The Judging Eye (29 page)

For the first time something
resembling compassion crossed the Prince-Imperial's face. He breathed as though
gathering wind for crucial words. "You are the warlike son of a warlike
people, Sorweel. Remain in Sakarpus, and you will be little more than a carefully
managed captive. Even worse, you will never resolve the turmoil that even now
chokes your heart. Ride with me and my brother, and you will see, one way or
another, what kind of king you must be."

He scarce understood what was
happening, so how could he know what he should or shouldn't do? But there was
heart to be found in the sound of resolution. And besides, he was developing a
talent for petulant remarks. "As I said," Sorweel replied, "what
choice."

Anasûrimbor Kayûtas nodded,
rather like a field surgeon regarding his handiwork, Sorweel thought.

It is enough that I obey...

"The slave who brought you
here," the Prince-Imperial continued in a by-the-way tone, "is named
Porsparian. He's from Shigek, an ancient land to the south of—"

"I know where it is."

Had it come to this? Had it come
to the point where interrupting his oppressors could count as vengeance?

"Of course you do,"
Kayûtas replied with a partially suppressed grin. "Porsparian has a
facility with tongues. Until I find you an instructor, you will practise your
Sheyic with him..." Trailing, the man leaned across the table to lift a
sheaf of papyrus between his fore and index fingers.

He held it our to Sorweel,
saying, "Here."

"What is it?"

"A writ of bondage.
Porsparian is now yours."

The young King blinked. He had
stared at the slave's back so long he could scarcely remember what he looked
like. He took the sheet in his hands, stared at the incomprehensible
characters.

"I know," Kayûtas
continued, "that you will treat him well."

At that, the Prince-Imperial
returned to his reading, acting for all the world as if their conversation had
never happened. Numb save where the sheet burned his fingertips, Sorweel
retreated. Just as he turned to cross the threshold, Kayûtas's voice brought
him up short.

"Oh, yes, and one final
thing," he said to the papyrus. "My elder brother, Moënghus... Beware
him."

The young King tried to reply
but came to a stammering halt. He grimaced, breathed past the hammering of his
heart, then tried again. "Wh-why is that?"

"Because," Kayûtas
said, his eyes still ranging the inked characters, "he's quite mad."

***

Stepping from the
Prince-Imperial's pavilion, Sorweel told himself he blinked for the sharpness
of the sun. But his burning cheeks and aching throat knew better, as did his
sparrow-light hands.

What am I to do?

The shouts of the cavalrymen
carried on the wind, followed by a caw-cawing of a horn, high and shrill above
the bone-deep din that was the Great Ordeal. The sound seemed to cut, to peel,
expose him past the skin.

How many kings? How many
grim-souled men?

What was Sakarpus compared to
any nation of the Three Seas, let alone the might and majesty that was the New
Empire? A god for an emperor. The sons of a god for generals. An entire world
for a bastion. Sorweel had heard the reports of his father's spies in the weeks
preceding the Ordeal's assault on the city. Shit-herders. This was what the Men
of the Three Seas called him and his kinsmen...

Shit-herders.

A blank feeling reached through
him, like forgetting to breathe, only more profound. What would his father say,
seeing him unmanned time and again, not because of the wiles or the
ruthlessness of their enemy, but because of... because of...

Loneliness?

The slave, Porsparian, watched
him from the shadow of their horses. Not knowing what to do, Sorweel simply
walked up and passed the writ of bondage to him.

"I..." he started,
only to gag on welling tears. "I-I..."

The old man gawked in voiceless
alarm. He grasped Sorweel's forearms and gently pressed the writ against the
padded fabric of his parm tunic. And Sorweel could only think, Wool, here
stands the King dressed in woollen rags.

"I failed him!"
he
sobbed to the uncomprehending slave.
"Don't you see? I failed!"

The old Shigeki gripped him by
the shoulders, stared long and hard into his anguished eyes. The man's face, it
seemed, was not so different from the writ Sorweel held against his breast:
smooth save where scored with lines of unknown script, across the forehead,
about the eyes and snout, as dark as any ink, as if the god who had carved him
had struck too deep with the knife.

"What do I do?"
Sorweel murmured and gasped. "What do I do now?"

The man seemed to nod, though
the yellow eyes remained fixed, immobile. Gradually, for reasons Sorweel could
not fathom, his breathing slowed and the roaring in his ears fell away.

Porsparian led him to his
quarters, taking too many turns for Sorweel to ever hope to remember. The tent
was large enough for him to stand in, and furnished with nothing more than a
cot for himself and a mat for his slave. For most of the afternoon, he laid in
a bleary reverie, staring at the white fabric, watching it rise and fall like
the shirt of a slumbering little brother. He paid no attention to the porters
when they arrived with his meagre collection of things. He held his father's
torc for a time, an age-old relic of the Varalt Dynasty, stamped with the seal
of his family: the tower and two-headed wolf. He pulled it to his breast,
clutched it so tight he was sure the sapphires had cut him. But when he looked
there was no blood, only a quick-fading impression.

King Proyas arrived as the tent
panels became waxen in the failing light. He said a few jocular words in
Sheyic, perhaps hoping to hearten with his tone. When Sorweel failed to
respond, the Exalt-General stared at the young King with a kind of magisterial
remorse, as though seeing in him some image from his own not-so-kindly past.

Porsparian knelt with his
forehead to the ground for the entirety of visit.

After Proyas left, the two sat
in utter silence, king and slave, pondering the way the rising dark made
everything transparent to the encampment's evening chorus. Singing warriors.
Churlish horses. Then, when the darkness was almost complete, they heard
someone, a Kidruhil trooper, relieving himself behind the tent's far corner.
Sorweel found himself smiling at the old Shigeki, who was little more than a
silhouette sitting on the ground a length away. When the trooper farted,
Porsparian abruptly cackled, rocked to and fro with his spindly legs caught in
his arms. He laughed the way a child might, gurgling against the back of his
throat. The effect was so absurd that Sorweel found himself howling with the
mad old man.

Afterwards, Sorweel sat on the
end of his cot while Porsparian busied himself lighting a lantern. Everything
seemed bare in the light, exposed. Without explanation, the old Shigeki
disappeared through the flap, into the dread world that murmured and rumbled
beyond the greased canvas. Sorweel stared at the lantern, which was little more
than a wick in a bronze bowl, until it seemed his sight must be marred forever.
The point of light seemed so clear, so whispering pure, that he could almost
convince himself that burning was the most blissful of death of all.

He looked away only when
Porsparian returned bearing unleavened bread and a steaming bowl—some kind of
stew. The scent of pepper and other exotic spices bloomed through the tent, but
Sorweel, as gaunt as he was, had no appetite. After some urging, he finally
convinced the slave to eat the entire meal instead of, as Sorweel surmised,
waiting on whatever scraps he might leave.

He thought it strange the way
Men did not need to share a language to speak about food.

He sat on the end of his cot as
before, watching the diminutive Shigeki. Without a whisper of
self-consciousness, the man pulled aside one of the rough-woven reed mats,
revealing a patch of bruised turf. He parted the grasses, cooing in a strange
voice as he combed his fingers through them, then he began praying over the
line of bare earth he had uncovered. In a moment of almost embarrassing
intensity, Porsparian pressed his cheek against the ground, hard, the way an
adolescent might grind against a willing lover. He muttered something—a prayer,
Sorweel supposed—in a language far more guttural than Sheyic. Holding his hand
like a spatula, he pressed a slot into the black soil—a ritual mouth, Sorweel
realized moments afterwards, when Porsparian placed a small portion of bread
into it.

By some trick of the light, it
actually seemed as if the earthen mouth
closed
.

Smacking his lips with
satisfaction, the cryptic little man rolled onto his rump and began fingering
the food into his own grey-and-yellow-toothed mouth.

Though Porsparian ate with crude
honesty of a Saglander, Sorweel could not help but see a kind of sad poetry to
his feasting. The inward pleasure of his eyes, the crook in his wrists as he
raised each stew-soaked gob of bread, the slight, backward tilt of his head as
he opened his dark-brown lips. The young King wondered how it could be that two
men so dissimilar, a world apart in age, station, and origin, could
share
such
a moment. Neither of them talked—what could they say, with their tongues
wrapped around different sounds for similar meanings? But even if they could
have spoken to each other, Sorweel was certain they would have said nothing.
Everything, it seemed, was manifest.

Nothing needed to be spoken
because all could be seen.

Sitting as he sat, watching as
he watched, a kind of wild generosity seized him, that glad-hearted madness
that emptied coffers and pockets. Without thinking, he reached under the cot
and retrieved the writ of bondage that Kayûtas had given him that very morning.
What did it matter, he thought, when he was already dead? For the first time he
thought he understood the freedom that lay concealed in the cold bosom of loss.

Porsparian, suddenly wary, had
set down his bowl to watch him. Sorweel stepped past him to squat over the
lantern, strangely conscious of the way his shadow swallowed the rear quarters
of the tent. He held the papyrus out, so the light glowed through the pulped
lines of the reeds used to make the sheets. Then he touched it to the tear-drop
flame...

Only to have the writ snatched
away by a stamping and cursing Porsparian. Sorweel jumped upright, even raised
his hands—for a bewildered moment he thought the old slave was about to strike
him. But the man merely flapped the sheet until the flame went out. Its
uppermost edges were curled and blackened, but it was otherwise intact.
Breathing heavily, the two regarded each other for a crazed moment, the king
slack and bewildered, the slave braced with old man defiance.

"We are a free
people," Sorweel said, warring against a renewed sense of dread and
futility. "We don't trade Men like cattle."

The yellow-eyed Shigeki shook
his head in a slow and deliberate manner. As though relinquishing a knife, he
set the writ onto the mussed blankets of Sorweel's cot.

Then he did something
inexplicable.

Bending at the waist over the
lantern, he drew his finger along the edges of the flame, oblivious to the
heat. Straightening, he pulled aside his tunic, revealing an old man's sunken
chest—wild grey hairs across nut-brown skin. With the lamp-black on his
fingertip, he traced what Sorweel immediately recognized as a sickle over his heart.

"Yatwer," the man
breathed, his eyes alight with a kind of embittered intensity. He reached out,
gripped the young King by the arm.
"Yatwer!"

"I-I don't
understand," Sorweel stammered. "The Goddess?"

Porsparian let his hand slide
down Sorweel's arm—a strangely possessive gesture. He grasped the young King's
wrist, ran a thumb along his horsing bracelet before turning his hand palm
outward. "Yatwer," he whispered, his eyes brimming with tears.
Drawing Sorweel's palm between them, he leaned forward and kissed the
soft-skinned basin.

Fire climbed the young King's
skin. He tried to yank his hand back, but the old man held him with the
strength of newly cast stocks. He rolled his age-creased face above Sorweel's
palm, as if drowsing to some unheard melody. A single tear tapped the spot
where his lips had touched...

It seemed to burn and cut all at
once, like something molten falling through snow.

Then the slave uttered a single
word in Sakarpic, so sudden and so clear that Sorweel nearly jumped.

"War..."

***

He was in awe of these people.
Their devious refinement. Their labyrinthine ways. Their faith and their
sorcery. Even their slaves, it seemed, possessed enigmatic power.

For watch after watch, Sorweel
lay rigid in his cot, holding his own hand, pressing the impossible blister on
his palm. Porsparian slept across the ground in the near darkness, his
breathing broken by a periodic cough and wheeze. When he at last learned their
language, Sorweel decided, he would tease the man for snoring like an old
woman.