The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(49)
Kellhus was not His Prophet.
Faith was deception, the mean and the base groping for the epic and the glorious—proof against idiot insignificance, against truth.
Ever had he hung upon the beating of a single, witless heart. Ever had he been flotsam in the mad surge of events, another battered now, reaching, clutching for a surety that did not exist.
Ever had he been used, exploited! Ever had he been a fool! A fool!
Ever had he fallen thus …
He fell to his knees among the shag-hide tents of the Nangaels, raised fists to the catamite images that clogged his eyes. Upon this ledge he huddled, sobbing for loss and degradation …
Faith was the small aping immensity, the remote painted across the near, the triumph of conceit over terror.
The most blessed ignorance.
And it was no more.
Terror had been a drug when Proyas was young.
Ever had he been a hero as a youth, dazzled by the great souls of legend; ever was he bent on proving his bravery, not to others, but to himself. His mother would sometimes weep for the hazards he dared: scaling the mortices of the Atikkoros, taunting the bulls used by a troupe of Invitic acrobats, and climbing every tree opportunity afforded, not simply into the bower, but to the skinny peak, where the wind would pitch him as an iron ingot upon a stalk of milkweed.
His favourite had been a grandiose oak that everyone called Wheezer for the hoarse noise it made when the wind possessed the proper temper. The tree’s original peak had been sheared away, leaving the lesser half of what had been a fork, an upward arching branch that provided the footing he used to surmount Wheezer the way he could no other tree. There he would hang swaying, his heart racing, his hands and head fuzzy for floating exhilaration, Aoknyssus reaching out in grim and intricate stages, and it would all seem to be for him—him! He must have climbed the hoary old beast at least a hundred times without incident. And then, one dour, autumnal day, it simply cracked. He still felt the twang of mortal terror recalling it, the clutch of cold sweat across his skin. He still caught his breath …
Swinging out and dropping down, doomed until a skein of lower branches miraculously caught the broken bough. He found himself hanging, legs kicking out over void. The entire palace would hear his scream (he would spend some three months hating Tyr?mmas, his older brother, for endlessly mimicking his cry. He could remember pondering, in the first few instants, which was the greater horror, dropping to his death, or hanging exposed as more and more shocked and scowling faces gathered beneath …
“Are you daft, boy? I said take my hand.”
And then, from nowhere it seemed, there was Achamian, standing as though upon invisible ground, floating, reaching out with ink-stained fingers.
“Never!”
“You would rather break your neck?”
“I would rather splint my soul!”
Even in extremis, the portly Schoolman’s look betrayed the same exasperated wonder that the boy so often provoked on flat ground.
“I fear you’re too young to die for your scruples, Prosha. One must have a wife to widow, children to orphan.”
“You’re damned! All Schoolmen are damned!”
“Which is why your father plunders his treasury to pay us. Now take my hand. Take it!”
“No!”
He was regularly astounded pondering this incident as a grown man. Perhaps others would find cause for pride in bravery, but not Proyas. If terror had been a plaything for him as a boy, a thing to be baited and teased, it was out of ignorance far more than for courage, the preposterous assurance that nothing truly untoward could happen to him. Tyr?mmas’s watery death would ignite the pyre beneath that confidence, teach him the terror of terror.
“Well …” the canny sorcerer had said, “you can wait for the God of Gods to reach down to save you …”
“What do you mean?” Proyas had cried, too breathless to be clever. Some twenty cubits clacked its jaws beneath him. The bark had already begun to bite.
“Or …” Akka continued, pausing for effect.
“Or what?”
Drusas Achamian splayed his inked fingertips wider still, and Proyas noticed that he chewed rather than pared his nails. “You can take the hand He has put before you.”
There had been love in the sorcerer’s look, a father’s bottled fear. He would never admit to the flare of love he had felt in that moment, and he would cringe from its memory the way he cringed from thought of carnal shames.
He dared raise a hand, shifting the entirety of his weight to his other grip, snapping the branch …
He had no recollection of the ground slapping him unconscious. He would get his splint, but for his left leg, not his soul. Everyone said it was a miracle that he had survived. His mother told him that Achamian had cried out louder than she had as he plummeted. For years following, various caste-nobles would mimic the cry—a kind of effeminate whoop—when the Schoolman barged by …
Neither he nor Achamian so much as mentioned the episode.
And now he fell once again.
Proyas staggered through the slums of the Shigeki, the parasols of the Antanamerans, the scissoring timbers of the Kurigaldmen. The ways were largely abandoned, so he had little need to conceal his distress. Still, a consciousness of his appearance rose whenever he neared the battered pavilion of some Lord. Shame and … a gloating. What had happened? What was happening? He began cackling. It seemed his heart would combust, leap into open flame, for the merest remembrance of what had transpired!