male members of House Varalt and their boonsmen rode out into the mountains in search of puma. Since his twelfth summer he had accompanied his father and his uncles, and he adored every moment of it, even though his youth chained him to the hunting camp with his cousins. And he loved nothing more than lying with his eyes closed, listening to his father speak before the late-night fire, not as a king but as a man among others.
The Lioning was how he learned his father was truly funny… and genuinely beloved by his men.
So he would lie with these memories, curl about their warmth. But whenever it seemed he could believe, some dread would lurch out of the nethers and the pretense would blow away like smoke before gusting apprehensions. Zsoronga. The Aspect-Emperor. And the Mother — the Mother most of all.
One question more than any other dominated the crowded commons of his soul. What? What does She want? And it would be the 'She' who appalled him the most, who filled his bowel with nervous water. She. Yatwer. The Mother of Birth…
He spent many sleepless watches simply hefting the vertiginous weight of this fact in his thoughts. He found it strange the way one could kneel, even pray with sobbing intensity, and yet never ponder, let alone comprehend, what lay behind the ancient names. Yatwer… What did that holy sound mean? The priests of the Hundred were dark and severe, every bit as harsh as the Tusk Prophets they took as their examples. They brandished the names of their Gods the way stern fathers raised whips: obedience was all they asked for, all they expected. The rest fell out of their hard readings of hard scriptures. For Sorweel, Yatwer had always been dark and nebulous, something too near the root of things, too aboriginal, not to be filled with the sense of peril belonging to sudden knives and fatal falls.
All children come to temple with a fear of smallness, which the priests then work and knead like clay, shaping it into the strange reconciliation-to-horror that is religious devotion, the sense of loving something too terrible to countenance, too hoary to embrace. When he thought about the world beyond what his eyes could see, he saw souls in their innumerable thousands with only frayed threads to hold them, dangling over the gaping black of the Outside, and the shadows moving beneath, the Gods, ancient and capricious, reptilian with indifference, with designs so old and vast that there could only be madness in the small eyes of Men.
And none were so old or so pitiless as the dread Mother of Birth.
That was what her name was: childhood terror.
To be pinched between such things! Yatwer and the Aspect-Emperor… Gods and Demons. Somehow he had been pulled into the world's threshing wheels, the grinding immensities-small wonder he had been so eager to escape the clamour of the Great Ordeal! Small wonder the travelling sway of his pony, Stubborn, carried the promise of deeper escape.
He posed the question to Zsoronga and his impromptu court one night, careful to conceal the intensity of his interest. Fires were of course forbidden, so they sat side by side facing south, alternately staring into their hands and into the starry heavens: the Kings and Princes of lands cowed but not quite conquered by the New Empire, yearning for homes thrown far over the night horizon. Obotegwa sat dutifully behind them, translating when needed. If anything spurred Sorweel in his language lessons with Eskeles, it was the burden his stupidity had become for the wise old Obligate.
They had been discussing omens and portents, how more and more signs seemed to inveigh against the Aspect-Emperor-none more so than the persisting drought. Charampa, in particular, was convinced that the Anasurimbor Dynasty's doom was imminent. 'They overreach! Think of their gall! How could they not be punished? I ask you! I ask you!'
Tzing seemed inclined to agree, and as always, no one could fathom Tinurit's opinion-or whether his smile was in fact a sneer, for that matter. Zsoronga, however, remained skeptical.
'What happens,' Sorweel finally ventured, 'if we fail the Gods simply because we don't know what they demand?'
'Ka sircu alloman…' Obotegwa began droning from behind him.
'Damnation,' Tzing replied. 'The Gods care nothing for our excuses.'
'No,' Zsoronga snapped, loud enough to pre-empt Charampa's eager reply. 'Only if we fail to properly honour our ancestors. The Heavens are like palaces, Horse-King. One does not need the King's permission to enter.'
'Pfah!' Charampa cried, as much to avenge his interruption as otherwise, Sorweel suspected. 'Here I thought the Zeumi were too sensible to believe that Inrithi nonsense!'
'No. It is not Inrithi nonsense. Honouring ancestors is far older than the Thousand Temples. You Cingi are as bad as the sausages…' Zsoronga turned to the young King of Sakarpus. 'Family survives death. Don't let this fool tell you different.'
'Yes…' Sorweel replied, listening far too keenly to what was said. This was what it meant to be a conquered people, a part of him realized: to turn to the foreign beliefs of foreign peoples. 'But what if your… your family is damned?'
The Successor-Prince watched him appreciatively. 'Trempe us mar-'
'Then you must do everything in your power to discover what the Gods do want. Everything. '
Though Zsoronga was not overtly pious, Sorweel knew from previous discussions that the Zeumi had a far different way, not so much of conceiving life and death, as valuing them, a way that made them seem zealots on occasion. Even the peculiarities of Obotegwa's interpretations revealed as much: the Zeumi used two versions of the same word to speak of life and death, words that roughly translated into 'small life' and 'great life,' with death being the latter.
'Otherwise?'
The Successor-Prince looked at Sorweel as if he were searching for something.
Grounds for trust?
'Otherwise you are lost.'
The World seems greater in the morning, and Men smaller. The ground shrank beneath the rising sun, scalded into white blindness, so that it seemed they woke on the very edge of creation. Raised hands shielded eyes. Broke-back grasses cast shadows like black wire.
Sorweel had grown up in this country; its imprint lay deep in his soul, so deep that simply looking at it braced him, like legs and a wide stance for his soul. Even still, it dizzied him to think how far they had ridden beyond the Pale. He had been educated, of course, and so knew the Pale for what it was: the northern terminus of Sakarpic power, and not the point where waking reality tipped into nightmares. But the superstitions of the rabble had a way of steaming upward, of soaking the more worldly understanding of the nobility. Despite his tutors, the Pale remained a kind of moral boundary in his imagination, the line that marked the fading of the good and the gathering of what was evil. Enough to catch his breath when he thought of the miles between him and his holy city. For a company as small as theirs to ride the emptiness as they did, a nagging part of him insisted, was nothing short of madness.
If anything silenced these worries, it was his growing respect for Captain Harnilas. He had not thought much of Old Harni at first. Like many other Scions, he had tried to detest the man, if not for who he was, then for what he represented. Diminishing others is ever the way men raise themselves, and the might of the Aspect-Emperor was such, the glory and the competence of the Kidruhil so obvious, that petty targets like Harnilas seemed to be the only ones remaining.
But the Captain was nothing if not dogged in his warlike wisdom. Gruff. Bearded in manner, even though he shaved like so many of his Nansur countrymen. His scars picked up where his wrinkles left off so that his face seemed tattooed with different sigils depending on the angle and intensity of the light. He so obviously cared so little for what his wards thought of him that they could not but esteem him.
'In Zeum,' Zsoronga once said, 'we call men like him nukbaru, masons… stone-hewers…' After Obotegwa finished translating, the Successor-Prince nodded toward the head of their small column. 'Our Captain.'
When Sorweel asked him why, Zsoronga smiled and said, 'Because to hew stone you must be stronger than stone.'
'Or smarter,' Eskeles had added.
Riding as they did had a way of nursing and smothering conversations. Sometimes they chattered as loudly as wives filing from Temple. Sometimes they rode in desert silence, with only the arrhythmic gait of their ponies to punctuate the perpetual wind. Usually their talk would be momentary, sparking here, fading there, as though a single animate spirit drifted through them all, drawing thought into voice one by one.
