The plains…
They passed like a dream.
CHAPTER TEN
There is morality and there is cowardice. The two are not to be confused, even though in appearance and effect they are so often the same.
If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders.
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
The shadows of missing things are always cold. And for Varalt Sorweel so very much was missing.
Like the way his mother would read to him in bed or how his father would pretend to lose finger-fights to him. Like laughter or hope.
Loss is at once memory-that is the kernel of its power. If you were to lose the memory with the person-the way Eskeles had said Nonmen lose-then loss would be complete, utter, and we could carry on oblivious. But no. The pain dwells in the balance of loss and retention, in losing and knowing what was lost. In being two incommensurate people, one with a father and mother, and one without. One with pride and honour…
And one without.
So the old him had continued to come up with jokes, questions, and observations to share with his father. Harweel had talked often with his son. While the new him, the orphan, would shiver, teeter, inner fingers groping for lost handholds. And that recognition, the crashing, all-encompassing cold, would strike him as if for the first time…
Your father is dead. Your people are slaves.
You are alone, a captive in the host of your enemy.
But the paradox, some would say tragedy, of human existence is that we so easily raise our lives about absence. We are bred for it. Men are forever counting their losses, hoarding them. There is meaning to be found in victimization, and no small justification. To be wronged is to be owed, to walk among debtors wherever you go.
But now even that embittered and self-righteous persona was missing… that boy.
Sorweel awoke tangled in fragmentary glimpses of the previous night. The last frantic moments with Eskeles, stranded in the very gut of Hell, the face of Serwa, hanging above a world painted in light and the shadows of spitting, gibbering violence…
Then Zsoronga's dark and handsome face, smiling in haggard joy.
'You took a knock on the head, Horse-King. Good thing you have more skull than brain!'
White-weathered canvas framed the Successor-Prince with dull brilliance. Sorweel raised a hand as if to block out the sight of him, tried to say something snide but choked on his own throat instead. His entire body buzzed with the deprivations of the previous weeks. He felt like a wineskin squeezed to its final pulpy dregs…
The alarm, when it came, wrenched him upright…
The Horde. The Ordeal. Eskeles.
'Ho!' Zsoronga cried, nearly toppling backward from his stool.
Sorweel glanced about the stifling confines of his tent, glaring with the urgent stupor of those worried they still dream. The canvas planes glowed with heat. The entrance flap wagged in the breeze, revealing a sliver of baked earth. Porsparian huddled in the corner next to the threshold, watching with a look that was at once wary and forlorn.
'Your slave…' Zsoronga said with a dark look at the Shigeki. 'I fear I tried to beat the truth out of him.'
Sorweel tried to focus on his friend, felt his eyes bulge for the effort. Something malodorous hung in the air, a smell he had breathed too long to identify. 'And?' he managed to cough.
'The wretch fears powers greater than me.'
The young King of Sakarpus rubbed his eyes and face, lowered his hands to consider the blood worn into the whorls of his palms. 'The others?' he asked roughly. 'What happened to the others?'
The question snuffed what remained of his friend's hilarity. Zsoronga explained how he and the others had continued riding hard for General Kayutas, how the treachery of the ground and fugitive exhaustion pulled them down one by one. Captain Harnilas was among the first to fall. A burst heart, Zsoronga assumed, given the way his pony had seized mid-stride. He never saw what became of Tzing. Only he, Tinurit, and four others managed to outdistance the Ten-Yoke Legion, only to be assailed by more Sranc-these from the Horde. 'That was when the longbeards saved us…' he said, his voice limping about his disbelief. 'Zaudunyani Knights. Agmundrmen, I think they were.'
Sorweel regarded his friend in the silence that followed. Zsoronga no longer wore the crimson tunic and golden cuirass of a Kidruhil officer. He had donned, rather, the apparel and regalia of his native Zeum: a battle-sash cinching a jaguar-skin kilt and a wig consisting of innumerable oiled ringlets-symbolic of something, Sorweel imagined. The fabric and accoutrements seemed almost absurdly clean and unused, entirely at odds with the starved, battered, and unwashed form they clothed.
'What about those we left behind,' Sorweel asked. 'What about Obotegwa?'
'Nothing… But perhaps that's for the best.'
The young King wanted to ask what he meant, but it seemed more important to ignore the man's tears.
'The Scions are no more, Sorweel. We are all dead.'
They both paused to ruminate. The bindings of the tent complained in a mellow wind. The clamour of the camp seemed to wax and wane with its breezy pulses, as if the sky were a glass that alternately blurred and focused the world's sound.
'And Eskeles?' Sorweel asked, realizing he had only assumed his tutor's survival. 'What about him?'
Zsoronga scowled. 'He's a fat man in times of famine.'
'What?'
'A Zeumi proverb… It means men like him never die.'
Sorweel pursed a thoughtful lip, winced at a sudden pain lancing through his sinuses. 'Even though they should.'
Zsoronga dropped his gaze as if regretting glib words, then looked up with a helpless smile. 'Zeumi proverbs tend to be harsh,' he said. 'We have always preferred the wisdom that cracks heads.'
Sorweel snorted and grinned, only to find himself tangled in recriminations of his own. So many dead… Friends. Comrades. It seemed obscene that he should feel amusement, let alone relief and gratification. For weeks they had strived, warred against distance and frailty to accomplish a mortal mission. They had faltered and they had feared. But they had persevered. They had won — and despite the grievous proportions of the toll exacted, that fact cried out with its own demented jubilation.
The Scions had died in glory… undying glory. What was a life of bickering and whoring compared with such a death?
Zsoronga did not share his celebratory sentiment.
'Those who fell…' Sorweel said in the tentative way of friends hoping to balm guessed-at pains. 'Few are so lucky, Zsoronga… Truly.'
But even as he spoke, the young King understood he had guessed wrong. The Successor-Prince did not grieve
