The world indeed held miracles, though only for those who dared abandon old hopes.
Breathing deeply, Esmenet untied the leather string about the first scroll.
Like The Third Analytic, The Sagas were one of those works familiar even to illiterate caste-menials such as herself. She found it strange recalling her impressions of such things before Achamian or Kellhus. The “Ancient North,” she knew, had always seemed weighty and profound, a phrase with a palpable, skin-prickling air. It lay like cold lead among the other names she knew, a marker of loss, hubris, and the implacable judgement of ages. She knew of the No-God, the Apocalypse, the Ordeal, but they were little more than curiosities. The Ancient North was a place, something she could point to. And for whatever reason, everyone had agreed that it was one of those words, enunciations that, like “Scylvendi” or “Tusk,” bore the whiff of overarching doom. The Sagas had been little more than a rumour attached to that word. Books, to be certain, were frightful things, but in the way of snakes to city dwellers. Something safely ignored.
Those times Achamian mentioned The Sagas, he did so only to dismiss or disparage. For a Mandate Schoolman, he said, they were like pearls strung across a corpse. He spoke of the Apocalypse and the No-God the way others described running arguments with their relatives, with a thoughtless, first-hand immediacy, and in terms and tones that would often set her hair on end. With Achamian, the “Ancient North,” which for all its dread had remained blank and obdurate, became something intricate and encompassing, a frame for what seemed an inexhaustible litany of extinguished hopes. By comparison, The Sagas had come to seem something foolish, perhaps even criminal. Those rare times she heard others mention them, she would smile inwardly and scoff. What could they know of these things? Even those who could read …
But as much as she had learned about the Apocalypse, the fact remained that she knew nothing of The Sagas themselves. The moment she gingerly unrolled the first section of scroll, that ignorance struck her with the curious force of undone deceptions. Despite the title, she was surprised to discover that The Sagas consisted of a number of different works written by a number of different authors, though only two, Heyorthau and Nau-Ganor, were named. There were nine “sagas” in total, starting with “The Kelmariad.” Some, she would later discover, were verse epics while others were prose chronicles. She chided herself for her surprise. Once again she’d found complexity where she had expected simplicity. Was that not always the way?
She had no idea where Kellhus had obtained the scroll, but it was very old, and as much painted as inked—the prize of some dead scholar’s library. The parchment was uterine, soft and unmottled. Both the style of the script and the diction and tone of the translator’s dedicatory seemed bent to the sensibilities of some other kind of reader. For the first time she found herself appreciating the fact that this history was itself historical. For some reason she had never considered that writings could be part of what they were about. They always seemed to hang … outside the world they depicted.
It was strange. Here she lay curled on her marriage bed, her head propped on silk-threaded pillows, the scroll at a lazy angle before her. But when she read the opening invocation,Rage—Goddess! Sing of your flight,
From our fathers and our sons.
Away, Goddess! Secret your divinity!
From the conceit that makes kings of fools,
From the scrutiny that makes corpses of souls.
Mouths open, arms thrown wide, we beseech thee:
Sing us the end of your song.
everything about her—the wrought canopy, the dim grottoes behind the screens, the hanging panels—disappeared. Reading, she realized, resituated . It made gauze of what was immediate, and allowed what was ancient and faraway to rise into view. It unpinned here from the senses, and made it everywhere. It released now from the cage of the present, and lent it the aspect of eternity.
Infected by a kind of floating wonder, she fell into the first of The Sagas.
She found the going both difficult and curiously erotic, as though, aside from the masturbatory solitude of reading, her struggle to accommodate the writer’s ancient assumptions was something too intimate not to be carnal. The realization that “The Kelmariad” was actually the history of Anasûrimbor Celmomas stole her breath—and sparked her first premonition of dread. This was not only the story of Achamian’s dreams, it was also the story of Kellhus’s blood. These times and places, she realized, were neither so ancient nor so faraway as she might have wished.
She gathered that the Dynasty of Anasûrimbor was old and venerable even in those days of Far Antiquity. In fact, the verses were replete with references to times and places—the Cond Yoke, the God-Kings of Ûmerau, the Rape of Omindalea—of which she knew nothing. For some reason, she had always thought of the First Apocalypse as the beginning of history rather than the end of one. Once again, what had been blank and monolithic became encompassing, a mansion with many rooms.
The birth of Celmomas II had been as ill-starred as any birth could be: he was the twin of a stillborn brother, named Huörmomas. The line,His rosy wail could not stir his brother’s blue slumber,
made her restless with thoughts of Serwë and Moënghus. And the way the poet used this macabre image to explain the High King’s flint-hearted brilliance made her inexplicably anxious. Huörmomas, the poet insisted, ever stalked his brother’s side, chilling his heart even as he quickened his intellect:Grim kinsman, frosting the breath of his every counsel.
Dark reflection! Even the Knight-Chieftains bundle their cloaks
When they catch your glint in their Lord’s eye.
After this, the strange intensity that had nagged everything, from the mere thought of reading The Sagas to the weight of the scrolls in her palm, took on the character of a compulsion. It was as if something—a second voice—whispered beneath what she read. Once she even bolted from the bed and pressed her ear to the embroidered canvas walls. She enjoyed stories as much as anyone. She knew what it was to hang in suspense, to feel the tug of some almost-grasped conclusion. But this was different. Whatever it was she thought she heard, it spoke not to some climactic twist, nor even to some penetrating illumination—it spoke to her. The way a person might.
The next four days would be haggard. Jealousy, murder, rage, and doom before all … The First Apocalypse engulfed her.
She quickly realized that, despite all her discussions with Achamian, her understanding of the Old Wars was merely episodic. “The Kelmariad” struck them into the shape of the Kûniüric High King’s life, beginning with the dire warnings of his arcane counsellor, Seswatha, and culminating with his death on the Eleneöt Fields. In many ways it began as a common tale: Seswatha was the Doomsayer, the only one who could correctly read the gathering signs. Celmomas, meanwhile, was the Arrogant King, the one who could see only what was self-serving.
Apparently, long before, a fugitive Gnostic School called the Mangaecca had somehow pierced the ancient glamour the Nonmen Quya had used to conceal Min-Uroikas, the legendary stronghold of the Inchoroi. While Celmomas was still a young man, emissaries of Nil’giccas, the Nonman King of Ishterebinth, approached Seswatha, the High King’s childhood friend and Vizier. The Nonmen worried that the Inchoroi, whom they had driven to the four corners of the world in the days of Cu’jara Cinmoi, had found their way back to Min-Uroikas and with the Mangaecca had renewed their harrowing studies. They told him of the rumours they had extracted from their long-dead captives. They told him of the No-God.
So Seswatha began his Long Argument, his attempt to convince the Ancient Norsirai Kings of the impending Apocalypse.
Though none of the sagas took Seswatha as its subject, he surfaced and resurfaced throughout, like something continually kicked up in the rolling flotsam of events. In “The Kelmariad” he was a principal, the stalwart of a mighty and inconstant king. The same was true of “The Kayûtiad,” the verse epic of Celmomas’s youngest and most glorious son, Nau-Cayûti, where Seswat
ha was both teacher and surrogate father. In “The Book of Generals,” the prose inventory of events following Nau-Cayûti’s death, his was the most powerful and most resented voice in council after council. In “The Trisiad,” the verse account of Trysë’s destruction, he was a shining beacon on the parapets, clawing dragons from the sky with sorcerous light. In “The Eämnoriad” he was the scheming foreigner who, for all his grand declarations, fled on the eve of the No-God’s approach. In “The Annal Akksersa” he was hope incarnate, the Raised Shield of High King Cundraul III. In “The Annal Sakarpa” he was a lunatic refugee, cast out after cursing King Hûruth V for not fleeing to Mehtsonc with the Chorae Hoard. And in “The Anaxiad,” the grand and tragic saga of Kyraneas’s fall, he was nothing less than the world’s saviour, the Bearer of the Heron Spear.
Hated or adored, Seswatha was the pin in the navigator’s bowl, the true hero of The Sagas, though not one cycle or chronicle acknowledged him as such. And each time Esmenet encountered some variant of his name, she would clutch her breast and think, Achamian.
It was no small thing to read of war, let alone apocalypse. No matter how pressing her daily routine, images from The Sagas dogged her soul’s eye: Sranc armoured in mandibles freshly cut from their victims. The burning Library of Sauglish and the thousands who’d sought refuge within her hallowed halls. The Wall of the Dead, the cloak of corpses draped about the seaward ramparts of Dagliash. Foul Golgotterath, her golden horns curving mountainous into dark skies. And the No-God, Tsurumah, a great winding tower of black wind …
War and more war, enough to engulf every city, every hearth, to sweep up all innocents—even the unborn—into its merciless jaws.
The thought that Achamian continually lived these things oppressed her with an evasive, even cringing, sense of guilt. Each night, he saw the horizon move with hordes of Sranc; he shrank beneath the pitch of dragons swooping from black-bellied clouds. Each night, he witnessed Trysë, the Holy Mother of Cities, washed in the blood of her bewildered children. Each night, he literally relived the No-God’s dread awakening, he actually heard the mothers wail over their stillborn sons.
Absurdly, this made her think of his dead mule, Daybreak. She had never understood, not truly, how much weight that name must have possessed for him. Such poignant hope. And this, she realized with no little horror, meant that she’d never understood Achamian himself—not truly. To be used night after night. To be debased by hungers vast, ancient, and rutting. How could a whore fail to see the outrage that had been heaped upon his soul?
You are my morning, Esmi … my dawn light.
What could it mean? For a man who lived and relived the ruin of all, what could it mean to awake to her touch, to her face? Where had he found the courage? The trust?
I was his morning.
Esmenet felt it then, overpowering her, and in the strange fashion of moving souls, she struggled to ward it away. But it was too late. For what seemed the first time, she understood: his pointless urgency, his desperation to be believed, his haggard love, his short-winded compassion—shadows of the Apocalypse, all. To witness the dissolution of nations, to be stripped night after night of everything cherished, everything fair. The miracle was that he still loved, that he still recognized mercy, pity … How could she not think him strong?
She understood, and it terrified her, for it was a thing too near to love.
That night, she dreamed that she floated over the deeps, stranded in the heart of some nameless sea. Terror pulled at her, like rocks bound about her ankles. But when she peered down, she could only see shadows in the blackening water beyond her feet. They bewitched her with their almost-clarity. Ponderous and vast, coiling about enormities. Though at first she refused to countenance it, her eyes gradually adjusted, and the monstrous forms became more and more distinct. Never had she felt so small, so exposed. The entire sea, beyond all the drowned horizons, lay placid and sun-green above black-boiling deeps. Flexing movement. Great milky eyes. Palisades of translucent teeth. And there, pale and naked, floating like a tuft through the midst of it … Achamian.
His arm waved dead in the current.
Suddenly she was gasping and shaking in Kellhus’s perfumed embrace. He shushed her, stroked hair from her eyes, explained that it was all a nightmare.
The desperation with which she held him shocked her. “I don’t want to share you,” she whispered, kissing the soft curls about his neck.
“Nor I you,” he said.
She had never told him about Achamian, about their kiss that horrid night with Proyas and Xinemus. But it was not a secret between them—merely something unspoken. She had spent hours pondering his silence, and hours more cursing her own. Why, when Kellhus had so consistently coaxed her every weakness from her, would he pass over this one in silence? But she dared not ask. Especially not while labouring through The Sagas.
She could see it all so clearly now. The derelict cities. The smoking temples. The strings of dead that marked the slave roads to Golgotterath. She followed the Nonmen Erratics as they rode across the countryside hunting survivors. She saw the Sranc digging up the stillborn and burning them on raised pyres. She watched it all from afar, more than two thousand years too late.
Never had she read anything so dark, so despairing, or so glorious. It seemed poison had been poured into wonder’s own decanter. This, she thought time and again, is his night …
And though she tried to beat the words from her heart, they rose nonetheless, as cold as accusatory truth, as relentless as earned affliction. I was his morning.
One evening, shortly before completing the last of the cantos, she happened upon Achamian sitting oblivious on a tilted table of stone, soaking his feet in the green of the Nazimel River. A gladness of heart struck her, so sudden and so simple that she actually gasped. Her dismay was equally abrupt, and far more complicated. She would have called out something like, “Killing the river now, are we?” for the man was nothing if not ripe. She would have plopped her bum alongside him, traded lame jokes as they swished the water together. She would have quietly crept up behind him and shouted “Look out!” in his ear. But now, just watching him seemed … menacing.
It was his fault for dying! If only he had stayed, if only Xinemus had said nothing of the Library, if only her hand hadn’t lingered in Kellhus’s lap … She felt his heart hush for terror.
Esmi, he had said the night of his return from the dead, “it’s me … Me.”
Beyond him a band of Thunyeri stripped nude, hopping as they struggled with their leggings. One of them ran howling, vaulted from a boulder into the burnished water. On the far shore, where the water trilled across gravel shallows, several women—slaves laundering clothes—held their sides in laughter. Out where the shade of the catalpa trees reached across the water, the Thunyeri broke the surface with a triumphant roar. Either ignoring the ruckus or insensible to it, Achamian leaned forward to scoop water into his palms. He splashed it across his face, grimaced and blinked. Sunlight winked from the black curls of his beard.
As though stunned, he stared into the waters, opening and shutting his eyes.
She had the abrupt sensation of awakening, as if the past months had been naught but one of those devious nightmares that somehow cloaked acts of horror in thoughtless normality. She had never succumbed to Kellhus. She had never repudiated Achamian. And she could call out, “Akka!”
But it was no dream.
Kellhus ran his warm palm from her shoulder to her breast, and she gasped as he pinched her nipple. Then his hand swept down across her belly to the bone-smooth curve of her hip, along her outer thigh, then around … inside. She raised and spread her legs … and Akka wept, clawed his beard in horror and disbelief. “Esmi!” he cried—he shrieked. “Esmi, please! It’s me! It’s me!
“I’m alive.”
Tears had blurred him into the sepia glare. She stood upon stony earth and yet she plummeted, for she understood that her betrayal was without bottom, that her infidelity was without
compare. The buzzing thoughts, the flush through face and thighs, that afternoon when Kellhus had accidentally brushed her breast. The hammering heart, the stinging breath, that night when Kellhus had hardened against the touch of her hand. The secret looks, the wanton reveries. The wonder of awakening beside him. The slick warmth between her legs when all was desert dry. The rapture of taking him, inside her knees, her womb—her heart. The strength of him, bearing into her. The moans.
The horror in Achamian’s eyes.
Who was that base and treacherous woman? For Esmenet knew she could never do such a thing. She simply wasn′t capable. Not to Akka. Not him!
Then she recalled her daughter, somewhere out there across the seas. Sold into slavery.
Reaching back to hook a sandal, Achamian pulled a foot from the water. He hunched against his knee, began lacing the leather strings. There was resignation in his manner, and tragedy too, as though his acts were both aimless and irresistible. Breathless, her hands pressed to her belly, Esmenet stole away.
She abandoned him by the river, a sole survivor of the Apocalypse, a man grieving his single trust, his one beauty.
Mourning the whore, Esmenet.
That night she returned to The Sagas, slack of limb and heart. She wept when she finished the final canto …
The pyres gutted, the towers fallen and black,
The foeman glutted, our glory slung ’cross his back,
The world’s keel broken, our blood thinner than our tears.
The story spoken, as though the dead possessed ears.
She wept and she whispered, “Akka.” For she was his world, and all lay in ruin.
Akka. Akka, please …
According to Nonman legend, the falling of the Incû-Holoinas, the Ark-of-the-Skies, had cracked the world’s mantle, striking wedges into the endless dark. Seswatha now knew this legend to be true.