The Warrior Prophet (70 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

She trailed in sudden understanding. Her skin pimpled. Once again she sat in shadow, and Kellhus hoarded the failing sun, looking for all the world like a bronze idol. The sun always seemed to relinquish him last …
“Men,” Kellhus said, “cannot dominate their hunger, so they dominate, domesticate, the
objects
of their hunger. Be it cattle …”
“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 swallowed. “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 thoughts and warp your heart. You break and remake, cut and cut and cut, all so you might answer in your conqueror’s tongue!”
Never, it seemed, had she been so motionless. The air within her throat, even the blood within her heart, seemed absolutely still … Kellhus had become a voice falling from somewhere between tears and firelight.
“You say, ‘Let me shame myself for you. Let me suffer you! I beg you,
please!
’”
And somehow, Esmenet knew where these words must lead, so she thought of other things, like how parched skin and cloth seemed so clean …
Filth, she realized, needed water the same as men.
“And you tell yourself,” Kellhus continued, “‘These tracks I will not follow!’ Perhaps you refuse certain perversities. Perhaps you refuse to kiss. You pretend to scruple, to discriminate, though the world has forced you onto trackless ground. The coins! The coins! Coins for everything, and everything for coins! For the landlord. For the apparati, when they come for their bribes. For the vendors who feed you. For the toughs with scabbed knuckles. 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?’”
Her face was wet. When she drew her hand from her cheek, the whorls of her fingertips were black.
“You speak the tongue of your conquerors …” Kellhus whispered. “You say, Mimara, come with me child.”
A shiver passed through her, as though she were a drumskin …
“And you take her …”
“She’s dead!” some woman cried. “She’s
dead!
”
“To the slavers in the harbour …”
“Stop!
” the woman hissed.
“I say, no!”
Gasping, like knives.
“And you sell her.”
 
She remembered his arms enclosing her. She remembered following him to his pavilion. She remembered lying at his side, weeping and weeping, while his voice made her anguish plain, while Serwë stroked tears from her cheeks, ran cool fingers through her hair. She remembered telling them what had happened. About the hungry summer, when she had swallowed men for free just for their seed. About hating the little girl—the filthy little bitch!—who wept and demanded and demanded, who ate her food, who sent her into the streets, all because of love! About the hollow-eyed madness. Who could understand starvation? About the slavers, their larders growing fat because of the famine. About Mimara shrieking, her little girl shrieking! About the poison coins … Less than a week! They had lasted less than a week!
She remembered shrieking.
And she remembered weeping as she’d never wept before, because 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.”
 
She awoke with her head upon his arm. There was no confusion, though it seemed there should be. She knew where she was, and though part of her quailed, part of her exulted as well.
She lay with Kellhus.
I didn’t couple with him … I only wept.
Her face felt bruised from the previous evening. The night had been hot, and they’d slept without blankets. For what seemed a long time, she lay motionless, simply savouring his white-skinned nearness. She placed a hand upon his bare chest. He was warm and smooth. She could feel the slow drum of his heart. Her fingers tingled, as though she touched an iron-smith’s anvil as he hammered. She thought of the weight of him, flushed …
“Kellhus …” she said. She looked up to the profile of his face, somehow knowing he was awake.
He turned and looked at her, his eyes smiling.
She snorted in embarrassment, then looked away.
Kellhus said, “It’s strange, isn’t it, lying so close …”
“Yes,” she replied smiling, looking up, then out and away. “Very strange.”
He rolled to face her. Esmenet heard Serwë groan and complain from his far side, still asleep.
“Shhh,” he said laughing softly. “She loves sleep more than me.”
Esmenet looked at him and laughed, shaking her head, beaming with incredulous excitement.
“This is so strange!” she hissed. Never had her eyes felt so bright.
She pressed her knees together in nervousness. He was so close!
He leaned toward her, and her mouth slackened, her eyes became heavy-lidded.
“No,” she gasped.
Kellhus shot her a friendly frown. “My loin cloth just bunched,” he said.
“Oh,” she replied. They both burst into laughter.
Again she could sense the weight of him …
He was a man who dwarfed her, as a man should.
Then his hand was beneath her hasas, sliding between her thighs, and she found herself moaning into his sweet lips. And when he entered her, pinned her the way the Nail of Heaven pinned the skies, tears brimmed and spilled from her eyes, and she could only think,
At last! At last he takes me!
And it did not seem, it
was
.
No one would call her harlot any more.
PART III:
 
The Third March
 
 
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 
KHEMEMA
 
To piss across water is to piss across your reflection.
—KHIRGWI PROVERB
 
Early Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, southern Shigek
 
Sweating beneath the sun, the Men of the Tusk struck south, winding up the staggered escarpments of the South Bank, and onto the furnace plains of the Carathay Desert, or as the Khirgwi called it, Ej’ulkiyah, the “Great Thirst.” The first night, they stopped near Tamiznai, a caravan entrepôt that had been sacked by the retreating Fanim.
Shortly afterward, Athjeäri, who’d been sent to reconnoitre the route to Enathpaneah, returned from the southern waste, his men hollow-eyed with thirst and exhaustion. His mood was black. He told the Great Names that he’d found no unpolluted wells, and that he’d been forced to travel by night, the heat was so intense. The heathen, he said, had retreated to the far side of Hell. The Great Names told him of the endless trains of mules they’d brought, and of the Emperor’s fleet that would follow them loaded with fresh Sempis water. They explained their elaborate plans for transporting that water across the coastal hills.
“You know not,” the young Earl of Gaenri said, “the lands you risk.”
The following evening, the horns of Galeoth, Nansur, Thunyerus, Conriya, Ce Tydonn, and High Ainon pealed through the arid air. Pavilions were torn down amid the shouts of soldiers and slaves. Mules were loaded and beaten into long files. The Cultic Priests of Gilgaöl cast a goshawk onto their godfire, then released another to the evening sun. Infantrymen swung their packs from their spears, joking and complaining about the prospect of marching through the night. Hymns resolved and faded from the rumble of busy thousands.
The air cooled, and the first columns set across the western shoulders of Khemema’s coastal hills.
The first Khirgwi came after midnight, howling from the backs of loping camels, bearing the truth of the Solitary God and His Prophet on the edges of sharp knives. The attacks were both brief and vicious. They fell upon stragglers, soaked the sands with red waters. They evaded the Inrithi pickets and swept howling into the baggage trains, where they sliced open the precious bladders of water wherever they found them. Sometimes, especially when they strayed onto hard gravel flats, they were overtaken and cut down in furious melees. Otherwise, they outdistanced their pursuers and vanished into the moonlit sands.
The next day, the first mule trains crawled through the coastal hills to the Meneanor and found a bay, quicksilver in the sun and peppered by the red-sailed ships of the Nansur fleet. There were hearty greetings as the first boatloads of water were dragged ashore. Songs were raised as the onerous work of transferring the water to the mules began. Men stripped to their waist, and many plunged into the rolling waves to relieve themselves of the heat. And that evening, when the Holy War stirred from suffocating tents, they were greeted by fresh Sempis water.
The Holy War continued its nocturnal march. Despite the blood-curdling raids, many found themselves awed by the beauty of the Carathay. There were no insects, save the odd crazed beetle rolling its ball of dung across the sands. The Inrithi laughed at these, called them “shit chasers.” And there were no animals, except of course the vultures circling endlessly above. Where there was no water, there was no life, and apart from the heavy skins draped about the shoulders of the Holy War, there was no water in the Carathay. It was as if the sun had burnt the whole world to sterile bone. The Men of the Tusk stood apart from the sun, stone, and sand, and it was beautiful, like a haunting nightmare described by another. It was beautiful because they need not suffer the consequences of what they witnessed.

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