The Warrior Prophet (51 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Sitting before Achamian’s tent, her back turned to their pathetic possessions, her every surface exposed to gaping, sun-bright spaces, she wept—called out his name as though he might lie hidden behind some copse of black willows, whose verdant branches waved each independent of the other, as though beneath the tug of different skies.
She could almost see him, crouched behind that shade-black trunk.
Come out, Akka … They’ve all left. It’s safe now, my love …
Day. Night.
Esmenet would make her own silent inquiries, an interrogation without hope of answer. She would think much of her dead daughter, and make forbidden comparisons between that cold world and this one. She would walk down to the Sempis and stare at its black waters, not knowing whether she wanted to drink or drown. She would glimpse herself in the distance, arms waving …
One body, no warmth.
Day. Night. Moment by moment.
Esmenet had been a whore, and whores knew how to wait. Patience through the long succession of lusts, her days lined up as though words on a scroll as long as life, each whispering the same thing.
It’s safe now, my love. Come out.
It is safe.
 
Since leaving Xinemus’s camp, Cnaiür passed his days much as before, either conferring with Proyas or discharging his requests. Skauras had wasted little time in the weeks following his defeat on the Battleplain. He’d ceded what land he couldn’t hold, which included the entire North Bank of the Sempis. He burned every boat he could find to prevent any mass crossing, raised makeshift watch towers along the entire South Bank, and gathered the remnants of his army. Fortunately for the Shigeki and their new Inrithi warlords, he hadn’t burned the granaries or scorched the fields and orchards as he withdrew. In Council, Saubon claimed this was due to the heathen’s haste, which in turn was due to their terror. But Cnaiür knew better. There had been nothing haphazard about the Kianene evacuation of the North Bank. They knew Hinnereth would delay the Men of the Tusk. Even at Zirkirta, where the Scylvendi had crushed the heathen eight years before, the Kianene had recovered quickly from their initial rout. They were a tenacious and resourceful race.
Skauras had spared the North Bank, Cnaiür knew, because he intended to reclaim it.
This wasn’t a fact Inrithi stomachs found easy to digest. Even Proyas, who’d set aside the many conceits of his caste and had embraced Cnaiür’s tutelage, couldn’t believe the Kianene still posed any real threat.
“Are you assured of your victory?” Cnaiür asked one night while supping with the Prince in private.
“Assured?” Proyas replied. “But of course.”
“Why?”
“Because my God has willed it.”
“And Skauras? Would he not give much the same answer?”
Proyas’s eyebrows jumped up, then knitted into a frown. “But that’s not to the point, Scylvendi. How many thousands have we killed? How much terror have we struck into their hearts?”
“Too few thousands, and far, far too little terror.”
Cnaiür explained the way the memorialists recited verses dedicated to each of the Nansur Columns, stories that described their devices, their arms, and their mettle in battle so that when the Tribes went on pilgrimage or to war, they could read the Nansur battle line. “This was why the People lost at Kiyuth,” he said. “Conphas switched his Columns’ devices, told us a false story …”
“Any fool knows how to read his opponent’s line!” Proyas spat.
Cnaiür shrugged. “Then tell me,” he said, “what story did you read on the Battleplain?”
Proyas blanched. “How in the blazes am I supposed to know? I recognized only a handful …”
“I recognized all of them,” Cnaiür asserted. “Of all the great Kianene Houses, and there are many, only two-thirds rode against us on the Plains of Mengedda. Of those, several were likely token contingents, depending on how many enemies Skauras entertains among his peers. After the massacre of the Vulgar Holy War, many among the heathen, including the Padirajah, were no doubt contemptuous of the Holy War’s threat …”
“But now …” Proyas said.
“They will not repeat their mistake. They will strike treaties with Girgash and Nilnamesh. They will empty every barracks, saddle every horse, arm every son … Make no mistake, even now they ride toward Shigek in their thousands. They will answer Holy War with Jihad.”
Following this exchange, Proyas out and out capitulated to his admonishments. At the next Council, after the other Great Names, with the exception of Conphas, scoffed at Cnaiür and his warnings, Proyas had captives secured in cross-river raids dragged before them. They confirmed everything Cnaiür had predicted. For over a week, the wretches said, Grandees from as far away as Seleukara and Nenciphon had been riding out of the southern deserts. Some names even the Norsirai seemed to recognize: Cinganjehoi, the far-famed Sapatishah of Eumarna, Imbeyan, the Sapatishah of Enathpaneah, even Dunjoksha, the tyrannical Sapatishah who ruled the governorate of Amoteu from Shimeh.
It was agreed. The Holy War had to cross the River Sempis as soon as humanly possible.
“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 realize that?”
“I have said or offered nothing that Conphas himself could not say or offer.”
Proyas laughed. “Save trust, Scylvendi. Save trust.”
Though Cnaiür grinned, these words cut him for some reason. What did it matter, the trust of dogs and cattle?
Cnaiür had been born for war, as much as he’d been bred for it. This, and this alone, was the one certainty of his life. So he bent himself to the problem of assaulting the South Bank with relish and uncommon zeal. While the Great Names directed the construction of rafts and barges in great enough numbers to convey the entire Holy War across the Sempis, Cnaiür supervised the Conriyan effort to find the ideal place to land. He led his war parties on night raids against the South Bank, even bringing cartographers to map the terrain. If one thing impressed him about the Inrithi manner of making war, it was their use of maps. He directed the questioning of captives, and even taught several traditional Scylvendi techniques to Proyas’s interrogators. He questioned those, such as Earl Athjeäri, who raided the South Bank to plunder and harry, about what they’d seen. And he held council with others, like Earl Cerjulla, General Biaxi Sompas, and Palatine Uranyanka, who shared his task.
Except for Proyas’s councils, he neither saw nor spoke to Kellhus. The Dûnyain was little more than a rumour.
Cnaiür’s days were much the same as before. But his nights …
They were far different.
He never pitched his tent on the same ground. Most evenings, after sunset or after supping with Proyas and his caste-nobles, he rode from the Conriyan camp, past the sentries and out into the fields. He struck his own fire, listened to the night wind roar through the trees. Sometimes, when he could see it, he stared at the Conriyan encampment and counted fires like an idiot child. “Always number your foemen,” his father had once told him, “by the glitter of their fires.” Sometimes he gazed at the stars and wondered if they too were his enemies. Every so often, he imagined he camped across the lonely Steppe. The Holy Steppe.
He often brooded over Serwë and Kellhus. He found himself continually rehearsing his reasons for abandoning her to the Dûnyain. He was a warrior—a Scylvendi warrior! What need had he, man-killing Cnaiür, of a woman?
But no matter how obvious his reasons, he still couldn’t help but think of her. The globes of her breasts. The wandering line of her hips. So perfect. How he’d burned for her, burned the way a warrior, a man, should! She was his prize—his proof!
He remembered pretending to sleep while listening to her sob in the darkness. He remembered the remorse, as heavy as spring snow, pressing him breathless with its cold. What a fool he’d been! He thought of the apologies, of the desperate pleas that might soften her hatred, that might let her see. He thought of kissing the gentle swell of her belly. And he thought of Anissi, the first wife of his heart, slumbering in the flickering gloom of their faraway hearth, holding tight their daughter, Sanathi, as though sheltering her from the terror of womanhood.
And he thought of Proyas.
On the worst nights he hugged himself in the blackness of his tent, screaming and sobbing. He beat the earth with his fists, stabbed holes with his knife, then fucked them. He cursed the world. He cursed the heavens. He cursed Anasûrimbor Moënghus and his monstrous son.
He thought,
So be it.
On the best nights he made no camp at all, but instead rode to the nearest Shigeki village, where he would kick in doors and glory in screams. On a whim, he avoided those doors marked with what he imagined was lamb’s blood. But when he found all the doors so marked, he ceased to discriminate.
“Murder me!”
he would roar at them.
“Murder me and it stops!”
Bawling men. Shrieking girls and silent women.
He would take what compensation he could.
A week passed before Cnaiür found the Holy War’s best point of purchase on the South Bank: the shallow tidal marshes along the southern edge of the Sempis Delta. Of course all the Great Names, with the exception of Proyas and Conphas, balked at the news, especially after their own people returned with descriptions of the terrain. They were knights, through and through, trained and bred to the charge, and from all accounts, no horse could do more than thrash its way forward through the marsh.
But of course that was the point.
At a Council held in Iothiah, Proyas bid him to explain his plan to the assembled Inrithi. He unrolled a large map of the southern Delta across the table occupied by the Great Names.
“At Mengedda,” he declared, “you learned the Kianene were faster. This means no matter where you assemble to cross the Sempis, Skauras will assemble first. But at Mengedda you also learned the strength of your footmen. And more important, you
taught
. These marshes are shallow. A man, even a heavily armed man, can easily walk through them, but horses must be led. As much as you pride your mounts, the Kianene pride theirs more. They will refuse to dismount, and they will not send their conscripts to contest you. What could conscripts do against men who can break a Grandee’s charge? No. Skauras will yield the entirety of the marsh …”
He jabbed a chapped finger at the map, some distance to the south of the marsh.
“He will draw back here, to the fortress of Anwurat. He will give you all this pasture to assemble. He will cede you both ground and your horses.”
“How can you be so certain?” Gothyelk cried. Of all the Great Names, the old Earl of Agansanor seemed the most troubled by Cnaiür’s savage heritage—with the exception of Conphas, of course.
“Because Skauras,” Cnaiür said evenly, “is not a fool.”
Gothyelk hammered a fist down on the table. But before Proyas could intervene, the Exalt-General stood from his seat and said, “He’s right!”
Stunned, the Great Names turned to him. Since the debacle at Hinnereth, Conphas had largely kept his counsel. His was no longer a welcome voice. But to hear him confirm the Scylvendi on something as daring as this …
“The dog’s right, as much as it pains me to say it.” He looked at Cnaiür with eyes that both laughed and hated. “He’s found our purchase on the South Bank.”
Cnaiür imagined cutting his pampered throat.
After this, the Scylvendi Chieftan’s reputation was secured. He even became something of a fashion among certain Inrithi caste-nobility, particularly the Ainoni and their wives. Proyas had warned him this might happen. “They will be drawn to you,” he explained, “the way old leches are drawn to young boys.” Cnaiür found himself beset with invitations and propositions. One woman, through sheer perseverance, even found him at his camp. He stopped short of strangling her.
As the far-flung Holy War began gathering near Iothiah, Cnaiür troubled himself with thoughts of Skauras, much the way he’d once troubled himself with thoughts of Conphas before the Battle of Kiyuth. The man was obviously fearless. The story of him standing alone paring his nails while Saubon’s Agmundrmen archers feathered the surrounding turf had become something of a legend. And from his interrogations of Kianene captives Cnaiür had learned other details: that he was a severe disciplinarian, that he possessed a gift for organization, and that he commanded the respect of even those who otherwise outranked him, such as the Padirajah’s son, Fanayal, or his famed son-in-law, Imbeyan. Cnaiür had also, quite inadvertently, learned much from Conphas, who occasionally recollected incidents from his youth as a hostage of the Sapatishah. If his stories could be believed, Skauras was an exceedingly canny and strangely mischievous man.

Other books

Reckless by Samantha Love
Sins Out of School by Jeanne M. Dams
Collingsworth by Andy Eisenberg
Caribbean Heat by Sky Robinson
Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson
Too Many Men by Lily Brett
Kiss of Crimson by Lara Adrian