Toll the Hounds

‘You smell of sex.’

‘Yes, I imagine so.’

‘Do not touch me. I am poison.’

‘I-I have no desire to… touch you, High Priestess. I have walked this village-the conditions are deplorable. The Son of Darkness, I well know, will not long abide such poverty.’

She squinted up at him. ‘You are the Benighted’s friend. The only Tiste Andii for whom humans are not beneath notice.’

‘Is this what you believe of us, then? That is… unfortunate.’

‘I am ill. Please go away, sir.’

‘My name is Spinnock Durav. I might have told you that when last we met-I do not recall and clearly neither do you. You… challenged me, High Priestess.’

‘No, I rejected you, Spinnock Durav.’

There might have been something like wry amusement in his tone as he replied, ‘Perhaps the two are one and the same.’

She snorted. ‘Oh, no, a perennial optimist.’

He reached down suddenly and his warm palm pressed against her forehead. She jerked back. Straightening, he said, ‘You are fevered.’

‘Just go.’

‘I will, but I intend to take you with me-’

‘And what of everyone else so afflicted in this camp? Will you carry them all out? Or just me, just the one upon whom you takc pity? Unless it is not pity that drives you.’

‘I will have healers attend the camp-’

‘Do that, yes. I can wait with the others.’

‘Salind-’

‘That’s not my name.’

‘It isn’t? But I was-’

‘I simply chose it. I had no name. Not as a child, not until just a few months ago. I had no name at all, Spinnock Durav. Do you know why I haven’t been raped yet? Most of the other women have. Most of the children, too. But not me. Am I so ugly? No, not in the flesh-even I know that. It’s because I was a Child of the Dead Seed do you know the meaning of that, Tiste Andii? My mother crawled half-mad on a battlefield, reaching beneath the jerkins of dead soldiers until she found a member solid and hard. Then she took it into herself and, if she were blessed, it would spill into her. A dead man’s seed. I had plenty of brothers and sisters, a family of aunts and a mother who in the end rotted to some terrible disease that ate her flesh-her brain was long gone by then. I have not been raped, because I am untouchable.’

He stared down at her, evidently shocked, horrified into dumb silence.

She coughed, wishing she did not get sick so often-but it had always been this way. ‘You can go now, Spinnock Durav.’

‘This place festers.’ And he moved forward to pick her up.

She recoiled. ‘You don’t understand! I’m sick because he’s sick!’

He halted and she finally could make out his eyes, forest green and tilted at the comers, and far too much compassion gleamed in that regard. ‘The Redeemer? Yes, I imagine he is. Come,’ and he took her up, effortlessly, and she should have struggled-should have been free to choose-but she was too weak. Pushing him away with her hands was a gesture, a desire, transformed into clutching help-lessly at his cloak. Like a child.

A child.

‘When the rains stop,’ he murmured, his breath no doubt warm but scalding against her fevered cheek, ‘we shall rebuild. Make all this new. Dry, warm.’

‘Do not rape me.’

‘No more talk of rape. Fever will awaken many terrors. Rest now.’

I will not judge. Not even this life of mine. I will not-there is weakness in the world. Of all sorts. All sorts …

Stepping outside with the now unconscious woman in his arms, Spinnock Durav looked round. Figures on all sides, both hooded and bareheaded in the rain, water streaming down.

‘She is sick,’ he said to them. ‘She needs healing.’

No one spoke in reply.

He hesitated, then said, ‘The Son of Darkness will be informed of your… difficulties.’

They begun turning away, melting into the grey sheets. In moments Spinnock found himself alone.

He set out for the city.

The Son of Darkness will be informed. ,, but he knows already, doesn’t he? He knows, but leaves it all to… to whom? Me? Seerdomin? The Redeemer him-selfl

‘Give my regards to the priestess.’

Her, then, this frail thing in my arms. I will attend to her, because within her lies the answer.

Gods, the answer to what?

Boots uncertain in the slime and mud, he made his careful way back. Night awaited.

And, rising up from the depths of his memories, the fragment of some old poem, ‘The moon does not rain, but it weeps.’ A fragment, yes, it must be that. Alas, he could not recall the rest and so he would have to settle with the phrase-although it truth it was anything but settling.