“I could have done better! If you’d shut your stupid mouth—!”
“My mouth!” Suddenly it was quiet as I could ask. “You hear me, Tel. If she treats me like that again I’ll ram her dinner down her throat!”
“Stop!”
We could not have been struck dumber by a lightning strike. He towered over us, in the fat-lamp’s flutter looking ten feet tall.
“Tellurith?”
As ever, he was quiet. At his cruelest, tower manners never eluded Sarth. When we quarreled it had been by omission, in frigid malice. A glacier’s ice.
“Oh, sweet Work-mother . . .”
I could not go on. It had been exhaustion in his voice. Distress. When all I wanted was to throw off my good clothes and forget the day’s cloven dilemmas and the procession tomorrow would have waiting, and fall into bed.
But how are they to understand, if I never spell out what I think?
“Coming here, I thought about all this. And I made up my mind. We’re going to change things, and not just leaving Amberlight. Or settling here. We’ll bring men out of the towers, for good. We’ll have a—a different life.”
Silence. Fulminating, absorbing? Stubbornly resistant, in the dark?
“And this—now—may outrage the village, and upset the Ruand, but it’s the strategy I chose. I thought it out before we went. And I decided—for your sakes—” it was hard to keep my voice steady, “that I would begin as I mean to go on. No compromise. And no backing down.”
It was suddenly so quiet I could hear them breathe.
“There are other men here. If you want to renege—you can. But even for you—I can’t.”
Silence. Mother, I thought, and my soul ached. They don’t see it. And if they don’t . . .
“Tel . . .”
Alkhes’ voice. Husky. Suspiciously soft. Head down, guilty as a beaten dog. Not daring to grope for my hand.
I caught at it, pulling him round. Catching Sarth, as in turn I heard the breath that spoke clearer than words, deciphered through years’ experience. Equal shame. Equal guilt.
“Don’t blame yourselves. And don’t make any more of it. Can we just,” suddenly I was more than bone weary, “go to bed?”
* * *
Settling. Week 5.
Journal kept by Sarth
So much that Tellurith does I miss, or misunderstand. That supper. What she has already done, here in the House. Not just settling the women into new precedences, new trades, no longer shaper and power-worker, but surveyor, timber-cutter, carpenter. Stone-mason, builder, child-carer, cook.
But including men as well.
Perhaps it is that everyone who came was already disposed to, determined on change, but it still astounds me, that Charras trusted me to yoke and drive her bullocks today. That burly taciturn Quetho should pass on the adze when she took a break and just grunt, “Down that end there. Watch the knots.” It still amazes me, that muscles trained in the gymnasium prove effective for anything else.
And I have only just fathomed all those extra delays on the road, negotiating with Korite farmers at what I find, now, were holdings of Telluir House. Source of winter provisions, grain, hay. Timber. And young folk, free after harvest, trickling up for hire.
Paid from our folk’s loot in that chaos when the hill fell, shattering three armies along with Amberlight. Which spoils include, I learn, ten chests of Cataract silver: mercenaries’ pay.
But I understand too why from dawn to dark Tellurith has been out with us, men and women, hire and House-folk alike, using pick and cutter on a foundation; guiding timber over the sawpit; helping unload logs, adding the day-wages with Hanni. Not leading, not obvious, but unrelentingly there.
She is using Iskarda’s ways against them. I recall those sentences clipped in half, those eyes dropped in mid-glower. Traditionalists, to their back-teeth. Obdurate, therefore, against us: the men. Especially us. Alkhes and me. And as obdurate in their loyalty. They are Telluir vassals. It would break their honor, to flout her in person. To throw us out.
Trouble, therefore, has stayed minor. A broken wheel, slipped loads, a worker hurt. Except in our own bed.
The Mother knows, it is big enough. An old four-poster with corners thick as unshaped trees, it could sleep six uncrowded, and possibly it has. There are linen sheets, furs, a brazier, if not the permeating qherrique, that could leave you in shirt-sleeves at mid-winter. And trouble underneath.
For me, to swing an axe for firewood is exhilaration. To peel a turnip, to mind a child, is liberty. Tellurith remains a leader, if not in a House. But Alkhes was—is—a soldier. A general. Bred to that strange world where men rule. The first time Zariah asked him to stir a cook-pot—
By the Mother’s luck she had already turned away. I had time to set chopped onions aside and murmur, “Did you jar that arm?”
His eyes whipped round. Slitted, blazing black. I think he nearly spat. Words, if nothing else.
“I can do it, if it’s too bad.”
He gave me that trademark lightning glare and snatched the spoon in his left hand.
I chopped onions and tried for words to defuse the hush: Your arm is still splinted. You aren’t fit to use a kitchen knife, let alone an axe. Your own trades are lost. Not only is there nobody here to command, there is nobody to kill, and almost nothing to fight. To do this is not ignominy. It’s value, use, respect.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “Zuri will be looking for you.” He can patrol and consult with the troublecrew, if nothing else.
I tried a glance, and earned myself another glare. And then a furiously presented back.
I can bear it for myself. But if he looses that venom on Tellurith . . .
Give the Mother thanks, not yet. Sullen, sour, unkind between the sheets as a thundercloud, but nothing more. She must know, from the way she suffers it. He resents his limits, I expect. I know he resents me. And I think, somewhere he cannot yet look, he resents Tellurith.
Most of all, he resents sharing her.
Am I so different? How long is it since she would lie in my arms, curled in the big Tower window, and pour her heart out half a night? Shared trouble and decision, sweeter than union of the flesh. He and I have both known that. And can no longer be her one ear, her sole confidant.
And with minds’ sharing goes the body’s. Including sex.
* * *
Little chance of that while all of us were dead on our feet. But with half a moon gone, the plots and work-crews are settled, new houses planned, folk beginning to find their place. We took a break at the moon-turn, for hirecrew to visit home. And it left Tellurith with energy too.
So in bed last night, the house quiet, the moon’s great silver blossom in the narrow window, she turned over and began to caress Alkhes.
I gave fresh thanks for Tower discipline, and prepared to re-smother the snakes in my own flesh. We sleep now with Tellurith between us. But when I muttered about fuel for the morning and began to ease out my side, she rolled back and caught my hair.
“Wait, Sarth.”
I froze. He’ll kill me, I thought. At a stroke.
“I said I’d marry you both. I meant what I said.”
Any Tower boy knows before puberty that he may be bedded by more than one wife at once, and many of us, to say it again, have shared with other men. Not, evidently, Alkhes.
He