The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(101)
To eat meaning.
And so they rode, day in and day out, crossing the trampled, lifeless miles, pacing and pondering their innumerable foe. They watched the Schoolmen stride the low sky, a necklace of brilliant lights strung across the horizon. Their gazes danced from flash to flicker, point to burning point. Some took to watching the way the lights steeped and burnished the pluming veils above. Some watched the obscene thousands perishing below, mites engulfed in sweeping fire. Periodically, they turned in their saddles to study the columns of the Great Ordeal, the assemblies glittering in the high sunlight. The visions made fanatics of them all.
They had come to the ends of the earth. They did war to save the very World.
There could be no doubting in the penumbra of such mad spectacle …
The justness of their cause. The divinity of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
Only their strength remained in question.
Gradually, so slow as to defeat the discrimination of many, a different pitch had crept into the Horde’s thundering howl, a plaintive edge, more panicked than crazed, almost as though the Sranc knew they were being eaten. The Schoolmen who strode the low skies in the Culling found they could now glimpse the seething fields they scoured, parsed, and blasted. Where for weeks and months the beasts had seemed to elude and frustrate the pursuing horsemen, now they seemed to genuinely flee.
“They fear us!” a joyous Siroyon declared in Council.
“No,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, ever quick to dispatch assumptions that might lead his men to dismiss their foe. “They scream according to their hunger and exertion and nothing more. Now that our bellies are full, our advance has quickened. We have merely twisted the lute-strings tight.”
But for many, there could be no denying the growing desperation of their Adversary. Time and again, the Holy Aspect-Emperor cautioned his Believer-Kings, reminding them that Sranc were not Men, that straits hardened them, that starvation fuelled their ferocity. Even still, a new daring took root among the more feckless skirmishers. They believed they knew their foe as well as any ancient Knight-Chieftain: his ebb, his flow, his more treacherous vicissitudes. And as always, the assumption of knowledge licensed a growing sense of impunity.
What was more, a dark and destructive will had impregnated their thoughts—all their thoughts—a need, a hunger, to visit catastrophic destruction upon their foe, to reap him as wheat, to gather him into infinite sheaves, and gorge upon him in ecstasy. “Think!” they would cry to one another in private. “Think of the feast!”
Seeing these dark inklings, the Holy Aspect-Emperor harangued them in council, upbraiding them for their recklessness. On several occasions he even went so far as to invoke the Martial Prohibitions, and condemned several caste-nobles to the lash. Time and again he called their attention to how far they had come. “Who?” he would cry, his voice booming through the Eleven Pole Chamber. “Who among you will be the first to have come so far only to perish in rank folly? Who among you shall earn the honour of that song?”
And then, when the Ordeal had reached the eastern frontier of Illawor, he stabbed his finger on the great, illuminated map his Believer-Kings so often bickered over, and drew his haloed finger down the Fish Knife, the fabled Harsunc, inked in bold black. It was too deep to be forded, too broad for Sranc to swim; even those not privy to the reports of the Imperial Trackers knew as much.
Soon, the Horde would be caught before them.
It would defend Dagliash no matter what.
“What feast,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor asked his Believer-Kings, “will be served up then?”
The timbers pitched. Proyas’s stomach climbed his ribs, then dropped.
Two days previous the Ordeal had come upon a forest of poplars—or the remnants of one—in the wake of the Horde. Given the mists enveloping the shoreline, the apparition of savaged trees had seemed more an omen than a boon. But come nightfall the blessing they represented had become plain. The carpenters set to repairing innumerable wains and other accoutrements. Their idle brothers, meanwhile, cavorted about genuine bonfires, whooping into the void. Agmundrmen and others fashioned great spits, which they used to roast Sranc whole. Flames climbed the height of Momemn’s walls for the whoosh of grease. The encampment, long condemned to chill and gloom for the lack of fuel, blazed for the light of innumerable fires, and Men ambled as though drunk, their beards shining for gluttony, their gazes bright for something too vicious to be called jubilation.
Only the Schoolmen and the Shrial Knights refrained from partaking in the bacchanal. But while the former remained within their enclaves as always, the latter set about cutting and appropriating the best timber they could find. Under the watchful gaze of Lord Ussiliar, they toiled through the night, dressing and dowelling and binding, fashioning a platform large enough to deck a Cironji war-galley.
The Raft, they called it.
Now Proyas stood upon it with his fellow Believer-Kings, swinging over emptiness on a mummer’s stage, gazing stupefied across the teeming leagues, for the day possessed the arid clarity of summer’s abdication. For all the miracles he had witnessed over the years, this seemed the most preposterous. Even the Grandmasters among them appeared visibly awestruck. Many present had seen the now legendary Throwing-of-the-Hulls, when Kellhus emptied Invishi’s harbour by raising and casting burning ships whole at Prince Akirapita’s Chorae-equipped bowmen. Although that episode was the greater spectacle, they had spied it from afar. This, however, this had the intimacy of a father’s embrace, and the profundity of unhinged ground, vaulting not simply as a person, but as a place. Proyas watched others exchange small looks of wonder, heard the murmur of astonishment and glee.