Bahn blinked to clear his eyes. Through the air above the bed the dust motes were dancing as though in play, whipped up by the frantic action of the last hour.
‘We make too much noise,’ she muttered next to him, but without much concern in her voice, even as a child’s yell rang up through the thin boards of the floor, and voices murmured from behind the even thinner wall at their heads.
Bahn could only gasp and wait for his galloping heart to stop racing. He was burning up, and he kicked away the thin blanket that had snared itself around his ankles. He wiped his stubbled face dry, and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning.
The room was a cupboard-like space with a triangular, slope-beamed ceiling too low for a man to stand properly beneath. It reeked of dampness, sex, and the spiced smoke from an incense burner sitting beneath the open window. A perch, they called this kind of attic room in Bar-Khos; the preserve of prostitutes and street hustlers, or those in hiding from the law.
Bahn looked down at the girl as she rolled against his side and rested an arm across his stomach, her white skin as smooth as paper. Like her face, her small breasts were flushed, and he lay there and enjoyed the sensation of them flattening against his chest while the soft lilt of her voice played in his ears. ‘Or rather, you make too much noise,’ she was saying in her Lagosian accent, and she slid her hand downwards past his stomach, and stroked his downy hair with painted nails.
‘You were hardly quiet yourself,’ he breathed, and felt his scrotum tighten as her nails explored him further – sweet Mercy, he was responding again already. He could not get enough of this girl.
Absently, Bahn wondered if a shade had possessed him these past days and weeks; one of those spirits of mad impulse that seized hold of lives and spurred them headlong into tragedy with their insatiable needs.
If only I believed in such things, Bahn considered in his usual rational way. He knew that this weakness was his alone to carry. He thought of Marlee, his wife, and felt the usual first flutters of guilt in his stomach, a nausea he would carry with him for the rest of the day. He sighed heavily.
The girl beside him knew that sound by now, and she drew her hand away to leave him in peace. She cradled her head against the nook of his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on the low sloping beams of the ceiling above them. He observed the spikes of her honey-coloured hair as they bristled against his skin.
‘I hardly recognized you, when I first came in,’ he told her.
She looked up with those eyes that he still found so mesmerizing.
‘Your hair,’ he explained, nodding to the ridge of erect hair that ran along the middle of her scalp, like the mating display of some jungle bird. He could smell it, the wax that coated it and made it stiff like that. ‘It makes you look like one of those travelling tuchoni.’
‘You don’t like it? Meqa did it for me. She’s half tuchoni herself, or so she tells it.’
‘I like it well enough. It’s certainly… exotic.’ Yet Bahn couldn’t help but think of the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her, standing on a corner with the other street girls of the Quarter of Barbers, in a thin rain that had plastered her short hair in curls around her head. ‘I just thought it suited your name, the way that it was.’
‘I still have my curls,’ she purred, twisting one with a finger, blinking up at him through her lashes.
‘Enough now,’ he urged.
‘What?’
He said nothing for a few moments. ‘Let’s just lie here a while. Two people in a room together. I’ll still pay for your time.’
She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile she had ever offered him. ‘I can do that.’
The girl lay back against his arm. She pursed her lips and blew at a shining dust mote to push it away from her face. Her eyes followed it and Bahn found himself doing the same, tracking its motion through the cloud of swirling specks that filled the room.
The mote drifted over a stack of folded clothing pressed between the bed and the wall. At last it vanished amongst the leaves of a jubba plant in a chipped wooden bowl, where a single blue flower was in late bloom. A Lagosian thing that, to pot plants and bring them indoors, a fashion that had been catching on in the city since the steady influx of refugees from Lagos had first begun; Marlee had even started doing it.
Outside, a crow flapped past the window, making its ugly calls. For long moments Bahn simply gazed through the curtains of lace, staring at the meagre view of housing tenements under construction on the other side of the yards and communal vegetable plots, the cranes and scaffolding poking up beneath a slab of azure sky. The voice sounded again through the sheet-thin wall behind them; Meqa, bartering with a customer over her price. From below, the sounds of the children continued to rise from the ground floor.
They were a tribe, those fifteen children, and they were ruled only by their mother Rosa, the landlady of the house, who as it turned out was not their mother at all, save for two of them; rather, she was a middle-aged widow with a good heart, who could not help but take in every stray hungry child that she encountered. The children themselves barely seemed to notice the men who clambered up the creaking stairs at the rear of the house at all hours. Bahn, on his handful of recent visits here, had been ignored by them after only a few glances his way – the children too busy shrieking around in the muck of the backyard, fighting over worms and yelling in delight each time they snapped one in half.
It was enough to make Bahn think of his own son and infant daughter, though he chased those thoughts away, quickly, before they could gain any substance.
‘It’s quiet,’ the girl said.
She referred to the silence of the guns at the Shield, half a laq to the south.
Bahn nodded. The Mannian guns had lain silent for more than a week now. It was said that a period of mourning had been declared across the Empire in respect for the death of the Matriarch’s son. In return, the guns of the Bar-Khosian defences had followed their example, though purely to preserve their blackpowder.
His voice was wistful as he spoke. ‘It was like this ten years ago, before the siege and the war. Just normal everyday sounds of a city.’ Bahn sighed once more. ‘I wonder if it will ever be this way again.’
‘You sound troubled,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes as she watched his expression. ‘Have you heard something?’
For an instant Bahn felt a tension in his chest, his muscles clamping tight around his heart. In his mind’s eye he saw the far sparkle of fires in the distance, like cities burning.
‘No,’ he lied to her. ‘Not that I could tell you, anyway, if I had.’ Bahn squeezed her shoulder and tried to ease the tension in his chest by breathing deeply. ‘I’ve too much on my mind, that’s all.’
She asked nothing more of him, and simply laid her head upon his beating heart. ‘You should not fret so,’ she murmured.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you worry like an old woman. Too much thinking,’ and she lifted her head to tap him twice on his left temple.
He forced a smile to his face. ‘My mother is the same. Always worrying about something or other.’
She nodded, understanding.
Bahn looked at her fully, sprawled as she was against him; the slight redness of her nostrils from inhaling dross; the bruise on her neck the precise size of his pursed lips. He had been rough on her again.
When had he last given Marlee a lusty bite like that? he wondered. Before their son had arrived, he realized. Before the war, when they had both been young and carefree.
Bahn ran a finger across the smooth skin of her shoulder.
I will feel this guilt either way, he considered.
Without warning he rolled himself on top of her. For a moment there was surprise in her eyes, though it was gone in an instant as he bent and kissed her throat, to be replaced by something unreadable.