As a result, Eskeles was both an insult and a kind of illicit opportunity-a contradiction, like all things Three Seas.
The Mandate Schoolman would join him each morning, usually within a watch of the march getting underway, and they would while away the time with drill after laborious language drill. Though Eskeles encouraged him to believe otherwise, Sorweel's tongue balked at the sound and structure of Sheyic. He often went cross-eyed listening to Eskeles drone. At times, he feared he might slump unconscious from his saddle, the lessons were so boring.
Once he enlisted Zsoronga to hide him in the middle of his retinue, he came to dread the sorceror's appearance so. The Successor-Prince promptly betrayed him, but not before having his fill of laughing at the sight of the Schoolman riding on his burrow craning his neck this way and that. Old Obotegwa, he explained, was growing weary speaking for two men.
'Besides,' he said, 'how can we be sure we're talking to each other at all? Perhaps the old devil makes it all up so he can laugh himself to sleep.'
Obotegwa simply winked and grinned mischievously.
Eskeles was a strange man, obese by Sakarpi standards, but not so fat as many Sorweel had seen in the Ordeal. He never seemed to get cold, despite wearing only a red-silk tunic with his leggings, one cut to expose the black fur that crawled from his belly to his beard, which even oiled and plaited never quite seemed under control. He had an affable, even merry face, high cheeks beneath pig-friendly eyes. This, combined with a lively, even careless manner, made him exceedingly difficult to dislike, despite his sorcerous calling and the brownish tinge of his Ketyai skin.
At first Sorweel could scarcely understand a word he said, his accent was so thick. But he quickly learned how to listen through the often bizarre pronunciations. He discovered that the man had spent several years in Sakarpus as part of a secret Mandate mission posing as Three Seas traders.
'Dreadful, dreadful time for the likes of me,' he said.
'I suppose you missed your Southron luxuries,' Sorweel jeered.
The fat man laughed. 'No-no. Heavens, no. If you knew what me and my kind dreamed each night, your Glory, you would understand our profound ability to appreciate the simplest of things. No. It was your Chorae Hoard… Quite extraordinary really, dwelling in the vicinity of so many Trinkets…'
'Trinkets?'
'Yes. That's what we Schoolmen like to call them-Chorae, that is. For much the same reason you Sakarpi call Sranc-what is it? Oh, yes, grass-rats.'
Sorweel frowned. 'Because that's what they are?'
Despite his good humour, Eskeles had this sly way of appraising him sometimes, as if he were a map fetched from the fire. Something that had to be read around burns.
'No-no. Because that's what you need them to be.'
Sorweel understood full well what the fat man meant-men often used glib words to shrink great and terrible things-but the true lesson, he realized, was quite different. He resolved never to forget that Eskeles was a spy. That he was an agent of the Aspect-Emperor.
Learning a language, Sorweel quickly realized, was unlike learning anything else. At first, he thought it would be a matter of simple substitution, of replacing one set of sounds with another. He knew nothing of what Eskeles called grammar, the notion that a kind of invisible mechanism bound everything he said into patterns. He scoffed at the sorcerer's insistence that he first learn his own tongue before venturing to learn another. But the patterns were undeniable, and no matter how much he wanted to dispute the fat man and his glib I-told-you-so smile, he had to admit that he could not speak without using things such as subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs.
Though he affected an attitude of aloof contempt-he was in the presence of a leuneraal, after all-Sorweel found himself more than a little troubled by this. How could he know these things without knowing them? And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness-to the point where it had simply not existed-what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?
So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.
None of which made the lessons any less boring. But thankfully even Eskeles's passion for Sheyic would begin to wane by midafternoon, and his disciplined insistence on the drills would lapse. For a few watches, at least, he would let the young King indulge his curiosity about more sundry things. Sorweel spent much of this time avoiding the topics that really interested him-sorcery because he feared it sinful, and the Aspect-Emperor for reasons he could not fathom-and asking questions about the Three Seas and the Great Ordeal.
So he learned more details about the Middle-North and its peoples: the Galeoth, the Tydonni, and the Thunyeri. The Eastern Ketyai: the Cengemi, the Conriyans, and the Ainoni. And the Western Ketyai: primarily the Nansur, the Shigeki, the Kianene, and the Nilnameshi. Eskeles, who, Sorweel was beginning to realize, was one of those vain men who never seemed arrogant, discussed all these peoples with the confidence and wicked cynicism of someone who had spent his life travelling. Each nation had its strengths and weaknesses: the Ainoni, for instance, were devious plotters but too womanish in their affect and attire; the Thunyeri were savage in battle but about as sharp as rotten fruit-as Eskeles put it. Sorweel found all of it fascinating, even though the sorcerer was one of those men whose animate enthusiasm actually seemed to deaden rather than liven the subject matter.
Then, one afternoon several days into his instruction, Sorweel summoned enough courage to mention the Aspect-Emperor. He related-in a form abbreviated by embarrassment-the story Zsoronga had told him about the emissaries cutting their own throats before the Zeьmi Satakhan. 'I know he's your master…' he ended awkwardly.
'What about him?' Eskeles replied after a thoughtful pause.
'Well… What is he?'
The sorcerer nodded in the manner of those confirmed in their worries. 'Come,' he said cryptically, spurring his mule to a trot.
The Kidruhil typically rode near the forward heart of the Great Ordeal, where they could be sent in any direction given the unlikely event of an attack. But word of Sranc activity to the west had led to their redeployment on the extreme left flank. This meant the sorcerer and his ward need press neither hard nor far to ride clear of the slow roping columns. Looking absurd on his mule-his legs straight rather than bent, his girth almost equal to his mount's-Eskeles pressed along the shoulders of a long low knoll. Sorweel followed, alternately smiling at the sight of the man and frowning at his intentions. Beyond the crest of the knoll, the farther plains sloped up into the horizon, bone-coloured for the most part but shot with whorls of grey and ash black. The green of the more lush lands to the south had become little more than a haze.
Staring off into the distance, the sorcerer reined to a halt at the summit, where Sorweel joined him. The air was crisp and chill.
'So dry,' Eskeles said without looking at him.
'It often is. Some years the grasses all die and blow away… Or so they say.'
'And that,' Eskeles continued, pointing toward the northwest. 'What is that?'
There was a Kidruhil patrol in the distance, a line of tiny horses, but Sorweel knew that Eskeles pointed beyond them. The sky was a bowl of endless turquoise. Beneath it the land ascended a series of rumps, then spread bluing into a series of flats and folds, like a tent after its poles had been dropped. Reaching in and out of the horizon, an immense band cut across the plain, mottled black and grey near its centre and fading into the natural grain of the surrounding grasslands along its edges.
'The great herds,' Sorweel said, having seen such tracks many times. 'Elk. Endless numbers of them.'
The sorcerer turned in his saddle, nodding back the way they had come. The breeze pulled a comb of hairs from his beard.
'And what would you say that is?'
Perplexed, Sorweel wheeled his horse about, followed Eskeles's bemused gaze. Not since Sakarpus had he seen the Great Ordeal from its edge, and he found himself shocked at the difference of watching something that had encompassed him from afar. Where before the world had seemed to roll into the immobile masses, now the masses rolled over an immovable world. Thousands upon thousands of figures, scattered like grain, thrown like threads, knitted into slow heaving carpets, gradually creeping across the back of the earth. Arms twinkled to the
