The Judging Eye (20 page)

He stared at the greening
sycamores, their crowns nodding in a chill wind that could scarce reach him
where he sat on the balcony. The grand old trees fascinated him. The wending
lines of trunks parsed into great hanging limbs. The leaves twittering like
minnows in the sun. The arrhythmic back and forth against iron-bellied clouds.
There was a power to them, a power and a stillness, that seemed to dwarf the
staid background of marble columns and walls and shadowy interior spaces stacked
three storeys high.

He would very much like to be a
tree, Kelmomas decided.

The secret voice murmured, as
though proposing lame solutions to an all-conquering boredom. But Kelmomas
ignored it, concentrated instead on the sound of his mother's fluting dialogue.
By lying on his belly and pressing his face against the cold polish of the
balustrades, he could almost see her sitting at the edge of the East Pool, the
only place where the Enclosure opened onto the expanse of the Sea.

"So what should I
do?"
she was saying.
"Move against the whole Cult?"

"I fear Yatwer is too
popular,"
his uncle, the Holy Shriah replied.
"Too
beloved."

"The Yatwerians,
yes-yes,"
his sister, Theliopa, said in her spittle-laden, words-askew
way.
"Father's census figures indicate that some six out of ten
caste-menials regularly attend some kind of Yatwerian rite. Six-out-of-ten. Far
and away the most popular of the Hundred. Far-far. Far-far."

The pause in Mother's reply said
it all. It wasn't so much that she reviled her own daughter—Mother could never
hate her own—only that she could find no reflection of herself, nothing
obviously human. There was no warmth whatsoever in Theliopa, only facts piled
upon facts and an intense aversion to all the intricacies that seal the intervals
between people. The sixteen-year-old could scarce look at another's face, so
deep was her horror of chancing upon a gaze.

"Thank you, Thel."

His older sister was like a dead
limb, Kelmomas decided, an extension into insensate space. Mother leaned on her
intellect only because Father had commanded it.

"I remember what it was
like,"
Mother continued.
"I shudder to think how many coppers
I tossed to beggars, thinking they might have been disguised priestesses. The
Goddess of the Gift..."
A laugh, at once pained and rueful.
"You
have no idea, Maitha, what a salve to the heart Yatwer can be..."

Piqued by the undertones of
anxiousness and melancholy in her voice, Kelmomas craned his head, pressed
against the marble posts until his cheeks ached. He saw her, reclining in her
favourite divan, little more than a teary-eyed silhouette against the glassy
expanse of the pool. She seemed so small, so blow-away frail, that he found it
difficult to breathe...

She needs us
, the voice
said.

Just then his nursemaid, Porsi,
arrived with his twin brother, Samarmas. Popping to his feet with little-boy
effortlessness, Kelmomas skipped from the veranda into the redolent gloom of
the playroom. Samarmas's grin ate up his angelic face the way it always did, turning
him into a leering childhood version of an Ajoklian idol. Porsi, her acne scars
like dappled wine stains, her fingers resting possessively on his brother's
golden maul, immediately began speaking in her now-the-twins-are-together
voice. "Would you like to play
parasta
? Would you like to do that?
Or, something different? Oh, yes, how could I forget? Such
strong
boys—growing too old for parasta, aren't we? Something warlike, then. Would
that be better? I know! Kel, you could be sword while Sammi plays shield..."

On and on she would go, while
Kelmomas would smile or sulk or shrug and stare into her face and ponder all
the small terrors that he saw there. Usually, he would play along, making games
of the games she organized for the two of them. While playing parasta, he would
modulate his tantrums over the course of successive days, gauging the variables
that informed her response. He found that the very same words could make her
laugh or grit her teeth in frustration, depending on his tone and expression. He
discovered that if he abruptly walked up to her and placed his head on her lap,
he could summon mist, even tears to her eyes. Sometimes, while Samarmas drooled
and mumbled over some ivory toy, he would turn his cheek from her thigh and
stare in a lazy, all-is-safe way into her face, smelling the folds of her
crotch through her gown. She would always smile in nervous adoration,
thinking—and he knew this because he somehow could see it—that a little god
stared up from her lap. And he would say curious, childlike things that filled
her heart with awe and wonder.

"You are just like
him," she would reply every so often. And Kelmomas would exult, knowing
that she meant Father.

Even slaves can see it,
the
voice would say. It was true. He was able to hold so much more in the light of
his soul's eye than the people around him. Names. Nuances. The rate at which
various birds beat their wings.

So he knew, for instance,
everything about the sickness the physician-priests called Moklot, or the
Shudders. He knew how to simulate the symptoms, to the point where he could
fool even old Hagitatas, his mother's court physician. All he need do was think
about becoming feverish, and he became feverish. The trembly-shake-shake, well,
even his halfwit brother could do that. He knew that when he told their Porsi
that his calves were cramping she would rush off to fetch his medicine, an
obscure and noxious leaf from faraway Cingulat. And he knew that she would not
find it in the infirmary, because how could she, when it was hidden beneath her
own bed? So he knew she would begin searching...

Leaving him alone with his twin
brother, Samarmas.

"But why, Maitha?"
Mother
was saying.
"Are they mad? Can't they see that we're their
salvation?"

"But you know the answer
to this, Esmi. The Cultists themselves are no more or no less foolish than
other Men. They see only what they know, and they argue only to defend what
they cherish. Think of the changes my brother has wrought..."

Porsi would be gone for a long
time. She would never think to look under her pallet because she had never
placed it there. She would search and search, growing ever more
bah-bah-teary-eyed, knowing that she would be called to account.

Smiling, Kelmomas sat
cross-legged and contemplated his brother, who had his head to the maroon
carpets, staring up at a dragon from some miniature perspective. Though his
hands dwarfed the dragon's palm-worn head, he seemed diminutive, like a
soapstone figurine playing with elaborately carved grains of sand. A toy
Prince-Imperial poking toys that were smaller still.

Only the lazy battle of boredom
and awe in his expression made him seemed real.

"So this business of the
White-Luck?"
his mother's distant voice asked.

"White-Luck-White-Luck,"
Theliopa said. Kelmomas could almost see her rocking on her stool, her
joints twitching, her hands climbing from her elbows to her shoulders then back
again.
"A folk belief with ancient Cultic origins—ancient-old-ancient.
According to Pirmees, the White-Luck is an extreme form of providence, a Gift
of the Gods against worldly tuh-tuh-tyranny."

"White-Luck-White-Luck,"
Samarmas chimed in unison, then gurgled in his chin-to-windpipe way. Kelmomas
glared him into silence, knowing that their uncle, at least, was entirely
capable of hearing him.

As was anyone who shared their
father's incendiary blood.

"You think it's nothing
more than a self-serving fraud?"
his mother asked his uncle.

"The White-Luck?
Perhaps."

"What do you mean,
'perhaps'?"

Samarmas had ambled to and from
the toy trunk, bearing several more figures, some silver, others mahogany.
"Mommy," he murmured in a world-does-not-exist voice, extracting the
figurine of a woman cast in aquiline silver. He held her to the hoary dragon so
they could kiss. "Kisses!" he exclaimed, eyes lit with gurgling
wonder.

Kelmomas had been born staring
into the deluge that was his twin's face. For a time, he knew, his mother's
physicians had feared for him because it seemed he could do little more than
gaze at his brother. All he remembered were the squalls of blowing hurt and
wheezing gratification, and a hunger so elemental that it swallowed the space
between them, soldered their faces into a single soul. The world was shouldered
to the periphery. The tutors and the physicians had droned from the edges, not
so much ignored as overlooked by a two-bodied creature who stared endlessly
into its own inscrutable eyes.

Only in his third summer, when
Hagitatas, with doddering yet implacable patience, made a litany of the
difference between beast, man, and god, was Kelmomas able to overcome the
tumult that was his brother. "Beasts move," the old physician would
rasp. "Men reflect. Gods make real." Over and over. "Beasts
move. Men reflect. Gods make real. Beasts move..." Perhaps it was simply
the repetition. Perhaps it was the palsied tone, the way his breath undid the
substance of his words, allowing them to soak into the between places, the
gem-cutting lines. "Beasts move..." Over and over, until finally
Kelmomas simply turned to him and said, "Men reflect."

A blink, and what was one had
become two.

He just... understood. One
moment he was nothing, and another he was staring, not at himself, but
at a
beast
. Samarmas, Kelmomas would later realize, was wholly what he would
later see lurking in all faces: an animal, howling, panting, lapping...

An animal that, because of his
unschooled sensitivities and its sheer immediacy, had devoured him, made a lair
of his skull.

A blink, and what had absorbed
suddenly repelled. Afterwards, Kelmomas could scarcely bear looking into the
carnival of Samarmas's face. Something about it wrenched him with disgust, not
the grimace-and-look-away variety, but the kind that pinched stomach walls
together and launched limbs in wild warding. It was as though his brother wore
his bowels on the outside. For a time, Kelmomas wanted to cry out in warning
whenever Mother showered Samarmas with coos and kisses. How could she not see
it, the unsheathing of wet and shiny things? Only some instinct to secrecy had
kept him silent, a will, brute and spontaneous, to show only what needed to be
shown.

Now he was accustomed to it, of
course. The beast that was his brother.

The dog.

"Hey, Sammi," he said,
wearing his mother's mouth-watering smile. "Watch..."

Bending over, he placed a single
palm on the floor and raised his feet in the air. Grinning upside down, he
bounced one-handed toward him, from indifferent carpet to cold marble.

Samarmas gurgled with delight,
covered his mouth and pointed. "Bum-bum!" he cried. "I see your
bum-bum!"

"Can't you do this,
Sammi?"

Samarmas pressed his cheek to
his shoulder, smiled bashfully down. "Nothing," he conceded.

"The Gods did not see
the First Apocalypse,"
Uncle Maithanet was saying,
"so why
would they see the Second? They are blind to the No-God. They are blind to any
intelligence without soul."

Again the imperceptible pause
before Mother's reply.
"But Kellhus is a
Prophet
... How—?"

"How could he be hunted
by the Gods?"

Kelmomas lingered upside-down
next to his brother, his heels swaying above.

"Isn't there
anything
you
can do, Sammi?"

Samarmas shook his head, still
doing his gurgle-laugh-gurgle at his brother's ridiculous pose.

"Lord Sejenus,"
Maithanet
was saying,
"taught us to see the Gods not as entities unto themselves,
but as fragments of
the God.
This is what my brother hears, the
Voice-Absolute. This is what has renewed the Covenant of Gods and Men. You know
this, Esmi."

"So you're saying the
Hundred could very well be at war with the God's designs—with their very own
sum?"

"Yes-yes,"
Theliopa
interjected.
"There are one hundred and eighty-nine references
referring to the disparate ends of the Gods and the God of Gods, two from the
Holy Tractate itself. For they are like Men, hemmed in by darkness, making war
on the shadows of they know not what.' Schol-Scholars, thirty-four, twenty.
'For I am the God, the rule of all things...' "

Kelmomas swung his feet down to
sit cross-legged before Samarmas, shimmied close enough to touch knees. "I
know
," he whispered. "I know something you can do..."

Samarmas flinched and jerked his
head, as though hearing something too remarkable to be believed.

"What? What? What?"

"Think of your own
soul,"
Uncle Maithanet was saying.
"Think of the war within,
the way the parts continually betray the whole. We are not so different from
the world we live in, Esmi..."

"I know—I know all
this!"