Anna Smith Spark - The Tower of Living and Dying

‘He hated me.’

‘Yes.’ She thought: he did not hate you. I saw that, I who have never known a father. He did not hate you, any more than you hated him. But there is nothing else that can be said. If we repeat the lie, it is true, is it not? Without that lie … without that lie, we are nothing.

I could have stayed in my Temple, when the men came to kill me. Woken the other priestesses. Called the guards. I did not call for help. I ran. Two slaves died. I ran.

‘I’ll bury him with all honours.’ Marith rubbed painfully at his eyes.

He is almost pitiful, Thalia thought. And I … I do pity him. So indeed we shall be happy. If pity and lust together can make love and happiness.

‘All honours.’ He was drifting back towards sleep. ‘He would have killed you … He told everyone I was dead … King Illyn …’ he muttered again, rubbing at his face, ‘King Illyn Altrersyr …’ The walls of the Great Temple rose up in Thalia’s mind, high and huge, the faint glimpse of golden domes and silver towers, the sound of voices talking about things she had never seen. High great walls, shutting out the world.

The weather changed, becoming bitter cold, hard frosts, one morning a faint dusting of snow. The marshes froze over, a thin skin of ice that cracked beneath the weight of a man’s foot. The reeds stood out bare and black. The birds fled with the ice, the last flocks of them gathering on the roofs of Malth Calien and flying into the west like long plumes of smoke. Lone deer picked their way through the frozen landscape. The trees bent furred under the frost. The last few lords of the furthest islands came, of those who would come, and the news ran down from Seneth that Tiothlyn was crowned king at Malth Elelane and was raising his own troops.

‘Why does he hate him?’ Thalia asked Matrina Fiolt, Osen’s wife. At first Thalia had not liked her at first, golden haired with deep, heavy breasts and round cheeks, making eyes at Marith, smiling with him as a woman who had known him for longer, who knew how to say things that Thalia did not understand but that made him laugh. ‘My Lady’, she called Thalia, but with something in her voice that Thalia recognized from her Temple, meekness cutting like knives. But it was so dull, sitting in this cold place looking out at the marshes with nothing to think of but what was to come.

‘Who? Hate who?’

‘Marith. Why does he hate his brother? And the queen?’

Matrina put down her embroidery, a long fine girdle patterned with flowers. Frowned. ‘I … Most brothers hate each other, a little bit, I think … And Marith and Ti … I don’t know, I’ve never met Tiothlyn. But it must have been hard, I suppose, the two of them, with so much before them … Being Marith’s brother … Did you not have brothers or sisters you were jealous of? Saw yourself less than or better than or different to, and thought your parents loved the more?’

No. Nothing. Only the God, Great Lord Tanis Who Rules All Things, whose power reached to a small dark room and a knife. Thalia thought: life and death I know. Light and dark. Killing. Nothing in between. Nothing that means anything in the living of a human life.

‘I quarrelled with my brother all the time when I was a child,’ Matrina went on, ‘we fought like cats and dogs over everything. I love him, of course. But I was glad to leave and come here. And they are so close in age, and so similar, and Marith — and the king’s birth mother—’

‘She is dead,’ Thalia said. ‘His father killed her.’

Matrina coloured a little, then laughed. ‘Look at me!’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no reason not to talk about it, any more. She died when Marith was still only a baby, and the king, the old king, I mean, King Illyn married Queen Elayne so soon after that. These old things, they get forgotten. What does it matter? Twenty years, she’d been dead. But then Marith started talking about it, stood up before his father and accused him of having his mother killed. My father and brother were there, they saw. And Tiothlyn was so angry back. And the king too, of course. Marith had to apologize, say it was lies. Who knows? But young men quarrel with their fathers, and their brothers, and take against their stepmothers. My father and my brother quarrel. My father wasn’t even sure he meant it.’

On and on. So far back, the shadows that ate at him … Thalia shuddered. Saw it all before her, and the old king again, eyes and mouth jutting open, golden with honey. Killers and murderers, all of them. Death and hate. On and on and on.

A clatter from the courtyard, a harsh voice shouting, ‘Faster! Again! That slow and you’ll be dead, the lot of you! Again!’ A flurry of fine powdery snow blew in at the window. Sand and dust had blown in occasionally, long ago in the Temple when all things were different.

‘Seneth is a beautiful island,’ Matrina said. ‘Perhaps Osen will take me to live there, if the king keeps him close to him.’ She frowned again, took up her embroidery and set back to her work. ‘I wish my father would come. It’s so awkward like this.’ Marith had explained it to Thalia: Matrina’s father Lord Dair sat in his hall on Belen Island, torn between astonishment at his daughter’s husband’s good fortune and his own loyalty to the Murades and the queen. The complexities of it all made Thalia’s head ache. Always, it came back to killing their own kin.

‘This is war,’ Marith said wearily later when she asked him. They stood together on the outer wall, watching a column of men march in under the gate. ‘That is what war is.’ His face was pale, following the soldiers’ progress with hungry eyes. Scarlet armour and dark spears, white pennants fluttering with the great blaze of an orange sun, come up from ships beached on the mud flats, black timber and white sails and red painted eyes on the prow. Almost the last, he thought, Stansel of Belen with three hundred men and five ships. Not a huge host gathered, though enough to fill the halls of Malth Calien twice over, camped in the orchard and the horse yard, eating the castle and its villages out of everything in their stores, hunting and fishing the marshes bare. It would be a hard winter, for those left behind. The earth around the castle was fouled with sewage that would spread disease.

They must leave soon. Marith must know it. The men cooped up in the fortress grew restless, eager for war. Ghost lights flickered out on the marshes. Shadows circled the towers of Malth Calien. Bright dead screams in the evening. Kill and kill and kill and kill. Death! Death! Death! It would be better for him when they were moving, Thalia thought. Away into clean air. Away into doing. He sat in the hall at night and let them praise him and call him king and conqueror, and most times he laughed with them and believed it, but sometimes now he would mock them and curse them to their faces, and once he had broken down and wept. Get him away from these things. If they could be alone, themselves … He and she stood together alone on the walls and he smiled his sad smile and looked more what he had been, beautiful and desolate as the frost on the marsh. They would leave for Malth Elelane. They would bury his father, kill his brother and his stepmother. They would marry and he would crown her as his queen. And then perhaps he would have some kind of peace.

He turned with his beautiful dead eyes and his smile as the last men came under the gateway, a voice calling out the order to bar again the gates. ‘That is the last of them. Soon. Very soon.’

Men’s voices shouted from the courtyard, commands, greetings, cheers. They came down from the walls into the midst of it, men and horses and servants, Matrina Fiolt with an anxious face trying to order her household in the face of something almost like a siege.