How many women had there been? He had lost count. It would have been better, perhaps, if he’d at least once elected to share his gift of longevity. Better, yes, than watching those few who’d remained with him for any length of time lose all their beauty, surrendering their youth, until there was no choice but for Kallor to discard them, to lock them away, one by one, in some tower on some windswept knoll. What else could he have done? They hobbled into lives of misery, and that misery was an affront to his sensibilities. Too much bitterness, too much malice in those hot, ageing eyes ever fixing upon him. Did he not age as well? True, a year for them was but a heartbeat for Kallor, but see the lines of his face, see the slow wasting of muscle, the iron hue of his hair. .
It was not just a matter of choosing the slowest burning wood, after all, was it? And with that thought he kicked at the coals of the fire, watched sparks roil nightward. Sometimes, the urgent flames of the quick and the short-lived delivered their own kind of heat. Hard wood and slow burn, soft wood and smoulder shy;ing reluctance before ashen collapse. Resinous wood and oh how she flared! Blinding, yes, a glory no man could turn from.
Too bad he’d had to kill every child he begat. No doubt that left most of his wives and lovers somewhat disaffected. But he had not been so cruel as to hesi shy;tate, had he? No. Why, he’d tear those ghastly babes from their mothers’ arms not moments after they’d tumbled free of the womb, and was that not a true sign of mercy? No one grows attached to dead things, not even mothers.
Attachments, yes, now they were indeed a waste of time and, more relevantly, a weakness. To rule an empire — to rule a hundred empires — one needed a certain objectivity. All was to be used, to be remade howsoever he pleased. Why, he had launched vast construction projects to glorify his rule, but few understood that it was not the completion that mattered, but the work itself and all that it implied — his command over their lives, their loyalty, their labour. Why, he could work them for decades, see generations of the fools pass one by one, all working each and every day of their lives, and still they did not understand what it meant for them to give to him — to Kallor — so many years of their mortal existence, so much of it, truly, that any rational soul would howl at the cruel injustice of such a life.
This was, as far as he was concerned, the real mystery of civilization — and for all that he exploited it he was, by the end, no closer to understanding it. This willingness of otherwise intelligent (well, reasonably intelligent) people to parcel up and then bargain away appalling percentages of their very limited lives, all in service to someone else. And the rewards? Ah, some security, perhaps. The cement that is stability. A sound roof, something on the plate, the beloved offspring each one destined to repeat the whole travail. And was that an even exchange?
It would not have been no, for him. He knew that, had known it from the very first. He would bargain away nothing of his life. He would serve no one, yield none of his labour to the edification and ever-expanding wealth of some fool who imagined that his or her own part of the bargain was profound in its generosity, was indeed the most precious of gifts. That to work for him or her was a
Just how many rules of civil behaviour were designed to perpetuate such egregious schemes of power and control of the few over the many? Rules defended to the death (usually the death of the many, rarely that of the few) with laws and wars, with threats and brutal repression — ah, those were the days, were they not? How he had gloried in that outrage!
He would never be one of the multitude. And he had proved it, again and again, and again. And he would continue to prove it.
A crown was within reach. A kingship waited to be claimed. Mastery not over something as mundane as an empire — that game had grown stale long ago — but over a realm. An entity consisting of all the possible forces of existence. The power of earthly flesh, every element unbound, the coruscating will of belief, the skein of politics, religion, social accord, sensibilities, woven from the usual tragic roots of past ages golden and free of pain and new ages bright with absurd promise. While through it all fell the rains of oblivion, the cascading torrent of failure and death, suffering and misery, a god broken and for ever doomed to remain so — oh, Kallor knew he could usurp such a creature, leave it as powerless as his most abject subject.
All —
