The Warrior Prophet (47 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

She glimpsed him writhing beneath Serwë …
He’s found a younger whore,
something whispered.
“Why do you do this?” she asked, her voice far sharper than she had wished.
An exasperated pause. “Do what?”
“It’s like a labyrinth with you, Akka. You throw open gates, invite me in, but refuse to show me the way. Why do you always hide?”
His eyes flashed with inexplicable anger.
“Me?” he laughed, turning back to his task. “
Hide,
you say?”
“Yes, hide. You’re
so weak,
Akka, and you need not be. Think of what Kellhus has taught us!”
He glanced at her, his eyes poised between hurt and fury. “How about you? Let’s talk about your daughter … Remember her? How long has it been since you’ve—”
“That’s different! She came before you!
Before
you!”
Why would he say this? Why would he
try
to hurt?
My girl! My baby girl is dead!
“Such fine discriminations,” Achamian spat. “The past is never dead, Esmi.” He laughed bitterly. “It’s not even
past
.”
“Then where’s my daughter, Akka?”
For an instant he stood dumbstruck. She often baffled him like this.
Broken down fool!
Her fingers started shaking. Hot tears spilled across her cheeks. How could she think such things?
Because of what he said …
How dare he!
He gaped at her, as though somehow reading her soul. “I’m sorry, Esmi,” he said vaguely. “I shouldn’t have mentioned … I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
His voice trailed away, and he again turned to his mule, began angrily cinching straps. “You don’t understand what the Gnosis is to us,” he added. “More than my pulse would be forfeit.”
“Then teach me! Show me how to understand!”
This is Kellhus! We discovered him together!
“Esmi … I can’t talk to you about this. I can’t …”
“But why?”
“Because I know what you’ll say!”
“No, Akka,” she said, feeling the old whorish coldness. “You don’t. You’ve no idea.”
He caught the rough hemp cord hanging from his mule’s crude bridle, momentarily fumbled it. For an instant, everything about him, his sandals, his baggage, his white-linen robe, seemed lonely and poor. Why did he always look so poor?
She thought of Sarcellus: bold, sleek, and perfumed.
Shabby cuckold!
“I’m not leaving you, Esmi,” he said with a queer kind of finality. “I could never leave you. Not again.”
“I see but one sleeping mat,” she said.
He tried to smile, then turned, leading Daybreak away at an awkward gait. She watched him, her innards churning as though she dangled over unseen heights. He followed the path eastward, passing a row of weather-beaten round tents. He seemed so small so quickly. It was so strange, the way bright sun could make distant figures dark …
“Akka!” she cried out, not caring who heard. “Akka!”
I love you.
The figure with the mule stopped, distant and for a moment, unrecognizable.
He waved.
Then he disappeared beneath a stand of black willows.
 
Intelligent people, Achamian had found, were typically less happy. The reason for this was simple: they were better able to rationalize their delusions. The ability to stomach Truth had little to do with intelligence—nothing, in fact. The intellect was far better at arguing away truths than at finding them. Which was why he had to flee Kellhus and Esmenet.
He led his mule along a path bounded to his right by the black expanse of the Sempis and to his left by a line of gigantic eucalyptus trees. Save for the odd flash of warmth between limbs, the half-canopy sheltered him from the sun. A breeze seeped through his white linen tunic. It was peaceful, he thought, to at long last be alone …
When Xinemus had told him that certain books pertaining to the Gnosis had been found in the Sareotic Library, he could read the subtext well enough.
You should leave,
his friend had said without saying. Ever since the night with the Wathi Doll, Achamian had expected to be banished from his friend’s fire, even if temporarily. Even more, he
needed
to be banished, to be forced from the company of those who overwhelmed him …
But it cut nonetheless.
No matter, he told himself. Just another feud born of the awkwardness of their friendship. A caste-noble and a sorcerer. “There is no friend more difficult,” one of the poets of the Tusk had written, “than a sinner.”
And Achamian was nothing if not a sinner.
Unlike some sorcerers, he rarely pondered the fact of his damnation. For much the same reason, he imagined, men who beat their wives didn’t ponder their fists …
But there were other reasons. In his youth, he’d been one of those students who’d delighted in irreverence and impiousness, as though the mortal blasphemy he learned licensed any blasphemy, large and small. He and Sancla, his cellmate in Atyersus, used to actually read
The Tractate
aloud and laugh at its absurdities. The passages dealing with the circumcision of caste-priests. And of course the passages dealing with manural purification rites. But one passage, more than any other, would haunt him over the years: the famous “Expect Not Admonition” from the Book of Priests.
“Listen!” Sancla had cried from his pallet one night. “‘And the Latter Prophet said: Piety is not the province of money-changers. Do not give food for food, shelter for shelter, love for love. Do not throw the Good upon the balance, but
give without expectation
. Give food for nothing, shelter for nothing, love for nothing. Yield unto him who trespasses against you. For these things alone, the wicked do not do. Expect not, and you shall find glory everlasting.’ ”
The older boy fixed Achamian with his dark, always-laughing eyes—eyes that would make them lovers for a time. “Can you believe it?”
“Believe what?” Achamian asked. He already laughed because he knew that whatever Sancla cooked up was certain to be deliriously funny. He was simply one of those people. His death in Aöknyssus three years later—he’d been killed by a drunken caste-noble with a Trinket—would crush Achamian.
Sancla tapped the scroll with his forefinger, something that would have earned him a beating in the scriptorium. “Essentially Sejenus is saying, ‘Give without expectation of reward, and you can expect a huge reward!’”
Achamian frowned.
“Don’t you see?” Sancla continued. “He’s saying that piety consists of good acts in the absence of selfish expectation. He’s saying you give nothing—nothing!—when you expect something in exchange … You simply don’t give.”
Achamian caught his breath. “So the Inrithi who expect to be exalted in the Outside …”
“Give nothing,” Sancla had said, laughing in disbelief. “Nothing! But we, on the other hand, dedicate our lives to continuing Seswatha’s battle … We give everything, and we can expect only damnation as a result. We’re the only ones, Akka!”
We’re the only ones.
As tempting as those words were, as moving and as important as they’d been, Achamian had become too much a sceptic to trust them. They were too flattering, too self-aggrandizing, to be true. So instead, he’d thought it simply
had
to be enough to be a good man. And if it wasn’t enough, then there was nothing good about those who measured good and evil.
Which was likely the case.
But of course Kellhus had changed everything. Achamian now pondered his damnation a great deal.
Before, the question of his damnation had merely seemed an excuse for self-torment. The Tusk and
The Tractate
couldn’t be more clear, though Achamian had read many heretical works suggesting that the Scriptures’ manifold and manifest contradictions proved that the prophets, olden day and latter, were simply men—which they were. “All Heaven,” Protathis had once written, “cannot shine through a single crack.”
So there
was
room to doubt his damnation. Perhaps, as Sancla had suggested, the damned were in fact the elect. Or perhaps, as Achamian was more inclined to believe, the
uncertain
were the Chosen Ones. He’d often thought the temptation to assume, to sham certainty, was the most narcotic and destructive of all temptations. To do good without certainty was to do good without expectation … Perhaps
doubt itself
was the key.
But then of course the question could never be answered. If genuine doubt was in fact the condition of conditions, then only those ignorant of the answer could be redeemed. To ponder the question of his damnation, it had always seemed, was itself a kind of damnation.
So he didn’t think of it.
But now … Now
there could be an answer
. Every day he walked with its possibility, talked …
Prince Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
It wasn’t as though he thought Kellhus could simply tell him the answer, even if he could ever summon the courage to ask. Nor did he think that Kellhus somehow embodied or exemplified the answer. That would make him too small. He was not, in some mystic Nonmen fashion, the living sign of Drusas Achamian’s fate. No. The question of his damnation or his exaltation, Achamian knew, depended on what
he himself was willing to sacrifice
. He himself would answer the question …
With his actions.
And as much as this knowledge horrified him, it also filled him with an abiding and incredulous joy. The fear it engendered was old: for some time he’d feared the fate of the entire world depended on those selfsame actions. He’d grown numb to consequences of deranged proportions. But the joy was something new, something unexpected. Anasûrimbor Kellhus had made
salvation
a real possibility. Salvation.
Though you lose your soul, the Mandate catechism began, you shall win the world.
But it need not be! Achamian knew that now! Finally he could see how desolate,
how bereft of hope,
his prior life had been. Esmenet had taught him how to love. And Kellhus, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, had taught him how to hope.
And he would seize them, love and hope. He would seize them, and he would hold them fast.
He need only decide what to do …
“Akka,” Kellhus had said the previous night, “I need ask you something.”
Only the two of them sat about the fire. They boiled water for some midnight tea.
“Anything, Kellhus,” Achamian replied. “What troubles you?”
“I’m troubled by what I must ask …”
Never had Achamian seen such a poignant expression, as though horror had been bent to the point where it kissed rapture. A mad urge to shield his eyes almost overcame him.
“What you
must
ask?”
Kellhus had nodded.
“Each day, Akka, I am less my self.”
Such words! Their mere memory struck him breathless. Standing in an islet of sunlight, Achamian paused along the trail, pressed his palms to his chest. A cloud of birds erupted into the sky. Their shadows flickered across him, soundless. He blinked at the sun.
Do I teach him the Gnosis?
To his gut he balked at the notion—the mere thought of surrendering the Gnosis to someone outside his School made him blanch. He wasn’t even sure he
could
teach Kellhus the Gnosis, even if he desired. His knowledge of the Gnosis was the one thing he shared with Seswatha, whose imprint owned every movement of his slumbering soul.
Will you let me? Do you see what I see?
Never—never!—in the history of their School had a sorcerer of rank betrayed the Gnosis. Only the Gnosis had allowed the Mandate to survive. Only the Gnosis had allowed them to carry Seswatha’s war through the millennia. Lose it, and they became no more than a Minor School. His brothers, Achamian knew, would fight themselves to extinction to prevent that from happening. They would hunt both of them without relenting, and they would kill them if they could. They would not listen to reasons … And the name, Drusas Achamian, would become a curse in the dark halls of Atyersus.

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