R. Bakker: The Judging eye

The voices continued to chirp and gaggle somewhere to the left, on a blade of level earth that formed the foundation for several hoary old maples.

"Momma! Momma!" he heard young Yorsi cry. Then he spied him through the weave of branches, barrelling up the slope. His mother, Tisthanna, strolled down toward him, wiping her hands on her apron and quite-Achamian was relieved to note-unconcerned. "Look!" Yorsi cried, waving something small and golden.

Then he saw a petite woman climbing in Yorsi's wake, laughing at the four blond children who danced around her, their questions rising in chiming counterpoint. "What's your mule called?" "Can I chop your sword?" "Can I? Can I? Can I?" Her hair was Ketyai black and half-cropped, and she wore a leather cloak whose many-panelled manufacture shouted caste-noble even from such a distance. But given his high vantage and the way she looked down at her little interlocutors, Achamian could see nothing of her face.

He felt a tickle in his throat. How long had it been since their last visitor?

In the beginning, when it had just been him and Geraus, only the Sranc had come. He had lost count of how many times he had lit up the hillside with the Gnosis, sending the vile creatures howling back into the forest deeps. Every tree within bowshot carried some scar of those mad battles: A sorcerer poised on the edge of a half-ruined tower, raining brilliant destruction down on fields of what looked like raving, white-skinned apes. Geraus still suffered nightmares. Afterwards, with the end of the Unification Wars, it had been the Scalpoi, the innumerable Men-Galeoth, Conriyans, Tydonni, Ainoni, even Kianene-who had come to collect the Aspect-Emperor's bounty on Sranc scalps. For years it seemed some blood-mad camp of theirs lay within a day's distance of them. And on more than a few occasions, Achamian had to resort to the Gnosis to cut short their drunken depredations. But even they moved on after time, hunting their vicious prizes into the wilderness's truly primeval deeps. Periodically a troop of them would happen upon the tower, and if they were hungry or otherwise broken by the horrors of their trade, some kind of woe was certain to follow. But then even they ceased coming.

So what had it been? Five, maybe six years since the last visitor had climbed to the foot of their tower?

It had to be. That long at least. There had been those two starving Scalpoi who had come shortly after Geraus had taken Tisthanna for his wife, but after? Certainly not since the last of the children had been born.

No matter, the rule had been simple over the years: Visitors meant grief, the Gods and their laws of hospitality be damned.

Holding hands with one of the girls, the nameless woman came to a friendly stop before Tisthanna, bowed her head in greeting-precisely how far Achamian couldn't tell because of an obscuring tree limb, though it seemed the inclination proper to caste-menials. He could see her boots through a brace of budding twigs, the toe of her left absently scuffing the winter-flat leaves; they were every bit as fine as her ermine-trimmed cloak.

Perhaps she was only equipped like a caste-noble.

Craning his head, he leaned out perilously far, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but to no effect. He heard Tisthanna's whinnying laugh, and it relieved him-somewhat. Tisthanna was nothing if not sensible.

Then the two women were walking side by side into the clearing that encircled the tower's foundation, talking loudly enough to be overheard, but in that close, feminine tone that seemed to baffle masculine ears. Nodding at something, Tisthanna, her blonde hair stacked upon her apple-round face, looked up and gestured to him in the window. Achamian, who leaned stooped out like yard and tackle, tried to pull himself into a more dignified posture. His left foot slipped. The sill-stone beneath his left palm cracked free the rotten mortar-

He nearly followed it clacking down.

Tisthanna let loose an involuntary "Ooop!" then chortled as Achamian, his long white beard dragging along the stones, carefully palmed his way back to safety.

"Mast-Master Akka!" the children called out in a broken chorus.

The stranger looked up, her delicate face bemused and open and curious…

And something in Achamian suffered a greater fall.

There is a progression to all things. Madness, miracles, even dreams broken into their most feverish extremes follow some thread of association. The unexpected, the astonishing, are always the effect of ignorance, no matter how absolute they may seem. In this world, everything has its reasons.

"So," she said, her tone balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them, "the Great Wizard."

There was a strangeness to her, something like the stare of children with ill-mannered smiles.

"What are you doing here?" Achamian snapped.

He had sent Tisthanna and the children away and now stood with the woman in the sunlight to the lee of the tower, on the broad white stone the children called the Turtle Shell. For years they had been drawing on it with the tips of burnt sticks: grotesque faces, oddly affecting pictures of trees and animals, and, lately, the letters Achamian had taught them to write. There was an order to the drawings, with the steadier lines of symbol and verisimilitude struck across the pale remnants of fancy, like the record of the soul's long, self-erasing climb.

She had instinctively sought out the highest point-something that inexplicably irritated him. She was short, obviously lithe beneath her leather and woollens. Her face was dark, beautiful, with the colour and contours of an acorn. Save for the green irises and a slight elongation of the jaw, she was exactly as he remembered her…

Except that he had never seen her in his life.

Was she the reason why Esmenet had betrayed him? Was she why his wife-his wife! — had chosen Kellhus over a sorcerer, a broken-hearted fool, all those years ago?

Not because of the child she carried, but because of the child she had lost?

The questions were as inevitable as the pain, the questions that had pursued him beyond civilization's perfumed rim. He could have continued asking them, he could have yielded to madness and made them his life's refrain. Instead he had packed a new life about them, like clay around a wax figurine, then he had burned them out, growing ever more decrepit, ever more old, about their absence-more mould than man. He had lived like some mad trapper, accumulating skins that were furred in ink instead of hair, the lines of his every snare anchored to this silent hollow within him, to these questions he dared not ask.

And now here she stood… Mimara.

The answer?

"I wondered if you would recognize me," she said. "I prayed you would, in fact."

The morning breeze sifted through the dark edges of her hair. After so much time spent in the company of Norsirai women, Achamian found himself struck by memories of his mother and sisters: the warmth of their olive cheeks, the tangle of their luxurious black hair.

He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his unkempt beard. Shaking his head, he said, "You look like your mother… Very much."

"So I'm told," she said coolly.

He held out a hand as though to interrupt her, then lowered it just as quickly, suddenly conscious of its knob-knuckled age. "But you never answered me. What are you doing here?"

"Searching for you."

"That much is obvious. The question is why."

This time the anger shone through, enough to make her blink. Achamian had never stopped expecting the assassins, whether sent by the Consult or the Aspect-Emperor. But even still, the world beyond the horizon's rim had grown less and less substantial over the years. More abstract. Trying to forget, trying not to hear when your deepest ears were continually pricked was almost as difficult as trying to hate away love. At first nothing, not even holding his head and screaming could shut out the murderous bacchanal. But somehow, eventually, the roar had faded into a rumble, and the rumble had trailed into a murmur, and the Three Seas had taken on the character of a father's legendary exploits: near enough to be believed, distant enough to be dismissed.