Steven Erikson
Fall of Light
BOOK ONE
So they lust for blood. Poets know its taste, but some know IT better than others. A few are known to choke on it. Stand at a distance, then, and make violence into a dance. Glory in its sounds, in the mayhem and those stern expressions that seem better suited to an unpleasant task completed with reluctant forbearance. There is for the audience that glee of admiration in the well-swung sword, the perfect thrust, the cold, professional face with the flat eyes. Revel, then, in the strut, and see something enticing in the grim camaraderie of failed men and women-
Failed? You say many do not see that? Oh dear.
Shall I then offer up the reek of shit and piss? The cries for loved ones far away? The hopeless longing for a mother’s embrace to ease the pain and the terror, to bless the gentle slowing of the hammering heart? Shall I describe the true faces of violence? The twist of fear, the heaviness of dread, the panic that rushes in a surge of blood, a surge that drains the visage and bulges the eyes? But what value any of this, when to feel is to acknowledge the frailty of one’s own soul, and such frailty must ever be denied in the public swagger that so many find essential, lest they lose grip.
Indeed, I would think armour itself whispers of weakness. Tug free the helm’s strap, let your scalp prickle in the cool air. Strip down until you stand naked, and let’s see again that swagger.
There are poets who glory in their recounts of battle, of all those struggles so deftly ritualized. And they tend lovingly their garden of words, heaping high the harvest of glory, duty, courage and honour. But each of those luscious, stirring words is plucked from the same vine, and alas, it is a poisonous one. Name it necessity, and look well upon its spun strands, its fibrous belligerence.
Necessity. The soldiers attack, but they attack in order to defend. Those they face stand firm, and they stand firm to defend as well. The foes are waging war in self-defence. Consider this, I beg you. Consider this well and consider this long. Choose a cool dusk, with the air motionless, with dampness upon the ground. Draw away from all company and stand alone, watching the dying sun, watching the night sky awaken above you, and give your thoughts to necessity.
The hunter knows it. The prey knows it. But on a field of battle, when every life totters in the balance, where childhoods, begun long ago, and youthful days suddenly past, have all, impossibly, insanely, led to this day. This fight. This wretched span of killing and dying. Was this the cause your father and mother dreamed of, for you? Was this the reason for raising you, protecting you, feeding you, loving you?
What, in the name of all the gods above and below, are you doing here?
Necessity, when spoken of in the forum of human endeavour, is more often a lie than not. Those who have laid claim to your life will use it often, and yet hold you at a distance, refusing you that time of contemplation, or, indeed, recognition. If you come to see the falseness of their claim, all is lost. Necessity: the lie hiding behind the true virtues of courage and honour – they make you drunk on those words, and would keep you that way, until comes the time for you to bleed for them.
The poet who glories in war is a spinner of lies. The poet who delights in visceral detail, for the sole purpose of feeding that lust for blood, has all the depth of a puddle of piss on the ground.
Oh, have done with it, then.
ONE
Stepping out from the tent, Renarr faced the bright morning light, and did not blink. Behind her, on the other side of the canvas wall, the men and women were rising from their furs, voicing bitter complaints at the damp chill, snapping at the children to hurry with the hot, spiced wine. Within the tent, the air had been thick with the fug of lovemaking, the rank sweat of the soldiers now gone, the metallic bite of the oils with which the soldiers honed weapons and worked to keep leather supple, the breaths of drunkards and the faint undercurrent of vomit. But out here those smells were quickly swept away, clearing her head as she watched the camp stir awake.
She took coin no different from the other whores, although she did not need it. She made her false moans and moved beneath a man like a woman both eager and hungry, and when they shuddered, emptying their hoards into her and becoming weak and childlike, she held them as would a mother. In every way, then, she was the same as the others. Yet they kept her apart, forever pushed away from their close company. She was the adopted daughter of Lord Urusander, after all, Legion Commander and reluctant holder of the title of Father Light, and this was a privilege worthy of dreams, and if flower petals were scattered in her wake, they were the colour of blood. She had no friends. She had no followers. The company she kept had all the warmth of a murder of crows.
There was frost silvering the tufts of grass between the tents and the ground was frozen hard underfoot. The smoke rising from the cookfires did not rise far, drifting like confusion about the heads of the soldiers as they readied their gear.
She could see, in their agitated gestures, in the nerves betrayed by fumbling at buckles and the like, and could hear, in the surly tones of their conversations, that many now believed that this would be the day. A battle was coming, marking the beginning of the civil war. If she turned to her left, and could make her vision cut through the hillside to the northeast, through the unlit tumble of stone and earth and root and then out again into the morning light, she would see the camp of the Wardens, a camp little different from this one, barring these snow-burnished skins and hair now the hue of spun gold. And in that other camp’s centre, on a standard rising from the command tent, she would make out the heraldry of Lord Ilgast Rend.
The day felt reluctant, but in an ironic way, like a woman feigning resistance on her first night, with rough hands pushing her thighs apart, the air then filling with its share of harsh breaths, ecstatic moans and clumsy grunts. And when it was all done with, amidst deep pools of satisfied heat, there would be blood on the grass.
Just so. And as Hunn Raal would say, had he the wits, justice is a sharp-edged thing and today it will be unsheathed, and wielded with a firm hand. The reluctance is an illusion, and as only Osserc knows, my resistance was indeed feigned, the day Urusander’s son took me to rough bed. We are awash in lies.
Of course, it was equally likely that Lord Urusander would defy this seemingly inevitable destiny. Bind the woman’s legs together, securing a chastity belt with thorns on both sides, to refuse satisfaction from either direction. He might well ruin things for everyone.
So, in its more prosaic details – the frost, the faint but icy wind, the plumes of breath and smoke, the distant neighing of horses and the occasional bray of a pack-mule; all the sounds of a day’s dawning in the company of men, women, children and beasts – she could, if unmindful, believe the stream of life to be unbroken, with all its promise arrayed before it, bright as the morning sun.
She drew her cloak about her rounded shoulders, and set out through the camp. She passed between tent rows, stepping carefully to avoid the ropes and stakes, taking caution on the furrows that cut diagonally across her path, and the stubble left behind by the harvesting only a week past. She skirted the trenches carved deep into the soil where wastes floated on the sluggish surface of murky water, along with the bloated carcasses of rats. By mid-afternoon, when the sun warmed the air enough, mosquitoes would arrive in thick, spinning clouds, thirsty for blood. If soldiers stood arrayed in ranks, facing the enemy, there would be little comfort preceding the clash of weapons.