With these words drifting back to her, and then out to the sides to fall away leaving no echo, Haut resumed his march.
Korya followed. ‘This is Azathanai.’
‘Very good,’ he answered without turning.
‘What do they mean by it?’
‘Ask the Jheleck. Bah, too late for that. The fools left, tails between their hairy legs. And to think, they wanted you. Another bauble. I wonder – what will your kin do with a score of Soletaken pups?’
‘I don’t know. Tame them, I suppose.’
Haut’s laugh was sharp, cutting. ‘To tame something, one must take advantage of its stupidity. They will never tame those beasts, because savage though they may be, they are not stupid.’
‘Then, as hostages, they will learn the ways of the Tiste, and see them not as strangers, nor enemies.’
‘You believe this? Perhaps it will be so.’
The path continued its climb, though not so steep as to make uncertain their purchase. But her legs were getting tired. ‘Master, did you expect this?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Child, we have been invited.’
‘By whom?’
‘That remains to be discovered.’
* * *
She knew her life was yet modest, but already she had a sense that most promises would, eventually, prove empty. There was nowhere to go but forward, but no one could avow that what lay ahead was a better life. Potential felt like a burden, possibility like wolves on her trail. Her dreams of godly powers were the frayed remnants of childhood; they trailed like wisps behind her, tired as the streamers of last year’s fete. She thought back to the dolls in the trunk’s silent, dark confines, the eyes staring at nothing, the mouths smiling at no one, now well behind her – long gone from reach, or a moment’s rush across the floor. There was stillness in that place, as still as the room surrounding it, as still as the keep itself. And just as the dolls dwelt in their trunk, so too had she and Haut dwelt in the keep, and it might well be true that this realm was but another version, and that it was all a matter of scale.
The gods and goddesses were in their rooms. She could almost see them, standing at the high windows looking out and dreaming of better places, better times, better lives. And like the dolls, their eyes were focused on vast distances and nothing closer to hand could make them waver, not for a moment.
Yet stranger memories haunted her now. Her room in the tower, the dead flies lying in the grit of the stone windowsill, crowded up against the discoloured glass, as if in the frenzy to escape they had bludgeoned themselves to death trying to reach an unattainable light. She should never have swept the spiders’ webs from the frame, for the spiders would have fed well on the flies’ futility.
Was the future no more than a succession of worlds one longed to live in? Each one for ever beyond reach, with such pure light and vistas that ran on without end? Was frenzy and anguish really that different?
They had been ascending for what seemed half a day, and still the path ahead wended its way ever upward. Fires burned in the muscles of her legs, making her imagine peat fires – some childhood memory, a place where the forest had died so long ago it had rotted into the ground, in layer upon layer, all soaked through with water the colour of rust. She remembered bundles of sodden skins pulled out from the pools, dangling stone weights from black ropes. She remembered stuffing wiry as hair, and the day was cold and the air was thick with midges, and knives flashed as the bundles were cut open and the hides rolled out.
The memory, arriving now so suddenly, halted Korya in her tracks.
Jheleck skins.
Haut must have sensed her absence behind him, for he turned about, and then made his way back down to her.
‘Master,’ she said, ‘tell me of the first encounters between the Jheleck and my people.’
The Jaghut’s pained expression filled her with dismay.
When he said nothing she spoke, her tone dull but relentless: ‘I found a memory, master. We understood nothing of Soletaken, did we? That the giant wolves we slew were in fact people. We killed them. We hunted them, because it is a lust in our souls, to hunt.’ She wanted to spit that last word, but it came out as lifeless as the others. ‘We cut their hides from their carcasses and we cured those skins in the bogs.’
He gestured for her to walk and set out once again. ‘The origin of the Jheleck is a mystery, hostage. When they have sembled into their walking forms, standing upon two legs, they bear some resemblance to the Dog-Runners of the far south. Their features are perhaps more bestial, but then, that should hardly surprise you – the frigid world of the far north is a harsh home, after all.’
‘Do the Dog-Runners treat with them?’
‘There are Jheck in the south now. It may be that they do.’
‘We hunted them. For pleasure.’
‘It is the legacy of most intelligent beings to revel in slaughter for a time,’ Haut replied. ‘In this we play at being gods. In this, we lie to ourselves with delusions of omnipotence. There is but one measure to the wisdom of a people, and that is the staying hand. Fail in restraint and murder thrives in your eyes, and all your claims to civilization ring hollow.’
‘Is there such a legacy among you Jaghut?’
‘There was a time, Korya, when the Jaghut ceased their forward stride.’
A faint chill came to her at that, as if he but plucked at her earlier thoughts with fullest knowing.
‘We faced a choice then,’ Haut went on. ‘To resume our onward journey, or to turn round, to discover the blessing that is walking back the way we came. In our standing in one place, we argued for centuries, until finally, in our mutual and well-deserved disgust, we each chose our own paths.’
‘And so ended your civilization.’
‘It was never much of one to begin with. But then, few are. So, you recall a grim memory, and would now chew it. Your next decision is crucial. Do you spit it out or do you swallow it down?’
‘I would walk from civilization.’
‘You cannot, for it resides within you.’
‘And not within you?’ she demanded.
‘Do not be a fool, Korya,’ he replied, his voice drifting back soft as a knife edge on a whetstone. ‘You saw well my array of weapons. Most arguments in iron are arguments of civilization. Which paint shall we wear? By which name are we to be known? Before what gods must we bow? And who are you to answer such questions on my behalf? I take up this axe to defend my savagery – but know this: you will hear the echo of such sentiments in every age to come.’
She snorted. ‘You imagine that I will live through ages, master?’
‘Child, you will live for ever.’
‘A child’s belief!’
‘An adult’s nightmare,’ he shot back.
‘You would I never grew up? Or are you happy to contemplate my eternal nightmare?’
‘The choice is yours, Korya. Spit it out or swallow it down.’
‘I don’t believe you. I will not live for ever. Nothing does, not even the gods.’
‘And what do you know of gods?’
‘Nothing.’ Everything. I stood with them, at the window.
In the dark of the trunk, the eyes saw nothing, yet knew it not. She could have taken the dolls out before she left. Set them out in a row upon the windowsill, among the dead flies, and pressed their flat faces against the grimy glass. She could have told them to see all there was to be seen.
But, goddess that she had once been, she was never so cruel.
We are not flies.
One day she had come to the window only to find all the flies gone. The sun’s warmth had brought them all back to life. That day had been the most frightening day of her young life.
I should have fed them to the spiders. If I had not swept their homes away.
In this place … ‘I have begun remembering things,’ she said.
He grunted, not turning, not slowing
his stride. ‘And are these memories yours?’
‘I think so. Who else’s?’
‘That remains to be seen, hostage. But it has begun.’
Mahybe. The vessel waiting to be filled. Trunk of dolls. Reach in, quickly now! Choose one, upon your life – choose one!
Another memory assailed her, but it could not be real. She was outside the tower, hovering in the hot summer air. Before her, the window, and through its grey glass, she saw row upon row of faces. She floated, looking upon them, wondering at their sad expressions.
Now at last, I think I know what the gods and goddesses were all looking at.
Jewels crunched and rolled under her feet. She imagined herself old, bent and broken, with at her hand all the gold, silver and gems of the world, and in her heart there was yearning, and she knew that she would give it all up … for one child’s dream.
* * *
Children died. Feren held those words in her mind, swaddled and snug-tight in bitter embrace. Some fell from the womb with eyes closed, and the warmth of the blood upon their faces was cruel mockery. They were expunged in waves of pain, only to lie still in dripping hands. No woman deserved that. For others, there were but a handful of years which only later seemed crowded, cries of hunger, small hands grasping, luminous eyes that seemed wise in the ways of things not spoken. And then one day, those eyes stared out from half-closed lids, seeing nothing.
Mischance was scurrilous. Fate had a way of walking into empty rooms with smug familiarity. Children died. The laments of the mothers were hollow sounds to anyone’s ears. People turned away and studied the ground, or some feature upon the horizon, as if it were changing before their eyes.
She remembered the look on Rint’s face, her beloved brother, and how it crumpled with comprehension. She remembered the old women working quietly, businesslike, and not meeting her gaze. She remembered her fury at the sound of youths laughing nearby, and then hearing the bark of someone hushing them. It was not that death was rare. In dogged step it ever remained close, cold as a shadow. The blunt truth was, the world beat upon a soul until bones bent and hearts broke.
Since then, she had been crawling away, and it had been years and for all that she had aged since that time she felt but a day older, the bruise of grief still fresh beneath her skin, with the echo of insensitive laughter hard in her ears.
As they travelled across Bareth Solitude, each night she took to her bed the young man, bastard son of Draconus, and told herself that it was because the Lord had asked it of her. But it was getting more and more difficult to meet her brother’s eye. Arathan was pouring his seed into her, twice, three times a night, and she did nothing to prevent what might come of that; just as she had done nothing the night that she slept with Grizzin Farl, but at least then she’d had the excuse of being rather drunk. Something wayward had taken hold of her, a rushing towards fate, eager to sink into dire consequences.
She had no fear of her own future, and to be mired in circumstances of one’s own making offered its own delusion of control. But she was claiming that which belonged to others – the years ahead of them, the lives they would be made to lead. Mothers who lost could become obsessed with protectiveness and that might well find Feren, and for that her child would suffer through life. Arathan could sire a bastard and so show his father a mirrored reflection, and the eyes in their self-regard would be cold and unforgiving. Her brother, disarmed anew, might flee from an uncle’s love, stung by the pain of a loss still too sharp to bear.
Arathan was the same age her son would now be, a young man spread-eagled beneath the world, as all young men were. He was not her son, but he could give her a son. Indeed, she was certain that he would. Her brother had seen something of this strange, macabre compact in her mind, this blending of fates, one empty, the other fast filling. She was convinced of that.
It was one thing to use for pleasure. It was another thing entire to just use. She taught Arathan the ways of lovemaking, whispering of grateful women in the future. But who were these women, who would give thanks to Feren for all that she’d given the man in their bed? Where would he find these women, this frail bastard son, soon to be abandoned among the Azathanai? Not a question with which she need concern herself, of course; and she reminded herself of this often, to little avail. He would be what she made him, and in turn he would make in her what he could never be: a son. And afterwards, in the dark and the heat, she would stroke his hair, and make his hands into fists – soft tips and absent nails – which she then closed her own hands around – and in fleeting ecstasy, sick with guilt, she imagined the boy’s fists to be smaller than they were, as if by the strength of her grip she could crush them down to proper proportions.
There was a kind of recklessness in women. To open her legs was to invite it in, and with the invitation came surrender. Each night, the taste of that surrender stole into her like a drug. Her brother could see it, and was right to fear it. A woman who does not care is a dangerous woman.
Each day, as they rode across the barren land, she longed for the night to come, for the boy’s helpless eagerness, for the shudders of his body against hers, for the waves that seemed to steal away his life – so much of it, rushing into her. She meant to use that life.
Children died. But a woman could make more children. Sons were born and sometimes they died, but there were many sons. And even dreams of the future held in hands, places of darkness.
* * *
Riding at his sister’s side, trapped in the silence between them, Rint studied the lie of the land, wishing that monuments might rise before them, erupting from the hard ground, halting them in their tracks. All forward progress denied: nothing to do but turn round and return to Kurald Galain.
When she took with child, she would flee, like a thief down a street, into hidden alleys, secret courses that none could follow. A prize in her womb, she would draw knife and hiss at any who drew near. Even her brother.
He cursed Draconus, cursed this entire venture; he felt his body weaken with anguish at the sight of young Arathan, riding so proud at his father’s side. He’d thought better of his sister. The world, crowding close round this meagre party, had grown sordid.
The day was drawing to a close, shadows stretched into their path from the lead riders, ephemeral and misshapen. To either side the plain rolled out, rippled like a dislodged rug, threadbare on the rises where the winter winds cut like knives for months on end. The deeper basins were bleached white, made lifeless by leaching salts.
They had passed some ruins just after noon. Foundation stones of pitted granite formed a rectangle on a level span just above a broad, shallow basin. The scale of the structure seemed oversized for Azathanai, and Rint saw little sign of their legendary stone-working skills in the roughly hewn granite. The walls had long since tumbled, forming a scree down the slope on the basin side and lying in heaps upon the opposite side. There was no evidence that anyone had ever harvested the rubble. Apart from the lone building, Rint saw no other signs of habitation – no pen walls, no field enclosures, and the ground bore no evidence of ploughing. He wondered at it as they rode by.
Only ignorance emptied the past. Fools built the world from nothing – the whim of a god, some bold acclamation of existence in the Abyss. None of these visions of creation did more than serve the vanity of those holding them. As if all was made for them; for their eyes to witness, for their wonder to behold. Rint did not believe it. The past had no beginning. Something always existed before, no matter how far back one reached. It was the conceit of a mortal life, which began and so must end, to then imagine all of existence following suit, as if cowed into obedience. In myriad forms all that existed had always existed.
His sister had made herself the lover of a bastard son who was of an age to match that of the son she had lost. Things twisted in thinking about that. Things peeled back, exposing ugly secrets in lurid half-light. The past had a face and it was a face she would make alive once more. Arathan deserved better and there wa
s no cause to wonder at his innocence, his naïveté in these matters: he was in his age of foolishness, as came upon all young men. Dreams raged like fires of the sun, but high as those flames might carry him, the fall promised an endless plunge into despair. Subtlety was lost – these were Arathan’s years of stumbling, awkward his limbs and overborne his mind, and the depthless love he now felt for Feren would soon turn to wounded hatred.
Such were Rint’s fears and he felt helpless before them. Twisting in his saddle he looked back the way they had come, seeking sign of Ville and Galak, but the plain stretched unbroken into the eastern gloom. Even under the best of circumstances they were still a day or two away.
Somewhere ahead of them were the first settlements of the Azathanai. He imagined imposing keeps, castles and palaces. Gardens where water flowed up from the ground in ceaseless servitude. And upon walls and around solid doors there would be scorch marks, from fires set by Jheleck raiders; and within the airy chambers, where the furniture was poor and worthless, there would be a faint hint of old smoke – not the smoke of woodfires, but that of cloth and bedding, acrid and bitter. These would not be welcoming places, and he knew he would long to be quit of them as soon as possible.
Why would the Azathanai feel any need, beyond simple hospitality, to entertain Lord Draconus? There was a mystery here. Grizzin Farl had looked upon Draconus as he would an old friend, and the familiarity between them in that night of revelry was no false performance. But as far as Rint knew, the Lord had dwelt within Kurald Galain all his life, and his years away from the House had been spent fighting in the wars. The Protector of the Azathanai had never visited the realm of the Tiste, as far as Rint could recall. How then did they meet?
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