long hours of darkness and vigilance, and then had suddenly vanished. He listened to distant gulls cry out in their eternal hunger. He looked at the other haggard faces of the command team, and returned their hollow gazes with his own.
Cold without and numb within, Bahn had climbed the Mount of Truth to report to General Creed, the old man awake in his Ministry chambers with the curtains still drawn, oil lamps flickering in the corners, looking as though he had not slept. The enemy had been repulsed at the cost of sixty-one defenders dead, Bahn informed him. Some were still unaccounted for. Countless more had been wounded. Repairs on the breached wall were now resuming, though it was still doubtful they could seal it in any way save for a makeshift one.
'Very well,' Creed's tired voice had replied, his back turned to Bahn in the deep leather armchair he sat within.
Knowing he was late, Bahn had stayed only long enough in the Ministry to wash his face and hands free of grime. He had also begged for some bread and cheese from the kitchen, and eaten that on the trot as he hurried down off the hill to the nearby Quarter of Barbers, the dawn streets lively, almost festive, as was their wont in the aftermath of such an attack.
His family temple was to be found in this quarter – Bahn's side of the family, in this area where he had been born and raised. On Quince Street, the prostitutes were still out from the night before, tending to business with those soldiers still drifting out from the walls, made lustful with relief and the shedding of blood.
As Bahn passed the women, a few called out to him by name, the older ones who still remembered him as a youth. He nodded with a tight smile, kept marching. At the corner of Quince and Abbot he caught the eye of one girl in particular. His stomach clenched at the sight of her. She recognized him, too, and not from long ago but from only recently, from mere days ago, as she curved her spine to pronounce her small bosom and peered out from under her heavy lashes.
So young, Bahn thought, with something close to despair in him.
He had made a promise to himself, that first and last time, that he would not do this again. Bahn strode onwards with every intention of passing the girl by. He turned his head only to nod a greeting, but then the girl's lips parted to speak, and he saw the colour of them, the soft red blush of them, and he halted.
Close up, he could see the red soreness around her nostrils from inhaling dross, and the sunken look of the addict in her eyes. She appeared thinner since last he had encountered her.
'How are you?' Bahn asked the girl, his words sounding gentle enough, though his voice was tense from the blood pulsing through him.
'I'm well', she had replied, and her look of hunger reached out to his own, stirring deep eddies of need.
His gaze roamed over her pale shoulders, the smooth skin of her chest under her low-cut dress. For a delicate moment he thought of savouring her small breasts in his mouth.
Bahn had taken her in an alleyway behind the side-street tenements, his sense of time suddenly diminished to a series of images as fractious and disconnected as in battle; consumed in all entirety by a need to empty his frantic lust inside her, along with incipient self-loathing certain to rally in strength later on, and those sights and sounds and scents that had surrounded him all through that awful bloody night and the ones before it, and the guilt too – shame even – at his pampered role in this war, the awareness of his own self-preservation as he looked down at men, at comrades, hour after hour, dying, while he did nothing but watch.
He released it all in those precious moments of squander, and afterwards, overcome by a hollow exhaustion, he pressed into her hand his purse which contained all the money he carried on him. Bahn wanted to say something more to the girl. She offered a brief smile, knowing the rhythms of men. For a moment Bahn felt he was a boy again.
Now, as the monks continued their chanting, and with the feel of the girl's body still impressed against his own, Bahn found that he was shivering slightly, perhaps from some form of aftershock from the night before, perhaps from the events more recent than that. He trembled in the stale temple air next to his wife, his son, the other family members who had come today to watch his daughter be bestowed with her name, and thought, in something of a panic, Merciful Fool, what was I thinking?
It had occurred in broad daylight, in an area where he was still well known by the locals. Anyone might have noticed him walk away with the girl, anyone who might know Marlee too. What would he do if he had caught some disease off the girl? How would he explain that away?
I am in the grasp of a demon, Bahn thought to himself. He looked about as though he had startled himself with this thought, and saw across the way, in the dim alcove of a wall opposite, a golden statue of the Great Fool kneeling in contemplation, thin and bald and handsome, grinning at him from ear to ear.
Bahn inhaled the pungent spiciness of the atmosphere, as it took long moments for his shaking to subside. Never again, he swore to himself, and in meaning it he felt his pulse begin to lower.
It is this war, he thought. It corrupts my spirit as it corrupts all things that it touches.
As though in some tacit agreement, the guns on the Shield opened up just then in a ripple of distant concussions. A few of the children's heads turned in interest; the rest of the congregation remained unmoved. Perhaps the guns heralded another Mannian assault after the brief respite. Perhaps it was simply the resumption of an ordinary day at the Shield. Bahn did not feel inclined to concern himself with it just now. It was hardly as though he was badly needed on the walls.
Before his gathered family, three monks of the Way stood around the cut-stone edges of a sunken fire. It was only a small fire, a handful of coals with soft red underbellies, barely smoking. Upon the coals lay a pile of mymar leaves, yellow and crisping inwards from their serrated edges, their smoke tinged blue and rising to curl around the coddled form of his daughter, who was held by the monks above the same fire, as they chanted and moved their hands in a circular motion so that she was borne with it, wrapped in a bundle of linen. She does not cry, Bahn observed, and his daughter coughed a tiny-lunged cough from the smoke wafting about her, and blinked up at the oldest of the three monks – old Jerv who had been here even when Bahn was a boy – and studied the white wisps of a beard that sprouted from his chin.
His daughter had made it through her first year, and was fit and well. For Mercians this meant a time for rejoicing, the time when the child would finally be bestowed with its name. For his daughter – who, ever since learning to crawl, had tended to rush around everywhere at a fast trot – this name would be Ariale, after the legendary horse with wings on its hooves. Marlee herself had announced this was the perfect name for her, but then Marlee thought all things that were humorous in life were apt and good. For Bahn it had taken some time to come around to the idea of naming his daughter after a horse.
Ariale Calvone. It was a good name, he decided now, smiling, and with that smile he felt more himself than he had done in many days.
The assemblage of people today was mostly from Marlee's side of the family: her mother, her aunts and uncles, shopkeepers and military men in the main, some of them people whom Bahn hardly knew at all, and who he had barely met since the day he and Marlee had first been bonded. As a family they looked well in their fine-stitched clothes, each standing with the same straight-backed dignity of Marlee herself.
In comparison, his own relatives were few in numbers, and looked at odds with the others in their casual stances and their well-worn temple-best clothing. His mother was not there, no doubt already busy mending shoes and leatherwork in her small dwelling-cum-workshop on Adobe Street, not far from here in fact. Bahn had not expected her to come, nor had it been for her benefit that they had chosen his family temple of boyhood for the ceremony. Their own local temple in the north of the city had simply been fully booked long in advance.
His aunt was in attendance, though, Vicha with her wild black hair barely tamed for the occasion, and her two daughters, Alexa and Maureen, both as blond as she was dark, all of them still officially in mourning after the death of Hecelos, husband, father and master carpenter, lost at sea when his grain convoy – the one that the Al-Khos shipyards were working so hard to replace – had been sunk on its return from Zanzahar five months previously. A good man, Bahn had always thought.
Reese was there too, striking in her red-headed beauty, though her eyes were lined with darkness as though she had not been sleeping much. Los was not with her, thank Ers.
A young monk emerged from the shadows and began to shuffle around the family members with a wooden aeslo in his hand, letting it ratchet open before flicking his wrist to clap its two boards together like the jaws of a mouth, over and over again, in a rhythm that was slow and brooding. His other hand bore a plain begging bowl, seeking alms in return for the service they were performing on this day. With solemn faces the congregation dutifully emptied coins into the bowl passing by.
