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.
He was losing it, Curl thought to herself as Bahn departed and the thump of his boots faded on the outside stairs. Curl had seen it before in other siege-shocked soldiers of the city, men ready to snap and run amok through the lives of those around them, tearing and snarling for a way out. They were always the roughest ones, she’d noticed, but Bahn in truth was not so bad on her, more fiercely passionate than anything else, as if he simply needed, in these brief hours with Curl, to forget everything about his present circumstances.
A suicide case, perhaps; hardly a berserker.
She hadn’t liked the fear in his voice though, when he had been talking about the guns lying silent. As if he was doomed; as if they were all doomed. She didn’t need to hear things like that; let him share those worries with his wife, whose name he kept crying out in the heat of the moment.
Curl rose and slipped her payment into her hidden pouch of coins in the pot of the jubba plant. The pouch held a handful of silvers and a little more in coppers. Not much for all the business she was doing. With the worsening shortage of food in the city leading to ever-higher prices, forcing Rosa to ask for larger contributions to their meals, she was finding it hard to maintain even that small sum from week to week.
Curl poured a jug of water into the clay washbasin. She stood naked on a cotton towel that she lay on the small portion of floor-space before the stand, and washed herself down