The Judging Eye (38 page)

Signs of Sranc.

A kind of communal recognition
dawned on the host, a realization that abandoned lands could be liberated. To
demonstrate this fact, King Hoga Hogrim—the nephew of Hoga Gothyelk, the famed
Martyr of Shimeh—commanded his Tydonni to draw stone from a nearby outcropping
for a great ring, an immense Circumfix implanted for all time in Condian earth.
The Longbeards laboured through the night, their numbers swelling as more and
more of their encamped neighbours joined them. The break of dawn revealed not
so much a ring as a circular fortress, as wide as five war-galleys set end to
end and with walls of unshaped sandstone standing the height of three men.

Afterwards, the Aspect-Emperor
himself walked among the exhausted men, remitting their sins and blessing their
distant kith and kin. "Men make such marks," he said, "as their
will affords them. Behold! Let the World see why the Tydonni are called the
'Sons of Iron.'"

And so the march wore on.
According to conventional military wisdom, a host as vast as the Ordeal should
break up and march in separate columns. Not only would this improve the ability
of the soldiery to collect forage, be it wild game or the grasses their hardy
ponies were bred to survive on, it would drastically increase their rate of
advance. But as strange as it sounded, the sloth of the Great Ordeal was a
necessity, at least at this stage in the long march to Golgotterath. The plan
was to stretch the supply umbilicus between the host and Sakarpus as far as
humanly possible, before taking what the Aspect-Emperor's generals grimly
referred to as the Leap, marching beyond the point of meaningful contact with
the New Empire.

Since the length of this
umbilicus depended on the ability of the Imperial supply trains to overtake the
Great Ordeal, dividing the host into quicker columns would simply increase the
length of the Leap. This would prove disastrous, given the needs of the host
and the scarcity of meaningful forage along the length of the Istyuli. Even if
the Ordeal were to break into a hundred columns and spread across the width of
the plain, it could not be trusted to provide enough game to make an
appreciable difference. The host had to carry the supplies required to reach
the more abundant lands of what had once been eastern Kûniüri, where, according
to the Imperial Trackers, it could easily find enough forage once it scattered.

So it crept forward as all
cumbersome armies must, scarcely travelling more than ten to fifteen miles a
march. Aside from numbers, the rivers were the greatest source of delay. Again
thanks to the Imperial Trackers, each waterway had been meticulously mapped
years in advance. Not only did the Great Ordeal's planners need to know where
the best crossing points were, they had to know the state of those fords at
various times of the year and during various kinds of weather. A single swollen
river could spell doom if it prevented the Great Ordeal from reaching
Golgotterath before the onset of winter.

But even mapped, the fords still
represented bottlenecks. In some cases, three, even four days were required
simply for the host to cross banks no more than a stone's throw apart. These
too were scheduled into the sacred host's ever-tightening margins.

In the highest councils of the
Aspect-Emperor, the possibility that the Consult might find some way to poison
these rivers was a matter of continual concern, if not outright dread. Only the
possibility that they might exterminate game along their path troubled them
more. As veterans of the First Holy War, both of the Ordeal's Exalt-Generals,
King Saubon and King Proyas, were intimately acquainted with the catastrophic
consequences of running out of water. Thirst, like hunger or disease, was a
vulnerability that increased in proportion to an army's size, which was why it
could unravel even the greatest host in a mere matter of days.

But among the rank and file, the
absence of Sranc was the only concern voiced about the evening fires, not
because they suspected anything devious—what trick could catch their Holy
Aspect-Emperor unawares?—but because they longed to put their spears and swords
and axes to work. Rumours were traded about the far-ranging exploits of Sibawul
te Nurwal, whose Cepaloran lancers had apparently run down several fleeing
Sranc clans. Similar tales were told about General Halas Siroyon and his
Famiri, or General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi and his steel-clad Eumarnan knights.
But the tales only seemed to whet their bloodlust and to draw out the trackless
tedium of the march. They complained the way warriors complained, about the
food, the lack of women, the pitch of the ground they slept across, but they
never forgot their sacred mission. They marched to
save the world
, which
for most meant saving their wives, their children, their parents, and their
lands. They marched to prevent the Second Apocalypse.

And
the God himself
marched
with them, speaking through the mouth, glaring through the eyes of Anasûrimbor
Kellhus I.

They were plain men—warriors.
They understood that doubt was hesitation, and that hesitation was death, not
only on the field of war, but on the field of souls as well. Only believers
persevered.

Only believers conquered.

***

What was Sakarpus compared to
this? And who was he, but the son of another Beggar King?

These were the questions that
Sorweel could not but ask whenever he looked to the shield line of the horizon.
Men. Wherever he turned his gaze, he saw more and more armed and armoured Men.

The Great Ordeal.

For Sorweel, it existed in
series of circles, each radiating outward, from his squad in the Company of
Scions to the very limit of the world. In his immediate vicinity, all was the
close tedium of riders on the march, defined more by sound and smell than sight:
the must of fresh dung, the equine snorts and complaints, the swishing
percussion of endless hooves through grass, the rattle of the small almost
chariotlike carts that each of the doughty little horses pulled. A glimpse was
all it took to surpass this mundane circle: Striding legs became scissoring
forests, men rocking in their high-backed saddles became slow-filing fields of
thousands. And beyond this, individuals vanished into many-coloured masses,
their armour winking in the high-sky sun. The shouts and calls and laughter
dissolved into a white ambient roar. Mobs congealed into ponderous columns
strung with vast trains of mules and teetering ox-carts.

The host did not so much cross
the greening pastures as they
encompassed
them, a slow flood of warlike
humanity. Everything and everyone became a link in a far greater articulation.
Only the high-jutting banners retained their singularity: the signs of tribes
and nations, each married in some fashion to the Circumfix. And farther, moving
beneath the silence that was the sky, even the banners became abstract, hooked
threads on the carpet that had become a darker earth. The
very ground seemed
to move
, out to the vanishing line of the plains.

The Great Ordeal. A thing so
great that not even the horizon could contain it. And for a boy on the cusp of
manhood, a thing that humiliated far more than it humbled.

What honour could dwell in a
soul so small?

Officially, the Company of
Scions was touted as one of the most elite units in the Kidruhil, but unofficially,
it was known to be largely ceremonial. The power of the Aspect-Emperor or more
importantly, the
rumour
of his power, was such that many rulers beyond
his sway sent their own sons to him as means to guarantee their treaties with
the New Empire. They were observers, perhaps even prisoners, but they certainly
were not warriors—let alone Men of the Ordeal.

For Sorweel, this was a source
of many contradictory passions. His blood ran hot at the prospect of battle—how
long had he pestered his father for an opportunity to ride to war? But at the
same time, the dishonour—if not the treachery—of riding beneath his enemy's
banners alternately gouged his belly with horror and squeezed his heart with
abject shame. He even caught himself
taking pride
in his uniform from
time to time: the fine tooling of the leather-stripped skirts, the soft castor
of the gloves, the interlocking motifs stamped into the cuirass, even the white
cloak of his caste-nobility.

For as long as he could
remember, Sorweel had always thought betrayal a kind of
thing
. And as a
thing, he assumed, it was what it was, like anything else. Either a man kept
faith with his blood and nation, or he didn't. But betrayal, he was learning,
was far too complicated to be a mere thing. It was more like a disease... or a
man.

It was too insidious not to have
a soul.

It
crept
, for one thing,
not like a snake or a spider, but like spilled wine, seeping into the
fractures, soaking everything its own colour. Each betrayal, no matter how
trivial, seemed to beget further betrayals. And it
deceived
as well,
postured as nothing less than
sense
itself, as reason. "Play
along," it told him. "Pretend to be one of their Kidruhil—yes,
pretend
."
Wise counsel, or so it seemed. It failed to warn you of the peril, of how each
day playing leached your soul of resolution. It said nothing of the slow
collapse of pretending into
being
.

He tried to remain vigilant, and
in the deep of night, he clung to his recriminations. But it was so hard, so
hard to remember the taste of
certainty
.

The Scions were scarcely a
hundred strong, far and away the smallest of the Kidruhil's three-hundred-odd
companies. They rode with the strange sense of being a sliver in a great fist,
an intrusion that inflamed and irritated. Kidruhil troopers were selected
according to their skill and their ardour. If anything made the Scions anathema
to their fellow Kidruhil, it was their
lack of faith
. Though the
officers were always careful to observe the semblance of diplomatic decorum,
their men understood, enough to allow a general contempt—and in some cases even
outright hatred—to shine through.

But if the Scions were an
outcast within the Kidruhil, then Sorweel was even more an outcast within the
Scions. Of course everyone knew who he was. How could any Son of Sakarpus not
be the talk of the Company, let alone the son of its slain king? Whether it was
pity or derision, Sorweel saw in their looks the true measure of his shame. And
at night, when he lay desolate in his tent listening to the fireside banter of the
others, he was certain he could understand the questions that kept returning to
their strange tongues. Who was this boy who rode for those who murdered his
father? This Shit-herder, what kind of craven fool was he?

At the end of his sixth day, as
he stood so that Porsparian could remove his gear, a black-skinned man with an
ashen pallor pressed his face through the flap and begged permission to enter.

"Your Glory... I am
Obotegwa, Senior Obligate of Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, Successor-Prince of High
Holy Zeüm." He fell to his knees as he said this, making three waving
flourishes with each of his hands and lowering his chin to his chest. He was
dressed in the finest silks, a padded yellow jacket stencilled with thin black
floral motifs. His ebony skin, which was a shock to Sorweel—until the coming of
the Great Ordeal, he had never seen any Satyothi—shone in the day's failing
light. His receding white hair and high-climbing beard had been trimmed close
to the apple-round contours of his skull. There seemed to be a sturdy honesty
both to his bearing and his voice, which possessed a raspy earthiness despite
its high tone.

As the son of an isolate nation,
Sorweel had little grasp of etiquette between nations. Even his own father had
seemed at a loss as to how to deal with the Aspect-Emperor's first fateful
emissaries. Sorweel found himself flustered by the man's elaborate display, as
well as bewildered by his command of the Sakarpic tongue. So he did what all
young men did in such circumstances: he blurted.

"What do you want?"

The Obligate raised his face,
displayed a grandfather's wise smile. "My Lord Master requests the
pleasure of your company at his fire, your Glory."

The young King accepted the
invitation, his cheeks burning.

All Sorweel knew of black men
was that they hailed from Zeüm, an ancient and great nation in the distant
west. And all he knew of Zeüm was that its people were black. He had noted
Zsoronga earlier, both during assembly and exercises. The man was difficult to
miss, even among the large retinue of black-skinned companions and servants
that rode with him. Men born to authority, Sorweel had noticed, often stood
apart from others, not merely in appearance, but in demeanour and comportment
as well. Some positively swaggered with prominence—or self-importance as the
case might be. Though Zsoronga communicated his station with a similar
intensity, he did so without any overt gestures whatsoever. You simply looked
at his party and
knew
that he was the first among them, as though
consciousness of rank possessed a kind of visual odour.

Obotegwa waited outside while
Porsparian finished ministering to the young King. The old Shigeki slave
muttered under his breath the whole time, periodically fixed him with a yellow-eyed
glare. Words or no words, Sorweel would have asked him what was amiss, but too
many worries plagued his thoughts. What could this Zsoronga want? Amusement for
his cohort? A lesson for his fellows, a living example of how base the blood of
nobles could be?