The Thorn Boy Read online

  He shook his head. ‘Darien, something has happened between us. Can’t you feel it?’

  I felt as if the sky had fractured. ‘What?’

  He looked at me. ‘I can’t explain...’ He kneeled before me and took my arms in his hands. ‘I want us to be friends. I need a friend. I am afraid. You are the only stable thing in my life now.’

  My whole body had become rigid. I wanted to pull away from him, sure he was playing with me, but wanting to believe he spoke without guile. ‘I will do whatever the king asks of me. Yes, we shall be friends.’

  He closed his eyes and shook his head, as if in pain. ‘No! Be my friend because you want to, not because your king has given an order.’

  I looked at him, a hopelessly enchanting vision of masculine beauty. ‘Why?’

  ‘We have happened to one another,’ he said, and with those words invoked all the confusion of the abyss into my staggering mind.

  I had not thought of my lover of the temple for weeks, but now the unsettling images came back to me in chilling, glorious clarity.

  The next few days are fragmented in my memory now. I spent so much time in Akaten’s company, Porfarryah began to complain. She asked me if I was sleeping with him, and I answered that I was not, which was true. Akaten made no overture towards me in that sense, and there was no way I would make such a move myself. At night, I dreamed of him, and sometimes the dreams were mildly erotic, but by the end of the week, I had managed to convince myself once more that I had not met Akaten in the temple.

  Twice in that week, I went to Alofel’s quarters at night. On the second occasion, he quizzed me in more detail about my friendship with the Khan’s boy. I confessed that we had now got to know one another, and that, yes, I had warmed to Akaten. This remark thoroughly aroused the king, who then subjected me to exquisite love-making. I could not complain about that, although it amused me to imagine that as we acted out our fantasies upon each other, we were both thinking of our Mewtish visitor.

  One night, I lay upon my bed, drowsing in the hot, perfumed air. All my windows were thrown open, and the cries of owls filled my room. Akaten and I had been out riding that afternoon, even though the weather was really too warm for the horses’ comfort. An armed guard had accompanied us, for Alofel still did not trust Akaten not to try and escape. I myself was unsure whether he’d take the opportunity if it arose. As we’d dismounted from our steaming mounts in the shadowed stable-yard, Akaten had stroked my hair. He had offered no explanation for the caress and had walked away from me before I could speak or respond. Afterwards, I considered that the gesture had been too pre-meditated. I suspected he knew all about my feelings for him and liked to pull my strings. He was never far from my thoughts.

  As I lay there, idly stroking myself, a knock came at the door. Hastily, I covered myself with a sheet. The hour was late. Who would come knocking at this time of the night? I suppose I knew even then who it was. ‘Come in,’ I said, and Akaten opened the door. I was unable to speak, although the question, ‘what are you doing here?’ churned round my mind.

  ‘Are you tired?’ he asked me, venturing into the moonlight that streamed through my window.

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘I want to walk in the garden, and as you are my official friend, I thought I’d call for you on the way.’

  ‘It is very late,’ I said.

  ‘And the night is beautiful. Come on. Don’t be tiresome. Why lie here awake when the moon calls us?’

  ‘Wait outside the door,’ I said. ‘I must dress.’

  He raised one eyebrow, but complied with my words.

  As we padded silently through the darkened halls of the palace, I wondered how Akaten had escaped his vigilant attendants. His position in the household was still tenuous. Technically, he was an enemy captive, who should not be allowed to wander around unsupervised.

  We roamed across the lawns, beneath the spreading branches of the trees. Peacocks drowsed on the grass, their folded tails trailing in the early dew. Akaten went to one of the trees and leaned back against it, gazing up through the sighing branches. So far, we had spoken little.

  ‘So, tell me, how did you escape?’ I asked him.

  He put his head on side to look at me. ‘Easily. I climbed the vines on the terrace wall up to the roof.’

  I could not help laughing. ‘A precarious climb! You were lucky you weren’t killed!’

  He smiled. ‘No, Darien, that wouldn’t have happened. Tonight, there is magic in the air.’

  My laugh turned into a sneer. ‘Is there?’

  He shook his head and looked at me. ‘You are so unimaginative.’

  ‘Hardly,’ I answered dryly. If only he knew!

  ‘You’re never anything but formal. It diminishes your attractions.’ He didn’t wait for me to respond to that, but began to walk around the tree, touching it with one hand. ‘It must be the way you’ve been trained, or brain-washed. It’s such a waste. I like to imagine you with tangled hair and dirt on your face. Then you would be more real.’

  Indignation hardened my heart. ‘I am very real, Akaten. More so than you can imagine.’

  ‘No, you are a dream.’

  I thought he seemed intoxicated as if he’d been drinking or smoking hemp. The conversation itself had taken on a dream-like quality. He seemed fragile and fey. Perhaps they had increased his dose of herbals again. Impulsively, I reached out and grabbed hold of his arm, stopped him circuiting the tree. He leaned his side against me, his head hanging forward. ‘What do you want of me?’ I hissed. ‘What is this game?’

  ‘The game of life,’ he answered. ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘Look at me!’ I said.

  He did so, blinking. I wanted to hit him, to kiss him.

  ‘Akaten, what are you doing?’

  He ran his fingers down both sides of my face. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to walk with you.’

  This was what I wanted. It had to be, and yet, my insecurities flood my mind. I should have taken him in my arms then, but a cruel spirit took hold of me. I desired him, yet in my confusion wanted to hurt him. My words were unforgivable. ‘Think of your dead Khan!’ I shook his arm. ‘Only a short while ago, you wanted to die for him. What’s this all about now? How can you be so fickle?’

  He pulled away from my hold, rubbing the flesh where I had touched him. ‘Don’t, Darien! Don’t say that!’ I saw his shoulders move. I heard him weep.

  ‘What do you expect?’

  He turned on me then, angrily palming away his tears. ‘Expect? Understanding. Was I so mistaken about you? I expect comfort, warmth. I always believed that’s what friends were for.’

  His anger pierced my heart more than his grief could ever do. ‘Are we really friends, Akaten? You see life as a simple process, but it is not.’

  He sighed, all the rage drained out of him. He was not a creature disposed to anger. ‘My life before seems unreal. I can hardly remember living it. Sometimes I think someone only told me about it. It’s hard to recall how I felt.’ He laughed uncertainly, clawed his fingers through his hair. ‘It was the philtres they gave me. I think they did something to me, something permanent.’ He laughed. ‘Akaten is dead. Yes, that’s it!’

  I disliked the gleam in his eyes. It seemed dangerous, a return to the territory of self-destructive grief, despite his words of feeling nothing. ‘Take hold of yourself,’ I said. ‘You sound mad.’

  He was still laughing, and staggered away from me to lean his forehead against the tree. I saw his long fingers flexing against the bark. I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders. ‘What am I doing here?’ he murmured. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  I turned him round. His eyes were black, full of pain. I could resist no longer, and wound my arms around him. ‘Akaten, you have suffered, and it takes time to get over that. You mind was dulled, yes, but it was for your own safety.’

  ‘I am destroyed by grief,’ he said, ignoring my remarks, ‘and that is why I’m so confused. If I lov
ed Harakhte above all others, why do I want you?’

  I couldn’t answer, but pulled him closer, expelling a groan of need. He could be no more confused than I.

  ‘Yes,’ Akaten murmured, as if coming to a decision, and then we were kissing in the night-shadow of the branches. A voice whispered in my head, You’ve come home, come home...

  After some minutes, Akaten broke away from me. ‘Water,’ he said. ‘I need to be near water.’

  I took his arm and led him towards the lakes. He staggered at my side, his fingers digging into my flesh. I took him to a place where thick evergreens shrouded the edge of the water, and here we sat down. Akaten took off his shoes and put his feet into the lake. White birds stood sleeping around us, like statues.

  ‘Can we swim?’ Akaten said.

  I shuddered. ‘No! This place is not for swimming. It’s full of weeds and mud.’

  Akaten sighed. ‘I should have known you’d say that.’ He got to his feet and began to undress himself.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘You’ll regret it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He stood before me unashamedly naked. ‘Come with me, Darien. Be daring.’ Without waiting to see whether I’d comply or not, he stepped into the water and began to wade out to where it became deeper. I watched him splashing around, wondering how long it would take for the guards to hear him and come investigating. I was thinking about whether he’d come back to my rooms, whether we could make love.

  Presently, he came back to the bank and lay shivering beside me, his skin striped with slimy weed. ‘That was wonderful,’ he said. ‘You should have joined me.’

  ‘Your teeth are chattering,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps we should go back now.’

  He smiled, and stroked my thigh with his damp fingers. ‘No, Darien, if you want me, you must have me here.’

  I remember uttering an anguished cry, and throwing myself against him, taking his cold, wet body in my arms. His shuddered in my embrace with silent laughter, wound his legs around my own. ‘Take me, Darien!’ he said. ‘With Alofel, you have to be a dutiful boy, but I want you to be a man for me.’

  ‘And how would you behave with Alofel?’ I couldn’t resist asking.

  ‘He waits for me to ask for his love,’ Akaten replied. ‘He will wait a long time.’

  ‘Don’t ever go to him,’ I said harshly. ‘If you do...’ I couldn’t finish. I meant that I did not want to have to look upon him as a rival, someone against whom I would eventually have to take action.

  ‘Give me a reason not to,’ Akaten said and pulled my face towards his own.

  We are all so many people; a hundred burgeoning personalities confined within a single body. I am weak, I am strong. I am afraid, I am courageous. I am a vessel, I am the fluid that fills it. Akaten was languorous beneath me, and I was not the person who had swooned in the arms of the stranger in the shrine. I felt powerful, twice as tall, capable of anything, but entirely tender. My love-making was as gentle as the dew falling around us. When I slid into him, he opened for me like a flower. He was a lily on the water, and I rode him slowly, so slowly, to the shore.

  From that moment, we became one. In the days that followed, we never spoke of love, although I was sure that was what I felt for Akaten. From a young age, I had been trained to suppress my feelings, and never to speak of them. Therefore, I had no way of knowing whether Akaten returned my feelings, or was simply comforted by our closeness. I was obsessed by him, wanted to be him, be absorbed by his flesh, sucked into his mind, so that we would be utterly inseparable.

  We tried to keep our alliance private, but it is impossible to keep secrets in the palace, and soon it was common knowledge that we spent most of our nights together. I was unsure as to how Alofel would react to this news when it finally came to his ears, but he never mentioned it to me, and his attitude towards me remained unchanged, even though he must have known I left his bed at midnight to go to Akaten’s chambers.

  Alofel continued to shower Akaten with presents and now, because it was obvious that Akaten was no longer stricken, Alofel commanded his presence. Every day, in the late afternoon, my lover would go to the king’s rooms and talk with him for over an hour. Several nights a week, they ate their evening meal together. I did not feel jealous exactly, but could not entirely eradicate the sense of unease that these visits conjured within me.

  Porfarryah was scathing of my relationship with the foreigner, and I felt myself cooling towards her. Our friendship became brittle and fragile, although we were careful not to let it break entirely. We still needed to be allies at court.

  The summer passed like a hazy dream. I can still recall the flavour of it; the endless days in the garden when Akaten would gaze at me smiling, his long eyes hooded with promise, and the hot nights when we lay together in the moonlight, our sweat fusing our bodies together, wrapped in the heavy perfume of night-blooming flowers and sexual musk. I should have known that nothing ever remains the same. As Harakhte had once said to Akaten, life is a dynamic process and change is inevitable.

  The Mewts had accepted their Cossic conquerors only grudgingly, and Alofel’s advisors had been busy constructing a new government in Mewt, and making promises to the people in order to keep them tractable. Near the end of the summer, when the gardens were baked dry and the lakes almost rancid, a delegation of Mewts came to Tarnax to engage in talks with the king. Among them was Menefer, the younger brother of the Khan, whom Alofel had installed as his puppet governor in Mewt and needed to keep sweet. Alofel had taken advantage of a family feud. He had learned that Menefer and Harakhte had had their problems. Perhaps recognising some ignoble trait within his brother, Harakhte had never given him status within the army or the government. Now, Menefer was being offered the throne of Mewt, but there was a cost.

  Akaten was disturbed by Menefer’s presence in the palace, and kept himself hidden. He told me that Alofel should not under-estimate Menefer. Whatever grudges might have existed between him and Harakhte, his loyalties would still lie more with the dead than with the conquerors. ‘Menefer has had to learn to survive,’ Akaten told me.

  I would not let the implication slip. ‘Did Harakhte treat him badly?’

  ‘They hated each other as much as they loved each other. The relationship was complex. You’d have had to witness it to understand.’

  I guessed that he thought his dead lover’s brother would consider him a traitor, because he had slipped into life at Tarnax so readily. I hoped the visit would not be protracted.

  The Mewts have an almost holy regard for beautiful boys beloved of kings, and Alofel was aware of this. Mewtish folklore was plump with tales about the mysterious, sacrosanct relationship of male lovers, whereas the Cossics were far more casual about these liaisons. Most Cossic noblemen had wives and boys, but there was really little distinction between them. So, in order to demonstrate to the Mewts that we Cossics were equally capable of homo-spiritual relationships, Alofel decreed that while our visitors remained at court, I must be present at all state functions, silent and enigmatic at his side. No mention was made of Akaten putting in an appearance; an arrangement that suited everyone, except perhaps the Mewts. The situation amused me, because I knew that both sides regarded the other to be barbarians.

  One night, soon after the Mewts’ arrival, a banquet was held in honour of the visitors, and Cossic dignitaries from around the land were invited to attend. Alofel wanted me beside him on the top table, much to the chagrin of Queen Mallory, whose place I temporarily usurped. She knew that the Mewts would note how far down the table she’d been placed. This was unprecedented. In public, when the queen was present, I was never seated closer to the king than her. At the time, I did wonder whether Alofel was doing rather too much to please our visitors. I had no love for Mallory, but we were not Mewts. We had our own traditions, and should stick with them.

  Menefer was a striking individual, honey-dark of hair and skin like Akaten. His demeanour was courteous, he had a dry wit and a quick intelligence. He was clearly w
ary of Alofel, and would only commit himself to plans that he deemed were designed to help his people. Honour, beauty and intelligence; a sickeningly noble combination of traits. I found it hard to credit that Harakhte had refused this man a place at his side. It pained me to hear that Menefer was considered but a shadow of his dead brother. How could Akaten love me if this were true? I was a pampered plaything, pale and thin; a sickle moon to the memory of Mewt’s slaughtered sun king.

  We sat down to eat at sunset, I at the head of the table next to Alofel, with Menefer on his other side. Further down the board, Queen Mallory sat glaring at us from among her company of women.

  Menefer complimented Alofel on the gracious hall, the wine, the food, the efficient service of the servants. Then his eyes turned to me. ‘And your companion delights the eye, a moon child. I have never beheld a youth so pale and lovely. Such magic must refresh your very soul.’

  Alofel smiled thinly, perhaps sensing in which direction the conversation was about to head. ‘Ah yes. Darien is my consolation.’

  I bit into a bitter fruit, mistrust coursing throughout my body, and smiled rather coldly at the Mewt.

  ‘There is one matter,’ Menefer began delicately, ‘which has been causing consternation at home.’

  ‘Yes?’ Beneath the table, Alofel’s thigh pressed gently against my own in warning. I returned the pressure. We were both suspicious.

  Menefer touched his mouth with his finger-tips, made an abrupt gesture. ‘It concerns my brother’s lover, Akaten.’

  Silence fell. I detected ears around the table tuning into the conversation. Alofel said nothing, but waited for Menefer to continue.

  The Mewt fixed Alofel with wide, guileless eyes. ‘The truth is, my lord, we want him back.’

  Alofel laughed politely. ‘That is a matter to be discussed with my advisors.’

  Menefer blinked slowly and shook his head. ‘No. With you. I understand why you want him near you, but Akaten is a legend in our country. The people feel he is a prisoner of war and that, to promote good feeling between our countries, he should be released. My brother is dead, but Akaten still lives. The people want to honour him. He must come home.’