“I am the Next Messenger,” he declared. “I’ve come with word of rata’s rising to the kingdoms of Galea. Stand aside.”
The commander controlled his restive horse. “Your arrest has been ordered by the Lords’ Assembly of Arsace in the name of King-Elect Hathrida. Submit, or be taken.”
“Return to your masters,” Râvar said. “Tell them I wish to march across this land in peace. But if I am opposed, I will defend my faithful, as I did in the Dracâriya hills. Remind those you serve of that. Remind them of the judgment I brought on your King.”
There was a stir among the Exiles; some of them made the sign of rata. The commander said, “You will not surrender?”
“I can surrender to no mortal power. rata alone commands me.”
“Seize him,” the commander ordered.
Two of the lieutenants dismounted, drawing their swords. Râvar allowed them a few steps, then cracked the road in front of them, opening a crevasse. They staggered back, their cries lost in the roar of power. As the men behind them fought their terrified mounts, Râvar called fire on the trees by the roadside, so that one after another they exploded into flame. Those soldiers whose horses did not bolt turned and fled.
“Tell them!” Râvar shouted after them, his voice nearly as thunderous as his shaping. “Tell your masters that I come!”
They did. Ten days later, on the vast agricultural plain that surrounded Ninyâser, Ardashir’s scouts returned with word of a large force blocking the way ahead. There were near three thousand men, they reported, foot soldiers and archers and cavalry, and they had with them several long-armed devices that Ardashir called catapults, meant for hurling heavy objects across great distances. Stones, he said. Vessels of manita, Râvar thought.
It made him smile. They thought they knew him. They thought they could accomplish what Santaxma had failed to do.
The City moved on until the army became visible, a dark mass on the table-flat land, haloed in the radiance of its many lives. Râvar called a halt then. Shelling himself in hardened air and bright illusion, he advanced with Ardashir and a phalanx of Twentymen. Before him, the Great South Way ran spear-straight between harvested fields and long rows of trellised vines. At its distant terminus the city floated like a mirage, sunlight gleaming on the golden pinpoints of its domes.
The army was drawn up on either side of the road, following the line of the irrigation ditches, a smaller force on the right, a much larger one on the left. The sun flashed from the bladed weapons of the foot soldiers, from the helms and scale hauberks of the cavalry. From a distance they appeared still, but nearer it was apparent that they were all in restless motion. Horses stamped and tossed their heads. The foot soldiers shifted, the forest of their weapons swaying. He imagined how they must see him—a star drifting slowly toward them, magnificent, inexplicable.
Not quite close enough to make out the faces of the nearest soldiers, he halted. A party of horsemen detached itself from the larger force—four of them, one bearing a golden flag. They gained the road and trotted toward him. Râvar waited, imagining the catapults, which he knew were ranged somewhere at the back. When he could hear the sound of hoofbeats, he raised his shining arms and flung forth his shaping will. Behind the parley party, above the road, a second sun seemed to burst into being. Fire roared from the sky. Râvar twitched the patterns; the fire screamed like a beast and became a storm of stone. He shifted focus; and the ground beneath the two halves of the army thundered into void.
It did not eat them all. As the shuddering echoes died, he saw men staggering beyond the edges of the emptiness he had made. One member of the parley party lay on the road, thrown by his panicked horse; the rest had bolted. Râvar turned toward his own men. All were on their knees. Ardashir’s mouth was moving; Râvar, his ears ringing with destruction, read the word he spoke: Judgment.
Râvar rested for the remainder of the day, and for the day after. The following morning he plugged the pit with an enormous plaque of banded sandstone: another testament, another signature, another hidden message. He left the coach’s window covers up and watched Axane’s face as they passed over it. For a moment, understanding swallowed all her careful self-containment, but when she turned toward him again, her mask was back in place.
By the time the Awakened City reached Ninyâser, half the populace was gone. The streets were littered with the signs of flight: trampled clothing, abandoned furnishings, overturned carts. Those who remained lined the streets as Râvar made a triumphal entry, going on foot before the coach so that all could see him in his garb of light, his pilgrims shouting and singing at his back. At his shoulder Ardashir whispered instruction, so that he led the way as if he knew it, coming at last to a river walled in stone, conducting his faithful across a bridge painted red and gold, rata’s colors. Beyond lay the tall gates of the ratist religious complex. Most of the monks and nuns had fled; those who remained fell down before him in adoration.
The City sojourned in Ninyâser for a week. Ardashir claimed for Râvar the largest residence, a great tile-roofed structure chopped up with walls into many rooms and hallways, which had belonged to the man who had ruled the ratist city-within-a-city. He shut Axane and Parvâti in one of the chambers, blocking the windows with stiffened air, blocking the door as well, though there was a device called a lock that supposedly made it fast. In Refuge there had been no locks, or any doors or windows either. Each evening he chose a different room, hoping to hate it less than the room he had chosen the night before, and lay all night listening to the chanting and singing of the faithful, who kept vigil in the court outside.
He found some relief, ironically enough, in the temple of rata. It was made of stacked-up stone rather than hollowed into living rock, but its proportions were familiar in a way most structures of this world were not, for Refuge’s Temple had been fashioned according to the same design. He took to spending the afternoons there, sitting crosslegged against the wall of the core, staring at the enormous image of rata Creator. Sometimes he watched so fiercely that it almost seemed the image might turn its great face ponderously to his, train on him its marble gaze—a notion that lanced him from throat to groin with a strange thrill of dread and anticipation. Sometimes he considered unmaking it, and all else in the place that spoke of the god or his Way: the wall friezes, the paintings along the inner curve of the gallery. Instead, when the candles that lit the image began to go out (for he had closed the temple to the few remaining vowed ratists, and there was no one to renew them), he replaced them with sourceless flames, so rata’s illumination would not diminish.
See, rata. I can be generous.
On the last day of the City’s stay, a massive induction ceremony was held in the plaza outside the temple. Hundreds of new faithful accepted Râvar’s mark and knelt before him to receive his blessing. There were beggars in rags and vowed ratists in stoles. There were tradesmen and merchants, artists and artisans, pickpockets and whores. There were grandmothers; there were infants. There were even a few nobles, who when the City moved on rode in coaches like Râvar’s own and were followed by trains of servants. Râvar sat on an improvised dais, murmuring words of benediction and bestowing points of light until his eyes blurred, his tongue grew as dry as ash, and all the faces became a single face, avid-eyed, openmouthed.
The pilgrimage departed, leaving the ratist complex, and the surrounding sections of Ninyâser, littered and battered. Many pilgrims chose to remain behind, too ill or exhausted to continue, or perhaps unhappy with the hard edge of anger the progress had acquired since Dracâriya. But the flood of new converts made up those numbers and more. The City was now more than three thousand strong, according to Ardashir, including the train of hangers-on it had acquired, peddlers and minstrels and herbalists and prostitutes who served or exploited the pilgrims according to need and gullibility. For the first time, the majority of the City was composed of newcomers, who had accepted the mark and sworn their fai
th but had never known the comradeship or the discipline of the caverns. The march, boisterous and unruly and strung over many days of travel, bore little resemblance to the neatly ordered columns that had walked singing out across the steppe. The proselytizing bands roamed at will; at night the pilgrims built bonfires and celebrated until dawn. Though Râvar still provided food and water, many of the faithful took what they needed from the farms and villages they passed, secure in the promise Râvar had made when they took his mark upon their hands: that no further deed they did in the time of Interim could stain them. Ardashir and his loyal Twentymen had largely lost control; the induction ceremony in Ninyâser had been the last event of which Ardashir was indisputably in charge, and even that had devolved into a riot, as new-made citizens surged into the streets to display their wounds and their miraculous blessing-lights to nonbelievers. Pragmatic as always, Ardashir confined himself to supervising the three hundred or so who kept pace with Râvar’s coach, a band mainly made up of First Faithful and pilgrims from the caverns, most of whom still accepted his authority.
It would not be fully true to say that the progress was proceeding according to plan. So much of what had happened Râvar had not planned—could not have planned. But it was proceeding according to desire. Everything he had intended he had accomplished. He had loosed his faithful like a plague. Where he passed, he left disorder and destruction. Each day he gathered more faithful, blackened more souls with blasphemy. He had vanquished Arsace’s leaders; there was no longer a breath of opposition, and the road to Baushpar lay open and undefended. He had succeeded, in many ways, beyond his wildest dreams. Certainly beyond anything he could have conceived in those sick and helpless days after Thuxra City.
Why, then, did he take so little pleasure in it? He had been so sure that Dracâriya was the turning point, the moment in which he set the seal of his vengeance indelibly upon this world. And it had been—beyond doubt it had been. But the tedium of the journey had not eased. The alienness of the landscapes had not diminished, nor had his distaste for them grown less acute. Occasionally he found the exaltation he craved: in his approach upon the army, as he swept into Ninyâser. Always it dwindled. Always it faded.
Soon, though, he would be in Baushpar. It shimmered before him like a beacon—no more than a week away, even at the City’s slow pace. Baushpar, where all but one of the Brethren waited, prepared by the Son Vivaniya. Baushpar, where the heart of his hatred lay. Perhaps that was why the other triumphs had not satisfied him. They were incidental to the true goal, shadows of the true punishment. In Baushpar, he would fill himself with retribution and never again be empty.
The palanquin jolted, canting sharply to the left. Râvar braced his hands against the sides. The burned village thrust into his mind again, vivid as the flash of shaping. For an instant he imagined he could smell decay. Nausea rose into his throat, and also anger. Why should this one dead village affect him so? But though he had killed thousands from a distance, burying them under rock, entombing them in the earth, he was rarely confronted with actual death. The ruins and the corpses had been too close to his nightmares. He had buried the village for effect, a great shaping to fix the moment in the legend of the journey; but at the back of the impulse, though he did not want to admit it, lay a little of what had driven him to do the same for his own people: the desire to make clean.
Would Ardashir, that tireless chronicler, name this deed as he had others? The journey had become a procession of such names, strung together like Communion beads: The Judgment of the Blasphemer. The Sermon in the Hills. The Miracle of Passage. The Testament of Fire. The Testament of Stone. The Sojourn in Ninyâser. Râvar had never seen Ardashir’s writings, but he imagined they were far from a literal recounting of events. Perhaps, though, Ardashir would prefer not to memorialize this particular incident.
Ardashir. Râvar felt a wave of weariness. He thought he had dealt effectively with what had happened. Ardashir had certainly seemed repentant. Would it be enough? Clear as Ardashir’s distress had been these past weeks, Râvar would not have imagined the First Disciple could do what he had done today. It was not simply that he had resorted to trickery to bring Râvar to the village; it was that he had brought Râvar there at all. Once, he would have exerted every effort to shield the Messenger’s tender soul from such a sight. How great must his anger and frustration have become to drive him to such a thing? Râvar was more than familiar with Ardashir’s anger, which constantly tested the limits of Ardashir’s control. But today was the first time in a long time that he had looked at Ardashir and remembered that this was a man who with his bare hands had killed his wife.
He suspected that Ardashir had guessed about the Daughter Sundit. Ardashir had never said a word to suggest it. But now and then Râvar looked into the First Disciple’s face and seemed to see too much understanding looking back. It was an act Ardashir should condone, he who believed the Brethren should be punished. Lately, however, Râvar found he was not so sure.
He did not fear Ardashir’s anger. What had he to fear from any ordinary man? But if he lost Ardashir’s faith, he would also lose the Awakened City. He could not manage on his own. The very thought was overwhelming.
He rubbed his eyes, smelling on his hands the phantom scent of soot. Profoundly, he longed for sleep. He leaned his head against the cushions, but sleep did not come.
The portion of the Awakened City that kept pace with Râvar had paused the evening before in a little town whose name Râvar could not recall. As elsewhere since Ninyâser, most of the inhabitants had fled, leaving behind only those who believed in him or were too stubborn to move. Some of the pilgrims had crowded into empty dwellings; others had camped at the outskirts. Such semianarchy had become routine, even in that relatively disciplined fragment of the pilgrimage, but it was a terrible goad to Ardashir, who still made efforts to reinstate the order he had imposed in the City’s early days of travel.
The bearers set the palanquin down before the house Ardashir had commandeered for Râvar. It was one of the largest in the town, with four rooms, two on each floor. Axane and Parvâti and Râvar occupied the upper chambers; Ardashir and his men had spread out their bedrolls downstairs.
“Shall I give the call to march, Beloved One?” Ardashir was his usual controlled self; their confrontation in the burned village might never have occurred.
“No. The day’s half-gone already. I’ll rest here again tonight.”
Ardashir bowed. Râvar retreated into the dim, angled spaces of the house. A flight of wooden stairs led up to the first room on the second floor, which had in it several narrow beds and two chests containing a few toys and items of children’s clothing. The ceiling was low; if he stretched his hand up he could touch it.
The rear chamber stood open, lamplight spilling through the rod-straight patterns of stiffened air that blocked the doorway. It had been the bedchamber of the house’s owner and his wife; there was a wide bed against one wall, and clothing chests and a squat iron brazier and an alabaster basin in a stand. Râvar’s own chest had been set in one corner, and a pair of kitchen pots brought up for the washing of Parvati’s linens. On the straw matting that covered the floor, Axane sat cross-legged, tossing a ball for Parvâti to chase. Parvâti shrieked with delight, grabbing the air as often as she grabbed the ball. Axane laughed, encouraging her. “That’s it, little bird. Oh, very good! Throw it back, now. Throw it back.”
Râvar stood watching, just beyond the margin of illumination. The little scene seemed oddly distant, as if much more than a few footsteps lay between him and it. As if the seal across the door were not there to contain what was inside but to exclude what was without. For an instant he craved with all his heart to cross that barrier—not simply into the room but into the world it seemed to represent. A world in which he had a family.
He unblocked the door and entered. Axane jumped a little, startled. Parvâti made a crowing sound. Shakily, she pushed herself to her f
eet, as she had just begun to be able to do, and came wobbling toward him.
“Don’t let her,” Râvar said. “I need to wash my hands.”
Axane seized Parvâti round the waist. “No, no, little bird. Not right now.”
Râvar let the robe slide off his shoulders onto the floor. At the basin, he shaped fresh water. He rubbed at his hands, then bent to rinse his face, the Blood swinging forward and banging against the basin’s rim. When he straightened Axane was standing by him, holding out a linen cloth.
“Are we leaving?” she asked.
“No.” He blotted water from his cheeks. “We’ll stay the night.”
She nodded with her usual calm. He gave her back the cloth. Washing his face and hands had not been enough; he needed to change his clothes.
“Help me with my boots.”
He sat on the bed. She knelt and eased off his boots. He crossed to the chest that held his possessions and pulled out trousers and a pair of tunics, then padded barefoot into the other room to put them on. He and Axane existed in the utmost intimacy, sleeping side by side, spending nearly every hour of the day sitting across from one another in the coach. Yet from the beginning he had been scrupulous about this sort of privacy—not as a kindness to her, but to spare himself.
In the caverns he had made up his mind that she, like Gyalo Amdo Samchen, should be his witness, that he would punish her by forcing her to watch his progress through the world. It meant enduring a far closer proximity than in the caves. It meant stirring curiosity and surmise among his followers, since he would no longer be able to keep her and Parvâti hidden. But for punishment’s sake, he would do it. He was the Next Messenger, half a god, his purposes beyond fathoming; he could act as he pleased, however strange it seemed to mortals. Most of the pilgrims, no doubt, would draw the basest and most obvious conclusion: that the Next Messenger, whose human flesh so many of them had tried to tempt, had at last chosen to answer the passions of his mortal aspect.
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