She referred to the silence of the guns at the Shield, half a laq to the south.
Bahn nodded. The Mannian guns had lain silent for more than a week now. It was said that a period of mourning had been declared across the Empire in respect for the death of the Matriarch’s son. In return, the guns of the Bar-Khosian defences had followed their example, though purely to preserve their blackpowder.
His voice was wistful as he spoke. ‘It was like this ten years ago, before the siege and the war. Just normal everyday sounds of a city.’ Bahn sighed once more. ‘I wonder if it will ever be this way again.’
‘You sound troubled,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes as she watched his expression. ‘Have you heard something?’
For an instant Bahn felt a tension in his chest, his muscles clamping tight around his heart. In his mind’s eye he saw the far sparkle of fires in the distance, like cities burning.
‘No,’ he lied to her. ‘Not that I could tell you, anyway, if I had.’ Bahn squeezed her shoulder and tried to ease the tension in his chest by breathing deeply. ‘I’ve too much on my mind, that’s all.’
She asked nothing more of him, and simply laid her head upon his beating heart. ‘You should not fret so,’ she murmured.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you worry like an old woman. Too much thinking,’ and she lifted her head to tap him twice on his left temple.
He forced a smile to his face. ‘My mother is the same. Always worrying about something or other.’
She nodded, understanding.
Bahn looked at her fully, sprawled as she was against him; the slight redness of her nostrils from inhaling dross; the bruise on her neck the precise size of his pursed lips. He had been rough on her again.
When had he last given Marlee a lusty bite like that? he wondered. Before their son had arrived, he realized. Before the war, when they had both been young and carefree.
Bahn ran a finger across the smooth skin of her shoulder.
I will feel this guilt either way, he considered.
Without warning he rolled himself on top of her. For a moment there was surprise in her eyes, though it was gone in an instant as he bent and kissed her throat, to be replaced by something unreadable.
He was losing it, Curl thought to herself as Bahn departed and the thump of his boots faded on the outside stairs. Curl had seen it before in other siege-shocked soldiers of the city, men ready to snap and run amok through the lives of those around them, tearing and snarling for a way out. They were always the roughest ones, she’d noticed, but Bahn in truth was not so bad on her, more fiercely passionate than anything else, as if he simply needed, in these brief hours with Curl, to forget everything about his present circumstances.
A suicide case, perhaps; hardly a berserker.
She hadn’t liked the fear in his voice though, when he had been talking about the guns lying silent. As if he was doomed; as if they were all doomed. She didn’t need to hear things like that; let him share those worries with his wife, whose name he kept crying out in the heat of the moment.
Curl rose and slipped her payment into her hidden pouch of coins in the pot of the jubba plant. The pouch held a handful of silvers and a little more in coppers. Not much for all the business she was doing. With the worsening shortage of food in the city leading to ever-higher prices, forcing Rosa to ask for larger contributions to their meals, she was finding it hard to maintain even that small sum from week to week.
Curl poured a jug of water into the clay washbasin. She stood naked on a cotton towel that she lay on the small portion of floor-space before the stand, and washed herself down with a bar of apple-scented soap. Around her, the smoke from the incense coiled about her body and chased away the after-scents from the room. Still, an atmosphere of heaviness remained behind, the man’s woes and low spirits lingering on in the quietness. Curl hummed something from her childhood, making the room her own again.
Goosebumps rose on her skin as a cool breeze played through the open window. She dried herself quickly, and smeared a little lemon juice over her legs where the fleas kept biting. She checked her hair in the broken sliver of mirror that leaned next to the washbowl, then slipped into the cotton robe that she wore whenever she wasn’t working. Still humming, she slipped the wooden charm back around her neck, and listened to the shouts of Rosa chasing the children from the kitchen.
Rosa rented out all the upper rooms of her house to feed and clothe her tribe of wayward urchins. It made for a curious combination, with their world of playful youth and tantrums seeping always upwards through the cramped, sordid sessions of the working women in their tiny rooms, and the ghostly lives of the hardcore dross junkies, and the gentle madness of the urban hermits and struggling artists who lived alongside them. But it worked somehow, perhaps simply because they had no other choice but to make it work. Rosa kept the rents as low as she was able, and ensured that everyone felt part of an extended family. Against all expectations, there was a warmth in the house, a sense of belonging.
Curl was shaking now, though not from the cold. With care, she gathered her small wooden box from the floor and sat back against the pillows. Inside lay her precious stash of dross, the dusty grey powder held in an envelope of folded graf leaf. Curl poured a line of the stuff along the back of her hand, returned the envelope to the box and laid the box on the bed. She placed the stub of the reed she used for these occasions into her nostril, and held the other nostril shut, and took a deep, sharp inhalation that cleared the dust from the hand in one go.
She rubbed her nose and sniffed and lay against the pillows with a gasp, the back of her throat turning numb already. Her fingers and toes tingled, and the tingling spread to leave heat and pleasure in its wake. The sensation filtered up her limbs, her body, her head.. . until at last, with grace, it reached into her mind.
CHAPTER FIVE
Good Things Come in Life
His head was splitting with pain that morning, and he chewed on a dulce leaf as he stepped between the stalls of a thriving Q’os marketplace, peering out from the wet folds of his hood at a drizzle of rain that fell so fine it kept drifting, losing its direction.
Overhead, the bells of the nearby temples rang out the turning of the hour, sounding brash and overly loud after their dormancy of so many weeks. From the direction of the nearby Serpentine, the early morning chants of the pilgrims could be heard as they headed in a mass towards Freedom Square, celebrating the first day of the delayed festa that was the Augere el Mann, the period of mourning seemingly lifted.
Ash still wasn’t certain what he was doing here risking his neck in broad daylight for the sake of a little fresh bread. At the sight of so many people filling the streets the urge had simply come upon him, and no greater compulsion had countered it, so here he was, moving through the press of shoppers, with a scarf wrapped around his face and his hood low over his eyes, the smell of the closest bakery leading the way.
It was with a growling stomach that he found himself waiting his turn before a busy baker’s stall. From the leaden skies the rain continued to fall, dripping from the canopy overhead to patter onto his back. Ash cast his eyes around the walls and buildings that circled the market square. He paused to inspect the entrance points at either end of it, and the pair of auxiliaries who strolled around the stalls idly swinging their batons, looking for a reason to use them.
I shouldn’t be here in daylight, he told his stomach. This is reckless even for me.
An opening appeared before him and Ash squeezed his way into it, his purse in hand. ‘Yes?’ asked one of the aproned lads behind the counter.
‘Three seeded loaves. The largest you have. And something to carry them in.’
The lad tossed the loaves into a bag of twine netting and held it towards him. ‘One-and-a-half marvels,’ he informed him. ‘Plus a quarter for the bag. That’s one-and-three-quarters.’
It was an extortionate price, no doubt a result of the festa and the countless pilgrims, though he handed over two marvels and plucked the bag from the youth’s hand.
‘That’ll be an extra quarter.’
‘For what?’
‘For providing change.’
Someone shoved into Ash from behind as they tried to get closer to the counter. He shoved back without
