Consorts of Heaven Read Online Free PDF

floor in the centre of the hut.
    With her return his fears eased. She might be shit-poor and smelly, but she wanted to help him. He took a long, slow breath, then asked as evenly as he could, ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘I am called Kerin, master,’ she said, still intent on whatever she was doing.
    ‘Kerin, right,’ he said. The name meant nothing to him. ‘Damaru was here,’ he added.
    ‘Hoping for food. Well, he will have to wait till I have the fire going.’
    ‘He called me “sais”.’
    ‘Oh.’ Kerin stood, and he saw her clearly for the first time, caught in the harsh light from the open door. She wore a ragged brown shawl tied across a beige shirt, and a grey apron over a long, darker grey skirt. Her curly dark brown hair was pulled back by a strip of brown cloth. Her face was lined and filthy, though she had a delicate, slightly upturned nose, which on another woman might look vacuously pretty.
    Her dark eyes met his and he remembered the eyes from his dream. Dread surfaced again for a moment. Then she looked down.
    ‘Damaru was trying to make sense of you,’ she said. ‘I should have mentioned: my son is sky-touched.’
    Sky-touched? Whatever that meant, it was something to be proud of, from the tone of her voice. He had nothing to lose, and she was being friendly. He had to trust her. ‘Kerin, I’m confused. I still don’t know why he called me sais.’
    ‘It means outsider, stranger. Being a skyfool, he often names things literally.’
    ‘That’s - that’s actually pretty accurate. You see, I can’t recall my name just now. Until I remember it, I don’t mind if you call me that. Or something else, if you prefer.’
    She looked uncertain. ‘Are you sure, master? Sais is not a proper name.’
    ‘You have to call me something. Sais will do. Not master, all right?’ Just until his name came back to him - which it would do, soon.
    ‘All right,’ she said carefully, then added, ‘Sais.’ She bent down again, and a few moments later, smoke billowed past the end of the bed, curling and twisting in the draught. His eyes watered and he smelled something rich and earthy burning.
    He tried to take stock of his situation. He could name stuff around him, and the very squalor of the place was oddly reassuring: this wasn’t his home, but neither was it part of the barely remembered, chaotic nightmare world that he’d awakened from. Something this mundanely grim had to be real. Yet some words and concepts - skyfool , sais , having to fetch fire - meant nothing to him. And he still had no idea who he was or how he came to be here.
    Kerin interrupted his musings with a bowl of sweet-tasting medicine. Shortly after that Damaru came back. Sais - he’d call himself Sais for now, as he certainly felt like a stranger - watched the boy, searching for clues, looking for behaviour that identified him as ‘sky-touched’. His mother fussed over him, muttering something about his fingers, and led him over to the table where she had some dried plants laid out. The boy endured her attention.
    Afterwards she returned to the middle of the hut. Damaru followed her and sat down at her feet. The pounding in Sais’s head had eased, and he lifted it to see what was going on. Damaru was sitting on a low bench, little more than a hewn log, staring intently into the fire burning in a shallow pit in the centre of the floor. Kerin crouched beside him, stirring a large earthenware pot that sat on a flat stone balanced half over the flames. She looked up and said, ‘The porridge will be ready soon. I will help you sit up.’
    ‘Porridge’ turned out to be a tepid, lumpy goo, which under other circumstances would probably have tasted disgusting, but right now was the best food in the world. The woman’s portion was half the size of his and Damaru’s. Before she took her first spoonful she made a quick circling gesture over the food with her right forefinger. Damaru just tucked in.
    After he’d eaten he felt another