The Crippled God

Witness it!’

He blinked up at her. The knife point had dug deep, now grazing the bone of his cheek. He felt the blood running down to drip from the line of his jaw, the rim of his ear. ‘The child is not mine,’ he whispered.

‘But it is. You fool, can’t you see that? It will be the last Khundryl child! The last of the Burned Tears! You are Warleader Gall. It shall be born, and it shall look up into your face! How dare you deny it that? ’

His breath was coming in gasps. Do I have this left in me? Can I find the strength she demands of me? I … I have lost so much. So much.

‘This is our final night, Gall. Be our Warleader one last time. Be a husband. Be a father.’

A feeble, trembling hand fumbled with the furs covering him — he caught its movement, wondered at it. My own? Yes. Groaning, he struggled to sit up. The knife slipped away from his bloody cheek. He stared across at Jastara.

‘My son … did well by you.’

Her eyes went wide. The colour left her face. She shrank back.

Gall pushed the furs away, reached for his weapon belt.

Summoned by a mother’s cries, Badalle walked with her children. Saddic stumbled at her side. They were all closing in, like an indrawn breath.

The army was on the move. She had not believed these soldiers capable of rising yet again, to face the wastes ahead. She did not understand the source of strength they had found, the hard will in their eyes. Nor did she understand the way they looked at her and Saddic, and at the other children of the Snake. As if we have been made holy. As if we have blessed them. When the truth is, it is they who have blessed us, because now we children will not have to die alone. We can die in the arms of men and women, men and women who for that moment become our fathers, our mothers.

But, here in the Khundryl camp, a new child was about to come into the world.

When she arrived, the clawed warriors surrounded the birth-tent. She saw the corpse of a horse nearby and walked over to stand upon it.

Her children saw and they faced her, for they knew what was coming. Looking down, she met Saddic’s shining eyes, and nodded.

Badalle awakened her voice. ‘There is a mother this night.’

Warriors turned to her — they had no choice. She would make them listen, if only to give them the one thing that she had left. Where it all began, so it ends. This is what I have, the only thing I ever had. Words.

‘There is a mother this night

In the desert of dreams

Beneath stars burned blind

And soldiers must march where

She leads them on the dead trail

By this truth we are all bound

Past the bodies left in the ditch

She looks up where we fail

And the sky is without end

Follow her for the time of our birth

Is a birth still to come

There is a mother this night

Who leads an army of children

What will you ask of her

When dawn awakens?

What will you demand of her

That she would give

If only she could?

There is a mother in the night

For a child lost in the dark’

Faces stared up at her, but she could make no sense of what she saw in them. And she could barely remember the words she had just spoken, but when she looked down at Saddic he nodded, to tell her that he had them, gathered like the toys in the sack dangling from one hand. And when he is a man, he will write this down, all of this, and one night a stranger will find him, a poet, a singer of tales and a whisperer of songs.

He will come in search of the fallen.

Like a newborn child, he will come in search of the fallen.

Saddic, you will not die here. Not for many, many years. How do I know this? And the woman who sleeps in the other room — who has loved you all her life — who is she? I would see that, if I could.

The mother’s cries were softer now.

A man appeared. Walked through the silent crowd that parted from his path. Strode into the tent. Moments later, the mother inside was weeping, a sound that filled the world, that made Badalle’s heart pound. And then, a small, pitiful wail.

Badalle sensed someone standing near her. She turned to see the Adjunct.

‘Mother,’ Badalle said, ‘you should be leading your children.’

‘Did you truly think I would miss this?’

Sighing, Badalle stepped down from the carcass of the horse. Reached out and took the Adjunct’s hand.

She flinched as if stung, stared down at Badalle as if in shock. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘Mother, when will you let yourself feel?’

The Adjunct backed away, and moments later she was gone, lost in the crowd. If it made a path for her, Badalle couldn’t see it.

‘There is a mother this night,’ she whispered, ‘but to her the stars are blind.’

Koryk reached up and with one finger probed the line of his gums. When he withdrew the finger and looked down, he saw that it was smeared with blood. And that was a good joke. He was dying of thirst, just like all the others, but he’d been drinking his own blood for two days now. Wiping his finger clean on his thigh, he glanced over at the others.

Smiles was going to outlast them all. Women were stronger in ways no man dared admit. But then they had to be.

There was more blood running down the back of his nose. He could never quite manage to get his throat clear of it, no matter how many times he swallowed. They had to be. A house of whores. I saw all I ever needed to see. Better than any tutor’s endless droning on about history. Better than all the sages and prophets and agitators and rebels. Aye, those ones made fists and shook them, punching walls at the injustice of it all — but those walls, they were just the boxes they’d built for themselves, the boxes they lived in. They could never see past. And for most of them, that box was their whole world. They had no idea there was anything outside it.

But the whores knew. Laughter for the moment, but take the stretch of years and it’s all heartbreak. A woman gives up her body when she has nothing else left to give. She gives it up like a man his last copper. In a whore’s eyes, you’ll find everything that we do to each other. Everything.

He’d killed a fellow Bonehunter last night. A man trying to steal an empty cask. But he wasn’t thinking about that. That damned face so twisted with need, or the sigh that left the man on that last breath. No, he was thinking about whores.

They could have schooled me in shame. But they didn’t. And now, gods help me, I wish they had. Because then, he would understand what it was that forced his comrades back to their feet, that gave them the strength to pick up their gear one more time, knees bending under that weight. ‘The