The Judging Eye (37 page)

"How much misfortune must
there be?" she heard herself crying.

The White-Luck hunt us...
Hunts us...

"All of the woe the world
has to offer, if need be. So long as we overcome the only one that is
fatal."

The Second Apocalypse.

She was beating his chest
softly, pressing her forehead into the jasmine-scented silk. She could feel the
reptilian imprint of the nimil-mail beneath. Looking up through tears, he
seemed a towering glow and shadow both. "But it's
you
they hunt!
What? Do the Gods
want
a Second Apocalypse? Do they want the world shut
against them?"

She had chosen Kellhus over
Achamian. Kellhus! She had chosen her womb. She had chosen power and sumptuous
ease. She had chosen to lay her hand upon the arm of a living god... Not this!
Not this!

"Come, Esmi. I know
Maithanet has explained this to you."

"B-but it seems... it
s-s-seems..."

"Most live on the edge of
heartbeats, trusting their betters and the blind eyes of habit to see them
further. A rare few can apprehend the span of entire lives. But you and I do
not possess either luxury, Esmi. We must act according to the dictates of the
ages, or there will be no ages for anyone to live. And this makes us appear
cold, merciless, even monstrous, not only to others and ourselves, but to the
Hundred as well.
We walk the Shortest Path,
the labyrinth of the
Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the
burden that the Gods begrudge."

She found herself on the surface
of his voice, for once hearing it with a musician's cold ear: the tunnelling
harmonics, the resonance that forced it into unheard immediacy, the papery rasp
that raised it outside the circle of the world.

The voice that had conquered the
First Holy War, then all the Three Seas. The voice of the King of Kings, the
mortal echo of the God of Gods... The voice that had conquered first her thighs
and then her heart.

She thought of that final
afternoon with Achamian, the day that Holy Shimeh fell.

"I haven't the strength! I
ca-can't b-bear losing any-any-m-more..."

"You
have
the
strength."

"Let Maithanet rule! He's
your brother. He shares your gifts. He should rule..."

"He is Shriah. He cannot be
more."

"But why? Why?"

"Esmi, you have my love, my
trust. I know that you have the strength to do this."

A gust from over the dark sea.
The violet sheers roiled and billowed, parted like gossamer lips.

"The White-Luck," he
whispered in a voice that was the sky, the curve of all horizons, "shall
break against you."

She gazed up at his face through
sting and tears, and it seemed that in it she could see
every
face, the
mien of all those who had bent upon her in Sumna, when she had kept a whore's
bed.

"How? How can you
know?"

"Because the anguish that
makes mud of all your thoughts, because the fear that stains your days, because
all your regret and anger and loneliness..." A haloed hand cupped her
cheek. Blue eyes sounded her to the bottommost fathoms.

"All this makes you
pure."

***

Iothiah...

"Cursed!" Nannaferi
cried. "Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!"

All old voices failed in some
manner; they cracked or they quavered, or they dwindled with the loss of the
wind that once empowered them. But for Psatma Nannaferi, the breaking of her
voice, which had once made her family weep for its melodic purity, seemed to
reveal more than it marred, as though it were but paint, hoary and moulted,
covering something furious and elemental. It struck over the surrounding
clamour, reached deep into the packed recesses of the Catacombs.

Hundreds had gathered, filling
the Charnal Hall with sweat and exertion, crowding the adjacent tunnels,
stamping the detritus across the floors. Torches bobbed like buoys at sea,
casting ovals of illumination across the bowed ceilings, revealing pockets of
expression in the shadowy masses: smiles and howls, mouths fixed about
wonder—disbelieving wonder. Smoke pooled in the dark gaps between the lintels.
Fingers of light probed the niche-pocked walls and the innumerable urns packed
within, cracked and leaning, limned in ages of dust.

"Cursed be the thief!"
Nannaferi shrieked. "For he who dines on the fortune of others is a
bringer of famine!"

She stood naked before them,
wearing her skin like a beggar's rags. White-painted sigils sheathed her arms
to the pit and her legs to the crotch, but her torso and genitals gleamed,
adorned only in sweat. She stood withered and diminutive before them, and yet
she towered, so that it seemed that her blood-soaked hair should brush the low
ceilings.

And
he
sat before her,
naked and immobile on a beaten chair. A slave's chair.

The White-Luck Warrior.

"Cursed be the homicide,
the
murderer
, he who lies in wait to slay his brother!"

She parted her hairless legs,
paused so that all could see slick lines of blood running from her shining
pudenda. And she grinned a proud and vicious grin, as though to say,
Yes!
Witness the strength that is my womb! The Great Giver, the Son Bearer, the
gluttonous Phallus Eater!

Yes! The Blood of my
Fertility flows still!

The ecstatics immediately before
her wept at the miracle, stared with the eyes of the strangled, tore their hair
and gnashed their teeth. And their rapture became grounds for the rapture of
the cohort behind them, and so on, through tunnel after forking tunnel, until a
thousand voices roared through the closeted deeps.

"Cursed be
whore
!"
she cried, not needing to read the text, the
Sinyatwa
, on the scuffed
stone at her feet. "Cursed be she who lies with men for gold over seed,
for power over obedience, for lust over love!"

She bent as though to abuse
herself. With the blade of her right palm, she scraped a line of blood, drawing
it up to the creases of her swollen sex. She huffed in pleasure, then raised
her bloody palm for all to see.

"Cursed be the false—the
deceivers of men!
Cursed be the Aspect-Emperor!
"

There are pitches of passion
that are holy simply for the intensity of their expression. There is worship
beyond the caged world of words. Psatma Nannaferi's hatred had long ago burned
away the impurities, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so
often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the homicidal
outrage of the betrayed, the unwavering fury of the degraded and the
dispossessed. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way
murder and fire can cleanse.

And at long last she had found
her knife.

She stepped over the scriptures,
pressed the slack pouches of her breasts against the sweat of his neck and
shoulders. She reached around him with her arms. Holding her right palm like a
palette, she dipped the third finger of her left hand into her issue, then
marked him: a horizontal line along each of his cheeks.

They gleamed menstrual crimson.
Wurrami, the ancient counterpart of the thraxami, the lines of ash used by
mourning mothers.

"Ever!" she cried.
"Ever have we dwelt in the shadow of the Whip and Club. Ever have we been
despised—we,
the Givers!
We,
the weak!
But the Goddess knows!
Knows why they beat us, why they leash us, why they starve and violate us! Why
they do everything save kill!"

She prowled around him, raised
her buttocks across his hips. With a shrill cry, she thrust down, encompassed
him to his grunting foundation. A broken chorus of cries passed through the
congregation, as the penetration was multiplied in heart and eye.

"Because without Givers,"
she shouted in a voice hoarse for passion—doubly broken, "there is nothing
for them to take! Because without slaves, there can be no masters! Because we
are the wine that they imbibe, the bread that they eat, the cloth that they
soil, the walls that they defend! Because we are the truth of their power! The
prize they would conquer!"

And she could feel it: he the
centre of her, and she the circumference of him—an ache encircled by fire. Hoe
and Earth! Hoe and Earth! She was an old crone splayed across a boy, her eyes
the red of blood, his the white of seed. The crowd before them bucked and
heaved, a cauldron of avid faces and sweat-slicked limbs.

"We shall stoke!" she
moaned and roared. "We shall foment! We shall teach those who give what it
means to take!"

And she slid, drawing her loose
buttocks across the plate of his abdomen. His was the body of a man newly wed—a
father of but one child. Slender, golden for the perfection of its skin. Not
yet bent to the harshness of the world, to the toil that all giving exacts.

Not yet strong.

"There is the knife that
cuts," she croaked, "and there is the sea that drowns. Always we have
been the latter. But now! Now that the White-Luck has come to us, we are
both
,
my Sisters! On our seas they shall founder! And on our knife they shall
fall!"

She rode the hook of him harder
and harder, until he convulsed and screamed. The earth shook—the unborn kicking
at the Mother's womb. Gravel streamed from the ceilings. And she could feel the
hot flood him, the outward thrust. And then, with his slumping, a kind of
inward breath—and it was her turn to jerk rigid and scream. She could feel her
strength fill him, the knitting of muscle across his frame, the scarring, the
aging
strong
of a body wracked by years in the world. The soft hands that clawed
her chest became horned with calluses, thick with throttling strength, even as
her scrotal breasts rounded, lifted in the memory of a more tender youth. The
smooth cheek against her neck became leathery with unlived seasons, gravelly
with the memory of another's pox.

And as youth washed through her,
drawing a thousand thousand wrinkles into smooth swales of skin, the mad faces
encircling her surged forward, clutching at the sodden floor beneath their
feet...

Beaten and battered she had been
tipped in libation. And now the dread Goddess raised her, a bowl cast of gold.

A vessel. A grail. A cup filled
with the Waters-Most-Holy. The Blood and the Seed.

"Cursed!" she shrieked
in a singer's heart-cutting voice, high and pure, yet warmed by the memory of
her authoritarian rasp. She watched as the Blood of her Fertility was passed
among the throngs, a never-diminishing pool that was passed from palm to palm.
She watched the Ur-Mother's children mark their cheeks with the red line of
hatred...

"Cursed be he who misleads
the blind man on the road!"

CHAPTER TEN

Condia

Look unto others and ponder
the sin and folly you find there.

For their sin is your sin,
and their folly is your folly.

Seek ye the true reflecting
pool?

Look to the stranger you
despise, not the friend you love.

—
Tribes 6:42,
The Chronicle of the Tusk

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132
Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia

The Istyuli Plains dominated the
heart of Eärwa, running from the northern back of the Hethantas to the southern
spurs of the Yimaleti. It seemed hard to believe that this region had birthed
dynasties and toppled empires before the First Apocalypse and the coming of the
Sranc, consisting as it did of nothing more than endless sheaves of arid
grassland.

In the days of Far Antiquity, a
schism opened between the western Norsirai tribes, the High Norsirai, who under
the tutelage of the Nonmen raised the first great literate civilization of Men
along the banks of the River Aumris, and their eastern kin, the White Norsirai,
who clung to the nomadic ways of their ancient fathers. For an entire age the
Istyuli formed the barbaric hinterland of the High Norsirai nations that rose
and fell about the great river cities of the west: Trysë, Sauglish, Umerau, and
others. The tribes of White Norsirai who roamed and warred across the plains
sometimes raided, sometimes bartered with, and continually despised their
earth-tilling cousins to the west. The fewer the roads the harsher the codes,
as the ancient Kûniüric proverb had it. And periodically, when united beneath
the tyranny of some powerful tribe or personality, they invaded and conquered.

To the north of Sakarpus, the
Istyuli Plains still bore the name of one of those conquering peoples, the
Cond.

Nothing remained to mark their
passing: The Cond, like most pastoral peoples, were primarily remembered for
works destroyed rather than works raised. For the Men of the Ordeal, only the
name connected the sloped terrain to the legends of their long-dead glory. They
were accustomed to the rumour of lost peoples and nations, for their own lands
had stacked them deep. But there was a melancholy attached to their thoughts of
the Cond. Where the far antique peoples of the Three Seas had been replaced by
other peoples, the end of the wild-haired horsemen of the Cond had been the end
of Men on these plains. Proof of this lay in those signs of habitation the
Inrithi did find: great heaps of bone sucked to the marrow, and swaths of turf
overturned not by plows, but by claws hungry for grubs.