The Warrior Prophet (65 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Later, before she left with Serwë to scrounge through the half-abandoned bazaars of Ammegnotis, Kellhus assisted her with her reading. Despite her protestations, he’d given her
The Chronicle of the Tusk
as a primer. Simply holding the leather-bound manuscript filled her with dread. The look of it, the smell of it, even the rasping creak of its spine spoke of righteousness and irrevocable judgement. The pages seemed inked in iron. Every word she sounded out possessed an anxiousness all its own. Every bird-track column threatened the next.
“I need not,” she told Kellhus, “read the warrant of my own damnation!”
“What does it say?” Kellhus asked, ignoring her tantrum.
“That I’m filth!”
“What does it
say,
Esmi.”
She returned to the exhausting trial of wrestling sounds from marks, and words from sounds.
The day was desert hot, particularly in the city, where the stone and the mud brick soaked up the sun and seemed to redouble its heat. Esmenet retired early that night, and for the first time in many days, fell asleep without crying for Achamian.
She awoke to what the Nansur called “fool’s morning.” Her eyes simply fluttered open, and she found herself alert, even though the darkness and the temperature told her the morning lay many watches away. She frowned at the entrance to the tent, which had been pulled open. Her bare feet jutted from her blankets. Moonlight bathed them and the sandalled feet of a man …
“Such interesting company you keep,” Sarcellus said.
Screaming never occurred to her. For a heartbeat or two, his presence seemed as
proper
as it seemed impossible. He lay beside her, his head propped on his elbow, his large brown eyes glittering with amusement. Beneath white, gold-floriated vestments, he wore a Shrial gown with a Tusk embroidered across its chest. He smelled of sandalwood and other ritual incenses she couldn’t identify.
“Sarcellus,” she murmured. How long had he been watching her?
“You never did tell the sorcerer about me, did you?”
“No.”
He shook his head in rueful mockery. “Naughty whore.”
The sense of unreality drained away, and the first true pang of fear struck her.
“What do you want, Sarcellus?”
“You.”
“Leave …”
“Your prophet isn’t what you think he is … You do know that.”
Fear had become terror. She knew full well how cruel he could be to those who fell outside the narrow circle of his respect, but she’d always thought herself within that circle—even after she’d left his tent. But something had happened … Somehow, she understood she meant nothing, absolutely
nothing,
to the man now gazing upon her.
“Leave now, Sarcellus.”
The Knight-Commander laughed. “But I need you, Esmi. I need your help … There’s gold …”
“I’ll scream. I’m warning—”
“There’s life!”
Sarcellus snarled. Somehow his hand had clamped about her mouth. She didn’t need to feel the prick to know he held a knife to her throat.
“Listen, whore. You’ve made a habit of begging at the wrong table. The sorcerer’s dead. Your prophet will soon follow. Now I ask, where does that leave you?”
He swept the covers away, exposed her to the warm night air. She flinched, sobbed as the knifepoint swizzled across her moonlit skin.
“Eh,
old
whore? What will you do when your peach loses its pucker, hmm? Whom will you bed then? How will you end, I wonder? Will you be fucking lepers? Or will you be sucking scared little boys for scraps of bread?”
She wet herself in terror.
Sarcellus breathed deep, as though savouring the bouquet of her humiliation. His eyes laughed. “Is that
understanding
I smell?”
Esmenet, sobbing, nodded against the iron fingers.
Sarcellus smirked, removed his hand.
She shrieked, screamed until it seemed her throat must bleed.
Then Kellhus held her, and she was drawn from the tent to the glowing coals of the firepit. She heard shouts, saw men crowding about them with torches, heard voices rumbling in Conriyan. Somehow she explained what happened, shuddering and sobbing within the frame of Kellhus’s strong arms. After what seemed both heartbeats and days, the commotion passed. People returned to what sleep remained to them. The terror receded, replaced by the exhausted throb of embarrassment. Kellhus told her he would complain to Gotian, but that there would be very little anyone could do.
“Sarcellus is a Knight-Commander,” Kellhus said.
And she was just a dead sorcerer’s whore.
Naughty whore.
Esmenet refused Serwë’s offer to stay with her and Kellhus in their pavilion, but accepted her offer to wash with her laver. Afterward, Kellhus followed her to her tent.
“Serwë cleaned it for you,” he said. “She replaced your bedding.”
Esmenet started crying yet again. When had she become so weak? So pathetic?
How could you leave me? Why did you leave me?
She crawled into the tent as though diving into a burrow. She hid her face in clean woollen blankets. She smelled sandalwood …
Bearing his lantern, Kellhus followed, sat cross-legged over her. “He’s gone, Esmenet … Sarcellus won’t return. Not after tonight. Even if nothing happens, the questions will embarrass him. What man doesn’t suspect other men of acting on their own lusts?”
“You don’t understand,” she gasped. How could she tell him? All this time fearing for Achamian, even daring to mourn him, and still … “I lied to him!” she exclaimed. “I
lied to Akka!
”
Kellhus frowned. “What do you mean?”
“After he left me in Sumna the Consult came to me, the
Consult
Kellhus! And I knew that Inrau’s death had been no suicide. I knew it! But I never told Akka. Sweet Sejenus,
I never told him!
And now he’s gone, Kellhus! Gone!”
“Breathe, Esmi.
Breathe
… What does this have to do with Sarcellus?”
“I don’t know … That’s the mad part. I don’t know!”
“You were lovers,” Kellhus said, and she went still, like a child confronted by a wolf. Kellhus had always known her secret, since that night at the Shrine above Asgilioch when he’d interrupted her and Sarcellus. So why her terror now?
“For a time you thought you loved Sarcellus,” Kellhus continued. “You even judged Achamian against him … You judged and found Achamian wanting.”
“I was a fool!” she cried. “A fool!” How could she be such a fool?
No man is your equal, love! No man!
“Achamian was weak,” Kellhus said.
“But I loved him
for
those weaknesses! Don’t you see? That’s why I loved him!”
I loved him in truth!
“And that’s why you could never go to him … To go to him while you shared Sarcellus’s bed would be to accuse him of those very weaknesses he couldn’t bear. So you stayed away, fooled yourself into thinking you searched for him when you were hiding all the while.”
“How can you know these things?” she sobbed.
“But no matter how much you lied to yourself, you
knew
… And that’s why you could never tell Achamian about what happened in Sumna—no matter how much he needed to know! Because you knew he wouldn’t understand, and you feared what he would
see
…”
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 all was safe. He blew out his lantern, then quietly withdrew from her tent. The warm memory of his fingers continued to comb her hair.
 
Obviously famished, Serwë had started eating early. A pot of rice boiled on the fire, which Kellhus periodically opened and closed, adding onions, spices, and Shigeki pepper. Ordinarily Esmenet would have cooked, but Kellhus had her reading aloud from
The Chronicle of the Tusk,
laughing at her rare fumbles and showering her with encouragement.
She was reading the Canticles, the old “Tusk Laws,” many of which the Latter Prophet had rescinded in
The Tractate
. Together they wondered that children were stoned to death for striking their parents, or that when a man murdered some other man’s brother, his
own
brother was executed.
Then she read, “‘Suffer not a …’”
She recognized the words because of sheer repetition. Sounding out the following word, she said, “‘whore …’” and stopped. She glanced at Kellhus and angrily recited, “‘Suffer not a whore to live, for she maketh a pit of her womb …’” Her ears burned. She squelched a sudden urge to cast the book into the flames.
Kellhus gazed back, utterly unsurprised.
He’s been waiting for me to reach this passage. All along …
“Give me the book,” he said, his tone unreadable.
She did as she was told.
In a fluid, almost thoughtless motion, he pulled his knife from the ceremonial sheath he wore about his waist. Pinching the blade near the tip, he proceeded to scratch the ink of the offending statement from the vellum. For several heartbeats, Esmenet couldn’t comprehend what he was doing. She simply stared, a petrified witness.
Once the column was clean, he leaned back to survey his handiwork.
“Better,” he said, as though he’d just scraped mould from bread. He turned to pass the book back.
Esmenet couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “But … But you can’t do that!”
“No?”
He pressed the book into her hands. She fairly tossed it into the dust on her far side.
“That’s
Scripture,
Kellhus. The Tusk. The Holy Tusk!”
“I know. The warrant of your damnation.”
Esmenet gawked like a fool. “But …”
Kellhus scowled and shook his head, as though astonished she could be so dense.
“Just who, Esmi, do you think I am?”
Serwë chirped with laughter, even clapped her hands.
“Wh-who?” Esmenet stammered. It was the most she could manage. Other than in rare anger or jest, she’d never heard Kelhus speak with … with such
presumption
.
“Yes,” Kellhus repeated,
“who?”
His voice seemed satin thunder. He looked as eternal as a circle.
Then Esmenet glimpsed it: the shining gold about his hands … Without thinking, she rolled to her knees before him, pressed her face into the dust.
Please! Please! I’m nothing!
Then Serwë hiccuped. Suddenly, absurdly, it was just Kellhus before her, laughing, drawing her up from the dust, bidding her to eat her supper.
“Better?” he said as she numbly resumed her place beside him. Her whole skin burned and prickled. He nodded toward the open book while filling his mouth with rice.
Bewildered, flustered, she blushed and looked down. She nodded to her bowl.
I knew this! I always knew this!
The difference was that Kellhus now knew as well. His presence burned in her periphery. How, she breathlessly wondered, how could she ever look into his eyes again?
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 her 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.

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