Chapter Eleven
A body was lying on the beach in the sand, face up to the rain. It was lying in the tideline, the ebb and flow of the waves making its head roll back and forth. Its skin was very white.
Thalia watched it for a while. It shook its head and shook its head and there should be something meaningful in it. Just a dead thing, she thought. Just a dead thing bloated up and eaten by the water. Swollen and salt-filled. There was a jagged hole in its chest, where it had been dead before it drowned. The sea had taken its blood.
‘Here’s another!’ a voice called across the beach. Two soldiers came down near her, took the body by the arms, dragging it away up to the pyres that burned on the shore where the sand was dry. Driftwood and reeds and dead flesh. The salt crackled, burned up a brilliant yellow; they fed the fire with pitch to keep the flames high even with the wet bodies in the rain. Thalia watched them drag the body up, its feet making ruts in the sand.
Osen Fiolt came down the beach towards her. He stopped, nodded his head to her.
‘The raiding party has come back,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘They’ve got some bread. Dried fish. Beer. We won’t die hungry, at least.’
‘We will not die,’ Thalia said. We will not. We will not. I will not.
Osen’s face flickered, looking across the beach where the men worked at the pyres, feeding the flames with pitch-soaked wood. The bones of the ships, consuming themselves. ‘We can’t sail, in this wind, and Tiothlyn can’t sail either, and that’s the only luck we have. But he’ll come. And we’ll all be dead.’
‘We defeated’ — she did not quite know how to say it, ‘his father’, ‘his brother’, what do I know, she thought again, what do I know of fathers and brothers, these foreign words, even in my own tongue I have never spoken them, meaningless words, and yet to say them, it hurts me, to say what it is he did — ‘we defeated King Illyn. We can defeat Tiothlyn.’
‘Whatever happened at Malth Salene …’ Osen shook his head. ‘I wasn’t there, of course. So perhaps you could ask him to do whatever he did again? I’m surprised Ti hasn’t come already, in all honesty. King Illyn would have marched the men overnight immediately we turned tail on him, followed the ships along the coast. We’re less than a day’s march from Morr Town.’ He gestured at the smoke from the pyres. ‘It’s not exactly like he can’t know where we are.’
‘So we will destroy him.’ Thalia thought: I saw what Marith did, at Malth Salene. I saw every man who opposed him die. I know what he is. What is in him. I will not die here. I will not.
‘Destroy Tiothlyn? He’ll cut the men’s throats like dogs, Thalia. Those that haven’t already fled. But no – that will be why he’s waiting. Why kill us himself when our men can do it for him?’
The men were slumped in ragged shelters frozen in the wind, breathing in the smoke of dead flesh. But they would fight. She knew, looking at their faces, she who had seen Malth Salene fall. They would fight for him. Or she would make them fight, if she must. But perhaps they would die, even so. More broken bones on the shoreline, buried in the sand like the wreck of the ships. She looked across at the litter of shelters, like plague sores on the grass beyond the sedge. No one, she thought then, no one thinks that they will die. I do not suppose that his father thought that he would die. His father, his brother – they must have thought, also, that they would win. Remembered the eyes of the sacrifices bound to her altar, staring up at her, she stood before them with the knife in her hands, the High Priestess of Great Tanis, and still, in their eyes, the certainty there somehow that they would not die, that her knife would not truly kill them, even as she killed them.
But I will not die here, she thought. I will not.
‘Why are you still here, then, Lord Fiolt?’ Thalia asked. ‘Why have you not already fled? Or killed him?’ Some little of the dignity game in the Temple, drawing her old status as the God’s hand and the God’s knife. If this is ended, if I am broken and dying here, I can at least have that.
‘Because …’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I could ask that same question of you, High Priestess Thalia.’
You could. They looked at one another. Each pitying the other, perhaps, Thalia thought. For being caught in this. Not able to leave. Drawn to what was offered. Kingship! Victory! Glory! The promise in Marith’s face.
Osen looked away from her. Looked again at the bodies burning in sparks of salt and pitch. Breathed in deep, and Thalia could see his nostrils flare, breathing in the smell of the smoke. Put his hand on the hilt of his sword. Caressing it.
‘Anyway. Here we are. The raiding party has come back,’ said Osen again. ‘There’s food, at least, now. That’s all I came to tell you. I’ll have something brought to you. And to him. Our Lord King. I’ll have watches set tonight. Hopefully we won’t be slaughtered in our sleep, at least.’ He rubbed his face again. ‘Bread and beer and dried fish. Some of the men might even stay here to die with us, if we feed them.’
‘Thank you, Lord Fiolt.’
I will not die, she thought. I spared Marith’s life, only a little time ago.
The promise in Marith’s face …
She went back to the shelter they had built for him as king. Sail cloth, ship’s timbers, branches. The sand was soft under her feet, then the crunch of pebbles, up over the dunes, down though the sedge to the coarse bare flat grass. Men’s faces followed her as she walked. The man Tal sat before the ragged flap of the tent doorway, wrapped in his cloak, his sword on his knees. He bowed his head as Thalia entered.
‘Marith?’
He was sitting staring at the wall, where the canvas was ripped to let in a beam of half-light.
‘Thalia?’
‘The men took some food in the village. Osen Fiolt is having something prepared for us.’
No answer. She sat down next to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought … I thought … They should have welcomed me. They were there. My brother. My mother — my stepmother. They should have … they should … I’m sorry. Ah, gods.’ Spat out a laugh. ‘I told you I was afraid for you to come. But I really thought … She’s my mother. How could she not welcome me back?’
Memories: his face in the desert, his eyes soft and sad and filled with light like stars; his face in the golden morning, bright and living and filled with joy and love and pride. And she remembered also Ausa, the priestess in the Temple, her friend, whom she had punished and maimed and ruined, and who had asked after her in friendship when it was done.
Perhaps, she thought. Perhaps they would have welcomed him back, even despite everything, if he had been able to see them. Perhaps they still would.
Marith said, ‘Hilanis the Young skinned his brother alive, you know? His wife wore a gown made of the skin on the day he was crowned. My great-great-grandfather. Skinned his older brother alive. I found an old leather robe once, tucked away in a cupboard, I thought for years it was Tareneth’s skin. There was a mark on it I even thought was a bloodstain.
