The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  Such a battle! And he—he! the Lion of Kiyuth!—would be little more than a subaltern …

  No matter, it would be salt for the honey, as the Ainoni were fond of saying. The bitterness that made vengeance sweet.

  “When dawn breaks and the Scylvendi dog leads us into battle,” Conphas said, still studying the documents fanned across the table before him, “I’ve decided that you, Martemus, will be my representative.”

  “Do you have any specific instructions?” the General asked stiffly.

  Conphas looked up, appraised the hard-jawed man for several condescending moments. Why had he allowed him to keep his blue general’s cloak? He should have sold the fool to the slavers.

  “You think I give you this charge because I trust you to the degree I distrust the Scylvendi … But you’re wrong. As much as I despise the savage, as much as I intend to see him dead, I do in fact trust him in matters of war …” And well he should, Conphas mused. As strange as it seemed, the barbarian had been his student for quite some time. Since the Battle of Kiyuth, if not longer …

  No wonder they called Fate a whore.

  “But you, Martemus,” Conphas continued. “You I scarcely trust at all.”

  “Then why give me such an assignment?”

  No protestations of innocence, no hurt looks or clenched fists … Only stoic curiosity. For all his failings, Conphas realized, Martemus remained a remarkable man. It would be such a waste.

  “Because you’ve unfinished business.” Conphas handed several sheets to his secretary, then looked down as though to study the next sheaf of parchment. “I’ve just been told the Prince of Atrithau accompanies the Scylvendi.” He graced the General with a dazzling smile.

  Martemus said nothing for a stone-faced moment.

  “But I told you … He’s … he’s …”

  “Please,” Conphas snapped. “How long has it been since you’ve drawn your sword, hmm? If I doubt your loyalty, I laugh at your prowess … No. You’ll only observe.”

  “Then who—”

  But Conphas had already waved the three men forward: the assassins dispatched by his uncle. The two, who were obviously Nansur, weren’t all that imposing, perhaps—but the third, the black-skinned Zeumi, drew nervous glances from even the most distracted of Conphas’s officers. He towered a full head above the surrounding mob, bull-chested and yellow-eyed. He wore the red-striped tunic and iron-scale harness of an imperial auxiliary, though a great tulwar hung across his back.

  A Zeumi sword-dancer. The Emperor had been generous indeed.

  “These men,” Conphas said, staring hard at the General, “will do the work …” He leaned forward, lowering his voice so as not to be overheard. “But you, Martemus, you’ll be the one who brings me Anasûrimbor Kellhus’s head.”

  Was that horror he saw in the man’s eyes? Or was it hope?

  Conphas fell back into his chair. “You can use your cloak as a sack.”

  The long howl of Inrithi horns pierced the predawn gloom, and the Men of the Tusk arose certain of their triumph. They stood on the South Bank. They had met their enemy before and had crushed him. They would enter battle with all of their assembled might. And most importantly, the God himself walked among them—they could see Him in thousands of bright eyes. Spears and lances had become, it seemed to them, markers of the Tusk.

  The air was rifled by the commanding cries of thanes, barons, and their majordomos. Men hastened into their gear. Horsemen streamed between the tents. Armoured men knelt in circles, praying. Wine was passed, bread hastily broken and devoured. Bands of men drifted to their places in the line, some singing, some watchful. Small groups of wives and prostitutes waved hands and coloured scarfs at passing troops of mounted warriors. Priests intoned the most profound benedictions.

  By the time the sun gilded the Meneanor, the Inrithi had assembled in rank after glorious rank across the fields. Several hundred paces away an immense arc of silvered armour, brilliant coats, and stamping horses awaited them. From the southern heights to the dark Sempis, the Fanim encompassed the horizon. Great divisions of horsemen trotted across the northern pastures. Arms flashed from the walls and turrets of Anwurat. Deep formations of spearmen darkened the shallow embankments to the south. More horsemen massed across the southern hilltops, following the heights to the sea. Every distance, it seemed, bristled with heathen.

  The Inrithi line seethed with the habits and hatreds of its constituent nations. The unruly Galeoth, hurling insults and jeering reminders of earlier slaughter. The magnificent knights of Conriya, hollering curses through silvered war masks. The glaring Thunyeri, swearing oaths of blood to their shield-brothers. The disciplined Nansur, standing immobile, keen to the calls of their officers. The Shrial Knights, eyeing the skies, their lips tight with fervent prayer. The haughty Ainoni, anxious and impassive behind the white cosmetics of war. The black-armoured ranks of Tydonni, taking sullen measure of the mongrels they were about to kill.

  A hundred hundred banners fluttered in the morning wind.

  What was this trade he had made? War for a woman …

  With Kellhus at his side, Cnaiür led a small army of officers, observers, and field messengers up turf and gravel ramps to the summit of a small hillock dominating the central pastures. Proyas had provided him slaves, and they hastened to prepare his command, unloading trestles from the wains, pitching canopies, and laying mats upon the ground. They raised his ad hoc standard: two bolts of white silk, each banded with lateral stripes of red and flanked by horsetails that swished in the sea-borne breeze.

  The Inrithi were already calling it the “Swazond Standard.” The mark of their Battlemaster.

  Cnaiür rode to the summit’s edge and stared in wonder.

  Beneath him, sweeping out in either direction, the Holy War darkened the woollen distances: great squares and mobs of infantrymen, files and lines of burnished knights. Facing them, the heathen ranks scrawled along the hills and opposing fields, twinkling in the morning sun. Just small enough to obscure with two fingers, the fortress of Anwurat reared in the near distance, its walls and parapets adorned with long saffron banners.

  The air thrummed with the din of innumerable shouts. The faint peal of faraway battlehorns was overpowered by the strident blare of those more near. Cnaiür breathed deep, smelled sea, desert, and dank river—nothing of the absurd spectacle before him. If he closed his eyes and covered his ears, he thought, he could pretend he was alone …

  I am of the Land!

  He dismounted, contemptuously thrust his reins to the Dûnyain. Staring across the plains, he searched for weaknesses in the Inrithi disposition. Beyond a mile, their standards became little more than snags in the tatting of their ranks, so he could only assume the farther Great Names had arrayed their formations as discussed. The Ainoni especially, on the extreme south, looked little more than dark fields aligned along the lower slopes of the coastal hills.

  He pinched his eyes, stiffened in sudden awareness of Kellhus at his side. The man wore a white samite robe, cinched into a tail in the Conriyan style, which is to say at the small of his back, so that his waist and legs remained unencumbered. Beneath he sported a corselet of Kianene manufacture—probably looted from the Battleplain—and the pleated kilt of a Conriyan knight. His battlecap was Nansur, open faced, without so much as a nose bar. As always, the long pommel of his sword jutted above his left shoulder. Two crude-looking knives, their hilts worked with Thunyeri animal devices, had been thrust into his leather girdle. On the right breast of his robe, someone had embroidered the Red Tusk of the Holy War.

  Cnaiür’s skin prickled at the nearness of him.

  What was this trade he had made?

  Never had Cnaiür suffered a night like the night previous. Why? he’d screamed at the Meneanor. Why had he agreed to teach the Dûnyain war? War! For Serwë? For a bauble found on the Steppe?

  For nothing?

  He’d traded many things over the past months. Honour for the promise of vengeance. Leather
for effeminate silks. His yaksh for a prince’s pavilion. The Utemot in their unwashed hundreds, for the Inrithi in their hundreds of thousands …

  Battlemaster … King-of-Tribes!

  Part of him reeled in drunken exultation at the thought. Such a host! From the river to the hills, a distance of almost seven miles, and still the ranks ran deep! The People could never assemble such a horde, not if they emptied every yaksh, saddled every boy. And here he, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, breaker-of-horses-and-men, commanded. Outland princes, earls and palatines, thanes and barons in their thousands, even an Exalt-General answered to him! Ikurei Conphas, the hated author of Kiyuth!

  What would the People think? Would they call this glory? Or would they spit and curse his name, give him to the torments of the aged and infirm?

  But wasn’t all war, all battle, holy? Wasn’t victory the mark of the righteous? If he crushed the Fanim, ground them beneath the heel of his boot, what would the People think of his trade then? Would they finally say, “This man, this many-blooded man, is truly of the land”?

  Or would they whisper as they always whispered? Would they laugh as they always laughed?

  “Yours is the name of our shame!”

  What if he made a gift of the Inrithi? What if he delivered them to destruction? What if he rode home with Ikurei Conphas’s head in a sack?

  “Scylvendi,” Moënghus said from his side.

  That voice!

  Cnaiür looked to Kellhus, blinking.

  Skauras! the Dûnyain’s look shouted. Skauras is our foe here!

  Cnaiür turned to the expectant Inrithi behind him. He could hear them muttering. With the exception of Proyas, each of the Great Names had sent representatives—to keep watch as much as to dispense advice, Cnaiür imagined. He recognized many of them from the Councils of the Great and Lesser Names: Thane Ganrikka, General Martemus, Baron Mimaripal, others. For some reason, a great hollow opened in his belly …

  I must concentrate! Skauras is the foe here!

  He spat across the dusty grass. Everything was at the ready. The Inrithi had assembled with a swiftness and exactitude that heartened. Skauras had deployed precisely as Cnaiür had expected. There was nothing more to be done, yet …

  More time! I need more time!

  But he had no time. War had come, and he’d agreed to yield its secrets in exchange for Serwë. He’d agreed to surrender the last shred of leverage he possessed. After this he would have nothing to secure his vengeance. Nothing! After this, there would be no reason for Kellhus to keep him alive.

  I’m a threat to him. The only man who knows his secret …

  So what was she, that he’d doom himself for her? What was she, that he would trade war?

  Something is wrong with me … Something.

  No! Nothing! Nothing!

  “Signal the general advance,” he barked, turning back to the field. A chorus of excited voices erupted behind him. Horns soon clawed at the sky.

  Kellhus fixed him with shining, empty eyes.

  But Cnaiür had already looked away, back to the sweep of the west and to the great lines and squares of the Holy War sprawled across it. Long rows of armoured horsemen were beginning to trot forward, followed by deeper ranks of footmen, walking with the speed with which one might greet a friend. Perhaps half a mile distant, the Fanim awaited them across the depths and the heights, holding tight their stamping thoroughbreds, hunching behind shield and spear. The pounding of their drums rumbled down from the hills.

  The Dûnyain loomed in his periphery, as sharp as a mortal rebuke.

  What was this trade he had made? A woman for war.

  Something is wrong …

  Behind him, the Inrithi lords began singing.

  Along the entirety of the line, the Inrithi knights quickly outpaced the men-at-arms. Hares darted from copses, raced across the parched turf. Shod hooves made hash of desiccated weeds. Soon the Men of the Tusk sailed across the uneven pasture, trailing immense skirts of dust. The sky was darkened by heathen arrows. Horses shrieked, tumbled. Armoured men rolled across the turf and were trampled by their kin. But the Men of the Tusk combed the fields with thundering hooves. Bobbing lance tips sketched circles around the nearing wall of heathen, who barbed the distance like a hedge of silvered thorns. Hatred clamped tooth to tooth. War shouts became howls of ecstasy. Heart and limb hummed with rapture. Could anything be so clear, so pure? Outstretched like great, fluid arms the holy warriors embraced their enemy.

  The sermon was simple.

  Break.

  Die.

  Serwë was utterly alone. She’d avoided the company of the priests and other women who’d gathered in prayer at various points throughout the encampment. She’d already prayed to her God. She’d kissed him, and had wept as he’d ridden off to join the Scylvendi.

  She sat before their firepit, boiling water for the tea prescribed by Proyas’s physician-priest. Her tanned arms and shoulders burned in the rising sun. There was sand beneath the thin grass, and she could feel its grit chafe the soft skin behind her knees. The pavilion billowed and snapped like a ship’s sail in the wind—a strange song, with random crescendo and meaningless pause. She wasn’t afraid, but she was afflicted by competing confusions.

  Why must he risk himself?

  The loss of Achamian had filled her with pity for Esmenet and with fear for herself. Until his disappearance it hadn’t seemed she lived in the midst of a war. It had been more like a pilgrimage—not one where the faithful travel to visit something sacred, but rather one where people travel to deliver something holy.

  To deliver Kellhus.

  But if Achamian, a great sorcerer, could vanish, become a casualty, might not Kellhus vanish also?

  But this thought didn’t so much frighten her—the possibility was too unthinkable—as it confused her. One cannot fear for a God, but one can be baffled over whether one should.

  Gods could die. The Scylvendi worshipped a dead god.

  Does Kellhus fear?

  That too, was unimaginable.

  She thought she heard something—a shadow—behind her, but her water had begun to boil. She stood to retrieve the crude kettle with clumsy sticks. How she missed Xinemus’s slaves! She managed to set it on the turf without burning herself—a minor miracle. She stood, sighing and rubbing her lower back, when a warm hand reached around her and clutched her growing belly. Kellhus!

  Smiling, she half-turned, pressed her cheek to his chest and hooked a hand about his neck.

  “What are you doing?” she laughed—and frowned. He seemed shorter. Did he stand in a hole?

  “Warring is hungry business, Serwë. Certain appetites must be attended.”

  Serwë blushed and wondered yet again that he had chosen her—her!

  I bear his child.

  “Now?” she murmured. “What of the battle? Don’t you worry?”

  His eyes laughing, he drew her toward the entrance of their pavilion.

  “I worry for you.”

  His Inrithi retinue chattered and cheered behind him. Different voices cried, “Look! Look!”

  Everywhere Cnaiür turned, he saw glory and horror. To his right, waves of Galeoth and Tydonni galloped across the northern pastures into masses of Kianene horsemen. Before him, thousands of Conriyan knights raced beneath the peril of Anwurat’s heights. To his immediate left, the Thunyeri, and beyond them, the Nansur Columns, marched inexorably westward. Only the extreme south, obscured by curtains of dust, remained inscrutable.

  His heart quickened. His breath sharpened. Too fast! Everything happens too fast!

  Saubon and Gothyelk scattered the Fanim, pursued them hard through swirling grit.

  Proyas, flanked by hundreds of mail-armoured knights, crashed into the bristling ranks of an immense Shigeki phalanx. His footmen had charged into his wake, and now thronged about Anwurat’s southern bastions, bearing mantlets and great iron-headed ladders. Archers raked the parapets in volleys, while trains of men and oxen dragged assorted siege engine
s into position.

  Skaiyelt and Conphas advanced across the pasture to the south, holding their horses in reserve. A series of earthen embankments, shallow but too sharp for charging horses, stepped the fields before them. As Cnaiür had guessed, the Sapatishah had massed his Shigeki conscripts along them. The position might have rendered Skauras’s entire centre immune to attack had not Cnaiür ordered several hundred rafts dragged from the marshes and dispersed among the Thunyeri and Nansur. Even now, in a hail of spears and javelins, the Nansur were raising the first of them as improvised ramps.

  General Setpanares and his tens of thousands of Ainoni knights remained hidden. Cnaiür could see the rearmost infantry phalanxes—they were little more than the shadows of squares at this distance—but nothing more.

  Already the dogs gnaw at my gut!

  He glanced at Kellhus. “Since Skauras has secured his flanks using the land,” he explained, “this battle will be one of yetrut, penetration, not one of unswaza, envelopment. Hosts, like men, prefer to face their enemy. Circumvent or break their lines, assault them from the flank or the rear …”

  He let his voice trail. The wind had thinned the dust to near transparency across the southern hills. Peering, he could see threads of what must be Ainoni knights withdrawing all along their two-mile section of line. They seemed to be reforming on the slopes. Behind them, the many bars and squares of Ainoni infantry had stalled.

  The Kianene still held the heights.

  I should have given the Ainoni the centre! Who has Skauras positioned there? Imbeyan? Swarjuka?

  “And this,” Kellhus asked, “is how you crush your foe?”

  “What?”

  “By assaulting their flank or rear …”

  Cnaiür shook his black mane. “No. This is how you convince your foe.”