The Tower of Living and Dying

The sea is choked with rubble. Dead people. Dead animals. Broken trees. Broken houses. Broken ships. They sail slowly, prows brushing through the bobbing ruins of lives. The wind is against them, but the sails fill and they sail.

They come again around the headland. A flash of white on the high cliff. The smooth waters of the bay open before Him. Winter sunlight. The sea welcoming Him home. His fortress rises before Him. The harbour is broken, its wall shattered into pebbles, not a single ship remaining whole. The war engines are missing. The houses and taverns of the lower town have been swept away like sand.

On the broken stones of the harbour His people are waiting. They cheer Him, receive Him kneeling, throw open every door and window of their town as a sign. He walks up the high road to His fortress, the whalebone gates that were raised for Him a thousand years before He was born. The grey towers of Joy. The golden tower of Despair. His fortress. The stones bid Him welcome. His fortress, built for Him and Him alone. His servants kneel before Him in a blare of silver trumpets, holding bloody offerings in outstretched hands. They spread the victory feast before Him. Wine and honey and plates of gold. His soldiers raise the paean, shout His name. Victory! Victory and triumph! Rejoice! Rejoice! And then His bedchamber, with the crimson hangings and the windows open to the sea, and the woman with her eyes wide.

And He is home.

PART TWO (#ulink_04faca1d-dd2d-532b-99dc-2364f1ddaa8c)

Chapter Fifteen (#ulink_5e9588fb-91ca-5ea1-af85-84faeca1ed32)

A wedding party in Sorlost.

It was painfully hot. Yellow dust piled in the streets, thick with dead insects, dead leaves. The skin felt grimy, gritted by the heat, eyes stinging, bodies sticky and overripe; people clung to the shadows, poured lemon scented water on the parched flagstones, drank tea under wilting trees. Birds hung in cages from heat cracked branches, singing out notes to cool the ear. The street sellers sat by the fountains, kohl stained faces rank as peaches; at dusk the knife-fighters grappled, sodden with each other’s sweat, warm metal slipping over warm bone. In the corners bodies mounted: firewine drunks and hatha eaters and beggar children, mummified and wet lipped. The air moved sluggishly. Dust in the shafts of light. Curse this city in her burning. Her body and her soul are silver mirrors, heated with solipsistic lust. Like a dog she pants and scratches, the sweat of her lovers coalescing on her azure tiles. In her dust is her voice harsh as trumpets. Her dust chokes me as it fondles my mouth. Hot dry air of the furnace, drawing out all of my waters, salt fingers sucking me dry. In her desiccation her stones drip perfume. In her desiccation I am entombed in ecstasies of rain. Her rough stones enfold me, the arid depths of her passion, her kisses an abrasion dry as desert sand. Oh city of shit and sunlight! Oh city of dawn and the setting sun! In your embrace I dream of water. In your embrace I am withered to broken straw. Curse you, and yet I will lie forever in your burning, my body wracked with the heat of your love.

Serenet Vikale, The Book of Sand. New and popular, much quoted, certainly caught the sensation of the current heat. But, if one were feeling uncharitable, one might be inclined to ask questions about the state of the man’s private life.

Anyway. A wedding party in Sorlost. The meeting of two great families, a symbol of peace and stability in an uncertain time. That the two great families concerned were the cause of that instability is to be ignored. Get some money moving around the city, largesse distributed, gifts and jewels and silks bought. Demonstrate to the masses that all is secure and perfect. There is no reason to be concerned. Why should anyone in Sorlost be concerned?

Whisper it: there is discord in the Sekemleth Empire of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Eternal Golden City of Sorlost. Two high lords, Orhan Emmereth and Darath Vorley, conspired against their Emperor, hired assassins to kill him and all his court. The Emperor survived their manoeuvrings. The assassins all died in the attempt. But Orhan is now Nithque to the Emperor. The Emperor’s hands and eyes and mouth. He has the power to rebuild the Empire’s armies, restore its glory, rehouse its starving poor. Inevitably, such power has brought opposition. Enemies. For a brief few days, there was fighting in the city streets. The price of Orhan’s power is the sacrifice of Darath’s brother Elis to a rival nobleman, March Verneth. The weapon of choice is March’s daughter Leada’s wedding veil.

Thus, a wedding party in Sorlost.

Elis Vorley wore an ivory silk shirt fastened with diamond buttons, a long cloak trimmed with seed pearls, an arm-ring of wrought gold. Sweat trickled down his forehead, matting his hair beneath a garland of hyacinths and copperstem leaves. Darath and Orhan, similarly garlanded, stood and watched while a body servant made the last careful adjustments to the groom’s clothes.

‘Are you finally ready?’ asked Darath.

Elis gestured hopelessly at the body servant. ‘Ask him.’

‘He’s fine,’ Darath told the body servant. ‘He’ll do. We need to leave.’

Another delicate sweep of the man’s hands over folds of red and gold silk fine as breathing, an iridescent sheen on it like wet stone. ‘He is ready, My Lord.’

‘Good. The bride will have run off with one of the flute players before we get there at this rate.’

Elis started to speak. Darath held up his hand. ‘Don’t say it, dear brother. Peace and concord and all that, remember? We all make sacrifices. I have a scar on my stomach the length of my hand; Orhan has the job of Nithque. You just need to poke a not unattractive young woman a couple of times.’

Another servant brought forward a dish of salt and honey. All three ate a mouthful. Salt and sweet: the grief and pleasure of this brief, pitiful life. Before battle. Before marriage. Before death. Before birth. The Emperor ate of it every morning and evening, to remind him that immortal as he was he was but a man. Outside the door a new litter waited, built of whale bone and silver lace. All things done as they ought.

‘Come on then.’ They climbed into the litter. A procession formed up around them, guardsmen and servants and hired celebrants crowned in copperstem, shaking rattles made of walnut shells. At the front of the procession a man danced in gold ribbons, life and light and the joy of the rising sun. Crowds had gathered to watch, shouted out luck songs to the groom. So hot, sweat seemed to rise from the flagstones. Everything shimmered in the heat, luminously unreal as the sheen on Elis’ cloak. A flute piped tunelessly. A street woman swayed on bound ankles in a tinkle of tiny bells.

Orhan thought of his own wedding procession, the bitter irony of the singing, the cold, sad sorrow in Darath’s eyes. The two of them in the litter, hands clutching, knowing it would all be different, saying it didn’t matter but it did matter, trying to see how beautiful each looked in his wreath of flowers, fiddling with the clasps and folds of their cloaks. It had been hot that day too.

The curtains of the litter were open to display the groom but there was still no air. Under incense and perfume bodies were already rank with sweat. Orhan wiped his forehead, damp and clammy, a smear of pollen coming away on his hand. Some petty magery kept the flowers from collapsing into mush. Save safe charms: useful for preserving meat and keeping dead things in bloom. The petals had an odd crusted feel to them like they’d been coated in broken glass. Darath smiled at him, deep blue hyacinths and pale pink roses against his gold-black hair and copper-black skin, sweat on his forehead like drops of honey, glints of longing in his silver-black eyes. Remembering the same thing.

‘Nice comfy litter,’ said Darath. ‘But whale bone? Somewhat eccentric for you, I’d have thought?’

Elis groaned. ‘Eloise insisted on it. Said it had more cachet. Certain people’s sisters have set the stakes in litter fashions remarkably high. I keep thinking I can smell bloody fish when I look at it. And as for the cost … do you have any idea how much people charge to carry a dead whale for a month through high desert? But Eloise went on and on. I have no particular objection to marrying Leada. It’s the fact I seem to be marrying her grandmother as well that’s going to cripple me.’

‘You should be filled with gratitude Eloise judges her granddaughter such a jewel. You wouldn’t want a wife whose own family thought her only worth a cheap knock-off job.’ Darath said, ‘You’ve got something on your face, Orhan. Come here. No, stay still … Pollen. Stop poking at your garland or you’ll be yellow by the time we get there.’

‘It itches.’ A stem of something, rubbing arhythmically against his left temple. Sure to be there nagging at him all day.

They reached the gates of the House of Silver. More crowds, gathered to peer at the brilliance of the spectacle. Also March had probably paid them. Shouts of ‘hurrah’ as the litter swept past.

‘Here we are then,’ said Darath with an encouraging smile at Elis. ‘Marital bliss.’

‘Taking one for the team,’ Elis muttered. ‘I expect some very good New Year gifts from you two.’

‘Oh come on. She was meant for you. If she takes after her father, there can’t be two people in the city better matched. Stupid, venal, fat arsed, terrible taste in clothing … Who else were you planning to marry, anyway? That bath girl you like with the wonky nose?’

Litter servants came to hand them down carefully, stepping them onto a man’s broad thick back. Another final rearrangement of clothing; Orhan pushed at the garland in the hope it would stop digging into his head. Then looking up at the House of Silver that glittered before them, its doorways crowned with orange blossom, walls suppurating in the heat.

So here is the man who wants to kill me, Orhan thought. The last time he’d been here … the last time he’d been here had been the night of Eloise Verneth’s party, when Tam Rhyl had mocked him and Darath had begged to be involved in the conspiracy to kill the Emperor. Such complex patternings. Orhan thought: I think maybe I sealed your death that night, March.

Inside the first atrium the air was thick with perfume. Rose. Jasmine. Cinnamon. Mint. Paper blossoms floated in silver bowls. Outside in the courtyard shouts and the jangle of rattles. A murmur of voices from the room beyond. Elis tossed his head. Darath and Orhan led him through into the wedding chamber, where all the great families of the Sekemleth Empire were gathered. Hot, sweaty stink beneath their oils, reeking of life and the glories of human flesh. A mass of light and colour. Shifted as the guests turned. Fluttering of silk sleeves, jewelled feathers nodding, painted faces opening in panting smiles.

Leada Verneth was sitting on a high golden chair at the very end of the room, swathed in a silver bridal veil. Black skin and hair showed through vaguely, like a shadow of a woman, very still but if you looked you could see her head moving, her gaze shifting from guest to guest and then to her bridegroom as he walked down towards her. She stood awkwardly; Elis lifted her veil and folded it back. Not an unattractive young woman, indeed, and could carry her wedding splendour, swirls of gold paint over her cheek bones, diamonds on her forehead, pearls the size of pigeon eggs hanging from her ears. She looked at Elis and smiled.

Darath as the groom’s kinsman was given a dish of bread and oil, came up to them, broke the loaf in half, dipped each half in the oil, gave a piece to each. Bride and groom solemnly ate a small mouthful, put the rest back on the dish. March as bride’s kin repeated the same with a sweet cake dipped in wine. The couple sat on their matched chairs and the women of the house sprinkled them with water. Sighs. Muttered cheers. They stood and clasped hands and walked together back down to the perfumed atrium, out and into the lace and bone litter with its dancers and flurries of noise.

The sacrifice is made. Married.

Orhan travelled back to the House of Flowers with Bil in their own litter. Rather have gone with Darath, but … He felt himself more accommodating towards Bil. Less pitiful in her pride, perhaps, now he and she, Lord and Lady Emmereth, the Nithque and the Nithque’s wife, were the centre of the Sekemleth Empire, the most powerful of all the inhabitants of Sorlost. Ten guardsmen with drawn knives marched around them. It had been a horrible scrum of bodies as the cream of high society scrambled for their litters. Jamming the streets as they processed to the groom’s house for the bridal feast. The litter kept having to stop: Orhan shuddered each time, feeling Bil on edge too beside him. Vulnerable, prostrate within their silk curtains. Not that long at all since a mage had brought down fire in an attempt to destroy Orhan. Killed several of his guards. The litter curtains would go up in streams of white silent burning. Knives and swords and magery tearing around Orhan and Bil as they sat …

‘March didn’t want to kill you, Orhan,’ Darath had reassured him. ‘He only wanted to humiliate you.’

‘I’ll tell that to the bereaved families.’

‘He’ll hardly likely try anything on his own daughter’s wedding day, will he?’

‘No,’ Orhan had agreed. Of course not. Carried entombed in silk through slow crowded streets, Bil’s swollen body beside him, he thought: of course not, of course not.

Darath had excelled himself arranging the wedding banquet, decking the walls with silk ribbons, finding some wonderworker to make the ceilings swirl with coloured lights. A soft murmuring sound like the fluttering of wing beats or the drumming of heavy rain.

‘Not … not …?’

‘No, of course it’s not the same mage, Orhan! March sacked him and drummed him out of Sorlost.’

Low couches spread with green brocade clothes were arranged in intimate groups of four or five diners, each with its own sweet-faced young table servants to attend: they would be dining in the old high style, reclining, titbits eaten with fingers, small shallow bowls for the drink.

Behind the newly-weds, Elis’ bridegifts were arranged on a canopied dais. March should be well content there, at least. Stacked up four deep with so much carved gem work they seemed to be giving off sunlight but carefully judged to indicate that the Verneths were the wealthier. Bil flared her nostrils daintily as she looked at them.

‘Tasteless.’

‘Most of them, yes. It’s meant to be something of a joke.’

‘How?’