The timbers pitched. Proyas’s stomach climbed his ribs, then dropped.
Two days previous the Ordeal had come upon a forest of poplars—or the remnants of one—in the wake of the Horde. Given the mists enveloping the shoreline, the apparition of savaged trees had seemed more an omen than a boon. But come nightfall the blessing they represented had become plain. The carpenters set to repairing innumerable wains and other accoutrements. Their idle brothers, meanwhile, cavorted about genuine bonfires, whooping into the void. Agmundrmen and others fashioned great spits, which they used to roast Sranc whole. Flames climbed the height of Momemn’s walls for the whoosh of grease. The encampment, long condemned to chill and gloom for the lack of fuel, blazed for the light of innumerable fires, and Men ambled as though drunk, their beards shining for gluttony, their gazes bright for something too vicious to be called jubilation.
Only the Schoolmen and the Shrial Knights refrained from partaking in the bacchanal. But while the former remained within their enclaves as always, the latter set about cutting and appropriating the best timber they could find. Under the watchful gaze of Lord Ussiliar, they toiled through the night, dressing and dowelling and binding, fashioning a platform large enough to deck a Cironji war-galley.
The Raft, they called it.
Now Proyas stood upon it with his fellow Believer-Kings, swinging over emptiness on a mummer’s stage, gazing stupefied across the teeming leagues, for the day possessed the arid clarity of summer’s abdication. For all the miracles he had witnessed over the years, this seemed the most preposterous. Even the Grandmasters among them appeared visibly awestruck. Many present had seen the now legendary Throwing-of-the-Hulls, when Kellhus emptied Invishi’s harbour by raising and casting burning ships whole at Prince Akirapita’s Chorae-equipped bowmen. Although that episode was the greater spectacle, they had spied it from afar. This, however, this had the intimacy of a father’s embrace, and the profundity of unhinged ground, vaulting not simply as a person, but as a place. Proyas watched others exchange small looks of wonder, heard the murmur of astonishment and glee.
Couras Nantilla, who stood next to him, clutched his arm as if to say, See! See!
But Nersei Proyas saw only the power and nothing of the proof. Small commiserations like Nantilla’s grasp simply recalled the consolation lost and the rank turmoil gained: the knowledge that he was no longer Zaudunyani, even though he belonged to them all the same. These Men who had been his brothers were now gulls … fools bent on suffering for their delusions!
And so his heart was broken even as it bounced on a string of giddy drops and steep, aerial turns.
Out of instinct, he aspired to the blank mien and manner that is the refuge of all lost souls in public. But melancholy possesses a spite all its own, and seeks to reveal itself regardless of what the soul wills. Kellhus brought the Raft about, Yinwaul fell away, and the Nele?st bobbed across the whole of the horizon. The angle of the sunlight also changed, and Proyas turned, startled to find himself standing in another’s shadow. It was Saubon. His hand upon the rail, the Galeoth loomed before him, standing so as to shield him from the others.
“Dour befits our terrible station,” the man muttered under his breath, “but not tears …”
Proyas averted his face, pawed away the wetness. His eyes had felt muddy, but then they always felt muddy of late. For a heartbeat he stood as one broken, utterly abject in Saubon’s alarmed gaze. Then he found it, the old arrogant posture, the mien and stance of a great man possessing warrant both temporal and divine—the most profound assurance known to Men. He communicated his gratitude to Saubon with a lingering look.
What was happening?
The encampment blurred as cobbles underneath a carriage. Thousands clotted the battered land, all of them crying out, creating a roar that was scooped by the velocity of their passage overhead. To a soul they shouted out, bellowed in praise and adulation of their False Prophet. Dark and pale and sunburned faces. Mouths pitting beards. Thickets of axes and spears and swords threshing into oblivion.
And then, in a heartbeat, it was all gone, a commotion fading to vapour behind them. The racing ground snapped asunder, and the Raft hurtled out over the turbulent plate of the Nele?st Sea …