hatch plots in his soul than take any real action…
How Drusas Achamian, the only Wizard in the Three Seas, had been a cringer and a coward.
The strange thing is that he found himself actually yearning for those days-missing not so much the fear, perhaps, as the simple anguish of needing another. Living with her in Sumna while she continued taking custom, sitting and waiting in the bustling agora, watching the to and fro of innumerable Sumnites while images of her coupling with strangers plagued him gut and soul. Perhaps this explained what happened later, when she had climbed into Kellhus's bed, believing that Achamian had perished in the Sareotic Library. If there was any fact from his past that caused Achamian to both flinch and marvel, it was the way he had continued to love both of them after their joint betrayal. Despite the years, he never ceased balling his fists at the pageant of memories, his awe of Kellhus and the godlike ease with which he mastered the Gnosis, and his impotent fury when the man retired… to lie with his wife-his wife!
Esmenet. Such a strange name for a whore.
'Fear…' the old Wizard said in resignation. 'I was always afraid with your mother.'
'Because she was a whore,' Mimara said with more eagerness than compassion.
She was right. He had loved a whore and had reaped the wages accordingly. Perhaps the final days of the First Holy War simply had been a continuation of those early days in Sumna. The same hurt, the same rage, only yoked to the otherworldly glamour that was Anasurimbor Kellhus.
'No…' he said. 'Because she was so beautiful.'
It seemed a proper lie.
'What I don't understand,' Mimara exclaimed with the air verbalizing something she had long debated in silence, 'is why you refuse to hold her accountable. She was a caste-menial, not sold into slavery like me. She chose to be a whore… just as she chose to betray you.'
'Did she?' It seemed that he listened to his voice more than he spoke with it.
'Did she what? Choose? Of course she did.'
'Few things are so capricious as choice, girl.'
'Seems simple to me. Either she chooses to be faithful or she chooses to betray.'
He glared at her. 'And what about you? Were you chained to your pillow in Carythusal? No? Does that mean you chose to be there? That you deserved everything you suffered? Could you not have jumped off the ship when the slavers she sold you to put out to sea? Why blame your mother for your wilful refusal to run away?'
Her look was hateful but marred by the same hesitation that seemed to dog all of their heated conversations of late, that moment of searching for the proper passion, as if willing away some reptilian fragment of self that simply did not care. Mimara, part of him realized, was injured because he had said something injurious, not because she felt any real pain. That capacity, it seemed, had been lost in the dark bowels of Cil-Aujas.
'There are chains,' she said dully, 'and then there are chains.'
'Exactly.'
A kind of humility haunted her manner after that, but one that seemed more motivated by weariness than any real insight. Even so, he welcomed it. Arrogance is ever the patron of condemnation. Though most all men lived in total ignorance of the ironies and contradictions that mortared their lives, they instinctively understood the power of hypocrisy. So they pretended, laid claim to an implausible innocence. To better sleep. To better condemn. The fact that everyone thought themselves more blameless than blameworthy, Ajencis once wrote, was at once the most ridiculous and the most tragic of human infirmities. Ridiculous because it was so obvious and yet utterly invisible. Tragic because it doomed them to unending war and strife.
There is more than strength in accusation, there is the presumption of innocence, which is what makes it the first resort of the brokenhearted.
During the first years of his exile, Achamian had punished Esmenet in effigy innumerable times in the silent watches before sleep-too many times. He had accused and he had accused. But he had lived with his grievances too long, it seemed, to perpetually condemn her for anything she might have done. No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.
And Esmenet was nothing if not clever.
So he forgave her. He could even remember the precise moment. He had spent the bulk of the day searching his notes for the specifics of a certain dream, one involving a variant of Seswatha's captivity in Dagliash-he could no longer remember why it was important. Furious with himself, he had decided to climb down from his room to assist Geraus with his wood chopping. The odd blister, it seemed, helped focus his thoughts as well as steady his quill. The slave was doggedly hacking away at one of the several shorn trunks he had drawn to the crude hutch where they stored their wood. Grabbing what turned out to be the dull axe, Achamian began chopping as well, but for some bizarre reason he could not strike the wood without sending chips spinning up into Geraus's face. The first one went unmentioned. The second occasioned a frowning smile. The third incited outright laughter and a subsequent apology. The fifth chip caught the man in the eye, sent him to the water-bucket blinking and grimacing.
Once again Achamian apologized, but only so far as was seemly between master and slave. Strangely enough, he had come to prize the jnanic etiquette he so despised when travelling the fleshpots of the Three Seas. Afterward he stood there, watching the man he owned rinse his left eye time and again, feeling somehow guilty and wronged at the same time. After all, he had meant to assist the man…
Geraus turned toward him, ruefully shook his head, and commended him for his supernatural aim. Achamian's vague ire evaporated, as it always did in the face of the man's relentless good nature. And then, impossibly, he caught the scent of the desert, as if somewhere just beyond the arboreal screens that fenced his tower, he would find the dunes of the mighty Carathay.
And just like that, she was forgiven… Esmenet, the whore become Empress.
Numb to his fingertips, Achamian returned the axe to its nook. 'Better to heed the Gods,' Geraus had said in approval.
Of course habits, like fleas, are not so easy to kill, especially habits of thought and passion. But she was forgiven, nonetheless. Even if he wasn't finished accusing her, she was forgiven.
And somehow, while walking with a band of killers through the empty heart of a dead civilization, he managed to explain this to Mimara.
He told her about their very first meeting, about the bawdy way her mother had accosted him from her window.
'Hey, Ainoni,' she had shouted down. It was the custom in Sumna to call all bearded foreigners Ainoni. 'A man so swollen needs to take his ease, lest he bursts…'
'I was quite fat in those days,' he said, answering Mimara's dubious look.
And he told her about herself-or at least the memory of her that continued to haunt her mother.
'This was the summer after the famine. Sumna, the whole Nansur Empire had suffered grievously. In fact, the poor had sold so many of their children into slavery that the Emperor issued an edict voiding all such sales between Nansur citizens the previous summer. Like most caste-menials, your mother was too poor to afford citizenship, but Exceptions were being issued by various tax farmers throughout the city. Your mother would have never told me about you, I think, were it not for the law… the Sixteenth Edict of Manumission, it was called, I think. She needed the gold, you see. She was mad for gold-for anything she might use as a bribe.'
'You gave it to her.'
'Your mother never dreamed she could get you back. In fact, she never thought she would survive the famine. She literally believed she was sparing you her doom. You simply cannot imagine the straits she was in, the chains that shackled her. She sold you to Ainoni slavers, I think, because she thought the farther she could deliver you from the Nansurium the better.'
'So the Emperor's edict was useless.'
'I tried to tell her, but she refused to listen… Really refused,' he added with a chuckle, drawing a finger to the small scar he still sported on his left temple. 'Even still, she managed to secure the Exception… from a man, a monster, named Polpi Tharias-someone I still dream of killing. The first day the law went into effect she went down to the harbour. I don't know about now, but back then the Ershi district-you know? the north part of the harbour, in the shadow of the Hagerna-was where the slavers held their markets. She refused to let me accompany her… It was something… something she needed to do on her own, I think.'
