“It is not a matter of trust, Athadian,” Kustos told him, facing him in the cold wind. “It is simply a matter of my not choosing, myself, to inquire. That is what I’m not telling you, Lord Cyrodian—things I don’t want to know.” And, as he urged his horse ahead through a low snow bank: “The man has tortured babies, by all the gods. Taken babies from their mothers and tortured them until they died. I am a soldier. I have seen everything and done everything. But answer me this, Athadian: What foulness is it that drives a man to torture babies?”
CHAPTER FORTY
Lamentoso doloroso on the eve of the fall of the first world.
Patterns of humanity, late during the night or with the heavy tread of years: echoes and foreshadowings, the fate held clasped tightly to the bosom like some old vow or promise resuscitated:
An old man’s eyes in the face of a newborn baby.
Life, your renewal is a path of decay and blemished wonder, fear without answers.
Time, your tread is as unerring as the loud roll of soil down the hillside, as the slow breathing of moist growing roots, as the fleet shadows of clouds—as relentless as dripping frost under the new-old sun.
Trapped on earth, trapped by hopes and memories, where is our answer if not within ourselves? What is our cause, if not ourselves? O many-faced, all-voiced humanity, your enemy is astride your shoulder, it is held fast in your mirror, it breathes with your breath, quickens with your life, dreams with your dreams.
O Time, your face is human.
O Death, your name is Humanity.
O humanity, reducing strong elements to dust, your name is blown on a tempest, you frighten the stars, you are ever young, but old, and as ignorant as some force of nature.
O humanity, your names are legion. And misery and defeat, anguish and rot, curl invisibly in the crib of the newborn beside the newborn, baby or hope or ambition.
Strive, strive to be wise, many-faced and all-tongued one, intolerant humanity, killer of dreams, conniver and eater. Destroy yourself, humanity, in the name of justice, and let honest nature rest without you to spin new carpets of unsoiled colors.
These things that come, they come with cause.
* * * *
Ilbukar the golden-shored, the early-skied, where the road ends.
The Athadian Empire had embarked on its centuries-long course of expansion for reasons purely economic and political. Not so the East. The peoples of the East had not intentionally developed a hegemonic policy, but it had grown as they had grown. At a time when assertive kings of Athad and their eager assistants on the compliant Athadian High Council were moving toward a bold new economy and a drastic encroachment upon the empire’s surrounding territories, the peoples of the East found themselves faced with an ever-increasing population that at last burst the bonds of millennia-old tradition and set its clans on the march. Like a tidal force, the eastern people, consolidating and uniting, moving and gathering, spread westward across the vacant steppes and plains of their central continent and created a nomadic way of life suiting their barbaric, splendid, colorful ways. With cattle in their wake and their families in wagons, small-ponied riders swept ever toward the sunfall place, capturing cities, making use of the conquered, slaughtering the reluctant and the defiant, intermarrying, breeding, building, moving, and ever moving on. The loose clans with their names taken from local groves and rivers and hills necessarily gave rise to tribes, which became states and nations, and finally an empire—the empire consolidated by Guragu, master of Salukadia, the empire of families and tribes and nations that reached from the Sea Where the Sun Rises to the Mountains of Purple Eyes—the Kalussian Range, so far west that early legends claimed the world ended there, or that it was the remote, shadowy home of dead gods and demons.
When he died peacefully with his wives and children around him, in the twenty-third winter of his chevauchée in the fortress-city he had built that bore his name—Gurakad—the Blue Wolf of the Tribes observed a vision of world conquest: the extension of his empire unto the Western Sea That Reaches, the Ursalion, which the Wolf himself knew only from crude, incomplete maps. His eldest son, Hamurlin, was charged with continuing the conquests of the Salukadian peoples; but Hamurlin the Limp died two years later of a fever, and his weak brother Huabrul—“Wind-destined”—inherited the iron sword, the jade scepter, and the brand of the wolf mark.
Disregarded as a boy by ambitious warlords, the hetmuks, and by belligerent nobles, the aihman-sas, within his rule, Huabrul gathered to him the strongest, fiercest, and most loyal of his generals and put all dissenters to the sword, even their parents and children and wives; and thereafter, in a life of twelve years’ conquests—seven of which were spent besieging the impossible city of Surulman in the icy passes of the Iltaran Mountains—Huabrul at last moved his armies as far west as the Sidesian Pass. Here he died, peacefully like his father; for it had been predestined that the great ghens of Salukadia would die three in peace and three in terror. Huabrul, in the act of death, ordered the execution of all his sons save the eldest, and so he passed on to the Wide Plain of Clouds with the heads of fourteen children piled beside his bed. The rule of the empire was inherited by Huagrim ko-Ghen, Master of Masters and son of the son of the Master of Masters.
In the third year of his reign, Huagrim the Great took the city of Ilbukar, which sat upon the Owal Sea, and which controlled the busy trade that passed through the narrow Strait of Owal. From his palace built in Ilbukar, many stories tall and made of polished stone and glazed brick, decorated with painted friezes and hung with the flowers and trees of pleasurable gardens, Huagrim could nightly survey the purple waters of the endless Ursalion Sea and visit the memory of his father and his father’s father in the temple of the Endowui, the pantheon of animal totems and nature gods revered by the Salukadians. It was with the taking of Ilbukar that Huagrim settled at last, with his wife, Attarea, whom he called the Dove, and his two living sons, Agors, the elder, and Nihim, the younger. The ghen hung up the iron sword and the wolf brand, and with the jade scepter administered justice across all the reaches of his far-sweeping empire.
Ilbukar was his western capital; Kilhum, far back across the steppes, his eastern. Huagrim ko-Ghen, like his father, had never seen the city that marked the beginning of his grandfather’s war marches. And so, in the fifth year of his reign, with his wife and two sons, Huagrim set out upon a wide and long journey to visit the stretches of what he owned, to visit with his countless chiefs, and to administer his justice personally in important ceremonies.
The effort took nearly eight years to complete. Huagrim and his vast train and his army spent their winters in Surulmankad, Gurakad, Boshan, Hiusu, and the other major cities of the empire. But on the return journey, Attarea fell ill, and she died one warm spring morning en route to Gurakad. She was entombed there, in the city of the Blue Wolf, first of the masters of men. Huagrim ordered that a great temple be erected in her memory, and he and his sons and his train and his army spent a year in Gurakad while the mausoleum was built. Then he dedicated it with the ashes of five thousand slain cattle and a thousand sacrificed horses, and seventy aromas of incense; and Huagrim the Great, supplicant before the watching Endowui, importuned those gods and spirits to guard his wife’s ghost, the meaning of his heart, until such a day should come when he must reside with her in the Wide Plain of Clouds.
The great chief returned to Ilbukar in the thirteenth year of his reign, to find the city under his appointed ministers and aihman-sas more prosperous than ever. Yet Huagrim brooded. Not an old man, he entered his middle years with all the stoppered anger and frustrated temperament of an elderly desexed priest. He spent increasing hours within doors, in the temple or in the vast rooms of his hundred-chambered palace.
And, as will happen sometimes with a man, great or small, in his grief, Huagrim looked otherwhere than fate to explain Attarea’s early demise, and it came to him one day in a temple ceremony, amidst the crashing of gongs and the smoke of incenses, the chanting of the
priests and the shadows of the pillared Endowui, that the blame for his wife’s passing lay at the feet of the western nations. The cause for this was perplexing, but Huagrim knew in his heart that it was so. And the more he brooded upon it, the clearer it became to him; the more he considered it, the more apparent it was (in the circumventive, indirect, and mysterious way of destiny) that he had to do more than meet the western nations at their borders: he had to answer his wife’s death.
True, the Holy City meant little to him. It had divided itself into West and East, and the imposing of Salukadian law upon its eastern sections had not inconvenienced the citizens there at all, used as they had become to the vicissitudes of cosmopolitan life. Nor had it angered the Athadian government, nominal authority over western Erusabad, to speak now with Salukadian officials rather than spokesmen from some other culture. And yet, Erusabad was important to Huagrim as the final jewel in his crown. (Like Attarea, a jewel?) It was a symbol because of the importance it held for both East and West. Perhaps, Huagrim considered, he should erect a temple to the Endowui there and consecrate it to Attarea’s memory.
Or, if the city were entirely under the control of the Salukadian empire, then the ghost of Guragu ko-Ghen, watching from afar, might laugh pleasantly with thunder to see his empire stretch from the mightiest city of the East to the greatest city of the West.
Huagrim thought long upon it. He spoke with his sons. Agors, the elder, hot-tempered and with the blood of his father and his father’s fathers in him, wished to take the Holy City immediately; Nihim, the younger, no warrior but learned in the skills of negotiation, book wisdom, and spiritual philosophy, declared that it would be poking a lion with a stick. Why, he asked his father, should we do such a thing to Erusabad when already we have the benefit of it without doing more?
To which Agors replied, typically, “Little brother, had you lived in our grandfather’s day, you might well have asked why he should conquer the world, seeing that the world was there already without his having to take it.”
Huagrim laughed mightily at this logic and took himself to the temple to pray to his wife’s ghost and the ghosts of his father and grandfather, and to be guided by them. He ordered readers and seers to him, old men of the steppes who still spoke only the language of the steppes and who burned animals and spilled blood to divine the future. These men assured the conqueror that the gods and spirits favored such a thing. Huagrim met with his generals and administrators, and these told him that the nations of the West were in uneasy alliance with the Athadian Empire, that the provinces sometimes chafed under its yoke, that its king was a young man unlearned in statecraft and unhappy generally with life (as were all in the West), and that Dusar, the governor of Athadian-controlled Erusabad, had spent long years in the city and was corrupt.
“Therefore, wise son of conquerors, Khilhat, domu Ghen sa ko-Ghen, make war on the cities of the West the way the men of the West make war: so, with money, and not as you and your father and his father, Guragu ko-Ghen, made war in the plains, with sword and torch. Buy Dusar. Buy Nutatharis, the king of Emaria, who is an enemy of Athadia, and bid him hurt Athadia however he can, as our ally; for he hates Athadia but loves power, and we are the power of the world. The West is weak; it is tearing; it is ready to be rent like an old robe—not with the sword, as we would cut the corpses of cattle for food, but more precisely with our fingers, with fingers full of gold and mouths full of promises. The West is dying, O Khilat, O Ghen sa ko-Ghen, and we are born now, new like a sun, strong and mighty, to rule the world.”
Huagrim considered all this. He prayed mightily in the temple to the Endowui. He spoke at length with his ministers concerning Nutatharis the Emarian and the man’s apparent interest in the Low Provinces over across from Ilbukar.
And at last, praying and thinking and deciding, Huagrim scorned his son Nihim’s advice and nodded in agreement with Agors’s; and in the fourteenth year of his reign, he took down from his wall the iron sword and the wolf brand and plotted to make Erusabad, the Holy City, a Salukadian city.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
When Adred reached the capital, he took a room in a lodging house near the central square and sent word via messenger to Lord Abgarthis that he would like to meet with him at the earliest opportunity. A short time later, he was very surprised to answer his door and admit, not his returned messenger, but Lord Abgarthis himself.
The old man entered, making no excuses for himself. Adred, wholly unprepared for this informality, closed his door and bowed politely, stammered something, and then gestured to a chair. Without a word Abgarthis settled himself upon it and rested his ivory walking stick against the wall behind him. For the first time, then, Adred noticed that Lord Abgarthis was dressed, not in his robes of state (in which, by custom, he habitually appeared), but in a fine robe more suited to a nobleman than to a high-ranking member of the palace elite.
“You are astonished to see me?” Abgarthis asked.
Adred smiled, slightly embarrassed, as he took a chair opposite him. “Yes. Very much so. I was certain that you were much too occupied to see me before this evening at the earliest.”
“Count Adred, much has changed since you left here. I no longer attend the High Council.”
“What?”
“King Elad has removed me.”
Adred’s amazement was complete. “But you’ve served the crown for forty years!”
“Neverthless.…” He gestured. “I’m afraid I overstepped my bounds and insulted Elad in public.”
“Abgarthis, what has happened?”
The elder grinned without any real humor in his expression. “The revolt in Sulos? That damned ship filled with human heads? Yes—exactly. When it arrived here, our king made a grand spectacle of it. Turned out the army and everyone at the palace, made it a public event. Ordered the thing burned—right out there.” Abgarthis nodded toward the windows. “We were watching from a balcony. I was appalled and told Elad so. Even went further—I rebuked him and suggested that he was creating only more harm by this, accelerating mistrust toward him rather than discouraging further protests. He took offense. The next morning, he served me with notice of my dismissal.”
Adred was silent for a long moment. Then: “But you still serve in the palace.”
“Oh, certainly. I am still high adviser. He simply has removed me from Council, where even my smallest whisper carried like thunder. Henceforth, anything I say is not officially noted; without record of my sentiments or arguments, I can be gracefully ignored during sessions or debates. But, no…I am too much respected and too…powerful, in my own way, for Elad to do away with me completely.”
“He still requires you. You are the heart of the palace. This rebuke will be withdrawn.”
“In time, no doubt. Does he know that you have returned?”
“No. I contacted you only. I wasn’t sure how he might answer me or receive me.”
“He’s anxious to know what’s become of Orain and Galvus.”
Adred sighed. “He won’t like to hear it.”
“Killed? I was—”
“No, not killed. They survived the revolt. But both of them are living in a tenement apartment on the docks of Sulos. Living the life of sailors, common rabble.”
The old man’s response to this was loose, hearty laughter, joyous and savage. “Ah, that lad is the only hope of us, I know it, I am sure of it! Thank the gods for him! Damn his father, but thank the gods for Prince Galvus!”
Adred asked him if there were any word (by the way) of the treacherous Cyrodian. Abgarthis told him that they had heard nothing; the wild ox might very well have died already in exile, although he himself did not believe that.
“He is too crafty not to have survived,” was Abgarthis’s opinion. “We’ll hear of him again when it is most inconvenient for us.”
Adred told him then why he had returned. “Abgarthis, you know what I mean when I tell you that this revolt, this revolution, is a real thing.”
“A genera
l uprising? From the people?”
“Yes. But much of the gentry, as well, are sympathetic.”
“I’m far from surprised. We have made too many mistakes for too long. We push their faces in dung and expect them to love us for it.”
“Is Elad aware of how pronounced this problem is?”
Abgarthis frowned. “King Elad is aware, these days, only of the fair face and form of Princess Salia of Gaegosh. Oh, yes—you were gone by that time. Ogodis of Gaegosh is a fox; his daughter is an extremely beautiful young woman, and it is Ogodis’s intention to trade her on the market for as high a price as he can manage. Elad is quite taken by her.”
“A marriage?” Adred sounded doubtful of it.
“Within the month, or I’m no judge of events. Surely. It is precisely what Ogodis wants and the last thing Elad needs. But it will improve trade and give our businesses more cheap labor to make use of. Elad is a coward, Count Adred. I swear by the high ones, there was hope for him once. He was dutiful. There were a few weeks when I know he intended to give his best—he was even reviewing his brother’s law books! But—” Abgarthis shook his head “—he is weak. He admires too much, in others, traits he does not possess himself. Ogodis is a puffbag and an ass; he puts on a show, he is all pretense. Elad is impressed. True! Even though he sees the foolishness and knows it for what it is. Ogodis has honeyed the trap, and our lord steps into it, grinning. Oh, she’ll warm his bed at night, and her father will be right there in the next room, goading her on. She is his puppet. Foul, foul.”
“Elad can’t possibly be this stupid.”
“Actually, he’s not. I’ve tried to warn him that anything he says or does is like dropping a pebble in a pool—but he cannot grasp it, not practically. Or he doesn’t care. No matter what he attempts, it becomes sour for him; and now is not the moment for Elad to learn by failures. He’s turned the bureaucracy upside down, bribed the army with shortened gold—he’s devalued our money even more, as you may have noticed—and, to put a gold cap on it, he’s marrying this beautiful child while he’s still dizzy from ordering the execution of hundreds of his subjects.” Abgarthis sniffed. “Things move more rapidly for Elad than they do in a burlesque by Sivion. I like that man’s plays, but what Elad’s doing isn’t humorous.”
The West Is Dying Page 28
