R. Bakker - The Judging eye

"No."

A vertiginous, dumbfounded moment, as if he had leaned forward expecting an answer to brace him. "What then? Do not play me on such matters, Zsoronga! I come to you as a friend!"

The Successor-Prince somehow grinned and scowled all at once. "You must learn, Horse-King. Too many wolves prowl these columns. I appreciate your honesty, your overture, I truly do, but when you speak like this… I… I fear for you."

Obotegwa had softened his sovereign's tone, of course. No matter how diligently the Obligate tried to recreate the tenor of his Prince's discourse, his voice always bore the imprint of a long and oft-examined life.

Sorweel found himself looking down at the polished contours of his pommel, so different from the raw hook of iron on Sakarpi saddles. "What does this-this… Achamian say?"

"He says the Anasыrimbor is a man, neither diabolic nor divine. A man of unheard-of intellect. He bids us imagine the difference between ourselves and children…" The black man trailed into silence, his brows furrowed in concentration. He had this habit of staring down and to the left when pondering, as though judging points buried deep in the ground.

"And?"

"The important thing, he says, isn't so much what the Anasыrimbor is, as what we are to him."

Sorweel glared at him in exasperation. "You speak in riddles!"

"Yusum pyeb-!"

"Think to your childhood! Think of the hopes and fears. Think of the tales the nursemaids told you. Think of the way your face continually betrayed you. Think of all the ways you were mastered, all the ways you were moulded."

"Yes! So?"

"That is what you are to the Aspect-Emperor. That is what we all are."

"Children?"

Zsoronga dropped his reins, waved his arms out in grand gesture of indication. "All of this. This divinity. This apocalypse. This… religion he has created. They are the kinds of lies we tell children to assure they act in accord with our wishes. To make us love, to incite us to sacrifice… This is what Drusas Achamian seems to be saying."

These words, spoken through the lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chilled Sorweel to the pith. Demons were so much easier! This… this…

How does a child war against a father? How does a child not… love?

Sorweel could feel the dismay on his face, the bewilderment, but his shame was muted by the realization that Zsoronga felt no different. "So what are his wishes, then? The Aspect-Emperor. If all this is… is a fraud, then what are his true ends?"

They had climbed out of the shallow marsh and now crested a low knoll. Zsoronga nodded past Sorweel's shoulder, to where, in the congestion of the near distance, the young King could see Eskeles's absurd form fairly bowing the back of his huffing donkey. More lessons…

"The Wizard does not say," the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. "But I fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with."

That night he dreamed of Kings arguing across an ancient floor.

"There is the surrender that leads to slavery," the Exalt-General said. "And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that difference."

"So says the slave!" Harweel cried, standing in a flower of outward-hooking flames.

How bright his father burned. Lines of fire skittering up the veins wrapping his arms. His hair and beard a smoking blaze. His skin blistering like pitch, shining raw, trailing lines of fiery grease…

How beautiful was his damnation.

At first he battled the slave, crying out. Porsparian was little more than hands in the darkness, fending, pressing, and then as Sorweel eventually calmed, soothing.

"Ek birim sefnarati," the old slave murmured, though it sounded more like a mutter in his broken wood-pipe voice. "Ek birim sefnarati… Shhh… Shhh…" Over and over, little more than a shadow kneeling at the side of Sorweel's cot.

Illumination slowly tinted the greater dark beyond the canvas planes of his tent, a slow inhalation of light.

"I saw my father burn," he croaked to the uncomprehending slave.

For some reason, he did not begrudge the gnarled hand that rested on his shoulder. And it seemed a miracle the way the slave's cracked-leather features gained reality in the fading gloom. Sorweel's own grandfather had died on the Pale when he was very young, so he had never known the indulgent warmth of a father's father's adoration. He had never learned the way the years opened the hearts of the old to the miraculousness of the young. But he thought he could see it in Porsparian's strange yellow-smiling eyes, in the rattle of his voice, and he found himself trusting it completely.

"Does that mean he's damned?" he asked thickly. A grandfather, it seemed, would know. "Dreams of burning?"

The shadow of a stern memory crossed the old Shigeki's face, and he pressed himself to his feet. Sorweel sat up in his cot, absently scratched his scalp while watching his slave's shadowy labour. Porsparian stooped to pull the mat from the turf floor, then knelt in the manner of an old woman worshiping. As Sorweel had seen him do so many times, he plucked away the turf, then pressed the form of a face into the soil-a face that seemed unmistakably feminine despite the gloom.

Yatwer.

The slave brought dirt to his eyes, then began slowly rocking to a muttered prayer. Back and forth, without any discernible rhythm, like a man struggling against the ropes that bound him. On and on he muttered, while the dawning light pulled more and more details from obscurity: the crude black stitching of his tunic's hem, the tufts of wiry white hair that climbed his forearms, the cross-hatching of kicked and pressed grasses. A kind of violence crept into his movements, enough to draw Sorweel anxiously forward. The Shigeki jerked from side to side, as though yanked by some interior chain. The intervals between the spasms shrank, until it seemed he flinched from a cloud of bee stings. A series of convulsions…

Sorweel leapt to his feet, stepped forward, hands held out. "Porsparian!" he cried.

But something, some rule of religious witness perhaps, held him back. He remembered the incident with the tear, when Porsparian had burned his palm, and a hollowing anxiousness seized him. He felt like a thing of paper, creased and rolled and folded into the shape of a man. Any gust, it seemed, could make a kite of him, toss him to the arches of heaven. What new madness was this?

His soiled fingers still to his eyes, the old man writhed and bucked as though kicked and beaten from within. Breath whistled from flaring nostrils. His voice had sputtered into a ragged gurgle…

Then, like grass springing back to form in the wake of boots, he was upright and still. Porsparian drew aside his hands, looked to the earth with eyes like red gelatin…

Gazed at the earthen face.

Sorweel caught his breath, blinked as though to squint away the madness. Not only had the slave's eyes gone red (a trick, some kind of trick!), somehow the mouth pressed into the soil face had opened.

Opened?

Forming a plate with his palms, Porsparian lowered his fingers to the lower lip, received the waters pooling there. Old and bent and smiling, he then turned to his master and stood. His eyes had returned to normal, though the knowingness they possessed seemed anything but. He stepped forward, reached out. Muck trailed like blood from the pads of his fingers. Sorweel shrank backward, nearly toppled over his cot.

Standing across the morning-glowing canvas, Porsparian actually seemed a creature made of shadowy earth, like something moulded from the mud of an ancient river watching with the forever look of yellow eyes. "Spit," the old slave said, stunning him with the clarity of his Sakarpic pronunciation. "To keep… face… clean."