Aside from the wonder, there was never any answer.
Ajencis had called this experience
umresthei om aumreton,
“possessing in dispossession.” In his most famed work,
The Third Analytic of Men,
he claimed it to be the heart of wisdom, the most reliable mark of an enlightened soul. The same as true possession required loss and recovery, true existence, he argued, required
umresthei om aumreton
. Otherwise one simply stumbled through a dream …
“Ships,” Achamian said to Xinemus. “Burnt ships.”
The great irony, of course, was that
umresthei om aumreton
rendered everything dreamlike—or nightmarish, as the case might be.
The lifeless heights of Khemema’s coastal hills walled the circumference of the bay. Beneath tiered escarpments, a series of narrow beaches rimmed the shoreline. The sands were linen white, but for as far as the eye could see, a rind of blackened debris marred the slopes, like the salt ringing the armpits of a field-slave’s tunic. Everywhere, Achamian saw ships and the remains of ships, all gutted by fire. There were hundreds of them, covered in legions of red-throated gulls.
Shouts echoed across the deck of the
Amortanea
. The Captain, a Nansur named Meümaras, had called anchor.
Some ways from the shore, several half-burned derelicts conferred on a sandbar—triremes by the look of them. Beyond them, a dozen or so prows reared from the water, their iron rams browning with rust, their bright-painted eyes chapped and peeling. The majority of ships packed the strand, beached like diseased whales, obviously cast up by some forgotten storm. A few were little more than blackened ribs about a keel. Others were entire hulks, stumped on their side or overturned entirely. Batteries of broken oars jutted skyward. Seaweed hung in hairy ropes from the bulwarks. And everywhere Achamian looked he saw gulls, swinging through the air above, squabbling over lesser wreckage, and crowding the upturned bellies of ship after harrowed ship.
“This is where the Kianene destroyed the Imperial Fleet,” Achamian explained. “Where the Padirajah nearly destroyed the Holy War …” He remembered Iyokus describing the disaster while he’d hung helpless in the cellars of the Scarlet Spires’ compound. That was when he’d stopped fearing for himself and had started fearing for Esmenet.
Kellhus. Kellhus has kept her safe.
“The Bay of Trantis,” Xinemus said sombrely. By now, the whole world knew of this place. The Battle of Trantis had been the greatest naval defeat in the Empire’s history. After luring the Men of the Tusk deep into the desert, the Padirajah had attacked their only source of water, the Imperial Fleet. Though no one knew exactly what had happened, it was generally accepted that Kascamandri had managed to secrete a great number of Cishaurim aboard his own fleet. According to rumour, the Kianene had returned from the battle short only two galleys, both of which they’d lost to a squall.
“What do you see?” Xinemus pressed. “What does it look like?”
“The Cishaurim burned everything,” Achamian replied.
He paused, almost overcome by a visceral reluctance to say anything more. It seemed blasphemous, somehow, rendering a thing like this in words—a sacrilege. But then such was the case whenever one described another’s loss. There was no way around words.
“There’s charred ships everywhere … They look like seals, sunning on the shore. And there’s gulls—thousands of gulls … What we call
gopas
in Nron. You know, the ones that look like they’ve had their throats cut. Ill-mannered brutes they are.”
Just then, the
Amortanea
’s Captain, Meümaras, walked from his men to join them on the railing. From their first meeting in Iothiah, Achamian had found himself liking the man. He was what the Nansur called a
tesperari,
a private contractor who’d once commanded a war galley. His hair was short and patrician-silver, and his face, though leathered by the sea, possessed a thoughtful delicacy. He was clean-shaven, of course, which made him seem boyish. But then all Nansur seemed boyish.
“It’s out of our way, I know,” the man explained. “But I had to see for myself.”
“You lost someone,” Achamian said, noting his swollen eyes.
The Captain nodded, looked nervously to the charred hollows strewn across the beach. “My brother.”
“You’re certain he’s dead?”
A party of gulls screeched overhead. An embassy, offering terms.
“Others,” Meümaras said, “acquaintances of mine who’ve gone ashore, say that bones and dried carcasses litter the strand for miles—north and south. As catastrophic as the Kianene attack was, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, survived because General Sassotian had moored so close to shore … Don’t you smell it?” he asked, glancing at Xinemus. “The dust … like bitter chalk. We stand at the edge of the Great Carathay.”
The Captain turned to Achamian, held his gaze with firm brown eyes. “No one survived.”
Achamian stiffened, struck by what was now an old fear. Despite the desert air, a clamminess crept over his skin. “The Holy War survived,” he said.
The Captain frowned, as though put off by something in Achamian’s tone. He opened his mouth in retort, but then paused, his eyes suddenly thoughtful.
“You fear you’ve lost someone as well.” He glanced yet again at Xinemus.
“No,” Achamian said.
She’s alive! Kellhus has saved her!
Meümaras sighed, looked away in pity and embarrassment. “I wish you luck,” he said to the lapping waters. “I truly do. But this Holy War …” He fell into cryptic silence.
“What about the Holy War?” Achamian asked.
“I’m an old sailor. I’ve seen enough voyages blown off course, enough vessels founder, to know the God gives no guarantees, no matter who the captain or what the cargo.” He looked back to Achamian. “There’s only one thing certain about this Holy War: there’s never been a greater bloodletting.”
Achamian knew different, but refrained from saying as much. He resumed his study of the obliterated fleet, suddenly resenting the Captain’s company.
“Why would you say that?” Xinemus asked. As always when he spoke, he turned his face from side to side. For some reason, Achamian found the sight of this increasingly difficult to bear. “What have you heard?”
Meümaras shrugged. “Craziness, for the most part. There’s talk of hemoplexy, of disastrous defeats, of the Padirajah marshalling all his remaining strength.”
“Pfah,” Xinemus spat with uncharacteristic bitterness. “Everyone knows as much.”
Achamian now heard dread in Xinemus’s every word. It was as though something horrific loomed in the blackness, something he feared might recognize the sound of his voice. As the weeks passed it was becoming more and more apparent: the Scarlet Spires had taken more than his eyes; they had taken the light and devilry that had once filled them as well. With the Cants of Compulsion, Iyokus had moved Xinemus’s soul in perverse ways, had forced him to betray both dignity and love. Achamian had tried to explain that it wasn’t
he
who’d thought those thoughts, who’d uttered those words, but it didn’t matter. As Kellhus said, men couldn’t see what moved them. The frailties Xinemus had witnessed were his frailties. Confronted by the true dimensions of wickedness, he’d held his own infirmity accountable.
“And then,” the Captain continued, apparently untroubled by Xinemus’s cholic, “there’s the stories of the new prophet.”
Achamian jerked his head about so fast he wrenched his neck. “What about him?” he asked carefully. “Who told you this?”
It simply had to be Kellhus. And if Kellhus survived …
Please, Esmi. Please be safe!
“The carrack we exchanged berths with in Iothiah,” Meümaras said. “Her captain had just returned from Joktha. He said the Men of the Tusk are turning to someone called Kelah, a miracle worker who can wring water from desert sand.”
Achamian found his hand pressed against his chest. His heart hammered.
“Akka?” Xinemus murmured.
“It’s him, Zin … It has to be him.”
“You know him?” Meümaras asked with an incredulous grin. Gossip was a kind of gold among seamen.
But Achamian couldn’t speak. He clung to the wooden rail instead, battling a sudden, queerly euphoric dizziness.
Esmenet was alive.
She lives!
But his relief, he realized, went even deeper … His heart leapt at the thought of Kellhus as well.
“Easy!” the Captain cried, seizing Achamian by the shoulders.
Achamian stared at the man dully. He’d nearly swooned …
Kellhus. What was it the man stirred within him? To be more than what he was? But who, if not a sorcerer, knew the taste of those things that transcended men? If sorcerers sneered at men of faith, they did so because faith had rendered them pariahs, and because faith, it seemed to them, knew nothing of the very transcendence it claimed to monopolize. Why submit when one could yoke?
“Here,” Meümaras was saying. “Sit for a moment.”
Achamian fended away the man’s fatherly hands. “I’m okay,” he gasped.
Esmenet and Kellhus. They lived! The woman who could save his heart, and the man who could save the world …
He felt different, stronger hands brace his shoulders. Xinemus.
“Leave him be,” he heard the Marshal saying. “This voyage has been but a fraction of our journey.”
“Zin!” he exclaimed. He wanted to chortle, but the pang in his throat forbade it.
The Captain retreated, whether out of compassion or embarrassment, Achamian would never know.
“She lives,” Xinemus said. “Think of her joy!”
For some reason, these words struck the breath from him. That Xinemus, who suffered more than he could imagine, had set aside his hurt to …
His hurt. Achamian swallowed, tried to squeeze away an image of Iyokus, his red-irised eyes slack with indolent regret.
He reached out, clutched his friend’s hand. They squeezed, each according to his desperation.
“There will be fire when I return, Zin.”
He swept his dry eyes across the wrecked warships of the Imperial Fleet. Suddenly they looked more a transition and less an end—like the carapaces of monstrous beetles.
The red-throated gulls kept jealous watch.
“Fire,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CAR ASKAND
For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.
—SONGS 57:3,
THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
Like many old tyrants, I dote upon my grandchildren. I delight
in their tantrums, their squealing laughter, their peculiar fancies. I
wilfully spoil them with honey sticks. And I find myself wondering at
their blessed ignorance of the world and its million grinning teeth.
Should I, like my grandfather, knock such childishness from them? Or
should I indulge their delusions? Even now, as death’s shadowy pickets
gather about me, I ask, Why should innocence answer to the world?
Perhaps the world should answer to innocence …
Yes, I rather like that. I tire of bearing the blame.
—STAJANAS II,
RUMINATIONS
Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
The following morning a pall of smoke lay over Caraskand. The city quilted the distance, pocked here and there by great, gutted structures. The dead lay everywhere, piled beneath smoking tabernacles, sprawled through sacked palaces, scattered across the reaches of Caraskand’s famed bazaars. Cats lapped blood from the grouting. Crows pecked at sightless eyes.
A single horn echoed mournfully across the rooftops. Still groggy from the previous day’s debauch, the Men of the Tusk stirred, anticipating a day of repentance and sombre celebration. But from various quarters of the city more horns blared out, sounding the call to arms. Iron-mailed knights clacked down streets, crying out frantic alarums.
Those who climbed the southern walls saw divisions of many-coloured horsemen spilling across ridge lines and down sparsely wooded hills. At long last, Kascamandri I, the Padirajah of Kian, had taken the field against the Inrithi. The Great Names desperately tried to muster their thanes and barons, but with their men scattered throughout the city, it was hopeless. Gothyelk, still distraught over the loss of his youngest, Gurnyau, couldn’t be roused, and the Tydonni refused to leave the city without the beloved Earl of Agansanor. With the recent death of Prince Skaiyelt, the long-haired Thunyeri had disintegrated into clannish mobs, and, unaccountably, had renewed their bloody sack of the city. And the Ainoni Palatines, with Chepheramunni on his death bed, had fallen to feuding amongst themselves. The horns called and called, but far too few answered.