‘The river below would welcome our sorry fragments.’
The currents swirled their invitation, but there was nothing friendly in the sly gestures. Prazek shook his head. ‘Indifference is a bitter welcome, my friend.’
‘I see no other promise,’ Dathenar said with a shrug. ‘Let us list the causes of our present fate. I will begin. Our lord wanders lost under winter’s bleak cloak, and makes no bold bulge in his struggle – look out from any tower, Prazek, and you see the season unrelieved, settled flat by the weight of snow, where even the shadows lie weak and pale upon the ground.’
Prazek grunted, his eyes still fixed on the black waters below, half his mind contemplating that mocking invitation. ‘And the Consort lies swallowed in a holy embrace. So holy is that embrace, that there is nothing to see. Lord Draconus, you too have abandoned us.’
‘Surely, there is ecstasy in blindness.’
Prazek considered that, and then shook his head again. ‘You’ve not dared the company of Kadaspala, friend, else you would say otherwise.’
‘No, some pilgrimages I avoid by habit. I am told his self-made cell is a gallery of madness.’
Prazek snorted. ‘Never ask an artist to paint his or her own room. You invite a spilling out of landscapes one would not wish to see, for any cause.’
Dathenar sighed. ‘I cannot agree, friend. Every canvas reveals that hidden landscape.’
‘Manageable,’ said Prazek. ‘It is when the paint bleeds past the edges that we recoil. The wooden frame offers bars to a prison, and this comforts the eye.’
‘How can a blind man paint?’
‘Without encumbrance, I should say.’ Prazek waved one hand dismissively, as if to fling the subject into the dark water below. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘to the list again. The Son of Darkness walks winter’s road seeking a brother who chooses not to be found, and the Suzerain confides in the night for days on end, forgetting even the purpose of dawn, while we stand guard on a bridge none would cross. Where, then, the shoreline of this civil war?’
‘Far away still,’ Dathenar answered. ‘Its jagged edge describes our horizons. For myself, I cannot cleanse my mind of the Hust camp, where the dead slept in such untroubled peace, and, I confess, nor can I scour away the envy that took hold of my soul on that day.’
Prazek rubbed at his face, fingers tracking down from his eyes to rake through his beard. The water flowing beneath the bridge tugged at his bones. ‘It is said that no one can swim in the Dorssan Ryl now. It takes every child of Mother Dark down to her bosom. No corpse is retrieved, and the surface curls on in its ever-twisting smiles. If envy of the fallen Hust so plagues you, friend, I’ll offer no staying hand. But I will grieve your passing as I would my dearest brother.’
‘As I would your leaving my company, Prazek.’
‘Very well, then,’ Prazek decided. ‘If we cannot guard this bridge, let us at least guard each other.’
‘A modest responsibility. I see the horizons draw closer.’
‘But never to divide us, I pray.’ Prazek straightened, turning his back to the river and leaning against the wall. ‘I curse the poet! I curse every word and each bargain it wins! To so profit from beleaguered reality!’
Dathenar snorted. ‘An unseemly procession, this row of words you describe. This rut we stumble along. But think on the peasant’s language – as it wallows in its simplicity, off among the fields of fallow converse. Will the day begin in rain or snow? Does your knee ache, my love? I cannot say, dear wife! Oh and why not, husband? Beloved, the ache that you describe can have but one meaning, and on this morning lo! among the handful of words I possess, I cannot find it!’
‘Reduce me to grunts, then,’ said Prazek, scowling. ‘I beg you.’
‘We should so descend, Prazek. Each of us like a boar rooting in the forest.’
‘There is no forest.’
‘There is no boar, either,’ Dathenar retorted. ‘No, we hold to this bridge, and turn eyes upon the Citadel. The historian looks on, after all. Let us discuss the nature of language and say this: that power thrives in complexity, and makes of language a secret harbour. And in this complexity the divide is asserted. We have important matters to discuss! No grunting boar is welcome!’
‘I understand what you say,’ Prazek said, with a wry smile. ‘And so reveal my privilege.’
‘Just so!’ Dathenar pounded a fist on the stone ledge. ‘But listen! Two languages are born from one, and as they grow, ever greater the divide, ever greater the lesson of power delivered, until the highborn who are surely highbred are able to give proof of this, in language solely their own, and the lowborn who can but grunt in the vernacular are daily reminded of their irrelevance.’
‘Swine are hardly fools, Dathenar. The hog knows the slaughter awaiting it.’
‘And squeals to no avail. But consider these two languages and ask yourself, which more resists change? Which clings so fiercely to its precious complexity?’
‘Troop in the lawmakers and the scribes-’
Dathenar’s nod was sharp, a flush deepening to midnight on his broad face. ‘The educated and the trained-’
‘The enlightened.’
‘This is the warring tug of language, friend! The clay of ignorance against the rock of exclusion and privilege.’
‘Privilege – I see the root of that word, in privacy.’
‘A fine point you make, Prazek. Kinship among words can indeed reveal hints of the secret code. But here, in this war, it is the conservative and the reactionary that stand under perpetual siege.’
‘As the ignorant are legion?’
‘They breed like vermin.’
Prazek straightened and spread wide his arms. ‘Yet see us here, on this bridge, with swords at our belts, and bolstered in spirit by the eagerness of honour and duty. See how it wins us the privilege of giving our lives in defence of complexity!’
‘To the ramparts, friend!’ Dathenar cried, laughing.
‘No,’ his companion said in a growl. ‘I’m for the nearest tavern, and bedamned this wretched privilege. Run the wine down my throat until I slur like a swineherd!’
‘Simplicity is a powerful thirst. Words softened to wet clay, like paste squeezed out between our fingers.’ Dathenar’s nod was eager. ‘This is mud we can swim in.’
‘Abandon the poet then?’
‘Abandon him!’
‘And the dread historian?’ Prazek asked, smiling.
‘He’ll show no shock at our faithlessness. We are but guards huddled beneath the millstone of the world. This post will see us crushed and spat out like chaff, and you know it.’
‘Have we had our moment, then?’
‘I see our future, friend, and it is black and depthless.’
The two men set out, quitting their posts. Unguarded behind them stretched the bridge, making its sloped shoulder an embrace of the river’s rushing water – with its impenetrable surface of curling smiles.
The war, after all, was elsewhere.
* * *
‘It can be said in no other way,’ Grizzin Farl sighed, as he ran a massive, blunt fingertip through the puddle of ale on the tabletop: ‘she was profoundly attractive in a plain sort of way.’
The tavern’s denizens were quiet at their tables, and the air in the room was thick as water, gloomy despite the candles, the oil lamps, and the fiercely burning fire in the hearth. Conversations rose on occasion, cautious as minnows beneath an overhanging branch, only to quickly sink back down.
Hearing his companion’s faint snort, the Azathanai straightened in his seat, in the pose of a man taking affront. The wooden legs beneath him groaned and creaked. ‘What do I mean by that, you ask?’
‘If I-’
‘Well, my pallid friend, I will tell you. Her beauty only arrived at second, or even third, glance. Was a poet to set eyes upon her, that poet’s talent could be measured, as if on a scale, by the nature of his or her declamation. Would frenzied birdsong not sound mocking? And so impugn that poet as shallow and stupid. But heed the other’s song, at the scale’s weighty end, and hear the music and verse of a soul’s moaning sigh.’ Grizzin reached for his tankard, found it empty. Scowling, he thumped it sharply on the table and then held it out.