Bahubali: The Beginning (2015) War Scene

When he was alone, he shook his head sorrowfully. Once on this site Yorbeth had brooded in his guise of a tree, his longest tap-root fed from a miraculous spring. Then that sad greedy fool of a packman...

But he was mortal, which the elemental had not been, and what was left? This stump, yielding tinder for overnight travelers, and a well whose chief renown was for the brewing of beer!

Yet it was not entirely to be wondered at. The news was of a piece with all the rest of what he'd learned during this, the latest of so many journeys undertaken in accordance with the obligations which bound him. Latest? Not impossibly, he was beginning to believe, the last.

For once it had made small difference that this journey was this journey, not the one before or after. In chaos, randomness was so extreme, the very contrasts made for a sense of uniformity. Now there were actual changes: the vanishing of Yorbeth not the greatest.

Back beyond Leppersley, for instance, Farchgrind was a household pet! The people heard him still, but conjured him to entertain their friends, and scoffed when he made his bragging promises. Laprivan of the Yellow Eyes had spent his substance, whatever the nature of it might be, and wearied of his struggle against the past. Footsteps left by those who plodded up his hill endured an hour or more.

And Barbizond had gone with Ryovora, despite Sardhin. The progress of rationality had worn him down-that bright being in his rainbow-gleaming cloud. It was still claimed that a knife from Barbizond would keep its edge forever, but the only man who'd mentioned the notion to the traveler this trip had been a sober farmer in Kanish-Kulya, and he'd employed the same diffident tone as the man just departed, the one who'd been embarrassed at reference to a spirit in the punk which carried fire so well.

That farmer was an earthy man leading a placid life, a little puzzled now and then when one of his fat and happy ploughboys brought some improbable growth to show him: a bunch of grapes that shone like polished metal, a turnip which, split apart, revealed the chambers of a human heart...

But his wine was plentiful and sweet, and there was never a lack of roasts to grace the spits in his kitchen, so he bothered his head not at all with traces of another age. Even the ancestry of his daughter-in-law was a source of kindly jokes around his table. Time was when any good Kanish family like his would have banished Kulya girls to the goose-run, be they never so beautiful-or perhaps honored their beauty by gang-rape if there were half a dozen sufficiently drunken men about.

Now, regal in a gown of peach-colored silk, a Kulya lady nightly shared his dinners, his heir fondly touching her goblet with his own to drink toast after toast to their three handsome boys asleep upstairs. With grandchildren growing apace, who should care when the blade of a harrow caught in the eye-socket of some moldering skull? That war was over; the armistice continued.

Likewise in Teq they made a mock of Lady Luck: her offering was a gobbet of spittle, launched at the floor when one of the company voiced hopes for an over-bold project.

Yet the rule bound him, and the traveler's nature was not such that he should complain. Forth he went on paths grown unfamiliar, and spoke with many people in many places, as for example in Wocrahin, where once

Memory! Memory! He had never foreseen that that intangible, binding the fluid nature of eternity into the sequential tidiness of Time, would also hamper the will like age itself! Almost, he began to envy those who could die....

No matter. In Wocrahin a man sat gobbling lamprey-pie in a splendid banquet-hall: gross in a purple doublet smeared with gravy-stains. Words chomped around a full mouth of the fish and crust, he forced out, " 'Fonly w'were freah y'muzzhr!"

"Ah, yes!" sighed his wife, accustomed to interpreting such talk: she fat as a prize breeding-sow, though childless, her vast bosom exposed almost to the bulging nipples over a gown crusted with seed-pearls, her head seeming to be depressed into her neck by the weight of the gem-crusted tiara she had put on, though they had no company to dinner apart from the thirty scrag-lean servants ranged around the hall.

"Would we were free of my mother!" she echoed when she had swilled her gullet with a swig of wine. "Ah, how finely we would live were we rid of her! She eats us out of house and home, the old bag!"

"Sh'yeats zazouter 'ousernome!" concurred the man.

The tall windows of the banquet-hall stood open to the warm summer night. Beyond them, watching the line of beggars who daily came-more from habit than optimism-to beg the cook for scraps, the traveler in black both heard the exchange and also saw the lady's mother, in draggled rags, pleading at the barred grille of the cellar where she was pent for a share of the beggars' crumbs.

He tapped his staff on the wall.

"As you wish, so be it," he said, and went away. The ceiling of the banquet-hall creaked behind him; it freed the greedy pair within a minute from all burdens, life itself not excluded.