Thinking, Please… Let it end here.
The trees, he had realized upon awakening. The Dream had been refracted through their lethargic wrath, distorted. A forest tunnel. A forest clearing. Now the barked skin of the Mop had fallen away, revealing the true locus of his dream captivity, one that he recognized instantly, yet was long in admitting…
The Dread Ark. Min-Uroikas. He now dreamed the experiences of some other soul, a captive of the Consult, shuffling to his doom in the belly of wicked Golgotterath.
And yet, despite the mad significance of this latest transformation, despite all the care and scrutiny he had heaped upon his Dreams over the years, he found himself dismissing these ethereal missives with an inexplicable negligence. Even though their horror actually eclipsed his old dreams of the Apocalypse, they simply did not seem to matter… for some reason… for some reason…
The old Wizard laughed sometimes, so little did he care.
– | Seventeen days into the Istyuli Plains, the day following the scarf, Mimara suddenly asked him why he had fallen in love with her mother.
Mimara was forever talking about the "Empress," as she called her, always describing her in ways that lampooned and criticized. Often she would adopt her mother's tone and voice-lips pulled into a line, eyelids wary and low, an expression that strove to look impervious yet seemed brittle instead. It was a habit that amused and alarmed the old Wizard in equal measure.
Although Achamian was forever defending Esmenet, as well as chiding Mimara for her lack of charity, he had always managed to avoid revealing his true feelings. His instinct was to keep his counsel when talking mothers to their children-even when adult. Motherhood, it seemed, meant too much to be trusted to something as sordid as truth.
So he would tell her pleasant lies, the kind of polite observations designed to discourage further discussion. If she insisted or, worse yet, pestered him with direct questions, he would bark and bristle until she relented. Too much pain, he would tell himself. And besides, he had become quite fond of acting the crabby old Wizard.
But this time he did neither.
"Why?" she asked. "Out of all the women you had lain with, why love her?"
"Because she possessed a sharp wit," he heard himself reply. "That was why I… why I returned, I think. That and her beauty. But your mother… She was always asking me questions about things, about the world, the past-even my Dreams fascinated her. We would lie in her bed sweating, and I would talk and talk, and she would never lose interest. One night she interrogated me until dawn gilded the cracks of her shutters. She would listen and…"
He trailed into the marching silence, not so much stymied by the difficulty of what he wanted to say as astonished by the fact he spoke at all. When had confession become so easy?
"And what?"
"And she… she believed me…"
"Your stories, you mean. About the First Apocalypse and the No-God."
He glanced about, as though wary about being overheard, when in truth he really did not care.
"That… But it was more, I think. She believed in me."
Could it be so simple?
And so he continued. He heard himself explaining things he never knew he understood, how doubt and indecision had so ruled his soul and intellect that he could scarce act without lapsing into endless recriminations. Why? Why? Always why? He heard himself explaining the horrors of his Dreams, and how they had frayed his nerves to the quick. He heard himself telling her how he had come to her mother weak, a man who would sooner hatch plots in his soul than take any real action…
How Drusas Achamian, the only Wizard in the Three Seas, had been a cringer and a coward.
The strange thing is that he found himself actually yearning for those days-missing not so much the fear, perhaps, as the simple anguish of needing another. Living with her in Sumna while she continued taking custom, sitting and waiting in the bustling agora, watching the to and fro of innumerable Sumnites while images of her coupling with strangers plagued him gut and soul. Perhaps this explained what happened later, when she had climbed into Kellhus's bed, believing that Achamian had perished in the Sareotic Library. If there was any fact from his past that caused Achamian to both flinch and marvel, it was the way he had continued to love both of them after their joint betrayal. Despite the years, he never ceased balling his fists at the pageant of memories, his awe of Kellhus and the godlike ease with which he mastered the Gnosis, and his impotent fury when the man retired… to lie with his wife-his wife!
Esmenet. Such a strange name for a whore.
"Fear…" the old Wizard said in resignation. "I was always afraid with your mother."
"Because she was a whore," Mimara said with more eagerness than compassion.
She was right. He had loved a whore and had reaped the wages accordingly. Perhaps the final days of the First Holy War simply had been a continuation of those early days in Sumna. The same hurt, the same rage, only yoked to the otherworldly glamour that was Anasurimbor Kellhus.
"No…" he said. "Because she was so beautiful."
It seemed a proper lie.
"What I don't understand," Mimara exclaimed with the air verbalizing something she had long debated in silence, "is why you refuse to hold her accountable. She was a caste-menial, not sold into slavery like me. She chose to be a whore… just as she chose to betray you."
"Did she?" It seemed that he listened to his voice more than he spoke with it.
"Did she what? Choose? Of course she did."
"Few things are so capricious as choice, girl."
"Seems simple to me. Either she chooses to be faithful or she chooses to betray."
He glared at her. "And what about you? Were you chained to your pillow in Carythusal? No? Does that mean you chose to be there? That you deserved everything you suffered? Could you not have jumped off the ship when the slavers she sold you to put out to sea? Why blame your mother for your wilful refusal to run away?"
Her look was hateful but marred by the same hesitation that seemed to dog all of their heated conversations of late, that moment of searching for the proper passion, as if willing away some reptilian fragment of self that simply did not care. Mimara, part of him realized, was injured because he had said something injurious, not because she felt any real pain. That capacity, it seemed, had been lost in the dark bowels of Cil-Aujas.
"There are chains," she said dully, "and then there are chains."
"Exactly."
A kind of humility haunted her manner after that, but one that seemed more motivated by weariness than any real insight. Even so, he welcomed it. Arrogance is ever the patron of condemnation. Though most all men lived in total ignorance of the ironies and contradictions that mortared their lives, they instinctively understood the power of hypocrisy. So they pretended, laid claim to an implausible innocence. To better sleep. To better condemn. The fact that everyone thought themselves more blameless than blameworthy, Ajencis once wrote, was at once the most ridiculous and the most tragic of human infirmities. Ridiculous because it was so obvious and yet utterly invisible. Tragic because it doomed them to unending war and strife.
There is more than strength in accusation, there is the presumption of innocence, which is what makes it the first resort of the brokenhearted.
During the first years of his exile, Achamian had punished Esmenet in effigy innumerable times in the silent watches before sleep-too many times. He had accused and he had accused. But he had lived with his grievances too long, it seemed, to perpetually condemn her for anything she might have done. No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.