Everything possesses a nagging lightness. The colours, the maroon swirls of different weeds drying and dying, the patches of sienna dust, the black of some recent grass fire. The swagger of the land piling without height, as if some god had poured mud atop mud just to watch the edges spread over the horizon. The drama of the sky, the clouds climbing in ranges, here tangled into luxuriant locks, there swept up and around in a snowy mélange of wings. A kind of disbelief plagues everything she sees, as if existence were foam, and the world nothing more than a titanic bubble …
What was happening?
“You have the look,” a voice gurgles from behind.
She turns and sees teeth and gums, eyes pinched into besotted creases. Sarl, somehow shadowy though all the world is bright, looking like a filthy gnome.
“You have the look … Aye!”
She can hear phlegm snap in his cackle. The peril of speaking to madmen, she realizes, is that it permits them to speak to you.
“Don’t dispute me, girl, it’s true. You have the look of a path long mudded. Am I wrong? Am I? Tell me, girl. How many men have marched ’cross your thighs?”
She should hate him for saying this, but she lacks the inner wind. When has feeling become an effort?
“Many fools. But men … Very few.”
“So you admit it!”
She smiles out of some coquettish reflex, thinking she might use his carnal interest to learn more about Lord Kosoter.
“What am I admitting?”
The grin drops from his face, enough for her to glimpse a sliver of his bloodshot eyes. He leans close with a kind of wonder—too close. She fairly gags at his buzzing reek.
“She burned a city for you—didn’t she?”
“Who?” she replies numbly.
“Your mother. The Holy Empress.”
“No,” she laughs in faux astonishment. “But I appreciate the compliment!”
Sarl laughs and nods in turn, his eyes once again squeezed into invisibility. Laughs and nods, trailing ever farther behind her …
What was happening?
She is not who she is …
She is already two women, each estranged from the other. There is the Mimara who knows, who watches the old motives, the old bonds, gradually disintegrate. And there is the Mimara who has gathered all of the old concerns and set them in a circle about an unspeakable pit.
She is already two women, but she needs only touch her bowing abdomen to become three.
They laugh at her for all the food she eats. More and more, she is ravenous come evening. She chides the Wizard for loitering when he should be preparing the humble field Cants he uses to cook their spoiling game. She scolds Xonghis when he fails to secure them enough game.
Whatever speech they possess leaks away as the sun draws down the horizon. They sit in the dust, their beards lacquered with grease, the entrails of their victims humming with flies. Vultures circle them. They sit and they wait for rising darkness … for the melodious toll of Cleric’s first words.
“I remember …”
They gather before him. Some come crawling, while others shuffle, kicking up ghostly trails of dust that the wind whips into quick oblivion.
“I remember coming down from high mountains, and treating with Mannish Kings …”
He sits cross-legged, his forearms extended across his knees, his head hanging from his shoulders.
“I remember seducing wives … healing infant princes …”
Stars smoke the arch of Heaven paint the Nonman’s slouching form in strokes of silver and white.
“I remember laughing at the superstitions of your priests.”
He rolls his head from side to side, as if the shadow he cradles possesses hands that caress his cheeks.
“I remember frightening the fools among you with my questions and astounding the wise with my answers. I remember cracking the shields of your warriors, shattering arms of bronze …”
And it seems they hear distant horns, the thunder of hosts charging, clashing.
“I remember the tribute you gave to me … The gold … the jewels … the babes that you laid at my sandalled feet.”
A hush.
“I remember the love you bore me … The hatred and the envy.”
He raises his head, blinking as if yanked from a dream inhumanly cruel for its bliss. Veins of silver fork across his cheeks … Tears.
“You die so easily!” he cries, howls, as if human frailty were the one true outrage.
He sobs, bows his head once more. His voice rises as if from a pit.
“And I never forget …”
One of the scalpers moans in carnal frustration … Galian.
“I never forget the dead.”
Then he is standing, drawn like a puppet by invisible strings. The Holy Dispensation is about to begin. Strange shouts crease and crumple the windy silence, like the yelping of leashed dogs. She can see hunger leaning in their avid eyes. She can see manly restraint give way to clutched arms and rocking gesticulations. And she does not know when this happened, how awaiting the pouch had become a carnival of fanatic declarations, or how licking a smudged fingertip had become carnal penetration.
She sits rigid and estranged, watching Cleric, yes, but watching his pouch even more. As meagre as their rations are—scarce enough to blacken the crescent of a pared fingernail—she wonders how long they have before the purse fails them altogether. Finally he towers before her, his bare chest shining with hooks of light and shadow, his outstretched finger glistening about the nub of precious black.
She cannot move.
“Mimara?” the Ishroi asks, remembering her name.
He calls to both of her selves, to the one who knows but does not care and to the one who cares but does not know.
But for once it is the third incarnation that answers …
“No,” it says. “Get that poison away from me.”
Cleric gazes at her for a solemn moment, long enough for the others to set aside their singular hunger.
There is horror in the Wizard’s look.
Lord Incariol gazes at her, his eyes watery white about coin-sized pupils. “Mimara …”
She repeats herself, finding new wind in her unaccountable resolution. “No.”
Desire, she has come to understand, is not the only bottomless thing …
There is motherhood.
She dreams that an absence binds her, a hole that claws at her very substance. Something is missing, something more precious than jewels or celebrated works, more sustaining than drink or love or even breath. Something wonderful that she has betrayed …
Then she is gasping, swallowing at sour consciousness, and blinking at the visage of Incariol leaning over her.
She does not panic, for everything seems reasonable.
“What are you doing?” she coughs.
“Watching you.”
“Yes. But why?”
Even as she asks this, she realizes that only sorcery, subtle sorcery, could have made this visitation possible. She thinks she can even sense it, or at the very least guess at its outlines, the warping of the Wizard’s incipient Wards. It was as if he had simply bent the circumference of Achamian’s conjuring, pressed into his arcane defences as if they were no more than a half-filled bladder.
“You …” the flawless face said. “You remind me … of someone … I think …”
There is something old about this reply. Not dead nation old, but doddering old … frail.
“What is it?” she asks. She does not know where this question comes from, nor which traitor gives voice to it.
“I no longer remember,” he replies with a grave whisper.
“No … The Qirri … Tell me what it is!”
The Wizard murmurs and stirs beside her.
Cleric stares at her with ancient, ancient eyes. The Nail of Heaven traces a perfect white sickle along the outer rim of his brow and skull. He has a smell she cannot identify, a deep smell, utterly unlike the human reek of
the Wizard or the scalpers. The rot that softens stone.
“Not all of my kind are buried … Some, the greatest, we burn like you.”
And she understands that she has been asking the wrong question—the wrong question all along. Not what, but who?
“Who?” she gasps. Suddenly his hand is all that exists. Heavy with power, gentle with love. Her eyes track its flying path to his hip, to the rune-stitched pouch …
“Taste …” he murmurs in tones of distant thunder. “Taste and see.”
She can feel the weight of him, the corded strength, hanging above her, and a part of her dreams she is naked and shivering.
His finger lowers toward her, pointing to something that cannot be seen …
She leans back her head, parts her lips. She closes her eyes. She can taste her breath, moist and hot, passing from her. The finger is hard and cold. She closes the pliant lobes of her mouth about it, warming and wetting its stubborn white skin. It comes alive, pressing down the centre of her tongue, tracing the line of her gums. It tastes of strength and dead fire.
In the corner of her eye she glimpses the Captain through overlapping lattices of dead grass—a wraith watching.
Above her, Cleric’s face dissolves into a porcelain blur. Relief tunnels like lightning through her, swelling the slack hollows about her heart, flushing her extremities. Thin clouds race overhead, black trimmed in starlight, swept into the shapes of wings and scythes. They lend the illusion of surface across the infinite plummet of Heaven like froth drawn along a stream.
He draws his finger back, and a reflex rises within her. She clamps her lips about his knuckle, takes the tip between her teeth, pad and nail. Her tongue soaks whatever residue remains.
He places his hand across her face, thumb against her chin, fingers along her jaw and cheek. He withdraws the penetrating finger slowly, rolling down her lower lip. The Nail of Heaven gleams along its glazed edges. He stands in a single motion, at once swift and utterly soundless. She cannot tear her eyes from him, nor can she smother the longing that wells through her—so profound the ground itself seems to move.
Her mouth tastes of ash and soot and glory …
Glory everlasting.
The old Wizard walked.
Once, while travelling between Attrempus and Aöknyssus, he saw a child of no more than ten summers fall from the willow he had climbed in the hope of stealing honey from a great hive. The child broke his neck, died in his father’s arms, mouthing inaudible words. Another time, while walking the endless paddies of the Secharib, he saw a woman accused of witchcraft stoned to death. They had bound her with rose wicks so that her struggles scored her skin. Then they cast stone after laughing stone, until she was little more than a crimson worm writhing through the mud her bleeding had conjured from the dust. And once on the road between Sumna and Momemn, he camped at the ruins of Batathent, and in the cool of morning, glimpsed the shadow of Fate cast across the First Holy War.
Adversity lay in all directions, the Nilnameshi were fond of saying. A man need only walk.
“I know what it is,” Mimara said from his side. The sun spiked his eyes when he turned to her. Even when he squinted and raised his hand, it framed her with fiery white, blackened her with encircling brilliance. She is a shadow. A judging shadow.
“The Qirri …” her silhouette continued. “I know what it is …”
An angel-of-the-sun delivering tidings of woe.
“What is it?” he asked. But not because he cared. He had outrun all caring.
“Ashes …” she almost whispered. “Ashes from the pyre.”
Something in this stirred him, as if she had kicked a long-gutted fire and discovered coals—deep burning coals.
“Ashes? Who?”
He slowed, allowing her to outrun the sun’s glare. He blinked at the immobility of her expression.
“Cû’jara Cinmoi … I think …”
A name drawn from the root of history.
There was nothing to say, so he turned to the trackless world before them. Great flocks of tern rose like steam from the far-ranging folds of dust and grasses.
The plains …
They passed like a dream.
CHAPTER
TEN
The Istyuli Plains
There is morality and there is cowardice. The two are not to be confused, even though in appearance and effect they are so often the same.
—EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES
If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders.
—ZARATHINIUS, A DEFENCE OF THE ARCANE ARTS
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
The shadows of missing things are always cold. And for Varalt Sorweel so very much was missing.
Like the way his mother would read to him in bed or how his father would pretend to lose finger-fights to him. Like laughter or hope.
Loss is at once memory—that is the kernel of its power. If you were to lose the memory with the person—the way Eskeles had said Nonmen lose—then loss would be complete, utter, and we could carry on oblivious. But no. The pain dwells in the balance of loss and retention, in losing and knowing what was lost. In being two incommensurate people, one with a father and mother, and one without. One with pride and honour …
And one without.
So the old him had continued to come up with jokes, questions, and observations to share with his father. Harweel had talked often with his son. While the new him, the orphan, would shiver, teeter, inner fingers groping for lost handholds. And that recognition, the crashing, all-encompassing cold, would strike him as if for the first time …
Your father is dead. Your people are slaves.
You are alone, a captive in the host of your enemy.
But the paradox, some would say tragedy, of human existence is that we so easily raise our lives about absence. We are bred for it. Men are forever counting their losses, hoarding them. There is meaning to be found in victimization, and no small justification. To be wronged is to be owed, to walk among debtors wherever you go.
But now even that embittered and self-righteous persona was missing … that boy.
Sorweel awoke tangled in fragmentary glimpses of the previous night. The last frantic moments with Eskeles, stranded in the very gut of Hell, the face of Serwa, hanging above a world painted in light and the shadows of spitting, gibbering violence …
Then Zsoronga’s dark and handsome face, smiling in haggard joy.
“You took a knock on the head, Horse-King. Good thing you have more skull than brain!”
White-weathered canvas framed the Successor-Prince with dull brilliance. Sorweel raised a hand as if to block out the sight of him, tried to say something snide but choked on his own throat instead. His entire body buzzed with the deprivations of the previous weeks. He felt like a wineskin squeezed to its final pulpy dregs …
The alarm, when it came, wrenched him upright …
The Horde. The Ordeal. Eskeles.
“Ho!” Zsoronga cried, nearly toppling backward from his stool.
Sorweel glanced about the stifling confines of his tent, glaring with the urgent stupor of those worried they still dream. The canvas planes glowed with heat. The entrance flap wagged in the breeze, revealing a sliver of baked earth. Porsparian huddled in the corner next to the threshold, watching with a look that was at once wary and forlorn.
“Your slave …” Zsoronga said with a dark look at the Shigeki. “I fear I tried to beat the truth out of him.”
Sorweel tried to focus on his friend, felt his eyes bulge for the effort. Something malodorous hung in the air, a smell he had breathed too long to identify. “And?” he managed to cough.
“The wretch fears powers greater than me.”
The young King of Sakarpus rubbed his eyes and face, lowered his hands to consider the blood worn into the whorls of his palms. “The others?” he asked roughly. “What happened to the others?”
Th
e question snuffed what remained of his friend’s hilarity. Zsoronga explained how he and the others had continued riding hard for General Kayûtas, how the treachery of the ground and fugitive exhaustion pulled them down one by one. Captain Harnilas was among the first to fall. A burst heart, Zsoronga assumed, given the way his pony had seized mid-stride. He never saw what became of Tzing. Only he, Tinurit, and four others managed to outdistance the Ten-Yoke Legion, only to be assailed by more Sranc—these from the Horde. “That was when the longbeards saved us …” he said, his voice limping about his disbelief. “Zaudunyani Knights. Agmundrmen, I think they were.”
Sorweel regarded his friend in the silence that followed. Zsoronga no longer wore the crimson tunic and golden cuirass of a Kidruhil officer. He had donned, rather, the apparel and regalia of his native Zeüm: a battle-sash cinching a jaguar-skin kilt and a wig consisting of innumerable oiled ringlets—symbolic of something, Sorweel imagined. The fabric and accoutrements seemed almost absurdly clean and unused, entirely at odds with the starved, battered, and unwashed form they clothed.
“What about those we left behind,” Sorweel asked. “What about Obotegwa?”
“Nothing … But perhaps that’s for the best.”
The young King wanted to ask what he meant, but it seemed more important to ignore the man’s tears.
“The Scions are no more, Sorweel. We are all dead.”
They both paused to ruminate. The bindings of the tent complained in a mellow wind. The clamour of the camp seemed to wax and wane with its breezy pulses, as if the sky were a glass that alternately blurred and focused the world’s sound.
“And Eskeles?” Sorweel asked, realizing he had only assumed his tutor’s survival. “What about him?”
Zsoronga scowled. “He’s a fat man in times of famine.”
“What?”
“A Zeümi proverb … It means men like him never die.”
Sorweel pursed a thoughtful lip, winced at a sudden pain lancing through his sinuses. “Even though they should.”