The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Sarcellus is a Knight-Commander,” Kellhus said.

  And she was just a dead sorcerer’s whore.

  Naughty whore.

  Esmenet refused Serwë’s offer to stay with her and Kellhus in their pavilion, but accepted her offer to wash with her laver. Afterward, Kellhus followed her to her tent.

  “Serwë cleaned it for you,” he said. “She replaced your bedding.”

  Esmenet started crying yet again. When had she become so weak? So pathetic?

  How could you leave me? Why did you leave me?

  She crawled into the tent as though diving into a burrow. She hid her face in clean woollen blankets. She smelled sandalwood …

  Bearing his lantern, Kellhus followed, sat cross-legged over her. “He’s gone, Esmenet … Sarcellus won’t return. Not after tonight. Even if nothing happens, the questions will embarrass him. What man doesn’t suspect other men of acting on their own lusts?”

  “You don’t understand,” she gasped. How could she tell him? All this time fearing for Achamian, even daring to mourn him, and still … “I lied to him!” she exclaimed. “I lied to Akka!”

  Kellhus frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “After he left me in Sumna the Consult came to me, the Consult Kellhus! And I knew that Inrau’s death had been no suicide. I knew it! But I never told Akka. Sweet Sejenus, I never told him! And now he’s gone, Kellhus! Gone!”

  “Breathe, Esmi. Breathe … What does this have to do with Sarcellus?”

  “I don’t know … That’s the mad part. I don’t know!”

  “You were lovers,” Kellhus said, and she went still, like a child confronted by a wolf. Kellhus had always known her secret, since that night at the Shrine above Asgilioch when he’d interrupted her and Sarcellus. So why her terror now?

  “For a time you thought you loved Sarcellus,” Kellhus continued. “You even judged Achamian against him … You judged and found Achamian wanting.”

  “I was a fool!” she cried. “A fool!” How could she be such a fool?

  No man is your equal, love! No man!

  “Achamian was weak,” Kellhus said.

  “But I loved him for those weaknesses! Don’t you see? That’s why I loved him!”

  I loved him in truth!

  “And that’s why you could never go to him … To go to him while you shared Sarcellus’s bed would be to accuse him of those very weaknesses he couldn’t bear. So you stayed away, fooled yourself into thinking you searched for him when you were hiding all the while.”

  “How can you know these things?” she sobbed.

  “But no matter how much you lied to yourself, you knew … And that’s why you could never tell Achamian about what happened in Sumna—no matter how much he needed to know! Because you knew he wouldn’t understand, and you feared what he would see …”

  Despicable, selfish, hateful …

  Polluted.

  But Kellhus could see … He’d always seen.

  “Don’t look at me!” she cried.

  Look at me …

  “But I do, Esmi. I do look. And what I see fills me with wonder.”

  And these narcotic words, so warm and so close—so very close!—stilled her. Her pillow ached against her cheek, and the hard earth beneath her mat bruised, but all was warm and all was safe. He blew out his lantern, then quietly withdrew from her tent. The warm memory of his fingers continued to comb her hair.

  Obviously famished, Serwë had started eating early. A pot of rice boiled on the fire, which Kellhus periodically opened and closed, adding onions, spices, and Shigeki pepper. Ordinarily Esmenet would have cooked, but Kellhus had her reading aloud from The Chronicle of the Tusk, laughing at her rare fumbles and showering her with encouragement.

  She was reading the Canticles, the old “Tusk Laws,” many of which the Latter Prophet had rescinded in The Tractate. Together they wondered that children were stoned to death for striking their parents, or that when a man murdered some other man’s brother, his own brother was executed.

  Then she read, “‘Suffer not a …’”

  She recognized the words because of sheer repetition. Sounding out the following word, she said, “‘whore …’” and stopped. She glanced at Kellhus and angrily recited, “‘Suffer not a whore to live, for she maketh a pit of her womb …’” Her ears burned. She squelched a sudden urge to cast the book into the flames.

  Kellhus gazed back, utterly unsurprised.

  He’s been waiting for me to reach this passage. All along …

  “Give me the book,” he said, his tone unreadable.

  She did as she was told.

  In a fluid, almost thoughtless motion, he pulled his knife from the ceremonial sheath he wore about his waist. Pinching the blade near the tip, he proceeded to scratch the ink of the offending statement from the vellum. For several heartbeats, Esmenet couldn’t comprehend what he was doing. She simply stared, a petrified witness.

  Once the column was clean, he leaned back to survey his handiwork.

  “Better,” he said, as though he’d just scraped mould from bread. He turned to pass the book back.

  Esmenet couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “But … But you can’t do that!”

  “No?”

  He pressed the book into her hands. She fairly tossed it into the dust on her far side.

  “That’s Scripture, Kellhus. The Tusk. The Holy Tusk!”

  “I know. The warrant of your damnation.”

  Esmenet gawked like a fool. “But …”

  Kellhus scowled and shook his head, as though astonished she could be so dense.

  “Just who, Esmi, do you think I am?”

  Serwë chirped with laughter, even clapped her hands.

  “Wh-who?” Esmenet stammered. It was the most she could manage. Other than in rare anger or jest, she’d never heard Kelhus speak with … with such presumption.

  “Yes,” Kellhus repeated, “who?” His voice seemed satin thunder. He looked as eternal as a circle.

  Then Esmenet glimpsed it: the shining gold about his hands … Without thinking, she rolled to her knees before him, pressed her face into the dust.

  Please! Please! I’m nothing!

  Then Serwë hiccuped. Suddenly, absurdly, it was just Kellhus before her, laughing, drawing her up from the dust, bidding her to eat her supper.

  “Better?” he said as she numbly resumed her place beside him. Her whole skin burned and prickled. He nodded toward the open book while filling his mouth with rice.

  Bewildered, flustered, she blushed and looked down. She nodded to her bowl.

  I knew this! I always knew this!

  The difference was that Kellhus now knew as well. His presence burned in her periphery. How, she breathlessly wondered, how could she ever look into his eyes again?

  Throughout her entire life she’d looked upon things and people that stood apart. She was Esmenet, and that was her bowl, the Emperor’s silver, the Shriah’s man, the God’s ground, and so on. She stood here, and those things there. No longer. Everything, it seemed, radiated the warmth of his skin. The ground beneath her bare feet. The mat beneath her buttocks. And for a mad instant, she was certain that if she raised her fingers to her cheek, she would feel the soft curls of a flaxen beard, that if she turned to her left, she would see Esmenet hovering motionless over her rice bowl.

  Somehow, everything had become here, and everything here had become him.

  Kellhus!

  She breathed in. Her heart battered her breast.

  He scraped the passage clean!

  In a single exhalation, it seemed, a lifetime of condemnation slipped from her, and she felt shriven, truly shriven. One breath and she was absolved! She experienced a kind of lucidity, as though her thoughts had been cleansed like water strained through bright white cloth. She thought she should cry, but the sunlight was too sharp, the air too clear for weeping.

  Everything was so certain.

  He scraped the passage clean!

  The
n she thought of Achamian.

  The air smelled of wine and vomit and armpits. Torches flared through the murk, painting mud-brick walls in oranges and blacks, illuminating slivers of the drunken warriors who crowded the dark: a bearded jaw line here, a furrowed brow there, a glistening eye, a bloody fist upon a pommel. Cnaiür urs Skiötha walked among them, through the tight alleys of the Heppa, Ammegnotis’s ancient district of revels. He shouldered his way forward, moving intently, as though he had a destination. Laughter and light boomed through wide-thrown doors. Shigeki girls giggled, called out in mangled Sheyic. Children hawked stolen oranges.

  Laughing, he thought. All of them laughing …

  You’re not of the land!

  “You!” he heard someone cry.

  Weeper! Faggot weeper!

  “You,” a young Galeoth man at his side said. Where had he come from? His eyes flashed in wonder, but something about the broken light made his face lurid. His lips looked wanton and feminine, the black hollow of his mouth promising. “You travelled with him. You’re his first disciple! His first!”

  “Who?”

  “Him. The Warrior-Prophet.”

  You beat me, old Bannut, his father’s brother, cried, for fucking him the way you fucked his father!”

  Cnaiür seized the man, yanked him close. “Who?”

  “Prince Kellhus of Atrithau … You’re the Scylvendi who found him on the Steppe. Who delivered him to us!”

  Yes … The Dûnyain. Somehow he’d forgotten about him. He glimpsed a face blow open, like Steppe grasses in a gust. He felt a palm, warm and tender upon his thigh. He began shaking.

  You’re more … More than the People!

  “I am of the People!” he grated.

  The man wrenched ineffectually at his wrists. “Pleease!” he hissed. “I thought … I thought …”

  Cnaiür tossed him to the ground, glared at the shadowy procession of passersby. Did they laugh?

  I watched you that night! I saw the way you looked at him!

  How did he find himself on this track? Where was he riding?

  “What did you call me?” he screamed at the prostrate man.

  He remembered running as hard as he could, away from the black paths worn through the grasses, away from the yaksh and his father’s all-knowing wrath. He found a clutch of sumacs and cleared a hollow in their hidden heart. The weave of green grasses through grey. The smell of earth, of beetles crawling through damp and dark grottoes. The smell of solitude and secrecy, under the sky but sheltered from the wind. He pulled the broken pieces from his belt and spread them in breathless wonder. He reassembled them. She was so sad. And so beautiful. Impossibly beautiful.

  Someone. He was forgetting to hate someone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SHIGEK

  In terror, all men throw up their hands and turn aside their faces. Remember, Tratta, always preserve the face! For that is where you are.

  —THROSEANIS, TRIAMIS IMPERATOR

  The Poet will yield up his stylus only when the Geometer can explain how Life can at once be a point and a line. How can all time, all creation, come to the now? Make no mistake: this moment, the instant of this very breath, is the frail thread from which all creation hangs. That men dare to be thoughtless …

  —TERES ANSANSIUS, THE CITY OF MEN

  Early Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shigek

  One day, returning from the river with their laundered clothes, Esmenet overheard several Men of the Tusk discussing the Holy War’s preparations for their continuing march. Kellhus spent part of the afternoon with her and Serwë, explaining how the Kianene, before retreating across the desert, had slaughtered every camel on the South Bank, just as they’d burned every boat before retreating across the Sempis. Since then, forays into the deserts of Khemema to the south had found every well poisoned.

  “The Padirajah,” Kellhus said, “hopes to make of the desert what Skauras hoped to make of the Sempis.”

  The Great Names, of course, were undeterred. They planned to march along the coastal hills followed by the Imperial Fleet, which would provide them with all the water they would need. The road would be laborious—they would have to send parties of thousands through the hills to collect the water—but it would see them safely to Enathpaneah, to the very marches of the Sacred Land, long before the Padirajah could possibly recover from his defeat at Anwurat.

  “Soon you two will be shuffling through sand,” Kellhus said in the warm teasing manner that Esmenet had learned to love long ago. “It’ll be hard for you, Serwë, heavy with child, carrying our pavilion on your back.”

  The girl shot him a look, at once scolding and delighted.

  Esmenet laughed, at the same time realizing she’d be travelling even farther from Achamian …

  She wanted to ask Kellhus if he’d heard any word from Xinemus, but she was too frightened. Besides, she knew Kellhus would tell her as soon as any news arrived. And she knew what that news would be. She’d glimpsed it in Kellhus’s eyes many, many times.

  Once again they’d gathered about the same side of the fire to avoid the winding smoke, Kellhus in the centre, Serwë on his right, and Esmenet on his left. They were cooking small pieces of lamb on sticks, which they ate with small pieces of bread and cheese. This had become a favourite treat of theirs—one of many little things that had kept the promise of family.

  Kellhus leaned past her to grab more bread, still teasing Serwë.

  “Have you ever pitched a pavilion across sand before?”

  “Kell-hussss,” Serwë complained and exulted.

  Esmenet breathed deeply his dry, salty smell. She couldn’t help herself.

  “They say it takes forever,” he chided, withdrawing his hand and accidentally brushing Esmenet’s right breast.

  The tingle of inadvertent intimacy. The flush of a body suddenly thick with a wisdom that transcended intellect.

  For the remainder of the afternoon, Esmenet found her eyes plagued by a nagging waywardness. Where before her look had confined itself to Kellhus’s face, it now roamed over his entire form. It was as though her eyes had become brokers, intermediaries between his body and her own. When she saw his chest, her breasts tingled with the prospect of being crushed. When she glimpsed his narrow hips and deep buttocks, her inner thighs hummed with expectant warmth. Sometimes her palms literally itched!

  Of course this was madness. Esmenet needed only to catch Serwë’s watchful eyes to recall herself.

  Later that night, after Kellhus had left, the two of them stretched across their mats, their heads almost touching, their bodies angled to either side of the fire. They often did this when Kellhus was away. They stared endlessly into the flames, sometimes talking, but mostly saying nothing at all, save yelping when the fire spat coals.

  “Esmi?” Serwë asked in a peculiar, brooding tone.

  “Yes, Serchaa?”

  “I would, you know.”

  Esmenet’s heart fluttered. “You would what?”

  “Share him,” the girl said.

  Esmenet swallowed. “No … Never, Serwë … I told you not to worry.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying … I don’t fear losing him, not any more, and not to anyone. All I want is what he wants. He’s everything …”

  Esmenet lay breathless, staring between legs of wood at the pulsing furnace of coals.

  “Are you saying … Are you saying that he …”

  wants me …

  Serwë laughed softly. “Of course not,” she said.

  “Of course not,” Esmenet repeated. With an inner shrug, she shook away these mad and maddening thoughts. What was she doing? He was Kellhus. Kellhus.

  She thought of Akka, blinked two burning tears.

  “Never, Serwë.”

  Kellhus didn’t return until the following night, when he rode into their little camp accompanied by Proyas himself. The Conriyan Prince looked particularly travel-worn and haggard. He was dressed in a simple blue tunic—his riding clothes, Esmene
t supposed. Only the gold-embroidered intricacy of his hems spoke to his station. His beard, which he usually kept clipped close to his jaw, had grown out, so that it more resembled the square-cut beards of his caste-nobles.

  At first Esmenet kept her gaze averted, worried Proyas might guess the intensity of her hatred if he glimpsed her eyes. How couldn’t she hate him? He’d not only refused to help Achamian, he’d refused to allow Xinemus to help as well, and had divested the Marshal of his rank and station when he insisted. But something in his voice, a high-born desperation, perhaps, made her watchful. He seemed uncomfortable—even forlorn—as he took his place beside Kellhus at the fire, so much so that she found her dislike faltering. He too had loved Achamian once. Xinemus had told her as much.

  Perhaps that’s why he suffered. Perhaps he wasn’t so unlike her.

  That, she knew, was what Kellhus would say.

  After pouring everyone watered wine, and serving the men the remnants of the meal she’d prepared for herself and Serwë, Esmenet took a seat on the far side of the fire.

  The men discussed matters of war as they ate, and Esmenet was struck by the contradiction between the way Proyas deferred to Kellhus and the general reserve of his manner. Suddenly she understood why Kellhus forbade his followers from joining their camp. Men like Proyas, like any of the Great Names, she supposed, would be troubled by Kellhus. Those at the centre of things were always more inflexible, always more invested, than those at the edges. And Kellhus promised a new centre …

  It was easy to move from edge to edge.

  The men fell silent to finish their lamb, onions, and bread. Proyas set aside his plate, washed his palette with a sip of wine. He glanced at Esmenet, inadvertently it seemed, then stared off into the distance. Esmenet suddenly found the quiet suffocating.

  “How fares the Scylvendi?” she asked, uncertain of what else to say.

  He glanced back to her. For an instant, his eyes lingered on her tattooed hand …

  “I see him but rarely,” the handsome man replied, staring into the flames.