For some reason, he found the camp oppressive and sitting still impossible, so he suggested a trek into the mountains. Kellhus immediately agreed, saying that he’d yet to see the Holy War from afar. “Nothing is understood,” he said, “until glimpsed from the heights.” Serwë, who’d so often been abandoned throughout the day, was almost embarrassingly delighted to join them. Esmenet seemed happy simply to hold Achamian’s hand.
The stout mountains of the Unaras Spur loomed large against azure skies, curving like a row of ancient molars toward the horizon. They searched all morning for a vantage that would let them see the Holy War entire, but the jumbled slopes confounded them, and the farther they walked, the more it seemed they could see only the outskirts of the vast encampment, hazed by the smoke of innumerable fires. They encountered several mounted patrols, who warned them of Fanim scouting parties. A band of Conriyan horsemen commanded by one of Xinemus’s kinsmen insisted on providing an armed escort, but Kellhus ordered them away, invoking his status as an Inrithi Prince.
When Esmenet asked whether this was wise given the danger, Kellhus said only, “We walk with a Mandate Schoolman.”
True enough, she supposed, but all this renewed talk of the heathen had unnerved her, reminded her the Holy War didn’t march against abstractions. She found herself glancing to the east more and more often, as though expecting the heights they climbed to reveal the smouldering remains of Tusam.
How long had it been since she’d last sat in her window in Sumna? How long had she’d been walking?
Walking. The city whores called those who followed the Columns peneditari, the “long-walkers,” a word that often became pembeditari, the “scratchers,” because many believed camp-whores carried various infestations. Depending on who was asked, peneditari were either as worldly and thus as admirable as caste-noble courtesans, or as polluted and thus as despicable as the beggar-whores who laid with lepers. The truth, Esmenet would discover, lay somewhere in between.
She certainly felt like a peneditari. Never had she walked so much or so far. Even the nights, which she’d spent on her back or her knees, it seemed she’d walked, following a great army of capricious cocks and accusing eyes. Never had she pleasured so many men. Their ghosts still toiled upon her when she awoke in the morning. She would gather her things, join the march, and it would feel as though she fled rather than followed.
Even still, she’d found time to wonder, to learn. She studied the changing character of the lands they passed through. She watched her skin darken, her stomach flatten, her legs harden with muscle. She learned a smattering of Galeoth, enough to shock and delight her patrons. She taught herself how to swim by watching children thrashing in a canal. To be encompassed by cool water. To float!
To be cleansed all at once.
But every night was the same. The slap of pale loins, the crush of sunburned arms, the threats, the arguments, even the jokes she and the other whores shared about the fire—these things, it seemed, were flattening her, pounding her into a shape she could never fit into her previous life. As never before, she dreamed of faces, leering and whiskered.
Then, just the previous night, she had heard someone shouting her name. She whirled, surprised perhaps, but incredulous as well, thinking she’d misheard. Then she saw Achamian, obviously drunk, scuffling with a hulking Thunyeri.
She tried to flee, but she couldn’t move. She could only watch, breathless, as the warrior threw him to the ground. She screamed when the boot came down, but she still couldn’t move. Only when he pulled himself sobbing to his knees, cried out her name.
She ran to him—What choice did she have? In all the world, he had only her—only her! The outrage she’d thought she would feel was nowhere to be found. Instead, his touch, his smell, had exacted an almost perilous vulnerability, a sense of submission unlike any she’d ever known—and it was good. Sweet Sejenus, was it good! Like the small circle of a child’s embrace, or the taste of peppered meat after a long hunger. It was like floating in cool, cleansing water.
No burdens, only flashing sunlight and slow-waving limbs, the smell of green …
Now she was no longer peneditari; she was what the Galeoth called “im hustwarra,” a camp-wife. Now, at long last, she belonged to Drusas Achamian. At long last she was clean.
I could go to temple, she thought.
Esmenet had told him nothing of Sarcellus, nothing of that mad night in Sumna, nothing of what she suspected regarding Inrau. To speak of one, it seemed, would compel her to speak of the others. Instead, she said she’d left Sumna out of love for him, and that she’d joined the camp-followers after he’d repudiated her outside Momemn.
What could she do? Risk everything now that they’d found each other? Besides, she had left Sumna for him; she had joined the camp-followers because of him. Silence did not contradict truth.
Perhaps, if he’d been the same Achamian who had left her in Sumna …
Achamian had always been … weak, but it was a weakness born of honesty. Where other men became silent and remote, he spoke, and this gave him a curious kind of strength, one which set him apart from nearly every man Esmenet had known, and many women. But he was different now. More desperate.
In Sumna, she’d often accused him of resembling the madmen in the Ecosium Market who continually howled about iniquity and doom. Whenever they passed one, she’d say, “Look, another of your friends,” just as he’d say, “Look, another one of your customers” when they glimpsed some dreadfully obese man. Now, she wouldn’t dare. Achamian was still Achamian, but he’d acquired the same hollow, spent look of those madmen, the same stooped eyes, as though he perpetually watched some horror that walked between what everyone else could see.
What he said terrified her, of course—How couldn’t she believe him?—but what terrified her more was the way he said it: the rambling, the erratic laughter, the spiteful vehemence, the bottomless remorse.
He was going mad. She knew this in her bones. But it wasn’t, she understood, the discovery of the Consult, nor even the certainty of the Second Apocalypse, that was breaking him, it was this man … this Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
Such a stubborn fool! Why wouldn’t he yield him to the Mandate? If Achamian weren’t already a sorcerer, she’d say he’d been bewitched. No arguments would sway him. Nothing!
According to Achamian, women had no instinct for principle. For them everything was embodied … How had he put it? Oh yes, that existence preceded essence for women. By nature, the tracks travelled by their souls ran parallel to those demanded by principle. The feminine soul was more yielding, more compassionate, more nurturing than the masculine. Consequently, principle became more difficult for them to see, like a staff in a thicket, which was why women were more likely to confuse selfishness for propriety—which, apparently, was what she was doing.
But for men, whose inclinations ranged so far and so violently, principle was an ever-present burden, a yoke they either toiled under or cast off altogether. Unlike women, men could always see what they should do, because it differed so drastically from what they wanted.
At first, Esmenet had almost believed him. How else could she explain his willingness to risk their love?
But then she realized it was the principle that galled her, not some dim-witted feminine confusion of hope and piety. Had she not given herself to him? Had she not relinquished her life, her talent?
Had she not finally relented?
And what was she asking him to relinquish in return? A man he’d known but a few weeks—a stranger! A man, moreover, that according to his own principles, he should surrender. “Perhaps yours is the womanish soul!” she’d wanted to cry. But for some reason, she couldn’t. If men must spare women the world, then women must spare men the truth—as though each forever remained alternate halves of the same defenceless child.
Esmenet paused for breath, watched Achamian and Kellhus exchange some comment—something inaudible and humorous. Achamian laughed aloud. I must show him. Somehow
I must show him!
Even when one floated, there was always a current …
Always something to fight.
Serwë walked at her side, every so often casting nervous glances her way. Esmenet said nothing, though she knew the girl wanted to talk. She seemed harmless enough, given the circumstances. She was one of those rare women who could never be deflowered, never be despoiled. Had she been a fellow whore in Sumna, Esmenet would have secretly despised her. She would have resented her beauty, her youth, her blond hair, and her pale skin, but more than anything she would have resented her perpetual vulnerability.
“Akka has—” the girl blurted. She blushed, looked down to her feet. “Achamian’s been teaching Kellhus wondrous things—wondrous things!”
Even her endearing accent. Resentment was ever the secret liquor of harlots.
Staring at nothing on the southern horizon, Esmenet said, “He has, has he?”
Perhaps that was the problem. Achamian had offered Kellhus the sanctuary of his instruction before he learned of the Consult skin-spies, which was to say, before he knew with certainty the man was the Harbinger—if he was in fact the Harbinger. Perhaps that was the obscure principle Achamian referred to, the bond … Kellhus was his student, like Proyas or Inrau.
The thought made Esmenet want to spit.
Without warning, Serwë sprinted ahead, leaping over hummocks and through braces of weeds. “The flowers!” she cried. “They’re so beautiful!”
Esmenet joined Achamian and Kellhus where they stood watching her. Several paces away, the girl kneeled before a bush freighted with extraordinary turquoise blooms.
“Ah,” Achamian said, moving to join her, “pemembis … Have you never seen them before?”
“Never,” Serwë gasped.
Esmenet thought she could smell lilac.
“Never?” Achamian said, plucking a flower of his own. He glanced back at Esmenet, winked. “You mean you’ve never heard the legends?”
Esmenet waited next to Kellhus as Achamian related his story: something about an empress and her bloodthirsty paramours. Several uncomfortable moments passed. The man was tall, even for a Norsirai, and he possessed those muscular, long-armed proportions that would have sparked uncouth speculation among her old friends in Sumna. His eyes were striking blue, possessed of a clarity that recalled Achamian’s stories of ancient northern kings. And there was something about his manner, a grace that didn’t seem quite … earthly.
“So you lived among the Scylvendi?” she finally said.
Kellhus glanced at her as though at a distraction, then looked back to Serwë and Achamian. “For a time, yes.”
“Tell me something about them.”
“Such as …”
She shrugged. “Tell me about their scars … Are they trophies?” Kellhus smiled, shook his head. “No.”
“Then what are they?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer … The Scylvendi believe only in actions, though they’d never say such. For them, only what men do is real. All else is smoke. They even call life ‘syurtpiütha,’ or ‘the smoke that moves.’ For them a man’s life isn’t a thing, something that can be owned or exchanged, but rather a line or a track of actions. A man’s line can be braided into one’s own, as in the case of one’s fellow tribesmen; herded, as in the case of slaves; or it can be stopped, as in the case of killing or murder. Since this latter is the action which ends action, the Scylvendi see it as the most significant, the most real, of all actions. The cornerstone of honour.
“But the scars, or swazond, don’t celebrate the taking of life, as everyone in the Three Seas seems to assume. They mark the … intersection, you might say, between competing lines of action, the point where one life yields its momentum to another. The fact that Cnaiür, for instance, bears the scars of many means that he walks with the momentum of many. His swazond are far more than his trophies, they’re the record of his reality. Seen through Scylvendi eyes, he’s the single stone that has become an avalanche.”
Esmenet stared in wonder. “But I thought the Scylvendi were uncouth … barbarians. Surely such beliefs are too subtle!”
Kellhus laughed. “All beliefs are too subtle.” He held her with shining blue eyes. “And ‘barbarity,’ I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.”
Unsettled, Esmenet looked to the grasses thronging about her sandalled feet. She glanced at Achamian, saw him watching her from where he and Serwë crouched. He smiled knowingly, then continued expounding on the bobbing flowers.
He knew this would happen.
Then, from nowhere, Kellhus said, “So you were a whore.”
She looked up in shock, reflexively covered the tattoo on the back of her left hand. “And what if I was?”
Kellhus shrugged. “Tell me something …”
“Such as?” she snapped.
“What was it like, lying with men you didn’t know?”
She wanted to be outraged, but there was a compelling innocence to his manner, a candour that left her baffled—and willing.
“Nice … sometimes,” she said. “Other times, unbearable. But one must feed to be fed. That’s simply the way of things.”
“No,” Kellhus replied. “I asked you to tell me what it was like …”
She cleared her throat, looked away in embarrassment. She saw Achamian brush Serwë’s fingers, suppressed a pang of jealousy. She laughed nervously.
“Such a strange question …”
“Have you never asked it?”
“No … I mean yes, of course, but …”
“So what was your answer?”
She paused, flustered, frightened, and curiously thrilled.
“Sometimes, after a heavy rain, the street beneath my window would be rutted by the wains, and I would … I would watch them—the wheels creaking through the ruts—and I would think, that’s what my life is like …”
“A track worn by others.”
Esmenet nodded, blinked away two tears.
“And other times?”
“Whores are mummers—you must understand that. We perform …” She hesitated, searched his eyes as though they held the proper words. “I know the Tusk says we degrade ourselves, that we abuse the divinity of our sex … and sometimes it feels that way. But not always … Often, very often, I have these men upon me, these men who gasp like fish, thinking they’ve mastered me, notched me, and I feel pity for them—for them, not me. I become more … more thief than whore. Fooling, duping, watching myself as though reflected across silver … It feels like … like …”
“Like being free,” Kellhus said.
Esmenet both smiled and frowned, troubled by the intimacy of the details she’d revealed, shocked by the poetry of her own insight, and somehow curiously relieved, as though she’d discharged a great burden. She almost trembled. And Kellhus seemed so … near.
“Yes …” She tried to swallow away the quaver in her voice. “But how—”
“So we’ve learned about holy pemembis,” Achamian said, joining them with Serwë. “What have you learned?” He shot Esmenet a significant glance.
“What it’s like to be who we are,” Kellhus said.
Sometimes, though not often, Achamian would scan the distances and simply know that he’d walked the same or similar path two thousand years before. He would freeze, as though glimpsing a lion in the brush, and just look about in witless astonishment. It was a recognition that baffled, a knowing that could not be.
Seswatha had walked these same hills once, fleeing besieged Asgilioch, searching with a hundred other refugees for a way through the mountains, for a way to escape dread Tsuramah. Achamian found himself glancing over his shoulder, always northward, expecting to see black clouds massing on the horizon. He found himself clutching wounds he didn’t have, blinking away images of a battle he hadn’t fought: the Kyranean defeat at Mehsarunath. He found himself walking as though an automaton, gouged of all hope, of all aspiration save survival.
&nb
sp; At some point Seswatha had abandoned the others to wander alone among the windswept rocks. Somewhere, not far, he’d found a small, shaded grotto, where he curled like a dog, hugging his knees, shrieking, wailing, imploring death … When morning came, he had cursed the Gods for drawing breath.
Achamian found himself glancing at Kellhus, his hands shaking, his every thought turmoil.
Concerned, Esmenet asked him what was wrong.
“Nothing,” he muttered brusquely.
She smiled, squeezed his hand as though she trusted him. But she knew. Twice he caught her casting terrified glances at the Prince of Atrithau.
As the afternoon waxed, Achamian slowly recollected himself. The farther they wandered from Seswatha’s footsteps, it seemed, the more he could pretend. Without realizing, he’d led the others too far to return to the Holy War before dark, so he suggested they find a place to camp.
The mountain faces mellowed against violet clouds. As evening approached, they spied a stand of blooming ironwoods perched on a squat promontory. They hiked toward them, climbing the furrowed skirts of the mountain. Kellhus noticed the ruins first: the heaped remains of an old Inrithi chapel.
“Some kind of shrine?” Achamian asked no one in particular as they waded across scrub and grasses toward the foundations. The stand, he realized, was in fact an overgrown grove. The ironwoods stood in rows, their dark limbs knitted in purple and white, waving in the warm evening breeze.
They picked their way through blocks of stone, then clambered over the heaped walls, where they found a mosaic floor depicting Inri Sejenus, his head buried in debris, his two haloed hands outstretched. For a time all four of them simply milled about, exploring, trampling paths through the thronging weeds, wondering, Achamian supposed, at all that had been forgotten.
“No ash,” Kellhus noted, after kicking at sandy earth. “It’s as though the place simply fell in upon itself.”
“So beautiful,” Serwë said. “How could anyone let this happen?”
The Warrior Prophet Page 11