This was partly born out of an old idea that's been hovering waiting for a voice, and partly sparked by one of Sarah's pieces - wonderful thing, creative partnership, innit?
The Temple ( 985 words)
The temple stood in the desert; a small, plain building, baking in the sun. An acolyte, tall and shaven-headed, bowed Javed in to coolness and soft light. Javed left his guard in the outer chamber, and walked to the altar past the wooden screens carved with processions and sacrifices. Though he always came here at the same hour, it seemed the light fell, every time, on a different carving. He paused, and frowned.
The priestess appeared. She was like a carving herself, cool, ascetic, smelling of some pleasantly astringent soap, her robes falling in simple folds.
“Look there,” Javed said. “That caddell, spirit of battle, urging the men forward.”
“My Lord?”
“She is wearing a mask. See?”
The priestess bent closer. “Why, I believe you are right, my Lord.”
“It is slipping. Look, she is weeping under it. That is no spirit to send men to war!”
“Perhaps that is why she wears a mask. So they will not see her tears.”
“Hmmm.”
The priestess often remained silent, unless he asked her a direct question. He found it restful. But today she broke with custom.
“What troubles my Lord?”
“The barbarians,” he said. “Trade is all very well, but they are a corrupting influence. I’m told their howling music is heard now even in our own villages, and their customs…” he looked at her calm pale face, so untouched and pure. “Well, I should not mention such things to you.”
“Many people come here to tell me their troubles, my Lord. I am not quite ignorant of the world.”
“Their women choose their own mates, and fight beside them in battle!”
He saw one of her eyebrows rise a little, but that was all. “Indeed?”
“Yet they none of them read. Not one. They despise it. Why, even our women are taught to read! No man wants an ignorant wife! How they ever run a household…but of course, they don’t have households; they live like wild dogs.”
The priestess said nothing; but she, like him, was looking at the caddell, with her frantic gestures and downturned, sobbing mouth. A young man lay broken at her feet. “She is like their women,” Javed said.
“Perhaps, my Lord, they lack the refinements of mind that an education can bring.”
“Perhaps…”
***
Biradex cracked his head guard across the jaw. She had been about to go into the temple ahead of him, checking for trouble. “Stay out here.”
She stepped back. “Lord,” she said, through swelling lips.
“No respect,” he growled to the acolyte. “Let ’em raisin in the sun for an hour.”
The priestess lowered her painted eyelids, the acolyte bowed. Biradex eyed him with disapproval. The man couldn’t have done much today but sweep the temple floor, yet his bald head was gleaming with sweat and his breath came short.
Biradex followed the priestess, eyeing with appreciation the ample hips dressed in not much but gold. He’d wait to be asked, though; he knew priestesses. Sink your dick there when it wasn’t wanted and you might not get it back.
Outside, the temple was plain as a skin tent; inside, it was rich night. Heavy carved screens across the windows kept out the sun. The air swirled with incense; the carvings flickered and danced in the torchlight.
Biradex flung the deer on the altar. The priestess sunk her hands in its guts, and her eyes rolled back in her head. “You are troubled, great Lord,” she said, her voice gutteral and somehow insinuating. Biradex felt a shudder up his spine, but squared up to the spirit that possessed her; it wasn’t in his nature to do otherwise.
“Yes, by the balls of Lodek, I’m troubled. We should have attacked as soon as we arrived in this land.”
“After that trek, with your warriors half-dead of thirst and gut-rot? A fine show you’d have made.”
Biradex growled. “Well, well, I admit, your advice then was good. But these soft city dwellers are sucking the life out of my people. First, it’s trade; fine goods and furbelows. Now…we have to invade, and soon.”
“And what has given you this panting eagerness to stick your head out for the axe?”
“You think I don’t have reason? Listen to this. Adrek, my own sister’s son, came to me asking for permission to go study in the city! My own blood, a scribe!”
The thing possessing the priestess growled. “And for this you will invade? I never took you for a fool, Biradex.”
Biradex snarled; he didn’t like being called a fool, even by a demon.
“A scribe?” the voice went on, “a spy! A gatherer of secrets! The scholars in this city know more than its battle leaders. You’d have the place in your hand in a month, without a fight.”
Biradex opened his mouth, and shut it again.
“Hmm.”
***
The acolyte brought another jug of water and poured it over the priestess, scrubbing the scented oil out of her hair.
“Gaaaah,” she said. “That’s good. No, I’ll do it, I can tell your back’s hurting.”
“We need lighter screens,” said the acolyte. “That was too damn close. Javed’s rearguard had barely got out of sight. One of these days they’re both going to be headed this way at the same time.”
“We managed in Travisten.”
“Only with the help of a handy rainstorm and thirty-three runaway mules.”
“We should have kept those mules,” the priestess said, stretching.
“If all it needed was stubbornness, we’ve got thirty-three mulesworth right here.”
An undignified tussle resulted, in which they both got very wet.
***
Two days later, the young man eager, his female guard glaring and suspicious, with one hand on her knife, the first two barbarian students entered the university.
A year after that, the temple stood abandoned; and in a distant town, two short-tempered twin queens, and one anxious warlord, began to hear rumours of a new shrine to their favourite gods…
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