The body directly before him, however, was that of a child. The blue of the eyes was now covered in a milky film, giving it its only depth, since all that was behind that veil was flat, like iron shields or silver coins, sealed and deprived of all promise. They were, he told himself yet again, eyes that no longer worked, and the loss of that was beyond comprehension.
He would paint this child’s face. He would paint it a thousand times. Ten thousand. He would offer the paintings as gifts to every man and every woman of the realm. And each time any one man or woman stirred awake the hearth gods of anger and hate, feeding the gaping mouth of violence and uttering pathetic lies about making things better, or right, or pure, or safe, he would give them yet another copy of this child’s face. He would spend a lifetime upon this one image, repeated in plaster on walls, on boards of sanded wood, in the threads of tapestry; glazed upon the sides of pots and carved on stones and from stone. He would make it one argument to defy every other god, every other venal emotion or dark, savage desire.
Kadaspala stared down at the child’s face. There was dirt on one cheek but otherwise the skin was clean and pure. Apart from the eyes, the only discordant detail was the angle between the head and the
body
, which denoted a snapped neck. And bruising upon one ankle, where the killer had gripped it when whipping the boy in the air – hard enough to separate the bones of the spine.
The gods of colour brushed lightly upon that face, in tender sorrow, in timorous disbelief. They brushed light as a mother’s tears.
The fingers of his right hand, folded over the saddle horn, made small motions, painting the boy’s face, filling the lines and planes with muted colour and shade, working round the judgement-less eyes, saving those for last. His fingers made the hair a dark smudge, because it was unimportant apart from the bits of twig, bark and leaf in it. His fingers worked, while his mind howled until the howling fell away and he heard his own calm voice.
‘Denier Child …
so I call it. Yes, the likeness is undeniable – you knew him? Of course you did. You all know him. He’s what falls to the wayside in your triumphant march. Yes, I kneel now in the gutter, because the view is one of details – nothing else, just details. Do you like it?
‘
Do you like this?
‘
The gods of colour offer this without judgement. In return, it is for you to judge. This is the dialogue of our lives
.
‘
Of course I speak only of craftsmanship. Would I challenge your choices, your beliefs, the way you live and the things you desire and the cost of those things? Are the lines sure? Are the colours true? What of those veils on the eyes – have you seen their likeness before? Judge only my skill, my feeble efforts in imbuing a dead thing with life using dead things – dead paints, dead brushes, dead surface, with naught but my fingers and my eyes living, together striving to capture truth
.
‘
I choose to paint death, yes, and you ask why – in horror and revulsion, you ask why? I choose to paint death, my friend, because life is too hard to bear. But it’s just a face, dead paints on dead surface, and it tells nothing of how the neck snapped, or the wrongness of that angle with the body. It is, in truth, a failure
.
‘
And each time I paint this boy, I fail
.
‘
I fail when you turn away. I fail when you walk past. I fail when you shout at me about the beautiful things of the world, and why didn’t I paint those? I fail when you cease to care, and when you cease to care, we all fail. I fail, then, in order to welcome you to what we share
.
‘
This face? This failure? It is recognition
.’
There were other corpses. A man and a woman, their backs cut and stabbed as they sought to hold their bodies protectively over those children they could reach, not that it had helped, since those children had been dragged out and killed. A dog was stretched out, cut in half just above the hips, the hind limbs lying one way, the fore limbs and head the opposite way. Its eyes, too, were flat.
When travelling through the forest, Kadaspala was in the habit of leaving the main track, of finding these lesser paths that took him through small camps such as this one. He had shared meals with the quiet forest people, the Deniers, although they denied nothing of value that he could see. They lived in familiarity and in love, and wry percipience and wise humility, and they made art that took Kadaspala’s breath away.
The figurines, the masks, the beadwork – all lost in the burnt huts now.
Someone had carved a wavy line on the chest of the dead boy. It seemed that worship of the river god was a death sentence now.
He would not bury these dead. He would leave them lying where they were. Offered to the earth and the small scavengers that would take them away, bit by bit, until the fading of flesh and memory were one.
He painted with his fingers, setting in his mind where all the bodies were lying in relation to one another; and the huts and the dead dog, and how the sun’s light struggled through the smoke to make every detail scream.
Then, kicking his mule forward, he watched as the beast daintily stepped over the boy’s body, and for the briefest of moments hid every detail in shadow.
In the world of night promised by Mother Dark, so much would remain for ever unseen. He began to wonder if that would be a mercy. He began to wonder if this was the secret of her promised blessing to all her believers, her children.
Darkness now and for evermore. So we can get on with things
.
A score or more horses had taken the trail he was now on. The killers were moving westward. He might well meet them if they had camped to rest from their night of slaughter. They might well murder him, or just feed him.
Kadaspala did not care. He had ten thousand faces in his head, and they were all the same. The memory of Enesdia seemed far away now. If he was spared, he would ride for her, desperate with need. For the beauty he dared not paint, for the love he dared not confess. She was where the gods of colour gathered all the glory in their possession. She was where he would find the rebirth of his faith.
Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruellest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.
If he lived a handful of breaths from this moment, or if he lived a hundred thousand years, he would fight – for something, a truth, that he could not even name. It was, perhaps, the god behind the gods of colour. The god that offered both creation and recognition, that set forth the laws of substance and comprehension, of outside and inside and the difference between the two.
He wanted to meet that god. He wanted a word or two with that god. He wanted, above all, to look into its eyes, and see in them the truth of madness.
With brush and desire, I will make a god
.
Watch me
.
But in this moment, as he rode through swords of light and shrouds of shadow, upon the trail of blind savagery, Kadaspala was himself like a man without eyes. The painted face was everywhere. His fingers could not stop painting it, in the air, like mystical conjurations, like evocations of unseen powers, like a warlock’s curse and a witch’s warding against evil. Fingers that could close wounds at a stroke, that could unravel the bound knots of time and make anew a world still thriving with possibilities – that could do all these things, yet tracked on in their small scribings, trapped by a face of death.
Because the god behind the gods was mad.
I shall paint the face of darkness. I shall ride the dead down the throat of that damned god. I, Kadaspala, now avow this: world, I am at war with you. Outside – you, outside, hear me! The inside shall be unleashed. Unleashed
.
I shall paint the face of darkness. And give it a dead child’s eyes
.
Because in darkness, we see nothing
.
In darkness, behold, there is peace
.
* * *
Narad’s fingers brushed the unfamiliar lines of his own face, the places that had twisted or sagged. Haral’s fists had done more than bruise and cut. They had broken nerves. He had looked upon his face reflected in a forest pool, and barely recognized it. The swelling was gone, bones mending as best they could, and most of the vision had returned to his left eye, but now he bore another man’s visage, thickened and pulled down, stretched and dented.
He had known Haral’s history. He had known that the bastard had lost his family in the wars, and that there was a cauldron of rage bubbling and popping somewhere inside the man. But for all that, Narad had been unable to stop himself, and finally – the day with that highborn runt – all of his verbal jabs and prods had pushed the caravan captain too far. It wasn’t hard to remember the look in Haral’s face, in the instant before he struck, the raw pleasure in the man’s eyes – as
though
a door had been thrown open and all the fists of his anger could now come flying out.
There was plenty of anger among the Tiste, swirling and on occasion rising up to drown sorrow, to overwhelm what was needed to just get along. Or maybe it was a force that existed in everyone, like a treasure hoard of every humiliation suffered in a lifetime of broken dreams and disappointments, a treasure hoard, a chest, with a flimsy lock.
Narad was an ugly man now, and he would think like an ugly man, but one still strong enough to keep sorrow’s head down, beneath the surface, and find satisfaction each and every time he drowned it. He wasn’t interested in a soft world any more, a world where tenderness and warmth were possible, rising like bright flowers from beds of skeletal lichen and sun-burnt moss. He needed to keep reminding himself of all of that.
He sat listening to the conversations in the camp around him, the words coming from those gathered round the fire, or outside the tents. Jests and complaints about the damp ground, the fire’s wayward but vengeful smoke. And he could hear, in rasping susurration, iron blades sliding on whetstones, as nicks were worked out and blunt edges honed sharp once again. Narad was among soldiers, true soldiers, and their work was hard and unpleasant, and he now counted himself one of them.
The troop awaited the return of their captain, Scara Bandaris, who along with a half-dozen soldiers had gone on to Kharkanas, to deliver the Jheleck hostages. Left behind by the caravan, still rib-cracked, still face-swollen, still half-blind, Narad had stumbled upon this troop and they had taken him in, cared for him, given him weapons and a horse, and now he rode with them.
The war against the Deniers had begun, here in this ancient forest. Narad had not known such a war was even threatening; he had never been impressed by the forest people. They were ignorant, most likely inbred, and meek as lambs. They weren’t much of an enemy, and it didn’t seem to be much of a war. The few huts they had come upon yesterday had been what Narad would have expected. One middle-aged man with a bad knee, a woman who called him husband, and the children they’d begotten. The girl who’d been hiding in the hut might have been pretty before the fire, but she was barely human after it, crawling out like she did. The killing had been straightforward. It had been professional. There had been no rapes, no torture. Every death delivered had been delivered quickly. Narad told himself that even necessity could be balanced with mercy.
The problem was: he was having trouble finding the necessity.
Corporal Bursa told him that he and his troop had cleaned out most of the Deniers in this section of forest – a day’s walk in any direction.
He
said it had been easy as there didn’t seem to be too many warriors among them, just the old and mothers and the young. Bursa reminded Narad of Haral, and already he had felt his instinctive response to a man bad at hiding hurts, but this time he kept quiet. He had learned his lesson and he wanted to stay with these men and women, these soldiers of the Legion. He wanted to be one of them.
He had drawn his sword in the Deniers’ camp, but none of the enemy had come within reach, and almost before he knew it the whole thing was over, and the others were firing the huts.
Where the girl had hidden was something of a mystery, but the smoke and flames had driven her out, eventually. Narad had been close by – well, the closest of any of them – and when she’d crawled out Bursa had ordered him to put the creature out of its misery.
He still remembered edging closer, fighting the gusts of heat. She was making no sound. Not once had she even screamed, although her agony must have been terrible. It was right to kill her, to end her torment. He told himself that again and again, as he worked ever closer – until he hunched over her, staring down at her scorched back. Pushing the sword into it had not been as hard as he thought it would be. The thing below him could as easily have been a sow’s carcass, roasted on a spit. Except for all the black hair.
There was no reason, then, that his killing her should be haunting him. But he was having trouble laughing and joking with the others. He was, in fact, having trouble meeting their eyes. Bursa had tried telling him that these forest folk weren’t even Tiste, but that was untrue. They were – the lame man they’d cut down could have been from Narad’s own family, or a cousin in a nearby village. He felt confused and the confusion wouldn’t go away. If he could get drunk it’d go away, for a time, but that wasn’t allowed in this troop. They drank beer because it was safer than the local water, but it was weak and there wasn’t that much of it and besides, these soldiers weren’t like that. Captain Scara Bandaris wouldn’t allow it; by all accounts, he was hard and ferociously disciplined, and he expected the same of his soldiers.