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?"