They named the tree the Blood Weeper, and its gloomy image would trouble them all in the wee hours of the following nights, beckoning as a whore might, warding as a leper must—the last tree they would ever see.
The Crossing required two full days. Five lines were strung across the wairing, each bound at intervals to iron poles that had been driven into the water-kicking rock; five tenuous threads that transformed the wairing into the neck of a wrecked lute, strings knotted by labouring, struggling forms, legs braced, steps infirm for the blast of waters, backs heaped with armour and supplies. Many bore the butchered arms and legs of Sranc, meat scavenged from the fields to the south. The limbs were bound at the wrists or ankles to short segments of rope that could be slung over shoulders or across necks, conspiring to create what, from a certain distance at least, appeared a most ghastly apparel, a swinging mantle of what seemed the arms and legs of women and children, given the creature’s lithe and pallid hairlessness. Those who fell from the upstream lines would often spin into others, creating a flailing avalanche, dozens of Men reaching out from wagging blooms of severed, Sranc limbs.
No fewer than three hundred and sixty-eight souls perished for mishap. Few names of note were lost, among them Mud Waigwa, a monstrous Holca thane who attempted to drag ten Sranc carcasses across the wairing with him; and Lord Urbommû Hamazrel, one of Nurbanû Soter’s martial advisors, who simply stumbled, let slip the rope, and was ripped away.
As the Ordealmen gained the mire of the far shore, their brothers pulled them gasping from the collapsed embankments. Still sodden, they were funnelled into packed avenues, hounded by shouts to keep moving, always keep moving. So they stumbled onward, wringing hair and beard, pawing brow and eyes. A more amorphous congregation engulfed them, an immense gyre of souls likewise lurching, sorting between backs and shoulders, calling out to unseen kinsmen. The lifeless ground beneath their feet would be all they could see of the legendary Field Appalling. And it seemed more carnival than invasion, at least until the bristling masses thinned and parted, yielding space to cast aside their grisly encumbrances and find breast-heaving respite either leaning against or dropping to their knees. To a soul they peered into the west, across the vacancy that was Agongorea seen from Agongorea.
Distances piled upon distances as with any other vista, but the land was so scalloped as to possess an edge, to scrape as an oyster shell against the habits of the eye. Men are but one more fruit of the earth, at least apart from the divinity that animates them. To gaze upon land, any land, is to gaze upon what can sustain Men. But to peer across the Field Appalling was to look upon a land that suffered no life whatsoever, that rebuked, not simply Men, but their very foundation. “No ants,” the Southron Men would say, disguising their unease by pretending to marvel. “The land has no ants.” And they shuddered for the premonition of poison.
The sun lay as a crimson bulb upon the horizon by time the final contingents, Shigeki and Nansur for the most part, had “leapt the Knife,” as the Ordealmen called the act of crossing the wair. The Lords of the Ordeal raised greasy bowls in slicked fingers to toast their Exalt-General in the Umbilicus that night. “Steersman,” they called him, a blessed name, for despite the grievous toll, despite the losses of countrymen, even friends, it seemed a miraculous thing to deliver souls so numerous and unruly across the honed edge of the Sursa. If anything, the eulogy given for the Palatine of Kisht-ni-Secharib occasioned more relish than solemnity among those gathered. Rumour said that Urbommû Adokarsa, Lord Hamazrel’s younger brother and nominal successor could not stop grinning as he related the events that saw his brother drown.
Nersei Proyas called on the pits to be fired, the carcasses to be hoisted, so they might plot their glorious final march sated, their hearts clear of hunger. But such never happened. Called on to plan nothing less than Salvation, the Lords of the Ordeal traded morsels and howls instead. They lingered deep into the wiles of night, recounting stories of mishaps witnessed, drownings rumoured or seen. And Meat or no Meat, how could they not roar in exultation? How could they not set aside their care, if only for a span, and glory in the cruelties they had survived and inflicted?
The Horde was destroyed. They stood upon the fabled shores of Agongorea, the limit of the great Field Appalling. Soon they would spy the very Horns of Golgotterath! Soon they would overthrow them! Deliver the God’s own fury to the Unholy Consult.
And so they set aside their care and rejoiced, indulged acts that would have seen them shamed and murdered, stricken from the ancestor lists of their progeny …
Were they back home.
Faces were always more real. This was why they appeared scowling or grinning in so many things, from the mottle of fired bricks or the staining of sodden plasters, to the deformities of trees and the grace of clouds. All things possessed a face; one need only coax or coerce it from hiding. And as much as faces betrayed the kinship between Men and the World, it betokened their kinship to one another far more. The face both regarded and was regarded, bold before foes and downcast before lovers. Bodies were but impressions, glimpses stretched to cover the whole. Ever did Men turn face to face.
And it was this that Proyas saw leaning into the small heap of flame, faces … faces bleached in his combusting vision, beards larded, cheeks lacquered, sockets housing twin incendiary glitters … faces exulting, grinning beneath a dark look, about a famished bite, at the daring malice of some brother … grimacing, shrieking, whipping in mammalian extremis … faces thrown like rags against balled fists … faces cracking, folding into cloth and mud an—
“That is not for you to do, Uncle.”
Proyas yanked back from the Seeing-Flame, marvelled as always that he could feel its heat only as he leaned away. He pawed his own mien to convince incredulous fingers that he had not blistered then turned. A warlike figure stood at the threshold to the Aspect-Emperor’s spare chamber, otherworldly for the thousands of dancing tangerine lines the firelight cast across his Ishroi arms and armour. The leather-panelled imagery hung as shadowy apparitions about him, more history and scripture, lost to the mummery of the immediate.
“You should leave the Hearth be.”
“Your father …” Proyas gasped, staring wide at the flame-etched phantom that was Anasûrimbor Kayûtas … his Prophet’s son, the boy he had all but raised. “He wanted me to see.”
The air became thick with the unthinkable.
“We are exempt, Uncle, can you not see?”
The figure neared … so like him, only cold with nimil, alien with ghoulish insignia, afire with mirrored splinters. The lips beckoned from the corn-silk mat that was his beard.
“What misdeed,” Kayûtas said, his voice lowered to a growl, “can be committed in the shadow of such a foe? What wickedness? The license to do evil—this has ever been the great prize of the righteous!”
The young man closed a callused hand about his aching handle, bore him up to the brink.
“What did Father tell you?”
The Exalt General stood riven, bent crooked to some essential asymmetry, like a broken bow fiercely drawn. His eyes fluttered. He sneered about drool. And it seemed that he cared not what happened … so long as there was blood.
“That—” Proyas began only to pause on a thick swallow. “That the Men must … must eat…”
The Prince-Imperial smiled in impish triumph.
“See?” the hand said, for that was all that existed now—mouths and hands.
“What does it matter, becoming Sranc,” cruel fingers cooed …
So long as we save the World.
Did you hear? More shrieking.
I love the crack of those fat teeth in the fire—the sound of something precious heeled.
It burns … burns as a beacon within you.
But where char meets the fat … that is what quickens!
Your hatred. Your will to tear down, destroy.
Sweet, yet with the salts of fired life!
It comes as a clawing, I know … A wolve
n panic.
The fat seething about the crisping skin … Yes!—it lies in the juice of the beast.
The Meat is obscuring us—can’t you see? Like a cataract of the inner eye.
And that beard of sizzling froth!
Scratching us into something … too scrawny for human fetters—too quick!
The way it hangs like spit.
The residue of strife lay strewn across the lifeless plain.
King Iswolor rested out there, his bones as old as Ûmerau. So too did those belonging to the legendary Tynwur, the Bull of Sauglish, sent to his death for the jealously of King Carû-Ignaini of Trysë. His skeletal remains also lay exposed in eternal indignity, blunt and elephantine in a ring of layered Sranc helter …
No bones found burial in this land.
No bones found burial because nothing grew. No thistles. No amaranth. No lichens graced the rare bare stone. Black stumps yet stubbled the outermost swath of the landscape, pilings of rotted obsidian, remnants of the arboreal forest blotted by the arrival of the Incû-Holoinas. Lying in the lee of the cataclysm, the plain had been mortared in ash, a powder as fine as pumice but toxic to all life, and perpetually sodden, like the earth about waters. One could clench it in his fist, cast it skyward, but it would not blow. The wind whisked and whistled across the bleak horizons as though over a vast shield of metal.
The keen-eyed swore that gold flecked the unholy humus. And indeed on certain angles of sunlight, it gleamed in the corners of one’s eye.
The Men of Kûniûri had called it Agongorea, which the scribes of the Three Seas, ever slaves to their manuals, translated as ‘the Fields-of-Woe.’ But Agongorea was itself a translation of the Ihrimsû name the Far Antique Norsirai had learned from their Siqu teachers: Vishrûnûl, the Nonmen called it—the Field Appalling. Their whiter bones lay beneath the wrack of Men, the splintered and charred residuum of their millennial war against the Inchoroi: the nocturnal slaughter following the disaster of Imogirion; the bitter glory of Isal’imial, the battle that cast the last of the Inchoroi and their bestial hordes upon Min-Uroikas for the final time; and much more, enough to transform the flats and the valleys into a vast crypt floor.
The rain had stopped. Dawn bullied the last of the clouds from the sky, and the Interval tolled sonorous through the stone-combed wash of the River Sursa. The Ordealman stirred from their uneasy slumber, rose to join those already gazing and blinking at the sunlit revelation. Many peered, turned to their fellows with anxious queries. The distance, once uniform in its cadaverous pallor, was now sheeted with smashed pottery, grey embroidered in great columns and arcs and rings of human gravel.
The dead, they were told. The dead cobbled their way. “We march into a tomb …” the impious muttered, though under their breaths, lest the Judges hear.
None spoke of the debauched night. They skirted the corpses and the flotsam of brutality, avid to move on. Men squared their kits, gorged on the remnants of the feast. Within a watch, the clarion horns of the Three Seas sounded, and with hymns to their Aspect-Emperor kindled in innumerable hoarse throats, the Holy Host of Hosts embarked. The dead were left as daybreak had found them. There was no question of counting them, for they, like the crimes that had maimed and murdered them, charged a toll too high to be permitted to exist.
The Great Ordeal passed as a migratory cloud into the vacancy of Agongorea. That night they camped across what the ancient Norsirai had named Creärwi, or the Bald. For the first time, the Holy Host of Hosts trod upon the very same earth as had the ancient Ordeal assembled by Anasûrimbor Celmomas. The Judges passed as wild hermits among the Ordealmen, vestments soiled, eyes overbright, exhorting them to rejoice for reaching the very Bald named in scripture! They bid them feast, for never had salvation lain so near! “The Horns!” they cried. “Soon the Horns of Golgotterath shall prick the horizon!”
And so once again was wickedness transmuted into worship, atrocity into praise. Night fell as dishevelled hair, a fraught reprieve from the sun’s tyranny. The Nail of Heaven hung as a bared knife pending judgment, and the sprawling desolation of Agongorea gleamed as though alloyed with diamonds. The errant Sons of the Three Seas gorged upon their cherished foe. Pavilions became fuel, and sizzling shanks were held out upon spears over the fires. The singularity of the night consumed them, a darkness and an appetite out of joint with the passing of the days, a welling up from oblivion. Orgiastic excess, priapic violence, shrieks and gales of vicious hilarity—these blew through them, licentious gusts that commanded fists, mouths, and hands. Compelled crimes—both of the meat and for the meat. Only the exhaustion of their supply bridled the evil intensity of the bacchanal. For this was the night they consumed the last of the Meat and began slaughtering the first of the remaining ponies.
The morning saw the Ordealmen anxious for hunger. A strange rictus seized the faces of those few who, either for wretched luck or station, had gone entirely without, a grin that spoke of toothless hate and death in the desert sun.
Proyas looked out from the fires of the hallowed Tribe of Truth and despite his revulsion, exulted in the countless sins he saw.
Images slick and hard and labile, fixing him, whipping his heart with tantrums, meat pummelling meat, bone breaking bone, sweet with visions of stink, shining with exertion, excreta. It was the meat that winced, the meat that battled then struggled then twitched and curled.
Nothing could be more deep.
And yet Men chose breath over meat in all things fundamental. Everywhere, they hung what was holy upon the ephemeral and the fleeting, things too thin to age, too numb to suffer, or too quick to need flee. They would sooner celebrate their own exhalation than submit to the bottomless fact of their meat.
Fey fools! What was the soul if not a veil drawn by Men to spare themselves the indignities of their stink? A gown always unmudded for being always unseen!
Crouched naked in his Lord’s chamber, the Exalt-General rocked and cackled and screamed.
“Yes!” he cried. “That’s it! With the knife!”
The God was inhuman … A spider.
Of nothing and for no one.
While the Meat, of its own accord, grew dark and swollen for beauty.
The Interval did not sound the following morning.
The sun found the encampment strewn across the vast bleak, the capital of a savage and refugee nation.
They rose one by one, lurched from their tents and shelters, more the artifice of potters than Men. Not a soul had dreamed. A breathlessness stubbed their hearts for glimpsing the wages their fellows had paid for their bliss. But a void dwelt where the clamour of trauma and unspeakable transgression should have been, a reflexive blindness to what they had become …
Were becoming.
“Our Prophet has fled us …” some dared whisper to their brothers.
And so too had the Meat.
With infirm haste, the Ordealmen made ready, toiled to expense the fund of horror within them. But it was the prospect of the days ahead, not the insanity of the nights passed, that moved them. The Meat had been exhausted! And now they marched away from fields where the carcasses lay heaped. What did the count of days matter, when rot simply made skinnies taste sweet? To simply think this was to be stricken to the pit. Skin flushed moist. Scalps pricked. Everywhere one looked, Men could be seen swallowing, endlessly chasing the mirage of charred and larded morsels from their tongues. And they hurried, lest sloth further license their wistful imaginings … make incarnate what could not bear the shaming sun. There is a way that Men lean against the hungers that wrack them, an angle that leverages their greater nature. Ever are Men raised upright by what twists their soul. There is a fanaticism that radiates in proportion to the monstrosities concealed.
The Holy Host of Hosts set out without order or cohesion, rancid flocks moving as though condensed in the same oil, drifting in runnels and clots across the pubis of the land. Bones cracked beneath innumerable heels. The sky claimed the stunning emptiness that makes for sharp autum
nal days, a wintry premonition. The air forever seemed too thin to feed the fire creeping about their limbs. Not a voice was raised in conversation, let alone song or psalter. The march, rather, became one of reflection and private remonstrance, an occasion to enumerate all the accursed errors that had delivered them to such disaster …
What would they eat?
The Ordealmen wandered across the horizon-spanning exhumation. Souls teemed across every vista, Tydonni with their beards cast over their left shoulder, Ainoni dragging their shields like harrows, Nansur Columnaries with their packs teetering on their heads. Despite their unkempt appearance, they toiled with hale vigour, an alacrity rendered fearsome for their expressions.
The remaining horsemen roped ahead of the migration. They stared across what seemed a more elemental earth, a landscape flayed and whittled, peeled, a ground skinned to the foundation, so that for some, it seemed they wandered the very Floor of Creation. Even the clouds, spare as they had become, seemed to whisper for reverence. Bones and dirt extended ad infinitum about them, radiating into a plate that raced the sky. Many found solace in the desolation, hallucinating evidence of design in its simplicity. Never, it seemed, had they been less embroiled. Their shadows leaned in their saddles, peering. To cross Agongorea was to autopsy all landscapes, to cut down to the essential, to be stranded with implacable emptiness … and the life required to conquer it.