Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Naturally, the little wars were dressed up in ritual and significance. War spear challenge was followed by war dance, and invocation of demons, the one-eyed snake and diverse totems. I bowed to none of these, having seen early the vulgarity and impotence of the tribal pantheon. Generally men create gods in their own image.

The rites were just the husks left over from deeper things, no pith remaining and no mystery, nothing to lift up the soul or go to the brain like wine. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.

Precognition or self-deception?

Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, a destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth, and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.

A few old men began to say there had been a winter like this when they were warriors, and that it was a year of catastrophe and disappointment. But old men will ever spin this wheel. The summers were always hotter and the winters colder in the days of their strength, and the air thick with epic drama and portent.

I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.

To fall suddenly sick when you have never been ill is a hard lesson. If it teaches anything, it teaches you that you must not trust to the thing you know, that it is better to build on shifting sand than the rock which may confound you on the day it shatters.

This was the custom of the tribes, and perhaps, in the fogs of their pasts, the scheme had had its reasons. Yet like many of their ways, only the peel remained, the fruit was long gone.

The bird stabs the worm, the big cat breaks the bird’s neck, the man casts his spear into the heart of the cat. That is how the world is. Even the man had better look behind him; the wolf may be near, or another man, or fate, the hungriest hunter of them all.

There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.

We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.

The sea was a phenomenon I had never clapped eyes on for myself, yet it seemed, from the tales, a destination ultimate and uncompromising. The ocean’s edge, the brink of the land; the lip of Chaos.

There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope.

As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.

Now I saw braves hang themselves with amulets, leave tidbits for spirits, and still take an arrow in the neck. I, worshiping nothing and bribing nothing with prayers, rode among an enemy unscathed, scything them like summer wheat.

Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.

That evening I met a black witch with a red cat, walking on a headland above the sea.

I had reached the sea unexpectedly, but the sea is unexpected in any event to one who has never known it. You think it land at first, or sky, and penultimately mist. Then you realize a vast azure mass of water lies like a dragon in the sun’s last rays, breathing and shifting on the beaches.

He showed no fear. It seemed that, at the commencement, his race had known gods and no other. Gods had bound and ill treated and slaughtered and played with them. Gods were a fact, as were the sun and the shaking of the earth. Just another terrible reality.

I said, “When you are on your deathbed, Erran, pray that you never meet me in the place you are going to.”