But this time he did neither.
"Why?" she asked. "Out of all the women you had lain with, why love her?"
"Because she possessed a sharp wit," he heard himself reply. "That was why I… why I returned, I think. That and her beauty. But your mother… She was always asking me questions about things, about the world, the past-even my Dreams fascinated her. We would lie in her bed sweating, and I would talk and talk, and she would never lose interest. One night she interrogated me until dawn gilded the cracks of her shutters. She would listen and…"
He trailed into the marching silence, not so much stymied by the difficulty of what he wanted to say as astonished by the fact he spoke at all. When had confession become so easy?
"And what?"
"And she… she believed me…"
"Your stories, you mean. About the First Apocalypse and the No-God."
He glanced about, as though wary about being overheard, when in truth he really did not care.
"That… But it was more, I think. She believed in me."
Could it be so simple?
And so he continued. He heard himself explaining things he never knew he understood, how doubt and indecision had so ruled his soul and intellect that he could scarce act without lapsing into endless recriminations. Why? Why? Always why? He heard himself explaining the horrors of his Dreams, and how they had frayed his nerves to the quick. He heard himself telling her how he had come to her mother weak, a man who would sooner hatch plots in his soul than take any real action…
How Drusas Achamian, the only Wizard in the Three Seas, had been a cringer and a coward.
The strange thing is that he found himself actually yearning for those days-missing not so much the fear, perhaps, as the simple anguish of needing another. Living with her in Sumna while she continued taking custom, sitting and waiting in the bustling agora, watching the to and fro of innumerable Sumnites while images of her coupling with strangers plagued him gut and soul. Perhaps this explained what happened later, when she had climbed into Kellhus's bed, believing that Achamian had perished in the Sareotic Library. If there was any fact from his past that caused Achamian to both flinch and marvel, it was the way he had continued to love both of them after their joint betrayal. Despite the years, he never ceased balling his fists at the pageant of memories, his awe of Kellhus and the godlike ease with which he mastered the Gnosis, and his impotent fury when the man retired… to lie with his wife-his wife!
Esmenet. Such a strange name for a whore.
"Fear…" the old Wizard said in resignation. "I was always afraid with your mother."
"Because she was a whore," Mimara said with more eagerness than compassion.
She was right. He had loved a whore and had reaped the wages accordingly. Perhaps the final days of the First Holy War simply had been a continuation of those early days in Sumna. The same hurt, the same rage, only yoked to the otherworldly glamour that was Anasurimbor Kellhus.
"No…" he said. "Because she was so beautiful."
It seemed a proper lie.
"What I don't understand," Mimara exclaimed with the air verbalizing something she had long debated in silence, "is why you refuse to hold her accountable. She was a caste-menial, not sold into slavery like me. She chose to be a whore… just as she chose to betray you."
"Did she?" It seemed that he listened to his voice more than he spoke with it.
"Did she what? Choose? Of course she did."
"Few things are so capricious as choice, girl."
"Seems simple to me. Either she chooses to be faithful or she chooses to betray."
He glared at her. "And what about you? Were you chained to your pillow in Carythusal? No? Does that mean you chose to be there? That you deserved everything you suffered? Could you not have jumped off the ship when the slavers she sold you to put out to sea? Why blame your mother for your wilful refusal to run away?"
Her look was hateful but marred by the same hesitation that seemed to dog all of their heated conversations of late, that moment of searching for the proper passion, as if willing away some reptilian fragment of self that simply did not care. Mimara, part of him realized, was injured because he had said something injurious, not because she felt any real pain. That capacity, it seemed, had been lost in the dark bowels of Cil-Aujas.
"There are chains," she said dully, "and then there are chains."
"Exactly."
A kind of humility haunted her manner after that, but one that seemed more motivated by weariness than any real insight. Even so, he welcomed it. Arrogance is ever the patron of condemnation. Though most all men lived in total ignorance of the ironies and contradictions that mortared their lives, they instinctively understood the power of hypocrisy. So they pretended, laid claim to an implausible innocence. To better sleep. To better condemn. The fact that everyone thought themselves more blameless than blameworthy, Ajencis once wrote, was at once the most ridiculous and the most tragic of human infirmities. Ridiculous because it was so obvious and yet utterly invisible. Tragic because it doomed them to unending war and strife.
There is more than strength in accusation, there is the presumption of innocence, which is what makes it the first resort of the brokenhearted.
During the first years of his exile, Achamian had punished Esmenet in effigy innumerable times in the silent watches before sleep-too many times. He had accused and he had accused. But he had lived with his grievances too long, it seemed, to perpetually condemn her for anything she might have done. No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.
And Esmenet was nothing if not clever.
So he forgave her. He could even remember the precise moment. He had spent the bulk of the day searching his notes for the specifics of a certain dream, one involving a variant of Seswatha's captivity in Dagliash-he could no longer remember why it was important. Furious with himself, he had decided to climb down from his room to assist Geraus with his wood chopping. The odd blister, it seemed, helped focus his thoughts as well as steady his quill. The slave was doggedly hacking away at one of the several shorn trunks he had drawn to the crude hutch where they stored their wood. Grabbing what turned out to be the dull axe, Achamian began chopping as well, but for some bizarre reason he could not strike the wood without sending chips spinning up into Geraus's face. The first one went unmentioned. The second occasioned a frowning smile. The third incited outright laughter and a subsequent apology. The fifth chip caught the man in the eye, sent him to the water-bucket blinking and grimacing.
Once again Achamian apologized, but only so far as was seemly between master and slave. Strangely enough, he had come to prize the jnanic etiquette he so despised when travelling the fleshpots of the Three Seas. Afterward he stood there, watching the man he owned rinse his left eye time and again, feeling somehow guilty and wronged at the same time. After all, he had meant to assist the man…
Geraus turned toward him, ruefully shook his head, and commended him for his supernatural aim. Achamian's vague ire evaporated, as it always did in the face of the man's relentless good nature. And then, impossibly, he caught the scent of the desert, as if somewhere just beyond the arboreal screens that fenced his tower, he would find the dunes of the mighty Carathay.
And just like that, she was forgiven… Esmenet, the whore become Empress.
Numb to his fingertips, Achamian returned the axe to its nook. "Better to heed the Gods," Geraus had said in approval.
Of course habits, like fleas, are not so easy to kill, especially habits of thought and passion. But she was forgiven, nonetheless. Even if he wasn't finished accusing her, she was forgiven.
And somehow, while walking with a band of killers through the empty heart of a dead civilization, he managed to explain this to Mimara.
He told her about their very first meeting, about the bawdy way her mother had accosted
him from her window.
"Hey, Ainoni," she had shouted down. It was the custom in Sumna to call all bearded foreigners Ainoni. "A man so swollen needs to take his ease, lest he bursts…"
"I was quite fat in those days," he said, answering Mimara's dubious look.
And he told her about herself-or at least the memory of her that continued to haunt her mother.
"This was the summer after the famine. Sumna, the whole Nansur Empire had suffered grievously. In fact, the poor had sold so many of their children into slavery that the Emperor issued an edict voiding all such sales between Nansur citizens the previous summer. Like most caste-menials, your mother was too poor to afford citizenship, but Exceptions were being issued by various tax farmers throughout the city. Your mother would have never told me about you, I think, were it not for the law… the Sixteenth Edict of Manumission, it was called, I think. She needed the gold, you see. She was mad for gold-for anything she might use as a bribe."
"You gave it to her."
"Your mother never dreamed she could get you back. In fact, she never thought she would survive the famine. She literally believed she was sparing you her doom. You simply cannot imagine the straits she was in, the chains that shackled her. She sold you to Ainoni slavers, I think, because she thought the farther she could deliver you from the Nansurium the better."
"So the Emperor's edict was useless."
"I tried to tell her, but she refused to listen… Really refused," he added with a chuckle, drawing a finger to the small scar he still sported on his left temple. "Even still, she managed to secure the Exception… from a man, a monster, named Polpi Tharias-someone I still dream of killing. The first day the law went into effect she went down to the harbour. I don't know about now, but back then the Ershi district-you know? the north part of the harbour, in the shadow of the Hagerna-was where the slavers held their markets. She refused to let me accompany her… It was something… something she needed to do on her own, I think."
It was a strange thing for a man to enter the world of a damaged woman. The apparent disproportion between event and evaluation. The endless sinkholes that punished verbal wandering. The crazed alchemy of compassion and condemnation. It was a place where none of the scales seemed balanced, where the compass bowl never settled and the needle never showed true north.
"You know, girl, I think that was when I truly fell in love with her… that day, so very hot, as humid as any day in the Sayut Delta. I sat on the very sill she used to accost men on the street below, watched her slender form swallowed by the mobs…"
For some reason, he could not conjure the image in his soul's eye. Instead he glimpsed the eunuch-fat man she had vanished behind in the press: his smile hooking his jowls, empires of dark soaking his armpits.
Such is the perversity of memory. Small wonder the Nonmen lapsed into madness.
"She wasn't the only one," he continued. "Apparently thousands of Exceptions had been sold, almost all of them counterfeit. Not that it would have mattered, given that you were in Carythusal, far beyond the sway of the Emperor and his ill-considered law. The slavers had hired mercenaries in anticipation. There were riots. Hundreds were killed. One of the slaver's ships was set alight. When I saw the smoke I went out into the city to try to find her."
He idly wondered whether anyone had seen as many smoking cities as he. Many, he decided, if the rumours he had heard regarding the Wars of Unification were true.
Sarl and the Captain among them.
"Men are fools at the best of times," he continued, "but when they gather in mobs they lose whatever little reason they can claim when alone. Someone cries out, they all cry out. Someone bludgeons or burns, and they all bludgeon and burn. It's remarkable really, and terrifying enough to send kings and emperors into hiding.
"I was forced to resort to the Gnosis twice just to reach the harbour, and this in a city where Chorae were rife and sorcerers had their tongues scraped out with oyster shells. I actually remember little, just smoke, shadows running, bodies in the dust, and this… this cold that seemed to burn in the bottom of my gut."
Even after so many years, the phantasmagoric feel of that afternoon still tickled. It had been one of the first times his waking life had approximated the shrieking madness of his Dreams.
"Did you find her?" Mimara asked. She had been walking with her head slouched, almost slung, from her shoulders. It was a unlikely posture, a peculiar combination of reflection and defeat.
"No."
"No? What do you mean, no?"
"I mean no. I remember thinking I found her. Along one of the Hagerna's walls, lying face first in her own blood…" The moment came back to him unbidden. He had been nauseated for smoke and worry, leaning his then fat body against what seemed a laborious incline. The sight of her struck all thought and breath and motion from him. He just stood there, teetering, while the screams and shouts continued to pipe in the near distance behind him. At first, he had simply known it was her. The same girlish form and piling black hair. Even more, the same mauve cloak-though it struck him now that it might have only seemed the same cut and colour. Fear has a way of rewriting things to suit its purposes. She had fallen facing up-hill, pigeon-toed, one arm slack along her side, the other bent beneath her torso. The blood had streamed along her edges, outlining her in black and crimson. He remembered horns sounding across the harbour-the Shrial Knights signalling-and how in their blaring wake a hush had fallen, allowing him to hear the tap-tap of her blood directly into the heart of the earth: she had fallen across one of Sumna's famed gutters.
"But it wasn't her?" Mimara was asking.
Several young men had raced past without so much as seeing them. With nerveless fingers he had reached down, certain she would be as light as bundled rags. She was not, and it reminded him of pulling stones out of wet beach sand as a child. He heaved the woman onto her back, revealed her sodden face, and stumbled back against the wall, falling to his rump.
Joy and relief… unlike anything he would experience until the First Holy War.
"No," he replied. "Just some other unfortunate. Your mother had found her way back with nary a scrape." She had been sitting on her sill when he returned, staring down the slots between the opposing tenements, toward the harbour. The room was dark, so that she seemed to glow from where he stood in the doorway.
"She never spoke of you again… Not to me or anyone."
Not until she succumbed to Kellhus.
They both fell silent for a trudging time, as though struggling to absorb the sideways significance of his tale. They stared at the sparse crowd of scalpers before them: Pokwas with a vole carcass slung across his great tulwar, which he wore holstered diagonally across his back. Galian bobbing at his side, his stride as quick and nimble as his tongue. Conger and Wonard shuffling like hurried ghosts, their Galeoth war-knots so haphazard that their hair fell in filthy rags to their shoulders. Koll lurching and limping, his shoulders as sharp as sticks.
"Your mother is a survivor, girl," Achamian finally hazarded. "Same as you."
He found himself thinking that perhaps she had died that day in the harbour-or a part of her. The Esmenet he had found was not the Esmenet who had left him, that much was certain. Her melancholy had lifted, if anything. He remembered thinking that she had actually healed in some way. Before that day, a kind of inward lethargy had always blunted the appetite of her curiosities, the wicked edge of her witticisms. Or so it seemed at the time.
"Let the Outside sort her sins," he added.
He typically shied from this kind of talk. The World seemed too much a rind pulled across something horrific, and death loomed as the only terror. Someday his sins would be sorted as well, and he did not need Mimara and her Eye to know his ultimate fate.
He walked, waiting for Mimara to pinch him with more questions and unflattering observations. But she kept her face turned to the distances before them, the wind-whisking openness, the endless lines. You would not know the world was crooked, he thought, livi
ng on the plains.
Perhaps because they had been speaking Ainoni, he found himself recalling the time he had spent in Carythusal spying on the Scarlet Spires, and of this old drunk-Posodemas, he called himself-who would ply him with stories at a tavern called the Holy Leper. The man, who claimed to have survived seven naval battles and no less than five years as a captive of the Shirise pirates, would speak of nothing but his wives and mistresses. He would describe, in excruciating detail, how each had betrayed him in this or that humiliating respect. Achamian would sit listening to the cow-eyed wretch, alternately scanning the crowd and nodding in false encouragement, telling himself that few things were more precious to a man than his shame — the very sense endless drink stripped from him.
And that, he realized with no small amount of dismay, was what seemed to be happening here, on the long road to Ishual.
Endless intoxication. And with it, the slow strangulation of shame. What good was honesty when it carried no pain?
Dust on the horizon. Human smells on the hot wind.
Fleet, they sprinted across the grasses, running low so that the weeds clawed their shoulders, their numbers scattered wide so that the dust of their approach would not alert their prey. They howled insults at the hated sun. They were sleek creatures, tireless and unrelenting in the prosecution of their dread appetites. They took dirt for sustenance, violence for bliss. They wore the faces of their enemy, inhumanly beautiful when calm, twisted grotesqueries when aroused.
Sranc… Weapons of an ancient war, ranging a dead world.
They could smell them, the trespassers. They could see the lobes of flesh, the bloody pockets they would cut for their coupling, the eyes wide with unspeakable horror. Though generations had passed since their ancestors had last encountered Men, the fact of them had been stamped into their flesh. The aching splendour of their screams. The heat of their bleeding. The twitching glory of their struggles.
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