Read The Warrior Prophet Online
Authors: R. Scott Bakker
The Warrior Prophet (107 page)
Near the centre, opposite the Circumfix, screaming mastodons lumbered forward, their howdahs packed with black-faced Girgashi wearing blue turbans and bearing shields of red-lacquered cowhide. But daring outriders, Anpliean knights under Palatine Gaidekki, had raced forward, setting dead winter grasses and thickets aflame. Oily smoke tumbled skyward, pulled to the southeast by the wind. Several mastodons panicked, causing uproar among King Pilaskanda’s Hetmen. But most crashed through the smoke and stamped trumpeting into the Inrithi’s midst. Soon little could be seen. Smoke and chaos enveloped the Mark of the Circumfix.
Everywhere along the line Fanim horsemen crested rises, burst from citrus groves, or galloped clear of drifting smoke—magnificent divisions of them. Great Cinganjehoi, leading the proud Grandees of Eumarna and Jurisada, swept into the walking lines of Ainoni: Kishyati and Moserothu under Palatines Soter and Uranyanka. Farther to the south, the Grandees of Chianadyni assembled along the summits of the rising hills, awaiting King Saubon and his marching ranks of Galeoth. Wearing wide-sleeved khalats and Nilnameshi chainmail, they charged down the slopes, riding thoroughbreds raised on the hard frontiers of the Great Salt. Crown Prince Fanayal and his Coyauri struck Earl Anfirig’s blue-tattooed Gesindalmen, then swept into the confused lines of the Agmundrmen under Saubon’s personal command.
Along Caraskand’s walls the infirm cried and howled to their kinsmen, struggling to see what happened. But through the thundering drums, over the ululating war cries of the heathen, they could hear their brothers sing. Smoke obscured the centre, but nearer the walls they saw the Tydonni stand firm before flurries of Fanim horsemen, fighting with grim and preternatural determination. Suddenly Earl Werijen Greatheart and the knights of Plaideöl broke forward, riding what few nags they possessed, and shattered the astonished Kianene. Then far to the south, someone sighted Athjeäri and the inveterate knights of Gaenri streaming down dark slopes, crashing into the rear of the Chianadyni. Saubon had sent his young nephew to counter any flanking manoeuvres in the hills. After breaking and pursuing the division of cavalry Kascamandri had sent for this very purpose, the brash Earl of Gaenri found himself auspiciously positioned in the heathen’s rear.
The Fanim fell back in disarray, while before them, all across the Fields of Tertae, the singing Inrithi resumed their forward march. Many upon the walls limped eastward, toward the Gate of Horns, where they could see the first Men of the Tusk fight clear the smoke of the centre and press onward in the wake of retreating Girgashi horsemen. Then they saw it, the Circumfix, fluttering white and unsullied in the wind …
As though driven by inevitability, the iron men marched forward. When the heathen charged, they grabbed at bridles and were trampled. They punched spears deep into the haunches of Fanim horses. They fended hacking swords, pulled heathen shrieking to the ground, where they knifed them in the armpit, face, or groin. They shrugged off piercing arrows. When the heathen relented, some Men of the Tusk, the madness of battle upon them, hurled their helms at the fleeing horsemen. Time and again the Kianene charged, broke, then withdrew, while the iron men trudged on, through the olive trees, across the fallow fields. They would walk with the God—whether he favoured them or no.
But the Kianene were a proud, warlike people, and the host the Padirajah had assembled was great both in number and in heart. Though dismayed, the pious Warriors of the Solitary God were not undone. Kascamandri himself took to the field, hoisted by his slaves upon the back of a massive horse. Outdistancing the Inrithi, division after division of Fanim horsemen reformed on the outskirts of the Padirajah’s camp. Men cast about for sign of the Cishaurim. Then King Pilaskanda, the Padirajah’s tributary and friend, loosed the last of the mastodons upon the black-armoured Thunyeri.
The beasts stormed into the Auglishmen under Earl Goken the Red. Men were gored on great winding tusks, tossed and broken by trunks, split like sacks of fruit beneath colossal stamping feet. From the armoured howdahs strapped to the animals’ backs, Girgashi sent arrows into the faces of those shouting below. Then the giant Yalgrota felled one singlehanded, hammering the beast’s head with a mighty cudgel. The flint-hearted Auglishmen rallied, hewing the trumpeting beasts with axe and sword. Some mastodons toppled, pulled down by a hundred wounds; others panicked before the fire Prince Hulwarga brought against them and began rampaging through the Girgashi horsemen crowded in their rear.
Across the Tertae Plain, waves of Kianene cavalrymen descended upon the advancing Inrithi. Those watching from the Gate of Horns saw the Padirajah’s White Tiger close with the Circumfix. They saw the standards of Gaidekki and Ingiaban falter while those of the Nansur crept forward. The stout-hearted infantrymen of the Selial Column hacked their way into the Padirajah’s camp. Then the drums of the heathen went silent, and all the world seemed awash in Inrithi voices raised in triumph and song. Cinganjehoi fled the field. The giant Cojirani, the bloodthirsty Grandee of Mizrai, was slain by Proyas, the Prince of Conriya. Kascamandri, the glorious Padirajah of Kian, fell jawless and dying at the sandalled feet of the Warrior-Prophet. His jowled head was mounted upon the standard of the Circumfix. But his precious children escaped, spirited away by slippery Fanayal, the oldest of his sons.
Pinioned between the advancing Inrithi and the fallen camp, the Grandees of Chianadyni and Girgash charged and charged, but the Galeoth and Ainoni shrugged away their desperation and closed with them. The Men of the Tusk wept as they butchered the despairing heathen, for never had they known such dark glory.
And in the wake of the battle, some climbed the mastodon carcasses, held their swords out to the glare of the sun, and understood things they did not know.
The Holy War had been absolved.
Forgiven.
The surviving Grandees were strung from many-boughed sycamores, and in the evening light they hung, like drowned men floating up from the deep. And though years would pass, none would dare touch them. They would sag from the nails that fixed them, collapse into heaps about the base of their trees. And to anyone who listened, they would whisper a revelation … The secret of battle.
Indomitable conviction. Unconquerable belief.
Woollen cloak and furs raised against the rain, Aëngelas rode, part of a long file of horsemen plodding across the Plains of Gâl through never-ending curtains of falling grey. They followed a wide trail of trampled grasses. Now and anon someone would find the untrammelled footprint of a child, small and innocent, dimpling the mud. Men Aëngelas had known his entire life—strong men—wept aloud at the sight.
They called themselves the Werigda, and they searched for their missing wives and children. Two days before they had returned to their camp, warriors flushed with success in the ways of small war, and had found destruction and slaughter instead of their loved ones. Inveterate fighters became panicked husbands and fathers, sprinting through the wreckage crying names. But when they realized their families had been taken and not killed, they became warriors again. And they’d ridden, driven by love and terror.
By mid-morning, colossal stoneworks resolved from the sheets of rain and reared above them: the moss- and lichen-crowded ruins of Myclai, once the capital of Akssersia and the greatest city of the Ancient North save Trysë. Aëngelas knew nothing of the Old Wars, or of ancient and proud Akssersia, but he understood his people were descendants of the Apocalypse. They dwelt among the unearthed bones of greater things.
They followed the track over mounds, beneath headless pillars, and along walls spilling into gravel. The Sranc they followed, Aëngelas knew, were neither Kig’krinaki nor Xoägi’i, the clans that had been their rivals since time immemorial. They followed a different, more wicked clan—one never before encountered. Some of them were even horsed—something unheard of for the Sranc.
They passed through dead Myclai in silence, deaf to her rebuke for the unruined.
By evening the rains had stopped, but deepening cold was added to their horror, and their shivers became shudders. That night they found a firepit, and Aëngelas, poking through the black ash with his knife, retrieved a small pile of little bones. Children’s bones. The Werigda gnashed their teeth and howled at the dark heavens.
There could be no sleep that night, so they rode on. The plains seemed a heart-stopping hollow, a great funerary shroud, exposed at all points to abyssal portent, to impossibly cruel designs. What had they done? How had they angered the man-pummelling Gods? Had the Stag-Flame burned too low? Had the sacrificial calves been diseased?
Two more days of wet, shivering fury. Two more days of trembling horror. Aëngelas would see the tracks of barefoot women and children, and he would remember their burnt homes, the bodies of the tribe’s adolescents strewn amidst the wreckage, desecrated in unspeakable ways. And he would remember his wife’s frightened eyes before he’d left with the others to raid the Xoägi’i. He would remember her words of premonition.
“Do not leave us, Aënga … The Great Ruiner hunts for us. I’ve seen him in my dreams!”
Another firepit, more small bones. But this time the ashes were warm. The very ground seemed to whisper with the screams of their loved ones.
They were near. But both they and their horses, Aëngelas told them, were too weary for the grim work of battle. Many were dismayed by these words. Whose child would the Sranc eat, they cried, while they tossed on the hard ground? All of them, Aëngelas said, if the Werigda failed to win the morrow’s battle. They must sleep.
That night anguished cries awakened him. Pale, callused hands dragged him from his mat, and he drove his knife through the belly of his assailant. The thunder of hooves crashed around him, and he was struck face first into the turf. He struggled to his knees, crying out to his men, but the gibbering shadows were upon him. His arms were wrenched behind him and cruelly bound. He was stripped of his clothes.
With the other survivors, Aëngelas was driven through the night, pulled by a leather thong cut into his lips. He wept as he ran, knowing all was lost. No more would he make love to Valrissa, his wife. No more would he tease his sons as they sat about the evening fire. Over and over, through the agony of his face, he asked:
What have we done to deserve this? What have we done?
What have we done to deserve this? What have we done?
By the wicked glare of torchlight he saw the Sranc, with their narrow shoulders and dog-deep chests, surfacing from the night as though from the depths of the Sea. Inhumanly beautiful faces, as white as polished bone; armour of lacquered human skin; necklaces of human teeth; and the shrunken faces of men stitched into their round shields. He smelled their sweet stench—like feces and rotted fruit. He heard the nightmarish clacking of their laughter, and from somewhere in the night, the shrieks of the Werigda’s horses as they were slaughtered.
And periodically he saw the Nonmen, tall upon their silk-black steeds. What Valrissa had dreamed, he realized, was true: the Great Ruiner hunted them! But why?
They reached the Sranc encampment in the grey light of dawn, a string of naked, brutalized men. A great chorus of wails greeted them—women crying names, children howling
“Da! Daa!”
The Sranc led them into the midst of their huddled loved ones, and in an act of curious mercy, cut them loose. Aëngelas flew to Valrissa and his only remaining son. Wracked by sobs he hugged both of them, clutched at their bent backs. And for an instant he felt hope in the pale warmth of degraded bodies.
“Da! Daa!”
The Sranc led them into the midst of their huddled loved ones, and in an act of curious mercy, cut them loose. Aëngelas flew to Valrissa and his only remaining son. Wracked by sobs he hugged both of them, clutched at their bent backs. And for an instant he felt hope in the pale warmth of degraded bodies.
“Where’s Ileni?” he hissed.
But his wife could only cry “Aënga! Aëngaaa!”
The respite, however, was short-lived. Those men who couldn’t find their families, who either knelt alone in the frozen mud or raced screaming and searching for faces now dead, were butchered. Then those wives and children without husbands were also hacked to silence, until only those who had been reunited remained.
Under the dark eyes of the Nonmen, the Sranc then began beating the survivors into two rows, until the Werigda were drawn in long threads across snow and dead winter grasses, husbands opposite their wives and children.
Leashed to an iron spike hammered into the ground, Aëngelas cringed from the cold and threw himself over and over against the braided thongs that held him from his wife and son. He spat and raged at the passing Sranc. He tried to summon heartening words, words that might let his family endure, that might grace them with dignity for what was about to come. But he could only weep their names, and curse himself for not strangling them earlier, for not saving them from what was about to happen.
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