The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  “That is because you do not understand the ways of war,” Kellhus-as-Cnaiür continued. “They are hairy, and they are dark, like the cracks of unwashed wrestlers. War is where the sandal of the world meets the scrotum of men.”

  “I would be spared your blasphemy, Scylvendi.”

  Kellhus spat into the fire. “You think your ways are the ways of the People, but you are wrong. You are silly girls to us, and we would make love to your asses were they as muscular as those of our horses.”

  “I would be spared your affections, Scylvendi!”

  “But you would live on,” Esmenet cried out, “in the scars I cut into my arm!”

  The camp fairly shrieked with laughter. Xinemus hung his head between his knees, shuddering and snorting. Esmenet rolled backward on her mat, screaming in her enticing and adorable way. Zenkappa and Dinchases leaned against each other, their shoulders jerking. Serwë had curled into a ball, and seemed to weep with joy as much as laugh. Kellhus merely smiled, looked about as though mystified by their hysterics.

  When Cnaiür arrived later that night everyone fell silent, at once abashed and conspiratorial. Scowling, the Scylvendi paused before the fire, looked from face to grinning face. Achamian glanced at Serwë, was shocked by the malice in her smile.

  Suddenly Esmenet burst out laughing. “You should have heard Kellhus,” she cried. “You sounded hilarious!”

  The Scylvendi’s weathered face went blank. His murderous eyes became dull with … Could it be? Then contempt regained the heights of his expression. He spat into the fire and strode off.

  His spittle hissed.

  Kellhus stood, apparently stricken with remorse.

  “The man’s a thin-skinned lout,” Achamian said crossly. “Mockery is a gift between friends. A gift.”

  The Prince whirled. “Is it?” he cried. “Or is it an excuse?”

  Achamian could only stare, dumbstruck. Kellhus had rebuked him. Kellhus. Achamian looked to the others, saw his shock mirrored in their faces, though not his dismay.

  “Is it?” Kellhus demanded.

  Achamian felt his face flush, his lips tremble. There was something about Kellhus’s voice. So like Achamian’s father’s …

  Who’s he to—

  “Forgive me, Akka,” the Prince said, lowering his head as though stunned by his own outburst. “I punish you for my own folly … I act twice the fool.”

  Achamian swallowed. Shook his head. Forced a smile.

  “No … No, I apologize …” His voice quavered. “I was too harsh.”

  Kellhus smiled, leaned to place a hand on his shoulder. At his touch, Achamian’s entire side went numb. For some reason the Prince’s smell, leather with a hint of rosewater, always flustered him.

  “Then we’re fools together,” Kellhus said. There was delight, and the brief, uncanny sense that Kellhus was expecting something …

  “I’ve been saying that all along,” Xinemus growled from the far side of the fire.

  The Marshal’s timing was impeccable—as usual. Esmenet led the charge of nervous laughter, and they recaptured something of their earlier cheer. Achamian found himself laughing as well.

  All of them, at some point or another, inevitably ran afoul of one another’s humour. Xinemus would complain of Iryssas, who would harp about Esmenet, who would gripe about Serwë, who would carp about Achamian, who would gripe about Xinemus. Too dense, too forward, too vain, too crude, and so on. All men were caste-merchants in some respect, haggling and trading, but without scales or touchstones to confirm the weight or purity of their coinage. They had only guesswork. Backbiting, petty jealousies, resentments, arguments, and third-party arbitrations simply belonged to the market of men.

  But with Kellhus, it was different. Somehow he managed to browse the market without opening his purse. Almost from the beginning they’d recognized him as the Judge—including Xinemus, who was the titular head of their fire. No doubt there was an uncertainty about him, a capriciousness appropriate to his brilliance, but these were simply departures from a profound and immovable centre. Intelligence, as penetrating as any in near or far antiquity. Compassion, as broad as Inrau’s and yet somehow far deeper—a benevolence born of understanding rather than forgiveness, as though he could see through the delinquent rush of thought and passion to the still point of innocence within each soul. And words! Analogies that seized reality and burned it from the inside out …

  He possessed, Achamian sometimes thought, what the poet Protathis claimed all men should strive for: the hand of Triamis, the intellect of Ajencis, and the heart of Sejenus.

  And others thought this as well.

  Every evening, after the dinner fires burned low, men and women from every nation, it seemed, began gathering round the perimeter of Xinemus’s camp, sometimes calling out to Kellhus, but mostly keeping to themselves. A few in the beginning, then more and more, until they comprised a congregation of three dozen or so souls. Soon Xinemus’s Attrempans were leaving large swaths of empty pasture between their round tents and their Marshal’s pavilion. They would be supping with strangers otherwise.

  For the first week or so everyone, including Kellhus, did their best to ignore them, thinking this would shortly drive them away. Who, they wondered, would sit unacknowledged night after night watching others—watching strangers—take their repose? But like little brothers with no resources of their own, they persisted. Their numbers even multiplied.

  On a whim, Achamian took a seat among them one night, and watched as they watched, hoping to understand what it was that drew them to so demean themselves. At first, he merely saw familiar figures illumined by firelight against a greater dark. Cnaiür sitting cross-legged, his back as broad as an Ainoni fan and strapped with scarred muscle. Beyond him, on the far side of the fire, Xinemus upon his campstool, hands on his knees, his square-cut beard brushing his chest as he laughed in response to Esmenet, who knelt beside him, muttering something wicked about somebody, no doubt. Dinchases. Zenkappa. Iryssas. Serwë leaning back on her mat, bouncing her knees together, innocently exposing warm and promising shadows. And next to her, Kellhus, sitting serene and golden.

  Achamian glanced at those seated throughout the surrounding darkness. He saw Men of the Tusk from every nation and caste. Some leaned together, talking amongst themselves. But most sat as he did, apart from their fellows, eyes sorting through the bright figures before them as though struggling to read by fading candlelight. They seemed … ensorcelled, like fish drawn to a flashing lure. Compelled, not so much by the light as by the surrounding dark.

  “Why do you do this?” he asked the man sitting nearest to him, a blond Tydonni with a soldier’s forearms and a caste-noble’s clear eyes.

  “Can’t you see?” the man replied, without so much as glancing in his direction.

  “See what?”

  “See him.”

  “You mean Prince Kellhus?”

  The man turned to him, his smile at once beatific and filled with pity. “You’re too close,” he said. “That’s why you can’t see.”

  “See what?” Achamian asked. His breath felt pinched.

  “He touched me once,” the man inexplicably replied. “Before Asgilioch. I stumbled while marching and he caught me by the arm. He said, ‘Doff your sandals and shod the earth.’”

  Achamian chortled. “An old joke,” he explained. “You must have cursed the ground when you stumbled.”

  “So?” the man replied. He was fairly trembling, Achamian realized, with indignant fury.

  Achamian frowned, tried to smile, to reassure. “Well, it’s an old saying—ancient, in fact—meant to remind people not to foist their failings on others.”

  “No,” the man grated, “it’s not.”

  Achamian paused. “Then what does it mean?”

  Rather than answer, the man had turned away, as though wilfully consigning Achamian and his question to the oblivion of what he couldn’t see. Achamian stared at him for a thick moment, bewildered and curiously dismaye
d. How could fury secure the truth?

  He stood, slapped dust from his knees.

  “It means,” the man said from behind him, “that we must uproot the world. That we must destroy all that offends.”

  Achamian started, such was the hatred in the man’s voice. He turned—to sneer or to scold, he wasn’t sure which. Instead he simply stared, dumbfounded. For whatever reason, the man couldn’t match his gaze; he scowled at the firelight instead. Achamian glanced from him to the other faces in the darkness. Most had turned to the sound of angry voices, but even as he watched they drifted back to Kellhus in the light. And somehow, the Schoolman simply knew these people wouldn’t go away.

  I’m no different, he thought, feeling the perplexing twinge of insights into things already known. I simply sit closer to the fire …

  Their reasons were his reasons. He knew this.

  Their grounds were inchoate and innumerable: grief, temptation, remorse, confusion. They watched out of weariness, out of clandestine hope and fear, out of fascination and delight. But more than anything, they watched out of necessity.

  They watched because they knew something was about to happen.

  Without warning, the fire popped, belching a geyser of sparks, one of which floated toward Kellhus. Smiling, he glanced at Serwë, then reached out and pinched the point of orange light between thumb and forefinger. Extinguished it.

  Several gasped in the darkness.

  As the days passed, more and more watchers gathered. The situation became doubly uncomfortable, both because their camp had become a peculiar stage, an enclosure of light surrounded by shadowy watchers, and because of Kellhus’s seething humour. The Prince of Atrithau had affected everyone who frequented Xinemus’s fire, each according to their hopes and hurts, and to see the man who’d rewritten the ground of their understanding angry was troubling in the way of loved ones suddenly acting contrary to all expectations.

  One night, for reasons peculiar to his own brooding humour, Xinemus finally blurted: “Dammit, Kellhus! Why don’t you just talk to them?”

  Stunned silence. Esmenet reached out, clutched Achamian’s hand in the shadows between them. Only the Scylvendi continued eating, fingering gruel into his mouth. Achamian found himself repulsed, as though he witnessed something lewd and animal. A man too bent to the arch of his lust.

  “Because,” Kellhus said tightly, his eyes riveted upon the fire, “they make more of me than I am.”

  Do they? Achamian thought. He knew the others asked themselves the same question, even though they rarely spoke of Kellhus to one another. For some reason, a peculiar shyness afflicted them whenever the subject of Kellhus arose, as though they harboured suspicions too foolish or too hurtful to reveal. Achamian could only really speak of him to Esmenet, and even then …

  “So,” Xinemus snapped. More than anyone, he seemed able to pretend that Kellhus was simply another face about their fire. “Go tell them.”

  Kellhus stared at the Marshal for several unblinking moments, then nodded. Without a word, he stood and strode off into the darkness.

  And so began what Achamian came to call “The Imprompta,” the nightly talks—almost sermons—Kellhus started giving to the Men of the Tusk. Not always, but often, he and Esmenet would join him, watch from nearby as he answered questions, discussed innumerable things. He told the two of them that their presence gave him heart, that they reminded him he was no more than those to whom he spoke. He confessed a growing conceit, a thought that terrified because he found it easier and easier to bear.

  “So often when I speak,” he said, “I don’t recognize my voice.”

  Achamian couldn’t remember ever clutching Esmenet’s hand so fiercely.

  The numbers attending began to swell, not so fast that Achamian could notice a difference between consecutive nights, but fast enough that several dozen had become hundreds by the time the Holy War neared Shigek. A handful of more devoted listeners would assemble a small wooden platform, upon which they would lay a mat between two iron braziers. Kellhus would sit cross-legged, poised and immobile between the shining flames. Usually he would wear a plain yellow cassock—looted, Serwë had told Achamian, from the Sapatishah’s camp on the Plains of Mengedda. And somehow, whether by posture, bearing, or some trick of the light, he would look unearthly. Even glorious.

  One evening, for reasons he couldn’t fully articulate, Achamian followed Kellhus and Esmenet with a candle, his writing accoutrements, and a sheaf of parchment. The previous night Kellhus had spoken of trust and betrayal, telling the story of a fur trapper he’d known in the wastes north of Atrithau, a man who’d remained faithful to his dead wife by fostering a heartbreaking devotion to his dogs. “When one love dies,” he’d said, “one must love another.” Esmenet had openly wept.

  It just seemed that such words had to be written.

  With Esmenet, Achamian unrolled their mat to the left of Kellhus’s platform. Torches had been staked across the small field. The atmosphere was sociable, though hushed by something more than respect and not quite reverence. Achamian glimpsed more than a few familiar faces in the crowd. Several high-ranking caste-nobles were present, including a square-jawed man wearing a Nansur general’s blue cloak—General Sompas or Martemus, Achamian believed. Even Proyas sat in the dust with the others, though he seemed troubled. He looked away instead of acknowledging Achamian’s gaze.

  Kellhus took his place between the potted fires. The resulting silence seemed to hiss. For several moments he seemed unbearably real, like the sole living man, something raw and tumid in a world of smoky apparitions.

  He smiled, and Achamian’s chest, which had tightened like parched leather, relaxed to the point of feeling sodden. An unaccountable relief washed through him. Breathing deeply, he readied his quill, cursed as the first errant droplet of ink tapped onto the page.

  “Akka,” Esmenet chided.

  As always, Kellhus searched the faces of those before him, his eyes glinting with compassion. After a few heartbeats his gaze settled upon one man—a Conriyan knight by the look of his tunic and the heft of his gold rings. Otherwise he looked haggard, as though he still slept upon the Battleplain. His beard was knotted with forgotten plaits.

  “What happened?” Kellhus asked.

  The nameless knight smiled, but there was a strange and subtle incongruence in his expression, something like glimpsing the difference between white eyes and yellow teeth.

  “Three days ago,” the man said, “our lord heard rumour of a village some miles to the west, so we rode out, hoping for plunder …”

  Kellhus nodded. “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing … I mean, no village. Our lord was wroth. He claims the others—”

  “What did you find?”

  The man blinked. Panic flashed from the stoic weariness of his expression. “A child,” he said hoarsely. “A dead child … We were following this trail, something worn by goatherds, I think, cutting across this hillside, and there was just this dead child, a girl, no more than five or six, lying in our path. Her throat had been cut …”

  “What happened next?”

  “Nothing … I mean, we simply ignored her, continued riding as though she were nothing more than discarded cloth … a-a scrap of leather in the dust,” he added, his voice breaking. He looked down to his callused palms.

  “Guilt and shame wrack you by day,” Kellhus said, “the feeling that you’ve committed some mortal crime. Nightmares wrack you by night … She speaks to you.”

  The man’s nod was almost comical in its desperation. He hadn’t, Achamian realized, the nerve for war.

  “But why?” he cried. “I mean, how many dead have we seen?”

  “But not all seeing,” Kellhus replied, “is witness.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “Witness is the seeing that testifies, that judges so that it may be judged. You saw, and you judged. A trespass had been committed, an innocent had been murdered. You saw this.”

 
; “Yes!” the man hissed. “A little girl. A little girl!”

  “And now you suffer.”

  “But why?” he cried. “Why should I suffer? She’s not mine. She was heathen!”

  “Everywhere … Everywhere we’re surrounded by the blessed and the cursed, the sacred and the profane. But our hearts are like hands, they grow callous to the world. And yet, like our hands even the most callous heart will blister if overworked or chafed by something new. For some time we may feel the pinch, but we ignore it because we have so much work to do.” Kellhus had looked down into his right hand. Suddenly he balled it into a fist, raised it high. “And then one strike, with a hammer or a sword, and the blister breaks, our heart is torn. And then we suffer, for we feel the ache for the blessed, the sting of the cursed. We no longer see, we witness …”

  His luminous eyes settled upon the nameless knight. Blue and wise.

  “This is what has happened to you.”

  “Yes … Yes! B-but what should I do?”

  “Rejoice.”

  “Rejoice? But I suffer!”

  “Yes, rejoice! The callused hand cannot feel the lover’s cheek. When we witness, we testify, and when we testify we make ourselves responsible for what we see. And that—that—is what it means to belong.”

  Kellhus suddenly stood, leapt from the low platform, took two breathtaking steps into their midst. “Make no mistake,” he continued, and the air thrummed with the resonance of his voice. “This world owns you. You belong, whether you want to or not. Why do we suffer? Why do the wretched take their own lives? Because the world, no matter how cursed, owns us. Because we belong.

  “Should we celebrate suffering?” a challenging voice called. From somewhere …

  Prince Kellhus smiled, glancing into the darkness. “Then it’s no longer suffering, is it?”

  The small congregation laughed.

  “No,” Kellhus continued, “that’s not what I mean. Celebrate the meaning of suffering. Rejoice that you belong, not that you suffer. Remember what the Latter Prophet teaches us: glory comes in joy and sorrow. Joy and sorrow …”

  “I s-see see the wisdom of you-your words, Prince,” the nameless knight stammered. “I truly see! But …”