For watch after watch, Sorweel rode with the itch of this reminiscence floating within him. No distraction could scratch it away, not even Eskeles at his worst. To his chagrin, the rotund Schoolman insisted on practising language drills no matter who was in their vicinity-Zsoronga and Obotegwa more often than not. On one occasion, the entire company took up his chant, shouting Sheyic numerals across the plains while Sorweel gazed about in despair and disgust. Eskeles seemed to find the spectacle horribly amusing-as did Zsoronga, for that matter.
The Mandate Schoolman proved as much a source of embarrassment as irritation. His mere presence rendered Sorweel a schoolboy, though the man insisted he had been sent as much to chaperone the entire company as to tutor the woefully ignorant King Sorweel of Sakarpus. "The Holy Aspect-Emperor takes his enemies seriously," the sorcerer said with a glib twinkle in his eye, "and his enemies take their children seriously." Sorweel found the comment at once laughable and troubling. Eskeles, with his foppish Three Seas beard and portly stature, not to mention his lack of armour or weaponry, seemed almost absurdly defenceless and ineffectual-another soft-pawed leuneraal. And yet Sorweel had no reason to doubt the truth of what he said, that he had been sent to safeguard their company-especially after witnessing the sorcerous destruction of Sakarpus.
At night, Sorweel could almost pretend, when he kept his eyes hooked to the starry heavens, that none of what happened had happened, that the droning voices belonged to his father and his uncles, not the sons of exotic lands and distant kings. This was the time of the Lioning, when the Saglanders planted their crops, and when the male members of House Varalt and their boonsmen rode out into the mountains in search of puma. Since his twelfth summer he had accompanied his father and his uncles, and he adored every moment of it, even though his youth chained him to the hunting camp with his cousins. And he loved nothing more than lying with his eyes closed, listening to his father speak before the late-night fire, not as a king but as a man among others.
The Lioning was how he learned his father was truly funny… and genuinely beloved by his men.
So he would lie with these memories, curl about their warmth. But whenever it seemed he could believe, some dread would lurch out of the nethers and the pretense would blow away like smoke before gusting apprehensions. Zsoronga. The Aspect-Emperor. And the Mother — the Mother most of all.
One question more than any other dominated the crowded commons of his soul. What? What does She want? And it would be the "She" who appalled him the most, who filled his bowel with nervous water. She. Yatwer. The Mother of Birth…
He spent many sleepless watches simply hefting the vertiginous weight of this fact in his thoughts. He found it strange the way one could kneel, even pray with sobbing intensity, and yet never ponder, let alone comprehend, what lay behind the ancient names. Yatwer… What did that holy sound mean? The priests of the Hundred were dark and severe, every bit as harsh as the Tusk Prophets they took as their examples. They brandished the names of their Gods the way stern fathers raised whips: obedience was all they asked for, all they expected. The rest fell out of their hard readings of hard scriptures. For Sorweel, Yatwer had always been dark and nebulous, something too near the root of things, too aboriginal, not to be filled with the sense of peril belonging to sudden knives and fatal falls.
All children come to temple with a fear of smallness, which the priests then work and knead like clay, shaping it into the strange reconciliation-to-horror that is religious devotion, the sense of loving something too terrible to countenance, too hoary to embrace. When he thought about the world beyond what his eyes could see, he saw souls in their innumerable thousands with only frayed threads to hold them, dangling over the gaping black of the Outside, and the shadows moving beneath, the Gods, ancient and capricious, reptilian with indifference, with designs so old and vast that there could only be madness in the small eyes of Men.
And none were so old or so pitiless as the dread Mother of Birth.
That was what her name was: childhood terror.
To be pinched between such things! Yatwer and the Aspect-Emperor… Gods and Demons. Somehow he had been pulled into the world's threshing wheels, the grinding immensities-small wonder he had been so eager to escape the clamour of the Great Ordeal! Small wonder the travelling sway of his pony, Stubborn, carried the promise of deeper escape.
He posed the question to Zsoronga and his impromptu court one night, careful to conceal the intensity of his interest. Fires were of course forbidden, so they sat side by side facing south, alternately staring into their hands and into the starry heavens: the Kings and Princes of lands cowed but not quite conquered by the New Empire, yearning for homes thrown far over the night horizon. Obotegwa sat dutifully behind them, translating when needed. If anything spurred Sorweel in his language lessons with Eskeles, it was the burden his stupidity had become for the wise old Obligate.
They had been discussing omens and portents, how more and more signs seemed to inveigh against the Aspect-Emperor-none more so than the persisting drought. Charampa, in particular, was convinced that the Anasurimbor Dynasty's doom was imminent. "They overreach! Think of their gall! How could they not be punished? I ask you! I ask you!"
Tzing seemed inclined to agree, and as always, no one could fathom Tinurit's opinion-or whether his smile was in fact a sneer, for that matter. Zsoronga, however, remained skeptical.
"What happens," Sorweel finally ventured, "if we fail the Gods simply because we don't know what they demand?"
"Ka sircu alloman…" Obotegwa began droning from behind him.
"Damnation," Tzing replied. "The Gods care nothing for our excuses."
"No," Zsoronga snapped, loud enough to pre-empt Charampa's eager reply. "Only if we fail to properly honour our ancestors. The Heavens are like palaces, Horse-King. One does not need the King's permission to enter."
"Pfah!" Charampa cried, as much to avenge his interruption as otherwise, Sorweel suspected. "Here I thought the Zeumi were too sensible to believe that Inrithi nonsense!"
"No. It is not Inrithi nonsense. Honouring ancestors is far older than the Thousand Temples. You Cingi are as bad as the sausages…" Zsoronga turned to the young King of Sakarpus. "Family survives death. Don't let this fool tell you different."
"Yes…" Sorweel replied, listening far too keenly to what was said. This was what it meant to be a conquered people, a part of him realized: to turn to the foreign beliefs of foreign peoples. "But what if your… your family is damned?"
The Successor-Prince watched him appreciatively. "Trempe us mar-"
"Then you must do everything in your power to discover what the Gods do want. Everything. "
Though Zsoronga was not overtly pious, Sorweel knew from previous discussions that the Zeumi had a far different way, not so much of conceiving life and death, as valuing them, a way that made them seem zealots on occasion. Even the peculiarities of Obotegwa's interpretations revealed as much: the Zeumi used two versions of the same word to speak of life and death, words that roughly translated into "small life" and "great life," with death being the latter.