stage he rolled over, and in unthinking sleep threw a casual arm across Arden’s chest as if to pull her into an embrace. Arden slid away, and he did not stir.
She counted the days in their deal and Miah’s help to get to Maris, which meant there were still many mornings before Jonah’s return. She was under no illusion that intimacies were hard to stop, once started. But if Miah could keep his word even at the moment she stood before Bellis …
Then she might have one more chance to save him.
At first light Miah recovered both her coat and Jonah’s from the sand and waited with his back to her as she climbed into another layer of wet clothes, before leading her, limping and bloody from her terrible journey, to his small pony and cart. A disturbed ring of dirt about the shaggy animal along with some bright copper shaving was evidence of protective bloodwork. In this unclaimed territory between wilderness and the lich-machines, there were bound to be casualties.
She observed Miah surreptitiously as he hitched the pony back into its harness. How much mandatum power did he have? She rubbed one of her naked, inflamed coins uneasily. Half her palm was numb now, except for a little bite of sensation at their centre. Of all the talents that would make the Lions chase their exotic sanguinem to the ends of the earth, how did they not know of Miah’s existence?
Or perhaps they did. Arden recalled Chalice’s sly question, about a missing Riven. If they’d not known of him, then they’d certainly suspected his presence.
Along the road back to the shorefolk Miah asked no further intimacy of her. Arden began to entertain a hope that perhaps the next two nights might pass without a repeat of the night upon the serpent-hunter’s platform. It was not as if he’d seemed particularly enthusiastic about the deal, and she was quite a wretched mess. It couldn’t be in any way more than a chore, a saving of face. She sat in a huddle upon a sail-canvas roll at the back of the cart, too stiff and chafed to walk, the salt on her skin having turned into a crust, her face so wind-burnt it hurt even to move her mouth for the food and water Miah passed along.
Billows of smoke from far-off bunker-thief fires made lazy revolutions across their blackened path.
‘This place,’ she said, when the silence leaned too much like a weight about her. ‘It’s as if the land is injured, somehow.’
Miah only nodded. ‘It is injured. Hurt beyond imagining and no way we can change it,’ he said.
‘Not even …?’ she gestured at his arm, the blood beneath his skin. ‘Could nothing be done?’
‘I am no saint.’
They stopped once in a clearing, and she steeled herself that he might request her again, for his hand brushed her thigh, and he looked at her thoughtfully from under his heavy brow.
Instead he shared the last of his food. After the pony was given time to graze, they continued along a track that still bore the worn cobblestone ruts of an ancient civilization, most of which had sunk beneath the waves. Before the coming of the missionaries, Equus Island had been populated by the old ancestors of the deepwater folk. Anything that was not metal belonged to them. Then the waters had risen in an ancient cataclysm, leaving only the islands behind.
In the late afternoon they passed into estuarine country, inlets and streams fraying the coastal edge, and stopped for a while at a broken granite causeway that appeared to head out to the silvering sea. Miah pulled the pony up short, and they waited there for a little while in the blustery day as the tide retreated, leaving behind the braided remains of an old road indented with puddles. In some pools a knot of tardy, transparent eels skipped in panic, having been caught unawares by the fast departure of the sea. Miah gave the pony its own head as they crossed, occasionally leaving the cart to pluck the eels out of their shallow prisons, dump them in a small barrel of water he’d kept in the back of the cart. When Arden peered into the barrel, they were small, almost transparent versions of the sea-dragon the folk had brought to shore. They roiled in their own slime, indignant at capture.
‘Are they food?’
A shadow of a grin on that stony face. ‘Dragon-fry. We release them past the poison waters of Equus. They’d die here otherwise, or grow small, and stunted.’ He gestured out towards the horizon. ‘The waters here used to team with leviathan, back in the days before this place was corrupted. Sea-dragon schools so dense there could not be a boat piloted from one island to the other. Only the old blood kept the monsters at bay. There was pride in such work, then.’
As the light behind them was sinking into reds and golds, a smell of salt water heralded the return of the tide. Miah urged the pony forward and to the other side of the estuary. The land might have been desolate if not for slabs of basalt plates showing through the wild grass, a slight smell of onions and liquorice rising from grass that had been previously crushed from the forward camp of the deepwater folk. The trees here were hardly tall, but after the mud of the badlands, their scrubby presence was like a veritable forest.
They stopped for the night at a ruin so degraded by wind and storm it was impossible to see what it had been before. More stone underfoot, and a great rusted iron dish full of holes and ashes. Maybe it had once been a temple or pilgrimage way, for the lone building was far too small for a house.
Still, the locals appeared to still use it frequently, having added some journeyman comforts. A rockblood lantern in one corner. A raised bed-platform of old wicker, so one was not forced to sleep on the cold stones. The ceiling had been replaced with a haphazard construction of steel ribs and crackling oiled flax-canvas.
Miah disappeared for a while. Arden waited with the pony, staying close to its shaggy hide as a loom of anxiety made her fret about Miah’s return. The journey had tipped something inside her. After days of isolation she now feared it utterly. Miah was her only tool against Bellis, her only instrument of saving Jonah.
The thwacks of an axe echoed in the distance. When he returned, sweat shining in the fading light and dragging a sack of wood, she found herself panting in relief.
He noticed her straight away. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Just worried when it took so long, is all.’
He gruffed a laugh. ‘Huh, there’s nothing out there. Only the machines and the devilfish.’
He threw logs into the iron fire pit with kindling, set them alight, and she realized then she was crying, for fat tears rolled down her face and dripped off her chin.
‘This is not a puni
shment,’ he said irately. ‘I am not your executioner.’
She waved him off. ‘It is nothing. The journey has tired me.’
‘You can stop this whenever you want, Beacon. As soon as we reach the encampment I’ll have Gareb take you back to Burden Town. Forget the agreement.’
She remembered the man Malachi had introduced her to on the Deepwater Night, and shook her head, but found herself squeezing out more angry tears because she could not get even those chaotic emotions under control. ‘I need a bathroom, and a damn wash.’
‘Latrine bucket is around the back. Water too, but it’s cold.’
‘I don’t care if it’s cold. I stink like I’ve died in this coat,’ she said impatiently. ‘I’ve had enough of wallowing in my discomfort.’
Miah shrugged, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other. He was not meant to be with her for his pleasure. Whether the agreement was settled with her smelling of roses, or several days of dirt and sweat, it made no difference.
Unable to bear her wretchedness any longer she left him to unpack the rest of the provisions, and slipped into the near-dark. The fresh air had blown the rockblood scent away, and the sky sported a few translucent clouds across the northern horizon. The waning moon skirted close to the water line, washing out the stars.
Arden found the stone wash basin directly under an iron pump handle. Some remaining ceramic mosaics crunched underfoot. The water came out nearly freezing, but she didn’t mind, for it was a clean pain, sharp and real. She slipped out of the coat and the remains of her kidskins, and with a dented pewter dish sluiced down the salt from her skin even as it turned to gooseflesh, did her best to clean her wounds without soap.
When she looked up she found Miah sitting on a slab of driftwood, watching her.
A brief annoyance crossed her mind, to cover her nakedness to preserve the brief scraps of her honour, for there was something in his unreadable expression that worried her, as if he was going to ask something impossible.
Then her small pride was gone. She had resigned herself to this agreement and he would see everything before these days were out. She ignored him as best she could and scrubbed herself marginally clean. Oh, she thought, for hot water. And soap.
He watched Arden emotionlessly as she rinsed the blemishes from her skin. One leg stuck out, he was favouring the hunting injury, for their activity had likely snagged his stitches. A bottle of spirit in his hand reflected the rising moonlight.
As she finished washing, a scream echoed beyond the harbour, making her jump. ‘What was that?’
‘A machine, trying to get through,’ Miah said. ‘They never stop trying to cross the estuary. They won’t stop until the entire island is mud and we are driven into the ocean.’
‘Have you tried to stop them from coming too close?’ She gestured at the wound on his arm, which had scabbed up as dark as one of his tattoos.
He gave a mocking grunt. ‘Me against the saint’s wickedness?’ He shook his head. ‘All the blood in my body will not keep them from this shore.’
The wash basin was big enough to sit inside if she tucked her limbs in at a huddle, and truth be told it was better that he did not look at her further with such dour blankness. The cold water made her abraded skin numb, took the assorted pains away. She wrapped her arms about her legs to conserve warmth as she let the wind dry her. The distant screams were sometimes metal, but sometimes very human.
He rubbed the thigh which held the stitches. ‘We will be back by the afternoon. The day after that we will be headed to Maris.’
‘Thank you.’ Then, ‘It wasn’t Jonah’s fault. The rite he did, which went wrong and brought the monsters to your home. It was Bellis. She suggested it to him.’
‘He should have been stronger, said no.’
‘He was a fourteen-year-old boy, and grieving. Bellis is your enemy. Not him.’
His brow creased. ‘Do you very much long to see my cousin again?’ The liquor had softened his words, but not the intent. He didn’t bother to hide a critical curiosity.
‘I do, yes.’
‘And then what?’
‘Take him home with me to Lyonne.’
‘Marry him, even though he is already married?’
She felt herself blush as she hadn’t thought that far ahead, then understood why Miah spoke with such a scoff. ‘We aren’t like deepwater folk. Under Lyonnian law he is allowed to divorce Bellis.’
‘He is lucky.’ This said aside, almost at a mumble, as if he could not bear to compliment Jonah, even so abstractly.
‘Were you ever married, Miah?’ she asked, and prepared herself for any number of answers, including an annoyed spouse waiting back at the encampment followed by an onerous night of adultery.
He shook his head. ‘I have wanted to marry, several times. But I was never permitted a bride either by choice or arrangement.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘A Deepwater marriage has to be agreed upon, by all of us.’
‘No eloping into the mangroves?’ she said too light-heartedly, then regretted her words, for he was too solemn, and silent as he shook his head. Arden wondered why trouble gnawed at her even in this moment of gratitude. Still, her relief that their agreement remained firm disarmed her, and when he came to her with his hand offered, she took it without hesitation.
‘You’d best come inside. It’s safer.’
She rose from the basin and her breath steamed in the cold air. As insubstantial as a wraith she followed him into the plain stone room. He seemed somewhat kinder now than he had been on the platform, offering her a clean linen shirt to dry herself off with, and held out the bottle of kelp spirit.
‘Drink. This doesn’t have to be any more difficult than it already is.’
She took the bottle, drank, and coughed from the fumes. Drank again, enough to make her head spin even before she had finished swallowing.
He gestured her to the bed, removed his clothes. She didn’t want to look at him though a moment arose, brief and awkward, when he wanted to have her that way. Face to face, like lovers.
Even with the liquor dulling her mind, she knew she could not bear such closeness. A body was one thing, but her mind, her emotions – those had to remain unyielding. They had both revealed small vulnerabilities, put cracks in their armour.
Arden turned about and effected a position, saved herself from witnessing the sudden wrenching passion in his face, the hard, upthrust excitement of him, the scars and markings on his body so like Jonah’s, yet so different. In the half-light he was inhuman, losing the outline of a man and replacing it with a shape that was at once bulky and sinuous.
His eagerness extended into his act, and he did not last long in his labours before finishing; afterwards he embraced her until he grew soft, and sated. Arden lay as still as a small creature caught in the jaws of a much larger one, each heartbeat a pained squeeze of survival and emotional turmoil. Not long afterwards Miah fell out of her completely, rolled over and settled into a doze.
She lay upon the pallet. The toxin in the serpent oil unguent had had a peppery heat that burned within her even though they were apart, stopped her from escaping fully into that comfortable numbness the kelp spirit offered.
Another cup of spirit, she thought, and she might be drunk enough not to care.
19
Drink
‘Drink.’ He stirred against her, having woken wanting. By then it was not completely dark, and dawn was on its way.
‘Ugh, no more drink.’ She winced from her pounding head and wondered how long she had slept. Her legs creaked like old machinery as she moved under the rough blanket.
‘Drink,’ Miah said again, offering the bottle of spirit in urgent generosity, as if he thought it a kindness. Even though she was still halfway intoxicated from the first round she took a small sip from the bottle, rinsing the fuzz off her teeth and the blood-taste from her mouth.
If it was meant to take the edge off the act it did not work, for she could not p
ut herself outside herself when he seized her up in his thick, scarred arms and murmured words of hoarse instruction, could not drift away into a netherworld where everything was fog, and nothing mattered, because he was too present, too absolute, too insistent she not slip away.
Worst of all there followed a moment when the hot, fevered closeness of his scarred, naked body, the oceanic rhythm as he moved within her, dragged her off the precipice she’d been clinging to and plunged Arden into a dark, shuddering orgasm.
Her body’s treachery horrified her. The confused guilt which followed that awful sparking delight made her gasp. Miah took it the wrong way and held her close, murmuring words as if they were prayers. The months she’d spent hoisted inside a cage of sadness were not meant to be erased so simply and with the presence of another man.
‘Get on with it,’ she gritted, close to tears again and doing her best to hold them back, because if he saw her crying he would stop, and she would have come this far for nothing.
‘Get on with it?’ he said in return. He turned her over and made Arden look at him. ‘There was joy in that, don’t deny it.’
‘I’m not denying it.’
‘Then give me these days. You will have Jonah for the rest of your life.’
Pliant with despair she allowed him to examine her body in a way she’d not have allowed him the night before, let his lips work across her collar, to her sternum, to each nipple one by one so she might startle from the shock of his mouth there so unexpectedly. She did not push his head away when he thrust his stubbled face between her legs and into that place both root and crown, or when he tongued the key of her so she sobbed from the obliteration of her principles.
The jags of sensation wounded her so that when she cried out in climax again it was less in bliss and more in hopelessness.
Afterwards he embraced her like a lover and kissed her with a damp mouth still tasting of her surrender to him. An almost bitter triumph was in his face.
‘He was never there, was he?’ Miah said, smirking. ‘Never did that.’
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