R. Bakker - The white-luck warrior

"Then tell me those!"

"Bah! Leave me in peace!"

He was sparing her, he told himself. Of course his refusal to answer simply stoked her fears, but fearing and knowing were two different things. There is mercy in ignorance; Men are born appreciating this. Scarce a day passes when we do not save others from things-small and great-they would be worse for knowing.

The old Wizard wasn't the only one to suffer Mimara's rancour. Somandutta drew abreast of them one morning, his manner at once pensive and breezy with false good humour. He began by asking her questions, then plied her with various inane observations when she refused to reply. He was trying, the old Wizard knew, to rekindle something of their old banter, perhaps hoping to find unspoken forgiveness in the resumption of old ways and manners. His approach was at once cowardly and eminently male: he was literally asking her to pretend that he had not abandoned her in Cil-Aujas. And she was having none of it.

"Mimara… please," he finally hazarded. "I know… I know I wronged you… down… down there. But everything happened so… so quickly."

"But that's the way it is with fools, isn't it?" she said, her tone so light it could only be scathing. "The world is quick and they are slow."

Perhaps she had happened upon an old and profound fear of his. Perhaps she had simply shocked him with the summary ease of her condemnation. Either way, the young Nilnameshi caste-noble came to an abrupt stop, stood dumbfounded as the others trudged past. He ducked away from Galian and his teasing attempt to pinch his cheek.

Afterward Achamian joined him on the trail, moved more by the memory of Esmenet and the similarities of her pique than by real pity. "Give her time," he said. "She's fierce in her feelings, but her heart is forgiving…" He trailed, realizing this wasn't quite true. "She's too quick not to appreciate the… difficulties," he added.

"Difficulties?"

Achamian frowned at the petulance of the young man's tone. The fact was he agreed with Mimara: He did think Soma was a fool-but a well-meaning one. "Have you ever heard the saying, 'Courage for men is fodder for dragons?'"

"No," the fulsome lips admitted. "What does it mean?"

"That courage is more complicated than simple souls credit… Mimara may be many things, Soma, but simple isn't one of them. We all need time to build fences about what… what happened."

The wide brown eyes studied him for a moment. Even after everything they had endured, the same affable light illuminated his gaze. "Give her time…" Soma repeated in the tone of a young man taking heart.

"Time," the old Wizard said, resuming his march.

Afterward he found himself hoping the daft fool didn't confuse his advice for paternal permission. The thought of the man wooing Mimara made him bristle as if he really were her father. The question of why he felt this way plagued him for a good portion of the afternoon. For all her capricious strength, something about Anasurimbor Mimara demanded protection, a frailty so at odds with the tenor of her declarations that it could only seem tragic… beautiful. The air of things too extraordinary to long survive the world's rigour.

This realization, if anything, made her company more irritating.

"The woman saved your life," Pokwas told him one evening, when the to-and-fro of men milling found them side by side. "That means deep things in my country."

"She saved all our lives," Achamian said.

"I know," the towering Sword-dancer replied with a solemn nod. "But yours in particular, Wizard. Several times." A look of wonder crept into his face.

"What?" Achamian could feel the old scowl building, the one that had aged into his expression.

"You're so old," Pokwas said with a shrug. "Who risks everything to pluck an empty wineskin from a raging river? Who?"

Achamian snorted in laughter, wondered how long it had been since he had laughed. "An empty wineskin's daughter," he replied. And even as a part of him flinched from the lie-for it seemed sacrilegious to deceive men with whom he had shared utter and abject hardship-another part of him slumped backward in a kind of marvelling anxiousness.

Maybe this lie had also come true.

She watches the Wizard by moonlight, reviews his features the way a mother reviews her children: the counting of things beloved. The eyebrows like moustaches, the white hermit beard, the hand that clutches his breast. Night after night she watches.

Before, Drusas Achamian had been a riddle, a maddening puzzle. She could scarce look at him without railing in anger. So stingy! So miserly! There he sat, warm and fat with knowledge, while she haunted his stoop, begging, starving… Starving! Of all the sins between people, few are so unforgivable as being needed.

But now.

He looks every bit as wild as before, hung in wolf-pelts, stooped with years. Despite bathing in the chill blast of mountain streams (an episode that would have occasioned hilarity had the expedition not been so battered), he still carries the stain of Sranc blood across his knuckles and his cheek. They all do.

And still he denies her. Still he complains, upbraids, and rebukes.

The only difference is that she loves him.

She remembers her mother's first descriptions of him, back when the Andiamine Heights had been her home, when gold and incense had been her constant companions. "Have I ever told you about Akka?" the Empress asked, surprising her daughter in the Sacral Enclosure. There was always this twitch, a body-wide plucking of tendons, whenever her mother caught her unawares. Her jaw would tighten, and she would turn to see herself — as she knew she would be in twenty years' time. Mother, draped in white and turquoise silks, a gown reminiscent of those worn by Shrial Nuns.

"Is he my father?" she had replied.

Her mother shrank from the question, recoiled even. Asking about her father was Mimara's weapon of choice. Questions of paternity were at once accusations of whorishness. Woe to the woman who did not know. But this time the question seemed to strike her mother particularly hard, to the point where she paused to blink away tears.

"Your f-father," she stammered. "Yes."

Stunned silence. Mimara had not expected this. She knows now that her mother lied, that Esmenet said this simply to rob her daughter of the hateful question. Well… perhaps not simply. Mimara has learned enough about Achamian to understand her mother's passion, to understand how she might name him her daughter's father… in her soul's heart, at least. Everyone tells lies to dull the world's sharper, more complicated edges-some more pretty than others.

"What was he like?" she asked.

Her mother never looked so beautiful as when she smiled. Beautiful and hateful both. "Foolish, like all men. Wise. Petty. Gentle."

"Why did you leave him?"

Another question meant to injure. Only this time, Mimara found herself flinching instead of celebrating. Hurting her mother where she herself was concerned was one thing: victims have rights over criminals-do they not? Hurting her for things entirely her own, however, said more about Mimara than Mimara cared to hear.

Few passions require quite so much certainty as spite.

"Kellhus," Esmenet replied, her voice dim and damaged. You win, her eyes conceded as she turned to leave. "I chose Kellhus."

Now, watching the Wizard by moonlight, Mimara cannot stop thinking about her mother. She imagines the wrack that had to have been her soul, coming to her daughter again and again, each time with new hope, only to be punished and rebuked. Guilt and remorse crash through her, for a time. Then she thinks of the little girl who had shrieked in the arms of slavers, the child sobbing, "Mumma!" into the creaking dark. She remembers the stink and the pillows, the child who wept within her still, even though her face had become as flat and chill as new fallen snow.