Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (38 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet

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The marches tumbled to a halt sometime between mid-afternoon and dusk, depending on the terrain and, most important, the availability of water. Gedea was a dry land, the Atsushan Highlands especially so. After the brisk routine of pitching camp, they gathered about Xinemus’s fire, though Achamian often found himself eating alone with Esmenet, Serwë, and Xinemus’s slaves. More and more, Xinemus, Cnaiür, and Kellhus supped with Proyas, who, under the Scylvendi’s coarse tutelage, had become a man obsessed with strategy and planning. But usually they all found themselves about the fire for an hour or two before retiring to their pallets or mats.

And here, as everywhere else, Kellhus shone.

One night, shortly after the Holy War had left Hinnereth, they found themselves eating a contemplative meal of rice and lamb, which Cnaiür had secured for them the previous day. Commenting on the luxury of eating steaming meat, Esmenet asked the whereabouts of their provider.

“With Proyas,” Xinemus said, “discussing war.”

“What could they possibly talk about all the time?”

Caught mid-swallow, Kellhus held out a hand. “I’ve heard them,” he said, his eyes wry and bright. “Their conversations sound something like this …”

Esmenet was laughing already. Everyone else leaned forward eagerly. In addition to mischievous wit, Kellhus had an uncanny gift for voices. Serwë fairly chortled with excitement.

Kellhus assumed an imperious and warlike face. He spat between his feet, then in a voice that raised goose pimples, so near was it to Cnaiür’s own, he said: “The People do not ride like sissies. They place one testicle to the left of the saddle, one testicle to the right, and they do not bounce, they are so heavy.”

“I would,” Kellhus-as-Proyas replied, “be spared your impudence, Scylvendi.”

Xinemus coughed a mouthful of wine.

“That is because you do not understand the ways of war,” Kellhus-as-Cnaiür continued. “They are hairy, and they are dark, like the cracks of unwashed wrestlers. War is where the sandal of the world meets the scrotum of men.”

“I would be spared your blasphemy, Scylvendi.”

Kellhus spat into the fire. “You think your ways are the ways of the People, but you are wrong. You are silly girls to us, and we would make love to your asses were they as muscular as those of our horses.”

“I would be spared your
affections,
Scylvendi!”

“But you would live on,” Esmenet cried out, “in the scars I cut into my arm!”

The camp fairly shrieked with laughter. Xinemus hung his head between his knees, shuddering and snorting. Esmenet rolled backward on her mat, screaming in her enticing and adorable way. Zenkappa and Dinchases leaned against each other, their shoulders jerking. Serwë had curled into a ball, and seemed to weep with joy as much as laugh. Kellhus merely smiled, looked about as though mystified by their hysterics.

When Cnaiür arrived later that night everyone fell silent, at once abashed and conspiratorial. Scowling, the Scylvendi paused before the fire, looked from face to grinning face. Achamian glanced at Serwë, was shocked by the malice in her smile.

Suddenly Esmenet burst out laughing. “You should have heard Kellhus,” she cried. “You sounded hilarious!”

The Scylvendi’s weathered face went blank. His murderous eyes became dull with … Could it be? Then contempt regained the heights of his expression. He spat into the fire and strode off.

His spittle hissed.

Kellhus stood, apparently stricken with remorse.

“The man’s a thin-skinned lout,” Achamian said crossly. “Mockery is a gift between friends. A
gift
.”

The Prince whirled. “Is it?” he cried. “Or is it an excuse?”

Achamian could only stare, dumbstruck. Kellhus had rebuked him.
Kellhus
. Achamian looked to the others, saw his shock mirrored in their faces, though not his dismay.

“Is it?” Kellhus demanded.

Achamian felt his face flush, his lips tremble. There was something about Kellhus’s voice. So like Achamian’s father’s …

Who’s he to—

“Forgive me, Akka,” the Prince said, lowering his head as though stunned by his own outburst. “I punish you for my own folly … I act twice the fool.”

Achamian swallowed. Shook his head. Forced a smile.

“No … No, I apologize …” His voice quavered. “I was too harsh.”

Kellhus smiled, leaned to place a hand on his shoulder. At his touch, Achamian’s entire side went numb. For some reason the Prince’s smell, leather with a hint of rosewater, always flustered him.

“Then we’re fools together,” Kellhus said. There was delight, and the brief, uncanny sense that Kellhus was expecting something …

“I’ve been saying that all along,” Xinemus growled from the far side of the fire.

The Marshal’s timing was impeccable—as usual. Esmenet led the charge of nervous laughter, and they recaptured something of their earlier cheer. Achamian found himself laughing as well.

All of them, at some point or another, inevitably ran afoul of one another’s humour. Xinemus would complain of Iryssas, who would harp about Esmenet, who would gripe about Serwë, who would carp about Achamian, who would gripe about Xinemus. Too dense, too forward, too vain, too crude, and so on. All men were caste-merchants in some respect, haggling and trading, but without scales or touchstones to confirm the weight or purity of their coinage. They had only guesswork. Backbiting, petty jealousies, resentments, arguments, and third-party arbitrations simply belonged to the market of men.

But with Kellhus, it was different. Somehow he managed to browse the market without opening his purse. Almost from the beginning they’d recognized him as the Judge—including Xinemus, who was the titular head of their fire. No doubt there was an uncertainty about him, a capriciousness appropriate to his brilliance, but these were simply departures from a profound and immovable centre. Intelligence, as penetrating as any in near or far antiquity. Compassion, as broad as Inrau’s and yet somehow far deeper—a benevolence born of
understanding
rather than forgiveness, as though he could see through the delinquent rush of thought and passion to the still point of innocence within each soul. And words! Analogies that seized reality and burned it from the inside out …

He possessed, Achamian sometimes thought, what the poet Protathis claimed all men should strive for: the hand of Triamis, the intellect of Ajencis, and the heart of Sejenus.

And others thought this as well.

Every evening, after the dinner fires burned low, men and women from every nation, it seemed, began gathering round the perimeter of Xinemus’s camp, sometimes calling out to Kellhus, but mostly keeping to themselves. A few in the beginning, then more and more, until they comprised a congregation of three dozen or so souls. Soon Xinemus’s Attrempans were leaving large swaths of empty pasture between their round tents and their Marshal’s pavilion. They would be supping with strangers otherwise.

For the first week or so everyone, including Kellhus, did their best to ignore them, thinking this would shortly drive them away. Who, they wondered, would sit unacknowledged night after night watching others—watching strangers—take their repose? But like little brothers with no resources of their own, they persisted. Their numbers even multiplied.

On a whim, Achamian took a seat among them one night, and watched as they watched, hoping to understand what it was that drew them to so demean themselves. At first, he merely saw familiar figures illumined by firelight against a greater dark. Cnaiür sitting cross-legged, his back as broad as an Ainoni fan and strapped with scarred muscle. Beyond him, on the far side of the fire, Xinemus upon his campstool, hands on his knees, his square-cut beard brushing his chest as he laughed in response to Esmenet, who knelt beside him, muttering something wicked about somebody, no doubt. Dinchases. Zenkappa. Iryssas. Serwë leaning back on her mat, bouncing her knees together, innocently exposing warm and promising shadows. And next to her, Kellhus, sitting serene and golden.

Achamian glanced at those seated throughout the surrounding darkness. He saw Men of the Tusk from every nation and caste. Some leaned together, talking amongst themselves. But most sat as he did, apart from their fellows, eyes sorting through the bright figures before them as though struggling to read by fading candlelight. They seemed … ensorcelled, like fish drawn to a flashing lure. Compelled, not so much by the light as by the surrounding dark.

“Why do you do this?” he asked the man sitting nearest to him, a blond Tydonni with a soldier’s forearms and a caste-noble’s clear eyes.

“Can’t you see?” the man replied, without so much as glancing in his direction.

“See what?”

“See
him
.”

“You mean Prince Kellhus?”

The man turned to him, his smile at once beatific and filled with pity. “You’re too close,” he said. “That’s why you can’t see.”

“See what?” Achamian asked. His breath felt pinched.

“He touched me once,” the man inexplicably replied. “Before Asgilioch. I stumbled while marching and he caught me by the arm. He said, ‘Doff your sandals and shod the earth.’”

Achamian chortled. “An old joke,” he explained. “You must have cursed the ground when you stumbled.”

“So?” the man replied. He was fairly trembling, Achamian realized, with indignant fury.

Achamian frowned, tried to smile, to reassure. “Well, it’s an old saying—ancient, in fact—meant to remind people not to foist their failings on others.”

“No,” the man grated, “it’s not.”

Achamian paused. “Then what does it mean?”

Rather than answer, the man had turned away, as though wilfully consigning Achamian and his question to the oblivion of what he couldn’t see. Achamian stared at him for a thick moment, bewildered and curiously dismayed. How could fury secure the truth?

He stood, slapped dust from his knees.

“It means,” the man said from behind him, “that we must uproot the world. That we must destroy all that offends.”

Achamian started, such was the hatred in the man’s voice. He turned—to sneer or to scold, he wasn’t sure which. Instead he simply stared, dumbfounded. For whatever reason, the man couldn’t match his gaze; he scowled at the firelight instead. Achamian glanced from him to the other faces in the darkness. Most had turned to the sound of angry voices, but even as he watched they drifted back to Kellhus in the light. And somehow, the Schoolman simply knew these people wouldn’t go away.

I’m no different,
he thought, feeling the perplexing twinge of insights into things already known.
I simply sit closer to the fire
…

Their reasons were
his
reasons. He knew this.

Their grounds were inchoate and innumerable: grief, temptation, remorse, confusion. They watched out of weariness, out of clandestine hope and fear, out of fascination and delight. But more than anything, they watched out of necessity.

They watched because they knew something was about to happen.

Without warning, the fire popped, belching a geyser of sparks, one of which floated toward Kellhus. Smiling, he glanced at Serwë, then reached out and pinched the point of orange light between thumb and forefinger. Extinguished it.

Several gasped in the darkness.

As the days passed, more and more watchers gathered. The situation became doubly uncomfortable, both because their camp had become a peculiar stage, an enclosure of light surrounded by shadowy watchers, and because of Kellhus’s seething humour. The Prince of Atrithau had affected everyone who frequented Xinemus’s fire, each according to their hopes and hurts, and to see the man who’d rewritten the ground of their understanding
angry
was troubling in the way of loved ones suddenly acting contrary to all expectations.

One night, for reasons peculiar to his own brooding humour, Xinemus finally blurted: “Dammit, Kellhus! Why don’t you just
talk
to them?”

Stunned silence. Esmenet reached out, clutched Achamian’s hand in the shadows between them. Only the Scylvendi continued eating, fingering gruel into his mouth. Achamian found himself repulsed, as though he witnessed something lewd and animal. A man too bent to the arch of his lust.

“Because,” Kellhus said tightly, his eyes riveted upon the fire, “they make more of me than I am.”

Do they?
Achamian thought. He knew the others asked themselves the same question, even though they rarely spoke of Kellhus to one another. For some reason, a peculiar shyness afflicted them whenever the subject of Kellhus arose, as though they harboured suspicions too foolish or too hurtful to reveal. Achamian could only really speak of him to Esmenet, and even then …

“So,” Xinemus snapped. More than anyone, he seemed able to pretend that Kellhus was simply another face about their fire. “Go tell them.”

Kellhus stared at the Marshal for several unblinking moments, then nodded. Without a word, he stood and strode off into the darkness.

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet

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