‘Guanaro!’ she called out to the room. ‘Is it time for breakfast yet?’
The old priest in attendance emerged from the side chamber next to the door. He nodded and went back inside, where Che could hear gruff orders being given, and the clatter of chopping boards and cupboard doors being opened and shut.
‘Some buttered sandshrimps, perhaps!’ she hollered after him.
Sasheen settled back, watching the fire in the hearth before them. Her hand restlessly stroked the leather arm of the settle. ‘I have not given you my thanks yet,’ came her quiet voice.
‘Matriarch?’
‘You performed a great service in leading us to the home of the Roshun. You proved your loyalty to me, and to the order. That’s why I requested you as my personal Diplomat in this,’ she waved her hand towards the map, ‘scheme of ours. You understand?’
Che offered a shake of his head, and watched her turn to regard him.
‘I go forth to war on one of the riskiest ventures we have ever attempted. Once I leave this sanctum I will be as vulnerable as any other. Not only from the enemy, but from our own people. General Romano for instance. He would pluck out my eyes given half the chance. So,’ and she smiled once more, a tight fleeting thing, like a confession, ‘I will need those around me who I can trust with my life, who I can be certain will follow my commands. Who can get a job done without qualms.’
‘I see,’ replied Che.
She did not seem entirely satisfied by his response. Sasheen turned to fix herself a hazii stick from a table next to the settle. ‘I’ve given the general order. We leave with the fleet for Lagos on the morning after next, to join with the Sixth Army in Lagos.’
Che felt a little flutter of anticipation in his chest. For an instant, he looked at her with the cold eyes of a murderer, hearing the rasping voice of one of his handlers in his mind, telling him what he must do should the Matriarch show weakness or be exposed to the possibility of capture during the campaign.
‘You will miss the Augere then,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Sasheen acknowledged, searching for a match as she spoke. ‘All those hours of tedium parading myself to the chattel.’
Smoothly, Che rose and crossed to the fire, feeling her eyes tracking him. He lit one of the rushes standing in a clay pot on the hearth, brought the burning end of it back to Sasheen, who was indeed watching him with amused interest.
She placed her fingers against his hand to steady the tip of the rush. Her kohl-rimmed eyes flickered up to meet his own, her lips pursed softly around the end of the hazii stick. He felt a pulse in his thighs, his groin.
Stop it you fool. You know she is this way. Using her charms with those she must rely upon.
He settled himself amongst a cloud of hazii smoke, whilst Sasheen turned back to the door of the side chamber, perhaps drawn by the smell of frying butter. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked him. ‘I did not bother to ask you.’
The thought of sharing a meal with her, here in this chamber at the top of the world, filled him with a sudden discomfort. ‘No, thank you. I’ve eaten already.’
Sasheen studied him for a lingering moment. She looked at her bare leg and then back to his face. Her hand on the arm of the settle stopped moving; it slapped once, lightly, against the leather. ‘You heard, I’m sure, that we caught up with Lucian at last. The Elash snatched him from Prince Suneed’s court in Ta’if.’
‘Yes. I heard.’
She rose with a soft rustle of her robe and padded across the rug to another table next to the fire. A large, round glass jar sat alone on the tabletop, filled nearly to the brim with a white liquid. There came a sound of glass scraping against glass as she unscrewed the lid with care. Sasheen rolled her right sleeve up to her elbow; leaned forward and took a sniff of the substance within.
‘Royal Milk,’ she said, without taking her eyes from it. Che blinked. He’d never seen the Milk before, only knew of its existence, the excretions of a queen Cree from the land of the Great Hush, renowned for its powers of vitality.
The wealth of a small kingdom lay inside that single jar alone.
Even from here, he could smell the liquid over the sweetness of the frying butter and sandshrimps. It was an unpleasant scent, like bile. With care, Sasheen dipped her hand into the white liquid within. She grasped something and began to pull it out; a handful of matted hair.
A scalp, Che thought… but then the rest of it followed: a forehead, a pair of closed eyes, a nose, a mouth fixed in a grimace, a dripping chin, a roughly hewn neck. She held this apparition over the jar as the white liquid ran from the severed head and her own hand like quicksilver.
It was the severed head of a middle-aged man, Che could see as the Milk flowed clear from it. Dark hair turned grey at the temples. A wide full mouth, a long nose, sharp cheekbones and brows.
As the last drop dripped clear of it, Sasheen swung the head over the table and settled it by its ragged neck on the dark surface of tiq.
The face flinched in pain or surprise. Che stiffened where he sat, his wide-eyed stare fixed on the thing before him. The Matriarch backed away from the head as its eyes flickered open, blinking to clear them, bloodshot and tormented. White Milk spilled from the corners of its lips as it saw Sasheen and glared.
‘Hello, Lucian,’ she said to the thing.
The head closed its lips, seemed to swallow a mouthful of air.
‘ Sasheen,’ the man croaked in a strange, wet voice, almost belching the word.
Che’s eyes darted to the Matriarch then back to the head. It was Lucian all right. Sasheen’s one-time famous lover and general, one of the first of the Lagosian nobility to join the ranks of Mann when the island had first fallen to the Empire – before he had betrayed her, by leading the Lagos rebellion in fighting once more for independence.
Che had witnessed the pieces of his hung-and-quartered corpse hanging in Freedom Square, with the soldiers stationed below them chasing away the hungry crows. He’d thought that had been the end of the man. It seemed though that Sasheen had other ideas for her ex-lover.
The Holy Matriarch turned her back to the head. She smiled at Che, sudden mischief in her eyes.
Sasheen raised her right hand to her mouth, licked her fingers one by one. Even as Che watched her do this, he could see the blood rush to her skin, her eyes begin to dilate even further. She finished with a greedy smack of her lips.
‘Nothing like it in this whole wide world,’ she said breathlessly, and took a step towards Che, hungry for something.
Once more Che fought an absurd impulse to laugh. It only worsened as she leaned down towards him, becoming a jostling pain in his chest as she placed her hand against his cheek, pressed her mouth hard against his own. Her tongue darted, parting his lips.
So easy to kill her, he thought, right here and now, if his lips had still been smeared with venom.
The taste of the Royal Milk was like nothing he had ever tasted before. It was neither sweet nor sour, bitter nor salty. His tongue began to sting, and then to go numb, as Sasheen continued to kiss him.
‘ Whore,’ came the strange belching voice of Lucian from behind her.
And then the rush of it hit Che, like a breath of fire blossoming through the blood-ways of his body. It jolted him out of his tiredness in a snap so that his blood surged, pounding, and a sense of weightlessness overcame him, filling him with light instead, and air, and the first real glimmers of lust.
Sasheen pulled clear with a moan, and glanced quite obviously down at his crotch. She whirled away with a satisfied smile.
He gasped, close to losing himself entirely, and sprawled back against the settle as though falling.
Two pulses, he thought distractedly. I have two pulses in my neck .
‘Ah, breakfast,’ she declared, as the old priest entered with a tray of food.
Che tried to move and then thought better of it. He clung to the settle as though he would fly from it at any instant, while the sounds of Sasheen preparing to eat filtered towards him from far behind.