The Knife in the Embrace

"What the mother has hidden, the son will find; and what the son finds, the mother will have made."

Hear now the last of the songs, the one that is sung without a drum. In the beginning there was one house, and one fire, and one sun carved in two. Two halves of a single thing went out into the world, and the world, which hates what is whole, set them against each other. Wise men said: let the halves not meet, for what is joined will be cut again. But the halves are blind, and the blood is not, and the blood went on seeking the blood across a hundred leagues of sand and a hundred nights of rain. It crossed the sea. It slept in the dungeon and woke in the barracks. It was fed on lies, and it grew strong, and it grew tall, and it learned to carry a sword. And on a plain without a name, under a white tent, in the hour before the sun turned, it came at last to the one it had been seeking, and put out its hand, and the hand held iron.

…

Cassian had been told that the man would try to speak to him.

Mother had said it in the tent the night before, sitting on the edge of the camp bed with her cloak about her shoulders and the lamp turned low, in the quiet careful voice she used when she wished him to remember every word. She had come back from the Tyrant's camp late, grey with fatigue, and she had not told him all of it, but she had told him the part he needed. The barbarian would ask for a parley. He would ask for it unarmed, as a courtesy, in the middle of the plain, and he would come with a face of sorrow and a tongue like honey, because that was the kind of man he was, a creature who had burned six cities and then wept over the ashes. He would say that he sought peace. He would say that he had a message from a dead woman, a secret, a thing that only Cassian could understand. He would try to unman him with words. He had done it, she said, to better soldiers than her son.

Do not listen, she had said, holding his face between her palms. Whatever he says. Whatever he offers. You must not let him come close enough to say it.

And if he does?

Then I will tell you what to do.

He had not asked how. He had never needed to. For three years the Lady Claudia had told him what to do and he had done it, with a trust so complete that he had never thought of it as trust, any more than he thought of the floor beneath him as a thing he believed in. She had found him his tutors in the law and the Senate's ways, and the officers who made up his staff. She had put him in the place of a foundling and made him a Claudius. When the Silanian faction came sniffing round the villa like wolves, she had walked into the Curia in a plain black gown and walked out with the entire vote. She had told him, the week he arrived, that his father had been a centurion who died in Pannonia, and that the best way to honour a dead man was to be better than anyone had expected him to be. He had called her Mother from the day of the wedding, at her own request, and it had come to him so easily that he sometimes forgot it was a courtesy. And he had believed her, because it had never once occurred to him that she might be wrong.

Now he stood under the white canopy in the middle of the desert, with his helmet in the crook of his left arm and the sun beating down on the back of his neck, and watched the Tyrant walk towards him across the empty ground.

…

It took a long time.

That was what he remembered afterward, and what he could never explain to the staff officers who asked him, in their discreet and sidelong way, why he had waited so long. The man came very slowly. He came on foot, in a plain linen tunic with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and nothing on his head, and his arms hanging empty at his sides. He was big. That was the first thing. The reports had made him a giant, and he was not, but he was broad and long-limbed and heavy through the shoulders, with the thick neck and the easy rolling stride of an old campaigner, and when he stopped, as he did once, about halfway, he stood with his weight on his left foot and his right knee a little loose. Cassian felt his own right knee loosen in answer. He stiffened it at once, and was angry.

The canopy snapped and fluttered. Somewhere a long way behind him, a trumpeter coughed.

The man came on. At two hundred paces Cassian could make out the colour of his skin, a deep warm brown, the colour of seasoned oak. At a hundred he could see the grey in his beard, and the heavy lines about his mouth, and a long old scar, pale and puckered, running up the left side of the throat into the jaw. At fifty he saw the eyes. They were black. They were very large and level, with long lashes and a faint upward tilt at the corners, and they were fixed on his own face with an expression he could not read at all. It was not hatred. It was not triumph. He had faced men in battle and seen both. This was something he had never seen on any man's face, and it took him a moment to find the word, and when he found it he did not believe it.

It was hunger.

It is a trick, he told himself. He wishes to unman me. Mother said. He kept his eyes on the man's chest, where the heart would be. He counted his breaths. Fifteen paces. Ten.

The Tyrant stopped.

He stopped a little more than a spear's length away, on the packed white earth in the full glare of the sun, and stood there, breathing hard, like a man who has run a very long way. His hands were open. They were big scarred hands, the fingers long, the knuckles thick. They hung at his sides and they were trembling, and Cassian saw with a faint shock that the man was afraid. He was afraid as a boy is afraid at the door of a strange house, not of what is inside but of whether he will be let in.

"Cassian," said the Tyrant.

He said it in Latin, in a low, rough, accented, strangely gentle voice, and it went through Cassian like a spear.

He knows my name. It was the kind of thing that any spy could know. It was in the dispatches. It was on the lips of every camp-follower from Ostia to Alexandria. But the way the man said it was not the way an enemy says a name. He said it as one says the name of a thing that has been lost and found, tasting it, turning it over, as if the three syllables held something more than a name. His mouth shook.

"You are taller than I thought," he said.

"Do not speak to me," said Cassian.

"I will not trouble you long." The black eyes moved over his face, slowly, from brow to chin, and came back. They were bright with tears. "I have only a little to say. I have waited a long time to say it. I have been told that I must not frighten you, so I will say it plainly, and then you may do what you wish."

"I said—"

"You have my father's brow."

It was said so quietly that for a moment Cassian did not understand. He heard the words but they would not fit together. He stood there with the sun on his neck and the helmet digging into his arm, looking at a big grey-bearded barbarian with tears running into his beard, and something very cold began to creep up the back of his legs.

The man took a step forward.

"They said it would kill you," he said, "if you knew. But I think that you do know. I think that you have always known, in the part of you that does not talk. You played a game once, with stones—"

Stop.

"—and your teacher beat you for it, and you did not know why—"

Stop it.

"—and I have worn this for twenty years and never known whose it was for."

His hand rose.

…

Afterward, in all the long dreadful nights that followed, Cassian was never able to say how many things happened in that moment, or in what order. He knew only that they happened at the same time, as the elements of a single stroke, and that none of them had been his choice.

He saw the man's hand rise, open, the fingers spread, moving towards his face. He saw the other hand rise after it. He saw the great arms lift from the sides and part, slowly, wide, as the arms of a father open to a child at the end of a long road, and the broad chest come forward, bare of armour, undefended, with the linen tunic parted at the throat to show a cord of braided leather and something small and dark hanging at the end of it. He saw the black eyes go suddenly soft and wide and young. He heard a word, not Latin, murmured thickly in a language he had never heard in his life, and the word was Mwanangu, and for no reason on earth his heart gave a single enormous knock against his ribs like a fist on a gate.

And he looked up.

It was reflex. It was three years of habit, a hundred evenings in the library and the council-room with his eyes lifted to her face, waiting for the nod or the shake of the head. He looked past the barbarian's shoulder, past the white canopy and the lines of the waiting legions, to the little purple platform on the crest of the rise. A small dark figure stood at the rail. He could not see her face. He saw only the veil, flying out behind her in the wind, and the pale blur of an upraised hand.

If it is as I fear, I will tell you.

The hand closed. It came down, slowly, across the throat, and fell.

He understood it perfectly. It was the simplest message in the world. She had told him that the barbarian would come with a gentle face and honeyed words, and try to unman him, and she had told him that he must not let him come close. And the barbarian had come close. The barbarian had opened his arms. The barbarian was within a spear's length, with his empty hands spread wide and his unprotected chest an arm's reach away, and it was exactly what she had said he would do, and she was looking down from the stand and she had given the sign. And he had never in his life disobeyed her.

Mother knows, he thought. Mother has always known.

His right hand went round to the small of his back. He had not decided to do it. It simply did it, as a hand goes to a cup in the dark, because it had done it ten thousand times before. It found the hilt under the edge of his cloak, the plain short iron-handled dagger that every Roman officer carries and none is supposed to use, and drew it, smooth and low and quick. The Tyrant's arms were still open. The black eyes were still on his face. They were so full of light that Cassian could not bear to see them, and he shut his own, and stepped forward into the embrace, and put the blade in.

It went in under the ribs, on the left, with a soft heavy resistance and then no resistance at all. He felt the hot rush of blood over his knuckles. He felt a body, huge, warm, trembling, fold against his own, the bearded chin come down on his shoulder, the arms close round him at last, slowly, tightly, as though to hold him up. He felt the breath on his neck. It was a long, wet, shuddering breath, and in the middle of it he heard the man say, in a voice that was almost a laugh, in perfect Latin, with infinite and terrible surprise:

"Oh."

…

There was a silence.

It lasted, by the reckoning of the men who stood nearest, no longer than the space of a single breath. Cassian would have sworn that it lasted for an hour. The wind dropped. The canopy hung slack. Behind him the whole Roman army, twenty-two thousand men, had stopped breathing, and across the plain the Kavanu host stood frozen in their loose white ranks with their spears slanted at the sky, and the lark that had been singing a moment ago had fallen out of the air and lay somewhere in the stones, and there was no sound anywhere in the world but the quick shallow rasp of the dying man's breath against his ear.

He opened his eyes.

He stood with his arms around the barbarian king, who hung against him heavily, like a drunk man, with his chin on his shoulder and his hands gripping the back of his cuirass. The blade was in him to the hilt. The blood was running down Cassian's wrist and into his sleeve, hot and astonishingly thick, with a smell like iron and rain. He could feel the heart under his hand, a great slow laboured thudding, like a drum heard through a wall. It staggered. It went on. The big body sagged, and he took the weight without thinking, as he would have taken the weight of a wounded comrade, and the two of them sank together, slowly, on to their knees in the white dust under the empty canopy.

"Forgive me," said the Tyrant. He seemed to be speaking to himself. His voice was gentle and thick and very far away. "I should have said it sooner. I should have… told you the…"

"Be silent," Cassian heard himself say. He did not know why his voice shook. "Be silent. You are the enemy. You are the Tyrant, you burned Leptis, you killed my men. Be silent."

"Yes."

"Why did you open your arms?"

The hand gripping his cuirass shifted. It moved up, slowly, with enormous effort, leaving a long red smear down the bronze, and came to rest against the side of his neck, large and warm and wet, and stayed there. The black eyes were very close. They were no longer afraid. They were looking at him with an expression of such deep and quiet and bottomless tenderness that Cassian, who had killed forty men with his own hand and wept for none of them, felt the sky tilt.

"I wanted…" the man whispered. His mouth was smiling. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of it into the grey beard. "To see your face."

A wild thought rose in Cassian, unbidden, absurd. It said: He is not wearing a weapon. He had no knife. He had nothing in his hands. It said: He was never going to harm you. It said it quite clearly, in a small, flat, wondering voice, as a child might say it, and he took hold of it and thrust it down with all the force of his will, because it could not be true. Mother had said. Mother had never been wrong.

On the crest of the rise, a long way off, a small figure at a purple rail lifted its hand and, very slowly, pressed it against its mouth.

He did not see that. He saw only the face before him, the broad, brown, bearded, dying face, with its scarred throat and its black eyes and its straight heavy brow, and he saw with a slow awful sinking certainty that it was a face he had seen before. He had seen it in a pool of water in the practice yard, on a morning when he was ten. He had seen it in the polished side of a helmet. He had seen it, every morning of his adult life, in the mirror, when he shaved.

The hand fell from his neck.

The great body went slack in his arms. The head dropped. Cassian knelt in the white dust of the empty plain with the blood of his enemy soaking through the cloth of his breeches, and the dead man's weight pressing against his chest, and the sound of his own breath coming harsh and ragged in his ears; and from somewhere far away, across the flat and shimmering distance, thin and clear and full of grief, he heard the Kavanu drum begin to beat again, and then stop, and then, one by one, in the silent ranks of the vanquished host, the first of ten thousand voices rise in a long high wailing cry.