The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  The first two nights Achamian made and broke his own camp and prepared his own meals. The third night, Sarl invited him to dine at the Captain’s fire, which aside from Lord Kosoter and Sarl, included Kiampas and Incariol. Initially, Achamian had not known what to expect, but then, after dining on a repast of venison and boiled sumac shoots, he realized that he had known how it would be all along: Sarl discoursing on and on about everything and anything, with Kiampas contributing cautious asides, the Nonman adding cryptic and sometimes nonsensical observations, and the Captain staring down the night with nary a word.

  The invitation was not extended the following night, and Achamian fumed, not because he had been excluded, but because of the hollowboned loneliness that accompanied the exclusion. Of all the prospective perils that had plagued his soul’s eye, heartsickness had been the least of his worries. And yet here he was, four nights out, moping like the outcast runt at temple. He did his resolute best to keep his eyes fixed on his humble fire. But no matter how vehement his curses, his found his gaze ranging to the talk and laughter emanating from the other camps. Obviously frequented by other companies, the entire area had been cleared of deadfall and bracken, so he could clearly see the rest of the Skin Eaters between the ancient elms, their campfires pitched in the depressions between humps of packed earth, interlocked rings of illumination, anemic and orange, tracing trunks and limbs against the black of the greater forest.

  Achamian had almost forgotten what it was like, watching men about their fires. The arms folded against the chill. The mouths smiling, laughing, tongue and teeth peeking in and out of the firelight. The gazes hopping from face to face within the cage of camaraderie, only to return to the furnace coals during the inevitable lulls. At first it struck him as something fearful, an exposing of what humans do when they turn their backs to the world, their interiority laid bare to the vaults of dark infinity, cracked open like oysters, with no walls save a warlike nature. But as the moments passed, he found the sight more and more affecting, to the point of feeling old and maudlin. That in a place so vast and so dark creatures this frail would dare gather about sparks called light. They seemed at once precious and imperilled, like jewels mislaid across open ground, something sure to be scooped up by jealous enormities.

  His scrutiny did not go unnoticed. The first time he noticed the man watching him, Achamian simply looked away. But when he glanced back moments afterwards, the man was still staring—intently. Achamian recognized him as the Ketyai who had arrived at the company’s initial muster in Marrow fussing over the hems of his white Nilnameshi gowns. What might have been a hard moment passed between them, then the man was standing, talking, and nodding in his direction. As one, most of the others in his eclectic group followed his eyes, some craning their necks, some leaning to see past their fellows—a series of hooded, cursory looks. Achamian had seen them all innumerable times on the trail, wondered about their stories, but he had shared no words with any of them. He imagined it wouldn’t much matter even if he had. Like meadhall tables, campfires seemed to make foreigners of everyone.

  The Nilnameshi strode from the others to come crouch by Achamian’s humble little flame. He smiled and shrugged, introduced himself as Somandutta. He was relatively young, clean-shaven, as was the custom for Nilnameshi caste-nobles, with amiable eyes and a full-lipped mouth—the kind of man who inspired husbands to be more gracious to their wives. He seemed to blink continually, but it was a habit that only seemed ludicrous the first time you noticed it, then became quite natural after.

  “You’re not one of them,” he said, nodding with raised brows toward the Captain’s fire. “And you certainly aren’t one of the Herd.” He tipped his head to his right, in the direction of three neighbouring firepits, each of them crammed with younger flame-yellowed faces, most sporting long Galeoth moustaches. “That means you must be one of the Bitten.”

  “The Bitten?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling broadly. “One of us.”

  “One of you.”

  The generous face regarded him for a moment, as though trying to decide how to interpret his tone. Then he shrugged, smiled like somebody remembering a sensible deathbed promise. “Come,” he simply said. “Your beard has the punch of smoke.”

  Even though he had no clue what the Nilnameshi meant, Achamian found himself following the man. The “punch of smoke,” as it turned out, referred to hashish. A pipe was handed to him the instant he stepped up to the fire, and the next thing Achamian knew he was sitting cross-legged at the puffing centre of their attention. Out of nervousness perhaps, he drew deep.

  The smoke burned like molten lead. They roared with laughter as he hacked himself purple.

  “See!” He heard Somandutta cry. “It wasn’t just me!”

  “Wizard!” someone growled and cheered. Others took it up—“Wiz-Wiza-Wizard!” —and Achamian found himself smiling and choking and nodding in bleary-eyed acknowledgment. He even waved.

  “You get used to it. You get used to it,” someone assured him while rubbing the small of his back. “Only the good mud for the slog, my old friend. It has to take us far!”

  “See!” Somandutta repeated as though the world’s last sane man. “It’s not me!”

  The hashish was already soaking through Achamian’s senses by the time Somandutta, or Soma as the others called him, went around the circle with introductions. Achamian had met such groups before, strangers hammered into families by the privations of the road. Once they lowered their hackles, he knew, they would find in him cause to celebrate their fraternity. Every family was eager to prove itself exceptional in some way.

  There was Galian, perhaps the eldest member of Bitten. In his youth he had been a soldier in the old Nansur Army; he had even fought in the famed Battle of Kiyuth, where Ikurei Conphas, the last of the Nansur Emperors, had overcome the nomadic Scylvendi. The giant that Soma had earlier called Ox was Oxwora, a renegade son of the famed Yalgrota, one of the heroes of the First Holy War. There was Xonghis, a Jekki hillman who had been a former Imperial Tracker. He, Soma explained, was the Captain’s “peach,” by which he meant his most prized possession. “If he gets a chill,” the Nilnameshi caste-noble said, “you must surrender your cloak and rub his feet!” The other giant of the group was Pokwas, or Pox as he was called. According to Somandutta, he was a disgraced Zeümi Sword-Dancer, come to eke out a living among the unwashed barbarians of the Three Seas. “It’s always Zeüm this or Zeüm that with him,” the Nilnameshi explained with mock disgust. “Zeüm invented children. Zeüm invented wind …” There was Sutadra, or Soot, whom Achamian had already identified as Kianene because of his goatee and long moustaches. Apparently Soot refused to speak of his past, which meant, Soma said with exaggerated menace, he was a fugitive of some description. “Likely a Fanim heretic.” And lastly, there was Moraubon, a rangy Galeoth who had once been a Shrial Priest, “until he discovered that peaches don’t grow on prayers.” Apparently the question of whether he was “half-skinny” was a matter of ongoing debate.

  “He hunts,” Pox explained, his grin as broad as his black face, “with both bows strung.”

  Collectively, the seven of them were the only remaining members of the original company first assembled by Lord Kosoter some ten years previous. They called themselves the Bitten because they had been “gnawed” for so many long slogs. As it so happened, each and every one of them had been literally bitten by Sranc as well—and sported the scars to prove it. Pox even stood and dropped his leggings to reveal a puckered crescent across his left cheek, among other things.

  “Sweet Sejenus,” Galian exclaimed. “That solves the mystery of Soma’s missing beard!”

  Raucous laughter.

  “Was that where it was hiding?” Achamian asked as innocently as a crafty old man could manage.

  The Bitten fell dead silent. For a moment all he could hear was the talk and laughter from the other campfires echoing through the sieve of the surrounding forest. He had taken that step, so fateful
in the company of close-knit strangers, between watching and participating.

  “Where what was hiding?” Xonghis asked.

  “The skinny that bit him.”

  Somandutta was the first to howl. Then all the Bitten joined in, rocking on their mats, trading looks like sips of priceless wine, or simply rolling their eyes heavenward, shining beneath the eternal arches of the night.

  And Drusas Achamian found himself friends with the men he had in all likelihood killed.

  Ever since striking out from his tower, Achamian had been afraid that his old body would fail him, that he would develop any one of the innumerable ailments that deny the long road to the aged. For some reason, he had assumed that his far thinner frame would also be far weaker. But he was pleasantly surprised to find his legs growing more and more roped with muscle, and his wind becoming deep—to the point where he had no difficulty managing even the most punishing pace.

  Walking in file, leading their small mule trains, they followed a broad trail that generally ran parallel to the river. For long tracts it was treacherous going, as the trail had been scuffed deep enough to expose knobbed roots and buried rocks. The Osthwai Mountains loomed vast and magnificent above them, their peaks lost in a dark shoal of clouds as wide as the horizon. They seemed to eat the eastern sky in imperceptible increments.

  They passed several inbound companies, lines of lean, lean men, hunched beneath their remaining provisions and cord-threaded scalps, not a beast of burden to be seen. They would have looked macabre, like skeletons marching in stolen skins, were they not so jubilant at the prospect of gaining Marrow.

  “They were forced to winter in the Wilds,” Soma explained to Achamian. “We were almost caught ourselves. The Ochain Passes have been especially treacherous these past couple of years.” He bent his head to his feet, as though inspecting his boots for scuffs. “It’s like the world is getting colder,” he added after several steps.

  Tidings and jibes were shared back and forth as the companies passed. The newest whores. The worsening conditions in the Osthwai. The brokers who kept “forgetting their thumbs” when counting. Rumours of the Stone-Hags, a pirate company cum bandit army that apparently hunted scalpers the way scalpers hunted Sranc. Which tavern-keeps were watering their wine. And as always, the unaccountable cunning of the skinnies.

  “The trees!” one particularly hoary Norsirai said. “They came at us out of the trees! Like monkeys with fucking knives …”

  Achamian listened without comment, both fascinated and dismayed. Like all Mandate Schoolman, he looked at the world with the arrogance of someone who had survived—even if only in proxy—the greatest depravities circumstance could offer. But what happened in the Wilds, whatever it was that edged their voices when the Skin Eaters spoke of it, was different somehow. They too carried the look and posture of survivors, but of something more mean, more poisonous, than the death of nations. There was the wickedness that cut throats, and there was the wickedness that put whole peoples to the sword. Scalpers, Achamian realized, dwelt somewhere in the lunatic in-between.

  And for the first time he understood: He had no real comprehension of what was to come.

  The point was brought home by the half-starved man he saw slumped, his face between his knees, beneath the hanging veils of a willow. Before he knew what he was doing, Achamian was kneeling at the man’s side, pressing him upright. The fellow was as light as kindling pine. His face was sunken in the way Achamian had seen in Caraskand during the First Holy War, so that the edges and the irregularities of the skull beneath pressed clear through the skin, chipping short the cheeks and pitting the sockets. His eyes were as flat and waxen as any guttered candle.

  The man said nothing, seemed to stare into the same.

  Pokwas dropped a large hand on Achamian’s shoulder, startling him. “Where you fall is where you lie,” the Sword-Dancer said. “It’s a Rule. No pity on the slog, friend.”

  “What kind of soldiers leave their comrades to die?”

  “Soldiers who aren’t soldiers,” Pokwas replied with a noncommital shrug. “Scalpers.”

  Even though the Sword-Dancer’s tone said it all—the Wilds were simply a place too hard for ritual observance or futile compassion—Achamian wanted to ask him what he meant. The old indignant need to challenge, to contest, welled sharp within his breast. Instead, he simply shrugged and obediently followed the towering man back into the long-walking file.

  Achamian the talker, the asker of questions, had died a long time ago.

  But the episode continued to occupy the old Wizard’s thoughts, not the cruelty so much as the pathos. He had been away for so long a part of him had forgotten that men could die so ignominiously, like dogs skulking into the weeds to pant their last. The image of the unfortunate refused to fade: the eyes clouding, the lips mouthing the air, the body like sticks in the sack of his skin. How could he not feel like a fool? Between his Dreams of the First Apocalypse and his memories of the First Holy War, he could scarce imagine anyone who had seen more death and degradation than he. And yet there it was, the fact of a dying stranger, like an added weight, a tightness that robbed him of his wind.

  Was it some kind of premonition? Or was he simply growing soft? He had seen it many times, the way compassion made rotted fruit of old men’s hearts. The vitality of his old bones had surprised him. Perhaps his spirit was what would fail …

  Something always failed him.

  The trail wound on and on through the forest deeps, a track that had seen countless scalpers strut or shamble. Though Somandutta paced him on several occasions, trying to draw him into some inane topic of conversation, Achamian remained silent, walking and brooding.

  That night he made a point of sitting next to Pokwas at the fire. The mood was celebratory. Xonghis had felled a doe, which the company then portioned according to rank—the unborn fetus included. Achamian said nothing, knowing that the sacrilege of consuming pregnant game would mean nothing to these men.

  “I’m curious,” Achamian asked after eating his fill, “about these Rules of the Slog …”

  The black man said nothing at first. He looked particularly fierce, limned in firelight, his lips drawn back as he tore meat from bone. He chewed in contemplation a moment, then said, “Yah.”

  “If it were, say, Galian lying at the side of th—”

  “It would be the same,” the Zeümi interrupted through a mouthful of venison. He looked to Galian as he said this, shrugged in mock apology.

  “But he’s your … your brother, is he not?”

  “Course he is.”

  Galian made kissing noises from across the fire.

  “So,” Achamian pressed, “what about the rules of brotherhood?” This time it was Galian who answered. “The only rules on the slog, Wizard, are the rules of the slog.”

  Achamian scowled, pausing to sort between a number of different questions, but Galian interrupted him before he could speak. “Brotherhood is well and fine,” the former Columnary said, “so long as it doesn’t cost. As soon as it becomes a luxury …” He shrugged, resumed gnawing on the bone he still held in his right hand. “The skinnies,” he said with an air of distracted finality.

  The Sranc, he was saying. The Sranc were the only rule.

  Achamian studied their faces across the firelight. “No liabilities, is that it? Nothing that could afford your opponent any advantage.” He raised a finger to scratch the side of his nose. “That sounds like something our glorious Aspect-Emperor would say.”

  Aside from the vague intuition that discussing the Aspect-Emperor was generally unwise, the old Wizard really didn’t know what to expect.

  “I would help,” Soma blurted. “If Galian was dying, that is. I really would …”

  The eating paused. The ring of faces turned to the young Nilnameshi, some screwed in mock outrage, others sporting skeptical grins.

  With a guileless smile, Soma said, “His boots fit as fine as my own!”

  There was a moment of sile
nce. Soma’s jokes, Achamian had learned, generally occasioned a kind of communal trial and conviction, especially when he was trying to be funny. Heads were shaken. Eyes were rolled to heaven. Oxwora, the enormous Thunyeri with shrunken Sranc heads tangled in his shaggy mane, looked up from the glistening rib he had been gnawing, scowling as though his appetite had been ruined. Without a word he tossed the bone at the Nilnameshi. Either by fluke or by dint of grease, the thing slid rather than bounced from his head.

  “Ox!” Somandutta cried with real anger, but in the harmless way of the long heckled. The giant grinned, his beard and moustache spackled with flecks of meat.

  Suddenly the others were reaching to their feet, and a haphazard wave of bones peppered the hapless Nilnameshi, who held his arms out, cursing. He made as though to throw several back at this or that figure, but ended up joining the general laughter instead.

  “Loot thy brother,” the Zeümi said to Achamian in a there-you-have-it tone. The Sword-Dancer slapped his back. “Welcome to the slog, Wizard!”

  Achamian laughed and nodded, glanced out beyond the circle of illumined faces to the night-hooded world. It was no simple or mean thing, the companionship of killers.

  Two days following his introduction to the Bitten, Achamian glimpsed Xonghis jogging along the outside of the trudging line from the rear. The others paid him no attention: He continually roamed while the others marched. Out of boredom more than anything, Achamian asked the man what was wrong, expecting something wry and cutting in reply. Instead, the Jekki slowed his pace to stride beside him. His short-sleeved tunic revealed a grappler’s veined arms, brown beneath the reddish hint of sunburn. He was a lean, broad-shouldered man, with the aura of coiled reserve that seemed proper to a former Imperial Tracker.