Something to pass the time.
The Song of Hashaskor
Two:
You name yourself Kapali?
"Aye, lud."
You are strong, Kapali. Perhaps the strongest of the slaves we have taken from these river-lands.
"Aye, lud."
We have melted the metal of the slave-masks to forge iron weapons. We have no longer our rich Bahran mines, Kapali. So we brand our slaves in these harsh times, Kapali. Do you wish to be branded, Kapali?
"Nay, lud."
I thought not. Who are we, Kapali?
"Ye Satar, lud."
There are perhaps two thousand blooded Satar men among these ranks. Another thousand, Bahrans and middle-Sesh dwellers taken to our ways. Another two thousand, slave conscripts from Ayase, and raiders from the northern deserts. We are a bastard army, Kapali. We are a bastard army of lost sons.
He chuckled.
Kapali...we are homeless bastards like yourself.
"Aye, lud."
I will give you this hammer, Kapali, and I will give you a bronze mask. But first, Kapali, answer me this. Do you know Exatas?
Kapali grinned.
"Aye, lud. Kapali knows Exatas."
What is Exatas, Kapali?
"Scythe, m'lud. Scythe through grain."
And a fire in the grasslands, Kapali, driven by wind.
---
There is little joy in the desert. The Satar chose the Sapphire City because it sweltered. In high summer, the heat channeled through the streets in rolling waves, driving the locals indoors, clearing the streets until the roaring, clattering night markets engulfed the city with strings of colored lanterns and the hawkers plying their trade in a dozen languages. It was a ruthless, predatory dance. The day belonged to the columns of soldiers, marching to campaign. To the masks. The night to their servants. If you could kill to better yourself, you did. If you could not, you learned, or you died.
There is little joy in the desert.
From desert to desert, my life. Atraxes himself chose my exile. He saw the rise of Xetares, the reign of silver giving way to gold. Do not contest it, he told Xephaion. Do not support my son. Die in peace, friend. And so he did. It was a mercy, in a way.
Atraxes knew that the Exatai was unsustainable. The clans ran their own dominions, living in a world of mutual assassinations. It was the old Satrapy of legend slowly coming into birth again. What did Atraxes want? Did he truly love the Exatai that he built? He and his father, the ruthless killers, an epoch of slaughter and subjugation. Perhaps the Exatai was sustainable, through beautiful concentric circles of expanding destruction, expanding throughout the world.
I think Atraxes wanted it to die. He wanted it to end.
Six princes of the Satar contested the throne at the Den of Wolves, the great hexagonal pit of sandstone where politics and bloodsport were openly unified. At least the Satar are honest about their succession. Other nations pretend that successions can pass without blood, with order and law. The Satar reply, blood is order. Blood is law. I refused. If I were not the son of the Silver Fist, with the blood of the Holy Redeemer running through my veins, they would have carved me slowly, and left me to bleed out my entrails under the chill winds of Tephas.
Instead, they gave me a minor garrison posting, an adjunct role in the domination of the civilized world.
And then they failed. And then they died. Every single one of them. It was left to me, blooded Prince of the Star, to grovel to a subject people, these strange Faronun hill-dwellers who we slaughtered by the thousands. And even then they refused my blood. Not even my enemies would take from me my legacy.
The burden of Exatas came to me, unbidden.
And I found a brutal truth from which I had fled all my life.
I wanted it.
I loved it.
To be greater than a man, to be a mask. A figure of fear, of terror, and of awe. Arastephas was unquenchable once the golden mask had been placed on his face. He was inhabited by the Lord of Thunder, the First Spear, Taleldil Kaphaixetas.
But I know the fear my father felt, and it tempers me. He did not want the Exatai to die. He wanted the Exatai to become something greater than the meaningless, mindless slaughter of the Redeemers.
But I do not know what he wished to replace it with.
My father never told me. Perhaps he never knew.
There is little joy in the desert. It is an empty sorrow. It is a promise of wind and fire. A promise of a scythe through grain.