Hugh Cook: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Enough for an army.

Once Guest's inevitable reprisals had added another field of blood and butchery to history's scenery, the Weaponmaster pursued his father, and the pursuit soon took him into the hills.

I remember.

It was cold in the hills.

By now, Lord Onosh was running in earnest. But however he ran, he could not escape from his son. In desperation, the Witchlord Onosh split his forces, sending parties in five different directions in the hope of evading pursuit. But the Witchlord's doom was so patent that some of his people deserted with the express intention of betraying him.

Guest Gulkan accepted the intelligence which was brought to him by the deserters, then had them put to death.

"For," said Guest, "treason is a capital crime, and, besides, it is these deserters who are putting me to the necessity of killing my father."

In the face of these judicial murders, Sken-Pitilkin said nothing, for Guest's mood had become changeable, and the wizard thought it unwise to challenge him when he had entered into one of his sanguinary phases.

And you think you would have done otherwise?

Well, perhaps you would have. But perhaps you would have died on account of your attempted diplomacy. In any case, this is not the tale of what might have been. This is the story of that which was. I remember.

I remember it was cold.

It was cold in the hills, cold in those days of spring, and colder yet by night. In the weariness of the long pursuit, men slept in the saddle. The pursuit went on by day and night, until bad weather set in, bringing abolishing rain, and clouds which reduced the night to an utter darkness.

I remember.

The trees, by night, wrathed by the rending winds. The campfires, driven and shriven by the bone-bleak wind. The muttered discontents of the fingerjoints, old bones protesting against the cold, against the unrelenting rigors of campaigning. Bao Gahai had died in the course of the Witchlord's war with the Weaponmaster, and was there any guarantee that a wizard would prevail in health where a witch had failed and perished?

Dawn, at last.

Dawn, and the rain dying away, and a weak light filtering through the breaking clouds. The ground mired with mud, and wet with petals, the petals of spring blossom brought down to earth by the drenching rains of the night.

Then Guest Gulkan took the saddle and led his people in pursuit. And many men marveled to see the confidence with which he led the way, wasting no time on spying for tracks.

But of course Guest Gulkan had often hunted in these hills.

He had hunted with his father, back in the days when Lord Onosh had sported after bandits. Guest knew the habits of the hunted, and knew too the lie of the land. Lord Onosh had fled through the hills in a great arc, and that arc had taken him into a valley which led down toward the Yolantarath River. The steep scarps of the valley's rocky sides meant that Lord Onosh would now be inevitably channeled down toward the flatlands, like many parties of bandits before him.

So Guest pursued, leading his men with a certainty which the ignorant attributed to precognitive powers – powers which came, or so said a wild rumor, from the fact that he had been mothered by a witch.

But, as they drew nearer and nearer the Yolantarath, Guest allowed the pace to slacken; and Sken-Pitilkin, deducing from this slackening a lessening of Guest's wrathfulness, ventured to open a conversation.

"You remember this," said Sken-Pitilkin, opening a conversation with the Weaponmaster in the hope of later being able to raise the matter of his execution of the men who had betrayed his father.

"Perhaps," said Guest carelessly. "Or perhaps I dreamt of it. Have you ever thought this might be a dream, and you but a dream in a dream?"

It goes without saying that Sken-Pitilkin had heard of this tired old philosophical conceit some twice times ten thousand times in the past.

"A dream has a purpose," said Sken-Pitilkin. "It's purpose is the cleansing of the mind. Having a purpose, it is simple. Since life is both complex and disordered, we can say of a certainty that it has no purpose, hence is no dream."

"So you say," said Guest, "but your philosophy opens you to deception. If the world were a dream, perhaps it might have been designed for your own deceiving, in which case it would have been purposely designed to be complex and confusing, in order to convince you that it had no purpose."

Thus argued Guest Gulkan and his erstwhile tutor as they made their way down toward the Yolantarath River. Sken-Pitilkin, naturally, was able to easily and adroitly defeat his every argument; but Guest in his ignorance was unable to realize that he had been defeated, and repeatedly declared that a world undreamlike might yet be a dream, assuming it to have been designed for deception.

"That much you've said some three times already," said Sken-Pitilkin, when Guest had said it for the seventh time.

"Which makes it true," said Guest.

"No, not at all," said Sken-Pitilkin. "A thing said thrice is no more true than a thing said once, and to propose otherwise is a nonsense."

"On the contrary," said Guest Gulkan. "Words are the shaping of the world. You told me that yourself. It follows that to say is to shape, and a thing thrice-said gains truth by repetition."

This is typical of the Weaponmaster's erratic style of debate, which, for all it owed to formal logic and systematic learning, resembled nothing so much as an energetic washerwoman trying to hammer home a nail by flailing at it with a wet eel.

"You are confounding a theorem of Practical Politics with a theorem of Axiomatic Philosophy," said Sken-Pitilkin. "And thus it is proved that you are talking nonsense, whether you know it or not."

"Knowledge is unitary," said Guest. "You told me so yourself."

Knowledge is unitary. What does that mean? Guest Gulkan was not sure. But his tutor had often used this grand-sounding phrase to win their debates (or at least bring them to a conclusion) and Guest thought there was no harm in trying it.

"Knowledge is unitary, yes," said Sken-Pitilkin, "but even so, books are not fishes, songs are not sums, and politics is not philosophy, nor did I ever tell you it was."

"On the contrary," said Guest. "You have several times named philosophy as the very heart of politics, which is a nonsense, but is still what you told me."

"The nonsense is not mine but yours," said Sken-Pitilkin, striving with imperfect success to preserve an amiable tolerance in the face of such intellectual folly. "Political method is not philosophical truth, and I never said it was."

"The heart," said Guest, stubborn in dissent. "You claimed philosophy to be the heart of politics."

"One thing becomes not another simply by being placed inside it, whether at the heart or elsewhere," said Sken-Pitilkin. "A stone ditched in the river does not become water. Likewise, your sword would win no degree of equinity by being thrust the fullness of its length into the flesh of a horse, even if it should penetrate to the very heart."

"But that heart itself would be horse," persisted Guest.

"Heart, kernel, pith, gist, essence. The heart of a thing is the essence of a thing, and you claimed philosophy as the heart of politics."

"That is sophistry, and you know it, or should know it, or will know it by the time I'm finished with you," said Sken-Pitilkin. "In any case, I never said that philosophy is at the heart of politics, merely that it should be, which is quite a different matter entirely. I am a philosopher. Am I ruling Tameran? Am I so much as listened to when I venture political advice?"

"You'll be listened to ardently," said Guest, "if you can tell me how to make a peace with my father."

"If we are in luck," said Sken-Pitilkin, "then your father will out-distance you, and you will have no need to worry about either war or peace."