Divine Torment Read online

  Releasing the nipples at last, my hands continue their exploration, finding first the sensitive skin at the top of the breastbone that loves to be tickled, then the column of my throat. My pulse is thick and strong. I trace a web of sensation over my features, trying to picture what I might look like, if there were any to see me, and any light to see by. Chin, lips, nose, cheeks, eyelids, forehead. My lashes brush stiffly at my fingers, and a wet tongue awaits behind my lips to ensnare them as they pass. I can feel the breath fluttering in my chest and out of my nose. If I blow steadily I can create a cool breeze that stirs my breasts still further with prickles of gooseflesh.

  I draw my fingers through my hair, massaging my scalp right down to the nape of my neck. My hair is long. It lies softly on my shoulders and strokes my spine. My palms glide across the rounded muscles of my shoulders, back down over my breasts – torturing my hard nipples on the way with the brevity of their caress – and back to my belly. I find the tiny mouth of my navel in the centre of my belly. Below it is a padded mound of flesh over the pubic bone, the coarse silky hairs there sticking out in tufts and swirls. I touch that mound. Surely the sun is not in my belly at all; it burns between my closed legs.

  For a moment I force my hands away from my groin, back over my hips to knead and caress the cool curves of my buttocks. My arse is solid and muscular, and it likes the heavy grasp of demanding palms and fingers. The cleft between the cheeks is a crevasse that invites invasion. But my hands are drawn back, irresistibly, to the tight crease at the top of my thighs, to the lips pressed so firmly together. I cannot delve within while my legs are closed, ankle against ankle, so I am forced simply to press and stroke, tugging sometimes at the short hairs, tickling their wiry locks.

  Quickly, the sensation becomes unbearable. I wriggle my hips, but it is not enough. I have to part my thighs, taking a single step to the right, and with that movement completed I feel rock beneath my bare foot. Now my fingers can pour down into the cleft beneath, finding plump, swollen lips, a humidity and a heat among the coarse vegetation of my hair. I think of jungles, and my fingers prowl like tigers through the forest. I brace one hand on my thigh, crouching slightly to part my limbs. My legs are strong and my knees flex easily, taking the strain. I rise and fall, letting my hand slide further into the secret valley. Where the softness of my labia end, I find smooth tight skin leading to the muscular hole of my arse. That little mouth tightens and pouts at my touch. Stroking it is pleasurable, but not to be compared with the sensations awoken by the pressure of my palm on my turgid lips. I return to them, and find a trace of moisture. I smell the musk of my sex. There is a well there, hidden deep within the valley.

  Impatience overwhelms me at last; I have to spread my thighs further and devote my concentration to the task of my fingers, and this is impossible standing. I shuffle my feet, feeling wet sand shift between my toes, then I sink to my knees, thighs splayed. My shins rest among grasses, and some reaches up to tickle the underneath of my buttocks and my sensitive perineum. The tendons of my groin are rope-tight. Little sparks of light fill my mind with every flutter of my fingers, and these stars linger until they fill the sky. Faintly now I can see my own body, the jut of my breasts and the curves of my braced thighs. But I am not interested in looking out. My soul is concentrated in my fingertips, where they are probing for moisture and spreading the plump, wet petals of my sex. I find layers within layers; a complex flower of flesh. Within them is nested the void at the heart of the mystery; my hole, my vagina, my cunt. It is full of liquid as slippery as the finest oil, and with this lubrication I enter and explore, finding rings of muscle that grip my digits tightly, the curved grip of a canal that pulses and sucks at me. I am astonished to find that I not only have lips down there, a second mouth, but a throat, too, one that longs to swallow my straining fingers. I push deeper, and the light opens in my head, the white clear light of a full moon. I can see my other hand spread on my thigh, now. I can see the stiff points of my nipples.

  But the heel of my hand, pressed against my pubic mound, shudders a drumbeat that echoes up my spine. Enchanted by my cunt as I am, I recognise a stronger demand from that place and I have to respond. I withdraw from the liquid well and ease that moisture up the folds of flesh until I find it; the spider in the rose; the pearl in the oyster. I begin to rub my clitoris and the light grows, and with it the heat. I can feel the sun boil in my groin. It is filling my sex and the first rays of its brilliant light are touching the horizon. I spread myself wide for that sunrise. I am radiant with power.

  Everything rests on me as pearls are strung on a thread. I am the fragrance of the earth. I am the taste in water. I am the heat in fire and the sound in space. I am the light of the sun and moon and the life of all that lives.

  My hand pumps, my muscles lock. I feel the sun burst from my body in a storm of light that tears me into a million motes of incandescent dust. I am shattered irrevocably. I have become everything, and nothing. I have come.

  Well after nightfall the Eighth Host of the Imperial Irolian Army entered the city of Mulhanabin, General Veraine riding at its head. They entered by torchlight, through the only gate to the city. The men were tired and ill at ease, their legs caked with the mineral crust that coated the miles of ground they had covered, but they marched in tight formation, their steps precise. Veraine was proud of them. He was proud of their grim faces on heads held high, and of their disciplined silence, and of the ordered rattle of their hobnailed sandals on the stone underfoot as he raised his hand and ordered them to halt in the square just within the gate.

  The people of Mulhanabin were not silent. They crowded every alleyway and every window of the buildings that walled the square, their dark faces shining in the torchlight, and while they stared they talked in a continuous murmur, nervous as the cackle of hens.

  Veraine swivelled around in the saddle, searching the shadows for the bright yellow robes of a Yamani priest, or for signs of trouble. He was wearing full armour and the bronze helmet restricted his vision.

  ‘Good place for an ambush, sir,’ muttered Loy in an undertone. ‘A real bottleneck, this.’

  Veraine nodded. All the streets that led from the square were narrow and all seemed to lead upwards. They had entered the city at the lowest point, right at the base of the cliff. The rest of Mulhanabin towered above and before them, wall after wall and window above window, all the way to the top of the hill, steep as a cresting wave. Even the stars overhead were invisible past the glare from the torches. It felt very claustrophobic.

  ‘Tell the men to take up positions around this square, Commander,’ Veraine ordered. ‘They may stand at ease but they are not to break formation. Where’s that herald?’

  The outrider sent previously to the city steered his horse through the lines of soldiers and saluted.

  ‘You, lead the way to the Temple,’ said Veraine. ‘Commander, Rumayn, Arioc; you come with me. Sron, you are to remain in charge down here. Commander, I want twelve men on foot to accompany us. The trumpeters are to stay with Sron and signal in case of trouble.’

  Slowly the small party of mounted men and their retinue made their way up the heights of the city. Slowly, because the road wound back and forth across the face of the cliff, sometimes disappearing into tunnels behind the houses that clustered and teetered over the drop, and because the outrider was picking his way carefully, hesitating at each junction. There was no one wider route, rather a maze of passages that could lead anywhere. However, Veraine quickly noticed that it was the path with the most worn and eroded footing that they seemed to follow every time.

  ‘You were right about the chariot,’ he told Rumayn as his horse slithered yet again on the steep and concave pathway. ‘This city is a death trap.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ Rumayn said with enthusiasm. ‘Have you noticed how few of the buildings actually have courses of stones in the walls? They’ve just been carved out of the rock itself, from the cliff face. I’ve never seen anything like this! Gene
ral,’ he remembered at last.

  They reached a point where the jumble of houses washed up against the bank of a huge wall, and the road plunged beneath a wedge-shaped tower through a tunnel severed horse-lengths deep before emerging in an area where the gradient seemed less steep, the buildings larger and further apart. Clearly they were at the brow of the hill now, or close to it.

  ‘Ah,’ said Rumayn, twisting round to look back at the gateway with its looming gopuram tower. The soldiers marching at their heels were audibly panting with the strain of the climb. ‘I think we’ve left the secular part of the city. This is the temple Citadel, the sacred area. That below is where the people live; the ones who aren’t priests.’

  ‘What do they live on?’ Veraine asked with feeling. ‘There wasn’t a cultivatable furlong of soil out there on that plain.’

  ‘Pilgrims, mostly, I think, General,’ Rumayn said. ‘Many many thousands of them every year, all wanting food and drink and accommodation.’ He waved his hand at a large building close by, pierced with uncountable tiny windows. ‘Look, that’s a pilgrim hostel, I should think.’

  Veraine reined in his horse briefly. ‘It’ll make an admirable barracks for the men then,’ he said. ‘Commander Loy, when we have made our introductions you can billet them up here. And keep them under a tight rein. I want you to make it very plain to the men that we’re here to save this place, not to sack it. I don’t want any trouble with the inhabitants. Misbehaviour will be severely punished.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They moved up the broad street that sloped in front of them. The shadows around them were alive with movement and the sound of cymbals clashing. Scented smoke wafted from doorways along with the drone of chanting voices. Rumayn stared round him with the fascination of a hound on the hunt, remarking on each new feature. The buildings here were not modest domestic dwellings but squat towers, sloping as they rose in a pyramidal shape that echoed the hillside they had already climbed, to barrel-shaped roofs from which long pennons hung, hissing in the breeze. Every wall and sill was decorated in this part of the city, crowded with the statues of myriad gods and heroes that none of the Irolians could hope to identify. Here the polished sandstone was plastered and stuccoed over and every sculpture was painted in the most garish of colours. Monsters and demons, twenty-headed and bright blue or red, leered from niches all about them, while divine lovers clung to the columns, entwined in passionate embraces; all the soldiers stared furtively at these as they passed. They circled a huge sunken tank of water, glittering with the light of a thousand tiny lamps that floated in parchment boats on the surface. It was like entering a dream. Shadowy forms, eyes glinting in the light of their votive lamps, hovered on every side. Veraine, used to the simple lines of Irolian architecture and the uncluttered world of the soldier, found himself recoiling inwardly from the glitter and the colour and the visual confusion. He had deliberately to remind himself that this alien place did not represent menace; after all, the Yamani people had been subjugated for decades.

  Passing through this glinting, visionary place, watched at every pace but never accosted, they reached the highest point of Mulhanabin; a great broad building whose multi-towered roof rose in ranks like the peaks of a distant mountain range up to the tallest central tower. Above that was only the field of the stars. A wide stairway ascended to the door of this building and down these steps, at last, a priest hurried towards them, his yellow silk robes billowing against his portly frame. The priest lowered himself to flagstones before the horses’ hooves and pressed his forehead to the stone.

  ‘General Veraine, scion of the Eternal Empire, has entered Mulhanabin,’ said the herald sternly, in badly accented Yamani that made Rumayn wince. ‘Your high priest is commanded to receive him at once.’

  ‘Of course the Rasa awaits with pleasure the arrival of the Irolian General,’ the priest said from his crouch. ‘Let the temple guests follow me and enter the halls of Malia.’

  They dismounted and Veraine threw his reins to Arioc. ‘Wait here until we return,’ he said. Arioc, a slim and strikingly handsome youth, was a mystery to Veraine. The Eighth Host was a small army of seasoned soldiers, conspicuous for the lack of nobility posing around as officers. Yet Arioc, the eldest son of a family so refined that there were probably rubies in his veins rather than blood, had requested a transfer to this army as Veraine’s chariot-driver. Bearing in mind the young man’s lineage, Veraine felt it safer not to demur. He had been as surprised as he was pleased to find that Arioc was a skilful driver and a conscientious horseman.

  ‘And you,’ he added to the herald.

  They let the priest lead them into the dark interior of the temple, along several corridors and eventually to a door. ‘Please enter. The Rasa will meet you,’ he said with another bow.

  Veraine strode through the door, followed closely by the foot soldiers who fanned out at either side in a protective guard. Then he halted and stared about him. It was a large room with painted walls, made larger by its comparative emptiness. There were thick carpets on the floor, but the only furnishing was a low platform around the walls covered with more rugs and fat cushions. Lamps burning clarified butter shed a low light.

  ‘Well, he’s certainly not here to greet us,’ Veraine snapped. ‘What in hell does he think he’s doing?’

  ‘No, General, please,’ said Rumayn hurriedly. ‘It doesn’t carry the significance among the Yamani that it does with us. Please be patient. I’m sure the Rasa will be here shortly.’

  Veraine grunted, but accepted this. ‘Wait outside the door,’ he told the foot soldiers. ‘Let me know when the priest shows up.’ He walked restlessly around the room, then to the tall window. It was made of stone intricately carved into filigree, and he stared out through the petrified lacework into the void beyond. This room apparently overlooked the desert, and he could see nothing but darkness. The cool night wind fluttered on his face. He stood brooding, trying to curb his impatience and spinning through his head over and over again, as he always did, the options that lay before him, the probabilities, the likely outcomes.

  Rumayn’s little pleased noise of interest recalled him from his reverie. He turned, to find the adviser examining the wall paintings.

  ‘Amusing?’ he asked.

  ‘Depictions of the goddess Malia, General.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Loy, facing another wall. Veraine took the helmet with the horsehair plume off his head and crossed the room to look over his shoulder.

  The paint on the plastered walls was faded and peeling in places, but the scenes were still vivid. The figures were slightly larger than life-size and Malia was, like all Yamani goddesses, wasp-waisted with opulent breasts and snug hips. There was no denying that Yamani artists knew how to depict women; breasts like ripe fruit, waists as pliant as willows; the curves on their goddesses would make any man burn. And Malia stood in this particular scene with her knees spread, straddling the prone man on the ground beneath her, so that the uncompromising slash of her sex gaped at the viewers. But her skin was the grey-blue of a corpse, her eyes bulged from her face and her long hair writhed about her head like a nest of snakes. And from the slit abdomen of the man at her feet she was hauling the ropy green loops of his entrails, stuffing them into her slavering mouth.

  Veraine felt a coldness run up between his shoulders. ‘Can I assume she’s not a benevolent deity?’ he said dryly.

  ‘Hail Malia, mother of misfortune,’ Rumayn replied, reading slowly from the border of script painted above the pictures, running right around the room. Yamani writing was so florid that Veraine found it difficult to identify from abstract decoration, but Rumayn seemed able to pick it out. ‘Thou who gives birth to the earthquake. Thou who sends forth the famine. Thou who brings the plague at Thy heel. In Thy shadow lie a thousand curses. In Thy hearing sound the lamentations of the world. Thy breath is sickness; Thy footstep is the withering of the harvest; Thy wrath is doom. The burning-grounds of the innocent send forth a sweet savour in Thy nostr
ils. Bitter are Thy kisses. Unbearable are Thy caresses. Oh Thou who dances in the wastelands and in the marshes, Thou who dries up the womb, Thou who pulls the empty teat from the hungry mouth; we bow before Thee.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Some bitch,’ commented Loy.

  ‘She’s one of the great earth goddesses,’ Rumayn answered. ‘The killing earth. The soil that refuses to yield harvest. She’s part of the great triad of goddesses. Gelewi, the fertile earth, has her temple at Jalatabin in the south. Vahendra, the underpinning rock, is worshipped on the mountain of Bebi.’

  ‘We could have been sent to Jalatabin,’ Loy sighed.

  Veraine shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Commander. It’s out of bounds to the army.’ He started to circumnavigate the room, examining each picture just long enough to understand its contents.

  ‘I wasn’t complaining, sir,’ Loy said dutifully.

  ‘Understood, Commander.’ Veraine noted Malia in a rainbow of colours and with varying numbers of arms, but always performing some revolting act; she danced amid funeral pyres, she squatted among the contents of ossuaries. She fell ravening upon cities with swords and firebrands, and she crouched filthy and emaciated beneath the laden table, reaching up to snatch the food. She cradled children in arms that were pocked with weeping sores. One particularly vivid tableau depicted her straddling the hips of a decapitated man, accepting the thrusts of his member even as she gulped at the jets of blood gushing from his neck.

  ‘What do they want to worship a goddess like that for?’ Veraine asked with distaste. The Irolian people, with their eternal confidence in their destiny, had a pantheon composed purely of benevolent deities.

  ‘I should imagine, General, in the hope that she leaves them well alone,’ Rumayn said.

  ‘Well, I find I would like to leave this room alone. I think we’ve been kept here long enough waiting for the Rasa. Do you disagree, Rumayn?’