The White-Luck Warrior (43 page)

The old Wizard laughed sometimes, so little did he care.

—|—

Seventeen days into the Istyuli Plains, the day following the scarf, Mimara suddenly asked him why he had fallen in love with her mother.

Mimara was forever talking about the "Empress," as she called her, always describing her in ways that lampooned and criticized. Often she would adopt her mother's tone and voice—lips pulled into a line, eyelids wary and low, an expression that strove to look impervious yet seemed brittle instead. It was a habit that amused and alarmed the old Wizard in equal measure.

Although Achamian was forever defending Esmenet, as well as chiding Mimara for her lack of charity, he had always managed to avoid revealing his true feelings. His instinct was to keep his counsel when talking mothers to their children—even when adult. Motherhood, it seemed, meant too much to be trusted to something as sordid as truth.

So he would tell her pleasant lies, the kind of polite observations designed to discourage further discussion. If she insisted or, worse yet, pestered him with direct questions, he would bark and bristle until she relented.
Too much pain,
he would tell himself. And besides, he had become quite fond of acting the crabby old Wizard.

But this time he did neither.

"Why?" she asked. "Out of all the women you had lain with, why love
her
?"

"Because she possessed a sharp wit," he heard himself reply. "That was why I... why I
returned
, I think. That and her beauty. But your mother... She was always asking me questions about things, about the world, the past—even my Dreams fascinated her. We would lie in her bed sweating, and I would talk and talk, and she would never lose interest. One night she interrogated me until dawn gilded the cracks of her shutters. She would listen and..."

He trailed into the marching silence, not so much stymied by the difficulty of what he wanted to say as astonished by the fact he spoke at all. When had confession become so easy?

"And what?"

"And she... she
believed
me..."

"Your stories, you mean. About the First Apocalypse and the No-God."

He glanced about, as though wary about being overheard, when in truth he really did not care.

"That... But it was more, I think. She believed
in
me."

Could it be so simple?

And so he continued. He heard himself explaining things he never knew he understood, how doubt and indecision had so ruled his soul and intellect that he could scarce act without lapsing into endless recriminations. Why? Why? Always why? He heard himself explaining the horrors of his Dreams, and how they had frayed his nerves to the quick. He heard himself telling her how he had come to her mother
weak
, a man who would sooner hatch plots in his soul than take any real action...

How Drusas Achamian, the only Wizard in the Three Seas, had been a cringer and a coward.

The strange thing is that he found himself actually
yearning
for those days—missing not so much the fear, perhaps, as the simple anguish of needing another. Living with her in Sumna while she continued taking custom, sitting and waiting in the bustling agora, watching the to and fro of innumerable Sumnites while images of her coupling with strangers plagued him gut and soul. Perhaps this explained what happened later, when she had climbed into Kellhus's bed, believing that Achamian had perished in the Sareotic Library. If there was any fact from his past that caused Achamian to both flinch and marvel, it was the way he had continued to love
both
of them after their joint betrayal. Despite the years, he never ceased balling his fists at the pageant of memories, his awe of Kellhus and the godlike ease with which he mastered the Gnosis, and his impotent fury when the man retired... to lie with his wife—his
wife
!

Esmenet. Such a strange name for a whore.

"Fear..." the old Wizard said in resignation. "I was always afraid with your mother."

"Because she was a whore," Mimara said with more eagerness than compassion.

She was right. He had loved a whore and had reaped the wages accordingly. Perhaps the final days of the First Holy War simply had been a continuation of those early days in Sumna. The same hurt, the same rage, only yoked to the otherworldly glamour that was Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

"No..." he said. "Because she was so beautiful."

It seemed a proper lie.

"What I don't understand," Mimara exclaimed with the air verbalizing something she had long debated in silence, "is why you refuse to hold her
accountable
. She was a caste-menial, not sold into slavery like me. She
chose
to be a whore... just as she chose to betray you."

"Did she?" It seemed that he listened to his voice more than he spoke with it.

"Did she what? Choose? Of course she did."

"Few things are so capricious as choice, girl."

"Seems simple to me. Either she chooses to be faithful or she chooses to betray."

He glared at her. "And what about you? Were you chained to your pillow in Carythusal? No? Does that mean you chose to be there? That you
deserved
everything you suffered? Could you not have jumped off the ship when the slavers she sold you to put out to sea? Why blame your mother for
your wilful refusal to run away
?"

Her look was hateful but marred by the same hesitation that seemed to dog all of their heated conversations of late, that moment of searching for the proper passion, as if willing away some reptilian fragment of self that simply did not care. Mimara, part of him realized, was injured because he had said something injurious, not because she felt any real pain. That capacity, it seemed, had been lost in the dark bowels of Cil-Aujas.

"There are chains," she said dully, "and then there are
chains
."

"Exactly."

A kind of humility haunted her manner after that, but one that seemed more motivated by weariness than any real insight. Even so, he welcomed it. Arrogance is ever the patron of condemnation. Though most all men lived in total ignorance of the ironies and contradictions that mortared their lives, they instinctively understood the power of hypocrisy. So they pretended, laid claim to an implausible innocence. To better sleep. To better condemn. The fact that everyone thought themselves more blameless than blameworthy, Ajencis once wrote, was at once the most ridiculous and the most tragic of human infirmities. Ridiculous because it was so obvious and yet utterly invisible. Tragic because it doomed them to unending war and strife.

There is more than strength in accusation, there is the presumption of
innocence
, which is what makes it the first resort of the brokenhearted.

During the first years of his exile, Achamian had punished Esmenet in effigy innumerable times in the silent watches before sleep—too many times. He had accused and he had accused. But he had lived with his grievances too long, it seemed, to perpetually condemn her for anything she might have done. No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons
they
think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.

And Esmenet was nothing if not clever.

So he forgave her. He could even remember the precise moment. He had spent the bulk of the day searching his notes for the specifics of a certain dream, one involving a variant of Seswatha's captivity in Dagliash—he could no longer remember why it was important. Furious with himself, he had decided to climb down from his room to assist Geraus with his wood chopping. The odd blister, it seemed, helped focus his thoughts as well as steady his quill. The slave was doggedly hacking away at one of the several shorn trunks he had drawn to the crude hutch where they stored their wood. Grabbing what turned out to be the dull axe, Achamian began chopping as well, but for some bizarre reason he could not strike the wood without sending chips spinning up into Geraus's face. The first one went unmentioned. The second occasioned a frowning smile. The third incited outright laughter and a subsequent apology. The fifth chip caught the man in the eye, sent him to the water-bucket blinking and grimacing.

Once again Achamian apologized, but only so far as was seemly between master and slave. Strangely enough, he had come to prize the jnanic etiquette he so despised when travelling the fleshpots of the Three Seas. Afterward he stood there, watching the man he owned rinse his left eye time and again, feeling somehow guilty and wronged at the same time. After all, he had
meant
to assist the man...

Geraus turned toward him, ruefully shook his head, and commended him for his supernatural aim. Achamian's vague ire evaporated, as it always did in the face of the man's relentless good nature. And then, impossibly, he caught the scent of the
desert
, as if somewhere just beyond the arboreal screens that fenced his tower, he would find the dunes of the mighty Carathay.

And just like that,
she
was forgiven... Esmenet, the whore become Empress.

Numb to his fingertips, Achamian returned the axe to its nook. "Better to heed the Gods," Geraus had said in approval.

Of course habits, like fleas, are not so easy to kill, especially habits of thought and passion. But she was forgiven, nonetheless. Even if he wasn't finished accusing her, she was forgiven.

And somehow, while walking with a band of killers through the empty heart of a dead civilization, he managed to explain this to Mimara.

He told her about their very first meeting, about the bawdy way her mother had accosted him from her window.

"Hey, Ainoni," she had shouted down. It was the custom in Sumna to call all bearded foreigners Ainoni. "A man so swollen needs to take his ease, lest he bursts..."

"I was quite fat in those days," he said, answering Mimara's dubious look.

And he told her about herself—or at least the memory of her that continued to haunt her mother.

"This was the summer after the famine. Sumna, the whole Nansur Empire had suffered grievously. In fact, the poor had sold so many of their children into slavery that the Emperor issued an edict voiding all such sales between Nansur citizens the previous summer. Like most caste-menials, your mother was too poor to afford citizenship, but Exceptions were being issued by various tax farmers throughout the city. Your mother would have never told me about you, I think, were it not for the law... the Sixteenth Edict of Manumission, it was called, I think. She needed the gold, you see. She was mad for gold—for anything she might use as a bribe."

"You gave it to her."

"Your mother never dreamed she could get you back. In fact, she never thought she would survive the famine. She literally believed she was sparing you her doom. You simply cannot imagine the straits she was in, the
chains
that shackled her. She sold you to Ainoni slavers, I think, because she thought the farther she could deliver you from the Nansurium the better."

"So the Emperor's edict was useless."

"I tried to tell her, but she refused to listen...
Really
refused," he added with a chuckle, drawing a finger to the small scar he still sported on his left temple. "Even still, she managed to secure the Exception... from a man, a monster, named Polpi Tharias—someone I still dream of killing. The first day the law went into effect she went down to the harbour. I don't know about now, but back then the Ershi district—you know? the north part of the harbour, in the shadow of the Hagerna—was where the slavers held their markets. She refused to let me accompany her... It was something... something she needed to do on her own, I think."

It was a strange thing for a man to enter the world of a damaged woman. The apparent disproportion between event and evaluation. The endless sinkholes that punished verbal wandering. The crazed alchemy of compassion and condemnation. It was a place where none of the scales seemed balanced, where the compass bowl never settled and the needle never showed true north.

"You know, girl, I think that was when I
truly
fell in love with her... that day, so very hot, as humid as any day in the Sayut Delta. I sat on the very sill she used to accost men on the street below, watched her slender form swallowed by the mobs..."

For some reason, he could not conjure the image in his soul's eye. Instead he glimpsed the eunuch-fat man she had vanished behind in the press: his smile hooking his jowls, empires of dark soaking his armpits.

Such is the perversity of memory. Small wonder the Nonmen lapsed into madness.

"She wasn't the only one," he continued. "Apparently thousands of Exceptions had been sold, almost all of them counterfeit. Not that it would have mattered, given that you were in Carythusal, far beyond the sway of the Emperor and his ill-considered law. The slavers had hired mercenaries in anticipation. There were riots. Hundreds were killed. One of the slaver's ships was set alight. When I saw the smoke I went out into the city to try to find her."

He idly wondered whether anyone had seen as many smoking cities as he. Many, he decided, if the rumours he had heard regarding the Wars of Unification were true.

Sarl and the Captain among them.

"Men are fools at the best of times," he continued, "but when they gather in mobs they lose whatever little reason they can claim when alone. Someone cries out, they all cry out. Someone bludgeons or burns, and they all bludgeon and burn. It's remarkable really, and terrifying enough to send kings and emperors into hiding.

"I was forced to resort to the Gnosis twice just to reach the harbour, and this in a city where Chorae were rife and sorcerers had their tongues scraped out with oyster shells. I actually remember little, just smoke, shadows running, bodies in the dust, and this... this
cold
that seemed to burn in the bottom of my gut."

Even after so many years, the phantasmagoric feel of that afternoon still tickled. It had been one of the first times his waking life had approximated the shrieking madness of his Dreams.