The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  "Then tell me those!"

  "Bah! Leave me in peace!"

  He was sparing her, he told himself. Of course his refusal to answer simply stoked her fears, but fearing and knowing were two different things. There is mercy in ignorance; Men are born appreciating this. Scarce a day passes when we do not save others from things-small and great-they would be worse for knowing.

  The old Wizard wasn't the only one to suffer Mimara's rancour. Somandutta drew abreast of them one morning, his manner at once pensive and breezy with false good humour. He began by asking her questions, then plied her with various inane observations when she refused to reply. He was trying, the old Wizard knew, to rekindle something of their old banter, perhaps hoping to find unspoken forgiveness in the resumption of old ways and manners. His approach was at once cowardly and eminently male: he was literally asking her to pretend that he had not abandoned her in Cil-Aujas. And she was having none of it.

  "Mimara… please," he finally hazarded. "I know… I know I wronged you… down… down there. But everything happened so… so quickly."

  "But that's the way it is with fools, isn't it?" she said, her tone so light it could only be scathing. "The world is quick and they are slow."

  Perhaps she had happened upon an old and profound fear of his. Perhaps she had simply shocked him with the summary ease of her condemnation. Either way, the young Nilnameshi caste-noble came to an abrupt stop, stood dumbfounded as the others trudged past. He ducked away from Galian and his teasing attempt to pinch his cheek.

  Afterward Achamian joined him on the trail, moved more by the memory of Esmenet and the similarities of her pique than by real pity. "Give her time," he said. "She's fierce in her feelings, but her heart is forgiving…" He trailed, realizing this wasn't quite true. "She's too quick not to appreciate the… difficulties," he added.

  "Difficulties?"

  Achamian frowned at the petulance of the young man's tone. The fact was he agreed with Mimara: He did think Soma was a fool-but a well-meaning one. "Have you ever heard the saying, 'Courage for men is fodder for dragons?'"

  "No," the fulsome lips admitted. "What does it mean?"

  "That courage is more complicated than simple souls credit… Mimara may be many things, Soma, but simple isn't one of them. We all need time to build fences about what… what happened."

  The wide brown eyes studied him for a moment. Even after everything they had endured, the same affable light illuminated his gaze. "Give her time…" Soma repeated in the tone of a young man taking heart.

  "Time," the old Wizard said, resuming his march.

  Afterward he found himself hoping the daft fool didn't confuse his advice for paternal permission. The thought of the man wooing Mimara made him bristle as if he really were her father. The question of why he felt this way plagued him for a good portion of the afternoon. For all her capricious strength, something about Anasurimbor Mimara demanded protection, a frailty so at odds with the tenor of her declarations that it could only seem tragic… beautiful. The air of things too extraordinary to long survive the world's rigour.

  This realization, if anything, made her company more irritating.

  "The woman saved your life," Pokwas told him one evening, when the to-and-fro of men milling found them side by side. "That means deep things in my country."

  "She saved all our lives," Achamian said.

  "I know," the towering Sword-dancer replied with a solemn nod. "But yours in particular, Wizard. Several times." A look of wonder crept into his face.

  "What?" Achamian could feel the old scowl building, the one that had aged into his expression.

  "You're so old," Pokwas said with a shrug. "Who risks everything to pluck an empty wineskin from a raging river? Who?"

  Achamian snorted in laughter, wondered how long it had been since he had laughed. "An empty wineskin's daughter," he replied. And even as a part of him flinched from the lie-for it seemed sacrilegious to deceive men with whom he had shared utter and abject hardship-another part of him slumped backward in a kind of marvelling anxiousness.

  Maybe this lie had also come true.

  She watches the Wizard by moonlight, reviews his features the way a mother reviews her children: the counting of things beloved. The eyebrows like moustaches, the white hermit beard, the hand that clutches his breast. Night after night she watches.

  Before, Drusas Achamian had been a riddle, a maddening puzzle. She could scarce look at him without railing in anger. So stingy! So miserly! There he sat, warm and fat with knowledge, while she haunted his stoop, begging, starving… Starving! Of all the sins between people, few are so unforgivable as being needed.

  But now.

  He looks every bit as wild as before, hung in wolf-pelts, stooped with years. Despite bathing in the chill blast of mountain streams (an episode that would have occasioned hilarity had the expedition not been so battered), he still carries the stain of Sranc blood across his knuckles and his cheek. They all do.

  And still he denies her. Still he complains, upbraids, and rebukes.

  The only difference is that she loves him.

  She remembers her mother's first descriptions of him, back when the Andiamine Heights had been her home, when gold and incense had been her constant companions. "Have I ever told you about Akka?" the Empress asked, surprising her daughter in the Sacral Enclosure. There was always this twitch, a body-wide plucking of tendons, whenever her mother caught her unawares. Her jaw would tighten, and she would turn to see herself — as she knew she would be in twenty years' time. Mother, draped in white and turquoise silks, a gown reminiscent of those worn by Shrial Nuns.

  "Is he my father?" she had replied.

  Her mother shrank from the question, recoiled even. Asking about her father was Mimara's weapon of choice. Questions of paternity were at once accusations of whorishness. Woe to the woman who did not know. But this time the question seemed to strike her mother particularly hard, to the point where she paused to blink away tears.

  "Your f-father," she stammered. "Yes."

  Stunned silence. Mimara had not expected this. She knows now that her mother lied, that Esmenet said this simply to rob her daughter of the hateful question. Well… perhaps not simply. Mimara has learned enough about Achamian to understand her mother's passion, to understand how she might name him her daughter's father… in her soul's heart, at least. Everyone tells lies to dull the world's sharper, more complicated edges-some more pretty than others.

  "What was he like?" she asked.

  Her mother never looked so beautiful as when she smiled. Beautiful and hateful both. "Foolish, like all men. Wise. Petty. Gentle."

  "Why did you leave him?"

  Another question meant to injure. Only this time, Mimara found herself flinching instead of celebrating. Hurting her mother where she herself was concerned was one thing: victims have rights over criminals-do they not? Hurting her for things entirely her own, however, said more about Mimara than Mimara cared to hear.

  Few passions require quite so much certainty as spite.

  "Kellhus," Esmenet replied, her voice dim and damaged. You win, her eyes conceded as she turned to leave. "I chose Kellhus."

  Now, watching the Wizard by moonlight, Mimara cannot stop thinking about her mother. She imagines the wrack that had to have been her soul, coming to her daughter again and again, each time with new hope, only to be punished and rebuked. Guilt and remorse crash through her, for a time. Then she thinks of the little girl who had shrieked in the arms of slavers, the child sobbing, "Mumma!" into the creaking dark. She remembers the stink and the pillows, the child who wept within her still, even though her face had become as flat and chill as new fallen snow.

  "Why did she leave you?" she asks the old Wizard the following afternoon on the trail. "Mother, I mean."

  "Because I died," the old Wizard says, his brown eyes lost in the fog of distant seeing. He refuses to say anything more specific. "The world is too cruel to wait for the dead."

  "And
the living?"

  He stops and fixes her with that curious stare of his, the one that makes her think of artisans reviewing the work of more gifted rivals.

  "You already know the answer to that one," he says.

  "I do?"

  He seems to catch his smile, condense it into pursed lips. Galian and Sutadra file between them, the former frowning, the latter intent and oblivious. There are times when they all become strangers to one another, and now is one of them-though it seems that Sutadra has been a stranger all along. Bald stone ridges flange the distances beyond the Wizard, promising toil and arms bundled against high wind.

  "Why…" the Wizard begins, then trails. "Why didn't you leave me back in the pit?"

  Because I lov "Because I need you," she says without breath. "I need your knowledge."

  He stares at her, his beard and hair trembling in the breeze. "So the old wineskin has a few swallows left," he says inexplicably.

  He ignores her glare, turns to follow the others. More riddles! She fumes in silence for the remainder of the afternoon, refuses to even look at the old fool. He laughs at her, she decides-and after acknowledging that she had saved him! Bent-back ingrate.

  Some starve. Some eat. Disparity is simply the order of things. It's only when fat men make sauce out of other's starvation that it becomes a sin.

  – | She belongs.

  The others have shown this to her in ways numerous and infinitesimal. The pitch of their talk does not change when she enters their midst. They tease her with brotherly skepticism instead of masculine daring. Their eyes are less inclined to linger on her limbs and more inclined to remain fixed on her gaze.

  The Skin Eaters are less and they are more. Less because of what Cil-Aujas has taken, more because she has become one of them. Even the Captain seems to have accepted her. He now looks through her the way he looks through all his men.

  They make camp on a ridge that falls in a series of gravel sheaves into the Mop. She stares at the forests for a time, at the play of sunlight across the humped canopy. Birds like floating dots. She thinks of how the expedition will crawl across the landscape, like lice picking their way through the World's own pelt. She has heard the others mutter about the Mop, about the dangers, but after Cil-Aujas, nothing seems particularly dangerous, nothing that touches sky.

  They dine on what remains of Xonghis's previous kill, but she finds herself more eager for the smudge of Qirri that Cleric dispenses. Afterward, she keeps to herself, makes a point of avoiding Achamian's many looks, some questioning, others… searching. He does not understand the nature of his crime-like all men.

  Somandutta once again tries to engage her, but she simply glares at the young caste-noble until he slouches away. He had saved her in Cil-Aujas, actually carried her for a mad term, only to abandon her when her need was greatest-and this she cannot forgive.

  To think she had thought the fool charming.

  She watches Sarl instead: he alone has not bathed since climbing out of the Ziggurat's bowel, so he sometimes seems more shade than man. Sranc blood has soaked into the very texture of his skin. His hauberk is intact, but his tunic is as foul as rags worn by a latrine beggar. He huddles against a rust-stained boulder the size of a cart, huddles in a way that suggests hiding one moment, conspiring the next. The boulder is his friend, she realizes. Sarl now sits with everything as if it were his closest friend.

  "Ah, yes…" he murmurs in the gurgle that is his voice. His small black eyes glitter. "Ah… yesss…" The dusk carves his wrinkles so deep that his face looks woven of bundled string.

  "The fucking Mop… The Mop. Eh, lads? Eh? "

  Viscous laughter, followed by a snapping cough. The back of his thought is broken, she realizes. He can only kick and claw where he has fallen.

  "More darkness, yes. Tree darkness…"

  She does not remember what happened at the bottom of the Great Medial Screw, and yet she knows nonetheless, knows with the knowledge that moves limbs and drums hearts.

  Something was open that should not have been open. She closed it…

  Somehow.

  Achamian, during one of his many attempts to sound her out on the matter, mentions the line between the World and the Outside, of souls returning as demons. "How, Mimara?" he asks with no small wonder. "What you accomplished… It should not have been possible. Was it the Chorae?"

  No, she wants to say, it was the Tear of God… But she nods and shrugs instead, in the bored manner of those who pretend to have moved on to more decisive things.

  She has been given something. What she has always considered a blight, a deformity of the soul, has become fraught with enigma and power. The Judging Eye opened. At the moment of absolute crisis, it opened and saw what needed to be seen…

  A tear of the God, blazing in her palm. The God of Gods!

  She has been a victim her whole life. So her instinct is the immediate one, to raise a concealing hand, to turn a shoulder in warding. Only a fool fails to hide what is precious.

  Precious-and of course utterly incompatible with the one thing she desperately wants. Chorae and witches, as the Ainoni would say, rarely prosper beneath the same roof.

  She finds a sour comfort in this-even a kind of warrant. Had it been pure and simple she would have shunned it out of jaded, melancholy reflex. But now it is something that demands to be understood-on her terms…

  So of course the old Wizard refuses to tell her anything.

  More comfort. Frustration and torment is the very shape of her life. The one thing she trusts.

  That night she awakens to the sound of Sarl crooning in a low, lilting voice. A song like smoke, quickly drawn into soundlessness by the ridge's height. She listens, watching the Nail of Heaven as it peeks through the tattered garments of a cloud. The words to the song, if there are any, are incomprehensible.

  After a time, the song trails into rasping murmur, then a moan.

  Sarl is old, she realizes. He left more than his wits in the bowel of the mountain.

  Sarl is dying.

  A pang of terror bolts through her. She turns to look for the Wizard among the rocks, only to find him immediately behind her, bestial with hair. He had crept to her side after she had fallen asleep, she realizes.

  She stares into the shadow of his rutted face and smiles, thinking, At least he does not sing. She crinkles her nose at his smell. She drifts back asleep to the fluttering image of him.

  I understand, Mother… I finally see… I really do.

  She dreams of her stepfather, wakes with the frowning confusion that always accompanies dreams too sticky with significance. With every blink she sees him: the Aspect-Emperor, not as he is but as he would be were he the shade that haunted the accursed deeps of Cil-Aujas…

  Not a man but an emblem. A living Seal, rising on tides of hellish unreality.

  "You are the eye that offends, Mimara…"

  She wants to ask Achamian about the dream but finds the memory of their feud too sharp to speak around. She knows what everybody knows about dreams, that they are as likely to deceive as to illuminate. On the Andiamine Heights, the caste-noble wives would consult augurs, pay outrageous sums. The caste-menials and the slaves would pray, usually to Yatwer. The girls in the brothel used to drip wax on pillow-beetles to determine the truth of their dreams. If the wax trapped the insect, the dream was true. She has heard of dozens of other folk divinations besides. But she no longer knows what to believe…

  It's the Wizard, she realizes. The damned fool is rubbing off on her.

  "The eye that must be plucked."

  They breakfast on the last of a juvenile buck. The sky is cloudless, and the morning sun is chill and sharp. An air of renewal surrounds the scalpers; they talk and prepare the way they used to, the animation of men reacquainting themselves with old and arduous tasks.

  The Captain sits on a boulder overlooking the forested vista below, sharpening his blade. Cleric stands below him, shirtless beneath his nimil hauberk. He nods as though in prayer, l
istening as always to the grinding mutter of the Captain. Galian huddles in close conference with Pokwas and Xonghis, while Soma hovers over them. Sutadra has withdrawn up the trail to pray: he is always praying of late. Conger speaks to his countrymen in avid tones, and though Gallish defeats her, she knows that he attempts to rally them. Sarl mutters and cackles to himself as he shaves tiny slices no bigger than a fingernail from his breakfast cut, which he then chews and savours with absurd relish, as if dining on snails or some other delicacy.

  Even Achamian seems to sense the difference, though he says nothing. The Skin Eaters have returned. Somehow, they have recovered their old ways and roles. Only the worried glances exchanged between jokes and declarations betray their fright.

  The Mop, she realizes, the famed primeval forests of the Long Side. They fear it-apparently enough to forget Cil-Aujas for a time.

  "Skinnies," Sarl cackles, his face flushed red. "Chop and bale them, boys… We have skin to eat!"

  The cheer raised is so winded, so half-hearted, that the shadow of Lost Mansion seems to leap across them anew… There are so few left.

  And Sarl is not one of them.

  A tin clank alerts the company, tells them that their Captain has slung his battered shield over his back-what has become the signal for them to resume their march. The slopes are treacherous, and twice she infuriates the old Wizard by offering him a steadying hand. They wend their way down, descending lower and lower, picking and barging their way through massed ranks of scrub. It seems she can feel the mountains climbing into sky-high absurdity behind her.

  The Mop grows beneath and before them, becoming larger and larger, until she can make out the vying of individual limbs across the tossed canopy. Despite the descriptions she has heard, she finds herself gawking in wonder. The trees are nothing short of monumental, such is their size. Through screens of leaves she glimpses soaring trunks and spanning limbs and the dark that is the world beneath the canopy.