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
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.
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia
The Istyuli Plains dominated the heart of Eдrwa, 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: Trysл, 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 Kыniьric 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.
Signs of Sranc.
A kind of communal recognition dawned on the host, a realization that abandoned lands could be liberated. To demonstrate this fact, King Hoga Hogrim-the nephew of Hoga Gothyelk, the famed Martyr of Shimeh-commanded his Tydonni to draw stone from a nearby outcropping for a great ring, an immense Circumfix implanted for all time in Condian earth. The Longbeards laboured through the night, their numbers swelling as more and more of their encamped neighbours joined them. The break of dawn revealed not so much a ring as a circular fortress, as wide as five war-galleys set end to end and with walls of unshaped sandstone standing the height of three men.
Afterwards, the Aspect-Emperor himself walked among the exhausted men, remitting their sins and blessing their distant kith and kin. 'Men make such marks,' he said, 'as their will affords them. Behold! Let the World see why the Tydonni are called the 'Sons of Iron.''
And so the march wore on. According to conventional military wisdom, a host as vast as the Ordeal should break up and march in separate columns. Not only would this improve the ability of the soldiery to collect forage, be it wild game or the grasses their hardy ponies were bred to survive on, it would drastically increase their rate of advance. But as strange as it sounded, the sloth of the Great Ordeal was a necessity, at least at this stage in the long march to Golgotterath. The plan was to stretch the supply umbilicus between the host and Sakarpus as far as humanly possible, before taking what the Aspect-Emperor's generals grimly referred to as the Leap, marching beyond the point of meaningful contact with the New Empire.
Since the length of this umbilicus depended on the ability of the Imperial supply trains to overtake the Great Ordeal, dividing the host into quicker columns would simply increase the length of the Leap. This would prove disastrous, given the needs of the host and the scarcity of meaningful forage along the length of the Istyuli. Even if the Ordeal were to break into a hundred columns and spread across the width of the plain, it could not be trusted to provide enough game to make an appreciable difference. The host had to carry the supplies required to reach the more abundant lands of what had once been eastern Kыniьri, where, according to the Imperial Trackers, it could easily find enough forage once it scattered.
So it crept forward as all cumbersome armies must, scarcely travelling more than ten to fifteen miles a march. Aside from numbers, the rivers were the greatest source of delay. Again thanks to the Imperial Trackers, each waterway had been meticulously mapped years in advance. Not only did the Great Ordeal's planners need to know where the best crossing points were, they had to know the state of those fords at various times of the year and during various kinds of weather. A single swollen river could spell doom if it prevented the Great Ordeal from reaching Golgotterath before the onset of winter.
But even mapped, the fords still represented bottlenecks. In some cases, three, even four days were required simply for the host to cross banks no more than a stone's throw apart. These too were scheduled into the sacred host's ever-tightening margins.
In the highest councils of the Aspect-Emperor, the possibility that the Consult might find some way to poison these rivers was a matter of continual concern, if not outright dread. Only the possibility that they might exterminate game along their path troubled them more. As veterans of the First Holy War, both of the Ordeal's Exalt-Generals, King Saubon and King Proyas, were intimately acquainted with the catastrophic consequences of running out of water. Thirst, like hunger or disease, was a vulnerability that increased in proportion to an army's size, which was why it could unravel even the greatest host in a mere matter of days.
But among the rank and file, the absence of Sranc was the only concern voiced about the evening fires, not because they suspected anything devious-what trick could catch their Holy Aspect-Emperor unawares? — but because they longed to put their spears and swords and axes to work. Rumours were traded about the far-ranging exploits of Sibawul te Nurwal, whose Cepaloran lancers had apparently run down several fleeing Sranc clans. Similar tales were told about General Halas Siroyon and his Famiri, or General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi and his steel-clad Eumarnan knights. But the tales only seemed to whet their bloodlust and to draw out the trackless tedium of the march. They complained the way warriors complained, about the food, the lack of women, the pitch of the ground they slept across, but they never forgot their sacred mission. They marched to save the world, which for most meant saving their wives, their children, their parents, and their lands. They marched to prevent the Second Apocalypse.
And the God himself marched with them, speaking through the mouth, glaring through the eyes of
