“They used to be,” he says, lighting the pipe. He goes cross-eyed, staring at the touch of fire and bowl.
“I don’t understand.”
He draws deeply on the stem; the bowl glows like a molten coin.
“Do you know,” he asks, exhaling a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, “why Seswatha left us his dreams?”
She knows the answer. Her mother always resorted to talk of Achamian to salve the abrasions between her and her embittered daughter. Because he was her real father, Mimara had always thought. “To assure the School of Mandate never forgets, never loses sight of its mission.”
“That’s what they say,” Achamian replies, savouring his smoke. “That the Dreams are a goad to action, a call to arms. That by suffering the First Apocalypse over and over, we had no choice but to war against the possibility of the Second.”
“You think otherwise?”
A shadow falls across his face. “I think that your adoptive father, our glorious, all-conquering Aspect-Emperor, is right.” The hatred is plain in his voice.
“Kellhus?” she asks.
An old man shrug—an ancient gesture hung on failing bones. “He says it himself, Every life is a cipher …” Another deep inhalation. “A riddle.”
“And you think Seswatha’s life is such.”
“I know it is.”
And then the Wizard tells her. About the First Holy War. About his forbidden love for her mother. About how he was prepared to gamble the very World for the sanctuary of her arms. There is a candour to his telling, a vulnerability that makes it all the more compelling. He speaks plaintively, lapsing time and again into the injured tone of someone convinced others do not believe them wronged. And he speaks slyly, like a drunk who thinks he confides terrible secrets …
Even though Mimara has heard this story many times, she finds herself listening with an almost childish attentiveness, a willingness to be moved, even hurt, by the words of another. He has no idea, she realizes, that this story has become song and scripture in the world beyond his lonely tower. Everyone knows he loved her mother. Everyone knows that she chose the Aspect-Emperor and that Achamian subsequently fled into the wilderness …
The only secret is that he still lives.
With these thoughts her wonder quickly evaporates into embarrassment. He seems overmatched, tragically so, wrestling with words so much larger than himself. It becomes cruel to listen as she does, pretending not to know what she knows so well.
“She was your morning,” she ventures.
He stops. For a heartbeat his eyes seem to lose something of their focus, then he glares at her with a kind of compressed fury. He turns to tap his pipe against a stone jutting from the matted leaves.
“My what?”
“Your morning,” Mimara repeats hesitantly. “My mother. She used to tell me that … that she was your morning.”
He holds the bowl to the firelight for inspection. “I no longer fear the night,” he says with an absent intensity. “I no longer dream as Mandate Schoolmen dream.” When he looks up, there is something at once flat and decisive in his eyes. The memory of an old and assured resolution.
“I no longer pray for the morning.”
She leans back to pluck another log for the fire. It lands with a rasping thump, sends a train of sparks twirling up through the smoke. Watching their winking ascent to avoid his gaze, she hugs her shoulders against the chill. Somewhere neither near nor far, wolves howl into the bowl of the night. As though alarmed, he glances away into the wood, into the wells of blackness between the variant trunks and limbs. He stares with an intensity that makes her think that he listens as much as he hears, to the wolves and to whatever else—that he knows the myriad languages of the deep night.
It is then that he tells his tale in earnest …
As though he has secured permission.
Her mother had waited for him like this, so very long ago.
Over the days and nights since Mimara’s arrival, Achamian had told himself many things. That he was angry—how could he reward such impudence? That he was prudent—what could be more dangerous than harbouring a fugitive Princess-Imperial? That he was compassionate—she was too old to master the semantics of sorcery, and the sooner she understood this, the better. He told himself many things, acknowledged many passions, save the confusion that was the truth of his soul.
Her mother, Esmenet, had waited for him on the banks of the River Sempis over twenty years previous. Not even word of his death could turn her from her vigil, so obstinate, so mulish was her love. Not even sense could sway her.
Only Kellhus and the appearance of honesty.
Even before Mimara began her watch—or siege, as it sometimes seemed—Achamian knew that she shared her mother’s stubbornness. It was no small feat travelling alone from Momemn the way she had; his skin prickled at the thought of it, this small woman daring the Wilds to find him, spending night after night alone in the scheming dark. So even before he had shut his doors against her, commanded his slaves to avoid her, he knew she would not be so easily driven away. Even that night when he had struck her in the rain.
Something more was needed. Something deeper than sense.
He told himself that she was mad enough to do it, that she would literally waste to nothing waiting for him to climb down from his tower. He told himself he needed only to be honest, to confess the truth in all its mangled detail, and that she would see, realize that her vigil could win only the destruction of two souls. He told himself these things because he still loved her mother, and because he knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.
So he came in kindness, with the food she so obviously needed, and with an openness that itched because of its premeditation. He certainly hadn’t anticipated losing himself in story and conversation. It had been so long since he had truly spoken. For nigh twenty years, his words had always skipped without sinking.
“I’m not even sure when it began happening, let alone why,” he said, pausing to draw a palsied breath. “The Dreams began to change … in strange, little ways at first. Mandate Schoolmen claim to relive Seswatha’s life, but this is only partially true. In fact, we dream only portions, the long trauma of the First Apocalypse. All we dream is the spectacle. ‘Seswatha,’ the old Mandate joke goes, ‘does not shit.’ The banalities—the substance of his life—is missing … The truth of his life is missing.”
All the things that were forgotten, he realized.
“In the beginning, I noticed a change in the character, perhaps, but nothing more. A slight difference in emphasis. When the dreamer is remade, won’t the dreams change also? Besides, the dread spectacle was simply too overwhelming to care all that much. When thousands are screaming, who pauses to count bruises on an apple?
“Then it happened: I dreamed of him—Seswatha—stubbing his toe … I fell asleep, this world folded in on itself the way it always does, and his world rose into its place. I was he, crossing a gloomy room racked with what seemed to be thousands of scrolls, mumbling, lost in thought, and I stubbed my toe on the bronze foot of a brazier … It was like a fever dream, the ones that travel like a cart in a circle, happening over and over. Seswatha stubbing his toe!”
Without thinking, he had leaned forward and clutched the tip of his felt-slippered foot. The leather was fire hot. Mimara simply stared at him, her eyes placid above fine-boned cheeks, looking for all the world like the past, like her staring out over the smoke of a harsher fire. Another abject listener. Either she remained silent out of irritation—perhaps he had spoken too long or too hard—or she kept her counsel, understanding that his story was a living thing, and as such could only be judged as a whole.
“When I awoke in the morning,” he continued, “I had no idea what to make of it. It didn’t strike me as a revelation of any kind, only a curiosity. There are always anomalies, you see. If this were Atyersus, I could show you whole tomes cataloguing the vario
us ways in which the Dreams misfire: the inversions, substitutions, alterations, corruptions, and on and on. More than a few Mandate scholars have spent their lives trying to interpret their significance. Numerological codes. Prophetic communications. Ethereal interferences. It’s an easy obsession, considering the suffering involved. They convince nobody save themselves in the end. As bad as philosophers.
“So I decided the toe-stubbing dream was my own. Seswatha never stubbed his toe, I told myself. I stubbed my dream toe while dreaming that I was Seswatha. After all, it was my toe that ached all morning! It never happened, I told myself. Not really …
“And of course the next night it was back to the Dreams as I knew them. Back to the blood and the fire and the horror. A year passed, maybe more, before I dreamed another banality: Seswatha scolding a student on a veranda overlooking the Library of Sauglish. I dismissed this one the same as the first.
“Then two months after that, I dreamed yet another trivial thing: Seswatha huddled in a scriptorium, reading a scroll by the light of coals …”
He trailed, though whether to let the significance settle in or to savour the memory, he did not know. Sometimes words interrupted themselves. He pinched the hem of his cloak, rolled the rough-sewn seam between thumb and forefinger.
Mimara ran the blade of her hand across the bowl’s interior curve to scoop out the last of her gruel—like any slave or caste-menial. It was strange, Achamian noted, the way she alternately remembered and forgot her jnanic manners. “What was the scroll?” she asked, swallowing.
“A lost work,” he replied, absent with memories. He blinked. “Gotagga’s Parapolis … The title means nothing to you, I know, but for a scholar it’s nothing short of … well, a miracle. The Parapolis is a lost work, famous, the first great treatise on politics, referenced by almost all the writers of Far Antiquity. It was one of the greater treasures lost in the First Apocalypse and I dreamed of reading it, as Seswatha, sitting in the cellars of the Library …”
Mimara paused for one last pass of her tongue along the bowl’s rim. “And you don’t think you invented this?”
Irritation marbled his laugh. “I suppose my tongue is sharp enough to count me clever, but I’m no Gotagga, I assure you. No. No. There was no question. I awoke in a mad haste, searching for quill, hide, and horn so I could scratch down as much as I could remember …”
Her meal forgotten, Mimara watched him with same shrewd canniness that had so honed her mother’s beauty. “So the dreams were real …”
He nodded, squinting at the memory of the miracle that had been that morning. What a wondrous, breathless scramble! It was as though the answer was already there, wholly formed, as clear as the steam rolling off his morning tea: He had started dreaming outside the narrow circle of his former Mandate brothers. He had begun dreaming Seswatha’s mundane life.
“And no one,” she asked, “no Mandate Schoolman, has ever dreamed these things before?”
“Bits maybe, fragments, but nothing like this.”
How strange it had been, to find his life’s revelation in the small things; he who had wrestled with dying worlds. But then the great ever turned upon the small. He often thought of the men he’d known—the warlike ones, or just the plain obstinate—of their enviable ability to overlook and to ignore. It was like a kind of wilful illiteracy, as if all the moments of unmanly passion and doubt, all the frail details that gave substance to their lives, were simply written in a tongue they couldn’t understand and so needed to condemn and belittle. It never occurred to them that to despise the small things was to despise themselves—not to mention the truth.
But then that was the tragedy of all posturing.
“But why the change?” she asked, her face a delicate oval hanging warm and motionless against the black forest deeps. “Why you? Why now?”
He had inked these questions across parchment many times.
“I have no idea. Perhaps it’s the Whore—fucking Fate. Perhaps it’s a happy consequence of my madness—for one cannot endure what I’ve endured day and night without going a little mad, I assure you.” He made her laugh by blinking his eyes and jerking his head in caricature. “Perhaps, by ceasing to live my own life, I’d began living his. Perhaps some dim memory, some spark of Seswatha’s soul, is reaching out to me … Perhaps …”
Achamian blinked at the crack in his voice, cleared his throat. Words could soar, dip, and dazzle, and sometimes even cross paths with the sun. Blind and illuminate. But the voice was different. It remained bound to the earth of expression. Not matter how it danced, the graves always lay beneath its feet.
On the back of a heavy breath, he said, “But there is a far greater question.”
She hugged her knees before the pop and swirl of the fire, blinking slowly, her expression more careful than impassive. He knew how he must look, the challenge in his glare, the defensiveness, the threat of punishing surrogates. He looked like a venomous old man, balling up his reasons in uncertain fists—he knew as much.
But if there were judgment in her eyes, he could detect nothing of it.
“My stepfather,” she said. “Kellhus is the question.”
He imagined he must be gaping at her, gawking like a stump-headed fool.
He had spoken to her as if she were a stranger, an innocent, when in point of fact she was joined to him at the very root. Esmenet was her mother, which meant that Kellhus was her stepfather. Even though he had known this, the significance of that knowing had completely escaped him. Of course she knew of his hatred. Of course she knew the particulars of his shame!
How could he be so oblivious? The Dûnyain was her father! The Dûnyain.
Did this not instantly make her an instrument of some kind? A witting or unwitting spy? Achamian had watched an entire army—a holy war—succumb to his dread influence. Slaves, princes, sorcerers, fanatics—it did not matter. Achamian himself had surrendered his love—his wife! What chance could this mere girl have?
How much of her soul was hers, and how much had been replaced?
He gazed at her, tried to scowl away the slack from his expression.
“He sent you, didn’t he?”
She looked genuinely confused, dismayed even. “What? Kellhus?” She stared at him, her mouth open and wordless. “If his people find me, they would drag me home in chains! Throw me at the feet of my fucking mother—you have to believe that!”
“He sent you.”
Something, some mad note in his voice perhaps, rocked her backward. “I’m not ly-lying …” Tears clotted her eyes. A strange half-crook bent her face to the side, as though angling it away from unseen blows. “I’m not lying,” she repeated with a snarling intensity. A twitch marred her features. “No. Look. Everything was going so well … Everything was going so well!”
“This is the way it works,” Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice. “This is the way he sends you. This is the way he rules—from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! He-he’s always been kind—”
“Did he ever tell you to forgive your mother?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Did he ever tell you the shape of your own heart? Did he ever speak salving words, healing words, words that helped you see yourself more clearly than you had ever seen yourself before?”
“Yes—I mean, no! And yes … Please … Things were going so—!”
There was a grinding to his aspect, an anger that had become reptilian with age. “Did you ever find yourself in awe of him? Did something whisper to you, This man is more than a man? And did you feel gratified, gratified beyond measure, at his merest tenderness, at the bare fact of his attention?”
He was shaking as he spoke now, shaking at the memories, shaking at the nakedness of twenty years stripped away. It seemed to hang about the edges of his vision, the lies and the hopes and the betrayal
s, the succession of glaring suns and uproarious battles.
“Akka …” she was saying. So like her whore-mother. “What are you talki—?”
“When you stood before him!” he roared. “When you knelt in his presence , did you feel it? Hollow and immovable, as if you were at once smoke and yet possessed the bones of the world? Truth? Did you feel Truth?”
“Yes!” she cried. “Everyone does! Everyone! He’s the Aspect-Emperor! He’s the Saviour. He’s come to save us! Come to save the Sons of Men!”
Achamian stared at her aghast, his own vehemence ringing in his ears. Of course she was a believer.
“He sent you.”
It was too late, he realized, staring at the image of Mimara across the fire. It had already happened. Despite all the intervening years, despite the waning violence of the Dreams, she had returned him to the teeth of yesterday. To simply gaze upon her was to taste the dust and blood and smoke of the First Holy War.
He understood her look—how could he not when he so readily recognized it as his own? Too many losses. Too many small hopes denied. Too many betrayals of self. The look of someone who understands that the World is a peevish judge, forgiving only to render its punishments all the more severe. She had suffered a moment of weakness when she had seen him clambering down the slopes with food; he could see that now. She had let herself hope. Her soul had taken her body’s gratitude and made it its own.
He believed her. She was not a willing slave. If anything she reminded him of the Scylvendi, of a soul at once strong and yet battered beyond recognition. And she looked so much like her mother …
She was precisely the kind of slave Kellhus would send to him. Part cipher. Part opiate.
Someone Drusas Achamian could come to love.
“Did you know I was there when he first arrived in the Three Seas,” he said, broaching the silence of dark forests and rustling flames. “He was no more than a beggar claiming princely blood—and with a Scylvendi as his companion no less! I was there from the very first. It was my back he broke climbing to absolute power.”