If they were caught in the wheels of some greater machination, then so be it.
It is night and the scalpers argue. The voices of the others climb about the Captain’s rare growl. They sit in a clutch several paces away, ragged shadows chalked in starlight. Sarl’s laughter scratches the night. For some reason the substance of their feud does not concern her, even though she periodically hears the word peach carried on the wind. She has her razor to consider.
Achamian lies trussed beside her, his face pressed into the turf. He either sleeps or listens.
Cleric sits cross-legged nearby, his knees obscured by weedy shags. He stares at her without embarrassment. She can still feel the chill of his finger across her tongue.
She raises her waterskin high, slowly pours it over her head. She can feel the water warm as it snakes along her scalp. Her hair wet, her gaze fixed on the watching Nonman, she lifts the razor to her scalp.
She works quickly, even thoughtlessly. She has done this innumerable times: the custom of whores in Carythusal was to wear wigs. She had owned eleven by the time her mother’s men had come with their swords and torches.
Galian’s voice rises in disbelief. “Slog?” he cries. “This is mor—”
Her hair drops in a tangle of ribbons across her lap. Rare dry strands ride the wind, float out behind her, where they snag grasses, hang quivering.
Cleric watches, twin points of white wetting his black gaze.
She pours more water across her shorn head, works her scalp until the filth becomes a kind of lather. Raising the razor once again, she takes the remaining hair down to nothing. Then she scrapes away her eyebrows.
When she finishes, she sits blinking at the imperturbable Nonman, savours the tingle of air over unearthed skin. Several heartbeats pass—more. His mere presence seems to crackle, he remains so motionless.
She crawls into the pool of his immediate gaze. Her skin pimples, as if she has been stripped of her clothing as well.
“Do you remember me?” she finally whispers.
“Yes.”
She raises her hand to his face, draws the pad of her finger across the soft length of his lips. She presses between, touches hot spit. She gently thrusts her finger between his fused teeth, wonders at the dullness of the opposing edges. She probes deep, forces a channel down the centre of his tongue.
How many thousands of years? she wonders. How many sermons across the ages?
She withdraws her finger, wonders at the gleam of inhuman saliva.
“Do you remember your wife?”
“I remember all that I have lost.”
She is beautiful. She knows she is beautiful because she so resembles her mother, Esmenet, who was the most celebrated beauty in the Three Seas. And mortal beauty, she knows, finds its measure in the immortal …
“How did she die?”
A single tear falls from his right eye, hangs like a bead of glass from his jaw. “With the others … Cir’kumir teles pim’larata …”
“Do I resemble her?”
“Perhaps …” he says, lowering his gaze. “If you wept or screamed … If there was blood.”
She moves closer, into the smell of him, sits so that her knees brush his shins. His pouch hangs from his waist, partially hooked in a miniature thicket of stems. Vertigo billows through her, a sudden horror of tipping, as if the pouch were a babe set too close to a table’s edge. She clutches his forearms.
“You tremble,” she whispers, resisting the urge to glance at the pouch. “Do you want me? Do you want to …” She swallows. “To take me?”
He draws away his arms, stares down into his palms. Beyond him, clouds pile like inky flotsam beneath the stars. Dry lightning scorches the plains a barren white. She glimpses land piling atop land, scabbed edges, woollen reaches.
“I want to …” he says.
“Yes?”
He lifts his eyes as if drawing them against weighted threads. “I … I want to …to strangle you …to split you with my—”
His breath catches. Murder floats in the sorrow of his gaze. He speaks like someone marooned in a stranger’s soul. “I want to hear you shriek.”
And she can feel the musky strength of him, the impotence of her flailing arms, clawing fingers, should he simply choose …
What? a stranded fragment of her asks. What are you doing? She’s not quite certain what she intends to do, let alone what she hopes to accomplish. Is she seducing him? For Achamian? For the Qirri?
Or has she finally broken under the weight of her suffering? Is that what it is? After all this time, is she still the child traded between sailors, weeping to the moan of timbers and men?
She glimpses herself climbing into the circuit of Cleric’s arms, taking his waist into the circuit of her legs. Her breath catches at the thought of his antique virility, the union of her flower and his stone. Her stomach quails at the thought of his arcane disfigurement, the ugliness heaving against her, into her.
“Because you love me?”
“I …”
He grimaces, and she glimpses Sranc howling by the light of sorcerous fire. He raises his face to the vault of the night, and she sees a world before human nations, a nocturnal age, when Nonmen marched in hosts from their great underworld mansions, driving the Sons of Men before them.
“No!” Cleric cries. “No! Because I … I need to remember! I must remember!”
And miraculously, she sees it. Her purpose and her intent.
“And so you must betray …”
His passion blows from him, and he falls still—very still. Clarity peers out from his eyes, a millennial assurance. Gone is the bewildered stoop, the listless air of indecision. He pulls his shoulders and arms into an antique pose of nobility. He draws his hands behind him, seems to clasp them in the small of his back. It is a posture she recognizes from Cil-Aujas and its innumerable engravings.
The voices of the scalpers continue to feud and bicker. The clouds continue to climb, a shroud drawing across the gaping bowl of Heaven. The Captain is speaking, but low rolling thunder obscures his voice.
The first darts of rain tap across the dust and grasses.
“Who?” Mimara presses. “Who are you, truly?”
The immortal Ishroi watches her, his smile wry, his eyes luminous with something too profound to be mere regret.
“Nil’giccas ….” he murmurs. “I am Nil’giccas. The Last Nonman King.”
To be silent, the old Wizard discovered, is to watch.
You see more when you speak less. First your eyes turn outward, the thoughtless way they always turn outward when you have spoken your say: to await a response, to gauge the effectiveness of your lies. But when your voice is bricked over, when you are robbed of the very possibility of speaking, your eyes are left hanging. And like bored children they begin inventing things to do.
Like observing things otherwise unseen.
He noticed the way Galian would sleep apart from the others, and how he would make inexplicable little cuts on his arms when he thought no one could see him. He noticed how Pokwas would glance at the small wounds when Galian seemed distracted. He noticed how Xonghis whispered what were either prayers or folk-charms over his arrows. He noticed Koll convulsing when no one else seemed to notice him at all.
He noticed how barren life became when camp after camp was struck without making a fire. When Men sat in darkness.
To see what was unseen was to understand that blindness was always a matter of degree. To say that all men were blind in some respect—to the machinations of others, to themselves—was a truism scarcely worth noting. What was astounding was the way this truism perpetually escaped Men, the way they confused seeing mere slivers with seeing everything they needed to see.
He pondered this for days: the invisibility of the unknown.
The hook from which all deception hung.
He struggled to remember the posture of his soul before Cleric and the Captain had fallen upon him. He had been so preoccupied with his inn
er demons, he had utterly forgotten the outer. It had never occurred to him that Lord Kosoter, whose cruelty had become such an unwelcome ally, could be an agent of the Aspect-Emperor. He had been too confused to fear for himself when they fell upon him, but his horror for Mimara, for what might happen to her absent his power, had been immediate. Time and again he had cried out, against the gag choking him, against the leather straps binding him, but against the colossal perversity of Fate most of all. He could scarce see her in the subsequent scuffle of shadows, but he saw enough to know the others had seized her, that their intent was both violent and carnal. He was not heartened in the least when Lord Kosoter intervened. He remembered the early days of the expedition, how the Captain had executed Moraubon for attempting to rape Mimara. The Captain, as Sarl had said, always gets the first bite. So Achamian assumed that he simply saved her for himself. He wasn’t at all surprised when the Captain fought to disarm rather than to kill her. What had stunned him, seized him with both horror and relief, was watching the Captain kneel before her.
He had been deceived. He had never trusted these men, these scalpers, but he had trusted their nature—or what he had assumed to be their nature. So long as they thought they marched for riches, for the Coffers, so long as they thought he was their key, he believed he could … manage them. Knowing. This was the great irony. Knowing was the foundation of ignorance. To think that one knew was to become utterly blind to the unknown.
He had been a fool. What scalper company would assent to an expedition such as this? Who would be so desperate as to wager their lives in pursuit of ancient rumour? Only fanatics and madmen would undertake such a quest. Only men like the Captain …
Or himself.
Thinking he knew, Achamian had blinded himself to the unknown. He had ceased asking questions. He had plucked his own eyes, and unless he could find some way to overcome this reversal, the daughter of the only woman he had ever loved was almost certainly doomed.
Ignorance was trust. Knowing was deception. Questions! Questions were the only truth.
This was the resolution that arose out of his first days of captivity. To notice everything. To question everything. To take no knowledge for granted.
This was why his aggression wilted so quickly, why a kind of fatalistic calm claimed his soul.
Why he began waiting.
I live because Kosoter needs me, he would remind himself. I live because of things I cannot see …
Of course the absurdity of all this pondering was not lost on him. A captive of men without scruple or pity, scalpers. A captive of his foe of foes, Kellhus … Far more than his life, he knew, would be decided by this forced march across the dregs of the Istyuli. And yet here he was, whiling away the watches pondering philosophical inanities.
His lips cracked to bleeding. His throat and palette scored with ulcers. His fingers numbed to paralysis, his wrists festering. And yet here he was, smiling at the play of insight, at the assemblage of categorical obscurities in his prying soul.
Only a drug could so overturn the heart’s natural order. Only the ashes of a legendary king.
Qirri. The poison that made strong.
They need only bend back their faces to drink.
The rain drums down across their heads, rolls across the distances in misty sweeps. The puddled earth sizzles, sucks at the rotting seams of their boots. Clothing sags and pinches, rubbing skin raw. Straps long rotted by sweat give way altogether. Pokwas is forced to bind his shoulder harness about his waist, so that the scythed tip of his tulwar sketches an arthritic line through the muck. Sarl even tosses away his hauberk in a bizarre tirade where he alternately argues, rages, and laughs. “On the ready!” he cries time and again. “This is skinny country, boys!”
On and on it falls. In the evenings they cluster together for their meagre repast, glaring into nowhere with a kind of beaten-down fury.
Only the Wizard, looking strangely young with his hair and beard flattened into sheets, seems unaffected. He watches with a canniness that Mimara finds both encouraging and alarming. It would be better, she thinks, if he were to look more defeated … Less dangerous.
Only Koll shivers.
On the third night, Cleric strips naked and climbs a clutch of thumb-shaped boulders. He is little more than a grey shadow in the near distance, yet all of them with the exception of Koll gaze in wonder. He does this sometimes, Mimara has learned, shouts his crazed sermons to the greater world.
They listen to him rant about curses, about ages of loss and futility, about the degradation of life’s end. “I have judged nations!” he bellows into the curtained gloom. “Who are you to condemn me? Who are you to deliver?”
They watch him trade lightning with the clouds. Even sodden, the earth shivers with competing thunders.
When Mimara looks away, she finds the old Wizard staring at her.
The ground is more broken, the undergrowth more toilsome: grasses like flayed hide, shrubs still sharp from the drought. Even still, the forests seem to arrive without warning. The land pitches upward, and kinked hill country climbs out of the grey haze, guttered with gorges booming with brown waters, sloped with stands of slender poplar and crooked fir.
Kûniüri, she realizes. At long last they have arrived.
It is the weariness of this realization, if anything, that astonishes her. Were she the same woman who had fled the Andiamine Heights, this moment would be profound with disbelief. Kûniüri, the ancient homeland of the High Norsirai ere their destruction, the place so deeply revered by the nameless authors of The Sagas. How many expositions had she read, descriptions of its works, chronicles of its kings? How many scrolls authored by its enlightened sons? How many psalms to its lost glory?
It all seems little more than dross in the face of her trudging misery. The world seems too grey, too cold and sodden for glory.
But the rain stops not long after, and the uniform grey resolves into clouds balled into fists of darkness. Soon the sun presses through, and the clouds are drawn into pageants of purple and gold. The land is revealed, and she gawks across previously unseen miles, rugged hills marching to the horizon, stumps of limestone rising from gowns of gravel and earth. For the first time in days her face is warmed for looking.
And again she thinks, Kûniüri.
During her years as a brothel-slave the name meant little to her. It seemed simply another dead thing known by everyone older and wiser, like a grandfather who had died before she was born. That had changed when her Empress mother had burned Carythusal. For all the symbolic tempest of her revolt, she fell upon the gifts her mother lavished upon her, the clothes, the cosmetics, and the tutors—the tutors most of all. Who she had been, the brothel-slave, dwindled to an ignorant kernel, albeit one that refused to relinquish the heights of her soul. The world became a kind of drug. And Kûniüri became an emblem of sorts, as much a marker of her ingrown emancipation as the dead and sacred land of The Sagas.
And now she is here, on the frontier of her own becoming.
That night they camp in the ruins of an ancient fort: battered foundations glimpsed between trees, the remains of a single bastion, massive blocks arrested in their downward tumble. After their passage across the Istyuli and the endless miles of human absence, the ruins almost seemed a landmark promising home.
Game is plentiful, and thanks to Xonghis and his unerring aim they feast on a thrush and a doe. The Imperial Tracker skins and butchers the doe, which Cleric then cooks using a small and incomprehensible Cant. As his eyes dim to a dark glitter, the tip of his finger shines as bright as a candle flame, and Mimara cannot but think of the glorious soot, the Qirri, that will blacken it later in the evening. Cleric slowly draws the pad of his finger along the haunches, then the ribs, transforming crimson lobes into sizzling, smoking meat.
The thrush they boil.
Afterward, Mimara saunters along the edges of the Captain’s distraction, then creeps back in a broad circle, ducking behind palms of leaning stone, slipping between thr
ongs of undergrowth. A wall of sorts borders the inner courtyard where they have gathered, an arc of unmortared stone broken into toothlike sections. The Captain has deposited the Wizard at the far end, careful as always to keep him segregated from the others. She hurries even though she knows she risks Cleric’s preternatural hearing. For a man who betrays almost no anxiety, Lord Kosoter is nothing if not a fastidious shepherd, always counting and remorselessly quick to catch strays with his crook.
She slows as she nears the wall behind the old Wizard, following the tingle of his Mark more than any visual cue. She slinks between sumac, presses against the cold stone. She stretches out onto her belly, creeps with serpent patience until she can see the Wizard’s maul of hair rising before her.
“Akka …” she whispers.
A warmth climbs through her as she speaks, an unaccountable assurance, as if out of all her crazed burdens, confession is the only real encumbrance. Secrecy mars the nature of every former slave, and she is no different. They hoard knowledge, not for the actual power it affords, but for the taste of that power. All this time, even before Achamian’s captivity, she has been accumulating facts and suspicions. All this time she has fooled herself the way all men fool themselves, thinking that she alone possessed the highest vantage and that she alone commanded the field.
All this time she has been a fool.
She tells him what she has learned about the Captain and his mission. “He knows he’s damned. We are his only hope of salvation—or so he believes. Kellhus has promised him paradise. So long as he needs us, we’re secure … As soon as I discover just why he needs us, I promise I’ll find some way to tell you!”
She tells him how Cleric is more than Ishroi—so much more. “Nil’giccas!” she cries under her breath. “The last Nonman King! What could that mean?”
She speaks of the terror she did not know she had. And there is something in her murmur, a despair perhaps, that bumps her from the ruts, carries her away from the tracks the previous weeks and months have worn into her thoughts. She recalls who she was.
The White Luck Warrior Page 49
