The Warrior Prophet (42 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

 
Its back to canvas, the thing called Sarcellus crouched, as still as stone. The musk of the Scylvendi’s fury permeated the night air, sweet and sharp, heady with the promise of blood. The sound of the woman weeping tugged at its groin. She might have been worth its fancy, were it not for the smell of her fetus, which sickened …
What passed for thought bolted through what passed for its soul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
 
SHIGEK
 
If all human events possess purpose, then all human deeds possess
purpose. And yet when men vie with men, the purpose of no man
comes to fruition: the result always falls somewhere in between. The
purpose of deeds, then, cannot derive from the purposes of men,
because all men vie with all men. This means the deeds of men must
be willed by something other than men. From this it follows that we
are all slaves.
Who then is our Master?
—MEMGOWA,
THE BOOK OF DIVINE ACTS
 
 
What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next?
—TRIAMIS I,
JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
 
Late Summer, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, southern Gedea
 
Gedea didn’t so much end as vanish. After dozens of skirmishes and petty sieges, Coithus Athjeäri and his knights raced south across the vast sandstone plateau of the Gedean interior. They followed ravines and ridge lines, always climbing. By day they hunted antelope for food and jackals for sport. At night they could smell the Great Desert on the wind. The grasses faltered, gave way to dust, gravel, and pungent-smelling scrub. After riding three full days without seeing so much as a goatherd, they finally sighted smoke on the southern horizon. They hastened up the slopes, only to rein their caparisoned mounts to a sudden and panicked halt. The ground plummeted a thousand feet or more. To either side great escarpments ramped into the hazy distances. Before them the long waters of the River Sempis snaked across a plain of verdant green, its back flashing opposite the sun.
Shigek.
The ancient Kyraneans had called her “Chemerat,” the “Red Land,” because of the copper-coloured silt the seasonal floods deposited across the plains. In far antiquity, she ruled an empire that extended from Sumna to Shimeh, and her God-Kings produced works unrivalled to this day, including the legendary Ziggurats. In near antiquity she was famed for the subtlety of her priests, the elegance of her perfumes, and the effectiveness of her poisons. For the Men of the Tusk, she was a land of curses, crypts, and uneasy ruins.
A place where the past became dread, it ran so deep.
Athjeäri and his knights descended the escarpments and wondered that sterile desert could so quickly become lush fields and heavy trees. Wary of ambush, they followed the ancient dikes, rode through one abandoned village then another. Finally they found one old man without fear, and with some difficulty determined that Skauras and all the Kianene had abandoned the North Bank. Hence the smoke they had seen from the escarpment. The Sapatishah was burning every boat he could find.
The young Earl of Gaenri sent word to the Great Names.
Two weeks later the first columns of the Holy War marched unopposed into the Sempis Valley. Bands of Inrithi spread across the floodplain, securing stores, occupying the villas and strongholds abandoned by the Kianene. There was little bloodshed—at first.
Along the river, the Men of the Tusk saw sacred ibis and heron wading among the reeds and great flocks of egret wheeling over the black waters. Some even glimpsed crocodiles and hippopotamuses, beasts which, they would learn, the Shigeki revered as holy. Away from the river, where small stands of various trees—eucalyptus and sycamore, date palm and fan palm—perpetually screened the distances, they were often surprised by ruined foundations, by pillars and walls bearing engravings of nameless kings and their forgotten conquests. Some of the ruins were truly colossal, the remains of palace or temple complexes once as great, it seemed to them, as the Andiamine Heights in Momemn or the Junriüma in Holy Sumna. Many of them wandered for a time, pondering things that may or may not have happened.
When they passed villages, walking along earthen banks meant to capture floodwaters for the fields, the inhabitants gathered to watch them, shushing children and holding tight barking dogs. In the centuries following the Kianene conquest the Shigeki had become devout Fanim, but they were an old race, tenants who had always outlived their landlords. They could no longer recognize themselves in the warlike images that glared from the broken walls. So beer, wine, and water were given to slake the invader’s thirst. Onions, dates, and fresh-baked breads were furnished to sate his hunger. And, sometimes, daughters were offered to comfort his lust. Incredulous, the Men of the Tusk shook their heads and exclaimed that this was a land of marvels. And some were reminded of their first youthful visit to their father’s ancestral home, of that strange sense of
returning
to a place where they had never been.
Shigek was oft named in
The Tractate,
the rumour of a distant tyrant, already ancient in those ancient days. As a result, some among the Inrithi found themselves troubled because the words seemed to overshoot the place. They urinated in the river, defecated in the trees, and slapped at the mosquitoes. The ground was old, melancholy, more fertile perhaps, but it was ground like any other ground. Most, however, found themselves struck by awe. No matter how sacred the text, the words merely dangled when the lands remained unseen. Each in their own way, they realized that pilgrimage was the work of stitching the world to scripture. They had taken their first true step.
And Holy Shimeh seemed so close.
Then Cerjulla, the Tydonni Earl of Warnute, encountered the walled town of Chiama. Fearing starvation because of a blight the previous year, the town elders demanded guarantees before throwing open their gates. Rather than negotiate, Cerjulla simply ordered his men to storm the walls, which were easily overcome. Once within, the Warnutishmen butchered everyone.
Two days afterward, there was another massacre at Jirux, the great river fortress opposite the South Bank city of Ammegnotis. Apparently the Shigeki garrison left there by Skauras had mutinied and murdered all their Kianene officers. When Uranyanka, the famed Ainoni Palatine of Moserothu, arrived with his knights, the mutineers threw open the gates only to be herded together and executed en masse. Heathens, Uranyanka would later tell Chepheramunni, he could tolerate, but treacherous heathens he could not forbear.
The following morning, Gaidekki, the tempestuous Palatine of Anplei, ordered the assault of a town called Huterat, not too far from the Old Dynasty city of Iothiah, presumably because his interpreter, a notorious drunkard, had mistranslated the town’s terms of surrender. Once the gates were taken, his Conriyans ran amok through the streets, raping and murdering without discrimination.
Then, as though murder possessed its own unholy momentum, the Holy War’s occupation of the North Bank degenerated into wanton carnage, though for what reason, no one knew. Perhaps it was the rumours of poisoned dates and pomegranates. Perhaps bloodshed simply begat bloodshed. Perhaps faith’s certainty was as terrifying as it was beautiful. What could be more true than destroying the false?
Word of the Inrithi atrocities spread among the Shigeki. Before the altar and in the streets the Priests of Fane claimed that the Solitary God punished them for welcoming the idolaters. The Shigeki began barricading themselves in their great, domed tabernacles. With their wives and children they gathered wailing on the soft carpets, crying out their sins, begging for forgiveness. The thunder of rams at the doors would be their only answer. Then the rush of iron-eyed swordsmen.
Every tabernacle across the North Bank witnessed some kind of massacre. The Men of the Tusk hacked the screaming penitents into silence, then they kicked over the tripods, smashed the marmoreal altars, tore the tapestries from the walls and the grand kneeling rugs from the floors. Anything carrying the taint of Fanimry they heaved into colossal bonfires. Sometimes, beneath the rugs, they found the breathtaking mosaics of the Inrithi who had originally raised the temple, and the structure would be spared. Otherwise the great Fanim tabernacles of Shigek were burned. Beneath monstrous towers of smoke, dogs nosed the heaped dead and licked blood from the broad steps.
In Iothiah, which had thrown open her gates in terror, hundreds of Kerathotics, an Inrithi sect that had managed to survive centuries of Fanim oppression, saved themselves by singing the ancient hymns of the Thousand Temples. Men who had wailed in terror suddenly found themselves embracing the long lost brothers of their faith. That night the Kerathotics took to the streets, kicking down doors, murdering old competitors, unscrupulous tax-farmers, anyone they had begrudged under the Sapatishah’s regime. Their grudges were many.
In red-walled Nagogris, the Men of the Tusk actually began slaughtering one another. Almost as soon as the Holy War had arrived in Shigek, the Shigeki potentates remaining in the city sent emissaries to Ikurei Conphas, offering to surrender to the Emperor in exchange for Imperial protection. Conphas promptly dispatched General Numemarius and a cohort of Kidruhil. Through some unexplained blunder, however, the gates were relinquished to a large force of Thunyeri, fierce Ingraulish and Skagwamen for the most part, who promptly began plundering the city. The Kidruhil attempted to intervene, and pitched battles broke out in the streets. When General Numemarius met with Yalgrota Sranchammer under flag of truce, the giant brained him. Disorganized by the death of their general and unnerved by the ferocity of the blond-bearded warriors, the Kidruhil withdrew from the city.
But none suffered more horribly than the Fanic priests.
At night, around fires of heathen reliquary, the Inrithi used them for drunken sport, slicing open their bellies, leading them like mules by their own entrails. Some were blinded, some strangled, some were forced to watch their wives and daughters raped. Others were flayed alive. A great many were burned as witches. Scarcely a village could be found without the mutilated corpse of some Fanic priest or functionary nailed to the vaulting limbs of a eucalyptus tree.
Two weeks passed, then suddenly, as though some precise measure had been exacted, the madness lifted. In the end, only a fraction of the Shigeki population had been killed, but no traveller could pass more than an hour without crossing paths with the dead. Instead of the humble boats of fishermen and traders, bloated corpses bobbed down the defiled waters of the Sempis and fanned out across the Meneanor Sea.
At long last, Shigek had been cleansed.
 
From the summit the ziggurat seemed far steeper than it had from the ground below. But then so did most things—after the fact.
Cresting the last of the treacherous steps, Kellhus turned to the surrounding vista. To the north and west, all was cultivation. He saw diked fields, lines of sycamore and ash, and villages that looked like mounds of shattered pottery in the distance. Several smaller ziggurats reared in the near distance, staunch and stolid, anchoring a network of channels and embankments that reached out to the hazy Gedean escarpments. To the south, past the shoulders of the ziggurat Achamian had called Palpothis, he saw stands of marsh gingkos standing like bent sentinels amid thickets of sandbar willows. The mighty Sempis glittered in the sunlight beyond. And to the east he saw lines of red through green—raised footpaths and ancient roadways—passing beneath shadowy copses and between sunny fields, all converging on Iothiah, which darkened the horizon with her walls and smoke.
Shigek. Yet another ancient land.
So old and so vast, Father … Did you see it thus?
He glanced down the stair that formed a causeway across the ziggurat’s mammoth back, saw Achamian still labouring up the steps. Sweat darkened the armpits and collar of his white linen tunic.
“I thought you said the ancients believed their gods lived atop these things,” Kellhus called down. “Why do you tarry?”
Achamian paused, scowled up at the remaining distance. Gasping for breath, he struggled to smile through his grimace. “Because the ancients believed their gods lived atop these things …”

Other books

strongholdrising by Lisanne Norman
The Big Snapper by Katherine Holubitsky
Dressed to Kilt by Hannah Reed
Foundation Fear by Benford, Gregory
Freefalling by Zara Stoneley
09-Twelve Mile Limit by Randy Wayne White
Fall of Colossus by D. F. Jones
Sweet Land of Liberty by Callista Gingrich