The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  "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?"

  The 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."

  Zsoronga dropped his gaze as if regretting glib words, then looked up with a helpless smile. "Zeümi proverbs tend to be harsh," he said. "We have always preferred the wisdom that cracks heads."

  Sorweel snorted and grinned, only to find himself tangled in recriminations of his own. So many dead... Friends. Comrades. It seemed obscene that he should feel amusement, let alone relief and gratification. For weeks they had strived, warred against distance and frailty to accomplish a mortal mission. They had faltered and they had feared. But they had persevered. They had won—and despite the grievous proportions of the toll exacted, that fact cried out with its own demented jubilation.

  The Scions had died in glory... undying glory. What was a life of bickering and whoring compared with such a death?

  Zsoronga did not share his celebratory sentiment.

  "Those who fell..." Sorweel said in the tentative way of friends hoping to balm guessed-at pains. "Few are so lucky, Zsoronga... Truly."

  But even as he spoke, the young King understood he had guessed wrong. The Successor-Prince did not grieve those who had fallen, he grieved his own survival... or the manner of it.

  "There is another... saying," Zsoronga said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. "Another proverb that you need to know."

  "Yes?"

  The Successor-Prince levelled his gaze. "Courage casts the longest shadow."

  Sorweel nodded. "And what does that mean?"

  Zsoronga flashed him the impatient look people give when called upon to elaborate embarrassing admissions. "
We Zeümi are a people of deeds," he said on a heavy breath. "We live to honour our dead fathers with wisdom in the court, valour on the fiel—"

  "The back door to the heavenly palace," Sorweel interrupted, recalling the man's explanation of Zeümi religion as a kind of spiritual influence-peddling. "I remember."

  "Yes... Exactly. The saying means that the courage of one man is the shame of the other..." He pursed his fulsome lips. "And you, Horse-King... What you did..."

  The night, the dark, the flurry of passion and dim detail came back to Sorweel. He remembered crying out to his friend the instant after Eskeles crashed to earth...

  "Are you saying I shamed you?"

  A dour grin. "In the eyes of my ancestors... most certainly."

  Sorweel shook his head in disbelief. "I apologize... Maybe if you're lucky, they'll smuggle you in the slave entrance."

  The Successor-Prince scowled. "It was a thing of wonder... what you did," he said with disconcerting intensity. "I saw you, Horse-King. I know you called to me... And yet I rode on." He glared like someone speaking against a mob of baser instincts. "I will be forever finding my way out from your shadow."

  Sorweel flinched from the look. His eyes settled on Porsparian where he sat humbled and huddled in the airy grey light...

  "Time to seek the company of cowards," he offered weakly.

  "The longest shadow, remember?" Zsoronga said, with an air of someone humiliated for his admission of humiliation. "The only way—the only way—to redeem myself is to stand at your side."

  Sorweel nodded, did his best to shrug away the clamour of adolescent embarrassment, and to comport himself as a man—as a king of a proud people. Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, the future Satakhan of High Holy Zeüm, was at once apologizing—which was remarkable in and of itself—and begging the most profound of favours: a means of recovering his honour and so securing the fate of his immortal soul.

  The young King of Sakarpus offered up his hand, palm up, with his index finger alone extended. One boonsman to another.

  Zsoronga frowned and smiled. "What is this... You want me to smell it?"

  "N-no..." Sorweel stammered. "No! We call it the virnorl... 'finger-lock' you would say. It is a pledge of unity, a way to say that henceforth, all your battles will be my battles."

  "You sausages," the Successor-Prince said, clasping his entire hand within the warm bowl of his own. "Come... Our mighty General wishes to see you."

  —|—

  Sorweel crouched next to his slave before following Zsoronga outside. "I can speak to you now," he said in Sheyic, hoping this might elicit some flicker of passion. But the old Shigeki merely regarded him with the same grieved lack of comprehension, as if he had forgotten Sheyic as promptly as Sorweel had learned it.

  "More importantly," he added before stepping clear the cloistered heat, "I can listen."

  Arid sunlight seemed to shower the whole of creation, so bright he stumbled for squinting. He stood at the tent threshold, blinking the liquid from the glare, until the world finally resolved into parched vistas. The camp, the crowded tents and grand pavilions, bleached of colour for brightness...

  And the horror that encircled it.

  Swales of blackening dead humped and pitted the distances. Sranc and more Sranc, teeth hanging spitless about gaping maws, eyes fogged, heaped into an endless array of macabre deadfalls. Limbs predominated in certain places, piled like the sticks Saglanders brought to market to sell as kindle. Heads and torsos prevailed in others, cobbled into mounds that resembled stacks of rotting fish. Great smears of black scored the far-flung mats, where the witches had burned their countless thousands. They reminded him of the charcoal grounds to the south of Sakarpus, only with bodies instead of trees charred to stumped anonymity. These marked the greatest concentrations of dead.

  The reek struck too deep to be smelled. It could only be breathed.

  The sight unsettled him, not for the grisly detail, but because of the preposterous scale. He wanted to rejoice, for it seemed that was what a true son of Sakarpus should do seeing their ancestral foe laid out to the horizon. But he could not. Breathing the carrion wind, glancing across the carcass heights, he found himself mourning, not for the Sranc, whose obscenity blocked all possibility of compassion, but for the innocence of a world that had never seen such sights.

  For the boy he had been before awakening.

  "Even if I survive," Zsoronga said from his side, "none will believe me when I return."

  "We must make sure you die then," Sorweel replied.

  The Successor-Prince smirked about a worried glance. They trekked on in awkward silence, sorting through industrious crowds of Inrithi, wending down tented alleys. Fairly every man Sorweel glimpsed bore some sign of the previous night's battle, whether it be bandages clotted about appalling wounds or the divided stares of those trying to stumble clear of memories of violence and fury. Many seemed to recognize him, and some even lowered their faces—in accordance, he imagined, with some precept of jnan, the arcane etiquette of the Three Seas.

  The awkward transformation of his relationship with Zsoronga, he realized with no little dismay, was but the beginning of the changes his thoughtless courage had wrought. Courage... It seemed such a foolish word, naught but the scribble of a child compared to the lunacy of the previous night. When he dared glimpse his memories, he suffered only the crowding of dread and terror. He felt a coward, looking back, so laughably far from the hero Zsoronga was making of him.

  A mob of caste-nobles and Kidruhil officers milled about the entrance to Kayûtas's command tent, and Sorweel simply assumed that he and Zsoronga would be forced to while away the watches in listless conversation. But faces turned to regard them as they approached, across the outer rind of warriors at first, then deeper as word of their arrival passed from lip to lip. The rumble of conversations evaporated. Sorweel and Zsoronga found themselves standing dumbfounded before their accumulated gazes.

  "Huorstra hum de faul bewaren mirsa!" a towering longbeard cried from the assembly's midst. The man shouldered his way through the others, his eyes bright with a kind of vicious joy. "Sorweel Varaltshau!" he bellowed, seizing him in a great, black-armoured embrace. "Famforlic kus thassa!"

  Suddenly everyone was cheering, and the young King found himself thrust into the crowd's congratulatory heart, shaking hands, returning embraces, nodding and thanking strangers with a kind of witless, breathless confusion. He acknowledged face after bruised face, even hugged a man blindfolded with bandages. In a matter of heartbeats he was delivered to the command tent, where he fairly tripped past the Pillarian Guards and into the washed light of the interior—so flustered that it seemed a minor miracle that he remembered to fall to his knees.

  "She positions you..."

  Anasûrimbor Kayûtas watched him from his chair, obviously amused by the spectacle of his arrival. Even in his Kidruhil cuirass and mail skirts, he sat with feline repose, his sandalled feet stretched across the mats before him, watching with the remote, lolling manner of an opium eater. Sorweel knew instantly that the man had not slept—and that he would not be the worse for it.

  The air was stifling, as much for the sunlight that frosted the canvas ceiling as for all the exhaling mouths. Five scribes crowded the sheaf-laden table to his right, and numerous others stood milling in what little space remained: officers and caste-nobles for the most part. Sorweel saw Eskeles among them, decked in his crimson Mandate robes, his left eye swollen into a greasy purple crease. He also glimpsed Anasûrimbor Serwa standing as tall as many of the men, swanlike in gowns of embroidered white. A memory of her arcane embrace whispered through him.

  Kayûtas allowed the uproar to subside before gesturing for him to stand. The Prince-Imperial was not long in waiting: something immaculate in his manner seemed to cut against all things unruly.

  "Teüs Eskeles has told us everything," he declared. "You have saved us, Sorweel. You..."

  A broken chorus of cheers and shouts rose from those gathered within th
e tent.

  "I... I did nothing," the Sakarpi King replied, trying to avoid the Swayali Grandmistress's gaze.

  "Nothing?" The Kidruhil General frowned, scratched the flaxen plaits of his beard. "You read the signs, like a true son of the plains. You saw the doom our foe had prepared for us. You counselled your commander to take the only action that could save us. And then, in the moment of utmost crisis, you lent your shoulder to Eskeles, cast your life on the longest of odds, so that he might alert us..." He glanced up toward his sister, then looked back, grinning like an uncle trying to teach his nephew how to gamble. "Nothing has ever been so impressive."

  "I did only what I... what I thought sensible."

  "Sense?" Kayûtas said with scowling good nature. "There are as many sensibilities as there are passions, Sorweel. Terror has a sense all its own: flee, shirk, abandon—whatever it takes to carry away one's skin. But you, you answered to the sense that transcends base desire. And we stand before you breathing, victorious, as a result."

  The Sakarpi King glanced about wildly, convinced he was the butt of some cruel joke. But everyone assembled watched with a kind of indulgent expectation, as if understanding he was but a boy still, unused to the burden of communal accolades. Only Zsoronga's solitary black face betrayed worry.

  "I... I-I know not what to say... You honour me."

  The Prince-Imperial nodded with a wisdom that belied the adolescent tenderness of his beard. "That is my intent," he said. "I have even sent a party of crippled riders back to Sakarpus to bear word of your heroic role to your kinsmen..."

  "You what?" Sorweel fairly coughed.

  "It's a political gesture, I admit. But the glory is no less real."

  In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see a wracked line of Kidruhil filing through the ruins of the Herders' Gate, outland conquerors, oppressors, crying out the treachery of Harweel's only son, how he had saved the very host that had laid Sakarpus low...

  Nausea welled through him. Shame squirmed in his breast, clawing his ribs, scratching his heart.

  "I... I don't know what to say..." he stammered.

  "You need not say anything," Kayûtas said with an indulgent smile. "Your pride is clear for all to see."