He walked into the Inner Temple and paced without hurry to the door of the Malia Shai’s room. His heart was pounding, but not with fear. If he’d met any Yamani guard he would have struck the man down, but there were no priests in evidence. Perhaps the gods were favouring him. Perhaps this was destiny, or the force of his own will that, hardened by bitterness and brandy, was capable of reordering the world. No light shone from her doorway. He hesitated only a moment before lifting the curtain.

She was asleep on her pallet, he saw at once, and his jaw tightened in a parody of a smile. He stalked noiselessly to the bedside, looked down at her for a long moment and then squatted on his heels. A thin sheet covered her to the breasts, but beneath that she slept naked. In the moon’s glow it was easy to make out the sheen of her skin, the curve of her shoulder, the swell of her hip. Though he was only inches from her warmth he seemed to be looking down on her from an infinite height, a frozen bitter mountaintop. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted the Malia Shai to feel the pain she’d caused him.

The only part of his part of him that was not cold was the pulse hammering in his groin.

Wake up, he commanded her silently. Wake up and see me crouched over you, hands about to seize you. See the intent in my eyes, so that I can see the fear in yours. Try to scream; see how far it gets you. I’d like that.

The Plot:

The ancient temple-city of Mulhanabin stands on the edge of the desert, the furthermost outpost of the Irolian Empire. The Yamani people, subjects of the Empire, hold Mulhanabin to be sacred, because there for generation after generation has lived the Malia Shai, living incarnation of the Goddess of the Cruel Earth – drought and famine and plague. She is, in each incarnation, raised and trained to live her life without passion.

Now the Empire is about to come under attack from the nomadic hordes of the Horse-eaters, and Mulhanabin lies directly in their path. The Irolians reluctantly send out an army to defend the city, because although they hold the gods of their subject peoples in contempt they do not wish to court the unrest that would follow if the temple were lost. General Veraine, newly promoted, is chosen to lead the army and prepare Mulhanabin for siege.

Upon arrival he instantly finds an enemy in the form of Rasa Belit, the eunuch High Priest. His relationship with the Malia Shai herself is far more complex: Veraine has no reverence for any gods, Irolian or Yamani, but he finds the young woman both strange and fascinating. He is absolutely forbidden from touching her but that only feeds a growing attraction that becomes an obsession.

Rasa Belit observes with fury that his divine priestess and the blasphemous foreign soldier are becoming too intimate and he arranges for Veraine to observe the Drought Ceremony, which he knows the Irolian will find sickening: it involves the Malia Shai in human sacrifice. Veraine goes off the rails; drunk and furious, he comes close to raping the Malia Shai but manages to restrain himself.

The Horse-eater army lays siege to the city. Dysentery breaks out among the pilgrims packed in behind the walls. Veraine is the target of an assassin sent by Rasa Belit, and while he is wounded he finally confesses his desire to the Malia Shai. She retreats, conflicted and confused. His hand forced by the plague, Veraine leads his desperately outnumbered men out in a night-time attack on the besieging camp, and in the middle of the battle an earthquake shatters the hillside and drops tons of rock on the Horse-eaters, effectively destroying their army.

During the victory celebrations the Malai Shai comes to Veraine’s bed. They are discovered by Rasa Belit, who has the Malia Shai walled up to die and hides Veraine away in a clifftop cell to be tortured at his leisure. Before he can start though, the plague strikes Rasa Belit down too. Veraine escapes, finds the Malai Shai and, since they cannot be together legitimately, agrees to flee with her out of the Empire altogether. They head west across the desert.

Notes:

The viewpoint in this book switches between the two lead characters so a lot of it is from a male perspective.

It’s a love-story, written from the heart. I make no apologies for that.

The setting is a land that’s a bit like ancient India – in as much as Middle Earth is a bit like Medieval Europe. ( If you liked the setting I thoroughly recommend the Bollywood film Asoka (2001) which is set in the 3rd Century BCE, stars the beautiful Kareena Kapoor and Shah Rukh Khan, and features battles, true love, heartbreak, wicked villains, redemption and some wet saris … but no sex.)

The Cover:

I hate the first-edition cover. I hate it so much. There I go writing this sword ‘n’ sandals adventure involving huge armies and exotic gods and searing deserts and what does Marketing do? Picks a random photo from a drawer featuring a white woman in modern clothes - because that’s what the current Black Lace look is and it appeals to their readers who want modern sassy urban heroines. As far as I can tell this means that people who would like the story won’t even pick the book up, and those who buy the book on the strength of the cover are going to be very disappointed indeed. Grr…

There’s only one white person in the whole of Divine Torment and that’s a slave called Hilde who makes a brief though energetic appearance in Chapter One. Veraine and the other Irolians are supposed to look northern Indian or Middle Eastern. The Malia Shai and the Yamani people look southern Indian.

The Japanese cover, though stylised and a little kinky, is much better.  And as for the second-edition UK cover (the one with the thuggish-looking swordsman) ... Well, despite making the re-enactor in me want to tear my hair out - Is that really supposed to be a chainmail coif? - it at least says This is a fantasy novel. Which is a vast improvement.

And it's purple.

Setting and Society:

The Irolians:

“Loyalty, piety, pride. Courage in warriors, ambition in men, compassion in women.” – the Irolian virtues.

The whole Empire setting is roughly – very roughly – based on accounts of prehistoric India, although this is definitely transferred to a fantasy world. In about 2500 BCE the Indus Valley civilisation (city-building, literate, had mains drainage) was superseded by the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans (pastoralist, warlike, hierarchical and worshipping gods like Vishnu and Shiva). Modern archaeologists downplay the idea of a large-scale invasion: mind you, you’d think from modern archaeology that nobody ever invaded anybody else in the whole of prehistory because they were just too busy trading. Modern archaeologists don't much like the word Aryan either, for obvious reasons.

Some of the military terms I use for the Irolians are imperial Roman ones – an optio is in charge of ten men, a tessarius is a military clerk. All those white linen tunics are Roman too, though the technology level is a bit lower in Divine Torment. There are steel weapons, but not many – officers only. Armour is still bronze (which makes it bulky). Ordinary soldiers still use bronze-headed spears and wicker shields. Pteurges (a sort of armoured kilt) were used by the Romans but originated with the Greeks.

So the Irolians are a bit Indian and a bit Roman and quite a bit Spartan in conception. They’ve acquired literacy and civilisation and technology from their subjects, learned to build impressive zigguarats (oops, that’s Mesopotamian) and are busy consolidating a great big Empire founded on the hard labour of other people. They treat the conquered Yamani with paternalistic contempt. They have a small pantheon of seven gods plus some much less important goddesses and believe that after death heroes become new stars in the sky – so they pray to their ancestors too. They are highly militaristic and women therefore occupy a low social status. Only one wife per man is allowed and only her children are legitimate, though concubines and slaves are often kept for sexual purposes.

Irolians aren’t nearly as militarised as the real Spartans, who practised eugenics and put all their freeborn boys into barracks as small children and raised them communally as soldiers of the state. The Irolians usually send their firstborn sons to be soldiers – but these are the only men who can inherit land and all other siblings are expected to work for and support them.

The other thing the Irolians have in common with the Spartans (but not the Romans) is institutionalised homosexuality. It is considered absolutely par for the course in the boys’ barracks as it encourages bonding and group loyalty - and if you don’t like being on the receiving end then you need to get tough enough and mean enough to defend yourself. Older boys prey systematically on the younger boys, pretty much in the same way as in an old-fashioned British boarding school, say (not having any personal experience of boys’ schools, I’m going on the autobiographies of Stephen Fry: Moab is my Washpot and Quentin Crisp: The Naked Civil Servant). As cadets get older and acquire more access to women the homosexuality tends to give way to heterosexuality, and is accepted rather than officially encouraged so long as a man is not exclusively gay. He has an obligation to breed more soldiers, after all. (Again, the Greeks took the warrior/homoerotic link further; the elite Sacred Battalion of Thebes for example was entirely made up of male lovers.)

The result of a military upbringing is that an Irolian soldier among his comrades displays loyalty, courage, humour and affection. He treats civilians with disdain and Yamani with marked contempt. He has little interest in women except as sexual receptacles. He treats his enemies … well, as badly as human beings can treat each other. You want to see that sort of thing, all you need to do is switch on the News. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity for forgetting that other people are human too.

There’s little hint in Divine Torment what civilian or female Irolian attitudes are like – except that wives are supposed to treat their husband’s concubines harshly. Rumayn, the civilian advisor, specifically states that he thinks compassion is a virtue that men should possess too.

(On the subject of the Spartans I recommend the novel Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. It’s about their heroic (and suicidal) defence of the narrow pass of Thermopylae where three hundred Spartans under Leonidas held back the entire Persian army for long enough to buy time for the other Greek states to defend themselves properly. Moving and tragic, it rather downplays the less commercially acceptable aspects of Spartan life (the homoeroticism, the proto-fascist state with its secret police and the institutionalised slaughter of children and slaves) to concentrate on the courage and sacrifice. ‘What is the opposite of fear? Love.’ Works for me.)

The Yamani:

“Temple records; the annals of the Yamani Kings; architecture; geometry; astrology; poetry. Medical texts. A thousand years of history - that’s what’s in this room.”

Because the Malia Shai has lived all her life in the confines of the temple you see practically nothing of Yamani civil society in this book; we just know it is far older than the Irolians’. Slavery is used as a judicial punishment among them, rather than treated as a financial opportunity; thence fewer slaves but they’ll be used rather more harshly. They believe in reincarnation. Men can take more than one wife. They believe that they invented writing. Women keep their hair covered in public.

They have, for very good reason, a massive chip on their collective shoulder about the Irolians.

Yamani religion is polytheistic, and generally speaking the people are much more personally devout than Irolians are. There are thousands if not millions of gods and goddesses, but they are considered to be in some sense all aspects of the infinite godhead. The material world is considered to have only a contingent reality: it arises from the dance of God and when the dance ceases the universe will pass away. There are both male and female priests (but more men). Good and Evil, too, are considered only aspects of the divine. Any form of piety is tolerated and among the general populacethere are minority religious sects devoted to living a ‘purer’ life.

Some of the Yamani gods require, in some situations, human sacrifice – which is absolute anathema to Irolians.

It’s quite obvious that my portrayal of the goddess Malia is derived from powerful Hindu goddesses, particularly Durga/Kali. She battles a demon at the beginning of time, defeating him where none of the other gods can. She is a force of destruction and suffering in the world, but also of necessary order.

Architectural terms such as garbhagria (innermost shrine) and gopuram (temple tower) are Indian, and I had the Meenakshi Sundaresvara temple at Madurai in mind for some of the buildings. The important concept of sunyata (emptiness) is Sanskrit too. The actual city of Mulhanabin was inspired by both Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and Sigiriya Rock in Sri Lanka.

The Characters:

The two lead characters have things in common: primarily they are both abnormal for the societies they come from. They’re both figureheads for highly-structured and powerful organisations – yet they’re both alone in the world, without close family or friends.

The Malia Shai:

“I am the goddess Malia. I was there at the creation of the universe. I remember it.”

The role of the Malia Shai is based directly on real life. In Kathmandu, Nepal, there is a girl called the Kumari, who is considered the incarnation of the Hindu goddess Teleju (Durga). She is chosen from a specific caste at the age of four, undergoes various tests to see if she is truly the goddess, and then is kept in reverential isolation until such time as she menstruates. This child is considered the guardian goddess of the state and the protector of the monarch. When she starts bleeding it is believed that the goddess has left her and she retires, to be replaced by a new toddler. Because Durga is a bloodthirsty and fearless deity, one of the tests requires the little girl to walk around a room filled with severed buffalo-heads and awash with blood, without showing fear or revulsion. Somehow they always manage to find one who can do it(!).

My version of the divine girlchild is a little different in that the Malia Shai’s vocation is lifelong, and thus all the problems of awakening sexuality and ego have to be dealt with too. Thus her training has to be more stringent. The psychological and spiritual techniques the priests use on her are designed to ensure that she never develops into a normal adult woman.

The only way to get a handle on the Malia Shai is to realise that she is by almost any standard not entirely sane. She is certainly not normal. Even in her own society she is unique. She believes she’s the incarnation of a goddess. She thinks that she can hear the prayers of her worshippers whispering ceaselessly at the back of her head. She has trance-visions and dreams of the gods, many of them highly erotic, and relates to them as living individuals, failing to distinguish between her spiritual/imaginative life and reality. In fact she finds her spiritual life more immediate and convincing.

It’s necessary that she carries on believing in her own divinity. It defines her whole existence. If she ever came to doubt it I think she’d suffer a complete collapse of personality; at least this way she can function.

My interest in the Malia Shai is connected to the contradictions in her character. She embodies what must be seen as an essentially destructive and evil goddess, yet she herself is not malicious or evil. Is this only because she’s taken a passive role? What would happen if she were required to act, or to choose, or to exercise real power?

Since early childhood the Malia Shai has been trained to strip herself of anger and fear and joy and indeed any emotion; to become Empty. Even the gods are routinely subject to worldly ties like emotion and craving, but three hundred and thirty-three successful incarnations of self-denial and the goddess Malia can free herself from earthly bonds and be reunited with God, thus absolving the world of all natural suffering. That’s the theory anyway.

Opposing all that is her instinctive nature. She is a goddess, they tell her; there is a fundamental authority to her decisions and her actions. If she wants to get angry no one has the right to gainsay her. If she chooses to kill fifty thousand people in a plague that is entirely up to her. These two sides of her personality, ascetic versus elemental, human avatar versus divine force of nature, come into direct conflict over Veraine. In theory she should shrug off her attraction to him. In practice she wants him likes she’s never wanted anything else in her life.

She falls for Veraine because…

Because she’s lonely.
Because he’s the first man to ever treat her like a normal human being. He talks to her instead of chanting and pleading. He argues. He flirts.
Because he doesn’t believe in her divinity, which she finds disturbing.
Because he opposes Rasa Belit, whom deep down she dislikes and resents.
Because he’s there to defend her and her city.
Because she’s, what, nineteen? – and he’s gorgeous.

Veraine:

“I’m not like most soldiers.”

Veraine is hot. I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t think that. I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t think he was sympathetic and likeable, either. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t got any flaws. I wanted him to be believable as a man too.

Veraine was born a slave. That’s the starting point for his character. He spent his childhood as one of the underdogs and mixed with Yamanis as well as Irolians. Importantly, according to his own admission he spent as much of that time as he could with the women of his father’s harem rather than the men of the farm or estate. His father did not acknowledge his existence until he was fourteen, and when he did almost his first act was to make Veraine watch the girl he was in love with get raped by his half-brother. He legitimised Veraine only out of vanity. Veraine loathes his father (now deceased) and half-brother and extends that to everything they stand for.

He entered the cadet barracks at fourteen, not eight like most other boys. He was treated as an outsider, slave-born, for years and had to learn total self-reliance. He would certainly have been the object of sexual abuse by older boys (but then that would be true for everyone there). He learned to fight for his life. Now in those circumstances he should have rejected his slave past and grown up ambitious and vicious, more Irolian than other Irolians. Yet somehow he managed to remember what it was like to be at the bottom of the heap and retain some independence of thought, and though he is now a part of the machinery of Empire he has never internalised its value system as his own.

Veraine is a very physical man and a natural though not domineering leader. He’s rather more thoughtful than a man of his station ought to be. He’s got a respect and a liking for women that sets him completely apart from other members of the officer/noble class. He’s also, despite all the odds, a fundamentally decent person – with the following caveats:

• He is a man, and he lives in a society where slavery is a normal part of life. He doesn’t approve of cruelty or abuse, but offer him an attractive woman and unless it’s obvious that she rejects him he’ll go for it. He’ll stop if she screams or bursts into tears or fights, but he’s not going to otherwise say ‘This woman is a slave – or a prostitute - and therefore she cannot be making a free choice to have sex with me.’
• He reacts really badly to alcohol. I mean, really badly . It lets all his demons out, and he makes a mean drunk. He knows this, which is why he barely touches the stuff … normally. After the Drought Ceremony in Chapter 6 he is so upset that he deliberately gets wasted. He doesn’t rape the Malia Shai but what he does to the Sajaal girl is absolutely, indefensibly shitty, and he knows it. (Technically that wasn’t rape either, because he got consent. Which is no justification.) Why doesn’t he attack the Malia Shai? Because by now he’s in love with her, and he realises it. Regardless of how horrifying he finds her actions and how angry he is, he can’t bring himself to hurt her. It’s a turning point in their relationship. (She, by the way, finds his cup in the morning and realises he’s been in her room. She says nothing.)

Veraine falls for the Malia Shai because …

Because he’s lonely.
Because he can’t have her.
Because she confounds and challenges and perplexes him. He can’t put her in a neat box in his head and this drives him crazy.
Because she can match him for intelligence and courage.
Because she is, in an odd way, innocent. She has no ulterior motives, no dishonesty, she does not manipulate. What you see is what you get. There’s an idealistic streak in Veraine, related to his sense of honour. It also makes him feel protective. That’s why he reacts so badly to the Drought Ceremony: he feels he’s somehow been betrayed by her.

 

The Supernatural

The question is, of course, whether the Malia Shai does have some kind of supernatural power or divine nature. She would consider the answer to be obvious; yes. Veraine would deny it, and to him that would seem equally obvious. The text as presented to the reader is deliberately ambiguous. Every detail that might be present as evidence of supernatural intrusion into the world can be reinterpreted:

• So the Malia Shai dreams about Veraine and the earthquake long before encountering either? No, she has a dream that might be interpreted as prophetic but only after the fact.
• So she sees and converses with the gods in visions? That’s a lot easier to do than you might think; it only requires some training in entering other states of consciousness. The ‘spirits’ one sees in a shamanic state certainly have autonomous proto-personalities: whether they have any external reality is another question entirely.
• So she hears the whispering voices of those praying to her? It might be sign of incipient schizophrenia. Or just that she is tuned in to her own internal monologues in a way that most normal people aren’t.
• So she remembers previous lives? As Veraine points out, she might well be remembering only the stories she’s heard.
• So the earthquake comes to Veraine’s aid at a critical moment, and destroys the Horse-eater army? Coincidence.
• So plague kills Rasa Belit and allows Veraine and the Malia Shai to escape together? Coincidence – and given that the plague is an endemic, recurring annual problem, not much of a coincidence at that. The source of the illness (dysentery) is, of course, not divine wrath but the contaminated holy water in the tank where the pilgrims bathe. They bring it with them to Mulhanabin every year. As the water gets dirtier and other sources of drinking-water fail, so the contamination builds up and spreads throughout the population. Those who drink water gathered only from the rooftop guttering (e.g. the Malia Shai, most of the soldiers) are less likely to be infected.

What the reader has to decide is whether the accumulation of coincidences and lucky incidents adds up to something that could be better described as fate, or divine will. Bear in mind that if there is some sort of higher power in action, it manages in the course of getting the two lovers together to cause the deaths of literally thousands of people, including many innocent bystanders. And while Veraine might blench at such a consideration, it would not trouble the Malia Shai one whit.