“Mu’miorn …” he whispered, dragged through Ages as dense as water.
They lay. For a time all Sorweel could hear was his friend’s breathing. His throat ached. Beyond the canvas planes, all creation slumped and toppled in slow silence.
“It is a thing of shame for you sausages,” Zsoronga finally said.
It was not a question, but Sorweel elected to treat it as such.
“Yes. A great shame.”
“In Zeum it is thought holy for the strong to embrace the strong.”
Sorweel attempted to snort in the old way—to make light of what could not be lifted.
Something diabolical hemmed the man’s laughter.
“When our wives are quick with children, warriors turn to one another, so that we may fight as lovers upon the field …”
These words left the Sakarpi King gasping.
“One need not think, dying for one’s lover.”
Sorweel relinquished his grip, but the greater hand clamped his wrist, forced his fingertips to trawl the length of the turgid horn, from root to summit. And he knew—understood with a philosopher’s profundity—that his will was unwelcome here, that he lay in the jaws of an appetite that had devoured his own.
That he had been and would be ravished, as certainly as a daughter of a conquered race.
“You are strong …” the ebony man said to the pale.
That he would rise to, even celebrate, his repeated violation, as certainly as any temple whore.
“And you are weak …”
That shame would devour him whole.
“I am here, Sorweel,” Zsoronga said, raising a thick-fingered hand to his breast. “Here, beneath the madness of what … what we have eaten …” He paused as if to secure evidence of his victim’s belief. “And I will die to protect you …”
He angrily wiped at tears the Son of Harweel could not see.
“To shield what is weak.”
There is a clarity to ancient things that all Men seek to emulate. To read about one’s forefathers is to read about Men who possessed fewer words, and so lived more concentrated lives, following codes that were ruthless for the brute fact of simplicity.
Clarity. Clarity was the gift of their innocence—their ignorance. Clarity was what made them the envy of their seed. What was, for them, was, something there to be seized, not something to be groped for behind curtains of disputation. Good and evil shouted from their worlds, their acts. Their judgment was as harsh as that belonging to the Gods. Punishment was without exception and cruel, even sadistic, for it could only be good to bring down evil upon evil, corruption upon corruption. No time was allotted for appeal, for no time was needed. Guilt was axiomatic, indistinguishable from accusation …
So did they seem Godlike, as well as Godly.
And so did the Ordealmen turn away from their ancestors with the compounding of their crimes. To a soul they had either lost or stowed their ancestor lists following Swaran?l and the fateful decree to eat their foes. If asked why, they would cite “bother,” but the truth was they could no longer at once bear the weight of their past and breathe. Where their forefathers had derived clarity from genuine ignorance, they relied on numbness and distraction.
One by one the Men of the Three Seas fled their abominable deeds, stealing as thieves across the night plain. They pawed at gore-caked faces with slicked hands, sought to cleanse filth with pollution. The meat they had bolted, the blood they had sucked, wrenched their guts as violently as their commissions wracked their hearts. Many found themselves on their hands and knees hooked about vomit that would not come, gagging on misery and horror, thinking, Sweet Seju … What have I done?
And it crackled as lightning through them, this question which sorts all beasts from all Men, stopping hearts, clenching teeth and eyes.
What have I done?
Anxious horror passed for sleep, and the following day found their souls too far from their legs to march the last miles remaining. The day was given over to an awakening like no other, a coming to see themselves, lighting voices as timbre stacked for the pyre, a growing chorus of shrieks and lamentations. They gaped about the fact of their atrocities. And their shame divided them as they had never been divided, rendered them each the butcher of their own hearts, the one most hated, most loathed and feared. How? How could such memories be? Of those who could not bear to live and remember, most refused to remember, but more than six hundred Ordealmen would refuse to live, casting themselves into damnation’s maw. The rest shrank into the shadows of their rangy shelters, where they warred with despair and incredulity and terror—all who had eaten of human flesh.
The Umbilicus remained abandoned, the avenues and alleyways deserted. Cries rose as if from beneath thousands of pillows, as things too sharp to be smothered. And beyond it all, the Horns reared as mountainous ghosts from the rotted teeth of the Occlusion, glinting in the pitiless sun, laughing it seemed, gloating …
The second morning, they awoke from such sleep as anguish afforded to find the horror that had paralysed now pursued, hunting them with a lunatic terror of place. None could bear the ground that bore them. Fleeing the Field Appalling had become the only way to breathe. The Horns caught the morning before the sun had even risen, smoldering with diurnal gold above the ragged summits of the Occlusion. It was inevitable that all eyes turn toward it, that all souls gaze agog.
No hymns were raised, no prayers called … Scarce a wonder was voiced.
They dismantled the camp, such as it was, and resumed marching, migrating toward the impossible spectre climbing the horizon before them. Not a soul had uttered an order. Not a tribe, cohort, or column marched together, let alone in formation. Not a man understood what he was doing, aside from getting away.
And so the Great Ordeal of Anas?rimbor Kellhus did not so much march toward Golgotterath as flee.
Sorweel would have whooped through the wood, had not his father taught him the ways of Husyelt the Hunter. So he crept across the dappled floors instead, mimicking the grim expression of his father’s Boonsmen. This was the only reason he found the thing: a ball of grey fur, no larger than a walnut, laying at the base of a cleft oak. Though the incident itself would be lost to him, the fascination he would never forget, discovering, as he had, what seemed some magic residuum of life.