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Spax dipped his head and then handed his goblet to Gaedis. ‘I hear your maids readying that bath, Highness. A most restorative conclusion to this night, I’m sure. Good night to you, Highness, Lieutenant.’

Once outside, he set out, not back to his clans, but to the encampments of the Burned Tears. It had occurred to him, when envisioning the grand parley to come, that he and Gall would, in all likelihood, be the only men present. An exciting notion. He wasn’t sure Gall would see it that way, of course, if the rumours he’d picked up were true, but there was another rumour that, if accurate, could offer a common rug for them both. Not a drinker of fancy wines, this Gall. No, the man likes his beer, and if manhood has any measure, it’s that.Advertisement

Just my opinion, mind. Now, let’s see, Warleader Gall, if you share it.

Stepping beyond the legion’s last row of tents, Spax paused. He spat to get that foul taste from his mouth. Wine’s for women. Gaedis, I bet that trick with the cork has spread a thousand soft thighs. You’ll have to teach it to me one day.

She might as well have tied a cask of ale to her belly. Her lower back was bowed, and every shift of weight made the bones creak. Muscles quivered, others were prostrate with exhaustion. Her breasts, which had never been modest or spry, now sat resting uneasy on the swell of that damned cask. Everything was swollen and too big-how was it that she kept forgetting? Of course, amidst all these groans and shuffles and grunts, her thoughts swam through honey. So sweet, this drowning. The world glowed. Life shouted. Sang.

‘Hoary witches of old,’ she muttered under her breath, ‘you’ve a lot to answer for.’ There was no possible position in which to sit in comfort, so Hanavat, wife to Gall, had taken to walking through the camp each night. She was the wandering moon of her people’s legends, in the ages before her sister moon’s betrayal, when love was still pure and Night lay down in the arms of Darkness-oh, the legends were quaint, if ever tainted with sorrow, that inevitable fall from grace. She wondered if such creations-those tales of times lost-were nothing more than a broken soul’s embrace of regret. The fall was in sensibility’s wake, too late to do anything about, but this-look around! — this is what it made of us.

The moon had ceased to wander. Snared in the webs of deceit, it could only slide round and round the world it loved-never to touch, doomed to tug at its lover’s tears, that and nothing more. Until, in some distant future, love died and with it all the pale fires of its wonder, and at last Night found her lover and in turn Darkness swallowed her whole. And that was the end of all existence.

Hanavat could look up now and see a vision that did not fit with the legend’s prophecy. No, the moon had been struck a mortal blow. She was dying. And still the web would not release her, whilst, ever cool, ever faint, her sister moon watched on. Had she murdered her rival? Was she pleased to witness her sister’s death throes? Hanavat’s gaze strayed southward to the jade lances arcing ever closer. The heavens were indeed at war.

‘Tea, Hanavat?’

Her attention, drawn down from the skies, found the shapes of two women seated round a small fire banked against a steaming pot. ‘Shelemasa. Rafala.’

Rafala, who’d been the one voicing the offer, now lifted into view a third cup. ‘We see you pass each night, Mahib. Your discomfort is plain to our eyes. Will you join us? Rest your feet.’

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‘I was fleeing the midwives,’ Hanavat said. She hesitated, and then waddled over. ‘The Seed Wakeners are cruel-what’s wrong with just an egg? We could manage one, I think, about the size of a palm nut.’

Shelemasa’s laugh was low and wry. ‘But not as hard, I’d hope.’

‘Or as hairy,’ Rafala added.

The two warrior women laughed.

Grunting, moving slowly, Hanavat sat down, forming the third point to this triangle surrounding the fire. She accepted the cup, studied it in the soft light. Pewter. Bolkando. ‘So, you didn’t sell everything back to them, I see.’

‘Only the useless things,’ Rafala said. ‘They had plenty of those.’

‘It’s what makes us so different from them,’ observed Shelemasa. ‘We don’t invent useless things, or make up needs that don’t exist. If civilization-as they call it-has a true definition, then that must be it. Don’t you think, Mahib?’

The ancient honorific for a pregnant woman pleased Hanavat. Though these two were young, they remembered the old ways and all the respect those ways accorded people. ‘You may be right in that, Shelemasa. But I wonder, perhaps it’s not the objects that so define a civilization-perhaps it’s the attitudes that give rise to them, and to the strangely overwrought value attached to them. The privilege of making useless things is the important thing, since it implies wealth and abundance, leisure and all the rest.’ pqdm.com