From the window of her room on Neela, Eilona gazed at the remains of the abandoned shoreline camp, half submerged in the mud that had rolled down from the Mountains of Ger.
‘What do you find so fascinating about the sight of that?’ Sinae Al’tor asked, unfolding a chair behind her. ‘We avoided a catastrophe.’
‘I sometimes see Mireea in it.’ Eilona turned to him as he opened the second chair. ‘Don’t you feel a bit sad, now that it is gone?’
‘Like you, I was happy to leave it, but unlike you right now, I am not interested in recasting it in my memory. Now, enough of that: we have my prize to drink.’ He reached down into the pack he had carried into the small house and began to pull out a kettle and a small brazier. ‘You have no idea how rare tea is,’ he said. ‘I have not been able to get it in the camp. If you hadn’t come to ask me for a kettle, I might not have even known you had any.’
‘It won’t do anything for your image,’ she teased. ‘You’re supposed to live on alcohol and vice.’
‘A cliché is only as good as the money it creates, my dear.’
She laughed and he struck a match, lighting the brazier. Eilona had gone in search of Sinae last night, nearly a week after they had moved on to Neela. The move from the shoreline had been orderly, and nothing but a few semi-permanent structures could be seen of the camp now. Most of the people had lodgings on the southern side of the city, away from the broken stone ramp that led to Wila, the empty island where her mother and the Mireean people had been imprisoned when they first came to Yeflam for refuge.
Eilona had been assigned a small house on the south-eastern curve of Neela, near her mother and her stepfather. There were enough houses that no one had to share, unless they wished, and though Eilona had felt decadent taking a whole house, she pushed aside the guilt by telling herself that there were still empty dwellings. Her new home had no furniture, nothing indeed, but for a small box of tea left in a piece of broken brickwork near where she had laid out her roll and blankets. The tin had been the colour of the brick, and when she had opened it, Eilona half expected coins, or letters of an affair, but the tea had been much more welcome. At least, until she realized that she had no kettle, no cups and no fire.
Sinae had solved that, however.
‘Mireea is probably gone, now,’ she said to him as the fire took hold in the brazier. Sinae had arrived with the chairs and brazier and his beautiful, blonde guard, but the latter had little interest in the tea. Instead, she wandered around Eilona’s house, silent as a ghost. ‘When you look at the skyline, the whole mountain range has collapsed, as if it was hollow. As if there never was a god in it.’
‘I hear enough about gods every night.’ He poured some of Eilona’s water into the kettle, the tea leaves following. ‘It’s bad business. I’ve been able to sleep in the midnight hours because people are having such divine thoughts.’
‘Do you?’
‘If they’ve stopped paying, yes.’ He set the kettle down and rose. ‘Your mother would prefer I keep them all night and listen, but they’re not saying anything of importance.’
No one was, anywhere, Eilona had learned.
She had little to do on Neela, now that her mother’s plans had been so turned around. She did not have any complaints in regard to that: she did not want anyone planning to kill her. But she had been left at a loose end, to a degree, and she had taken to going to her mother’s house and listening in on the meetings she held in the evening with Reila, Olcea and Sinae. Most of what they talked about came from the witch, who had been spying on the leaders of the other cities – or, to be more precise, Hien had been spying – to try and gauge their position in relation to Faje and the Faithful. Two had become converts to Se’Saera, but Olcea was clear that the Faithful could be found in all the cities, and the ‘refugee’ problem was widespread in all but the furthest cities, Toake and Enilr. She also believed that all the cities had given their ‘cursed’ over to the Faithful.
‘It makes me think of death,’ Sinae said, breaking into her thoughts. He stood beside her, his gaze on the new, strangely shaped mountain range. ‘What happens to a god when its body turns to dust?’
‘I can’t believe people come to you seeking pleasure.’
‘Prostitutes and philosophy. Empires are built on the back of both.’
Eilona smiled. ‘I don’t know what happens to a god,’ she said. ‘There are theories. Most of them based on the “cursed”, on the gods’ divinity seeping into the world, as if it was always part of that. But others have suggested that they return to their paradises, that they become one with it and maintain it for the rest of eternity with those who were faithful.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t particularly subscribe to that. It is a theory that has risen in the last century, as more and more is found out about the old gods. A lot that was thought lost in the Five Kingdoms has started to turn up on small islands, and in parts of the world where their rule did not spread. But the people who propose it seem almost to be trying to reach out to the old gods, to believe in what they once represented, to bring them back, in their own way. The work is half research, half wish-fulfilment, half wanting to go back to a simpler age.’
‘I would not have thought seventy-eight gods was a simpler age,’ Sinae said.
‘Controlled is probably a better description,’ she said.
He frowned and turned from the broken skyline. ‘What happened to the people who wanted to be free of the gods, back then?’
‘There weren’t many. There’s some evidence of people who didn’t want an afterlife, and didn’t want to be reborn, but not much. It was hard to escape the influence of the gods when they stood around you.’
‘So you could not be free?’
The tone of his voice caught Eilona’s attention. ‘Not really,’ she said, slowly, as the kettle on the brazier began to steam. ‘People who didn’t want anything to do with the gods were not largely accepted by others. They were driven out of villages, stripped of titles and wealth and, in some cases, stoned. There would be a lot more sympathy for them now, I suspect, but not then. When you think about it, it’s not terribly surprising. The gods stood around you, then. Ain, the God of Life, creator of the very planet we stand on, left statues through forests and deserts for people to make pilgrimages to. We have found some of those: they’re of men and women and children, but they’re not carved by any hand – they’re made. Even without the god to power them, they resonate, still. It was difficult to be anything but loyal in a world where the gods were so accessible.’
Sinae nodded, but if he had more to say, more that could give substance to Eilona’s concern, or push it away, he did not. Instead, his blonde guard silently entered the room, and he asked Eilona if she knew what flavour the tea was that she had found.