“‘What love lies beyond sacrifice?’”
Her face was wet. When she drew her hand from her cheek, the whorls of her fingertips were black.
“You speak the tongue of your conquerors …” Kellhus whispered. “You say, Mimara, come with me child.”
A shiver passed through her, as though she were a drumskin …
“And you take her …”
“She’s dead!” some woman cried. “She’s dead!”
“To the slavers in the harbour …”
“Stop!” the woman hissed. “I say, no!”
Gasping, like knives.
“And you sell her.”
She remembered his arms enclosing her. She remembered following him to his pavilion. She remembered lying at his side, weeping and weeping, while his voice made her anguish plain, while Serwë stroked tears from her cheeks, ran cool fingers through her hair. She remembered telling them what had happened. About the hungry summer, when she had swallowed men for free just for their seed. About hating the little girl—the filthy little bitch!—who wept and demanded and demanded, who ate her food, who sent her into the streets, all because of love! About the hollow-eyed madness. Who could understand starvation? About the slavers, their larders growing fat because of the famine. About Mimara shrieking, her little girl shrieking! About the poison coins … Less than a week! They had lasted less than a week!
She remembered shrieking.
And she remembered weeping as she’d never wept before, because she’d spoken, and he had heard. She remembered drifting in his confidence, in his poetry, in his godlike knowledge of what was right and true …
In his absolution.
“You are forgiven, Esmenet.”
Who are you to forgive?
“Mimara.”
She awoke with her head upon his arm. There was no confusion, though it seemed there should be. She knew where she was, and though part of her quailed, part of her exulted as well.
She lay with Kellhus.
I didn’t couple with him … I only wept.
Her face felt bruised from the previous evening. The night had been hot, and they’d slept without blankets. For what seemed a long time, she lay motionless, simply savouring his white-skinned nearness. She placed a hand upon his bare chest. He was warm and smooth. She could feel the slow drum of his heart. Her fingers tingled, as though she touched an iron-smith’s anvil as he hammered. She thought of the weight of him, flushed …
“Kellhus …” she said. She looked up to the profile of his face, somehow knowing he was awake.
He turned and looked at her, his eyes smiling.
She snorted in embarrassment, then looked away.
Kellhus said, “It’s strange, isn’t it, lying so close …”
“Yes,” she replied smiling, looking up, then out and away. “Very strange.”
He rolled to face her. Esmenet heard Serwë groan and complain from his far side, still asleep.
“Shhh,” he said laughing softly. “She loves sleep more than me.”
Esmenet looked at him and laughed, shaking her head, beaming with incredulous excitement.
“This is so strange!” she hissed. Never had her eyes felt so bright.
She pressed her knees together in nervousness. He was so close!
He leaned toward her, and her mouth slackened, her eyes became heavy-lidded.
“No,” she gasped.
Kellhus shot her a friendly frown. “My loin cloth just bunched,” he said.
“Oh,” she replied. They both burst into laughter.
Again she could sense the weight of him …
He was a man who dwarfed her, as a man should.
Then his hand was beneath her hasas, sliding between her thighs, and she found herself moaning into his sweet lips. And when he entered her, pinned her the way the Nail of Heaven pinned the skies, tears brimmed and spilled from her eyes, and she could only think, At last! At last he takes me!
And it did not seem, it was.
No one would call her harlot any more.
PART III:
The Third March
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
KHEMEMA
To piss across water is to piss across your reflection.
—KHIRGWI PROVERB
Early Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, southern Shigek
Sweating beneath the sun, the Men of the Tusk struck south, winding up the staggered escarpments of the South Bank, and onto the furnace plains of the Carathay Desert, or as the Khirgwi called it, Ej’ulkiyah, the “Great Thirst.” The first night, they stopped near Tamiznai, a caravan entrepôt that had been sacked by the retreating Fanim.
Shortly afterward, Athjeäri, who’d been sent to reconnoitre the route to Enathpaneah, returned from the southern waste, his men hollow-eyed with thirst and exhaustion. His mood was black. He told the Great Names that he’d found no unpolluted wells, and that he’d been forced to travel by night, the heat was so intense. The heathen, he said, had retreated to the far side of Hell. The Great Names told him of the endless trains of mules they’d brought, and of the Emperor’s fleet that would follow them loaded with fresh Sempis water. They explained their elaborate plans for transporting that water across the coastal hills.
“You know not,” the young Earl of Gaenri said, “the lands you risk.”
The following evening, the horns of Galeoth, Nansur, Thunyerus, Conriya, Ce Tydonn, and High Ainon pealed through the arid air. Pavilions were torn down amid the shouts of soldiers and slaves. Mules were loaded and beaten into long files. The Cultic Priests of Gilgaöl cast a goshawk onto their godfire, then released another to the evening sun. Infantrymen swung their packs from their spears, joking and complaining about the prospect of marching through the night. Hymns resolved and faded from the rumble of busy thousands.
The air cooled, and the first columns set across the western shoulders of Khemema’s coastal hills.
The first Khirgwi came after midnight, howling from the backs of loping camels, bearing the truth of the Solitary God and His Prophet on the edges of sharp knives. The attacks were both brief and vicious. They fell upon stragglers, soaked the sands with red waters. They evaded the Inrithi pickets and swept howling into the baggage trains, where they sliced open the precious bladders of water wherever they found them. Sometimes, especially when they strayed onto hard gravel flats, they were overtaken and cut down in furious melees. Otherwise, they outdistanced their pursuers and vanished into the moonlit sands.
The next day, the first mule trains crawled through the coastal hills to the Meneanor and found a bay, quicksilver in the sun and peppered by the red-sailed ships of the Nansur fleet. There were hearty greetings as the first boatloads of water were dragged ashore. Songs were raised as the onerous work of transferring the water to the mules began. Men stripped to their waist, and many plunged into the rolling waves to relieve themselves of the heat. And that evening, when the Holy War stirred from suffocating tents, they were greeted by fresh Sempis water.
The Holy War continued its nocturnal march. Despite the blood-curdling raids, many found themselves awed by the beauty of the Carathay. There were no insects, save the odd crazed beetle rolling its ball of dung across the sands. The Inrithi laughed at these, called them “shit chasers.” And there were no animals, except of course the vultures circling endlessly above. Where there was no water, there was no life, and apart from the heavy skins draped about the shoulders of the Holy War, there was no water in the Carathay. It was as if the sun had burnt the whole world to sterile bone. The Men of the Tusk stood apart from the sun, stone, and sand, and it was beautiful, like a haunting nightmare described by another. It was beautiful because they need not suffer the consequences of what they witnessed.
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 G
reat 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.