Perhaps he’s a man of reason.
“Yes,” the man continued. “Myself, and a handful of my brothers …”
“But not Gotian?”
Sarcellus grimaced in a fashion that Conphas found most agreeable. “No, not Gotian … Not yet, anyway.”
Conphas nodded. “By all means, continue …”
“We know you’ve tried to assassinate Prince Kellhus.”
The Exalt-General snorted, at once amused and offended. The man was either exceedingly bold or insufferably impertinent. “You know, do you?”
“We think …” Sarcellus amended. “Whatever … What’s important is that you realize we share your sentiment. Especially after the madness of the desert …”
Conphas frowned. He knew what the man meant: Prince Kellhus had walked from the Carathay commanding the worship of thousands, and the wonder of everyone, it sometimes seemed, save himself. But Conphas would’ve expected a Shrial Knight to argue signs and omens, not power …
The desert had been madness. At first Conphas had shambled through the sands no different from the rest, cursing that damned fool Sassotian, whom he’d installed as General of the Imperial Fleet, and pondering, endlessly pondering, mad scenarios that would see him saved. Then, after he burned through the hope that fuelled these ruminations, he found himself harassed by a peculiar disbelief. For a while, the prospect of death seemed something he merely indulged for decorum’s sake, like the fatuous assurances caste-merchants heaped onto their wares. “Yes, yes, you will die! I guarantee!”
Please, he thought. Who do you think I am?
Then, with the shadowy lassitude that characterized so much of that march, his doubt flipped into certainty, and he felt an almost intellectual wonder—the wonder of finding the conclusion to one’s life. There was no final page, he realized, no last cubit to the scroll. The ink simply gave out, and all was blank and desert white.
So here, he thought, looking across the wind-rippled dunes, lies my life’s destination. This is the place that has waited for me, waited since before I was born …
But then he’d found him, Prince Kellhus, scooping up water in that sandy pit—wading while he, Ikurei Conphas, died of thirst! Of all the deranged possibilities he’d considered, none seemed quite as mad as this: saved by the man he’d failed to kill. What could be more galling? More ludicrous?
But at the time … At the time, his heart had caught—it still fluttered at the memory!—and for an instant, Conphas had wondered if Martemus had been right … Perhaps there was more to this man. This Warrior-Prophet.
Indeed. The desert had been madness.
Conphas fixed the Shrial Knight with an appraising stare. “But he saved the Holy War,” he said. “Your life … My life …”
Sarcellus nodded. “Indeed, and that, I would say, is the problem.”
“How so?” Conphas snapped, even though he knew exactly what the man meant.
The Knight-Commander shrugged. “Before the desert, Prince Kellhus was simply another zealot with some claim to the Sight. But now … Especially now with the Dread God walking among us …” He sighed and leaned forward, his hands folded together, his forearms against his knees.
“I fear for the Holy War, Exalt-General. We fear for the Holy War. Half of our brothers acclaim this fraud as another Inri Sejenus, as our salvation, while the other half decry him as an anathema, as the cause of our misery.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Conphas asked mildly. “Why are you here, Knight-Commander?”
Sarcellus’s grin was crooked. “Because there’ll be mass mutinies, riots, perhaps even open warfare … We need someone with the skill and power to minimize or forestall such eventualities, someone who yet commands the loyalty of his men. We need someone who can preserve the Holy War.”
“After you’ve killed Prince Kellhus …” Conphas said derisively. He shook his head, as though disappointed by his own lack of surprise. “He camps with his followers now, and they guard him as though he were the Tusk. They say that in the desert a hundred of them surrendered their water—their lives—to him and his women. And now another hundred have stepped forward as his bodyguard, each of them sworn to die for the Warrior-Prophet. Not even the Emperor could claim such protection! And still you think you can kill him.”
A drowsy blink, which made Conphas certain—absurdly—that Sarcellus had beautiful sisters.
“Not think, Exalt-General … Know.”
Serwë’s scream was like an animal thing, as much a grunt as a wail. Esmenet bent over her, combing her fingers through the girl’s sweaty hair. Rain pulsed across the bellied ceiling of their makeshift pavilion, and here and there a trickle of water glittered in the gloom, slapping against plaited mats. For Esmenet, it seemed they crouched in the illuminated heart of a cave, littered by musty cloth and rotting reeds.
The Kianene woman Kellhus had summoned cooed to Serwë in a tongue only Kellhus seemed to understand. Esmenet found the throaty sound of the woman’s voice soothing. They stood, she realized, in a place where differences of language and faith no longer mattered.
Serwë was about to give birth.
The midwife sat cross-legged between Serwë’s opened knees, Esmenet knelt over her anguished face, and Kellhus stood above them, his expression watchful, wise, and sad. Esmenet looked to him, worried. All will be as it should be, his eyes said. But his smile did not sweep her apprehension away.
There’s more, she reminded herself. More than me.
How long had it been since Achamian had left her?
Not that long, perhaps, but the desert lay between them.
No walk, it seemed, could be longer. The Carathay had ravished her, fumbling with knot and clasp, thrusting leathery hands beneath her robe, running polished fingertips across her breasts and thighs. It had stripped her past her skin, to the wood of her bones. It had spilled and raked her across the sand, like seashells.
It had offered her up to Kellhus.
At first she’d barely noticed the desert. She’d been too drunk, too juvenile, with joy. When Kellhus walked with her and Serwë, she’d laughed and talked much as she always had, but it’d seemed a pretense somehow, a way to disguise the wondrous intimacies they now shared. She’d forgotten what it’d been like in her adolescence, before whoring had placed nakedness and coupling beyond the circle of private, secret things. Making love to Kellhus—and Serwë—had taken what was once brazen and made it demure. She felt hidden and she felt whole.
When Kellhus walked with his Zaudunyani, she and Serwë marched hand in hand, discussing everything and anything so long as it returned to him. They giggled and blushed, used jokes to plot pleasures. They confessed resentments and fears, knowing the bed they shared brooked no deceit. They dreamed of palaces, of armies of slaves. Like little boys, they boasted of kings kissing the earth beneath their feet.
But in all that time, she hadn’t so much walked through as around the Carathay. Dunes, like the tangle of tanned harem bodies. Plains hissing with sunlight. The desert had seemed little more than a fitting ground for her love and the nearing ascendancy of the Warrior-Prophet. Only when the water began to fail, when they massacred the slaves and the camp-followers … Only then did she truly cross the Great Thirst.
The past crumbled, and the future evaporated. Her every heartbeat belonged, it seemed, to a different heart. She could remember the accumulating signs of death, wasting, as though her body were a candle notched with the watches—a light to read by. She could remember wondering at Serwë, who’d become a stranger in Kellhus’s arms. She could remember wondering at the stranger who walked with her own limbs.
Nothing branched in the Carathay. Everything roamed without root or source. The death of trees: this, she had thought, was the secret of the desert.
Then Kellhus asked her to surrender her water.
Serwë. She’ll lose the baby …
His clear eyes reminded her of who she was: Esmenet. She drew up her waterskin and extended it with unwaveri
ng hands. She watched him pour her muddy life into a stranger’s mouth. And when the last of it trailed like spittle, she understood—she apprehended—and with a brilliance no less ruthless than the sun.
There’s more than me.
Kellhus tossed her waterskin into the dust.
You are the first, his eyes said, and his look was like water—like life.
Her feet scalded by gravel. Her hair feathered by dust. Her lips cracked by the sun. Every breath like burning wool in her throat and chest. And then, impossibly, they came to good, green earth. To Enathpaneah. They stumbled into a rivered valley, into the shade of strange willows. While Serwë dozed he undressed Esmenet, carried her into the transparent waters. He bathed her, washed the velvet dust from her skin.
You are my wife, he said. You, Esmi …
She blinked, and the sun glittered through her water-beaded lashes.
We crossed the desert, he said.
And I, she thought, am your wife.
He laughed, pawed at her face as though embarrassed, and she caught and kissed his sun-haloed palm … The waters that trailed from the flaxen ringlets of his hair and beard had been brown—the colour of dried blood.
Kellhus built a shelter of stone and branches for Serwë. He snared rabbits, rooted for tubers, and made fire by spinning sticks into sticks. For a time, it seemed they alone survived, that all mankind and not just the Holy War had perished. They alone spoke. They alone gazed and understood that they gazed. They alone loved, across all lands and all waters, to the world’s very pale. It seemed all passion, all knowing, was here, ringing in one penultimate note. There was no way to explain or to fathom the sensation. It wasn’t like a flower. It wasn’t like a child’s careless laugh.
They had become the measure … Absolute. Unconditioned.
When they made love in the river, it seemed they sanctified the sea.
You, Esmenet, are my wife.
Burning, submerged in clear waters—in each other … The anchoring ache.
The desert had changed everything.
“Kellhuuus!” Serwë panted between contractions. “Kellhus, I’m afraid!” She groaned and cried out. “Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!”
Kellhus exchanged several words with the Kianene matron, who rinsed Serwë’s inner thighs with steaming water, nodded and grinned. He glanced at Esmenet, then knelt beside the prostrate girl, cupped her shining cheek. She seized his hand and pressed her gasping mouth against it, her blond brows knitted in panic, her look desperate, beseeching.
“Kelluuussss!”
“Everything,” he said, his eyes bright with wonder, “is as it should be, Serwë.”
“You,” the girl exclaimed, gulping air. “You!”
He nodded, as though hearing far more than one enigmatic word. Smiling, he wiped tears from her cheek with the flat of his thumb.
“Me,” he whispered.
For a heartbeat, Esmenet glimpsed herself as though from afar. How could she not catch her breath? She knelt with him, the Warrior-Prophet, over the woman giving birth to his first child …
The world had its habits. Sometimes events would pinch, tickle, or caress—occasionally they would batter—but somehow they always funnelled into the monotony of the half-expected. So many dim happenings! So many moments that shed no light, that marked no turn, that signalled nothing at all, save elemental loss. For her entire life, Esmenet had felt like a child being led by the hand of a stranger, passing through this crowd and that, heading somewhere she knew she shouldn’t go, but fearing too much to ask or to fight.
Where are you taking me?
She had never dared ask this, not because she feared the answer, but because she feared what the answer would make of her life.
Nowhere. Nowhere good.
But now, after the desert, after the waters of Enathpaneah, she knew the answer. Every man she’d bedded, she had bedded for him. Every sin she’d committed, she had committed for him. Every bowl she’d chipped. Every heart she’d bruised. Even Mimara. Even Achamian. Without knowing, Esmenet had lived her entire life for him—for Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
Grief for his compassion. Delusion for his revelation. Sin so he might forgive. Degradation so he might raise her high. He was the origin. He was the destination. He was the from where and the to which, and he was here!
Here!
It was mad, it was impossible, it was true.
When she reflected on it, Esmenet could only laugh in joyous wonder. How distant the holy had always seemed, like the faces of kings and emperors on the coins she’d so coveted. Before Kellhus, all she knew of the holy was that it somehow always found her at the pitch of her misery and humiliation. Like her father, it came in the small hours of the night, whispering threats, demanding submission, promising brevity, solace, and providing only interminable horror and shame.
How could she not hate it? How could she not fear it?
She’d been a whore in Sumna, and being a whore in a holy city was no mean thing. Some of the others jokingly referred to themselves as “cutpurses at the gates to Heaven.” They traded endless, mocking stories about the pilgrims who so frequently wept in their arms. “All that work to see the Tusk,” old Pirasha had once quipped, “and they end up showing it instead!”
And Esmenet had laughed with them, even though she knew those pilgrims wept because they’d failed, because they’d sacrificed crops, savings, and the company of loved ones to come to Sumna. No low-caste man was so foolish as to aspire to wealth or joy—the world was far too capricious. Only redemption, only holiness, lay within their grasp. And there she was swinging her knees in her window, like one of those mad lepers who, for no more reason than spite, threw themselves upon the unafflicted.
How distant that woman now seemed—that whore. How near the Holy …
Serwë wailed and shrieked, her body cramped about the agony of her womb.
The Kianene woman cried out encouragement, grimaced and smiled. Serwë threw her head back into Esmenet’s knees, puffing air, staring with crazed eyes, screaming. Esmenet watched, breathless, her limbs numbed by wonder, her thoughts troubled that something so miraculous could fit so seamlessly into the moment-to-moment banality of life.
“Heba serrisa!” the Kianene woman cried. “Heba serrisa!”
The babe sucked its first breath, gave voice to its first, wailing prayer.
Esmenet stared at the newborn, realizing it was the spoils of her surrendered water. She had suffered so that Serwë might drink, and now there was this squalling babe, this son of the Warrior-Prophet.
There had been branches after all …
Crying, she looked down at Serwë. “A son, Serchaa. You have a son! And he isn’t blue!”
Biting her lip, Serwë smiled, sobbed and laughed. They shared a wise and joyous look no man save Kellhus could understand.
Laughing aloud, he lifted the screeching babe from the midwife’s arms, peered at it searchingly. It quieted, and for a moment seemed to study Kellhus in turn, dumbfounded as only an infant can be. He raised it beneath a glittering thread of water, rinsed the blood and mucus from its face. When it began squalling once again, he cried out in mock surprise, turned to Serwë with tender eyes.
For an instant, just an instant, Esmenet thought she’d heard the voice of someone hated.
He lowered the child and delivered it to Serwë, who cradled it and continued to cry. A sudden grief overcame Esmenet, the rebuke of another’s joy. Keeping her face lowered, she stood, then wordlessly rushed out of the pavilion.
Outside, the men of the Hundred Pillars, Kellhus’s sacred bodyguard, stared in iron-eyed alarm, but made no move to stop her. Even still, she wandered only a short distance among the ad hoc shelters, knowing that some fretting adherent would harass her otherwise. The Zaudunyani, the faithful, maintained an armed perimeter about the encampment at all times—as much to guard against their fellow Men of the Tusk, Kellhus had admitted, as against heathen sorties.
Another thing the dese
rt had changed …
The rain had stopped, and the air was cool and hard with dripping things. The clouds had parted and she could see the Nail of Heaven, like a glittering navel revealed by raised woollen robes. If she lifted her face and stared only at the Nail, she knew she could imagine herself anyplace: Sumna, Shigek, the desert, or even in one of Achamian’s sorcerous Dreams. The Nail of Heaven was the one thing, she thought, that cared nothing for where or when.
Two men—Galeoth by the look of them—trudged toward her through darkness and muck. “Truth shines,” one of them, his face still puckered from what had to be bad desert burns, muttered as they neared. Then they recognized her …
“Truth shines,” Esmenet replied, lowering her face.
She avoided their flustered looks as they passed. “Lady …” one of them whispered, as though choked by wonder. More and more they acted shamefaced and servile in her presence, as though she herself were becoming more and more. Though it made her uncomfortable, their obeisance also thrilled her. And with the passing of the days, it seemed to embarrass her less and please her more. It was no dream.
Notes rasped from the dark horizon. Somewhere, she knew, the Shrial Priests blew their prayer horns, and the orthodox Inrithi knelt before their makeshift shrines. For a moment the sound reminded her of Serwë’s cries, heard from afar.
Her grief tumbled into regret. Why couldn’t she give this moment of joy to Serwë, when in the desert she’d willingly given her her water, when she’d very nearly given her her life? Was it jealousy she felt? No. Jealousy pursed one’s lips into a bitter line. She hadn’t felt bitter …
Had she?
Kellhus is right … We know not what moves us. There was more, always more.
The mud felt cool beneath her toes—so different from furnace sands.
Cries from a nearby tent startled her. It was someone suffering the hollows, she realized. Even as she backed away, she battled the urge to see who it might be, to offer comfort.
“Pleeassse …” a thin voice gasped. “I need … I need …”