For watch after watch, Sorweel rode with the itch of this reminiscence floating within him. No distraction could scratch it away, not even Eskeles at his worst. To his chagrin, the rotund Schoolman insisted on practising language drills no matter who was in their vicinity—Zsoronga and Obotegwa more often than not. On one occasion, the entire company took up his chant, shouting Sheyic numerals across the plains while Sorweel gazed about in despair and disgust. Eskeles seemed to find the spectacle horribly amusing—as did Zsoronga, for that matter.
The Mandate Schoolman proved as much a source of embarrassment as irritation. His mere presence rendered Sorweel a schoolboy, though the man insisted he had been sent as much to chaperone the entire company as to tutor the woefully ignorant King Sorweel of Sakarpus. “The Holy Aspect-Emperor takes his enemies seriously,” the sorcerer said with a glib twinkle in his eye, “and his enemies take their children seriously.” Sorweel found the comment at once laughable and troubling. Eskeles, with his foppish Three Seas beard and portly stature, not to mention his lack of armour or weaponry, seemed almost absurdly defenceless and ineffectual—another soft-pawed leuneraal. And yet Sorweel had no reason to doubt the truth of what he said, that he had been sent to safeguard their company—especially after witnessing the sorcerous destruction of Sakarpus.
At night, Sorweel could almost pretend, when he kept his eyes hooked to the starry heavens, that none of what happened had happened, that the droning voices belonged to his father and his uncles, not the sons of exotic lands and distant kings. This was the time of the Lioning, when the Saglanders planted their crops, and when the male members of House Varalt and their boonsmen rode out into the mountains in search of puma. Since his twelfth summer he had accompanied his father and his uncles, and he adored every moment of it, even though his youth chained him to the hunting camp with his cousins. And he loved nothing more than lying with his eyes closed, listening to his father speak before the late-night fire, not as a king but as a man among others.
The Lioning was how he learned his father was truly funny … and genuinely beloved by his men.
So he would lie with these memories, curl about their warmth. But whenever it seemed he could believe, some dread would lurch out of the nethers and the pretense would blow away like smoke before gusting apprehensions. Zsoronga. The Aspect-Emperor. And the Mother—the Mother most of all.
One question more than any other dominated the crowded commons of his soul. What? What does She want? And it would be the “She” who appalled him the most, who filled his bowel with nervous water. She. Yatwer. The Mother of Birth …
He spent many sleepless watches simply hefting the vertiginous weight of this fact in his thoughts. He found it strange the way one could kneel, even pray with sobbing intensity, and yet never ponder, let alone comprehend, what lay behind the ancient names. Yatwer … What did that holy sound mean? The priests of the Hundred were dark and severe, every bit as harsh as the Tusk Prophets they took as their examples. They brandished the names of their Gods the way stern fathers raised whips: obedience was all they asked for, all they expected. The rest fell out of their hard readings of hard scriptures. For Sorweel, Yatwer had always been dark and nebulous, something too near the root of things, too aboriginal, not to be filled with the sense of peril belonging to sudden knives and fatal falls.
All children come to temple with a fear of smallness, which the priests then work and knead like clay, shaping it into the strange reconciliation-to-horror that is religious devotion, the sense of loving something too terrible to countenance, too hoary to embrace. When he thought about the world beyond what his eyes could see, he saw souls in their innumerable thousands with only frayed threads to hold them, dangling over the gaping black of the Outside, and the shadows moving beneath, the Gods, ancient and capricious, reptilian with indifference, with designs so old and vast that there could only be madness in the small eyes of Men.
And none were so old or so pitiless as the dread Mother of Birth.
That was what her name was: childhood terror.
To be pinched between such things! Yatwer and the Aspect-Emperor … Gods and Demons. Somehow he had been pulled into the world’s threshing wheels, the grinding immensities—small wonder he had been so eager to escape the clamour of the Great Ordeal! Small wonder the travelling sway of his pony, Stubborn, carried the promise of deeper escape.
He posed the question to Zsoronga and his impromptu court one night, careful to conceal the intensity of his interest. Fires were of course forbidden, so they sat side by side facing south, alternately staring into their hands and into the starry heavens: the Kings and Princes of lands cowed but not quite conquered by the New Empire, yearning for homes thrown far over the night horizon. Obotegwa sat dutifully behind them, translating when needed. If anything spurred Sorweel in his language lessons with Eskeles, it was the burden his stupidity had become for the wise old Obligate.
They had been discussing omens and portents, how more and more signs seemed to inveigh against the Aspect-Emperor—none more so than the persisting drought. Charampa, in particular, was convinced that the Anasûrimbor Dynasty’s doom was imminent. “They overreach! Think of their gall! How could they not be punished? I ask you! I ask you!”
Tzing seemed inclined to agree, and as always, no one could fathom Tinurit’s opinion—or whether his smile was in fact a sneer, for that matter. Zsoronga, however, remained skeptical.
“What happens,” Sorweel finally ventured, “if we fail the Gods simply because we don’t know what they demand?”
“Ka sircu alloman …” Obotegwa began droning from behind him.
“Damnation,” Tzing replied. “The Gods care nothing for our excuses.”
“No,” Zsoronga snapped, loud enough to pre-empt Charampa’s eager reply. “Only if we fail to properly honour our ancestors. The Heavens are like palaces, Horse-King. One does not need the King’s permission to enter.”
“Pfah!” Charampa cried, as much to avenge his interruption as otherwise, Sorweel suspected. “Here I thought the Zeümi were too sensible to believe that Inrithi nonsense!”
“No. It is not Inrithi nonsense. Honouring ancestors is far older than the Thousand Temples. You Cingi are as bad as the sausages …” Zsoronga turned to the young King of Sakarpus. “Family survives death. Don’t let this fool tell you different.”
“Yes …” Sorweel replied, listening far too keenly to what was said. This was what it meant to be a conquered people, a part of him realized: to turn to the foreign beliefs of foreign peoples. “But what if your … your family is damned?”
The Successor-Prince watched him appreciatively. “Trempe us mar—”
“Then you must do everything in your power to discover what the Gods do want. Everything.”
Though Zsoronga was not overtly pious, Sorweel knew from previous discussions that the Zeümi had a far different way, not so much of conceiving life and death, as valuing them, a way that made them seem zealots on occasion. Even the peculiarities of Obotegwa’s interpretations revealed as much: the Zeümi used two versions of the same word to speak of life and death, words that roughly translated into “small life” and “great life,” with death being the latter.
“Otherwise?”
The Successor-Prince looked at Sorweel as if he were searching for something.
Grounds for trust?
“Otherwise you are lost.”
The World seems greater in the morning, and Men smaller. The ground shrank beneath the rising sun, scalded into white blindness, so that it seemed they woke on the very edge of creation. Raised hands shielded eyes. Broke-back grasses cast shadows like black wire.
Sorweel had grown up in this country; its imprint lay deep in his soul, so deep that simply looking at it braced him, like legs and a wide stance for his soul. Even still, it dizzied him to think how far they had ridden beyond the Pale. He had been educated, of course, and so knew the Pale for what it was: the northern terminus of Sakarpic power, and not the point wh
ere waking reality tipped into nightmares. But the superstitions of the rabble had a way of steaming upward, of soaking the more worldly understanding of the nobility. Despite his tutors, the Pale remained a kind of moral boundary in his imagination, the line that marked the fading of the good and the gathering of what was evil. Enough to catch his breath when he thought of the miles between him and his holy city. For a company as small as theirs to ride the emptiness as they did, a nagging part of him insisted, was nothing short of madness.
If anything silenced these worries, it was his growing respect for Captain Harnilas. He had not thought much of Old Harni at first. Like many other Scions, he had tried to detest the man, if not for who he was, then for what he represented. Diminishing others is ever the way men raise themselves, and the might of the Aspect-Emperor was such, the glory and the competence of the Kidruhil so obvious, that petty targets like Harnilas seemed to be the only ones remaining.
But the Captain was nothing if not dogged in his warlike wisdom. Gruff. Bearded in manner, even though he shaved like so many of his Nansur countrymen. His scars picked up where his wrinkles left off so that his face seemed tattooed with different sigils depending on the angle and intensity of the light. He so obviously cared so little for what his wards thought of him that they could not but esteem him.
“In Zeüm,” Zsoronga once said, “we call men like him nukbaru, masons … stone-hewers …” After Obotegwa finished translating, the Successor-Prince nodded toward the head of their small column. “Our Captain.”
When Sorweel asked him why, Zsoronga smiled and said, “Because to hew stone you must be stronger than stone.”
“Or smarter,” Eskeles had added.
Riding as they did had a way of nursing and smothering conversations. Sometimes they chattered as loudly as wives filing from Temple. Sometimes they rode in desert silence, with only the arrhythmic gait of their ponies to punctuate the perpetual wind. Usually their talk would be momentary, sparking here, fading there, as though a single animate spirit drifted through them all, drawing thought into voice one by one.
The morning of their tenth day of ranging, they embarked in silence and continued riding that way.
They sighted the elk trail before noon, a mottled water-stain across the linen distances, as broad as a valley. They did not reach it until early afternoon, a thin file of cavalrymen picking their way across land battered by a thousand thousand hoofs, a trail as great as any of the World’s enormities.
Sorweel cursed himself for a fool, such was his relief.
The following day began the same as any other. The elk trail continued its southern arc, resembling the imprint of a curved sword left overlong in the grass, only writ across the entire landscape. The Scions filed through its great trampled heart, silent save for the clank of gear and the warbling of one or two desultory conversations. Even Charampa seemed disinclined to speak. Sorweel rocked in his saddle like the others, listening to the sweep of wind and the low ghost noises it made when it caught his ears.
The first shouts came from the head of the column: a pair of vultures had been sighted to their left. The entire company rode perched in their saddles, fingers pointing, eyes scanning the wandering line of the eastern horizon. The plain seemed to curl and fold more and more as it diminished in the haze, like a mangy carpet kicked against a wall. The sky rose high and endless above.
“We’ve found our herd!” Obotegwa cried, translating Zsoronga’s jubilant words.
Sorweel blinked and squinted, his face angled against the sun’s glare. He found and tracked the two floating specks—even glimpsed the bar of wings riding faraway winds. Before he knew what he was doing, he spurred Stubborn into a gallop. The pony leapt into its stride with almost doglike exuberance. The Scions watched with curiosity and amusement as he pounded to the fore of the line. Captain Harnilas was already scowling at him when he reined Stubborn to a reluctant halt.
“Merus pah veuta je ghasam!” the old cavalryman shouted.
“Captain!” Sorweel cried in Sheyic. With a sweeping gesture he directed the man’s grizzled attention toward the horizon. Then as emphatically as he could he spoke the one word that transcended all the languages of Men.
“Sranc.”
He matched the officer’s hard gaze, noticing, not for the first time, the scar on his left cheek, burn-puckered as though he had once shed a fiery tear. For the first time he saw the small soapstone figurines hanging about his neck: three children joined at the hands and feet, chipping across his cuirass. A strange sense of recognition welled through the young King, a realization that Harnilas, despite his exotic complexion and furious brown eyes, was not so different than his father’s boonsmen, that he chambered his heart, as so many warlike men did, to keep his sense clear of his compassion. Harnilas loved, as all men loved, in the cracks and crevices of a warring world.
Eskeles finally trotted into earshot, gasping as though his pony had ridden him instead of otherwise. Sorweel turned to the Schoolman. “Tell him to study those birds carefully. Tell him that they’re storks—the most holy of birds. Tell him that storks only follow Sranc on the plain.”
Eskeles frowned in his thoughtful way, then relayed the information to Captain Harnilas. Aside from a quick glance at the sorcerer he continued to watch Sorweel intently.
“Sranc,” the Captain repeated. The leathery face turned to squint at the specks floating in the distant sky.
Sorweel pursed his lips and nodded.
“The bird is holy.”
“Your tutor argues that the Sranc should be left to him,” old Obotegwa explained, “so that no lives need be lost. Harnilas disagrees. He thinks the Scions need … practice, even at the cost of lives. Better to begin with an easy blooding, he says, than a hard one.”
They had gradually closed on the high-circling storks over the course of the afternoon, taking care to remain upwind and to use the creases in the broken plain to keep their approach hidden. If Sorweel had entertained any fears regarding Harnilas, they had been allayed by the patient sensibility of his tactics and the thoughtless ease with which he exercised his command. After ascertaining the direction of their march, he angled their pursuit to better intercept their trail: they now knew they followed a warband of some three hundred—a number too small to suggest a migrating clan. They had almost been sighted twice now, crossing the crest of some knoll at the same time as their inhuman quarry, but they had managed to close within a mile of the warband. The sun had smouldered into evening, scorching the western horizon gold and crimson. Now the Company of Scions sheltered in a trough of cool shadow, watching Eskeles argue with their Captain.
The afternoon had been tense, certainly, but far more thrilling than anything else. With the possible exception of the Scylvendi, Tinurit, the Scions rode with grins whipped across their face. A kind of glee had possessed them, one that sparked low snorts of laughter whenever glances were exchanged, childlike in that sneaking way, murderous in its ultimate intent. For his own part, Sorweel felt none of the fear, not a whisper of the cowardice that he had thought would unman him. A limb-gripping eagerness filled him instead, a will to ride down and kill. Even his pony, Stubborn, seemed to sense the impending violence—and to welcome it.
Of course Eskeles was intent on ruining everything. Blasphemer, Sorweel found himself thinking.
Sorweel had no real idea how much influence his tutor wielded; Mandate Schoolmen were rumoured to be more powerful than Judges, but whether this extended to the field, or to Kidruhil Companies particularly, he did not know. He could only hope that their surly old Captain prevailed. Harnilas did not strike him as a particularly political man—which was probably why he had been given the Scions in the first place. Sorweel’s father had told him several times that intriguing killed far more men on the field than otherwise.
The two middle-aged men waved hands and shouted for several moments more, then Eskeles apparently said something either too clever or too impertinent. Harnilas stood in his stirrups and began thu
ndering at the sorcerer, who fairly wilted before the savage display. Sorweel found himself laughing with Zsoronga and Obotegwa.
“Fool!” Eskeles cried in corpulent exasperation as he rejoined them. “The man is a fool!”
“Practice-practice,” Sorweel sang, mimicking the tone the Schoolman took whenever he groaned about language drills. “You’re the one always saying the easy way is never the proper way.”
Zsoronga chortled at Obotegwa’s translation. The Schoolman glared at Sorweel for an angry moment, then collected himself with a harried smile. He looked up to the storks circling high above a crest that bowled the earth before them. Their white spans carried sunset gold. “I pray you prove me right, my King. I really do.”
A chill seemed to creep into the shadow.
Once decided, their pursuit became determined. At Harnilas’s gestured command they fell into wedge formation, rode the rising and falling knolls like a loose-jointed raft on ocean swells. They trotted to prevent winding their horses, a pace that allowed for more than a little excited chatter, though the anxiousness of cresting each rise knocked them into gazing silence.
“They don’t move,” Zsoronga said through Obotegwa. “Why? Have they seen us?”
“Could be,” Sorweel replied, fighting against the breathlessness that pinched his voice. “Or they could be resting … Sranc prefer the night. Sun exhausts them.”
“Then why not use the high ground, where they can keep watch?”
“The sun,” he repeated, speaking through a pang of sudden apprehension. “They hate the sun.”
“And we hate the night … which is why we double our watches.”
The Sakarpi King nodded. “But no Man has walked this land for thousands of years, remember. Why should they keep watch for myths and legends?”
His earlier eagerness seemed to slip out of him, plummet through the soles of his boots. They climbed a slope, riding into their shadows at an angle to the dust that pealed away from them. Everywhere he looked he saw ground, and yet it seemed he rode the lip of a perilous chasm. Vertigo leaned out from him, threatened to pull him from his saddle. There was no certainty, he realized. Anything could happen on the field of war.