which endures and endures,
for ever and ever.
“Glory to the God,” a dozen voices rumbled, resonating as though a temple congregation.
The sombre air lingered for a heartbeat, then the voices swelled once again. More toasts were raised. More steaming portions were cut from the spit. Esmenet watched, her breath tight, her blood slack in her veins. What she witnessed seemed impossibly beautiful. Bright. Bold. Regal. Even hallow. Part of her itched with the suspicion that if she called out and confronted them with the secret of her presence, they would all be whisked away, and she would be left standing before a cold firepit, mourning her impertinence.
This was the world, she realized. Here. Before her.
She watched the Prince of Atrithau speak into Xinemus’s ear, saw Xinemus smile then gesture in her direction. They began walking toward her. She shrank into the blackness behind the small tent, huddled as though cold. She glimpsed their shadows, side by side, ghostlike across the packed earth and grasses, then the two men passed her, following a wavering lane of light toward the stagnant canal. She held her breath.
“There’s always,” the tall Prince remarked, “such peace in the darkness beyond a fire.”
The two men halted at the edge of the canal, hiked their tunics, then fumbled with their loincloths. Soon two arcs were gurgling across the filmy surface.
“Hmm,” Xinemus said. “The water’s warm.” Even terrified, Esmenet rolled her eyes, smiled.
“And deep,” the Prince replied.
Xinemus cackled in a manner at once wicked and endearing. After securing himself, he slapped the other man on the back. “I’m going to use that,” he said merrily, “the next time I piss back here with Akka. If I know him, he’ll damn near fall in.”
“You’ll have a rope to throw him at least,” the taller man replied.
More laughter, at once hale and warm. A friendship, Esmenet realized, had just been sealed.
She caught her breath as they retraced their path. The Prince of Atrithau, it seemed, stared directly at her.
But if he saw anything, he did not betray it. The two men rejoined the others by the fire.
Her heart pounding, her soul buzzing with recriminations, she crept around the far side of the pavilion to a vantage where she need not fear discovery by pissing men. She leaned up against the stump of some kind of tree, crooked her head against her shoulder, and closed her eyes, letting the voices about the nearby fire carry her away.
“You gave me a fright there, Scylvendi. I thought for sure . . .”
“Serwë, is it? Ah, I should’ve known the beauty of the name would . . .”
They seemed good people, Esmenet thought, the kind of people Akka would prize as friends. There was . . . room between these people, she decided. Room to fail. Room to hurt.
Alone in the darkness, she suddenly felt safe, as she had with Sarcellus. These were Achamian’s friends, and though she did not exist for them, somehow they would keep her safe. A sense of drowsiness embalmed her. The voices lilted and rumbled, shining with honest good cheer. Just a snooze, she thought. Then she heard someone mention Akka’s name.
“. . . so Conphas himself came for Achamian? Conphas?”
“He was none too pleased. Smarmy bastard.”
“But why would the Emperor want Achamian?”
“You actually sound worried about him.”
“About who? The Emperor or Achamian?”
But this fragment was submerged by the tide of other voices. Esmenet felt herself drift.
She dreamed the stump she slept against was a whole tree but dead, stripped of leaves, twigs, bark, and branches, its trunk a phallic shaft ringed by winding limbs that hissed through the wind like switches. She dreamed that she could not awaken, that somehow the tree had rooted her to the suffocating earth.
Esmi . . .
She stirred. Felt something tickle her cheek.
“Esmi.”
A warm voice. A familiar voice.
“Esmi, what are you doing?”
Her eyes fluttered open. For an instant, she was too horrified to scream.
Then his hand was over her mouth.
“Shhhhh,” Sarcellus admonished. “This might be hard to explain,” he added, nodding in the direction of Xinemus’s campfire.
Or what was left of it. Only a few small licks of flame remained. With the exception of a lone figure curled across mats near the fire, everyone was gone. A pall had unfolded across the distances, as cool and as barren as the night sky.
Esmenet sucked air through her nose. Sarcellus removed his hand, then pulled her to her feet so he could draw her behind the pavilion. It was dark.
“You followed me?” she asked, pulling her forearm from his clasp. She was still too disoriented for anger.
“I awoke, and you were gone. I knew I’d find you here.”
She swallowed. Her hands felt light, as though they were preparing of their own volition to shield her face. “I’m not going back with you, Sarcellus.”
Something Esmenet could not decipher flashed in his eyes. Triumph? Then he shrugged. The ease of the gesture terrified her.
“That’s good,” he said absently. “I’ve had my fill of you, Esmi.”
She stared at him. Tears traced hot lines across her cheeks. Why was she crying? She didn’t love him . . . Did she?
But he had loved her. Of this she was certain . . . Wasn’t she?
He nodded in the direction of the abandoned camp. “Go to him. I no longer care.”
She felt desperation cramp the back of her throat. What could have happened? Perhaps Gotian had at last commanded him to turn her out. Knight-Commanders, Sarcellus had once told her, were largely forgiven indulgences such as she. But surely keeping a whore in the midst of a Holy War had caused tongues to wag. She had certainly endured enough lurid glares and crude laughs. His subordinates and peers alike knew what she was. And if she’d learned anything about the world of caste nobles, it was that rank and prestige could carry a man only so far.
That was it. Wasn’t it?
She thought of the stranger in the Kamposea Agora, of the alley-way, the sweat . . .
What was I doing?
She thought of the cool kiss of silk against her skin, of roasted meat, steaming and peppered, served with velvet wine. She thought of that winter in Sumna four years ago, the one following the summer droughts, when she could not even afford flour halved with chalk. She had grown so skinny that no one would buy her . . . She had come close. Very close.
An inner whisper, small, snivelling, and infinitely reasonable: Beg his forgiveness. Don’t be a fool! Beg . . .
Beg!
But she could only stare. Sarcellus seemed an apparition, something beyond any excuse, any appeal. Wholly man. When she said nothing, he snorted with impatience, then turned on his heel. She watched until the gloom swallowed his striding figure.
Sarcellus?
She had almost cried this aloud, but something cruel brought her up short.
You wanted this, a voice not quite her own grated.
To the east, the sky brightened beyond the far-away silhouette of the Andiamine Heights. The Emperor would soon be waking, she thought inanely. She studied the lone man lying next to the firepit. He did not move. Unconcerned, she wandered across the packed earth thinking of where she had seen the Scylvendi and where she had seen the Prince of Atrithau. She poured wine into a sticky bowl, sipped. She chewed on a discarded crust. She felt like a child who had awakened long before her parents, or a furtive scavenger nosing about in the absence of stomping men. She stood for a while above the sleeping form. It was Xinemus. She smiled, remembering his joke from earlier in the night, while he pissed with the Norsirai Prince. The coals tinkled and popped, their baleful orange sinking lower into the heap as dawn gathered grey on the horizon.
Where are you, Akka?
She began backing away, as though searching for something too large to be seen in a single look.
Footsteps start
led her. She whirled . . .
And saw Achamian trudging toward her.
She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was him. How many times had she spotted his portly shape from her window in Sumna? Spotted and smiled.
As he neared, she glimpsed the five stripes of his beard, then the first contours of his face, cadaverous in the gloom. She stood before him, smiling, crying, her wrists held out.
It’s me.
He looked through her, beyond her, and continued walking.
At first she simply stood, a pillar of salt. She had not realized how much time she’d spent both dreading and yearning for this moment. Endless days, it now seemed. How would he look? What would he say? Would he be proud of what she had discovered? Would he weep when she told him of Inrau? Would he rant as she told him of the stranger? Would he forgive her for straying? For hiding in Sarcellus’s bed?
So many worries. So many hopes. And now?
What had happened?
He pretended not to see me. Acted as though . . . as though . . .
She trembled. Brought a hand to her mouth.
Then she ran, a shadow among shadows, loping through sodden air, hurtling across slumbering camps, tripping through guy ropes, falling . . .
Her chest heaving, she clambered to her knees. She scooped dust into her hands, began tearing at her hair. Sobs overcame her. Fury.
“Why, Akka? Why? I c-came to s-s-save you, to t-tell you . . .”
He hates you! You’re nothing more than a dirty whore! A stain on his breeches!
“No! He loves me! H-he’s th-the only one who’s ever tr-truly loved me!”
No one loves you. No one.
“M-m-my d-daughter . . . Sh-she loved me!”
Would that she had hated! . . . Hated and lived!
“Shut up! Shut up!”
The tormentor became the tormented, and she curled into a ball, too anguished to think, to breathe, to scream. She rolled her face and mouth across the earth. A low, keening wail trembled across the night air . . .
Then she began coughing uncontrollably, convulsing in the dust. Spit.
For a long time she lay very still.
Tears dried. The burn became a sting encircled by an ache, as though her entire face had been bruised.
Akka . . .
She drifted through many thoughts, all of them curiously disconnected from the roaring in her ears. She remembered Pirasha, the old harlot she had befriended and lost years ago. Between the tyranny of many and the tyranny of one, Pirasha used to say, harlots chose the many. “That’s why we’re more,” she would spit. “More than concubines, more than priestesses, more than wives, more even than some queens. We may be oppressed, Esmi, but remember, always remember, sweet girl, we’re never owned.” Her bleary eyes would grow sharp with a savagery that seemed too violent for her ancient frame. “We spit their seed back at them! We never, never bear its weight!”
Esmenet rolled onto her back, drew a forearm across her eyes. Tears still burned in their corners.
No one owns me. Not Sarcellus. Not Achamian.
As though rising from a stupor, she pushed herself from the ground. Stiff. Slow.
Oh, Esmi, you’re getting old.
Not good for a whore.
She began walking.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MOMEMN
. . . even though the skin-spies were exposed relatively early in the course of the Holy War, most believed the Cishaurim rather than the Consult to be responsible. This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Late Spring, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Momemn
The Scylvendi wracked her with his hunger, his countenance fierce and famished. Serwë felt his shudder as though through stone, then watched dully as he abandoned his appetite and rolled back into the tented darkness.
She turned away, toward the far side of the cavernous tent Proyas had given them. Wearing a simple grey smock, Kellhus sat cross-legged next to a candle, hunched over a great tome—also given to them by Proyas.
Why do you let him use me like this? I belong to you!
She ached to cry this aloud, but she could not. She could feel the Scylvendi’s eyes upon her back, and if she turned, she was certain she would see them glow like a wolf’s in torchlight.
Serwë had recovered quickly over the past two weeks. The incessant ringing in her ears had disappeared and the bruises had faded yellow-green. Deep breaths still pained her, and she could walk only with a limp, but these had become more an inconvenience than a debility.
And she still carried his baby . . . Kellhus’s baby. That was the important thing.
Proyas’s physician, a tattooed priest of Akkeägni, had marvelled over this fact, giving her a small prayer chime with which to sound thanks to the God. “To show your gratitude,” he had said, “for the strength of your womb.” But she had no need of chimes to be heard in the Outside, she knew. The Outside had entered the world, had taken her, Serwë, as his lover.
The day before she’d felt well enough to carry their laundry down to the river. She perched the woven basket upon her head, as she had when still owned by her father, and simply limped through camp until she found someone she could follow to the appropriate place along the river. Everywhere she walked, Men of the Tusk laid bold eyes upon her. Though she was accustomed to such looks, she found herself at once thrilled, angered, and frightened. So many warlike men! Some even dared call out to her, often in tongues she couldn’t understand, and always in crude terms that drew braying laughter from their companions—“You think you limp now, eh, wench?” Those times she dared meet their eyes, she’d think, I’m the vessel of another, one far mightier and far holier than you! Most of them would be chastened by her fierce look, as though they could somehow sense the truth of her thought, but a few would glare until she looked away, their lust fanned rather than snuffed by her defiance—like the Scylvendi. None dared molest her, however. She was too beautiful, she realized, not to belong to someone of consequence. If only they knew!
The encampment’s dimensions had astonished her from the very first, but only when she joined the masses congregated along the bouldered banks of the River Phayus did she truly understand the Holy War’s immensity. Women and slaves, thousands of them, clotted the hazy distances, rinsing, scrubbing, adding to the endless staccato of wet cloth slapping against rocks. Pot-bellied wives waded into the brown river, scooping water to scrub at their armpits. Small groups of women and men laughed, gossiped, or sang simple hymns. Naked children darted through the confusion about her, crying, “No, you! You!”
I belong to this, she had thought.
And now, tomorrow, they were going to march into Fanim lands. Serwë, daughter of a tributary Nymbricani chieftain, would be part of a Holy War against the Kianene!
For Serwë, the Kianene had always been one among many mysterious, threatening names—not unlike “Scylvendi.” As a concubine she’d overheard the Gaunum sons speak of them now and again, their voices thick with contempt but also hedged by admiration. They would discuss abortive embassies to the Padirajah in Nenciphon, diplomatic feints, trivial successes and troubling setbacks. They would complain of the Emperor’s flawed “heathen policy.” And the people and places they mentioned would all seem curiously unreal to her, as though a vicious and gritty extension of some child’s fairy tale. Gossip with the slaves and other concubines—this was real. The fact that old Griasa had been caned the day before for spilling lemon sauce on the Patridomos’s lap. That Eppaltros, the beautiful groom, had stolen into the dormitory and made love to Aälsa, only to be betrayed by someone unknown and put to death.
But that world was gone, snuffed out forever by Panteruth and his Munuäti. The unreal people and places had swept in cataracts through the narrow circle of her lif
e, and now she walked with men who conferred with Princes, Emperors—even Gods. Soon, very soon, she would see the magnificent Grandees of Kian arrayed for battle, watch the fluttering banners of the Tusk storm the field. She could almost see Kellhus in the midst of the fracas, glorious and unconquerable, striking down the shadowy Padirajah.
Kellhus would be the violent hero of this unwritten scripture. She knew this. With inexplicable certainty, she knew this.
But now he looked so peaceful, bent by candlelight over an ancient text.
Her heart racing, she crawled next to him, gathering her blanket tight around her shoulders and against her breasts.
“What do you read?” she asked hoarsely. Then she began to weep, the memory of the Scylvendi still thick between her legs.
I’m too weak! Too weak to suffer him . . .
The gentle face looked up from the manuscript, somehow cold in the pale light.
“I’m sorry for interrupting,” she hissed through tears, her face pinched by a child’s anguish, by submission, awful and uncomprehending.
Where will I go?
But Kellhus said, “Don’t run, Serwë.”
He spoke to her in Nymbricani, the language of her father. This was part of the dark shelter they had built between them—the place where the wrathful eyes of the Scylvendi could not see. But at the sound of her native tongue, she was wracked by sobs.
“Often,” he continued, touching her cheek and brushing her tears into her hair, “when the world denies us over and over, when it punishes us as it’s punished you, Serwë, it becomes difficult to understand the meaning. All our pleas go unanswered. Our every trust is betrayed. Our hopes are all crushed. It seems we mean nothing to the world. And when we think we mean nothing, we begin to think we are nothing.”
A soft, crooning wail escaped her. She wanted to fall forward, to curl herself tighter and tighter until nothing remained . . .
But I don’t see it.
“The absence of understanding,” Kellhus replied, “is not the same as absence. You mean something, Serwë. You are something. This whole world is steeped in meaning. Everything, even your suffering, has sacred meaning. Even your suffering has a crucial role to play.”
The Darkness That Comes Before Page 56
