He wept.
Renarr remained sitting on the trunk, confused. Did this soldier want comfort? Or did he indeed seek condemnation? It was clear that crimes had been committed. Urusander would see those men hanged. In fact, it was possible that all three squads would dance on the rope. Her adoptive father was famous for his righteous outrage. ‘Have you reported this to your captain?’ she asked.
The blunt, toneless question met the man’s grief and swept it aside. She might as well have struck him across the face. Wiping at his eyes, straightening where he sat, he glared across at her. ‘Is that a joke? The bitch sent us into that camp! She could hear that mother’s screams from where she lounged in the next glade! Oh, and what was she doing while we murdered that family?’
‘Never mind,’ Renarr cut in, before the soldier could tell her what his captain had been up to. Renarr already knew enough to guess who the woman was. ‘And,’ she added, ‘obviously, Hunn Raal is not, strictly speaking, next on the chain of command. Is he? No, it’s the captains made equal, with only Urusander above them.’
The man abruptly stood, began pacing. ‘You can’t know,’ he said. ‘Hiding out here. Can you?’
She felt herself grow cold, and struggled to still her shaking hand as she drank again from the goblet. ‘You know who I am,’ she said. ‘You sought me out, thinking … what? That I would take this to Urusander? It was in your head – why, I have no idea – that my father and I still acknowledge each other. How did you work this out? Oh, he sends her down to the whore camps because she’s bored, the dear lass. Is it not what a father would do?’
He stopped pacing, and sat again, looking away. ‘Then deliver his justice yourself, Renarr. With your own hand! This heart wants to still its infernal beat! My bones close around it – I can barely breathe. I swear, those raped children – they’ve found me. Haunting me day and night now. It’s not what I signed up for, don’t you see? Not in my vow of service to the realm!’
‘It would seem that by far the most righteous punishment for you, soldier, is to leave you alive. Haunted by guilt for the rest of your years. You flee the ghosts of three raped boys, do you? Even when you did not take part? Well, how sad for you.’
He glared at her now, visage darkening. ‘I’m not paying for contempt.’
‘Oh, I am sorry. I was trying to make a point. It was clearly fine, then, that you raped the mother. Her ghost wanders elsewhere, one presumes. But those poor boys, with you watching on! Like botflies they’re now under your skin, gnawing their way into your heart. Of course, they were the ones watching you, at least at first, while you fucked their screaming mother.’
He stood, reaching for his weapon-belt. ‘For this, I’ll pay you nothing.’
‘For this,’ she retorted, ‘I will not be a coward’s path. You know the way to the keep, soldier. I am sure Urusander is there even now. And yes, he will accept an audience with a soldier of his legion.’
‘My squad-mates-’
‘Oh yes, them. Why, they’ll know, of course, once the charges are brought down. I see now why you thought it best to go through me. In that instance, you all stand accused, and all face the same punishment. You stand with your brothers and sisters, and not once do they question you or your loyalty.’ Renarr finished her wine.
‘It’s not cowardice,’ the young soldier said.
‘Isn’t it? Your entire tale is one of cowardly acts, from the moment you rode into the forest, hunting Deniers. Slaughtering women and children? Setting their homes ablaze? Entire companies, so brave in how you outnumbered your every opponent, and set swords to their flimsy spears and whatnot. Your armour against their thin hides. Your iron helms and their oh-so-fragile skulls.’
He drew his gutting knife.
She met his gaze, unafraid, understanding what this night had brought to her. ‘So be it,’ she said quietly. ‘Give me, then, your one moment of courage.’
With a savage slash – beneath eyes suddenly triumphant – the soldier cut his own throat. Blood poured out, rushing from the severed jugular.
He toppled and she stepped back.
He made of this whore’s tent a temple, and me his priestess. Or, at least, someone to stand in for his god – as priestesses are purported to do. He uttered his crimes … But the body lying on the floor beside her cot, so motionless now when an instant earlier it had been bursting with life – she could not tear her gaze from it.
There are ways of leaving. The worst of these is also the most final. You see, the bastard left, yet left his body behind. Why does the thought make me want to laugh? Guests will leave a mess, won’t they just? It falls to the host to see it cleaned up.
I am no priestess. This is no temple. But the confessions spill out night after night – none as bleak as this one, to be sure. But it was coming. I should have seen that. The fools have blood on their hands, guilt in their souls. The High Priestess of High House Light isn’t much interested in all that, alas. And their mothers are far away.
It is, I see now, an issue of faith. Faith and faiths, the natural ones and the other kinds, the imposed kinds.
She recalled the aftermath of the battle against the Wardens, and all the cries from the soldiers left dying on the field, while the whores and looters walked among them. So many had called out, like children, for their mothers. Their god, or goddess, was too remote for them, in that drawn-out journey into death. It was a faith they’d dropped away from, abandoned. What was left, if not the purest, the sweetest of all faiths? ‘Mother! Please! Help me! Hold me!’
Renarr had been witness to all that, there amidst the heaped bodies and the stench. But her memories of her own mother offered nothing. Too vague, too formless, making that ethereal, half-imagined figure almost godlike.
Wrong faith, then. Not one for me to call upon, not now, not later. Not even at the very end, I should think.
But these soldiers, they were far from their mothers, and few were able to reach their wives or husbands, assuming they had any. Failed by the High Priestess and that remote and strangely sinister temple they were even now building, and its god so bright as to blind all who might gaze upon it. Failed, too, that faith in the mother always close, always a short tear-filled run away, her arms opening wide to collect up the wayward child. Faiths, then, failed and failed again. What was left?
The whore, of course. Confused and confusing idol. Priestess and mother, lover and goddess, and all faith reduced to the basest of needs, one simple game to play out all the infernal wars of power. Astonishing, isn’t it, what a few coins can purchase?
Renarr collected up her heaviest cloak, and strode out from her tent. She set out from the whores’ camp where it clung to one side of the Legion’s outermost earthworks, and made her way along the embankment. Ahead, the dull, muted lights of Neret Sorr, and beyond that, the high hill of Urusander’s fortress.
Men had a way of filling her up, it seemed. He had sought her out, to make her his hand of justice. She had refused him to his face, and in answer to that he had taken his own life. She recalled the triumph in his eyes at that final moment, at the gift his own knife gave to him. There was something in those young eyes that fascinated her.
What did he see, I wonder? What avenue opened before him? A sudden way through, an escape from all the torment? Or was it just the venal act of a selfish child, wanting to somehow punish the woman standing before him … just passing the guilt along, as cowards will do.