The House of Sacrifice. Anna Smith Spark

of their petals shines on the skin. We find a lake up there, clear as mirrors, the birds of the mountain are reflected in it, Marith smiles and says it is almost as blue as my eyes. ‘Our child must have your eyes,’ he tells me. ‘Your eyes, and your skin, and my hair.’ The Mountains of Pain, the mountains are called. They are sharp as blades. But I cannot see pain in them. They are beautiful. Not a place for men, no, very few live here, if one goes too high into the mountains one’s breath is said to come heavy, the head feels dizzy, in the snow at the heights a man can sicken and die. But they are not things of pain. The name is from a story, I am told, a woman, a princess of Turain with black skin and silver hair, very beautiful, and her heart was broken, and she raised up the mountains so that she might live alone there, in solitude. Her pain, alone.

      Yellow cranes fly up from the south to build their nests in the mountain heights. Wild goats with horns as sharp as sarriss points; mountain eagles; grey wildcats that have no shadow as they hunt in the dusk. Walnut trees. Peach trees. Rose trees. Trout and perch in the rivers. Gellas fowl. Wild peacocks. Meadows like a carpet unfurled, cloth laid out in a market place. In the valleys the earth is good, golden woodlands, fields basking in the sun and watered by streams from the mountain heights, the crops grow up so fast here that the mountain people can gather three harvests a year; in the gardens the trees are so heavy with fruit that it does not need to be bought and sold, one can simply reach out to take. Here, in the warmth, we rest the soldiers, load ourselves with supplies, let the horses rest and fatten. The dragons are gone into the mountains. Weary, after the great labours they have done for us. We settle ourselves in the foothills, build a city of soldiers’ tents. The men of the mountains come to do us honour, kneel before us, crown us with silver, offer up gifts of animal skins and sweetwood and wine and fruit. ‘Dragon King’, they call Marith. He smiles radiant at that. They call me ‘Queen of Flowers’. We hold feast days and games, the Army of Amrath parades, dances, sings songs, stages races and mock fights. The winners are crowned as we are with flowers and gold. There are weddings, celebrations of births and birthdays, commemorations of our dead. Osen talks of writing a book, a history of our conquests, until Alleen Durith laughs him out of it.

      ‘What will we do, when we have conquered the world?’ I say to Marith. ‘We will do this. Celebrate and enjoy ourselves, fill the world with music and dancing and poems. Pass all this beauty on to our children and their children after them.’

      Marith tries to smile. ‘We have sacked all the great cities of the world, Thalia. Killed all the poets and the musicians who live in them.’

      ‘As you said, we will rebuild them. More beautiful than before. Never mind offering your soldiers a farm each: every soldier in the Army of Amrath can hold court in a palace in a great city, with retainers and painters and poets.’

      He rubs his eyes. But I lived for twenty years in one building, I fasted, I killed, I knelt in the darkness with a knife in my hand, I knelt in the blinding light for days without sleep. If there is nothing else for our armies to do … yes, we can sack them again and again. If there is nothing else for us to do.

      The child is growing so strong inside me, I feel her swimming within me, moving like a fish. Soon she will be born. Sometimes now she kicks so strongly Marith can feel it, if he puts his hand on my belly. ‘Quickly, quickly!’ I call to him, and he puts his hand where I show him. ‘I feel it!’ he cries. The wonder of it, each time, he laughs and shouts like a child himself, for pure longing joy. ‘My daughter,’ he says to it, he kisses my belly where it lies. The baby kicks and wriggles within me, as if she too is delighted by it.

      I say to him, ‘We won’t have time to conquer any more of the world, when we have our children to bring up.’

      I want my child to grow up happy and contented. Never to know hunger or helplessness. I want to give her a rich good life, far better than my own. I want her to have everything, wealth, status, for her life to be free from want, from sorrow, from grief. I want her life to be perfect. I would put my child’s life above others’ lives, I would do anything for this child inside me. Is this also a bad thing?

      No one, I am certain, has thought or done such a thing before. You, I am sure, have never thought these things.

      In the blazing light and heat of the south we celebrate Sunreturn. ‘Year’s Renewal,’ I say; Marith says with a laugh, ‘You heathen, it’s called Sunreturn.’ ‘There is no need for it to return,’ I say back to him, ‘you barbarian, look – the days are no shorter, the sun has not gone.’ He shakes his head, ‘True, true. But in my empire, Sunreturn is its right name.’ Indeed: such an absurd joke to us in the city of Sorlost the city of the dawn, that the people of the north should fear the death of the sun, this fool’s idea that the sun is so fragile. Sunreturn and Sun’s Height, what a strange joke! Yet I find that I miss the long days of the north. In Illyr, the summer days were so long I would go to bed sometimes when the sun was still golden, the light in the air as I lay waiting for sleep would be comforting. Like sleeping wrapped in light. I would fall asleep to the sound of birdsong; wake in the morning to a world already brilliant with light.

      On the feast day the fires of the camp from the mountain are like stars; the air rings with song; the servants are garlanded with hyacinths, they have spread the floor of our tent with rose petals, Osen Fiolt brings us crowns of white blossom, caught and frozen, alive, cold with frost. A new gown is waiting for me, rosy silk so fine it looks as though I am wearing the dawn sky. A necklace of spun gold flowers, delicate as breath. There is music and singing. Silver bells ringing in the air above our heads. We drink perfumed yellow wine out of diamond cups. Poets tell of his triumphs, the beauty of his battles: The Deeds of the New King; The Ruin of Tyrenae; The Fall of Tereen. Osen Fiolt raises his cup in a toast to us. As the others join him, gold and silver stars begin to fall from the ceiling of the tent. Outside, in the warm summer darkness, the soldiers dance in their costumes of branches and bones and ribbons, run and leap with burning torches to light up the night. ‘Luck! Luck!’ their voices shout. Inside me, I feel the child kick. Alleen’s servant girl begins to sing, her voice sweet and soft as honey, warm, rich. A man beside her accompanies her on an ivory flute. She claps her hands, stamps her feet as she sings, a fast rhythm, joyful. She has the heavy accent of Illyr; I think, from the words I can understand, that she is singing of Amrath and Eltheia, how much He loved her and she loved Him. Dansa Arual gets to her feet, begins to dance. Alleen Durith joins her, and Osen Fiolt, soon almost everyone is dancing. Marith sits and watches beside me, until Dansa Arual grabs his hands and I tell him to join them. The tent smells of crushed flowers, rose petals kicked up by dancing feet.

      In the grey light of the next morning, a pain grips my belly. I see the sun rise, I lie awake in the first light with the sounds of revelry around me. I begin to bleed.

      When the sun sets in the evening, my child is dead.

      Marith sits at my bedside, and we both knew that this would happen, and we both scream with grief. The greatest pain a human heart can endure, I am told, to lose a child, and I believe it. Marith’s voice, calling the shadows, his eyes are dragon eyes: ‘No. No. Please. Please. Just let her live.’ I hold her, for a little while. She moved, once, after she was born, her mouth opened, her eyes opened, she opened and closed the fingers of her hands, balled them into fists. Marith says that she did. Swears that she did. She is very cold in my arms, but very soft. She has tiny fingers all wrinkled up. She has tiny fingernails. Her ears are like tiny shells, she has fine black hair almost like feathers all over her head. Her skin is red-brown. Like apples. Her eyes are closed and I cannot bear to know what colour her eyes are. Her eyelashes are long and black. She has a smell on her like blood and like the sweat of a clean body after running, and like something else that I cannot describe and will never forget and already forget.

      They say that an unborn child’s heartbeat sounds like horses’ hooves galloping. A healer woman came to our tent once, pressed her head to my belly, listened, drummed her fingers on a stone to beat out the sound of my child’s heart. ‘It is strong, your child,’ she told us. ‘Listen. It sounds like your army racing into battle, My Lady Queen, My Lord King.’ But that child died inside me, unformed, a little smear of dark blood. It was not strong. We were camped in Cen Elora, then, when my last child died. The great pine forests that grow on the shore of the Closed Sea. The floor