Over the years, her husband had ceased being many things to Esmenet. But he was a miracle still.
The Matriarch of the Cult of Yatwer wept as a child might, snuffling and mumbling, “F-f-forgive … F-f-forgive meeeee …” Over and over.
“Comfort her,” Kellhus said to his half-brother. Nodding in obeisance, Maithanet stood and crouched at the wailing woman’s side.
Smiling, the Aspect-Emperor turned to Esmenet and reached out his hand. He spoke the sun-fiery words. She clutched two of his outstretched fingers, fell into his pulsing embrace. She felt the open spaces about them collapsing, dropping in sheets of ethereal fabric, falling away.
His light consumed her …
… and they were alone together, in the cool gloom of their private apartments. His legs crumpled, and he leaned and lurched against her. Grunting, Esmenet helped him stagger to their bed.
“Wife …” was all he said, rolling onto his back even though he still wore his sword, Certainty, sheathed across his shoulder blades. He raised a heavy hand to his forehead.
More air than light filtered in from the seaward balconies. The rooms were broad and surprisingly low-ceilinged, articulated by a series of steps that divided the bedroom proper from the lower regions. The furnishings were elegant and, with the exception of the crimson-cushioned bed, spare. She often wondered if her antipathy to ornament was more a result of the maddening complexities of her new life or a pining for the simple squalour of her old.
“How many?” she asked, knowing that he could only translocate the space of a horizon, and only then to places he had long studied from a distance or to places he had actually been. He had literally travelled all the way from the Istyuli Plains horizon by horizon.
“Many.”
She found herself looking away, blinking. The profile of various cities frescoed the walls, creating the pale illusion that the room occupied some impossible space over Invishi, Nenciphon, Carythusal, Aöknyssus, and Oswenta. Esmenet had commissioned them several years previous—as a physical reminder of her position in political space. It was a decision she had long since regretted.
Simple, her soul whispered. I must make things simple.
“You came …” she began, shocked to find she was already crying. “You came as s-soon as you heard?” She knew this could not be true. Each and every night Mandate Far-Callers spoke with him in his dreams, apprised him of all that happened on the Andiamine Heights and elsewhere. He had come because of the situation with the Yatwerians, because of Sharacinth. Not because of his idiot son.
There were no accidents with Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
He sat up on the edge of the bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world husband smell, wracked with sobs.
“We’ve been cursed!” she gasped. “Cursed!”
Kellhus gently pressed her back into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found herself drawing cool and soothing air.
“Misfortune,” he said. “Nothing more, Esmi.”
When had his voice become a drug?
“But isn’t that what the White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have this-this terrible feeling—such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas! Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they’re saying in the streets? Do you know that some of them actually celebrate! That—”
“You must take no action against them,” he said with stern compassion—the perfect tone. He always spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks of desire and confusion. “Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread, too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too long as it stands. Golgotterath must be overcome before the No-God is resurrected. The immediate ever clouds the far, and desire ever twists reason to its own ends. I know these concerns seem to blot out all other considerations—”
“Seem? Seem? Kellhus! Kellhus! Our son is dead!”
Her voice pealed raw across the polished stone hollows.
Silence. Where for others the lack of response augured wounds scored or truths too burdensome to ignore or dismiss, for her husband it meant something altogether different. His silence was always one with the world about it, monolithic in the way of framing things. Without exception it said, Hear the words you have spoken. You. It was never, ever, the mark of error or incapacity.
Which was why, perhaps, she found him so easy to worship and so difficult to love.
Then he uttered her name, “Esmi …”
“Esmi,” spoken in a voice so warm, so laced with compassion, that she found herself once again crying freely. He kissed her scalp and hair, a divine monster. “Shhhh … I’m not asking you to take comfort in abstractions, for there is none. Even still, the Great Ordeal remains the end that maps all others. We cannot allow anything, anyone, to take precedence over it. Not riots. Not the collapse of the New Empire …” It was as if she stared into her own eyes, his look was so canny—save that he knew her so much better than she knew herself.
“Not even the death of our son.”
She had understood this all along. His tone had told her so.
A breeze bellied the dust-violet sheers, drawing them over the hard line of the Meneanor Sea. A finger of light flickered across the mural of Carythusal.
“How much misfortune must there be?” she heard herself crying.
The White-Luck hunt us … Hunts us …
“All of the woe the world has to offer, if need be. So long as we overcome the only one that is fatal.”
The Second Apocalypse.
She was beating his chest softly, pressing her forehead into the jasminescented silk. She could feel the reptilian imprint of the nimil-mail beneath. Looking up through tears, he seemed a towering glow and shadow both. “But it’s you they hunt! What? Do the Gods want a Second Apocalypse? Do they want the world shut against them?”
She had chosen Kellhus over Achamian. Kellhus! She had chosen her womb. She had chosen power and sumptuous ease. She had chosen to lay her hand upon the arm of a living god … Not this! Not this!
“Come, Esmi. I know Maithanet has explained this to you.”
“B-but it seems … it s-s-seems …”
“Most live on the edge of heartbeats, trusting their betters and the blind eyes of habit to see them further. A rare few can apprehend the span of entire lives. But you and I do not possess either luxury, Esmi. We must act according to the dictates of the ages, or there will be no ages for anyone to live. And this makes us appear cold, merciless, even monstrous, not only to others and ourselves, but to the Hundred as well. We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden that the Gods begrudge.”
She found herself on the surface of his voice, for once hearing it with a musician’s cold ear: the tunnelling harmonics, the resonance that forced it into unheard immediacy, the papery rasp that raised it outside the circle of the world.
The voice that had conquered the First Holy War, then all the Three Seas. The voice of the King of Kings, the mortal echo of the God of Gods … The voice that had conquered first her thighs and then her heart.
She thought of that final afternoon with Achamian, the day that Holy Shimeh fell.
“I haven’t the strength! I ca-can’t b-bear losing any-any-m-more …”
“You have the strength.”
“Let Maithanet rule! He’s your brother. He shares your gifts. He should rule …”
“He is Shriah. He cannot be more.”
“But why? Why?”
“Esmi, you have my love, my trust. I know that you have the strength to do this.”
A gust from over the dark sea. The violet sheers roiled and billowed, parted like gossamer lips.
“The White-Luck,” he whispered in a voice that was the sky, the curve of all horizons, “shall break against you.”
/> She gazed up at his face through sting and tears, and it seemed that in it she could see every face, the mien of all those who had bent upon her in Sumna, when she had kept a whore’s bed.
“How? How can you know?”
“Because the anguish that makes mud of all your thoughts, because the fear that stains your days, because all your regret and anger and loneliness …” A haloed hand cupped her cheek. Blue eyes sounded her to the bottommost fathoms.
“All this makes you pure.”
Iothiah …
“Cursed!” Nannaferi cried. “Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!”
All old voices failed in some manner; they cracked or they quavered, or they dwindled with the loss of the wind that once empowered them. But for Psatma Nannaferi, the breaking of her voice, which had once made her family weep for its melodic purity, seemed to reveal more than it marred, as though it were but paint, hoary and moulted, covering something furious and elemental. It struck over the surrounding clamour, reached deep into the packed recesses of the Catacombs.
Hundreds had gathered, filling the Charnal Hall with sweat and exertion, crowding the adjacent tunnels, stamping the detritus across the floors. Torches bobbed like buoys at sea, casting ovals of illumination across the bowed ceilings, revealing pockets of expression in the shadowy masses: smiles and howls, mouths fixed about wonder—disbelieving wonder. Smoke pooled in the dark gaps between the lintels. Fingers of light probed the niche-pocked walls and the innumerable urns packed within, cracked and leaning, limned in ages of dust.
“Cursed be the thief!” Nannaferi shrieked. “For he who dines on the fortune of others is a bringer of famine!”
She stood naked before them, wearing her skin like a beggar’s rags. White-painted sigils sheathed her arms to the pit and her legs to the crotch, but her torso and genitals gleamed, adorned only in sweat. She stood withered and diminutive before them, and yet she towered, so that it seemed that her blood-soaked hair should brush the low ceilings.
And he sat before her, naked and immobile on a beaten chair. A slave’s chair.
The White-Luck Warrior.
“Cursed be the homicide, the murderer, he who lies in wait to slay his brother!”
She parted her hairless legs, paused so that all could see slick lines of blood running from her shining pudenda. And she grinned a proud and vicious grin, as though to say, Yes! Witness the strength that is my womb! The Great Giver, the Son Bearer, the gluttonous Phallus Eater!
Yes! The Blood of my Fertility flows still!
The ecstatics immediately before her wept at the miracle, stared with the eyes of the strangled, tore their hair and gnashed their teeth. And their rapture became grounds for the rapture of the cohort behind them, and so on, through tunnel after forking tunnel, until a thousand voices roared through the closeted deeps.
“Cursed be whore!” she cried, not needing to read the text, the Sinyatwa, on the scuffed stone at her feet. “Cursed be she who lies with men for gold over seed, for power over obedience, for lust over love!”
She bent as though to abuse herself. With the blade of her right palm, she scraped a line of blood, drawing it up to the creases of her swollen sex. She huffed in pleasure, then raised her bloody palm for all to see.
“Cursed be the false—the deceivers of men! Cursed be the Aspect-Emperor!”
There are pitches of passion that are holy simply for the intensity of their expression. There is worship beyond the caged world of words. Psatma Nannaferi’s hatred had long ago burned away the impurities, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the homicidal outrage of the betrayed, the unwavering fury of the degraded and the dispossessed. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way murder and fire can cleanse.
And at long last she had found her knife.
She stepped over the scriptures, pressed the slack pouches of her breasts against the sweat of his neck and shoulders. She reached around him with her arms. Holding her right palm like a palette, she dipped the third finger of her left hand into her issue, then marked him: a horizontal line along each of his cheeks.
They gleamed menstrual crimson. Wurrami, the ancient counterpart of the thraxami, the lines of ash used by mourning mothers.
“Ever!” she cried. “Ever have we dwelt in the shadow of the Whip and Club. Ever have we been despised—we, the Givers! We, the weak! But the Goddess knows! Knows why they beat us, why they leash us, why they starve and violate us! Why they do everything save kill!”
She prowled around him, raised her buttocks across his hips. With a shrill cry, she thrust down, encompassed him to his grunting foundation. A broken chorus of cries passed through the congregation, as the penetration was multiplied in heart and eye.
“Because without Givers,” she shouted in a voice hoarse for passion—doubly broken, “there is nothing for them to take! Because without slaves, there can be no masters! Because we are the wine that they imbibe, the bread that they eat, the cloth that they soil, the walls that they defend! Because we are the truth of their power! The prize they would conquer!”
And she could feel it: he the centre of her, and she the circumference of him—an ache encircled by fire. Hoe and Earth! Hoe and Earth! She was an old crone splayed across a boy, her eyes the red of blood, his the white of seed. The crowd before them bucked and heaved, a cauldron of avid faces and sweat-slicked limbs.
“We shall stoke!” she moaned and roared. “We shall foment! We shall teach those who give what it means to take!”
And she slid, drawing her loose buttocks across the plate of his abdomen. His was the body of a man newly wed—a father of but one child. Slender, golden for the perfection of its skin. Not yet bent to the harshness of the world, to the toil that all giving exacts.
Not yet strong.
“There is the knife that cuts,” she croaked, “and there is the sea that drowns. Always we have been the latter. But now! Now that the White-Luck has come to us, we are both, my Sisters! On our seas they shall founder! And on our knife they shall fall!”
She rode the hook of him harder and harder, until he convulsed and screamed. The earth shook—the unborn kicking at the Mother’s womb. Gravel streamed from the ceilings. And she could feel the hot flood him, the outward thrust. And then, with his slumping, a kind of inward breath—and it was her turn to jerk rigid and scream. She could feel her strength fill him, the knitting of muscle across his frame, the scarring, the aging strong of a body wracked by years in the world. The soft hands that clawed her chest became horned with calluses, thick with throttling strength, even as her scrotal breasts rounded, lifted in the memory of a more tender youth. The smooth cheek against her neck became leathery with unlived seasons, gravelly with the memory of another’s pox.
And as youth washed through her, drawing a thousand thousand wrinkles into smooth swales of skin, the mad faces encircling her surged forward, clutching at the sodden floor beneath their feet …
Beaten and battered she had been tipped in libation. And now the dread Goddess raised her, a bowl cast of gold.
A vessel. A grail. A cup filled with the Waters-Most-Holy. The Blood and the Seed.
“Cursed!” she shrieked in a singer’s heart-cutting voice, high and pure, yet warmed by the memory of her authoritarian rasp. She watched as the Blood of her Fertility was passed among the throngs, a never-diminishing pool that was passed from palm to palm. She watched the Ur-Mother’s children mark their cheeks with the red line of hatred …
“Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!”
CHAPTER TEN
Condia
Look unto others and ponder the sin and folly you find there. For their sin is your sin, and their folly is your folly. Seek ye the true reflecting pool? Look to the stranger you despise, not the friend you love.
—TRIBES 6:42, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-th
e-Tusk), Condia
The Istyuli Plains dominated the heart of Eärwa, running from the northern back of the Hethantas to the southern spurs of the Yimaleti. It seemed hard to believe that this region had birthed dynasties and toppled empires before the First Apocalypse and the coming of the Sranc, consisting as it did of nothing more than endless sheaves of arid grassland.
In the days of Far Antiquity, a schism opened between the western Norsirai tribes, the High Norsirai, who under the tutelage of the Nonmen raised the first great literate civilization of Men along the banks of the River Aumris, and their eastern kin, the White Norsirai, who clung to the nomadic ways of their ancient fathers. For an entire age the Istyuli formed the barbaric hinterland of the High Norsirai nations that rose and fell about the great river cities of the west: Trysë, Sauglish, Umerau, and others. The tribes of White Norsirai who roamed and warred across the plains sometimes raided, sometimes bartered with, and continually despised their earth-tilling cousins to the west. The fewer the roads the harsher the codes, as the ancient Kûniüric proverb had it. And periodically, when united beneath the tyranny of some powerful tribe or personality, they invaded and conquered.
To the north of Sakarpus, the Istyuli Plains still bore the name of one of those conquering peoples, the Cond.
Nothing remained to mark their passing: The Cond, like most pastoral peoples, were primarily remembered for works destroyed rather than works raised. For the Men of the Ordeal, only the name connected the sloped terrain to the legends of their long-dead glory. They were accustomed to the rumour of lost peoples and nations, for their own lands had stacked them deep. But there was a melancholy attached to their thoughts of the Cond. Where the far antique peoples of the Three Seas had been replaced by other peoples, the end of the wild-haired horsemen of the Cond had been the end of Men on these plains. Proof of this lay in those signs of habitation the Inrithi did find: great heaps of bone sucked to the marrow, and swaths of turf overturned not by plows, but by claws hungry for grubs.