The God is Not Willing (Witness #1)

by Steven Erikson

Valard of Tulips did make a curious recount in her Geographa ‘ta Mott, however, of the eponymous Teblor Pass, a mere three years later, noting the presence of a bone ridge in a certain line, there at the narrowest section of the trail, while upon the downward slope was found a deeper scatter of other bones. As if, she wrote, ‘a thousand men had died fighting a single line of defenders.’

Folibore leaned back, sighing. A little poetry was all it took, to keep the fists from flying.

It is curious how history can line up before us like witnesses all in a row, and among the faces straining to speak, only one in ten, or twenty, does not stand there with mouth tightly sewn shut. The past is often mute, yet that which shouts to us in the present makes mockery of presentiment. I would indeed wager that each and every ruined monument is a testament to stupidity. Nothing of wisdom survives. Only the vainglorious travesties of pride and idiocy.

So he sat, watching the spectacle beneath the moon’s silver light. The thousands made into one, the one broken free of its seasonal habit. It wasn’t enough to simply wonder why. There could be a dozen reasons for that and perhaps they were important, something worth taking notice of, but what took hold of his soul, what occupied his thoughts as the night slowly worked past and the beasts surged up onto the shore and then spread out, heading south across pastureland and the vast swaths where forests had once been, was something far more profound. People looked at the beasts and saw every habit as instinct, as if those beasts were slaves to their own natures. In many ways, perhaps they were. But what this night revealed to the hunter was that any animal – every animal – was more than just a collection of instincts. Making animals no different from people. Each life, properly alive. Alive in the way of people. Hopes, possibly even dreams. Desires, oh, yes, for sure there were desires. I do not wish to drown. I do not wish for my calf to drown or be dragged down by wolves. I do not wish for an arrow to stop my heart. Or puncture my lungs to make me cough blood, weaken, stagger, fall to my knees.

‘No such thing as saving a life, Rant. Better to say I happened by to prolong it.

There wasn’t much in Damisk’s past that he was proud of, and there wasn’t much of the world that he liked. At least, not when it came to the world of people. Too many of them were stupid. They couldn’t think clearly enough to save their lives. The worst part was, they didn’t know they were stupid. Every failure had an excuse, every loss was someone else’s fault. Stupid people always had a reason to be angry but didn’t have the capacity to understand that they were angry because they were frustrated, and they were frustrated because they didn’t understand, and they didn’t understand because they were stupid.

Sometimes a refuge makes the strongest cage, for one then has little interest in testing the bars.’

it’s your fault, the whole thing.’ ‘How’s it my fault?’ ‘Because you scouted the woods.’ ‘And if I hadn’t, Benger, we’d not know how bad it’s gotten.’ ‘Exactly. Peace of mind.’ ‘Fatal delusion, you mean!’ Benger shrugged. ‘Semantics.’

The stupid knew better than to look into their wake. The wise could not help it and so suffered greatly. This was humanity’s great divide,

‘If you seek to blind him to the world, you will fail. To live is to lose the faith you were born with to a thousand cuts, each year bleeding into the next. The eyes of the innocent see a world very differently from what you and I see. To know this is to revisit one’s own loss, eye to eye with sad reflection, and to feel once more that dreadful ache in your chest.’

When he thought about it, he recalled seeing few happy people. Not there, and not here. In children, yes, but then they got older and their faces grew serious, their eyes cold and challenging. Something, therefore, must happen when a certain age is reached. Some secret thing, a night, just as with the Teblor. When happiness was cut away, and in its place some new truth about the world was stitched onto the soul.

It is a necessary conceit to believe things cannot change beyond all recognition. To greet the day to come as if it was but a shadow cast forward by the day just done, is how we fashion the links of the chain that we call our lives. But it is in the moment when the world shows a new face, when the chain twists, buckles and binds, when rain turns into fire, water into stone, land into sea, that we must acknowledge a most unpleasant truth. Continuity is an illusion. Unseen forces work to their own ends.

It was conjectured that the great thaw might have consequences.’

the proclivity towards overspecialization ever narrows the focus of the mind, darling, and with each narrowing increment the interconnected relationships among all forms of knowledge and learning cease to obtain, indeed, cease to matter. A career devoted to a single cog loses sight of the machinery, forgets the purpose of the mill, grows deaf to the water in the vast wheel, and thinks nothing of the grain’s birth in the bread devoured.

It was well, Oams decided, that Fist Sevitt had made certain the refugees were at the front of the withdrawal to the new camp site well inland. They’d not seen this, and he hoped they never would. There were remnants of uniforms among the thousands of corpses that now marked the division between land and sea, but for the most part, the dead weren’t soldiers. They were Teblor. They were Ganrel. They were Wilders and Saemdhi, Bright Knot and Jhinan, Fildasz and Brethen, and countless other peoples beyond identification. Looking to the left, Oams could see that grisly wrack continuing on for as far as his eyes could discern. To the right, the sea’s shoreline curled northward, and there the bodies were mixed among uprooted trees, branches and massive mats and mounds of leaves. No one spoke. They weren’t here to speak. But Oams felt the failure like a stone in his chest. Still, he would not look away. Like the others, he studied the scene below, detail after detail, searing it onto his soul. There were reasons for doing this. No doubt they would make no sense to most people. At times, they made no sense to Oams, either. None of those reasons were easy to put into words. To bear witness, perhaps. Because to do otherwise would not only be the act of a coward, it would also be an act of disrespect. And it was not just the bodies of Malazan marines below – the bodies of friends and comrades lost – but all the others as well. Especially the children, and there were so many children....

Cowardice had a hundred thousand faces, after all. In most of them, the eyes were squeezed shut.