The House of Sacrifice. Anna Smith Spark

fields, people dying and being born, people thinking feeling dreaming as I dream. Children, he thought, live there. And it is absurd that they are real and exist there. I cannot imagine these places these people. I march my army on. We kill them. All across Irlast my dead lie scattered, mounds of them, my soldiers, dead! Their bones lie on the dark earth for the crows and the dogs, all out of love for me. They march beneath my banners to die for me in places they do not believe are real places, killed by men they cannot imagine are real and live. Ask them why and they will give a thousand excuses. And yet they are ordinary men.

       ‘I need to earn coin, I need to feed my family, my children will starve unless I earn a wage somehow.’

       ‘I’ve got responsibilities to the rest of them in the squad. We’re a team. I can’t let them down.’

       ‘I swore an oath to fight for my king. I am a man of honour. I cannot break my oath.’

       ‘I didn’t want to do it. But I was ordered to. If we all stopped doing anything we didn’t completely agree with …’

      None of us know, in our hearts, why we do these things. Because we can. Because we do. They really think I don’t know they’re all waiting to betray me?

      Two more days of victory feasting. Outside in the city, the Army of Amrath swarmed over the ruins, killing everything they found. Marith took Osen and Alleen Durith with him to visit the temple of the god spirit of Arunmen. See the house of the enemy that had defied him. He had visited the temple after he had been crowned here, and the presence of the god spirit had been welcoming to him as a king and an equal. So now he must come again as victor and conqueror. Killer of the god. Have a smug but entirely justified gloat. Twice, you beat me off, but in the end I was the stronger. You promised to defend your city, and you failed, like all the weak things of life. The black stone that was the god’s physical form had shattered, they said, at the moment his blow had struck.

      Also, the temple was the architectural highlight of the city, and thus of all Calchas. A very beautiful building. Huge and elegant. Loaded with beauty in gold and gemstones. Famed for its treasurers in jewels and silk. As one might expect. He was looking forward to seeing it again.

      Soldiers were pouring over snow-covered rubble. Digging up lumps of melted smoke-blackened gold. A group of them were having a fight.

      ‘What … what happened?’

      Alleen said, ‘The dragons …’

      ‘… sat on it?’

      ‘They took against it, certainly.’

      Osen said, ‘I think we might have managed to get some of the best things out of the remains. I can have the rest tracked down, if you like. The temple vessels and things.’

      ‘No. It’s fine. The soldiers can keep it. But the paintings on the walls … it’s a shame, I liked them.’ There had been a picture of a woman done in jewels above the west window, her face was quite wrong but her golden hair, the way she held her arms – reminded him—

      ‘The dragons destroyed it. Good.’

      Osen scuffed at the snow. A lump of plaster. A suggestion of yellow paint. Not his mother. She hadn’t been his mother. The woman who killed his mother. She did. Remember. She did. Killed his mother and replaced his mother as queen and tried to put her own son in his place as king. And so he’d killed her and hung her body from the walls of Malth Elelane. Her and her son beside her.

      ‘Please, Marith,’ she’d begged him.

      He went next to the place where they kept the wounded. Osen and Alleen did not come. A long walk. As was only correct and proper by every rule of warfare, the wounded were housed far off from anything, in tents far from the army’s camp. A presence to it that Marith could feel pressing down on him. When he reached the place he was clammy with cold sweat.

      Not so many wounded. Two days after the battle, most of them lay sleeping in the black earth with the dust between their teeth. They had marched through the Wastes and the Empty Peaks, crossed the Sea of Grief, tramped up and down Irlast from shore to shore. Desperate to share in his glory, reaching out for a tiny crust of what the Ansikanderakesis Amrakane had to offer. Four long years they had marched with him, they were the Army of Amrath and they would march and follow and pace out their lives following him. I don’t even know where I’m going. I could close my eyes, stab my knife at random into the map. And they would follow. And they lie in the black earth dead and forgotten. And they lie here in the sickhouse, rotting.

      Wounds like eyes. Wounds like open mouths. He could not look and he could not look.

      The flesh grew over them, wounds healing puckered and distorted. Excrescences of blood and skin. Black traces embroidering their bodies. Arms and legs pus-swollen.Their mouths moved with scabs growing over them. Mould covering their faces, in their bones, their teeth, they spat and choked and swallowed it. Mould, eating them. Hard cold as marble. Soft and damp as leaves. Rippling dry as driftwood. He heard them breathing. Saw them breathing. No face, no hands, no eyes, no mouth, no ears. See hear feel taste touch red. Where they moved, they left black trails of their flesh behind them. Shapes and words. Their living bodies seeping away into liquid. They moved and jerked, some of them. Spoke. Knew. Wounds that had once been human faces turned groping towards him. Bodies swollen up vast with fluids, bodies shrivelled down, lumps of flesh men without arms or legs. Burned men. And at those he almost could not look. Yearning reaching towards him.

      The worst, he thought afterwards, were those who did not seem so badly wounded. Like fruit rotted inside with maggots. They looked even strong, some of them.

      ‘The king, the king,’ the wounded whispered. Their voices thick and dry with pain. An old woman with no teeth in her mouth limped between them, giving them water, pressing a wet cloth to their cold, sweating faces, smoothing her fingers through their matted hair, running her hands over the pus of their wounds.

      ‘Hush now, deary, my boy, my boy, hush, hush, you sleep, you rest, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, deary, my boy.’

      ‘Water … water …’ A man clutched at Marith’s arm, not knowing him. ‘Water …’ His stomach was a mass of bandages, fat with bandages, spreading blood like cracks on ice. A deep wound to the gut will kill you, sooner or later, no matter what you do. Every soldier knows that. Yes. ‘Water … Mother! Mother!’ Verdigrised hand digging into him.

      ‘Hush, hush, deary, my boy.’ The nurse limped over wetted its black lips, pressed her wet cloth onto its white face. ‘Hush, deary, it’s well, you’ll soon be well.’

      At the far end of the tent the dead were piled. They should be taken away for burial each day. They had not been taken away. Some of the bodies must have been there since the first day of the siege. Beetles had got in there, and flies. A seething column of ants ripped the dead wounds open. Mould grew over black meat.

      ‘Be well,’ Marith whispered to his men. ‘Be well. You who died for me.’ He should know their names. He used to know all his soldiers’ names. After his victory over King Selerie he had visited all the wounded, thanked each of them by name.

      He thought: but I had a smaller army then. That’s unfair.

      He thought: half of them died within hours. Whether I knew their names or not. I stopped bothering.

      Thalia arrived the next evening. Sieges bored her now; she had decided to stay in Tereen in comfort until it was done. Her party swept into the palace courtyard, red banners crusted with snow. She rode a white horse, saddled and plumed in scarlet; she was wrapped in thick white furs showing only her eyes and her gloved hands. She slid down from the saddle into Marith’s arms.

      ‘Thalia!’

      There were snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. Marith kissed them away. Her eyes shone. The torchlight showed his reflection in her eyes smiling back at him. Dancing in the flickering light. She pushed back her hood, and the snow began to gather on her hair.

      ‘Thalia! I didn’t think