The Thousandfold Thought Part 31

But it was Proyas before him, his face drawn, grave with the utter absence of expression.

"I'm sorry, old tutor," the Prince said, "but it's Zin ... He's calling for you."

Without any real comprehension, he cast his blankets aside and bolted from his cot. For an instant he teetered: unlike the Incu-Holoinas, the canvas walls of the Prince's pavilion were square with the ground. Proyas steadied him, and they shared a long and sombre look. For so long the Marshal of Attrempus had stood at their borderlands, guarding the frontier across which the doubt of the one had warred with the certainty of the other. It seemed terrifying to stand face to face without him. But it also seemed true, a kind of human proof.

They had always stood this near, Achamian realized; they had merely stared off in different directions. Without warning, he found himself clasping the younger man's hand. It was not warm, but it seemed so very alive.

"I did not mean to disappoint you," Proyas murmured.

Achamian swallowed.

Only when things were broken did their meaning become clear.

Kellhus held her shaking in their bed.

"I do love you!" Esmenet cried. "I do!"

Shouts still echoed through the corridors. The Hundred Pillars, Kellhus knew, fanned across the grounds, searching for the Inchoroi's Synthese. But they would find nothing. Save for Captain Heorsa's death, everything had transpired as he'd expected. Aurang had sought only to deny him the Gnosis, not his life. So long as they knew nothing of the Dunyain, the Consult were trapped in the pincers of a paradox: the more they needed to kill him, the more they needed to learn learn him-and to find his father. him-and to find his father.

Which was why Achamian had been their target-not Kellhus.

Kellhus hadn't known whether Esmenet would recall her possession, but the instant her eyes fluttered open, he'd realized that she not only remembered, she remembered as though she herself she herself had spoken what was spoken, said what was said. There had been many hard words. had spoken what was spoken, said what was said. There had been many hard words.

"I do do love you, she wept. love you, she wept.

"Yes," he replied, his voice far deeper, far wider, than she could possibly hear.

Quivering lips. Eyes pa.r.s.ed between horror and remorse. Panting breath. "But you said! You said! You said!

"Only," he lied, "what needed to be heard, Esmi. Nothing more."

"You have to believe me!"

"I do, Esmi...I do believe."

She clutched her cheeks, scratched welts across them. "Always the wh.o.r.e! Why must I always be the wh.o.r.e?"

He looked through her, past her bewildered hurt, down to the beatings and the abuse, to the betrayals, and beyond, out to a world of rank l.u.s.t, shaped by the hammers of custom, girded with scripture, scaled by ancient legacies of sentiment and belief. Her womb had cursed her, even as it made her what she was. Immortality and bliss-this was the living promise all women bore between their thighs. Strong sons and gasping climax. If what men called truth were ever the hostage of their desires, how could they fail to make slaves of their women? To hide them like h.o.a.rded gold. To feast on them like melons. To discard them like rinds.

Was this not why he used her? The promise of sons in her hips?

Dunyain sons.

Her eyes were like silver spoons in the gloom, s.h.i.+mmering with scarcely held waters. He looked through them and saw so much he could never undo ...

"Hold me," she whispered. "Hold me, please."

Like so many others, she bore his toll. And it was only beginning ...

Achamian had always thought it strange that so little was felt at the appropriate moment-only afterward, and even then it never seemed ... proper.

When the Pederisk, the t.i.tle given to Mandate Schoolmen devoted to finding the Few among Nron's children, had come to their hovel bent on taking Achamian-a boy with "great promise"-to Atyersus, Achamian's father had denied him-not for love of his son, Achamian would later decide, but for reasons both more pragmatic and more principled. Achamian had proven himself a quick study at sea, one who need not be hit as often as the others. And more importantly, Achamian was his his son, and none other might have him. son, and none other might have him.

The Pederisk, a willowy man with a face as hard and weathered as any mariner's, was neither surprised nor impressed by his father's drunken defiance. Achamian would never forget the way his smell-rosewater and jasmine-had owned the sour room. His father became violent, and with a dreadful air of routine the Schoolman's men-at-arms began beating him. Achamian's mother had shrieked. His brothers and sisters had squalled. But a strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.

He had gloated.

Before that day, Achamian would never have believed his father could be so easily broken. For children, hard-hearted fathers were elemental, more deity than human. As judges, they seemed to stand beyond all possible judgement. Witnessing the humiliation of his father produced the first truly sorrowful day of his life-as well as a day of triumph. To see the great breaker broken ... How couldn't this transform the proportions of a young boy's world?

"d.a.m.nation!" his father had screeched. "h.e.l.l has come for you, boy! h.e.l.l! h.e.l.l!

Only afterward, as they trundled up the coast in the Schoolman's cart, would he cry, overwhelmed by loss and delinquent regret.

Far, far too late.

"I see it, Akka ..." A voice barely more than a rasp. Xinemus. "Where I'm going. I see it now."

"And what do you see?" Humour them. This was what one did with the grievously ill ...

"Nothing."

"Shush. I'll describe it all to you. The Many-Eyed Walls. The First Temple. The Sacred Heights. I'll be your eyes, Zin. You'll see s.h.i.+meh through me."

Through the eyes of a sorcerer.

Proyas's slaves had used screens to mark off an ad hoc sickroom for the Marshal of Attrempus. Embroidered pheasants cavorted across them, their tail feathers twining into the very trees they perched upon. Only two lanterns provided illumination, both of them hooded in blue cloth at the insistence of the physician-priests. Apparently Akkeagni was more discriminating with his colours than with his victims ... The result was peculiar, even eerie-something between firelight and moonlight. Everything in the spare chamber-the sagging canvas ceilings, the rush-matted ground, the blankets hanging from the Marshal's cot-possessed the nauseous pall of sickness.

Achamian knelt at the side of the cot, gently wiping his friend's brow with a wetted cloth. He dabbed the water pooled in his sockets, more because of the unnerving way it glinted in the gloom-like liquid eyes-than for the comfort of his friend.

Yet again he found himself at war with the urge to flee. Of all the unclean spirits, few were as terrifying or bloodthirsty as those belonging to dread Disease. Pulma had possessed him, the physician-priests had said, one of the most fearsome of Akkeagni's innumerable demons.

The lung-plague.

The Marshal jerked and convulsed. He arched across his cot as though his body were a bow taken up and drawn by something unseen. He made noises that could only be described as ... unmanly. Achamian clutched his bearded cheek, whispered words he could not recall afterward. Then, just as abruptly, Xinemus went slack. Once again his limbs were lost between the folds of his blankets.

Achamian wiped the sweat from the quivering planes of his face. "Shush," he whispered between the man's clawing breaths."Shush ...

"How the rules," the Marshal coughed, "have changed ...

"What do you mean?"

"The game between us ... benjuka."

Achamian still had no clue as to his meaning, but he could think of nothing to say. It seemeda...sin somehow, to question him twice.

"Remember how it was?" Xinemus asked. "The way you would wait in the dark while I took council with the Great?"

"Yes...I remember.

"Now it's I who wait."

Again Achamian couldn't think of anything to say. It was as though words had come to their end, to the point where only impotence and travesty could follow. Even his thoughts p.r.i.c.kled.

"Did you?" the Marshal abruptly asked.

"Did I what?

"Did you ever win?"

"Benjuka?" Achamian blinked, stretched his face into an aching smile. "Not against you, Zin ... But someday ...

"I think not."

"And why's that?" He hesitated, fearful of what answer this question might elicit.

"Because you try too hard," Xinemus said. "And when the plate doesn't yield-" He coughed, convulsed about pustulate lungs.

Achamian repeated, "When the plate doesn't yield ... He humoured him no longer. Selfish fool! Selfish fool!

"I see nothing," the Marshal gasped. "Sweet Sejenus! I see noth-" He cried out as though drowning in clotted blood, gagged, and thrashed. The sick-sweet flush of bowel filled the room.

Then he went slack. For several heartbeats all Achamian could do was stare. Without his eyes Xinemus seemed so ... sealed in sealed in.

"Zin!"

His friend's mouth worked soundlessly. Madly, Achamian thought of the fish heads heaped beneath his father's gutting table ... Mouths without stomachs, opening and closing, as slow as milkweed waving in the breeze.

"Leave ... me ..." his friend gasped. "Leave me ... be ..."

"This is no time for pride, you fool!"

"Nooooo, the Marshal of Attrempus whispered. "This ... is ... the ... only ...

And then it happened. One moment his complexion was mottled by the pallid exertions only the dying can know, and then, as quickly as cloth soaking water, it went purple-grey. A cooler air settled through the canvas s.p.a.ces, the quiet of utterly inert things. Lice thronged from Xinemus's scalp onto his brow, across his waxy face. Achamian brushed at them, twitched them away with the numb fastidiousness of those who deny death by acting otherwise.

He clutched his friend's hand, began kissing his fingers. "In the morning Proyas and I will take you to the river," he said breathlessly. "Bathe you ..."

Whining silence.

It seemed that his heart slowed, hesitated, like a boy unsure of the sincerity of his father's permission. His lips tightened, and a great void slowly opened in his chest, at first tugging and then lunging-demanding that he breathe breathe.

With a shameful reluctance, he watched him in the darkness, Krijates Xinemus, this man who would be his older brother, this corpse with the face of an only friend. The first of the lice found him-Achamian could feel them. Like the tickle of insight.

He breathed, drew the rank air deep. And though his cry reached out across the plains, it fell far short of s.h.i.+meh.

He pondered the plate, rubbing his hands together for warmth. Xinemus taunted him with a nasty chuckle.

"Always so dour when you play benjuka."

"It's a wretched game."

"You say that only because you try too hard."

"No. I say that because I lose."

With an air of chagrin, he moved the only stone among his silver pieces-a replacement for a piece stolen, or so Xinemus claimed, by one of his slaves. Another aggravation. Though pieces were nothing more than how they were used, the stone impoverished his play somehow, broke the miserly spell of a complete set.

Why do I get the stone?

Achamian did not sleep that night.

One of the Hundred Pillars had come, summoning both him and Proyas to the villa in the encampment's heart. Apparently there had been some kind of attempt on Kellhus's life. Achamian refused outright. When Proyas made ready to leave, Achamian reproached him with words so harsh, so blasphemous, that the waiting Guardsman drew his sword, aghast. Achamian fled before the Prince could retort.

For a time he wandered the dark ways of the Holy War, thinking of the way the dew made his sandalled feet ache, of how the Nail of Heaven never moved, of the way the Men of the Tusk all slumbered beneath tents of Kianene manufacture, their differences, their heritages, shed like rubbish on the long path to redemption. He thought of everything, anything, save that which might drive the wedges of madness deeper.

Then, as dawn brightened over the promise of s.h.i.+meh in the east, he made his way back to the fortified villa. He climbed the slopes and pa.s.sed unchallenged through the gates, and finally found himself walking the overgrown garden, heedless of the burrs and claws that snarled his robes, of the nettles that inflamed his skin. He waited below the verandah that fronted the main apartments-where his wife moaned about the c.o.c.k of the man he wors.h.i.+pped.

He waited for the Warrior-Prophet.

A lark called out from the dried stump of a cedar. Fiddle-necks, their orange blooms bent along hairy stems, trembled in the breeze.

He drowsed, dreamed of Golgotterath.

"Akka?" a blessed voice said as though from nowhere. "You look horrible."

Achamian found himself instantly awake, thinking, Where is she? I need her! Where is she? I need her!

"She sleeps," Kellhus said. "She suffered grievously last night ... much as you did."

The Warrior-Prophet stood above him, his flaxen hair and white gown glaring in the morning sunlight. Achamian blinked at his figure. Despite the beard, the resemblance to Nau-Cayuti, his ancient cousin, was unmistakable.

For some reason Achamian felt his fury and resolve crumble, as a child's might before a mother or a father. A grimace stole across his face.