More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
trading. They understood ships and boats in the same way they understood gods—a hereditary oblique wisdom, passed from father to boy. This
Power gives wings, and fire. Power is the wine after which all other wine is mud.
The invaders had become occupants of a land of plenty, and were learning its ways. Where the jerds marched now was in the drillyard and the court; they stacked their arms in taverns and by the couches of women, till half Hessek was impregnated with Masrian seed. Presently the Masrians mellowed into that intellectual and sane enjoyment of life that heralds the decay of human strength.
Seeing I was not about to fling lightnings in indiscriminate directions, curiosity had outweighed panic. Such is the civilizing effect of city life upon men. It kills the instincts and replaces them with extended noses.
But there was a predominance of masculine courtesans of Thei’s ilk. More than once, before I grew accustomed to it, my eye was caught by something too much a girl to be one.
your black Ungod of the Ancient Faith.” I did not want to delve in Ki’s skull, nor any man’s, but my mind was still sensitive from the previous contact, and the images cast up on the skim of his brain were abnormally distinct. “You call him the Shepherd of Swarms. Don’t you?” Ki lowered his eyes, the other man stared; both continued to row as if their arms moved independently. “He’s the god of flies, of crawling things and winged creeping things, of tomb-darkness and worms. That’s what you worship here in your swamp-sink.”
For the rats of the Rat-Hole I cared nothing, nor for the soft and luxurious populace of Bar-Ibithni who should shortly feel the nip of rats’ teeth.
Only those who live in the sugar-jar think the world is made of sweetmeat.
He gave as a boy does, charming, generous, and very casual. A rich boy, perhaps I should say, and to one who had grown up with little he did not wrest from others by dint of fighting it had a ring that set the teeth on edge.
I had remembered her imperfectly. It is hard to carry such an image about with one intact, like trying to memorize a landscape, every flower and stone and blade of grass. There is some feature one would mislay, something forgotten.
The face of Malmiranet would tell you many, many things, but you would not be certain which of them were true, until she chose that you should know.
I felt a pride come up in me like Masrimas’ dawn, for she was worth a battle, and I due for one.
It was like a tide of mud running into Bar-Ibithni, the overbrimming of the swamp, and the surface alive with poison.
I thought, Where did this start? Was it Basnurmon’s gift, the statuette from the brothel, fit only to laugh at? Or does he guess I lust for his mother, and has the eternal boy’s dislike of me for that? Or is it that he has never truly seen blood and fire all around him, those toy campaigns of the Empire too tender meat to wean him to this night?
He rode into the yard, fully dressed for battle, and on the white stallion with its trappings of white, that old Masrian illusion, a man-horse in the dark red torch glare.
They had their own strong sorcery that night, the rats of Old Hessek, for somehow they became instantaneously aware, scattered as they were across the length and breadth of Bar-Ibithni, that in that second their messiah had rejected them, and that the bolts of his lightning were turned on them.
Besides, she understood her worth, proud of what she was. She poured her gold on me from choice, not loneliness. There had been plenty before me, men she had selected to pleasure her, and put aside when she grew weary of them. I never before had one like her. She used sex like an instrument, not by means of games such as they teach in Eshkorek, but out of a beautiful, uncluttered lust. She had measured her own ground, explored it through. This thing was no surprise to her, as to some women it eternally remains, but rather an ancient way, old as earth and as bountiful. She required of it no
...more
Sitting before him, I had that same sense of impermanence as I had known on riding from the Citadel on the night of the rising, the sense that far too soon a man is in his grave, and how small are the hurricanes and mountains of his life—vengeance, love, might, and conquest—compared to that tiny heap of bone dust at its end.
I had concluded it was expiation I tried to work out there, and maybe something less grandiose, as if by confronting disaster, I could inure myself to what would come. Truly, I was not inured. My numb state was torn bit by bit into compassion and horror.
A warrior does not learn how to weep in the krarls of the red people, nor can he learn it after in hubris and Power. Yet there will come one day a blow so gentle that it will split the rock and find the spring beneath.
There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.
Ossif handed me a copper charm from his wagon. These charms they acknowledge as toys, their god cares for them anyway, but man in his weakness likes visible proof of caring. It is a joke between them and the Infinite.
It is, after all, a very small thing to be a lord of men, men and their lords being what they are.
That should have been me, out there on the hyacinth water. Able to laugh, able to remain a boy for the duration of my boyhood, to become a man without going through the pit of hell to get there. That should have been me.
at one point a dry fountain on a marble plinth depicted a girl wrapped with an enormous serpent, a pornographic, beautiful thing to rouse the blood,
I had come searching for wormwood. I put my hand into the pit of vipers and found instead flowers grew there, and wine cooled in a silver chalice and the sun rose in the black window.
Frustration was a dog that never bit them. Anything that might have clogged their psychic heritage was kept at bay. Love of life, celebration of mind and flesh, the purity of unstigmatized sex and fearless meditation, this was the cornucopia she poured upon them. She gave them everything that inadvertently she had denied to me. They should have turned out better than they did.
Yes, I should have slain Vazkor, as I had slain Ettook. Indeed, I should have hated Vazkor with a hatred beyond any hate I ever experienced. If she had bowed herself beneath such a yoke as his forever, she could not have been the vessel that fashioned me.
