Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  “Mistress already has them put ready,” he said, staring down at the spread-eagled body. “Colour same all over.” He prodded one of the man’s arms with the toe of his sandal. “Barbarian witchspawn.”

  “He is foreign,” she said, but she saw what he was thinking. All fighters had the marks of their clothes burned into them by the sun. This man was the same even tone all over, as if he didn’t react to the sun. “Go on then.”

  She worked on his hair with the finest comb, cutting the worst parts out. It was long and fine and spooled out under her hands with a kind of slippery ease that made her think of water. She had paused and was staring at its crow-wing blackness when the man took a deeper breath.

  Abruptly he groaned and tried to roll onto his side. She jumped back in surprise and fear and he fell to the floor, his hands hardly breaking his fall in their weakness. He vomited blood over the white rug. It came in two violent, thick gouts, the first dark and the second bright scarlet. Clots and thick strings of it spread out. It stank of carrion.

  Intana shrank back in her seat, watching him pant with his face just above the mess, joined to it by lines of matter and saliva.

  As quickly as it had happened, it was done. With a sound like a bellows being pushed closed he slumped forward and his forehead struck the stone floor with a hollow, heavy sound.

  After a second or two she pushed him onto his back with her foot to stop him choking. The stench of what had been inside him promised death. She didn’t think there was any point in attempting to do what she’d been told. Whatever had happened to him had been worse than it seemed, on the inside, and if he wasn’t dead yet, he soon would be. Perhaps it was a plague.

  His breath rattled loosely in his throat, catching now and again on something vile.

  She surrendered all attempts to continue herself and called for the maids to come scrub the place. They cleaned him up and laid him on the bed, wrapped in old and torn linens in case worse occurred, then they left her to take the responsibility.

  For want of another occupation, and to calm her thoughts of imminent reprisals, she went back to his hair. His youth and perfection upset her. Without meaning to she reached out and touched his face, laying her hand on his cheek with the edge of her thumb just touching his lips. She felt a sudden sensation as though her own breath was being pulled out of her and her head nodded. She fell asleep.

  And woke a time later sitting in her place, stiff and sore. It was getting dark. The maid had been in and lit the lamps but even that hadn’t woken her. Her charge breathed on and she let out a sigh, half a yawn, of relief.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Seppi Tar, Kya’s personal secretary. She entered with a sweep of her kimono and briefly put her hands together in greeting. “Is he . . . ?”

  “Asleep,” Intana said, rising and checking her appearance. She glanced to the side in a gesture of uncertainty.

  The girl turned her face and looked at the man with a direct appraisal she would never have shown in public. “Is he worth it?” She walked across and twitched a corner of the shroud with one hand, her fingernails gleaming with red lacquer. Her expression, beneath the paint of her elaborate makeup, mellowed considerably and her red-painted mouth became sad. “I see.”

  She glanced up at Intana, not quite meeting her eyes. “She will wait, if he will live. The doctor says there is nothing to be done if the wound is all inside, though he is a charlatan and I place no value on his opinion.”

  “He’s still alive,” Intana said.

  Seppi looked down at him again, critically. “Let her wait,” she said softly. “I will attend as your messenger and let her know you will not leave yet. There is a party tonight downstairs for one of the Greater Princes, which I must oversee. If not tonight, then the morning must do. And anyway, the city is full for the Games, she will have other plans to work on until then.”

  “Thank you.” Intana bowed deeply to the girl. The favour was not trivial.

  “It is my pleasure.” Seppi nodded and silently made her exit, keeping her face towards Intana but her gaze on the floor, a respect Intana knew marked the seriousness of her mortal situation at Kya’s whim.

  “Perhaps you’d better live,” she said.

  He put his hand up to his head. His eyes opened. They were dark, almost black, and stared straight into Intana’s own face as soon as they focused. He tried to speak and made another sound of pain, touching his jaw. Then he coughed and curled up over his stomach. She saw him finding his mouth full of disgusting things and moved as fast as she could, putting her hands out as he convulsively retched and spat it out. She cleaned herself up as he recovered.

  His eyes were shut now. He lay and managed his breath before slowly dragging his hand up and feeling around inside his mouth with his fingers.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  His face was different awake. It radiated a very calm, very gentle aura of watchfulness, not unlike being stared at by a domesticated cat. He tried to speak. Barely a whisper.

  She thought it was Dacian perhaps, a language she didn’t know.

  His gaze became a kind of touch.

  Beguiled despite all her cynicism, Intana felt herself smile back at him. She felt grateful, worried, weak . . . no, these were his feelings, she realized. But she felt them. She found herself frowning, laughing at this sudden communication, not understanding how it was possible.

  He said something in a voice that had to move cautiously around the pain in his mouth, but she didn’t understand it.

  With one hand he pointed to himself and said it again. His name. “Jalaeka.”

  “Intana,” she said.

  “The fair one,” he said carefully; her name’s common meaning.

  “Yes,” she said. She asked him the same question with her look, to see if he could see it.

  His smile was sudden, radiant. “No meaning,” he said. “Not defined.”

  She laid her hand on his, not knowing she would.

  He blinked and for an instant seemed almost shy.

  More confused now she drew her hand away, partly in embarrassment. A sudden understanding came to her. It was like seeing the solution to a difficult puzzle without really understanding how the puzzle even worked. She said, “The first person you see, they give you your name. No. They make . . .”

  He was agreeing. She thought it must be some religious devotional practice, some kind of mystic occult thing.

  “You saw,” he said. “You decided. And before. You thought. I listened. Not me. I . . . my . . .” He shrugged to show her he couldn’t quite express it.

  She laughed. “That’s silly. You only just came here.”

  And just like that the contact was gone. His face fell into lines of worry and confusion. “Yes. I forget though. Forget before. There was a battle . . . The others must be dead.”

  “Okay,” she said, smoothing her hand against his cheek.

  He moved into her touch. She hadn’t touched a man willingly since she was fourteen. She’d touched plenty in other ways that were able to mimic those feelings. She was a master of those kinds of touches, and here she was, her soul in the surface of her hand.

  “Francine,” he said and she bent over him and kissed him on the lips. His mouth tasted of blood but she didn’t care about that.

  But how could he have said that? He said her name surely?

  “I’m sorry,” she said and drew back, her hand against her mouth. She laughed. She felt giddy. Out of control. “You know my mind.”

  “Only because you want me to.”

  A year later. Hot weather. Dust. Ice chips melting in thick blue glass.

  Jalaeka was seated at the feet of the Empress’s daughter, Zara (the deranged one with the sadistic tendencies and wicked sense of humour), wearing a collar made of silver, attached to her hand by a gold chain. They were watching the annual bloody battle of the Games at the Circus, where the Orcryan Order smashed and battered its way to the higher ranks. On the benches below them sat th
e rows of monks in sandy robes, pressing the weak magic of their minds for this fighter and that, for political reasons, for their own advancement, for their friends. Beside the Empress, Kya, watching. In the Lesser Court seats, Intana, bored, disgusted, attending an ambassador, feeding his little dog slices of ham, longing to be anywhere else. In the cheap seats thousands of people sweating, eating, drinking, walking in and out from the latrine, scratching, swatting flies, laughing, swearing, gambling, grumbling.

  Jalaeka only recognized two people in the arena. The Greater Prince, Mazranaz, whose job it was to ride around on his frothing black charger and pretend to officiate by breaking up fights when too many people were getting mortally wounded, and the black warrior in the skull helm who had nearly killed him years before.

  Zara lifted her right foot and embraced him with her slender brown leg, her knee beside his neck. She pulled back and tightened the chain at the same time. “What are you looking at?”

  “Dying people,” he said, having long since found the best, the only, way to talk to her was to play along.

  “Someone in particular?”

  He took hold of her bare foot tightly and pressed it closer. “No one.”

  “You’d better not be,” she said lightly. “Or you’ll be down there with them.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Zar,” he said, watching the bodies being stretchered off. “You don’t have any pretensions.”

  “You don’t like me.”

  “No.”

  “And that’s what I like about you.” She brushed the fingers of the hand that didn’t hold the chain through his hair, then wound the long mass of it into her fist and pulled hard until his head bent back against her knee and bent low to kiss him, her chin to his nose.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” he said when she let go.

  “I want to watch to the end and see the executions. I want you to.”

  He didn’t show his smile. He wanted to see what happened to that warrior. She was disadvantaged by her height and sex but she made up for it with brutality and the kinds of skills that only come from obsessive application and natural talent. She was a general already, and so she only needed to fight a few. They were all good. She laid them on the ground one by one and put her foot on their faces until Mazranaz rode across to lend them the mercy of his blue banners of honourable defeat.

  And then, right in the middle of the last duel, she quit. It looked like an unlucky missed footing, but it was quite deliberate. She let go of her sword as she went down and when her head hit the floor the strap of her helm broke easily and it went rolling away from her. She made no effort to get up and only missed having her head cut off by inches because Mazranaz’s horse backed skittishly into her opponent and knocked him sideways as it took fright from another skirmish to its side.

  “What was that about?” muttered Zara’s half brother, Sedrepent. He flicked the knotted thread of his bets over his shoulder. “It can’t count.”

  “She wanted to die,” Jalaeka said.

  Sedrepent snorted. “Could have done that anytime, anywhere, or earlier.”

  “It’s not so easy,” he said.

  “More like a fix.” The prince shook his head. “The whole place is rotten as Zar’s miserable excuse for a mind.”

  “Fuck you!” hissed Zara.

  “Oh, fuck you too,” Sedrepent said wearily, then added to Jalaeka, “If you want the easy way out, you only have to ask.” He patted his ceremonial sword.

  Jalaeka shook his head. “Not today.”

  “I’m going back home, why don’t you come?”

  “He’s mine,” Zara said. “You can borrow him in exchange for your pathetic girlfriend, Lady Thingy. I want her to come to my party and be a pretty flower girl. You’re not invited.”

  Jalaeka bit Zara’s calf, not gently, and at the same time reached up and pulled the chain against her grip on it until the links broke. It wasn’t such a thin chain. It cut Zara’s fingers but even so, she didn’t let go.

  “Tiger,” she said, suddenly compliant. “I’ll be along as soon as all the bad people are dead.”

  “Don’t rush.” Jalaeka stood up and went with Sedrepent down the long, empty staircases inside the walls of the amphitheatre to the stables. They passed the surgeon’s rooms, and the infirmary where the Order was busy placing its wounded brothers into carts for the short journey across the river to the Order’s city palace.

  The black woman was there. She lay on a trestle, staring at the dark arches that led back to the arena. As Jalaeka passed her he touched her hand with his fingertips. The seeming supernatural insights and intuitions he used to feel that had frightened him a season ago were second nature now. He wanted to give her a kindness, and to ask her to tell him who he was, but there was only time for the first of those. She took a sharp breath when he touched her, although she didn’t look up at him, puzzled by her sudden feeling of energy and resenting it.

  “Why did you fall?” he whispered, pausing.

  She twitched her hand away from his. “I didn’t.”

  “Jalaeka?” the prince called from far ahead, and he had to go.

  In the rank darkness Sedrepent gave Jalaeka his own horse and took someone else’s. “You have a way with Zar. I can’t call it enviable. Still, a way. And I don’t envy you for it either.”

  “She’s not mad,” Jalaeka told him as they waited for the gate to open into the blazing whiteness of the roadway. “She’s just nasty.”

  “You don’t have to explain it to me,” Sedrepent said. “Her father was the same. Nobody was gladder than I was when he died. It’s a mercy she’s not in line for the throne. Mind you, on that note, watch your back.”

  The city was listless. Its smokes and steams rose straight into the sky. Birds dust-bathed in the courtyards, cats lay flat in shadows. Jalaeka went into Sedrepent’s bed in the eternal cool of the wine cellar.

  Kindness was not possible in such circumstances. No matter how much it tried to find a way.

  Sedrepent poured wine into Jalaeka’s mouth straight from the bottle and it flooded out and over the sheets and both of them. They both laughed.

  “You can’t tell me this isn’t better than being with Zar.”

  “I can’t,” Jalaeka said, rolling onto his side, smiling at Sed because he was genuinely a nice guy.

  “I like you,” Sedrepent said, with a slight frown. “A very great deal.”

  “I like you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you come here anyway? No, I shouldn’t have asked that. Now it’s ruined. I’m sorry. How stupid of me.”

  “Stop it,” Jalaeka said, taking the bottle and drinking some more. He upended the rest over the prince’s face.

  “I don’t want to stop it. I want to be loved,” Sedrepent said, blinking away rare vintage. “By you. Really. As a friend. You’re the only person who makes me feel like I have nothing to be ashamed of even though it’s not true. How . . . how do I do that?”

  “You don’t do it,” Jalaeka said, his turn to be weary. He lay back on the wet sheet. “I do it. And you don’t know if I mean it as long as you’re paying—and cheating off your sister’s time doesn’t count by the way.”

  “All right then. Go if you want to. I’ll fix things with Zar. I’ll give her some land, a few knights, a couple of ships or something. She’s greedy. She’ll take it.”

  “It’ll never work,” Jalaeka said. “I can’t trust you. You’re one of them. You always will be. Come on. You grew up with this. Don’t make it hard on yourself. Here I am. I do like you. It’s got to be enough.”

  Sedrepent rubbed his arm across his face. “You’re right, of course. Smart and pretty. Don’t you want to be free?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I can . . .”

  “You really can’t.” Jalaeka rolled onto his elbows and bent over Sedrepent’s agonized face. “And I’d be grateful if you didn’t try. That’s how you can be my friend. You leave i
t alone. I’ll see you, in private. On my own time. If you want me to.”

  “Only if you want to.”

  “I do.”

  Sedrepent reached out and pulled another bottle of wine out of the rack at random. “Kya must have you in a hell of a vise. Here, have another drink. Anyway, you won’t have to see me again after today.”

  “Going away?”

  “No. Right here. Stuck like you. Hurry up. I have to be drunk before she gets back.”

  Jalaeka blinked, genuinely surprised that the prince would not take his offer. He could feel how strongly Sed needed to be loved, and his own despair was up to smothering proportions. He felt panicked by its intensity. He could see Intana’s face, close to his own, feel the consequences of her clear vision that believed in love, even though she didn’t anymore. “You know what? I’ve got a better idea. Let’s risk the fact that I might love you anyway, and not reject you out of hand, given the chance.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’d rather have my dreams intact for all the times I’m going to have to watch Zara chop you into bits. Did you say ‘love’?”

  “Stop talking.”

  “I thought you said ‘love.’ ”

  Jalaeka shook his head and took a drink. “Two more and I’ll mean it.”

  “Good enough.” Sed took the bottle off him and poured half of it down his own throat.

  Not possible.

  Kaela was someone Jalaeka met when he was out one night alone. It was a rare occasion. In society he was universally recognized. The place they met was not society. It was a taverna in a hole in the ground that had previously been a grain store close to the river, before the barges and sea-ships got too big for the little central docks and all the work moved away to the deeper, wider water beyond the city wall.

  It was the same summer, but at the end, when the season’s dryness was at its worst and all the hills around the city were parched ochre, clutching white cut stubble and drab dust-covered lemon trees. The taverna opened after dark. Jalaeka came across it by accident, heard good music, and went inside. A man on the door, an old ex-gladiator, took the cover charge.