Moontide 02 - The Scarlet Tides (46 page)

When he had finished, he wiped his face and looked up to find the widow was staring at him curiously. She was young to be a widow; and from the light creeping through her shroud, he could see she was shapely. She twisted, coyly preening, and with her left hand, lifted her skirt a little, showing him her left ankle, which was narrow and graceful. Her foot was painted with swirls of henna and he felt a sudden stirring. The display of an ankle was an offer.

Widows in Amteh society had a precarious, vulnerable position. They were permitted to remarry, but any children under the age of ten were usually sold into slavery so no man would have to tolerate raising another man’s child. The Kalistham were not explicit, but most interpretations agreed that a widow was nefara until purified by remarriage. They survived however they could.

He picked up one of her buckets, put it back beneath the pump and hauled on the handle. Water flowed strongly and the two buckets were filled in no time.

She reached out and touched his bunched bicep, making an admiring sound. She was barely five feet tall and maybe half his weight, but she had lovely eyes.

‘These are heavy. Would you like me to carry them for you?’ he asked in a low voice. Beneath the smells of motherhood she had an enticing musk; it reminded him of the way Elena smelled when they sparred. He felt his loins stir dangerously.

I’ve been cooped up with the Rondian bitch too long
, he told himself.
I need a real woman, to purge these urges.

Once he’d rationalised his actions to himself he didn’t care what Elena might think. He glanced over his shoulder to where she was still loading the handcart, hunched over like a typical middle-aged woman.

Which is what she is.

He hefted the buckets, then called, ‘Wait for me here.’ He looked enquiringly at the widow, who shared an intimate smile with him and indicated an alley between two huts. He strode in front of her from the square.

Elena called furiously.

The widow led him to a hut, in poor repair and downwind of a midden. He wrinkled his nose, but when he carried the buckets inside, there was fresh lavender hanging from the ceiling in bunches, sweetening the air. There was one sleeping pallet, a tangle of sheets wound about a young boy of maybe seven, who was dozing; a newborn mewled softly beside him. The elder boy’s eyes flickered open and he stared in fright at Kazim, his expression gradually changing to one of wordless disgust.

He is young, but he knows what is happening here.
Kazim suddenly felt ashamed of himself.

The widow snapped at her son, who fled to a back room. Kazim felt his desire waver, but then he smelled her again, and his belly rumbled with that new, other desire. For an instant he pictured her dead, blood welling from her mouth, and a smoky, nourishing bubble of energy—

‘Where do you want these buckets?’ he mumbled, his face colouring.

The widow pointed to the stove and he placed the buckets beside it, then turned to face her.
It would be so easy
…

‘Three or five,’ she said matter-of-factly: three to pleasure him, five for intercourse. A gross overcharging, most would say, but he pulled out six coppers and dropped them on her table. Her hand
flashed out, swept them up and secreted them in a pouch hanging amidst the lavender. Then she turned to face him and started to disrobe.

The hole inside him where his gnosis sat was screaming to be filled, making him waver in his decision. She looked at him, puzzled, and then he saw fear blossom behind her eyes – that was enough to bring him back to sanity. He exhaled and released the hilt of his sword, which he had not even realised he’d been grasping, and sagged inside with relief and self-disgust.

Was this what my father went through every day after giving up the gnosis?
he wondered.
Or did someone chain his power to ease the struggle?
The thought of his father strengthened him. He could be stronger than his need.

Every
need. ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is wrong.’ Whoring was probably all she had left, but that did not make it right. ‘Why does your husband’s family not take care of you? Or your own?’

She dropped her eyes. ‘We eloped. I have no one, and I cannot go back.’

She is doubly nefara
, he told himself, but the condemnation felt cruel. She had married for love. This could have been Ramita and him. He backed away. ‘Keep the money,’ he told her. ‘I will not do this to you.’

She looked confused, troubled even, unsure if she were being condemned, pitied or patronised. ‘You are a good man,’ she said carefully. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Far away,’ he said softly.

‘Will you visit Shimdas village again?’ she asked. Her voice sounded needy. ‘We do not have many men here.’

He studied her face, seeing the pox scars, her unhealthy eyes and lank hair. But she had a quiet dignity that even the debasing life she was forced into had not broken. ‘Perhaps,’ he told her, surprised to find that he meant it.
But I could never stay …

She read that final thought in his eyes and her face went imperceptibly flat: a tiny dream that he might perhaps be the man who made her a wife again, restoring her to decency, winked out. He
wondered if she harboured that hope every time; wondered how she lived with what she did – how she went on.

Abruptly she was all business. ‘Thank you for the water,’ she said, as if that was the most profound thing that had taken place. But six coppers would help her through, for a while at least. He turned and left.

Elena was sitting in the village square on her own, exuding hostility. No one was near her. The shopkeeper was staring at her intently, perhaps wondering if she was as free with her body as the widow was.

<
Good fuck?>
she sent, her mental voice nasty.

,> he retorted, and went back to Dhani the shopkeeper while she simmered, clearly disbelieving. An idea had occured to him. ‘My friend,’ he said to the man in a soft voice. ‘A favour, please?’

The shopkeeper cocked his head warily.

Kazim dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘If any of the shihad come here, tell them that Kazim is near. That he has become a Zain.’
That should lead them to the monastery
. He pressed two silvers into the man’s palm. ‘Other than that, forget we came.’

Dhani nodded, then bade him good day.

Elena asked sourly as she climbed to her feet, moving like an old woman now. He didn’t reply, just strode away, leaving her to bring the now-laden handcart.

She apologised on the way home, much to his surprise. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I thought the worst of you, and you were only being kind to that widow.’

He blinked.
Well, in truth, if her son had not looked at me like that, I’d have screwed her
. Did deeds or actions matter more? It was a question for the Scriptualists, not him. He met Elena’s eyes and decided he too could do conciliatory gestures. ‘I am sorry also: you are right, about the gnosis.’

Elena blinked back at him. ‘Really?’

‘It is part of who I am now,’ he conceded. ‘I have to learn to control it.’
Or at least control my desire to use it – or I am going to kill someone.

She looked pleased, though it was too late for her to begin gnostic teaching once they’d stowed the new stores so instead they sparred for a little. He was conscious of a new tension between them, a physical tension. He’d not purged himself with the widow, and the desire he’d felt to hold someone and be held was still beating inside him. Watching her walk away set it off again.
Elena … I am wrong about her: she is not an old ferang jadugara. She is a woman.

Ramita’s father used to say that some people connected emotionally and others intellectually, but he and Elena had a physical connection. They were both athletes – competing athletes, yes, but there was mutual respect too, maybe even more than respect now. He sometimes saw a heat in her eyes as they fought, and now he knew it was in his also. But it was twisted around the need to kill and replenish the gnosis, and that frightened him.

Next morning, he spent a shaky few minutes in the privy, his bowels loosened by fear of what he was about to take on.
I must master this, or it will destroy me.
But he also slipped a dagger inside his tunic. They had a tacit agreement that no real weapons were to be worn while training, but he was suddenly afraid that he badly needed one.
If she learns what I really am, she may need to die – though I cannot imagine dealing that blow, especially after the vow we made …

When he returned to the gardens she was dressed in a salwar kameez and sitting cross-legged on a stone bench. At her gesture he sat at the other end of the bench, in easy reach of her, cross-legged also. He blanked his mind as Jamil had taught him to steady himself. Only then did he meet her eyes. ‘I am ready.’

‘Okay. First, let’s get an idea of what you can do,’ she replied. She reached out with her right hand, palm facing him. ‘Touch my hand,’ she told him, closing her eyes.

He blanked his mind utterly, dropping his purposes in behind a mask of compliance. His right hand he pressed to hers, palm to palm, and closed his eyes too. And sent his left hand to the hilt of his dagger.

She sighed softly as their auras touched. Her mental presence was much stronger through the touch-link, and it had a certain texture, a warm, astringent dampness that was distinctly her: herbal and
fragrant, like a mint paste. Initially it felt unsettling, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

‘You’re sensing my gnosis,’ she whispered aloud and in his mind. ‘My prime elemental affinity is to Water.’

‘How do I seem to you?’ he asked, curious despite himself.

‘Restless. Pricklish, like little jabs of lightning. Your touch is … unusual … draining, even.’ She reflected a moment. ‘Your prime affinity is to Air.’

That made sense to him. He recalled the joy of soaring alongside Molmar through the night skies of Kesh and Javon, and the way he’d been able to help the pilot-mage by feeding energy into the keel of the skiff.

She must have followed his train of thought, because it felt like she was there in the memory, in the bow of the skiff, her hair unbound like a pennant. She turned to face him and grinned.

she called above the roar of the winds. She laughed with pleasure.

His inner vision changed: suddenly the skiff was gone and there were just the two of them, arms spread like wings as they soared above the desert, the land spread beneath them like rumpled sheets. The sun and moon shared the sky and his sight went on forever. Elena’s face was lit by the same joy he was feeling, the sheer unbridled pleasure of being weightless and free.

He wasn’t sure whether he meant the gnosis or her.

she called merrily, suddenly diving towards the earth, and he went with her, plummeting, yet fully in control and revelling in the sudden speed. She rolled and he mimicked the manoeuvre, felt exhilarated as he roared past on a wind of his own summoning.

She looked across at him, smiling slyly.

She was very different now; her usual closed-minded world-weariness had given way to enjoyment of the moment, and it shook him, made him thunderingly conscious of what he was risking. He felt giddy just looking at her and that scared him.

He fought for composure, forcing himself to calm.

she said, smiling into his mind.

She’d caught that stray thought. What else had she heard? He hunched behind mental shields, closing her off a little, and the intensity of her mind’s presence in his receded considerably. She looked a little hurt, as if she’d felt that the brief moment they’d shared meant something, then her face became business-like again.

He gave reluctant acquiescence. His right hand was still entwined in hers. He wondered if she realised.

He slid the dagger out of its sheath and held the blade still inside his tunic.

The sensation of her changed as her liquid warmth washed over him with a tang like summer rain. Her face swam behind his eyes, her gaze penetrating as knives.

she told him. Then forked lightning jagged towards him. He yelped and caught it. She smiled then poked her tongue out, impish as a young girl.

she called, and sped away, soaring like a bird across the skies of his inner vision.

He followed, shaping the crackling energies of the lightning in his hand, then sent it blazing after her. It was her turn to squawk as she corkscrewed away from the searing bolt.

He pursued, feeling like a bird of prey as he tore across the skies in pursuit. Then suddenly
she
was that bird: an eagle, shrieking in hunger and fury. He gained swiftly, calling his challenge across the heavens as he knifed through the air towards her. His claws raked at her, but an instant before he caught her, the vision winked out and suddenly he was facing her again, panting slightly.

she said, her voice light and animated.
me.>
She shook her head, her mental voice slightly awed.

He ignored the question.

he asked, interested despite his fears.