The House of Sacrifice

by Anna Smith Spark

  That night he had to sleep rough under a tree, wrapped in the horse blanket, twigs poking into his back. Amrath slept rough with his men, didn’t the stories say that? I think they may have been lying. His shoulder was screaming; he had had to fight to hold himself upright, keep himself from twisting and slumping over in the saddle. His whole body was stiff. They brought him water in a helmet to wash his face; cold going-off badly roasted woodrat to eat. They couldn’t build a fire: too dangerous, the trees weren’t thick here, the light would show, Brychan looked sick at the thought. Brychan looked sick anyway, after a night’s watch and a day tramping at his king’s side. Marith gave him his cloak. Brychan gave it back. Marith gave it back again.

  “You’ll be cold,” said Brychan.

  “Give it to Kiana, then.”

  Brychan took the cloak, wrapped himself up.

  A wind stirred the leaves of the tree. Black, and the sky behind them was deep black-blue. Clouds moving, covering the stars, shredded away by the wind. Hard to tell what was sky and what was cloud and what was the leaves dancing. No moon tonight. So the stars were brighter. Thalia hated moonless nights. Did not often want to make love on moonless nights. It seemed understandable why.

  I’d happily never even touch her again, he thought. Just look at her, have her near me; no, not even look at her, just hear her voice. Just know she was alive. In another man’s bed, falling in love with someone else, never thinking of me, as long as she’s alive somewhere.

  The clouds grew thicker. Even the branches of the tree above his head were lost in the dark. The men around him black shapes in the black. Tricks of his eyes, his eyes wanting to see something in the dark. A weight crushing down over his face. The darkness was like a stone.

  My shadowbeasts, he thought. Come to smother me. Wrapped all around me. Ti blindfolding me with a velvet scarf playing blindman’s catch, trying to make me run and grab hold of him. It occurred to him suddenly that he would be dead in a few days. He should try to get to sleep. It would be nice to get some sleep before he was dead. Thought: I can’t die. Stupid. What made me think that? I came so close to dying, and I cannot die. I sit in the filth in the dark and I cannot die and I cannot live. If I could die, oh gods, I would be long long dead.

  Ha. No. I wouldn’t. I’d be here just as I am, trying to hang on with every last fibre of my being. Possibly I wouldn’t have let my army get slaughtered around me, though. Try to get some sleep. It’s so late. Perhaps the sun will rise soon. I would like that. The comfort of falling asleep in the dawn. These maudlin self-pitying dreams banished. I—

  A noise, in the dark.

  Off to the left.

  An animal noise. The night is full of animal noises. An owl, a deer… A mountain god, prowling on cloven hooves, coming to kill him…

  A noise again. A horse’s nicker, the jingle of a bridle, the horse rapidly hushed. A snap that might have been a twig breaking. Hard to tell in the dark where it was coming from. The whole camp, if you could call twenty men a camp, must be awake now, surely. Sat up, heard a twig snap under him, had to bite back another howl at the pain in his shoulder. Reached for his knife and his sword.

  The dark got suddenly darker. Black shape beside him, close to him. “My Lord King,” Alis Nymen whispered in his ear. “Horsemen, over towards the next ridge. Danger.”

  Really? You think?

  Quiet rasp of metal that was swords being drawn. All of them lying in the dark, trying not to breathe, trying not to move. One of their own horses neighed, unnerved by the tension licking around it. A bird called, off to Marith’s left. Rustle of leaves. A wild desperate animal shriek. So many things are awake tonight.

  A soldier crept over to him, whispered close: “There are a lot of them, My Lord King. Forty, at least. Most of them mounted. Further off than the noise suggests, and the land falls and rises again between us and them. If we’re lucky… There’s nothing we can do, My Lord King, except hope they don’t hear us. I’m worried about the horses making a noise. But I can’t see what to do else.”

  One might, if one were feeling unkind, suggest not creeping around whispering like a little boy sneaking out of bed. “Yes. Thank you.” And now we lie and wait. A horse neighed, and it sounded further off. The clouds were thinning, a single star visible through the leaves of the tree. Black clouds black leaves black sky, layers of darkness. Thank the gods it’s a moonless night. One of their horses neighed. Gods. Gods. His whole body aching to jump up, run; a shout hammering in his mouth. More stars visible, a pattern of them like open hands. A fox barked. So much noise in the darkness. The clouds thickened. He felt as though he would choke on the dark.

  This is all so familiar. Lying in silence in the dark. When the dawn came he might have been dozing. He was wet with dew and the blanket he was wrapped in reeked of damp. There had not been any noise of the horsemen for a long time.

  The clouds were low, the dawn came very gradually, setting the world soft warm pink the shadowless milky first light. A bird burst up from the tree above him in a clap of wings. A leaf drifted down onto his face.

  A soldier crept over to him, moving in the stiff way that men do when moving silently. He put his head very close to Marith’s face. “My Lord King.” Marith recognized his voice and the smell of his hair as the man who had spoken to him in the night. Grey-haired, a lean sharp face. “My Lord King, the horsemen are gone. Do you want me to scout out their tracks?”

  “Yes. Do it. Carefully.”

  The man smiled, “I think I can be careful, My Lord King.”

  “He could be going to betray us to them,” Alis whispered.

  “He could. He should have reported to you, not directly to me. He could have yelled for them to come and butcher us last night.”

  An eternity, waiting. In the light now they sat and looked at each other. None of them looking at Marith. He went over to Kiana, who was checking her sword, turning it over and over, polishing the decoration at the hilt with her cloak.

  “My Lord King.” She frowned. “Marith.”

  “If they’d come on us in the night, you would have been defenceless.”

  “Yes. I know.” She turned the sword over and over, the blade very close to her face. It was almost black, and then it was bright silver, and it was grey and cold.

  “What’s the man’s name?” he asked Kiana. “Do you know?”

  “Selerie,” she said. “The same as the old king. He’s one of my captains.” She looked at Marith, daring him to flinch. “You used to know all the officers’ names, Marith.”

  The man Selerie came back. Moving less cautiously, almost a smile on his face. Marith said, “Yes?”

  “My Lord King. I was right, forty of them at least, horses and men on foot with them. There’s a gully, on the other side of the ridge, they were on the other side of that, they went off to the north-east. Same direction we’re going in. I followed the trail a little way, there’s smoke, I think they may be camped somewhere up ahead. But, My Lord King… I found this.”

  The man Selerie opened his hand. On his palm was something dusty, metallic-looking. A copper brooch to fasten a cloak. A cheap, badly made thing. The pin was bent, it must have fallen from a cloak, been lost in the dark. It was stamped with a crude picture of a rose tree.

  “Chathe?”

  The man Selerie nodded. Grinning. “Chathe. Could be prisoners, but…” He looked straight into Marith’s face. The first time he had done so. “Lord Mathen of Chathe broke and ran from the battle, My Lord King. His horsemen with him. He must be somewhere. Him and his men. They would be heading north-east, I should think. Back home. I would bet a lot this is him.”

  Gods. Ryn Mathen.

  That cowardly useless treacherous bastard Ryn Mathen. If he is still alive, he deserves slow killing.

  Ryn Mathen the Chathean war leader, and his horsemen. Cousin to the king of Chathe, the new young one. Good with his sword: I saw him cut a man in half once, when we took Ander, rode up at him, cut his body straight across the m
iddle, the man’s legs stood up straight on their own for a moment after his body went flying, rooted in the mud, Ryn didn’t so much as blink. Looks at Thalia sometimes. Popular. His men are very loyal to him.

  Marith felt a great sickness come up over him.

  Good soldiers, too, Ryn’s men.

  “It can’t be. It’s a trap. The man’s wrong.”

  “I can think of better ways of setting a trap than wandering around in the dark dropping a cheap brooch, hoping we find it. If they had any idea we were here, they’d have fallen on us last night.”

  “It was a prisoner. Someone dropped a looted brooch. The man’s lying.”

  “I would trust Selerie with my life,” said Kiana. “He is not lying. He may be wrong.” She looked at Marith. “We have very little to lose.”

  “Only our lives,” said Alis. “The king’s life.”

  What she just said. Walked into that, didn’t you, Alis? They started out immediately, over the ridge, a nasty scramble down the narrow gulley the man Selerie had mentioned, a stream trickled down so they refilled their waterskins, splashed their faces, a nastier scramble up the other side. The land beyond was the same scrubby woodland, rising to bare mountain peaks. Marith tried to remember distance on the map, how much further the mountains lasted before the great dry plain that stretched away to the city of Elarne, the capital city of Chathe.

  “Here, My Lord King, you see?” The man Selerie was crouching, pointing to marks on the ground. “Horses, and footprints, you see? I found the brooch further on, near those rocks there.”

  Horse shit, horse piss, a bit further on what might have been man piss, up against the rocks near where Selerie had found the brooch. Definitely people on horseback, definitely heading northwards. Could be anyone going anywhere. Could be a bunch of people heading south and getting lost.

  But he knew. Knew and felt sick. “This is too easy,” he’d once said to Tobias inside the Summer Palace in Sorlost.

  Not exactly moving stealthily, Ryn Mathen and his men. Going fast. Eager to get on. The mountains must end soon, Marith thought, the plain of Elarne there stretching out before us, grasslands and flat fields; they’ll be pushing on, trying to get home. Their wives and children waiting for them, sleep in their own beds, sit before their own fires, try to go back to a pretence of their old life.

  She could be alive, there with Ryn, he thought then. Up ahead, and I’m coming for her, and she doesn’t know. Be happy, Thalia! Don’t mourn me! If it is Ryn Mathen up ahead of me, I hope you’re in his arms every night with him telling you he loves you, pregnant with a child that will live. Let it be for that that Ryn and his men were spared, to lead you to Elarne in safety, settle you there to live in peace.

  “Marith?” Kiana nudged her horse over to him. “You look… Is something wrong here? It could be a trap. My captain Selerie could be wrong. We could turn off from following them.”

  “No. Nothing. It’s Ryn Mathen and his men. I know it.”

  Thought: it’s too easy. I was dying. It was ended.

  They caught them at dusk. The very edge of the mountains: they had travelled more quickly than Marith had realized. Remembered approaching the Mountains of Pain from the north, the endless flat grassland and then suddenly on the horizon the mountains, bare blue sky with the mountaintops tearing it apart. Mount Trianor the tallest peak in the Mountains of Pain. The tallest peak in all Irlast outside of the Mountains of the Heart. Its name meant “the Needle.” A sacred mountain, god-haunted, snow-girt in the heights even in the heat of the south, any man who climbed it would be accursed. And they called it “the Needle,” after a woman’s embroidery tool. It stood as a guardian, the first and greatest of the mountains. Seen from the north, riding south at the head of a vast army… it looked like a needle. Seen from the south, running away… it looked like a needle.

  He strained his eyes, staring, the mountains too dark against the sky, the contrast too much to see. A tiny thing, wheeling in the air, near the very top. A flash of light. Moving, moving…

  No. A trick of the eye, the sky almost purple from looking, the grey mountain, the white snow catching the sunset, making his eyes hurt, him staring until he could no longer see. He rubbed his eyes angrily. There are no gods up there now. I know. Kiana pointed. “There.” A column of smoke, so faint in the evening, a ghostly thing. Like the peak of the Needle it was half-illusionary, there and not there, his eyes were itching and it was gone. Could be a village, a camp of axe-wielding savages on demon horses, picking their teeth with his soldiers’ fingerbones.

  Ha. No. They went on over another rise, a fold in the flanks of the Needle’s foothills, and there they were. Horsemen and horses and banners, even a few camp women had survived with them. The rose tree standard of Chathe snapping in the wind. A thousand of them. At least. A hundred horses. The noise of it; the smell of it, after days alone in the mountains, the reek of it. Shit and blood and hurting, and mostly blood. Familiar thing. Pulled his horse up short, whipped his head back with a hiss of pain in his shoulder, the noise and stink hitting him. Thought of the first time he’d seen an army hungry for the killing time, his father’s men lined up before Malth Salene’s walls. They did not fear to ride out to slaughter… Shock of it, running through him. So familiar he’d forgotten the way it felt.

  “Yes!” Kiana cried out beside him. “Safety. Eltheia be praised.”

  Three mounted scouts came up to meet them. Recognized him from a great distance, too great for sight, surely, as though they already knew him. Felt him coming, as a dog feels his master. Recognized his outline against the darkness, the shadow he cast. Blood stink, hunger stink. Thin pinched faces. Their horses all thin and sick.

  Hesitant. Confused. “My Lord King… My Lord King…” Marith looked back at them in silence. They were fully armed.

  “It is the king,” said Kiana. “Take us to Lord Mathen.”

  The camp was nestled in a river valley at the foot of the mountain, a steep wall of rock rising behind it, a high bare ridge shielding it to the east, the river cradling it in the west and the south. Well-protected against attack from all sides. But easy, Marith thought, to surround and pen in. He looked up into the sky towards the Needle’s peak.

  They had to cross the river, which was high and cold from snowmelt, biting at the men’s chests. Marith’s horse stumbled on the further bank, slipping on a loose stone; in the end he had to dismount, splashing heavily into the water, leave it for the men to lead up. Almost fell himself. When they got it up the wretched thing was lame. Kiana got her horse over easily. None of Ryn’s men seemed to think of lending him their horse, so he had to go on foot. His boots were soaked. Squelched when he walked. His cloak felt revolting, dripping around him.

  There was a rough fence around the camp, barely enough to call a defence against anything, a shallow ditch scratched in the earth, a row of stakes behind, piles of brushwood. Quite a few tents, though. Cookpots, blankets, a line of men’s shirts hanging to dry after washing, even a couple of carts. Useful things. Ryn seemed to have gathered up quite a number of useful things, when he fled the battlefield in panic running for his life.

  Ryn’s soldiers surrounded them. Silent faces, more voices murmuring, “The king… The king…” Well-armed. Few obviously wounded. A woman in the ragged finery of a courtesan, silk flowers in her hair. Even a child, clutching his mother’s skirts, peering out at Marith. Hands moved in luck gestures and in warding signs. A gasp, a shriek. A man spat for luck.

  And there ahead was Ryn’s tent, green and red leather, a rose tree banner flying at its height. It was looking a bit battered, pleasingly. Like it had got wet and not properly dried out again. Wrinkled. Old man skin. The rose tree banner was ripped, so that the rose tree looked like it was diseased. Like the trees of the Rose Forest had, when his men got to work on them. Torches thrust into the ground at either side of the doorway, smoking heavily, giving off a strong scent of pine. A guard with a sword, his helmet making his face a shadow, a nice thick warm clo
ak, a great rent in his armour where something had ripped it apart.

  The tent curtain moved aside. Ryn Mathen came out. For a moment Marith thought Thalia would come out behind Ryn. Almost saw her in the way the curtain moved.

  Ryn stood. Looked at him.

  “Marith,” Ryn said. Not “My Lord King, My Lord Ansikanderakesis Amrakane Amrath Returned to Us, our god.” Not “my friend, my comrade, my heart leaps with delight to see that you live.”

  “Marith. Gods.” Ryn’s clothes were soiled and crumpled, battered like the tent. His coat had been mended with a patch of gaudy yellow cloth. But his hair was clean, his beard clean and oiled, he wore a silver chain at his throat, a jewelled brooch at his shoulder, a gold ring. His left hand had a new wound on it, a fat scab running from his thumb to his wrist, disappearing into his coat sleeve. He was otherwise unharmed.

  “Marith. Gods.” His hand moved in a warding gesture. There was a long string of stones hanging beside the tent doorway that rattled loudly in a gust of wind. Ryn blinked at the sound in fear. Distant ripple of laughter. The torches flickered and the flames seemed almost like golden hair.

  Ryn’s hand was on the hilt of his sword, jerking there, pulling against the sword as a horse pulls against a bit. The guard held his sword level, his face was black nothing beneath the helmet, the rent in his armour ran where a man’s heart is. Half the plumes on his helmet were torn off. The soldiers came crowding up behind Marith, and they were all as silent as the guard was. Ryn’s sword rasped in the scabbard.