When he was nineteen, Inhei met the girl who would become his wife.

She was the daughter of a ropemaker from the Street of Bells. The first time Inhei noticed her, he stopped what he was doing to watch her as she wandered past the shop. She seemed to glide through the afternoon crowds, every step sure and graceful. She wore her dark hair long and glossy beneath a sequined shawl that fluttered in the breeze. Her smiling eyes were accentuated with careful dabs of kohl. When she noticed Inhei’s foolish stare from under the shop’s awning, she flashed him a friendly grin, without a hint of arrogance.

A few days after that, she came to buy copper pans for her mother. At least, that was her excuse.

By this time, Inhei was running his master’s business from top to bottom. He sold their wares to buyers across the city, using couriers hired from his old district. He sourced good copper and brass from the traders who came in through the mountains from the east. The money was coming in nicely, and though his master took the lion’s share, Inhei had more than enough for his family. For the first time in their lives, they never had to fear going hungry.

His younger siblings were beginning to pick up the rudiments of the business themselves. They balanced the books and stocked shelves for him while he haggled with the customers. He taught them to recognise flaws in the copper, cracks and bubbles from a bad casting. His youngest sister proved to have a particularly keen eye for that sort of thing. His master joked that she would put him out of a job one day.

Indeed, it was the diligence of Inhei’s siblings that the ropemaker’s daughter first remarked upon when she wandered up to the counter. “Are these your brothers and sisters? You’ve made quite a little army of them,” she told him. Her voice was light and sweet, almost musical.

“They’re clever children,” was all Inhei could manage to say. He found himself idiotically tongue-tied with her, in a way he had never been before with a customer.

The girl took a very long time choosing her pans. She had plenty of questions for him, about the business, about his family. About him. And, once he got over his initial shyness, it was easy to reply. He had so rarely spoken to anyone other than his siblings about the hard years of his childhood. He took some pride in spinning it into a yarn, lightening the darker moments so as not to sour the mood, deftly serving his other customers while he talked. The girl listened with eager-eyed interest, the gentle smile never leaving her face.

He stopped short of telling her exactly what had happened to his mother, however. Nor did he mention the alley gods.

After that, she came back to visit nearly every day. She no longer even pretended she was coming for the copperware. Inhei’s heart thrilled every time he saw her smiling face emerge from the crowds. He started going for walks with her in the evenings, and found to his delight she would hold his hand as they strolled along. His siblings teased him endlessly about it, but he knew they liked her as well.

Everything he learned about her made her more entrancing to him. She was a fine singer, not just of the usual temple chants but of folk tunes like the ones his mother had once sung. She had a deep knowledge of her father’s trade, easily as well-versed in jute and linen as Inhei was in copper and brass. She had travelled with her parents far beyond Kursalian, selling their wares in the western cities, once even riding with a Forester caravan on the high mountain roads. She knew some tradesman’s jokes far too bawdy to tell in polite company. Fortunately, she did not seem to consider him to be polite company.

When his master heard about the girl’s constant visits, he bellowed a laugh and slapped Inhei on the back. “Well? Aren’t you going to do something about it, you idiot boy? Quickly, before she finds someone more interesting!”

So, one breezy festival-day, Inhei took the girl to a public garden with a grand view of the mountains, and asked her if she would marry him.

“You don’t waste any time, do you?” she smiled. She didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised. Then she took both his hands in hers, pressed her lips to his, and said softly, “Of course I will.”

The wedding followed within weeks. Her parents were keen for their youngest daughter to be married off, and if they felt her choice of man to be too humble, they stayed quiet about it. Inhei paid as much of a dowry as he could afford.

For her, he would have paid more; paid anything.

They were married on the temple steps on a clear and beautiful night, lit by two bright moons that washed the streets below in a pale radiance. By tradition, the father of the groom was supposed to lead the marital procession through the courtyard. But, since Inhei was an orphan, an elderly priest was appointed for the task. The priest chanted his hymns off-key in a croaky, asthmatic voice, and Inhei’s wife had to suppress her giggles with the embroidered sleeve of her wedding-gown.

Inhei maintained the same fixed, respectful smile through the whole ceremony. He bowed to his new parents-in-law, to the priest, to the temple’s moonlit dome. He said the appropriate prayers out loud, while whispering an entirely different prayer in his head. He looped his devotional sash around his wife’s waist, while she knotted hers around him, to symbolise their joining before the gods of the temple.

Only when they were home, and heading to their honeymoon bed in a flurry of kissing and unfastening and carelessly-flung clothes, did he allow a wide and genuine grin to spread across his face.

*

The first pregnancy was a struggle. Inhei’s wife was a sweet and graceful girl, but she was not robust, and she was wracked with morning-sickness for months. When he heard her groaning and hissing with the pain, some of the old fear returned, that gnawing helplessness which he’d felt watching his father waste away.

The birth was hard and long and bloody. A brusque midwife from the Lower Apothecaries came to help, ordering Inhei’s sisters around as her deputies while Inhei looked on and prayed to every god he knew.

After hours of screaming and straining, there was a moment of awful silence, when he feared the worst.

Then came a baby’s piercing cry, and Inhei’s fleeting terror became wordless joy and relief. He had never seen something so beautiful as the sight of his exhausted, weakly smiling wife cradling their newborn daughter.

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Their second child, a boy, came somewhat easier, a little over a year later. And then, in the space of three years, two more girls came along. Each one grew to be as much of a delight as the first. Their babbling and cooing and pattering little footsteps were like music to Inhei’s ears. His younger siblings, most of them still children themselves, took to being aunts and uncles with great enthusiasm.

Inhei’s master scolded him good-naturedly for making so many babies. “Gods above, boy, can’t you control yourselves? The shop’s doing well, but not that well. And they won’t be old enough to earn their keep for years yet!”

Laughing, Inhei apologised. By that point, his wife was already showing the signs of her fifth pregnancy.

The children did indeed learn the copper trade, just as their aunts and uncles had before them. Inhei’s eldest daughter knew how to clean the tarnish from a pot by the time she was seven years old. Though Inhei loved all his children equally, he took a special pride in her. She was a bright and cheerful girl, quick of wit and kind of heart. Much like her mother, and the grandmother she would never meet.

Of course, Inhei and his wife made sure that their children attended the temple. They learned their hymns and their prayers, kept their sashes ever immaculate, and bowed to the wardens in the street. Neighbours remarked on what fine and devout children they were, a tribute to the piety of their parents.

Eventually, Inhei’s master moved away to Om Aledai, to spend his last years in the cooler air there. He had no children of his own, so he left the shop to Inhei. “It’s long been more yours than mine, anyway,” the old copper merchant said, when Inhei tried to object.

Inhei’s children saw his master off tearfully, running after his rattling carriage until it passed out of the city gates and into the dusty hills beyond. The old man had become almost a grandfather to them.

Inhei prayed that the gods would grant his master a swift and safe journey through the western mountains. He remembered what his mother had taught him. Out there, far from the temple’s reach, they were not alley gods at all; they were on the wind, unbounded, everywhere.

*

On a sweltering summer evening, not long after his eldest daughter turned ten, Inhei was walking with her back to their house after closing up the shop. In a wistful mood, he chose a route that took them past the street where he’d grown up. He slowed his pace to glance at those familiar doorways and balconies, looking out for any faces he recognised. It had been some time since he last came this way. A lot of the labouring families had moved away, following the temple work to the other side of the river. Still, a few of the older folk remained, and they would greet him if they saw him.

His daughter, tired from the day’s work and eager to get home, hurried ahead of him with all the impatience of impending teenagehood. She stopped suddenly halfway across the street, shading her eyes against the setting sun.

“Father, look.” Frowning, she pointed at old Chehga’s door, which stood ajar.

Inside, Inhei saw what he at first took for a heaped bundle of rags on the floor. Then he saw the tangled strings of coloured beads, and a gnarled, stick-thin arm poking out among them, the fingers twisted out of true by arthritis.

With his daughter following nervously behind him, Inhei stepped into Chehga’s house, for the first time since the day he’d confronted her all those years ago. The place was even more pitiful now, every surface greyed by dust, spiderwebs filling the mouth of the fireplace. The spinning-wheel was gone, perhaps pawned for food, along with much of the furniture. How long had she lived here, like this, all alone?

Chehga lay where she had fallen, hours or even days before, the shards of a broken soup-bowl scattered around her. Her eyes were closed. She was still breathing, but slowly, shallowly, groaning feebly with each breath. She looked much like Inhei’s father had in his last days, more bone than flesh. Inhei wondered how many people of the neighbourhood had walked past her door, spotted her, and walked on. Nobody liked old Chehga.

He knelt down on the dusty stone floor next to her. He was no doctor. He didn’t need to be. He could tell, at a glance, that Chehga was never going to get back up. She might linger there a day or two more, delirious and in worsening agony, until she succumbed to thirst in the summer heat. She had no family, and she had been cast out from the temple; nobody would bury her. In time, when the smell grew too bad to ignore and the corpse began to draw rats, the wardens would send down a couple of porters to throw her in the river.

Inhei closed his eyes a moment, remembering the faces of his mother, his father, his older brother. He thought of the colours daubed on alley walls, the ribbons bridging rooftops under the shadow of the temple dome. Then he gave his daughter a handful of brass coins, and told her to go with one of her uncles to the Lower Apothecaries.

“Find a doctor,” he said calmly. “Tsanreik is a good one, your uncle Omsar knows him well. His shop is by the Saffron Bridge. Ask him for a bottle of root-of-peace.”

The girl may have had her objections, but she didn’t voice them. She took a last uneasy glance at Chehga, then nodded and ran off up the street, her sandals slapping on the cracked cobbles. Inhei stayed beside Chehga’s wheezing, ancient form. He settled himself back to sit cross-legged.

Chehga opened one milky, cataract-clouded eye. Her breathing was thin and rattling. Her gaze, such as it was, found Inhei’s face.

From somewhere, she mustered the strength to speak, though her voice was so faint Inhei had to strain to hear it. “Mera…” she whispered. “Mera’s…boy.”

“Yes.”

“Mera’s…boy.” The map of wrinkles that was Chehga’s face contorted with the pain of each word. “I…I’m…sorry.”

Inhei said nothing. He sat there on the bare floor by the old woman’s side, the evening light deepening into darkness around them, until his daughter returned with the glass vial clutched in her hand.

*

It was a long summer that year, hot and dry. The river shrank to a trickle, leaving boats stranded at odd angles on the cracked mud of its banks. In the southern valleys, the drought drove ever more of the herdsmen north, into the cities, into Kursalian.

When he walked the alleys, Inhei began to notice new daubs of colour on the walls. Some were so fresh the paint still dripped. There were symbols he recognised, as familiar to him now as his own face in the looking-glass, but also ones he hadn’t seen before. Suns with bright zigzag rays, butterfly wings that looked real enough to fly, scrawled lines of glyphs very different from the temple script. One day, he spotted a rope hung with fluttering prayer-flags joining two shops in the Street of Bells, mischievously close to a wardens’ tower. The new arrivals had brought their gods, no less precious to them than their bundled belongings.

He made a study of them, adding them to the wordless scripture in his head. He was no priest, and the alley gods had none anyway. He had become something for which the temple had no name.

His wife knew about his true faith now, though he hadn’t told her much. Her family had closer ties to the temple than most; one of her brothers was a warden. In her gently understanding way, she let him have this part of his life that was closed off from her. He did not want to draw her into it against her will.

But he remembered what his mother had said, so long ago. One child, at least, must learn that there is truth outside the temple.

Just as she had, he chose a bright, clear day, when the markets were bustling and all Kursalian felt warm and alive.

His eldest daughter was in a jubilant mood when they left the shop that evening. They had been doing a roaring trade for weeks, as the crowds swelled with all the newcomers to the city. Inhei was already thinking of opening a second shop on the Pedlars’ Bridge, perhaps with his younger siblings in charge of it. They had often told him they wished to go back to their old neighbourhood.

Inhei listened, smiling, to his daughter’s energetic chatter about her favourite customers and the goings-on of her friends. She had never been an outcast, never gone cold or hungry, never been scorned by her neighbours. He swore to himself that she never would be.

We will be careful. And we will endure.

“Love,” he said, when they were still some way from home. “There’s something I’d like to tell you. Something my mother once told me.”

“A story?” his daughter asked, with the weary tolerance of a girl who has heard too many of her father’s stories.

“No. Something true,” he replied.

He led her through the sloping streets, into the clamouring crowds and the windblown summer dust. The temple dome shone sunset-gold over the rooftops ahead of them. He held her hand tightly, and began to tell her about the gods that had no names.