The Judging Eye (15 page)

"Are they that bad?"
she asks in the lame silence. She can scarce see him past the combination of
her tears and the fire's glare: an old and rutted face, one that has seen
much—too much—and yet has not forgotten how to be tender or honest.

He winks at her before gazing
down to fiddle with his pouch and pipe. He stuffs the bowl, his look both
pensive and sealed. He picks up a twig from the fire's edge; a small flame
twirls from the end of it.

"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 various 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..."