‘Very well. Until tonight then, Bellam, and thank you.’
After he’d left, Bellam shut the door and advanced on Snell, who once more cringed against the back wall.
‘You said-’
‘We do that, don’t we, when it comes to grown-ups.’
‘Don’t touch me!’
‘No grown-ups anywhere close, Snell-what do you like to do when they’re not around? Oh, yes, that’s right. You like to torment everyone smaller than you. That sounds a fun game. I think I’ll play, and look, you’re smaller than me. Now, what torment shall we do first?’
In leaving them for the time being, all grim concern regarding anything unduly cruel can be thankfully dispensed with. Bellam Nom, being cleverer than most, knew that true terror belonged not to what did occur, but to what might occur. He was content to encourage Snell’s own imagination into the myriad possibilities, which was a delicate and precise form of torture. Especially useful in that it left no bruises.
Bullies learn nothing when bullied in turn; there are no lessons, no about-face in their squalid natures. The principle of righteous justice is a peculiar domainwhere propriety and vengeance become confused, almost indistinguishable. The bullied bully is shown but the other side of the same fear he or she has lived with all his or her life. The about-face happens there, on the outside, not the inside. Inside, the bully and everything that haunts the bully’s soul remains unchanged.
It is an abject truth, but conscience cannot be shoved down the throat.
If only it could.
Moths were flattened against the walls of the narrow passageway, waiting for something, probably night. As it was a little used route to and from the Vidikas estate, frequented twice a day at specific times by deliveries to the kitchen, Chal-lice had taken to using it with all the furtive grace of the insouciant adulteress that she had become. The last thing she expected was to almost run into her husband there in the shadows midway through.
Even more disconcerting, it was clear that he had been awaiting her. One hand holding his duelling gloves as if about to slap them across her cheek, yet there was an odd smile on his face. ‘Darling,’ he said.
She halted before him, momentarily struck dumb. It was one thing to play out the game at breakfast, a table between them cluttered with all the false icons of a perfect and perfectly normal marriage. Their language then was such a smooth navigation round all those deadly shoals that it seemed the present was but a template of the future, of years and years of this; not a single wound stung to life, no tragic floundering on the jagged shallows, sailors drowning in the foam.
He stood before her now, tall with a thousand sharp edges, entirely blocking her path, his eyes glittering like wrecker fires on a promontory. ‘So pleased I found you,’ he said. ‘I must head out to the mining camp-no doubt you can hear the carriage being readied behind you.’
Casual words, yet she was startled, like a bird; flash of fluttering, panicked wings in the gloom as she half turned to register the snort of horses and the rustle of traces from the forecourt behind her. ‘Oh,’ she managed, then faced him once more. Her heart’s rapid beat began slowing down.
‘Even here,’ Gorlas said, ‘there is a sweet flush to your cheeks, dear. Most becoming.’
She could almost feel the brush of fingertips to grant benediction to the compliment. A moth, startled awake by the clash of currents in the dusty air, wings dry as talc as it fluttered against her face. She flinched back. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
This was just another game, of course. She realized that now. He did not want things to get messy, not here, not any time soon. She told herself this with certainty, and hoped it was true. But then, why not an explosive shattering? Freeing him, freeing her-wouldn’t that be healthier in the end? Unless his idea of freeing himself is to kill me. Such things happen, don’t they?
‘I do not expect to be back for at least three days. Two nights.’
‘I see. Be well on your journey, Gorlas.’
‘Thank you, darling.’ And then, without warning, he stepped close, his freehand grasping her right breast… ‘I don’t like the thought of strangers doing this,’ he said, his voice low, that odd smile still their, ‘I need to picture the face, one I know well. I need a sense of the bastard behind it.’
She stared into his eyes and saw only a stranger, calculating, as clinical and cold as a dresser of the dead-like the one who’d come to do what was needed with the corpse of her mother, once the thin veil of sympathy was tossed aside like a soiled cloth and the man set to work.
‘When I get back,’ he continued, ‘we’ll have a talk. One with details. I want to know all about him, Challice.’
She knew that what she said at this precise moment would echo in her husband’s mind for virtually every spare moment in the course of the next three days and two nights, and by the time he returned her words would have done their work in transforming him-into a broken thing, or into a monster. She could say All right, as if she was being forced, cornered, and whatever immediate satisfaction he felt would soon twist into something dark, unpleasant, and she would find herself across from a vengeful creature in three days’ time. She might say If you like, and he would hear that as defiance and cruel indifference-as if for her his needs were irrelevant, as if she would oblige out of pity and not much else. No, in truth she had few choices in what she might utter at this moment. In an instant, as he awaited her response, she decided on what she would say and when it came out it was calm and assured (but not too much so). ‘Until then, husband.’
He nodded, and she saw the pupils of his eyes dilate. She caught his quickened breathing, and knew her choice had been the right one. Now, the next three days and two nights, Gorlas would be as one on fire. With anticipation, with his imagination unleashed and playing out scenarios, each one a variation on a single theme.
Yes, Gorlas, we are not done with each other yet, after all.
His hand withdrew from her breast and, with a courtly bow, he stepped to one side to permit her to pass.
She did so.
Murillio hired a horse for the day; with tack included, the rental amounted to three silver councils along with a twenty-council deposit. Of that, the animal was worth perhaps five, certainly not much more. Slope-backed, at least ten years old, worn out, beaten down, the misery in the beast’s eyes stung Murillio to sympathy and he was of half a mind to forgo the deposit and leave the animal in the hands of a kindly farmer with plenty of spare pasture.
He rode at a slow, plodding walk through the crowded streets, until he reached Two-Ox Gate. Passing through the archway’s shadow, he collected the horse into a steady trot on the cobbled road, passing laden wagons and carts and the occa-sional Gadrobi peasant struggling beneath baskets filled with salted fish, flasks of oil, candles and whatever else they needed to make bearable living in a squalid hut along the roadside.
Once beyond the leper colony, he began scanning the lands to either side, seekingthe nearest active pasture. A short distance on he spied sheep and goats wandering the slope of a hillside to his right. A lone shepherd hobbled along the ridge, waving a switch to keep the flies off.’ Murillio pulled his mount off the road and rode towards him.
The old man noticed his approach and halted.
He was dressed in rags, but the crook he carried looked new, freshly oiled and polished. His eyes were smeared with cataracts from too many years in the bright sunlight, and he squinted, wary and nervous, as Murillio drew up and settled back in the saddle.
‘Hello, good shepherd.’
A terse nod answered him.
‘I am looking for someone-’
‘Nobody but me here,’ the old man replied, flicking the switch before his face.
‘This was a few weeks back. A young boy, up here collecting dung, perhaps.’
‘We get’em, out from the city.’
The furtiveness was ill-disguised. The old man licked his lips, switched at flies that weren’t there. There were secrets here, Murillio realized. He dismounted. ‘You know of this one,’ he said. ‘Five years old. He was hurt, possibly unconscious.’
The shepherd stepped back as he approached, half raised the crook. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘The ones that come out here, they got nothing. They live in the streets. They sell the dung for a few coppers. I got no help here, we just working for somebody else. We go hungry every winter-what was I supposed to do?’
‘Just tell me what happened,’ said Murillio. ‘You do that and maybe I’ll just walk away, leave you be. But you’re
