The Wings of Ashtaroth

Prologue: Children: Section VI: Samelqo

Samelqo: Qemassen: The City Streets

Night had fallen, and Qemassen's streets were so thick with revellers that Samelqo's acolytes may as well have carried him through a viscous porridge. Packed bodies—Massenqa, Anata, Ajwata, and even Eru—waved palm fronds and dyed feathers as Samelqo and his train of litters jostled downhill toward the temple district on the eastern slope of the city. Foreign beards beaded with the polychrome glass of Qemassen's artisans, foreign eyes lined with Massenqa kohl. It seemed even the substantial number of traders in Qemassen deigned to celebrate Molot's rites. Typical of such people that their protestations had turned out to be only talk. Foreign bellies, it turned out, ached as much as Massenqa ones.

Painted six-storied apartment complexes towered over the winding street, flat-roofed and rectangular. The complexes dominated the residential pockets all around the city, but only Qemassen's wealthiest lived so close to the palace on the Talefa hill, whence the remainder of the city fanned out like the skirts of a goddess. To the north and east lay Qemassen's harbour, its famed markets, and the lower quarter where Samelqo had spent the first years of his youth. There, the limestone of the upper city was replaced by mudbrick and rammed earth, and what family Samelqo had made for himself on the hill was replaced by the vestiges of his former household. Qemassen's steepest slope lay to the west, overshadowing government buildings and the city's vast cisterns, and to the south stood the grand gate that separated Qemassen proper from surrounding farmland, and the hilly landscape beyond its olive groves. It was for all of this—all of them—that Samelqo acted tonight, that Prince Aurelius's litter trailed Samelqo's in grim procession.

The night was almost cloudless, and a bright, yellow-white moon shone down upon the city of the Semassenqa. When he'd been younger, Samelqo had looked up into that night and seen the mother goddess Tanata's face on the moon's surface, the whispers of the gods in the winking of the stars. It had been a long time since he'd felt that wholeness, or found answers to his questions in the patterns and shapes above Qemassen. Had his goddess turned away from him? As an inquisitive young priest, he'd never planned to become so much Molot's man, but the way to the gods took so many detours, and it often happened that you turned out not to be who you once thought you were.

Which choice had finally decided Samelqo's path? When his parents had sold him to the temple as a child he'd had no choice at all, but as a young man he might not have fought so stridently to become heq-Ashqen of his temple. And once he'd become heq-Ashqen of his city, he might have fought harder to refuse King Isir the command that had assured Samelqo would entangle himself in the affairs of the Semassenqa.

But the choice that had led him here? No, that was something else entirely.

In Samelqo's mind's eye, the sands of southern Indas, where the once-great city of Tintellan formed a circular stronghold against the desert wilderness, surged in an imagined wind. The sands of Hazzan, god of the desert and child of Molot and Qalita.

He lifted his head high and proud, girding himself. Everything had its place, and Samelqo had earned his as much as any man. For good or ill, he had earned it.

As Samelqo peered past the curtains of his litter to the rabble crowding his acolytes' path, an Ajwata woman in a colourful, patterned headdress fell or was pushed against him, and Samelqo pulled himself back inside the safety of his transport with a jerk as her elbow bashed his face. He rubbed his nose gingerly. He did not much care for the asymmetry of a broken one. When he drew his hand from his face, the blue sleeve of his linen robe was bloodied.

At least he was nearly at Molot's temple and the day done. The meeting before the Semassenqa had left him rattled, though he'd anticipated far worse from the queen, whose violent moods were not unknown to him. As the years had passed, the shapeliness of her form was not the only thing to have left her. He had hoped she would understand, but that of course had been fanciful. Parents would do anything for their children, often to the detriment of all else they held dear. Moniqa was not the first. She would hardly be the last.