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.’
‘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.’
‘Wise words,’ murmured Rafala.
‘The tea is sweet enough,’ replied Hanavat.
The younger woman smiled, accepting the faint admonishment with good grace.
‘The child kicks,’ said Hanavat, ‘and so promises me the truth of the years awaiting us. I must have been mad.’ She sipped tea. ‘What brew is this?’
‘Saphii,’ answered Shelemasa. ‘It’s said to calm the stomach, and with the foreign food we’ve been eating of late, such calm will be a welcome respite.’
‘Perhaps,’ added Rafala, ‘it will soothe the child as well.’
‘Or kill it outright. At this point I don’t really care which. Heed this miserable Mahib’s warning: do this once to know what it means, but leave it at that. Don’t let the dream serpents back into your thoughts, whispering to you of pregnancy’s bliss. The snake lies to soften your memories. Until there is nothing but clouds and the scent of blossoms in your skull, and before you know it, you’ve gone and done it again.’
‘Why would the serpents lie, Mahib? Are not children women’s greatest gift?’
‘So we keep telling ourselves, and each other.’ She sipped more tea. Her tongue tingled as if she’d licked a bell of pepper. ‘But not long ago my husband and I invited our children to a family feast, and my how we did feast. Like starving wolves trying to decide which among us was the stranded bhederin calf. All night our children flung that bloody hide back and forth, each of them cursed to wear it at least once, and finally they all decided to drape the two of us in that foul skin. It was, in short, a most memorable reunion.’
The two younger women said nothing.
‘Parents,’ resumed Hanavat, ‘may choose to have children, but they do not choose their children. Nor can children choose their parents. And so there is love, yes, but there is also war. There is sympathy and there is the poison of envy. There is peace and that peace is the exhausted calm between struggles for power. There is, on rare occasions, true joy, but each time that precious, startling moment then dwindles, and in each face you see a hint of sorrow-as if what was just found will now be for ever remembered as a thing lost. Can you be nostalgic for the instant just past? Oh yes, and it’s a bittersweet taste.’ She finished her tea. ‘That whispering serpent-it’s whispered its last lie in me. I strangled the bitch. I tied it neck and tail to two horses. I collected every knuckled bone and crushed it to dust, then blew that dust to contrary winds. I took its skin and made it into a codpiece for the ugliest dog in the camp. I then took that dog-’
Rafala and Shelemasa were laughing, their laughs getting louder with each antic of vengeance Hanavat described.
Other warriors, round other small fires, were all looking over now, smiling to see old pregnant Hanavat regaling two younger women. And among the men there were stirrings of curiosity and perhaps a little unease, for women possessed powerful secrets, and none more powerful than those possessed by a pregnant woman-one need only to look into the face of a mahib to know that. The women, watching on but like their male companions too distant to hear Hanavat’s words, also smiled. Was that to soothe the men in their company? Possibly, but if so the expression was instinctive, a dissembling born of habit.
No, they smiled as the urgent whispers of their dream serpents filled their heads. The child within. Such joy! Such pleasure! Put away the swords, O creature of beauty-instead sing to the Seed Wakeners! Catch his eye and watch him fall in-the darkness beckons and the night is warm!
Was a scent released upon the air? Did it drift through the entire camp of the Khundryl Burned Tears?
In the Warleader’s campaign tent, Gall sat with a bellyful of ale heavy as a cask leaning on his belt, and eyed with gauging regard the tall iron-haired woman pacing in front of him. Off to one side sat the Gilk Barghast, Spax, even drunker than Gall, his own red-shot, bleary gaze tracking the Mortal Sword as she sought to prise from Gall every last detail regarding the Malazans. Where had this sudden uncertainty come from? Had not the Perish sworn to serve the Adjunct? Oh, if Queen Abrastal could witness what he was witnessing! But then she’d be interested in all the unimportant matters, wouldn’t she? Eager to determine if the great alliance was weakening… and all that.