The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  And he sat before her, naked and immobile on a beaten chair. A slave's chair.

  The White-Luck Warrior.

  "Cursed be the homicide, the murderer, he who lies in wait to slay his brother!"

  She parted her hairless legs, paused so that all could see slick lines of blood running from her shining pudenda. And she grinned a proud and vicious grin, as though to say, Yes! Witness the strength that is my womb! The Great Giver, the Son Bearer, the gluttonous Phallus Eater!

  Yes! The Blood of my Fertility flows still!

  The ecstatics immediately before her wept at the miracle, stared with the eyes of the strangled, tore their hair and gnashed their teeth. And their rapture became grounds for the rapture of the cohort behind them, and so on, through tunnel after forking tunnel, until a thousand voices roared through the closeted deeps.

  "Cursed be whore!" she cried, not needing to read the text, the Sinyatwa, on the scuffed stone at her feet. "Cursed be she who lies with men for gold over seed, for power over obedience, for lust over love!"

  She bent as though to abuse herself. With the blade of her right palm, she scraped a line of blood, drawing it up to the creases of her swollen sex. She huffed in pleasure, then raised her bloody palm for all to see.

  "Cursed be the false-the deceivers of men! Cursed be the Aspect-Emperor!"

  There are pitches of passion that are holy simply for the intensity of their expression. There is worship beyond the caged world of words. Psatma Nannaferi's hatred had long ago burned away the impurities, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the homicidal outrage of the betrayed, the unwavering fury of the degraded and the dispossessed. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way murder and fire can cleanse.

  And at long last she had found her knife.

  She stepped over the scriptures, pressed the slack pouches of her breasts against the sweat of his neck and shoulders. She reached around him with her arms. Holding her right palm like a palette, she dipped the third finger of her left hand into her issue, then marked him: a horizontal line along each of his cheeks.

  They gleamed menstrual crimson. Wurrami, the ancient counterpart of the thraxami, the lines of ash used by mourning mothers.

  "Ever!" she cried. "Ever have we dwelt in the shadow of the Whip and Club. Ever have we been despised-we, the Givers! We, the weak! But the Goddess knows! Knows why they beat us, why they leash us, why they starve and violate us! Why they do everything save kill!"

  She prowled around him, raised her buttocks across his hips. With a shrill cry, she thrust down, encompassed him to his grunting foundation. A broken chorus of cries passed through the congregation, as the penetration was multiplied in heart and eye.

  "Because without Givers," she shouted in a voice hoarse for passion-doubly broken, "there is nothing for them to take! Because without slaves, there can be no masters! Because we are the wine that they imbibe, the bread that they eat, the cloth that they soil, the walls that they defend! Because we are the truth of their power! The prize they would conquer!"

  And she could feel it: he the centre of her, and she the circumference of him-an ache encircled by fire. Hoe and Earth! Hoe and Earth! She was an old crone splayed across a boy, her eyes the red of blood, his the white of seed. The crowd before them bucked and heaved, a cauldron of avid faces and sweat-slicked limbs.

  "We shall stoke!" she moaned and roared. "We shall foment! We shall teach those who give what it means to take!"

  And she slid, drawing her loose buttocks across the plate of his abdomen. His was the body of a man newly wed-a father of but one child. Slender, golden for the perfection of its skin. Not yet bent to the harshness of the world, to the toil that all giving exacts.

  Not yet strong.

  "There is the knife that cuts," she croaked, "and there is the sea that drowns. Always we have been the latter. But now! Now that the White-Luck has come to us, we are both, my Sisters! On our seas they shall founder! And on our knife they shall fall!"

  She rode the hook of him harder and harder, until he convulsed and screamed. The earth shook-the unborn kicking at the Mother's womb. Gravel streamed from the ceilings. And she could feel the hot flood him, the outward thrust. And then, with his slumping, a kind of inward breath-and it was her turn to jerk rigid and scream. She could feel her strength fill him, the knitting of muscle across his frame, the scarring, the aging strong of a body wracked by years in the world. The soft hands that clawed her chest became horned with calluses, thick with throttling strength, even as her scrotal breasts rounded, lifted in the memory of a more tender youth. The smooth cheek against her neck became leathery with unlived seasons, gravelly with the memory of another's pox.

  And as youth washed through her, drawing a thousand thousand wrinkles into smooth swales of skin, the mad faces encircling her surged forward, clutching at the sodden floor beneath their feet…

  Beaten and battered she had been tipped in libation. And now the dread Goddess raised her, a bowl cast of gold.

  A vessel. A grail. A cup filled with the Waters-Most-Holy. The Blood and the Seed.

  "Cursed!" she shrieked in a singer's heart-cutting voice, high and pure, yet warmed by the memory of her authoritarian rasp. She watched as the Blood of her Fertility was passed among the throngs, a never-diminishing pool that was passed from palm to palm. She watched the Ur-Mother's children mark their cheeks with the red line of hatred…

  "Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!"

  CHAPTER TEN

  Condia

  Look unto others and ponder the sin and folly you find there.

  For their sin is your sin, and their folly is your folly.

  Seek ye the true reflecting pool?

  Look to the stranger you despise, not the friend you love.

  — Tribes 6:42, The Chronicle of the Tusk

  Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia

  The Istyuli Plains dominated the heart of Eдrwa, running from the northern back of the Hethantas to the southern spurs of the Yimaleti. It seemed hard to believe that this region had birthed dynasties and toppled empires before the First Apocalypse and the coming of the Sranc, consisting as it did of nothing more than endless sheaves of arid grassland.

  In the days of Far Antiquity, a schism opened between the western Norsirai tribes, the High Norsirai, who under the tutelage of the Nonmen raised the first great literate civilization of Men along the banks of the River Aumris, and their eastern kin, the White Norsirai, who clung to the nomadic ways of their ancient fathers. For an entire age the Istyuli formed the barbaric hinterland of the High Norsirai nations that rose and fell about the great river cities of the west: Trysл, Sauglish, Umerau, and others. The tribes of White Norsirai who roamed and warred across the plains sometimes raided, sometimes bartered with, and continually despised their earth-tilling cousins to the west. The fewer the roads the harsher the codes, as the ancient Kыniьric proverb had it. And periodically, when united beneath the tyranny of some powerful tribe or personality, they invaded and conquered.

  To the north of Sakarpus, the Istyuli Plains still bore the name of one of those conquering peoples, the Cond.

  Nothing remained to mark their passing: The Cond, like most pastoral peoples, were primarily remembered for works destroyed rather than works raised. For the Men of the Ordeal, only the name connected the sloped terrain to the legends of their long-dead glory. They were accustomed to the rumour of lost peoples and nations, for their own lands had stacked them deep. But there was a melancholy attached to their thoughts of the Cond. Where the far antique peoples of the Three Seas had been replaced by other peoples, the end of the wild-haired horsemen of the Cond had been the end of Men on these plains. Proof of this lay in those signs of habitation the Inrithi did find: great heaps of bone sucked to the marrow, and swaths of turf overturned not by plows, but by claws hungry for grubs.

  Signs of Sran
c.

  A kind of communal recognition dawned on the host, a realization that abandoned lands could be liberated. To demonstrate this fact, King Hoga Hogrim-the nephew of Hoga Gothyelk, the famed Martyr of Shimeh-commanded his Tydonni to draw stone from a nearby outcropping for a great ring, an immense Circumfix implanted for all time in Condian earth. The Longbeards laboured through the night, their numbers swelling as more and more of their encamped neighbours joined them. The break of dawn revealed not so much a ring as a circular fortress, as wide as five war-galleys set end to end and with walls of unshaped sandstone standing the height of three men.

  Afterwards, the Aspect-Emperor himself walked among the exhausted men, remitting their sins and blessing their distant kith and kin. "Men make such marks," he said, "as their will affords them. Behold! Let the World see why the Tydonni are called the 'Sons of Iron.'"

  And so the march wore on. According to conventional military wisdom, a host as vast as the Ordeal should break up and march in separate columns. Not only would this improve the ability of the soldiery to collect forage, be it wild game or the grasses their hardy ponies were bred to survive on, it would drastically increase their rate of advance. But as strange as it sounded, the sloth of the Great Ordeal was a necessity, at least at this stage in the long march to Golgotterath. The plan was to stretch the supply umbilicus between the host and Sakarpus as far as humanly possible, before taking what the Aspect-Emperor's generals grimly referred to as the Leap, marching beyond the point of meaningful contact with the New Empire.

  Since the length of this umbilicus depended on the ability of the Imperial supply trains to overtake the Great Ordeal, dividing the host into quicker columns would simply increase the length of the Leap. This would prove disastrous, given the needs of the host and the scarcity of meaningful forage along the length of the Istyuli. Even if the Ordeal were to break into a hundred columns and spread across the width of the plain, it could not be trusted to provide enough game to make an appreciable difference. The host had to carry the supplies required to reach the more abundant lands of what had once been eastern Kыniьri, where, according to the Imperial Trackers, it could easily find enough forage once it scattered.

  So it crept forward as all cumbersome armies must, scarcely travelling more than ten to fifteen miles a march. Aside from numbers, the rivers were the greatest source of delay. Again thanks to the Imperial Trackers, each waterway had been meticulously mapped years in advance. Not only did the Great Ordeal's planners need to know where the best crossing points were, they had to know the state of those fords at various times of the year and during various kinds of weather. A single swollen river could spell doom if it prevented the Great Ordeal from reaching Golgotterath before the onset of winter.

  But even mapped, the fords still represented bottlenecks. In some cases, three, even four days were required simply for the host to cross banks no more than a stone's throw apart. These too were scheduled into the sacred host's ever-tightening margins.

  In the highest councils of the Aspect-Emperor, the possibility that the Consult might find some way to poison these rivers was a matter of continual concern, if not outright dread. Only the possibility that they might exterminate game along their path troubled them more. As veterans of the First Holy War, both of the Ordeal's Exalt-Generals, King Saubon and King Proyas, were intimately acquainted with the catastrophic consequences of running out of water. Thirst, like hunger or disease, was a vulnerability that increased in proportion to an army's size, which was why it could unravel even the greatest host in a mere matter of days.

  But among the rank and file, the absence of Sranc was the only concern voiced about the evening fires, not because they suspected anything devious-what trick could catch their Holy Aspect-Emperor unawares? — but because they longed to put their spears and swords and axes to work. Rumours were traded about the far-ranging exploits of Sibawul te Nurwal, whose Cepaloran lancers had apparently run down several fleeing Sranc clans. Similar tales were told about General Halas Siroyon and his Famiri, or General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi and his steel-clad Eumarnan knights. But the tales only seemed to whet their bloodlust and to draw out the trackless tedium of the march. They complained the way warriors complained, about the food, the lack of women, the pitch of the ground they slept across, but they never forgot their sacred mission. They marched to save the world, which for most meant saving their wives, their children, their parents, and their lands. They marched to prevent the Second Apocalypse.

  And the God himself marched with them, speaking through the mouth, glaring through the eyes of Anasыrimbor Kellhus I.

  They were plain men-warriors. They understood that doubt was hesitation, and that hesitation was death, not only on the field of war, but on the field of souls as well. Only believers persevered.

  Only believers conquered.

  What was Sakarpus compared to this? And who was he, but the son of another Beggar King?

  These were the questions that Sorweel could not but ask whenever he looked to the shield line of the horizon. Men. Wherever he turned his gaze, he saw more and more armed and armoured Men.

  The Great Ordeal.

  For Sorweel, it existed in series of circles, each radiating outward, from his squad in the Company of Scions to the very limit of the world. In his immediate vicinity, all was the close tedium of riders on the march, defined more by sound and smell than sight: the must of fresh dung, the equine snorts and complaints, the swishing percussion of endless hooves through grass, the rattle of the small almost chariotlike carts that each of the doughty little horses pulled. A glimpse was all it took to surpass this mundane circle: Striding legs became scissoring forests, men rocking in their high-backed saddles became slow-filing fields of thousands. And beyond this, individuals vanished into many-coloured masses, their armour winking in the high-sky sun. The shouts and calls and laughter dissolved into a white ambient roar. Mobs congealed into ponderous columns strung with vast trains of mules and teetering ox-carts.

  The host did not so much cross the greening pastures as they encompassed them, a slow flood of warlike humanity. Everything and everyone became a link in a far greater articulation. Only the high-jutting banners retained their singularity: the signs of tribes and nations, each married in some fashion to the Circumfix. And farther, moving beneath the silence that was the sky, even the banners became abstract, hooked threads on the carpet that had become a darker earth. The very ground seemed to move, out to the vanishing line of the plains.

  The Great Ordeal. A thing so great that not even the horizon could contain it. And for a boy on the cusp of manhood, a thing that humiliated far more than it humbled.

  What honour could dwell in a soul so small?

  Officially, the Company of Scions was touted as one of the most elite units in the Kidruhil, but unofficially, it was known to be largely ceremonial. The power of the Aspect-Emperor or more importantly, the rumour of his power, was such that many rulers beyond his sway sent their own sons to him as means to guarantee their treaties with the New Empire. They were observers, perhaps even prisoners, but they certainly were not warriors-let alone Men of the Ordeal.

  For Sorweel, this was a source of many contradictory passions. His blood ran hot at the prospect of battle-how long had he pestered his father for an opportunity to ride to war? But at the same time, the dishonour-if not the treachery-of riding beneath his enemy's banners alternately gouged his belly with horror and squeezed his heart with abject shame. He even caught himself taking pride in his uniform from time to time: the fine tooling of the leather-stripped skirts, the soft castor of the gloves, the interlocking motifs stamped into the cuirass, even the white cloak of his caste-nobility.

  For as long as he could remember, Sorweel had always thought betrayal a kind of thing. And as a thing, he assumed, it was what it was, like anything else. Either a man kept faith with his blood and nation, or he didn't. But betrayal, he was learning, was far too complicated to be a mere thing. It was more like a disease
… or a man.

  It was too insidious not to have a soul.

  It crept, for one thing, not like a snake or a spider, but like spilled wine, seeping into the fractures, soaking everything its own colour. Each betrayal, no matter how trivial, seemed to beget further betrayals. And it deceived as well, postured as nothing less than sense itself, as reason. "Play along," it told him. "Pretend to be one of their Kidruhil-yes, pretend." Wise counsel, or so it seemed. It failed to warn you of the peril, of how each day playing leached your soul of resolution. It said nothing of the slow collapse of pretending into being.

  He tried to remain vigilant, and in the deep of night, he clung to his recriminations. But it was so hard, so hard to remember the taste of certainty.

  The Scions were scarcely a hundred strong, far and away the smallest of the Kidruhil's three-hundred-odd companies. They rode with the strange sense of being a sliver in a great fist, an intrusion that inflamed and irritated. Kidruhil troopers were selected according to their skill and their ardour. If anything made the Scions anathema to their fellow Kidruhil, it was their lack of faith. Though the officers were always careful to observe the semblance of diplomatic decorum, their men understood, enough to allow a general contempt-and in some cases even outright hatred-to shine through.

  But if the Scions were an outcast within the Kidruhil, then Sorweel was even more an outcast within the Scions. Of course everyone knew who he was. How could any Son of Sakarpus not be the talk of the Company, let alone the son of its slain king? Whether it was pity or derision, Sorweel saw in their looks the true measure of his shame. And at night, when he lay desolate in his tent listening to the fireside banter of the others, he was certain he could understand the questions that kept returning to their strange tongues. Who was this boy who rode for those who murdered his father? This Shit-herder, what kind of craven fool was he?