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They strike down the weak and call it justice. They ungird their loins and call it reparation. They bark like dogs and call it reason.
- ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN
For Men, no circle is ever closed. We walk ever in spirals.
- DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Bring he who has spoken prophecy to the judgement of the priests, and if his prophecy is judged true, acclaim him, for he is clean, and if his prophecy is judged false, bind him to the corpse of his wife, and hang him one cubit above the earth, for he is unclean, an anathema unto the Gods.
- WARRANTS 7:48, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and out purse is soon empty.
- SONGS 57:3, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
Like many old tyrants, I dote upon my grandchildren. I delight in their tantrums, their squealing laughter, their peculiar fancies. I willfully spoil them with honey sticks. And I find myself wondering at their blessed ignorance of the world and its million grinning teeth. Should I, like my grandfather, knock such childishness form them? Or should I indulge their delusions? Even now, as death's shadowy pickets gather about me, I ask, Why should innocence answer to the world? Perhaps the world should answer to innocence...
Yes, I rather like that. I tire of bearing the blame
- STAJANNAS II, RUMINATIONS
And We will give over all of them, slain, to the Children of Eanna; you shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire. You shall bathe your feet in the blood of the wicked.
- TRIBES 21:13, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wise think the God not at all. They know thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite.
It is enough, they say that the God thinks them.
- MEMGOWA, THE BOOK OF DIVINE ACTS
...for the sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others.
- 8:9:4 THE WITNESS OF FANE
What vengeance is this? That he should slumber while I endure? Blood douses no hatred, cleanses no sin. Like seed, it spills of its own volition, and leaves naught but sorrow in its wake.
- HAMISHAZA, TEMPIRAS THE KING
...an my soldiers, they say, make idols of their swords. But does not the sword make certain? Does not the sword make plain? Does not the sword compel kindness from those who kneel in its shadow? I need no other god.
- TRIAMIS, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
To piss across water is to piss across your reflection
- KHIRGWI PROVERB
The Great Names, of course, were undeterred. They planned to march along the coastal hills followed by the Imperial Fleet, which would provide them with all the water they would need.Certainty.
At first Esmenet kept her gaze averted, worried Proyas might guess the intensity of her hatred if he glimpsed her eyes. How couldn't she hate him? He'd not only refused to help Achamian, he'd refused to allow Xinemus to help as well, and had divested the Marshal of his rank and station when he insisted. But something in his voice, a high-born desperation, perhaps, made her watchful. He seemed uncomfortable - even forlorn - as he took his place beside Kellhus at the fire, so much so that she found her dislike faltering. He too had loved Achamian once. Xinemus had told her as much.
Perhaps that's why he suffered. Perhaps he wasn't so unlike her.
..."He finds it unbearable, I think..."Presumably Cnaiur has regained some part of his sanity after the previous two chapters.
"As a Scylvendi among Inrithi?"
Proyas shook his head, set his empty bowl curiously close to his right foot.
"Liking us," he said
Shame.
Everywhere she went. It was her characteristic stink.
"I'm sorry," she said to the two of them.
What was she doing here? What could she offer other than humiliation? She was polluted - polluted! And she stayed with Kellhus? With Kellhus? What kind of fool was she? She couldn't change who she was, no sooner than she could wash the tattoo from the back of her hand! The seed she could rinse away, but not the sin! Not the sin!
And he was... He was...
"I'm sorry", she sobbed. "I'm sorry!"
Esmenet fled the fire, crawled into the solitary darkness of her tent. Of his tent! Akka's!
Kellhus came to her not long after, and she cursed herself for hoping he would.
And what was he to do with such a request, now that it was too late?
Now that Achamian was gone.
I killed him...
And Proyas suddenly realised that he'd used his old teacher as a marker, as a measure of his own piety. What greater evidence could there be of righteousness than the willingness to sacrifice a loved one? Wasn't this the lesson of Angeshrael on Mount Kinsureah? And what better way t sacrifice a loved one than by hating?
Or delivering him to his enemies...
...All men were not equal. Certainly the Gods favoured whom they would, but there was more. Actions determined the worth of any pulse. Life was the God's question to men, and actions were their answers. And like all answers they were either right or wrong, blessed or cursed. Achamian had condemned himself, had damned himself by his own actions! And so had the whore... This wasn't the judgement of Nersei Proyas, this was the judgement of the Tusk, of the Latter Prophet!
Inri Sejenus...
Then why this shame? This anguish? Why this relentless, heart-mauling doubt?
Doubt. In a sense, that had been Achamain's single lesson. Gemoetry, logic, history, mathematics using Nilnameshi numbers, even philosophy! - all these things were dross, Achamian would argue, in the face of doubt. Doubt had made them, and doubt would unmake them.
Doubt, he would say, set men free... Doubt, not truth!
Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved.
That was what Achamian would say...
..."Ask yourself, Prosha... What if the choice isn't between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt?. Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?"...
..."Have you looked around you, Prosha? Pay attention, boy. Watch and tell me how many men, out of weakness, lapse into the practice of doubt. Listen to those around you, and tell me what you see...
He did exactly as Achamian had asked. For several days, he watched and listened. He saw much hesitation, but he wasn't so foolish as to confuse that with doubt. He heard the caste-nobles squabble and the hereditary priests complain. He eavesdropped on the soldiers and the knights. He observed embassy after embassy posture before his father, making claim after florid claim. He listened to the slaves joke as they laundered, or bicker as they ate. And in the midst of innumerable words Achamian had made so familiar, so commonplace... The words Proyas himself found so difficult! And even then, they belonged most to those Proyas considered wise, even-handed, compassionate, and least to those he thought stupid or malicious.
"I don't know"
Why were thees words so difficult?
"Because men want to murder," Achamian had explained afterward. "Because men want their gold and their glory. Because they want beliefs that answer to their fears, their hatreds and their hungers."
Proyas could remember the heart-pounding wonder, the exhilaration of straying...
"Akka?" He took a deep, daring breath. "Are you saying the Tusk lies?"
A look of dread. "I don't know"
He wanted me to be free.
And Proyas had given him away, thinking only of rewards.
The thought was too much to bear.
...Beliefs alone didn't control the actions of men. There was also desire, and these men, his apostles, must shine with that desire.
...He could tolerate no posturing among them.. It was the utter absence of presumption that made his company so utterly unique, that made their hearts leap and their stomachs giddy at the prospect of seeing him. The weight of sin was found in secrecy and condemnation. Strip these away, deny men their deceptions and their judgements, and their self-sense of shame and worthlessness simply vanished.Presumably - they - includes Esmenet.
They felt greater in his presence, both pure and chosen
Kellhus felt the childishness of his own horror fade in understanding. He looked to either side, saw the specimens curving out of sight, rows of white eyes set in shining red musculatures. They were only defectives - nothing more...The deep inhumanity of the Dunyain is laid bare before us - foreshadowing the Whale Mothers. The peeled away faces seem to echo the Consult Skin-Spies as well.
For all her native gifts, Esmenet remained a world-born woman. And for all world-born men and women, two souls shared the same body, face and eyes. The animal and the intellect. Everyone was two.
Defective.
One Esmenet had already renounced Drusas Achamian. The other would soon follow.
"... is it", he continued, "because men are granted more than women in this world?"
She stared, her thoughts spinning. She breathed deeply, set her palms carefully upon her knees. "You're saying women are... are actually equal?"
"Men", Kellhus said, "cannot dominate their hunger, so they dominate, domesticate, the objects of their hunger. Be it cattle..."And she sells her daughter to the slavers.
"Or women", she said breathlessly.
The air prickled with understanding.
"When one race", Kellhus continued, "is tributary to another, as the Cepalorans are to the Nansur, whose tongue do both races speak?"
"The tongue of the conqueror."
"And whose tongue do you speak?"
She swallowes. "The tongue of men".
With every blink, it seemed, she saw man after man, arched over her like dogs...
"You see yourself", Kellhus said, "as men see you. You fear growing old, because men hunger for girls. You dress shamelessly, because men hunger for your skin. You cringe when you speak, because men hunger for your silence. You pander. You posture. You primp and preen. You twist your thought and warp your heart. You break and remake, cut and cut and cut, all you might answer in your conqueror's tongue!"...
..." You say, 'Let me shame myself for you. let me suffer you! I beg you, please!"...
..."And secretly, you ask yourself, 'What could be unthinkable when I'm already damned? What act lies beyond me, when I have no dignity?'"
"What love lies beyond sacrifice?"
...she'd spoken and he had heard. She remembered drifting in his confidence, in his poetry, in his godlike knowledge of what was right and true...
In his absolution.
"You are forgiven, Esmenet"
Who are you to forgive?
"Mimara."
No one would call her harlot any more
...Toward them. No, not them - toward him.
"There's much certainty here"...Eleazaras tells him. Previous chapters shave implied that it is the doubters who will be saved, and Achamian is all about scepticism.
Plese, Esmi! Y-you're so beautiful... Almost as beautiful as me! But you're smart too! You speak to him the way other men speak to him! I've heard you!"
...exulting in the thought of Serwe's fear...
... Why did you lie with Akka? Why?
How could such beauty dwell in a slumbering face? For a time, Esmenet pondered what it was she thought she saw. There was a peculiar sense of sneakiness, the thrill of one-sided witness so familiar to children. This was what made Esmenet grin. But there was far more: the aura of dormant life, the premonition of death, the wonder of seeing the unruly carnival of human expression enclosed in the stillness of a single point. There was sense of truth, a recognition that all faces held this one point in common. This, Esmenet knew, was her face, as it was Achamian's, or even Kellhus'. But more than anything, there was a glorious vulnerability. The sleeping throat, the Nilnameshi proverb went, was easily cut.
Was this not love? To be watched while you slept...
Even before Achamian had left for the Library, she'd wondered what it was Kellhus saw in Serwe. Certainly it had to be more than her beauty - which was, Esmenet often thought, nothing short of otherwordly. Kellhus saw hearts, not skin, no matter how smooth or marble white. And Serwe's heart had seemed so flawed. Joyous and open certainly, but also vain, petulant, peevish, and wanton.
But now Esmenet wondered whether these very flaws held the secret of her heart's perfection. For she'd glimpsed that perfection while watching her sleep. For an instant, she'd glimpsed what only Kellhus could see... The beauty of frailty. The splendour of imperfection.
She had witnessed, she realised. Witnessed truth.
Despicable, selfish, hateful...
Polluted.
But Kellhus could see... He'd always seen.
"Don't look at me!", she cried.
Look at me...
"But I do, Esmi. I do look. And what I see fills me with wonder".
And these narcotic words, so warm and so close - so very close! - stilled her. Her pillow ached against her cheek, and the hard earth beneath her mat bruised, but all was warm and safe. He blew out his lantern, then quietly withdrew from her tent. The warm memory of his fingers continued to comb her hair.
Throughout her entire life, she'd looked upon things and people that stood apart. She was Esmenet, and that was her bowl, the Emperor's silver, the Shriah's man, the God's ground, and so on. She stood here, and those things there. No longer. Everything, it seemed, radiated the warmth of his skin. The ground beneath her bare feet. The mat beneath hr buttocks. And for a mad instant, she was certain that if she raised her fingers to her cheek, she would feel the soft curls of a flaxen beard, that if she turned to her left, she would see Esmenet hovering motionless over her rice bowl.
Somehow, everything had become here, and everything here had become him.
Kellhus!
She breathed in. Her heart battered her breast.
He scraped the passage clean!
In a single exhalation, it seemed, a lifetime of condemnation slipped from her, and she felt shriven, truly shriven. One breath and she was absolved! She experienced a kind lucidity, as though her thought had been cleansed like water strained through bright white cloth. She thought she should cry, but the sunlight was too sharp, the air too clear for weeping.
Everything was so certain.
He scarped the passage clean!.
Then she thought of Achamian.
Weeper! Faggot weeper!...A man grabs at him and tells him he is the first disciple of Kellhus - the man who delivered him to 'us'. Cnaiur had somehow forgotten about the Dunyain.
...You beat me, old Bannut, his father's brother, cried, for fucking him the way you fucked his father.
He remembered running as hard as he could, away from the black paths worn through the grasses, away from the yaksh and his father's all-knowing wrath. He found a clutch of sumacs and cleared a hollow in their hidden heart. The weave of green grasses through grey. The smell of earth, of beetles crawling through damp and dark grottoes. The smell of solitude and secrecy, under the sky but sheltered from the wind. he pulled the broken pieces from his belt and spread them in breathless wonder. He reassembled them. She was so sad. And so beautiful. Impossibly beautiful.Broken pieces of what? And who is sad and beautiful? Is the beetle an Ajokli reference?
Someone. he was forgetting to hate someone.
Kellhus finds Cnaiur raving in the sea. He is mistaken for his father. He cannot kill himQuoteWhat is this, Father? Pity?
He gazed at the abject Scylvendi warrior. From what darkness had this passion come?
Cnaiur screams at him to 'kill me', but he doesn't do it. There are 'other uses'. Who will murder you, Cnaiur?
Kellhus describes the difference between seeing and witnessing.Quote"...And then we suffer, for we feel the ache for the blessed, the sting of the cursed. We no longer see, we witness" ...
..."When we witness, we testify, and when we testify we make ourselves responsible for what we see. And that - that - is what it means to belong"...
"...This world owns you. You belong, whether you want to or not. Why do we suffer? Why do the wretched take their own lives? Because the world, no matter how cursed, owns us. Because we belong.
TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE. Are people supposed to witness and testify the No-God?
Illuminated by the morning sun. A striding vision. A walking aspect...
Something too terrible. Too bright.
"who?", he roared in his sacred tongue.
He hacked at the riderless horses barring him from his foe. One went down thrashing. Another screamed and bucked into the knotted heathen ranks.
"I am Cnaiur urs Skiotha", he bellowed, "most violent of all men!"
His heaving black stepped forward.
"I bear you fathers and your brothers upon my arms!"
Heathen eyes flashed white from the shadows of their silvered helms. Several cried out.
"Who", Cnaiur roared, so fiercely all his skin seemed throat, "will murder me?"
"What do you see?" the old man finally asked, looking to the canopy above them.
There were many eager answers. Leaves. Branches. Sun.
But Kellhus saw more. He noticed the dead limbs, the scrum of competing branch and twig. He saw slender trees, mere striplings, ailing in the shadow of giants.
"Conflict", he said.
"And how is that, young Kellhus?"
Terror and exultation - the passions of a child. "The tr-trees, Pragma", he stammered. "They war for... for space.
"Indeed", Pragma Uan replied, his manner devoid of anything save confirmation. "And this, children, is what I shall teach you. How to be a tree. How to war for space..."
"But trees don't move", another said.
"They move", the Pragma replied, "but they are slow. A tree's heart beats but once every spring, so it must war in all directions at once. It must branch and branch until it obscures the sky. But you you hearts beat many, many times, you need only war in one direction at at time. This is how men seize space".
Then he saw her, kneeling naked before a towering shadow. One eye swelled shut, blood pulsing from her scalp and nose, sheeting her neck and breasts.
What?
Without thinking, Cnaiur slipped into the gloom of the pavillion. The air reeked of foul rutting. The Dunyain whirled, as naked as Serwe, a bloody hand clamped about his engorged member.
"The Scylvendi", Kellhus drawled, his eyes blazing with lurid rapture. "I didn't smell you".
Cnaiur struck at his heart. Somehow the bloody hand flickered up, grazed his wrist. The knife dug deep just below the Dunyain's collarbone.
Kellhus staggered back, raised his face to the bellied canvas, and screamed what seemed a hundred screams, a hundred voices bound to one inhuman throat. And Cnaiur saw his face open, as though the joints of his mouth were legion and ran from his scalp to his neck. Through steepled features, he saw lidless eyes, gums without lips...
The thing struck him, and he fells to one knee. He yanked his broadsword clear.
But it had vanished through the flap, leaping like some kind of beast.
... And each time the Fanim reeled back, astounded by these defeated men who refused to be defeated.- war is conviction.
..."Why you beat me. Why your thoughts never stray far from me, but return, always return to me in fury. He's told me everything!.
Something trembled through him. He raised his fist but his fingers would not clench.
"What has he said?"
"That I'm nothing but a sign, a token. That you strike not me, but yourself!"
"I will strangle you! I will snap your neck like a cat's! I will beat blood from your womb!"
"Then do it!" she shrieked. "Do it, and be done with it!"
"You are my prize! My prize! To do with as I please!"
"No! No! I'm not your prize! I'm your shame! He told me this!" "Shame? What shame? What has he said?"
"That you beat me for surrendering as you surrendered! For fucking him the way you fucked his father!"
She lay still on the ground, legs askew. So beautiful. Even beaten and broken. How could anything human be so beautiful?
"What has he said?" he asked blankly.
...Where others adhered out of ignorance of the alternatives, he was continually forced to choose, and more importantly, to affirm one thought from the infinite field of possible thoughts, one act from the infinite field of possible acts. Why upbraid a wide for weeping? Why not strike her instead? Why not laugh, ignore, or console? Why not weep with her? What made one response more true than another? Was it ones's blood. Was it another's words of reason? Was it one's God?
Or was it, as Moenghus had claimed, one's goal?
Encircled by his people, born of them and destined to die among them, Cnaiur had chosen his blood. For thirty years he tried to beat his thoughts and passions down the narrow paths of the Utemot. But despite his brutal persistence, despite his native gifts, his fellow tribesman could always smell a wrongness about him. In the intercourse between men every move was constrained by other's expectations; it was a kind of dance, and as such, it brooked no hesitation. The Utemot glimpsed his flickering doubts. They understood that he tried, and they knew that whoever tried to be of the People couldn't be of the People.
So they punished him with whispers and guarded eyes - for more than a hundred seasons...
Thirty years of shame and denial. Thirty years of torment and terror. A lifetime of cannibal hatred... In the end, Cnaiur had cut a trail of his own making, a solitary track of madness and murder.
He had made blood his cleansing waters. If war was worship, the Cnaiur urs Skiotha would be the most pious of the Scylvendi - not simply of the People, but the greatest among them as well. He told himself his arms were his glory. He was Cnaiur urs Skiotha, the most violent of all men.
And so he continued telling himself, even though his every swazond marked not his honour, but the death of Anasurimbor Moenghus. For what was madness, if not a kind of overpowering impatience, a need to seize at once what the world denied? Moenghus not only had to die, he had to die now - whether he was Moenghus or not.
In his fury, Cnaiur had made all the world his surrogate. And he avenged himself upon it.
Despite the accuracy of this analysis, it availed Kellhus little in his attempts to possess the Utemot Chieftain. Always the man's knowledge of the Dunyain barred his passage. For a time, Kellhus even considered the possibility that Cnaiur would never succumb.
Then they found Serwe - a surrogate of a different kind.
From the very beginning, the Scylvendi had made her his track, his proof that he followed the ways of the People. Serwe was the erasure of Moenghus, whose presence Kellhus' resemblance so recalled. She was the incantation that would undo Moenghus' curse. And Cnaiur fell in love, not with her, but with the idea of loving her. Because if he loved her, he couldn't love Anasurimbor Moenghus...
Or his son.
What followed had been almost elementary.
Kellhus began seducing Serwe, knowing that he showed the barbarian his own seduction at the hands of Moenghus some thirty years previous. Soon, she became both the erasure and the repetition of Cnaiur's heartbreaking hate. The plainsman began beating her, not simply to prove his Scylvendi contempt for women, but to better beat himself. He punished her for repeating his sins, even though he at once loved her and despised love as weakness...
And so as Kellhus intended, contradiction piled upon contradiction. World-born men, he'd discovered, possessed a peculiar vulnerability to contradictions, particularly those that provoked conflicting passions. Nothing, it seemed, so anchored their hearts. Nothing so obsessed.
Once Cnaiur had utterly succumbed to the girl, Kellhus simply took her away, knowing the man would do anything for her return, and that he would do so without even understanding why.
And now the usefulness of Cnaiur urs Skiotha was at and end.
What is this, Father? Pity?
He gazed at the abject Scylvendi warrior. From what darkness had this passion come?
"...Imagine a world where no womb quickens, where no soul hopes!"
...the Lion of Kiyuth! - would be little more than a subaltern...
No matter, it would be salt for the honey, as the Ainoni were fond of saying. The bitterness that made vengeance sweet.
The air thrummed with the din of innumerable shouts. The faint peal of faraway battlehorns was overpowered by the strident blare of those more near. Cnaiur breathed deep, smelled sea, desert, and dank river - nothing of the absurd spectacle before him. If he closed his eyes and covered his ears, he thought, he could pretend he was alone...
I am of the Land!
What was this trade he had made?
Never had Cnaiur suffered a night like the night previous. Why? he'd screamed at the Meneanor. Why had he agreed to teach the Dunyain war? For Serwe? For a bauble found on the Steppe?
For nothing?
He'd traded many things over the past months. Honour for the promise of vengeance. Leather for effeminate silks. His yaksh for a prince's pavillion. The Utemot in their unwashed hundreds, for the Inrithi in their hundreds of thousands.
Battlemsater... King-ofTribes!
Part of him reeled in drunken exultation at the thought. Such a host! From the river to the hills, a distance of almost seven miles, and still the ranks ran deep. The People could never assemble such a horde, not if they emptied every yaksh, saddled every boy. And here he, Cnaiur urs Skiotha, breaker-of-horses-and-men, commanded. Outland princes, earls and palatines, thanes and barons in their thousands, even an Exalt-General answered to him! Ikurei Conphas, the hated author of Kiyuth!
What would the People think? Would they call this glory? Or would they spit and curse his name, give him the torments of the aged and infirm?
But wasn't all war, all battle, holy? Wasn't victory the mark of the righteous? If he crushed the Fanim, ground them beneath the heel of his boot, what would the People think of his trade then? Would they finally say, "This man, this many-blooded man, is truly of the land"?
Or would they whisper as they always whispered? Would they laugh as they always laughed?
"Yours id the name of our shame!"
What if he made a gift of the Inrithi? What if he delivered them to destruction? What if rode home with Ikurei Conphas' head in a sack?
"Scylvendi," Moeghus said from his side.
That voice!
Cnaiur looked to Kellhus, blinking.
Skauras! the Dunyain's look shouted. Skauras is our foe here.
But he had no time. War had come, and he'd agreed to yield its secrets in exchange for Serwe. He'd agreed to surrender the last shred of leverage he possessed. After he would have nothing to secure his vengeance. Nothing! After this, there would be no reason for Kellhus to keep him alive.
I'm a threat to him. The only man who knows his secret...
So what was she, that he'd doom himself for her? What was she, the he would trade war?
Something is wrong with me... Something.
No! Nothing! Nothing!
"Warring is hungry business, Serwe. Certain appetites must be attended."
Cnaiur snorted. "This war", he snapped in Scylvendi, "is simply your war made honest.
Kellhus acknowledge nothing. "Belief... You're saying battle is a disputation of belief... An argument." ...
..."So in battle, " Kellhus said, "conviction makes true".
A great ache filled Cnaiur's chest. Only Kellhus' strong grip saved him the humiliation of falling to his knees.
Always the same...
The Prophet seemed to be ... listening.
No. Bearing witness.
Something about Xinemus' expression struck Proyas to the marrow.
...What was the life of one man - a blasphemer no less - compared with that need? The God demanded sacrifices...
..."After all these years, you still don't understand, do you?"Proyas - you dickhead.
"What's there to understand?" Proyas cried. "How many times must we have this conversation? Achamian is Unclean! Unclean!" A heady sense of conviction seized him, an an incontestable making certain, as though knowing possessed its own fury. "If blasphemers kill blasphemers, then we're saved oil and wood.
..."What if e comes back and can't find me?"...
...She lingered in the gap where her joy had been...
Helplessness. If women were hope's oldest companions, it was due to helplessness. Certainly women often exercised dreadful power over a single hearth, but the world between hearths belonged to men. And it was into this world that Achamian had disappeared: the cold darkness between firepits.
All she could do was wait...
...Waiting. This was what tradition said a woman should do. To wait at the hearth's edge. To peer and peer and yet always be stared down. To haggle endlessly with nothing. To think without hope of insight. To repeat words said and words implied. To chase hints into incantations, as though by their tumbling precision and the sheer pitch of pain the movements of her soul might seize the world at some deeper level, and force it to yield.
As the days passed, it seemed she'd become a still point in the ponderous wheel of events, the only structure to remain after the floodwaters retreated. The tents and pavilions fell like shrouds unfurled across the dead. The vast baggage trains were loaded. Armoured men on horse chopped to and fro from the horizon, bearing arcane missive, onerous commands. Great columns were formed up across the pasture, and with shouts and hymns, they passed away.
Like a season.
And Esmenet sat alone in the midst of their absence...
"To think", Proyas confided to him afterward, "that I thought you no more than an effective ruse to employ against the Emperor. Now you're our general in all but name. You realise that?"
He never pitched his tent on the same ground.... He thinks of Anissi
... the first wife of his heart...and their daughter, Sanathi. He thinks of Proyas.
"Murder me and it stops!". He takes what 'compensation' he can.
...not only liked to trick and deceive, he liked to show, to prove...
For Skauras, the imminent battle would be more than a contest, it would be a demonstration...
...There must be something you can offer".
The Prince smiled mirthlessly. "Or someone," he said with uncommon grief.
Cnaiur had watched the Dunyain's influence grow. He'd watched as he gradually bridled all those about Xinemus' fire, working their hearts the way saddle makers worked leather, tanning, gouging, shaping. He'd watched as he lured more and more Men of the Tusk with the grain of his deceit. He'd watched him yoke thousands - thousands! with simple words and bottomless looks. He'd watched him minister to Serwe...
He'd watched until he could bear watching no more.
Cnaiur had always known Kellhus' capabilities, had always known the Holy War would yield to him. But knowing and witnessing were two different things. He cared nothing for the Inrithi. And yet, he found himself fearing for them - fearing, even as he scorned them! How they fell over themselves, fawning, wheedling, grovelling. How they degraded themselves, youthful fools and inveterate warriors alike. Imploring looks and beseeching impressions. Oh, Kellhus... Oh, Kellhus... Staggering drunks! Unmanly ingrates! How easily they surrendered.
And none more so than Serwe. To watch her succumb, again and again. To see his hand drift deep between Dunyain thighs...
Fickle, treacherous, whorish bitch! How many times must he strike her? How many times must he take her? How many times must he stare, dumbfounded by her beauty?
"I believe that your ancestors killed my God. I believe your race bears the blood-guilt of that crime".
His voice didn't quaver. His expression didn't break. But as always, he could hear the infernal chorus.
"So you worship vengeance..."
"I worship vengeance"
"And that's why the Scylvendi call themselves the People of War".
"Yes. To war is to avenge".
The proper answer. So why the throng of questions.
"To take back what has been taken," Proyas said, his eyes at once troubled and bright. "Like our Holy War for Shimeh".
"No", Cnaiur replied. "To murder the taker".
could be my son.
The sword fell with a clang to Cnaiur's feet. For an instant, it seemed he gagged on ice.
"Why," he spat contemptuously, "would I want your pregnant whore?
"She's your prize," Kellhus said. She bears your child."
Why did he long for her so? She was a vain, shallow waif - nothing more! Cnaiur had seen the way Kellhus used her, the way he dressed her. He'd heard the words he bid her speak. No tool was too small for a Dunyain, no word too plain, no blink too brief. He'd utilise the chisel of her beauty, the hammer of her peach... Cnaiur had seen this!
So how could he contemplate...
All I have is war.
The Meneanor crashed and surged across the beaches. The wind smelled ofbrine. Cnaiur stared at the Dunyain for what seemed a thousand heartbeat. Then at lats he nodded even though he knew he relinquished the last remnant of his hold on the abomination. After this he would have nothing left but the word of a Dunyain...
He would have nothing.
But when he closed his eyes he saw her, felt her soft and supple, crushed beneath his frame. She was his proof!
Tomorrow, after worship...
He would take what compensation he could
In terror, all men throw up their hands and turn aside their faces. Remember, Tratta, always preserve the face! For that is where you are.
- THROSEANIS, TRIAMIS IMPERATOR
The Poet will yield up his stylus only when the Geometer can explain how Life can at once a point and a line. How can all time, all creation, come to the now? Make no mistake: this moment, the instant of this very breath, is the frail thread from which all creation hangs.
that men dare to be thoughtless...
- TERES ANSANSIOUS, THE CITY OF MEN
