The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  And somehow, Achamian could feel his question …

  What is there to gain?

  “I’m not asking you to see,” Kellhus said. “I’m asking you to witness.”

  Blank face. Desolate eyes. The nameless knight blinked, and two tears silvered his cheek. Then he smiled, and nothing, it seemed, could be so glorious.

  “To make myself …” His voice quavered, broke. “To m-make …”

  “To be one with the world in which you dwell,” Kellhus said. “To make a covenant of your life.”

  The world … You will gain the world.

  Achamian looked down to his parchment, realized he’d stopped writing. He turned, looked helplessly at Esmenet.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I remember.”

  Of course she did.

  Esmenet. The second pillar of his peace, and by far the mightier of the two.

  It seemed at once strange and fitting to find something almost conjugal in the midst of the Holy War. Each evening they would walk exhausted from Kellhus’s talks or from Xinemus’s fire, holding hands like young lovers, ruminating or bickering or laughing about the evening’s events. They would pick their way through the guy ropes, and Achamian would pull the canvas aside with mock gallantry. They would touch and brush as they disrobed, then hold each other in the dark—as though together they could be more than what they were.

  A whore of word and a whore of body.

  The greater world had receded into shadow. He thought of Inrau less and less over the days, and pondered the concerns of his life with Esmenet—and Kellhus—more and more. Even the threat of the Consult and the Second Apocalypse had become something banal and remote, like rumours of war among pale-skinned peoples. Seswatha’s Dreams still came as fierce as ever, but they dissolved in the softness of her touch, in the consolation of her voice. “Hush, Akka,” she would say, “it’s only a dream,” and like smoke, the images—straining, groaning, spitting, and shrieking—would twist into nothingness. For once in his life, Achamian was seized by the moment, by now … By the small hurt in her eyes when he said something careless. By the way her hand drifted to his knee of its own accord whenever they sat together. By the nights they lay naked in the tent, her head upon his chest and her dark hair fanned across his shoulder and neck, speaking of those things only they knew.

  “Everyone knows,” she said one night after making love.

  They’d retired early, and they could hear the others: first mock protests and uproarious laughter, then utter quiet bound by the magic of Kellhus’s voice. The fire still burned, and they could see it, muted and blurred across the dark canvas.

  “He’s a prophet,” she said.

  Achamian felt something resembling panic. “What are you saying?”

  She turned to study him. Her eyes seemed to glitter with their own light. “Only what you need to hear.”

  “And why would I need to hear that?” What had she said?

  “Because you think it. Because you fear it … But most of all, because you need it.”

  We are damned, her eyes said.

  “I’m not amused, Esmi.”

  She frowned, but as though she’d noticed nothing more than a tear in one of her new Kianene silks. “How long has it been since you’ve contacted Atyersus? Weeks? Months?”

  “What is it with—”

  “You’re waiting, Akka. You’re waiting to see what he becomes.”

  “Kellhus?”

  She turned her face away, lowered her ear to his heart. “He’s a prophet.”

  She knew him. When Achamian thought back, it seemed that she’d always known him. He’d even thought her a witch when they met for the first time, not only because of the ever-so-faint Mark of the charmed whore’s shell that she used as a contraceptive, but because she guessed he was a sorcerer before he uttered scarcely five words. From the very beginning, she seemed to have a talent for him. For Drusas Achamian.

  It was strange, to be known—truly known. To be awaited rather than anticipated. To be accepted instead of believed. To be half another’s elaborate habits. To see oneself continually foreshadowed in another’s eyes.

  And it was strange to know. Sometimes she laughed so hard she belched. And when disappointed, her eyes dimmed like candles starved of air. She liked the feel of knives between her toes. She loved to hold her hand slack and motionless while his cock hardened beneath. “I do nothing,” she would whisper, “and yet you rise to me.” She was frightened of horses. She fondled her left armpit when deep in thought. She did not hide her face when she cried. And she could say things of such beauty that sometimes Achamian thought his heart might stop for having listened.

  Details. Simple enough in isolation, but terrifying and mysterious in their sum. A mystery that he knew …

  Was that not love? To know, to trust a mystery …

  Once, on the night of Ishoiya, which Conriyans celebrated with copious amounts of that foul and flammable liquor, perrapta, Achamian asked Kellhus to describe the way he loved Serwë. Only he, Xinemus, and Kellhus remained awake. They were all drunk.

  “Not the way you love Esmenet,” the Prince replied.

  “And how is that? How do I love her?” He staggered to his feet, his arms askew. He swayed before the smoke and fire. “Like a fish loves the ocean? Like, like …”

  “Like a drunk loves his cask,” Xinemus chortled. “Like my dog loves your leg!”

  Achamian granted him that, but it was Kellhus’s answer he most wanted to hear. It was always Kellhus’s answer. “So, my Prince? How do I love Esmenet?”

  Somehow a note of anger had crept into his tone.

  Kellhus smiled, raised his downcast eyes. Tears scored his cheek.

  “Like a child,” he said.

  The words knocked Achamian from his feet. He crashed to his buttocks with a grunt.

  “Yes,” Xinemus agreed. He looked forward into the night, smiling … Smiling for his friend, Achamian realized.

  “Like a child?” Achamian asked, feeling curiously childlike.

  “Yes,” Kellhus replied. “You ask no questions, Akka. It simply is … Without reserve.” He turned to him with the look Achamian knew so well, the look he so often yearned for when others occupied Kellhus’s attention. The look of friend, father, student, and teacher. The look his heart could see.

  “She’s become your ground,” Kellhus said.

  “Yes …” Achamian replied.

  She’s become my wife.

  Such a thought! He beamed with a childish glee. He felt wonderfully drunk.

  My wife!

  But later that same night, he somehow found himself making love to Serwë.

  Afterward he would scarcely remember, but he’d awakened on a reed mat by the remains of the fire. He’d been dreaming of the white turrets of Myclai and rumours of Mog-Pharau. Xinemus and Kellhus were gone, and the night sky seemed impossibly deep, the way it had looked that night he and Esmenet had slept out of doors at the ruined shrine. Like an endless pit. Serwë knelt above him, as flawless as ivory in the firelight, at once smiling and crying.

  “What’s wrong?” he gasped. But then he realized she’d hiked his robe to his waist, and was rolling his cock against his belly. He was already hard—insanely so, it seemed.

  “Serwë …” he managed to protest, but with each roll of her palm, bolts of rapture shuddered through him. He arched against the ground, straining to press himself into her hand. For some reason, it seemed that all he needed, all he’d ever needed, was to feel her fingers close about the head of his member.

  “No,” he moaned, digging his heels into the turf, clawing at the grass. What was happening?

  She released him, and he gasped at the kiss of cool air. He could feel his own fiery pulse …

  Something. He needed to say something! This couldn’t be happening!

  But she’d slipped free her hasas, and he trembled at the sight of her. So lithe. So smooth. White in shadow, burnished gold in firelight. Her peach hazed with
tender blond. She no longer touched him, yet her beauty flailed at him, wrenched at his groin. He swallowed, struggled to breathe. Then she straddled him. He glimpsed the porcelain sway of her breasts, the hairless curve of her belly.

  Is she with—

  She encompassed him. He cried out, cursed.

  “It is you!” she hissed, sobbing, staring desperately into his eyes. “I can see you. I can see!”

  He turned his head aside in delirium, afraid he would climax too soon. This was Serwë … Sweet Sejenus, this was Serwë!

  Then he saw Esmenet, standing desolate in the dark. Watching … He closed his eyes, grimaced, and climaxed.

  “Guh … g-guh …”

  “I can feel you!” Serwë cried.

  When he opened his eyes Esmenet was gone—if she had ever been.

  Serwë continued to grind against him. The whole world had become a slurry of heat and wetness and thundering aching thrusting beauty. He surrendered to her abandon.

  Somehow he awoke before the horns and sat for a time at the entrance to his tent, watching Esmenet sleep, feeling the pinch of dried seed on his thighs. When she awoke, he searched her eyes, but saw nothing. Through the hard, long march of the following day, she chastised him for drinking and nothing more. Serwë didn’t so much as look at him. By the following evening he’d convinced himself it had been a dream. A delicious dream.

  The perrapta. There could be no other explanation.

  Fucking fish liquor, he thought, and tried to feel ruefully amused.

  When he told Esmenet, she laughed and threatened to tell Kellhus. Afterward, alone, he actually wept in relief. Never, he realized, not even the night following the madness with the Emperor beneath the Andiamine Heights, had he felt a greater sense of doom. And he knew he belonged to Esmi—not the world.

  She was his covenant. Esmenet was his wife.

  The Holy War crept ever closer to Shigek, and still he ignored the Mandate. There were excuses he could assemble. He could ponder the impossibility of making discreet inquiries, bribes, or dissembling suggestions in an encampment of armed fanatics. He could remind himself of what his School had done to Inrau. But ultimately they meant nothing.

  He would rush the enemy ranks. He would see his heresy through. To the end, no matter what horrors it might hold. For the first time in a long and wandering life, Drusas Achamian had found happiness.

  And peace had come.

  The day’s march had been particularly trying, and Serwë sat by the fire, rubbing her toes while staring across the flames at her love, Kellhus. If only it could always be like this …

  Four days previous Proyas had sent the Scylvendi south with several hundred knights—to learn the ways into Shigek, Kellhus had said. Four days without chancing upon his famished glare. Four days without cringing in his iron shadow as he escorted her to their pavilion. Four days without his dread savagery.

  And each of them spent praying and praying, Let him be killed!

  But this was the one prayer Kellhus wouldn’t answer.

  She stared and wondered and loved. His long blond hair flashed golden in the firelight; his bearded features radiated good humour and understanding. He nodded as Achamian spoke to him about something—sorcery perhaps. She paid scant attention to the Schoolman’s words. She was too busy listening to Kellhus’s face.

  Never had she seen such beauty. There was something inexplicable, something godlike and surreal, about his appearance, as though a breathtaking elegance, an impossible grace, laid hidden within his expressions, something that might flare at any moment and blind her with revelation. A face that made each moment, each heartbeat …

  A gift.

  She placed a hand on the gentle swell of her belly, and for an instant, she thought she could feel the second heart within her—no larger than a sparrow’s—drumming through moment after thickening moment.

  His child … His.

  So much had changed! She was wise, far more so, she knew, than a girl of twenty summers should be. The world had chastened her, had shown her the impotence of outrage. First the Gaunum sons and their cruel lusts. Then Panteruth and his unspeakable brutalities. Then Cnaiür and his iron-willed madness. What could the outrage of a soft-skinned concubine mean to a man such as him? Just one more thing to be broken. She knew the futility, that the animal within would grovel, shriek, would place soothing lips around any man’s cock for a moment of mercy—that it would do anything, sate any hunger, to survive. She’d been enlightened.

  Submission. Truth lay in submission.

  “You’ve surrendered, Serwë,” Kellhus had told her. “And by surrendering, you have conquered me!”

  The days of nothing had passed. The world, Kellhus said, had prepared her for him. She, Serwë hil Keyalti, was to be his sacred consort.

  She would bear the sons of the Warrior-Prophet.

  What indignity, what suffering, could compare with this? Certainly, she wept when the Scylvendi struck her, clenched her teeth in fury and gagging shame when he used her. But afterward she knew, and Kellhus had taught her that knowing was exalted above all other things. Cnaiür was a totem of the old dark world, the ancient outrage made flesh. For every god, Kellhus had told her, there was a demon.

  For every God …

  The priests, both those of her father and those of the Gaunum, had claimed the Gods moved the souls of men. But Serwë knew the Gods also moved as men. So often, watching Esmenet, Achamian, Xinemus, and the others about the fire, she would be amazed that they couldn’t see, though sometimes she suspected that, in their heart of hearts, they knew and yet were stubborn.

  But then, unlike her, they didn’t couple with a god—and his guises.

  They hadn’t been taught how to forgive, how to submit, as she’d been taught, though they learned slowly. She often glimpsed the small, sometimes lonely ways in which he instructed them. And it was a wondrous thing, to watch a god instruct others.

  Even now, he instructed them.

  “No,” Achamian was asserting. “We sorcerers are distinguished by our ability, you caste-nobles by your blood. What does it matter whether other men recognize us as such? We are what we are.”

  With smiling eyes, Kellhus said, “Are you sure?”

  Serwë had seen this many times. The words would be simple, but the way would wrench at their hearts.

  “What do you mean,” Achamian said blankly.

  Kellhus shrugged. “What if I were to tell you that I’m like you.” Xinemus’s eyes flashed to Achamian, who laughed nervously.

  “Like me?” the Schoolman asked. He licked his lips. “How so?”

  “I can see the Mark, Akka … I can see the bruise of your damnation.”

  “You jest,” Achamian snapped, but his voice was strange …

  Kellhus had turned to Xinemus. “Do you see? A moment ago, I was no different from you. The distinction between us didn’t exist until just—”

  “It still doesn’t exist,” Achamian blurted, his voice rising. “I would have you prove this!”

  Kellhus studied the man, his look careful and troubled. “How does one prove what one sees?”

  Xinemus, who seemed unperturbed, chuckled. “What is it, Akka? There’s many who see your blasphemy, but choose not to speak it. Think of the College of Luthymae …”

  But Achamian had jumped to his feet, his expression bewildered, even panicked. “It’s just that … that …”

  Serwë’s thoughts leapt. He knows, my love! Achamian knows what you are!

  She flushed at the memory of the sorcerer between her legs, but then reminded herself that it wasn’t Achamian whom she remembered, it was Kellhus …

  “You must know me Serwë, in all my guises.”

  “There is a way to prove this!” the Schoolman exclaimed. He fixed them with a ludicrous stare, then without warning hurried off into the darkness.

  Xinemus had begun muttering some joke, but just then Esmenet sat next to Serwë, smiling and frowning.

  “Has Kellhus w
orked him into a frenzy again?” she asked, handing Serwë a steaming bowl of spiced tea.

  “Again,” Serwë said, and grasped the proffered bowl. She tipped a glittering drop to the earth before drinking. It tasted warm, coiled in her stomach like sun-hot silk. “Mmmm … Thank you, Esmi.”

  Esmenet nodded, turned to Kellhus and Xinemus. The previous night, Serwë had cut Esmenet’s black hair short—man short—so that now she resembled a beautiful boy. Almost as beautiful as me, Serwë thought.

  She’d never known a woman like Esmenet before: bold, with a tongue as wicked as any man’s. She frightened Serwë sometimes, with her ability to match the men word for word, joke for joke. Only Kellhus could best her. But she had always been considerate. Serwë had asked her once why she was so kind, and Esmenet had replied that the only peace she’d found as a harlot had been caring for those more vulnerable than her. When Serwë insisted she was neither a whore nor vulnerable, Esmenet had smiled sadly, saying, “We’re all whores, Serchaa …”

  And Serwë had believed her. How couldn’t she? It sounded so much like something Kellhus might say.

  Esmenet turned to look at her. “Was the day’s march hard on you, Serchaa?” She smiled the way Serwë’s aunt had once smiled, with warmth and concern. But then her expression suddenly darkened, as though she’d glimpsed something disagreeable in Serwë’s face. Her eyes became hooded.

  “Esmi?” Serwë said. “Is something wrong?”

  Esmenet’s look became faraway. When it returned, her handsome face wrinkled into another smile—more sad, but just as genuine.

  Serwë looked nervously to her hands, suddenly terrified that Esmenet somehow knew. In her soul’s eye, she glimpsed the Scylvendi toiling above her in the dark.

  But it wasn’t him!

  “The hills,” she said quickly. “The hills are so hard … Kellhus says he’ll get me a mule.”

  Esmenet nodded. “Make sure he …” She paused, frowned at the darkness. “What’s he up to now?”

  Achamian had returned from the darkness, bearing a small doll about as long as a forearm. He sat the doll down on the earth, with its back resting against the bonelike stone he’d been using as a seat moments earlier. With the exception of the head, it was carved from dark wood, with jointed limbs, a small rusty knife for a right hand, and engraved with rows of tiny text. The head, however, was a silken sack, shapeless, and no larger than a poor man’s purse. Staring at it, it suddenly seemed a dreadful thing to Serwë. The firelight gleamed across its polished surfaces and gave the illusion that the words had been carved inches deep. The small shadow that framed it was black as pitch against the stone and shifted uneasily with the twining glitter of the flames. It looked like a little dead man propped before a towering fire.