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He seemed to enjoy telling her about the habits of such women, as if he were generalizing about all women and in so doing telling her that he thought she was at heart the same. She would rather open a vein. She ignored the innuendo and asked him something else instead.
"If your team is not playing, why do you wish to watch? Surely a man such as you would not bestow your precious presence on the faithful on such a regular basis just to be generous."
He peered at her with a puzzled look, as if it were a strange question. "To see their strategy, of course, to learn the strengths, the weaknesses, of those who will become the opponents of my team."
His sly smile returned. "That is what you do—size up those who might be your opponents—and don't try to tell me that you don't. I see your gaze go to weapons, to the layout of rooms, to the position of men, cover, and escape routes. You are always searching for an opportunity, always watching, always thinking of how to defeat those who stand in your way.
"Ja'La dh Jin is much the same way. It is a game of strategy."
"I've seen it played. I'd say that the strategy is secondary, that it's primarily a game of brutality."
"Well, if you don't enjoy the strategy," he said with a smirk, "then you will no doubt enjoy watching men sweat, strain, and struggle against one another. That's why most women like to watch Ja'La. Men enjoy it for the strategy, the give and take of the contest, the chance to cheer their team to victory, and to imagine being such men themselves; the women like to watch half-naked bodies and sweat-slicked muscles. They like to watch the strongest men prevail, dream of being the desire of conquering heroes, and then scheme of ways to make themselves available to such men."
"Both sound pointless to me. Either brutality, or meaningless rutting."
He shrugged. "In my tongue, Ja'La dh Jin means 'the game of life.' Is not life a struggle—a brutal contest? A contest of men, and of sexes? Life, like Ja'La, is a brutal struggle."
Kahlan knew that life could be brutal, but that such brutality did not define life or its purpose, and that the sexes were not rivals, but meant to share together in the work and joys of life.
"To those like you it is," she said. "That's one difference between you and me. I use violence only as a last resort, only when it's necessary to defend my life—my right to exist. You use brutality as a tool of fulfilling your desires, even your ordinary desires, because, except by force, you have nothing worthwhile to offer to exchange for what you want or need?and that includes women. You take, you do not earn.
"I'm better than that. You don't value life or anything in it. I do. That's why you must crush anything good—because it puts the lie to your nothing of a life, shows by contrast how you do nothing but waste your existence.
"That's why you and those like you hate those like me—because I'm better than you and you know it."
"Such a belief is the mark of a sinner. To consider your own life meaningful is a crime against the Creator as well as your fellow man."
When she only glared at him, he arched an eyebrow with an admonishing look as he leaned a little closer. He held up a thick finger—adorned with a plundered gold ring—before her face to mark an important point, as if lecturing a selfish, headstrong child who was within an inch of getting a well-deserved thrashing.
"The Fellowship of Order teaches us that to be better than someone is to be worse than everyone."
Kahlan could only stare at such a vulgar ideology. That pious statement of hollow conviction gave her a sudden, true insight into the abyss of his savage nature, and the vindictive character of the Order itself. It was a concept that had abandoned the distant foundation upon which it had been built—that all life equally had the right to exist for its own sake—in order to justify taking life for the Order's own contrived notion of the common good.
Within that simple-sounding framework of an irrational tenet, he had just unwittingly revealed everything.
It explained the depravity of his whole cause and the determinant emotions driving the nature of those monstrous men massed outside, ready to kill anyone who would not submit to their creed. It was a dogma that shrank from civilization, praised savagery as a way of existence, and required constant brutality to crush any noble idea and the man who had it. It was a movement that drew to it thieves who wanted to think themselves righteous, murderers who wanted holy absolution for the blood of innocent victims that drenched their souls.
It assigned any achievement not to the one who had created it, but instead to those who had not earned it and did not deserve it, precisely because they did not earn it and did not deserve it. It valued thievery, not accomplishment.
It was anathema to individuality.
At the same time, it was a frighteningly sad admission of a rotting core of weakness in the face of life, an inability to exist on any level except that of a primitive beast, always cowering in fear that someone else would be better. It was not simply a rejection of all that was good, a resentment of accomplishment—it was, in fact, far worse. It was an expression of a gnawing hatred for anything good, grown out of an inner unwillingness to strive for anything worthwhile.
Like all irrational beliefs, it was also unworkable. To live, those beliefs had to be ignored to accomplish goals of domination, which in themselves were a violation of the belief for which they were fighting. There were no equals among those of the Order, the torchbearers of enforced equality. Whether a Ja'La player, the most professional of the soldiers, or an emperor, the best were not simply needed but sought after and highly valued, and so as a body they harbored an inner hatred of their failure to live up to their own teachings and a fear that they would be unmasked for it. As punishment for their inability to fulfill their sanctified beliefs through adherence to those teachings, they instead turned to the self-flagellation of proclaiming how unworthy all men were and vented their self-hatred on scapegoats: they blamed the victims.
In the end, the belief was nothing more than fabricated divinity?unthinking nonsense repeated in a mantra in an attempt to give it credibility, to make it sound sacred.
"I've already seen the Ja'La games," Kahlan said. She turned away from him. "I have no desire to see more of it."
He seized her upper arm, pulling her back around to face him. "I know you're eager to have me bed you, but you can wait. Right now we are going to watch the Ja'La games."
A lecherous smile oozed onto his face, like greasy muck bubbling up from his festering soul. "If you don't enjoy watching the games for their strategy and competition, then you can let your eyes roam over the naked flesh of the rivals. I'm sure that such sights will make you eager for what comes later tonight. Try not to be too impatient."
Kahlan suddenly felt foolish for protesting any reason to avoid his bed. But the Ja'La game was out among the men, and she had no desire to go out there again. She also had no choice. She hated being among those vile men. She reminded herself to get a grip on her feelings. The soldiers couldn't see her. She was being silly.
He pulled her toward the passageway out of the tent. She went without resisting. This was not a time to resist.
Outside, the five special guards waited. They all noticed that Kahlan was dressed, but none of them spoke. They stood tall, straight, and attentive, looking ready to jump if told to do so. They were obviously on their best behavior before their emperor, wanting to impress him.
Kahlan guessed that to be better than someone was all right if you were the emperor, and that it wouldn't make him worse than everyone. He fought for a doctrine from which he exempted himself, as did each and every one of his men. Kahlan knew better than to point it out.
"These are your new guards," Jagang told her. "We'll not have a repeat of the last incident, since these men can see you."
The men all looked pretty content with themselves, and the apparently harmless nature of the woman they were to guard.
Kahlan took a quick but good look at the first man the Sisters had brought to task, the partner of the one with the broken
nose. With a glance she evaluated the weapons he carried, a knife, and a crudely made sword with two halves of a wooden hilt wired onto the tang, and how graceless he appeared in the way he wore them. In that glance she knew that they were implements he no doubt used with bravado when slaughtering innocent women and children. She doubted that he had ever used them in combat with other men. He was a thug, nothing more. Intimidation was his weapon of choice.
By his self-satisfied smile, he looked unimpressed with her. After all, he had already, by himself, nearly brought her to task, and to his tent. In his mind he had been only a few steps away from having her under him.
"You," she said, pointing right between his eyes. "You I will kill first."
The men all snickered. She swept an appraising gaze over them and their weapons, learning what there was to learn.
She pointed at the man with the broken nose. "You die second, after him."
"What about us three?" one of the others asked, unable to suppress a chuckle. "What order will you kill us in?"
