The open road. Achamian had once told her it was like a string tied about his neck, choking him if he did not follow. She almost wished it felt that way now. She could understand being dragged to some destination. Instead, it felt like a long fall, and a sheer one at that. Simply staring down it made her feel dizzy.
Such a fool! It’s just a road!
She had rehearsed her plan a thousand times. Why fear now?
She was not a wife. Her purse she carried between her legs. She would, as the soldiers said, sell peaches on the way to Momemn. Men might stand midway between women and the Gods, but they hungered like beasts.
The road would be kind. Eventually, she would find the Holy War. And in the Holy War she would find Achamian. She would clutch his cheek and kiss him, at long last a fellow traveller.
Then she would tell him what had happened, of the danger.
Deep breath. She tasted dust and cold.
She began walking, her limbs so light they might have danced.
It would be dark soon.
CHAPTER TEN
SUMNA
How should one describe the terrible majesty of the Holy War? Even then, still unblooded, it was both frightening and wondrous to behold, a great beast whose limbs were composed of entire nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon, and the Nansurium—and with the Scarlet Spires as the dragon’s maw, no less. Not since the days of the Ceneian Empire or the Ancient North has the world witnessed such an assembly. Even diseased by politics, it was a thing of awe.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Midwinter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna
Even after night fell, Esmenet continued walking, intoxicated by the sheer impossibility of it. Several times she even raced into the dark fields, her feet whisking through frosted grass, her arms outstretched as she twirled beneath the Nail of Heaven.
The cold was iron hard, the spaces endless. The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor. So different from the humid murk of Sumna, where inky sensations stained everything. Here, in the cold and dark, the parchment of the world was blank. Here, it seemed, was where it all started.
She at once savoured and shuddered at the thought. The Consult, Achamian had once told her, believed much the same thing.
Eventually, as the night waxed, she sobered. She reminded herself of the arduous days ahead, of the dread purpose that drove her.
Achamian was being watched.
She could not think this without remembering that night with the stranger. Sometimes she felt nauseated, glimpsing the pitch that was his seed everytime she blinked. Other times she grew very cold, reviewing and assessing every spoken word, every stinging climax with the dispassion of a tax-farmer. She found it difficult to believe she had been that whorish woman, treacherous, adulterate . . .
But she had been.
It was not her betrayal that shamed her. Achamian, she knew, would not fault her. No, what shamed her was what she had felt, not what she had done.
Some prostitutes so despised what they did they sought pain and punishment whenever they coupled. Esmenet, however, counted herself among those who could laugh, from time to time, about being paid for being pleasured. Her pleasure was her own, no matter who fondled her.
But not that night. The pleasure had been more intense than any she’d ever experienced. She had felt it. Gasped it. Shuddered it. But she had not owned it. Her body had been notched that night. And it shamed her to fury.
She often grew wet at the thought of his abdomen against her belly. Sometimes she flushed and tensed at the memory of her climaxes. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he had taken her body captive, had seized what was hers and remade it not in his own image, but in the image of what he needed her to be. Infinitely receptive. Infinitely docile. Infinitely gratified.
But where her body groped, her intellect grasped. She quickly realized that if the stranger knew about her, he knew about Inrau. And if he knew about Inrau, there was simply no way his death could have been a suicide. This was why she had to find Achamian. The possibility that Inrau had committed suicide had almost broken him.
“What if it’s true, Esmi? What if he did kill himself?”
“He didn’t. Enough, Akka. Please.”
“He did! . . . Oh, sweet Gods, I can feel it! I forced him into a position where all he could do was betray. Me or Maithanet. Don’t you see, Esmi? I forced him to pit love against love!”
“You’re drunk, Akka. Your fears always get the best of you when you’re drunk.”
“Sweet Gods . . . I killed him.”
How empty her reassurances had been: wooden recitations born of flagging patience born of the unaccountable suspicion that he punished himself simply to secure her pity. Why had she been so cold? So selfish? At one point, she had even caught herself resenting Inrau, blaming him for Achamian’s departure. How could she think such things?
But that was going to change. Many things were going to change.
Somehow, impossibly, she had a part in whatever it was that was happening. She would be its equal.
You did not kill him, my love. I know this!
And she also knew who the killer was. The stranger, she supposed, could have hailed from any of the Schools, but somehow she knew he did not. What she had suffered was beyond the Three Seas.
The Consult. They had murdered Inrau, and they had ravished her.
The Consult.
As terrifying as this intuition was, it was also exhilarating. No one, not even Achamian, had seen the Consult in centuries. And yet she . . . But she did not ponder this overmuch, because when she did, she began to feel . . . fortunate. That she could not bear.
So she told herself she travelled for Achamian. And in unguarded moments, she styled herself a character from The Sagas, like Ginsil or Ysilka, a wife mortally ensnared in her husband’s machinations. The road before her, it seemed, would sing with a furtive glamour, as though hidden witnesses to her heroism watched her every step.
She shivered in her cloak. Her breath piled before her. She walked, pondering the sense of chill expectancy that accompanied so many winter mornings. Dawn’s light was slow in coming.
By mid-morning, she came across a roadside hostel, where she loitered in hopes of joining the small group of wayfarers who assembled in its yards. Two old men, their backs stooped beneath great bushels of dried fruits, waited with her. From their scowls Esmenet supposed they had glimpsed the tattoo on the back of her left hand. Everyone, it seemed, knew that Sumna branded her whores.
When the group at last took to the road, she followed it as unobtrusively as possible. A small cadre of blue-skinned priests, devotees of Jukan, led them, singing soft hymns and clinking finger cymbals. A handful of the others joined them in singing, but most kept to themselves, trudging, muttering in low voices. Esmenet saw one of the old men speaking to the driver of a wain. The teamster turned and looked at her in the blank way she had seen so often: the look of one who yearns for what must be loathed. He glanced away when she smiled. Sooner or later, she knew, he would manufacture some accidental way to speak to her.
Then she would have to make a decision.
But then a band on her left sandal snapped. She was able to knot the ends back into usable shape, but they pinched and chafed the skin beneath her woollen socks. Blisters broke, and soon she was limping. She cursed the teamster for not hurrying. She heartily cursed the canon that made it illegal for women to wear boots in the Nansurium. Then the knot gave way, and try as she might, she could not repair it.
The group dwindled farther and farther down the road.
She thrust the sandal into her satchel and began walking without it. Her foot went almost immediately numb. After twenty steps, the first hole opened in her sock. A short time after, her sock was little more than a ragged skirt about her ankle. She hopped as much as she walked, frequently pausing to rub warmth into the sole of her foot. She could see no sign of the others. Behin
d her, she glimpsed a distant band of men. They seemed to be walking pack animals . . . or warhorses.
She prayed it was the former.
The road she followed was the Karian Way—a relic of the Ceneian Empire, though kept in good repair by the Emperor. It ran straight through the province of Massentia, which in summer people called the Golden because of its endless fields of grain. The problem with the Karian Way was that it struck deep into the Kyranae Plains rather than heading directly toward Momemn. More than a thousand years before, it had linked Holy Sumna to ancient Cenei. Now it was maintained only so far as it serviced Massentia; it trailed into pasture, Esmenet had been told, after intersecting the far more important Pon Way, which did lead to Momemn.
Despite this detour through the interior, Esmenet had chosen the Karian Way after much careful deliberation. Even though she could neither afford nor read maps, and even though she had never before set foot outside of Sumna, she possessed intimate knowledge of this and many other roads.
All prostitutes ranked their custom according to their tastes. Some liked large men, others small. Some favoured priests with their hesitant, uncallused hands, while others favoured soldiers and their rough confidence. But Esmenet had always prized experience. Those who had suffered, who had overcome, who had seen far-away or astounding things—these were the men she prized.
When she was younger, she had coupled with such men and thought: Now I’m part of what they’ve seen. Now I’m more than what I was. When she pestered them with questions afterward, she did so as much to learn the details of her enrichment as out of curiosity. They left lightened of both silver and seed, but she had convinced herself that they took some part of her with them, that she had expanded somehow, that she, Esmenet, haunted eyes that watched and warred with the world.
Several people had cured her of this belief. There was the old whore, Pirasha, who would have starved had it not been for Esmenet’s generosity. “No, sweetling,” she once told her. “When women dip their cups in men, they draw only what’s been stolen.” Then there was the dashing Kidruhil cavalryman, the one she had thought she loved, who came to her a second time without any recollection of the first. “You must be mistaken,” he had exclaimed. “I’d remember a beauty such as you!”
Then she had given birth to her daughter.
She could remember thinking, not long after her daughter was born, that childbirth had signalled the end of her delusions. She knew now, however, that it had simply marked the transition from one set of self-deceptions to another. The death of a child: that marked the end of delusions. Gathering little clothing into a bundle, giving it to the expectant mother the floor below, saying kind words to ease her—her!—of her embarrassment . . .
Much foolishness had died with her daughter, and much bitterness had been born. But Esmenet was not, like some, inclined to spite. Even though she knew it belittled her, she continued to indulge her hunger for stories of the world, and she continued to prize the best storytellers. She wrapped her legs around them—gladly. She pretended to rise to their ardour, and sometimes, given the curious way pretence so often blurred into actuality, she did rise. Afterward, as their interests receded into the dark world they had come from, they became impenetrable. Even her kinder patrons seemed dangerous. So many men, she’d found, harboured a void of some kind, a place accountable only to other men.
Then the real seduction would begin. “Tell me,” she sometimes purred, “what have you seen that makes you more . . . more than other men?” Most found the question amusing. Others were perplexed, annoyed, indifferent, or even outraged. A rare handful, Achamian among them, found it fascinating. But every one of them answered. Men needed to be more. This was why, she had decided, so many of them gambled: they sought coin, certainly, but they also yearned for a demonstration, a sign that the world, the Gods, the future—someone—had somehow set them apart.
So they told her stories—thousands of them over the years. They smiled at their accounts, thinking they thrilled her, as they had when she was young, with knowledge of just who had bedded her. And with one exception, none of them guessed that she cared nothing for what their stories said about them, and everything for what their stories said about the world.
Achamian had understood.
“You do this with all your custom?” he once asked without warning.
She wasn’t shocked. Others had asked as much. “It comforts me to know my men are more than cocks.”
A half-truth. But true to form, Achamian was sceptical. He frowned, saying, “It’s a pity.”
This had stung, even though she had no idea what he meant. “What’s a pity?”
“That you’re not a man,” he replied. “If you were a man, you wouldn’t need to make teachers of everyone who used you.”
She had wept in his arms that night.
But she had continued her studies, ranging far through the eyes of others.
This was why she knew that Massentia was safe, that despite the longer distance, the Karian and Pon Ways were a far better route for a lone woman to take than the more direct routes along the coast. And this was also why she knew enough to walk with other travellers, so those passing by would simply assume she belonged.
And this was why her broken sandal frightened her so. Before, intoxicated by openness and sheer daring, she had felt unburdened by her solitude. Now it weighed against her. She felt exposed, as though archers lay hidden behind every clutch of trees, waiting for a glimpse of her tattooed hand, for a whispered word, or for some other inevitable cue.
The road climbed, and she hobbled on as best she could. A welling sense of despair only made her bare foot seem more painful. How could she walk all the way to Momemn like this? How many times had she been told that safe travel was always a matter of preparation? Each painful step seemed a rebuke.
The Karian Way gradually dropped before her, levelling over a shallow floodplain, then crossing what looked to be a minor river before spearing into the dark hills that ringed the horizon. Jutting from thickets of leafless trees, a ruined Ceneian aqueduct parsed the near distances, crumbling into small fields of debris where the locals had pillaged its stone. Mud tracks wound into the farther heights, skirting fallow fields, disappearing into climbing tracts of forest. But what held Esmenet’s hope and attention were the rustic buildings clustered about the bridge: a village of some kind, trailing thin lines of smoke into the grey sky.
She had some money. More than enough to repair her sandal.
She chided herself for her misgivings as she neared the village. One of the things that characterized Massentia, she had heard, was the fact that it possessed few of the great plantations that dominated so much of the Empire. Massentia was a land of free yeomen and craftsmen. Forthright. Honest. Proud. Or so she had heard.
But then she remembered the way such men scowled when they saw her hanging from her window in Sumna. “Men who own their drudgery,” old Pirasha had once told her, “think they own the Truth as well.” And the Truth was not kind to whores.
Esmenet cursed herself for worrying. Everyone said Massentia was safe.
She hobbled onto the packed earth of what passed for a humble market square, searching the surrounding shanties and facades for a cobbler. When she found none, she smelled the air for some sign of the fish oil that tanners hammered into their hides. A strip of leather was all she really needed. She passed thawing heaps of clay, then four interconnected potters’ sheds. In one, an old man worked his wheel despite the cold, coaxing curves from the clay with his thumbs. The mouth of an oven glowed behind him. His cough, which sounded like gurgling mud, startled her.
She idly wondered if the village was poxed.
A group of five boys mooned about the entrance to a stable, staring. The oldest, or at least the tallest, watched her with frank admiration. He would have been handsome had his eyes been even. She remembered one of her patrons telling her it was rare to find beautiful children in villages such as these, because they were so often so
ld to wealthy travellers. Esmenet found herself wondering whether a bid had ever been made on this boy.
She smiled as he sauntered toward her. Perhaps he—
“Are you a whore?” he asked baldly.
Esmenet could only stare in shock and fury.
“She is! She is!” another boy cried. “From Sumna! That’s why she hides her hand!”
A number of soldier’s curses came to her. “Go finger your chimney,” she snapped, “you little fucking pissant.”
The boy grinned, and Esmenet immediately realized he was one of them: men who think more of a dog’s bark than a woman’s words.
“Let me see your hand.”
Something in his voice unsettled her.
“Don’t you have stalls to muck?” Slave, her tone sneered.
The casual viciousness of his look hardened into something else. When he grabbed for her hand, she struck him on the cheek. He stumbled back, shocked.
Recovering himself, he stooped to the ground. “She’s a whore,” he told his compatriots, his tone grim, as though unfortunate truths entailed unfortunate consequences. He stood, rolling a dirty stone between his fingers. “An adulterate whore.”
A nervous moment passed. The four hesitated. They stood on a threshold of some kind, and they knew it, even if they understood nothing of its significance. Rather than rallying them with words, the handsome one whipped his stone.
Esmenet ducked, dodged it. But the others were crouching, gathering missiles of their own.
They began pelting her. She cursed, drawing up her arms. The thick wool of her cloak saved her from any real harm.
“Bastards!” she cried. They paused, at once cowed and amused by her ferocity. One of the boys, the fat one, guffawed when she bent to scoop up her own stones. She hit him first, just above his left eyebrow, splitting skin and sending him wailing to his knees. The others simply stared, dumbstruck. Blood had been drawn.