Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (21 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet

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The prohibitions against astrology were as severe as those against witchcraft. The future was too valuable to be shared with caste-menials.
“Better to be a whore, Esmi,”
her mother would say.
“Stones are nothing more than far-flung fists. Better to be beaten than to be burned …”

How old had she been? Eleven?

“She knew, which was why she refused to teach me …”

“She was wise.”

Meditative silence. Esmenet struggled with an unaccountable anger.

“Do you think they speak our future, Akka? The stars?”

A momentary pause. “No.”

“Why?”

“The Nonmen believe the sky is endlessly empty, an infinite void …”

“Empty? How could that be?”

“Even more, they think the stars are faraway suns.”

Esmenet wanted to laugh, but then, as though suddenly seeing
through
her reflection across waters, she saw the plate of heaven dissolve into impossible depths, emptiness heaped upon emptiness, hollow upon hollow, with stars—no suns!—hanging like points of dust in a shaft of light. She caught her breath. Somehow the sky had become a vast, yawning pit. Without thinking, she clenched the grasses, as though she stood upon a ledge rather than lay across the ground.

“How could they believe such a thing?” she asked. “The sun moves in circles about the world. The stars move in circles about the Nail.” The thought struck her that the Nail of Heaven itself might be another world, one with a thousand thousand suns. Such a sky that would be!

Achamian shrugged. “Supposedly that’s what the Inchoroi told them. That they sailed here from stars that were suns.”

“And you believe them, the Nonmen? That’s why you don’t think the stars weave our fate?”

“I believe them.”

“But you still believe the future is written …” The air became hard between them, the surrounding grasses as sharp as wire. “You believe Kellhus is the Harbinger.”

She realized she’d been speaking of Kellhus all along. Prince Kellhus.

A heartbeat of silence. The sound of laughter over ruined walls—Kellhus and Serwë.

“Yes,” Achamian said.

Esmenet held her breath. “What if he’s more? More than the Harbinger …”

Achamian rolled onto his side, propped his head on his palm. For the first time, Esmenet saw the tears coursing down his cheeks. He’d been crying all along, she realized. All along.

He suffers … More than I can ever know.

“You understand,” he said. “You see why he torments me, don’t you?”

Her skin recalled the path of Sarcellus’s finger along her inner thigh. She shuddered, thought she heard Serwë moaning in the dark, gasping …

“I asked you,”
Kellhus had said,
“to tell me what it was like.”

She no longer wanted to run.

“The Mandate cannot know, Akka … We must bear this burden alone.”

Achamian pursed trembling lips. Swallowed. “We?”

Esmenet looked back to the stars. One more language she could not read.

“We.”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE PLAINS OF MENGEDDA

Why must I conquer, you ask? War makes clear. Life or Death.
Freedom or Bondage. War strikes the sediment from the water
of life.

—TRIAMIS I,
JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

Early Summer, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, near the Plains of Mengedda

Cnaiür had known something was amiss long before sighting the fields of trampled pasture and dead firepits: too little smoke on the horizon, and too few scavenging birds in the sky. When he mentioned this to Proyas, the Prince had blanched, as though he’d confirmed a festering concern. When they crested the last of the hills and saw that only the Conriyans and the Nansur remained beneath Asgilioch’s walls, Proyas had fallen into an apoplectic fury, fairly shrieking curses as he whipped his horse down the slopes.

Cnaiür, Xinemus, and the other Conriyan caste-nobles comprising their party chased him all the way to Conphas’s headquarters, where the Exalt-General explained, in his infuriatingly glib way, that the morning of the day previous, Coithus Saubon had decided to make the most of Proyas’s absence. The Shrial Knights, of course, couldn’t lay hoof or boot in the tracks of another when it came to heathen land, and as for Gothyelk, Skaiyelt, and their barbaric kinsmen, how could they be expected to distinguish fools from wise men, what with all that hair in their eyes?

“Didn’t you argue with them?” Proyas had cried. “Didn’t you reason?”

“Saubon wasn’t interested in reason,” Conphas replied, speaking, as he always did, as though intellectually filing his nails. “He was listening to a louder voice—apparently.”

“The God?” Proyas asked.

Conphas laughed. “I was going to say ‘greed,’ but, yes, I suppose ‘the God’ will do. He said your friend, the Prince of Atrithau, had a vision …” He glanced at Cnaiür.

“You mean Kellhus?” Proyas cried. “
Kellhus
told him to march?”

“So the man said,” Conphas replied.
Such is the madness of the world,
his tone added, though his eyes suggested something far different.

There was a moment of communal hesitation. Over the past weeks, the Dûnyain’s name had gathered much weight among the Inrithi, as though it were a rock they held at arm’s length. Cnaiür could see it in their faces: the look of beggars with gold sewn into their hems—or of drunkards with over-shy daughters … What, Cnaiür wondered, would happen when the rock became too heavy?

Afterward, when Proyas confronted the Dûnyain at Xinemus’s camp, Cnaiür could only think,
He makes mistakes!

“What did you do?” Proyas asked the fiend, his voice quavering with rage.

Everyone, Serwë, Dinchases, even that babbling sorcerer and his shrew whore, sat stunned about the evening fire. No one spoke to Kellhus that way … No one.

Cnaiür almost cackled aloud.

“What would you have me say?” the Dûnyain asked.

“What happened?” Proyas cried.

“Saubon came to us in the hills,” Achamian said quickly, “while you were in Tus—”

“Silence!” the Prince cried, without so much as glancing at the Schoolman. “I have asked you—”

“You’re not my better!” Kellhus thundered. All of them, Cnaiür included, jumped—and not merely in surprise. There was something in his tone. Something preternatural.

The Dûnyain had leapt to his feet, and though a length away, somehow seemed to loom over the Conriyan Prince. Proyas actually stepped backward. He looked as though he had remembered something unspoken between them.

“You’re my
peer,
Proyas. Do not presume to be more.”

From where Cnaiür stood, the ochre walls and turrets of squat Asgilioch framed the head and shoulders of the two men. Kellhus, his trim beard and long hair shining gold in the evening sun, stood a full head taller than the swarthy Conriyan Prince, but both men emanated grace and potency in equal measure. Proyas had recovered his angry glare.

“What I
presume,
Kellhus, is to be party to all decisions of moment regarding the Holy War.”

“I made no decision. You know that. I told Saubon only …” For a fleeting moment, a strange, almost lunatic vulnerability animated his expression. His lips parted. He seemed to look through the Conriyan Prince.

“Only what?”

The Dûnyain’s eyes refocused, his stance hardened—everything about him …
converged
somehow, as though he were somehow more
here
than anyone else. As though he stood among ghosts.

He speaks in hidden cues,
Cnaiür reminded himself.
He wars against all of us!

“Only what I see,” Kellhus said.

“And just what is it you see?” The words sounded forced.

“Do you wish to know, Nersei Proyas? Do you
really
want me to tell you?”

Now Proyas hesitated. His eyes flickered to those surrounding, fell upon Cnaiür for a heartbeat, no more. Without expression he said, “You’ve doomed us.” Then turning on his heel, he strode in the direction of his quarters.

Afterward, in the stuffy confines of their pavilion, Cnaiür set upon the Dûnyain in Scylvendi, demanding to know what had really happened. Serwë huddled in her watchful little corner, like a puppy beaten by two masters.

“I said what I said to secure our position,” Kellhus asserted, his voice passionless, bottomless—the way it always was when he affected to reveal his “true self.”

“And this is how you secure our position? By alienating our patron? By sending half the Holy War to its destruction? Trust me, Dûnyain, I have fought the Fanim; this Holy War, this … this
migration,
or whatever it is, has precious little chance of overcoming them as it is—let alone conquering Shimeh! And you would
cut it in half?
By the Dead God, you
do
need me to teach you war, don’t you?”

Kellhus, of course, was unmoved. “Alienating Proyas is to our advantage. He judges men harshly, holds all in suspicion. He opens himself only when he’s moved to regret. And he will regret. As for Saubon, I told him only what he wanted to hear. Every man yearns to hear their flattering delusions confirmed. Every man. This is why they support—willingly—so many parasitic castes, such as augurs, priests, memorial—”

“Read my face, dog!” Cnaiür grated. “You will
not
convince me this is a success!”

Pause. Shining eyes blinking, watching. The intimation of a horrifying scrutiny.

“No,” Kellhus said, “I suppose not.”

More lies.

“I didn’t,” the monk continued, “anticipate the others—Gothyelk and Skaiyelt—would follow his lead. With just the Galeoth and the Shrial Knights, I deemed the risk acceptable. The Holy War could survive their loss, and given what you’ve said regarding the liabilities of unwieldy hosts, I though it might even profit. But without the Tydonni …”

“Lies! You would have stopped them otherwise! You could have stopped them if you wished.”

Kellhus shrugged. “Perhaps. But Saubon left us the very night he found us in the hills. He roused his men when he returned, and set out before dawn yesterday. Both Gothyelk and Skaiyelt had already followed him into the Southron Gates by the time we returned. It was too late.”

“You believed him, didn’t you? You believed all that tripe about Skauras fleeing Gedea. You
still
believe!”

“Saubon believed it. I merely think it probable.”

“As you said,” Cnaiür snarled with as much spite as he could muster, “every man yearns to hear their flattering delusions confirmed.”

Another pause.

“First I require one Great Name,” Kellhus said, “then the others will follow. If Gedea falls, then Prince Coithus Saubon will turn to me before making any decision of moment. We need this Holy War, Scylvendi. I deemed it worth the risk.”

Such a fool! Cnaiür regarded Kellhus, even though he knew his expression would betray nothing, and his own, everything. He considered lecturing him on the treacherous ways of the Fanim, who invariably used feints and false informants, and who invariably gulled fools like Coithus Saubon. But then he glimpsed Serwë glaring at him from her corner, her eyes brimming with hatred, accusation, and terror.
This is always the way,
something within him said—something exhausted.

And suddenly he realized that he’d actually
believed
the Dûnyain, believed
that he had made a mistake
.

And yet it was often like this: believing and not believing. It reminded him of listening to old Haurut, the Utemot memorialist who’d taught him his verses as a child. One moment Cnaiür would be sweeping across the Steppe with a hero like the great Uthgai, the next he would be staring at a broken old man, drunk on gishrut, stumbling on phrases a thousand years old. When one believed, one’s soul was
moved
. When one didn’t, everything else moved.

“Not everything I say,” the Dûnyain said, “can be a lie, Scylvendi. So why do you insist on thinking I deceive you in all things?”

“Because that way,” Cnaiür grated, “you deceive me in nothing.”