Chapter 1 - Saliah Eater of Sins
Saliah inhaled the sweet smell of chaos. There was nothing else like it. A city aflame, the sands around her soaked in the blood, sweat, fear, and desperation of its vanquished defenders. It was a smell that caressed her body more pleasingly than her silk robes. It wormed its way from her petite nose down along a sharp jaw, thin, neck, and warmed her breasts and flat stomach as it found its home and set her aflame.
It was one of the few smells strong enough to drown out the hundred thousand horses of her army. Though the beasts were a necessary part of war, Saliah hated them still.
"Empress," Kubla dipped his knee into the sand beside her, staining the silk of his pants in the same heady mixture of victory and defeat that slowly seeped into Saliah's sandals. The sandals were woven from the hair of a slave girl. It was exquisite hair. Or it had been. It was almost a shame to ruin them so quickly, but consumption was the purpose of beauty. What had taken the woman years to grow and hundreds of hours to care for, was ruined in hours by Saliah's touch.
"Well?" Saliah asked, knowing the answer. Waggons had been weaving out of the remnants of the city for days now. They wobbled with plunder stacked as high as their horses could pull. Or they stunk of defeat from slaves jammed elbow to neck in iron cages. Not one party had sped from the city, eager for her praise.
"The jewels still elude us. I fear they are lost in the fires," the memory of Saliah's anger colored his voice. Kubla was a patient, and clever, man. He knew he was the favorite son of her husband. He knew that the empire would be his in time. He even knew that Saliah had no interest in stopping him from his inheritance. But her wrath had swept up countries in flame, and his petty life was nothing to her if he displeased her. His mind was as easy for her to read as the setting sun in the sky. Yet even now his eyes struggled to keep their place, tempted, always tempted, to let his desires open to her.
She was so near the end of her time with Temüjin, yet how would she ever find another man like her Khan? Kubla was as formidable a son as any father could ask for, but Temüjin was a stallion to Kubla's ox. "If they had tasted fire, we would know," she said.
Kubla nodded at that, he had long ago stopped asking questions when she gave those kinds of answers. "Then I will order the sorting stopped, the city searched again. I'll have every carriage of plunder unpacked and searched, then have the men search each other. I'll remind them that the Stones are for the Khan himself."
Kubla's problem was rigidity. He could never think of the creative way to accomplish a task when the diligent one was available. Great men were great because they wove flexibility, creativity, and luck. Her eyes never left the flames of the city. A million people had lived there once, an accomplishment for humanity that would shine out for centuries, and she had ended it on a rumor. Pity that the rumor seemed to be no more than that.
"No. The men are not at fault, and the sorting is too hot in their mouths."
Fire flashed in her eyes, the blaze that had been consuming the city's courts, and temples, and government offices all afternoon leapt into an inferno as it found the wooden tenements that had once housed a million souls. The slaves could watch their homes burn through the night, see that they had no city to go back to. Ghouls would grow fat on the banquet of despair she had set out for them.
Saliah turned. A thousand horsemen of her honor guard parted without a word to make a path for her. Flanking elements of a hundred heavy horse each, galloped ahead to reposition themselves for her entrance into the camp. Her Khan did fret about her safety. Twenty picked men, each one a warrior of acclaim, dismounted and formed a circle around her, keeping pace with her, yet none daring to move within a dozen paces of her. She could feel their eyes on her when they thought she wasn't looking. She could smell their conflict between duty, lust, and the knowledge of what would happen if they so much as touched her. Twenty men, warriors of acclaim, and not one had ever been bold enough to take his chance.
If one had the brave soul could find himself with more than he dreamed. Her time with Temüjin was so near its end, a mere warrior would be no replacement, but she would be so flush with victory a few months of easy feeding would make for a tempting dessert. Yet none were bold enough.
She was almost under her pergola before she could hear the musicians beside it. The laughter, and shouts, and angry debates of ten thousand men drowned out flutes and trumpeters. Her army's camp was order. Kubla's doing. A thousand felt tents for the men, mountains of feed and fodder for their horses, a dozen pens that each would have swallowed the colosseum, all in perfect uniform lines. Cookfires ringed the periphery, every man at supper also a lookout.
The Sorting though was her own delicious chaos. The boring part was already over. Of the ten thousand women captured from the city, four thousand had already had lead bracelets hammered about their left wrists. They'd been driven into a communal pen the size of an Olympic field. They were the old, the ugly, the damaged. They would be treated like any other plunder and those that survived the trip to a slave market would be sold off even more cheaply than the men.
Chaff removed, the army's real meal was beginning. Clothes were being torn off, breasts fondled by soot-stained hands, screams and cries and sobbing of women competed with the laughter and debates of men over questions of what made for a copper ass or a silver ass, or the state of a slave's teeth, or the softness of her skin. The Golden women rose quickly, like cream, from the chaos. Some were obvious at a glance. Others would be argued about.
There could be only a hundred Golden women, that was the law. The Khan's personal take, the best hundred from ten thousand, true beauties all.
Saliah let herself sink into a bed of cushions set up under her pergola and sipped at a cup of wine, to never be seen eating or drinking would cause far too many rumors.
There was, as usual, more than one fight among the men. Their personal tastes made for prickly egos, and criticism of a woman was often taken as an insult to the man who liked her. The sun dropped in the sky as quickly as the wine in a hundred barrels. Another hundred barrels were opened as the moon began to rise, and by the time the moon reached its apex it's light shone down onto the bare wood of empty barrel bottoms.
There were too many women to pay attention to all of them. Trying to would only reduce them to a forest, when each was a leaf worthy of its own examination.
