The Crippled God (109 page)

But, here in the Khundryl camp, a new child was about to come into the world.

When she arrived, the clawed warriors surrounded the birth-tent. She saw the corpse of a horse nearby and walked over to stand upon it.

Her children saw and they faced her, for they knew what was coming. Looking down, she met Saddic’s shining eyes, and nodded.

Badalle awakened her voice. ‘There is a mother this night.’

Warriors turned to her – they had no choice. She would make them listen, if only to give them the one thing that she had left.
Where it all began, so it ends. This is what I have, the only thing I ever had. Words
.

‘There is a mother this night
In the desert of dreams
Beneath stars burned blind
And soldiers must march where
She leads them on the dead trail
By this truth we are all bound
Past the bodies left in the ditch
She looks up where we fail
And the sky is without end
Follow her for the time of our birth
Is a birth still to come
There is a mother this night
Who leads an army of children
What will you ask of her
When dawn awakens?
What will you demand of her
That she would give
If only she could?
There is a mother in the night
For a child lost in the dark’

Faces stared up at her, but she could make no sense of what she saw in them. And she could barely remember the words she had just spoken, but when she looked down at Saddic he nodded, to tell her that he had them, gathered like the toys in the sack dangling from one hand.
And when he is a man, he will write this down, all of this, and one night a stranger will find him, a poet, a singer of tales and a whisperer of songs
.

He will come in search of the fallen
.

Like a newborn child, he will come in search of the fallen
.

Saddic, you will not die here. Not for many, many years. How do I know this? And the woman who sleeps in the other room – who has loved you all her life – who is she? I would see that, if I could
.

The mother’s cries were softer now.

A man appeared. Walked through the silent crowd that parted from his path. Strode into the tent. Moments later, the mother inside was weeping, a sound that filled the world, that made Badalle’s heart pound. And then, a small, pitiful wail.

Badalle sensed someone standing near her. She turned to see the Adjunct.

‘Mother,’ Badalle said, ‘you should be leading your children.’

‘Did you truly think I would miss this?’

Sighing, Badalle stepped down from the carcass of the horse. Reached out and took the Adjunct’s hand.

She flinched as if stung, stared down at Badalle as if in shock. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘Mother, when will you let yourself feel?’

The Adjunct backed away, and moments later she was gone, lost in the crowd. If it made a path for her, Badalle couldn’t see it.

‘There is a mother this night,’ she whispered, ‘but to her the stars are blind.’

Koryk reached up and with one finger probed the line of his gums. When he withdrew the finger and looked down, he saw that it was smeared with blood. And that was a good joke. He was dying of thirst, just like all the others, but he’d been drinking his own blood for two days now. Wiping his finger clean on his thigh, he glanced over at the others.

Smiles was going to outlast them all. Women were stronger in ways no man dared admit. But then they had to be.

There was more blood running down the back of his nose. He could never quite manage to get his throat clear of it, no matter how many times he swallowed.
They had to be. A house of whores. I saw all I ever needed to see. Better than any tutor’s endless droning on about history. Better than all the sages and prophets and agitators and rebels. Aye, those ones made fists and shook them, punching walls at the injustice of it all – but those walls, they were just the boxes they’d built for themselves, the boxes they lived in. They could never see past. And for most of them, that box was their whole world. They had no idea there was anything outside it
.

But the whores knew. Laughter for the moment, but take the stretch of years and it’s all heartbreak. A woman gives up her body when she has nothing else left to give. She gives it up like a man his last copper. In a whore’s eyes, you’ll find everything that we do to each other. Everything
.

He’d killed a fellow Bonehunter last night. A man trying to steal an empty cask. But he wasn’t thinking about that. That damned face so twisted with need, or the sigh that left the man on that last breath. No, he was thinking about whores.

They could have schooled me in shame. But they didn’t. And now, gods help me, I wish they had
. Because then, he would understand what it was that forced his comrades back to their feet, that gave them the strength to pick up their gear one more time, knees bending under that weight. ‘
The Malazan soldier carries on his back all that’s needed for war
.’ Dassem’s credo for campaigns.
But what if there’s no war? What if the enemy is inside you? And what if this burden doesn’t belong to just you? What if it belongs to a whole damned world? What then?

He’d listened to that captain, Ruthan Gudd. Lying dry-skinned in the unbearable heat, shivering beneath the last blanket he still owned, he heard about the boy and the girl and the toys spilled out on the ground between them. They’d forgotten the word.
Toys
. But even finding it again hadn’t helped much, because they’d also forgotten how to
play
.

There’s a secret few would guess. In a house of whores, the love for children is as close to sacred as a mortal can get. Too precious to mock, because every whore remembers the child she once was. Maybe they were sad memories, maybe they were bittersweet, but it was all before the last thing was given away. So they know. It’s innocence that is sacred
.

Nothing else
.

On holy days, priests used to incite mobs to stone whores. No one would go out – he remembered all the women hiding in their rooms, speaking only in whispers lest some sound escape past the shutters, or
out under the door. And he used to cower with them, terrified, and on those days he came to learn a hatred for priests, for temples, for all those hunters of the unworthy.

So, Crippled God. Fallen One. If I could kill you with my bare hands, I would. If I could kill every priest, and every god, and all those others stalking the streets with stones in their hands, I would. For the whores and all you took from them. And for the children
.

He rose, shouldering his pack, his useless weapons, his useless armour, and faced the others, seeing that they too were ready, and when Tarr gestured they fell in one by one.

One more night. In the name of innocence
.

Bottle’s joints were on fire. Swollen and red, they made every step agony. Since when was a story enough to keep someone alive? No matter how heartbreaking, no matter how tragic. No matter how incensed the listener might become. The world lacked such simplicity. He’d never believed in speeches, was ever suspicious of that power to incite. Dreams could be voiced, desires could be uttered and then whispered back with fervour, but in the end most people eventually turned away and the crowd dispersed, and it was back home and getting on with living.

For all the boldness of believers on the front line, when the fires ebbed and no one was looking, it was time again to hide away.
But maybe we need that. Our little hole to climb down into. For some respite, where all the clamouring voices in your head can just die away. For blessed silence
.

And the ones who never get to that, who are so consumed they can find nowhere to hide, no place to rest, see what happens to them – see the fever in their eyes. They have made their lives torture, they have made the voice of their spirit one long, unbroken howl
.

Fevered, aye. He was that, and more. ‘
We’re the walking dead
.’ Fiddler’s words, or someone’s, anyway. Maybe Cuttle. No matter. The walking dead didn’t feel pain like this. The walking dead didn’t carry on their backs a thousand questions – questions with no answers.

His grandmother was now hobbling beside him. She didn’t belong on this trail, in this desert, but there she was. And maybe she wasn’t his grandmother at all, just some other wax witch twisting reeds in her arthritic hands, making dolls for the children in the village ahead. Gifts.

Charms. I remember you giving them away. Toys, you said, head bobbing. Free toys! And they all ran up to you, laughing
.

But you wove protections into those dolls. Blessings, wards against illness. Nothing powerful, nothing to stop, say, a flash flood or an avalanche. But the father that lashed out with his fists. The uncle who
slipped under the blankets in the dead of night. Those ones paid for what they did
.

And the cuts that healed. The fevers that went away
.

So, Grandmother, I’ll walk this last walk. In your memory. Make me a doll, for this pain
.

And take this child by the hand. And tell him again, how they will pay for what they did
.

For years, before her nails were worn down to bloody shreds by all that she clawed at, Smiles had carried a dream, carried it around like a pearl inside a battered shell. Of a day in the future when she was a mother, and she’d given birth to twins. Two girls, squalling and hissing the way girls do. Playing on the beach under her watchful eye.

And then, in a dark, desolate season – with the skies grey and the seas swollen – the older ones would come to her. ‘
The fish are gone
,’ they’d say. ‘
The spirits must be appeased. Choose one, Mother, and make of her the gift of our people, our gift to the thirsty waters
.’ And she would walk away, calling her daughters back to the hut.

They were lowborn. The whole family. Her husband and the father of the twins was gone, maybe dead. It was all down to her. One child to be blessed, the other cursed. Yet arguments could be made as to who was which. She knew all about that.

A night of bitter winds, of fires doused by spray. And Smiles would set out, knives in hand. And she would kill every one of those elders – in all their hunger, in all their needs now that they were too old to fish, now that the only authority they still possessed came with their threats and warnings about angry, vengeful spirits. Aye, she would show them a vengeful, angry spirit, and the gifts it would make to the hungry sea would appease a thousand spirits of the deep.

Those kinds of dreams were honey on the tongue, heady with the juices of pleasure and satisfaction. She suspected such dreams hid in the hearts of everyone. Desires for justice, for redress, for a settling of the scales. And of course, that sour undercurrent of knowledge, that none of it was possible, that so much would rise in opposition, in self-preservation even, to crush that dream, its frail bones, its pattering heart – even that could not take away the sweet delight, the precious hope.

Wells for the coin, league-stones for the wreaths, barrows for the widdershins dance – the world was filled with magical places awaiting wishes. And empires raised lotteries, opened games, sought to lift high heroes among the common folk –
and everyone rushes up with their dreams. But stop. Look back. Gods, look around! If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in? That village, that city, that life?

We are desperate with our dreams. What – oh, what – does that say?

So those two children had forgotten about toys. She wasn’t surprised. She remembered the day she sat with the last dolls she owned, but across from her sat no one. Where was her sister? They’d taken her.
But how can I play?

‘
Child, she was taken long ago. You cannot remember what you never had. Go out now and play with Skella
.’

‘
Skella is highborn – she just orders me around
.’

‘
That’s the way it is, child. Best you get used to it
.’

In her dream, she saved murdering Skella for last.

Cuttle’s brothers had been on the wall when it came down. He remembered his shock. Their city was falling. His brothers had just died defending it. Hengese soldiers were in the gap, clambering over the wreckage, coming out of the dust howling like demons.

Lessons, then. No wall was impenetrable. And the resolute in spirit could die as easily as could the coward. He would have liked to believe it wasn’t like that, none of it – this whole mess. And that children could be left to play and not worry about the life ahead. To play the way he and his brothers had played, unmindful of the irony as they charged each other with wooden swords and fought to defend a midden behind the fishworks, dying one by one like heroes in some imagined last stand, giving their lives to save the swarming flies, the screeching gulls and the heaps of shells. Where knelt a helpless maiden, or some such thing.

Maiden, stolen crown, the jewelled eye of a goddess. They wove fine stories around their deeds, didn’t they? In those long winters when it seemed that all the grey, sickly sky wanted to do was collapse down on the whole city, crush it for ever, they lived and died their shining epics.