On the seventh assigned meeting between the Holy War and the Imperial Fleet, the Men of the Tusk picked their way through dry gorges and gathered across the beaches. They looked across the Meneanor, which was marbled by vast curls of lime and turquoise, and saw no ships. The rising sun gilded the sea in white. They could see the distant breakers, like lines of foaming diamonds. But no ships.
They waited. Messengers were sent back to the encampment. Saubon and Conphas soon joined them, bathed in the sea water for a time, spent an hour arguing, and then rode back to the Holy War. A Council was called and the Great and Lesser Names squabbled until dusk, trying to decide what to do. Accusations were levelled against Conphas, but were quickly dropped when the Exalt-General pointed out that his life was as much at stake as theirs.
The Holy War waited a night and a day, and when the Emperor’s fleet still failed to arrive, they decided to continue their march. Many theories were aired. Perhaps, Ikurei Conphas suggested, the fleet had been beset by a squall and had decided to sail south to the next designated meeting point to conserve time. Or perhaps, Prince Kellhus suggested, there was a
reason
why the Kianene had waited so long to contest the seas. Perhaps the camels had been slaughtered and the fleet hidden to lure the Holy War into the Carathay.
Perhaps Khemema was a trap.
Two days later, the bulk of the Great and Lesser Names accompanied the mule trains across the hills to the sea, and stared dumbfounded at its empty beauty. When they returned from the hills, they no longer walked apart from the desert. Sun, stone, and sand beckoned to them.
All water was severely rationed according to caste. Anyone caught hoarding or exceeding their ration, it was declared, would be executed.
In Council, Ikurei Conphas unfurled maps inked by Imperial Cartographers in the days when Khemema had belonged to the Empire, and jabbed his finger at a place called Subis. The oasis of Subis, he insisted, was far too large for the heathens to poison. With the water remaining, the Holy War could reach Subis intact, but only if everything—mules, slaves, camp-followers—was left behind …
“Leave behind …” Proyas said. “How do you propose we do that?”
Even though orders were dispatched with the utmost secrecy, word spread quickly through the drowsing encampment. Many fled to their doom in the open desert. Some took up arms. The rest simply waited to be cut down: body-slaves, camp whores, caste-merchants, even slavers. Screams echoed over the dunes.
Several riots and mutinies broke out among the Inrithi. At first, many refused to kill their own. The Holy War, the Great Names explained to their men, had to survive.
They
had to survive. In the end, countless thousands were murdered by the grief-stricken Men of the Tusk. Only priests, wives, and useful tradesmen were spared.
That night the Inrithi marched blank-eyed through what seemed a cooling oven—away from the horror behind them, toward the promise of Subis … Men-at-arms, warhorses, and hearts had become beasts of burden.
When the Khirgwi found the fields of heaped bodies and strewn belongings, they fell to their knees and cried out in exultation to the Solitary God. The trial of the idolaters had begun.
The enormous column of the Holy War drifted and scattered in the rush southward. The Khirgwi massacred hundreds of stragglers. Several tribes cut to the heart of the column, wreaking what havoc they could before fleeing into the waste. One group of raiders actually stumbled upon the Scarlet Spires, and were burnt into oblivion.
The following morning the Great and Lesser Names met in desperation. Water, they knew, had to lie all about them; the Khirgwi couldn’t harass them otherwise. So where were their wells? They called forward the more successful raiders among them—Athjeäri, Thampis, Detnammi, and others—and charged them with taking the battle to the desert tribes with the goal of finding their hidden wells. Leading thousands of Inrithi knights, these men rode over the long dunes and disappeared into the wavering distances.
With the exception of Detnammi, the Ainoni Palatine of Eshkalas, they all returned the following night, beaten back by the ferocity of the Khirgwi and the merciless heat of the Carathay. No wells had been found. Even if they had, Athjeäri said, he had no idea how they might be found twice, so featureless was the desert.
Meanwhile, the water had almost run out. With Subis nowhere in sight, the Great Names decided to put down all horses save those belonging to caste-nobility. Several thousand Cengemi footmen, Ketyai tributaries of the Tydonni, mutinied, demanding that
all
horses be slaughtered and the excess rations be divided equally among all Men of the Tusk. Gothyelk and the other Earls of Ce Tydonn responded with ruthless alacrity. The leaders of the mutiny were arrested, gutted, then hung from pikes above the sand.
Very little water remained the ensuing night, and the Men of the Tusk, their skin like parchment, overcome by irritability and fatigue, began casting away their food. They no longer hungered. They
thirsted,
thirsted as they’d never thirsted before. Hundreds of horses collapsed and were left to snort their final breaths in the dust. A strange apathy descended upon the men. When the Khirgwi assailed them, many simply continued to walk, not hearing or not caring that their kinsmen perished behind them.
Subis,
they would think, and that name became more fraught with hope than the name of any God.
When dawn arose and they still hadn’t reached Subis, the decision was made to continue. The world became a hazy furnace of baked stone and dunes tanned and curved like a harlot’s lovely skin. The distances shimmered with hallucinatory lakes, and many perpetually ran, convinced they saw the promised oasis, promised Subis.
Subis
… A lover’s name.
The Men of the Tusk stumbled down long, flinty slopes, filed between sandstone outcroppings that resembled towering mushrooms on thin stems. They climbed mountainous dunes.
The village looked like a many-chambered fossil unearthed by the wind. The deep green and sun silver of the oasis beckoned with its impossibility …
Subis.
Ragged ranks surged across the sun-hammered sands. Men charged through the abandoned village, between date palms trailing skirts of dead fronds and acacias freighted with weaver’s nests. They jostled, skidded across the packed dust, toppled splashing and laughing into the glittering waters …
Where they found Detnammi.
Dead, bloated, floating in the crystal green, with all four hundred and fifty-nine of his men.
The promise of Subis had been poisoned. The Khirgwi had found a way.
But the Men of the Tusk were beyond caring. They gulped water and retched, then gulped more. Thousands upon thousands roared down the dunes and descended upon the oasis. They pushed and heaved at the masses before them only to find themselves engulfed. Hundreds were crushed to death. Hundreds more actually drowned as men were shouldered into the pool’s centre. Some time passed before the Great Names could impose order. Thanes and knights warded men from the oasis at sword point. They were forced to make more than a few examples. Eventually, vast relays were organized to fill and distribute waterskins. Swimmers began removing the dead from the pool. Bodies were heaped in the sun.
The Great Names denied Detnammi and his men funeral rites, realizing he’d struck south for Subis instead of searching for Khirgwi wells—obviously to save himself. Chepheramunni, the King-Regent of High Ainon, denounced the Palatine of Eshkalas, posthumously stripped him of his rank and station. Ritual Ainoni curses were cut into his body, which was laid out for the vultures.
Meanwhile, the Men of the Tusk drank their fill. Many retired to the shade beneath the palms, leaning against trunks and wondering that fronds could so resemble vulture’s wings. Their thirst slaked, they began to worry about sickness. The Cultic physician-priests of dread Pestilence, Akkeägni, were called before the Great Names, and they named those sicknesses associated with drinking water fouled by the dead. Otherwise, their pharmaka and their reliquary abandoned to the desert, they could do little more than mutter pre-emptive prayers.
The God would not be satisfied.
Everyone was afflicted somehow—chills, cramps, nausea—but thousands became severely ill, stricken by convulsive vomiting and diarrhea. By the following morning, the worst were doubled over with abdominal pain, their skin blotched by angry red spots.
In Council, the Great Names stared and stared at Ikurei Conphas’s maps. Enathpaneah, they knew, was simply too far. They sent several dozen parties to various points on the Meneanor coast, hoping against hope they might find the Imperial Fleet. Accusations were levelled against the Emperor, and twice Conphas and Saubon had to be physically restrained. When the search parties returned from the hills empty-handed, the Great Names solemnly agreed to continue their southward march.
Either way, Prince Kellhus said, the God would see to them.
The Men of the Tusk abandoned Subis the following evening, their waterskins brimming with polluted water. Several hundred, those too sick to walk, remained behind, waiting for the Khirgwi.
Sickness spread among the men, and those without friends or kin were abandoned. The Holy War became a vast army of shuffling men and stumbling horses, marching across blue vistas of sun-cracked stone and flint-strewn sand. About the Nail of Heaven, clouds of stars wheeled above them, numbering their dead. Those too sick to keep pace fell behind, wept in the dust like broken men, dreading the morrow’s sun as much as the Khirgwi.
“Enathpaneah,” the walkers said to one another, for the Great Names had lied, telling them Enathpaneah was only three days distant when it was more than six. “The God will show us to Enathpaneah.”
A name like a promise … Like Shimeh.
For those afflicted by diarrhea, the ration of water simply wasn’t enough. Already weakened, they collapsed, panting against the cool sands. Many of the sickest died this way—thousands of them.
After two days, the water began to run out. The thirst returned. Lips cracked, eyes grew curiously soft, and skin tightened, became as dry as papyrus and cracked around joints.
There were some, very few, who seemed impossibly strong during this trial. Nersei Proyas was one of the few caste-nobles who refused to water his horse while his men died. He walked among the steadfast knights and soldiers of Conriya, giving words of encouragement, reminding them that before all, faith was a matter of trial.
Followed by two beautiful women, Prince Kellhus also spread words of strength. They didn’t merely suffer, he told men, they suffered
for
… For Shimeh. For the Truth. For the God! And to suffer for the God was to secure glory in the Outside. Many would be broken in this furnace, that was true, but those who survived would know the temper of their own hearts. They would be, he claimed, unlike other men. They would be
more
…
The Chosen.
Wherever Prince Kellhus and his two women went, men crowded about them, begging to be touched, to be cured, to be forgiven. Stained by dust into the colour of the desert, his face bronzed and his flowing hair almost bleached white, he seemed the very incarnation of sun, stone, and sand. He, and he alone, could stare into the endless Carathay and
laugh,
hold out his arms to the Nail of Heaven and give thanks for their suffering.
“The God chooses!” he would cry, “The God!”
And the words he spoke were like
water
.
On the third night, he halted in a vast bowl between dunes. He marked a place across the trampled sands, and bid several of his closest adherents, his Zaudunyani, to begin digging. When they despaired of finding anything, he commanded them to continue. Very soon they felt
moisture
in the sand … Then he walked farther and bid those rushing past to dig more holes at various places. Others he organized into an armed perimeter. Held back by hedges of levelled spears, wondering thousands crowded around the lip of the depression, curious to see what happened. After several watches, some fourteen pools of dark water glittered in the moonlight. Spring-fed wells …
The waters were muddy, but they were sweet, and unfouled by the taste of dead men.
When the first of the Great Names at last beat and hollered their way to the floor of the depression, they found Prince Kellhus at the bottom of a pit, standing knee-deep in waters with a dozen others, hoisting brimming skins to the groping hands above.
“He showed me,” he laughed, when they hailed them. “The God showed me!”
More wells were dug at the behest of the Great Names, and water relays were once again organized. Since most of the Holy War had suffered severe dehydration, the Great Names decided to linger for several days. The remaining horses were butchered and eaten raw for lack of fuel. In the Councils, Prince Kellhus was congratulated for his discovery, but little more. Many in the Holy War, especially the caste-menials, openly hailed him as the Warrior-Prophet. In closed meetings the Great Names argued over the Prince of Atrithau, but they could find no consensus. The desert, Ikurei Conphas warned, had made a False Prophet of Fane as well.