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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Then he sobbed. Wept.
Weeper . . .
Bannut cackling, spitting up milky blood.
“I saw the way you looked at him! I know you were lovers!”
“No!” Cnaiür cried, but his hatred failed him.
All these years—pondering their silence, obsessing over the unspoken rebuke in their eyes, thinking himself mad for his suspicions, maligning himself for his fears, and still always pondering their hidden thoughts. How many slanders murmured in his absence? How many times, drawn by the sound of laughter, had he entered a yaksh only to find tight lips and insolent eyes? All this time they’d . . . He clutched his chest.
No!
He squeezed tears from his eyes, beat a scabbed fist against the turf harder and harder, as though he stoked a furnace. The face from thirty years ago floated before his soul’s eye, possessed of a demonic calm.
“You task me!” he hissed under his breath. “Heap burden upon burd—”
A flare of sudden terror silenced him. The sound of voices, carried on the wind.
Lying still, with his eyes open only to where his lashes blurred his vision, he listened. They spoke Sheyic, but what they said was indecipherable.
Did looters still range the battlefield?
Fawn-hearted wretch! Get up and die!
The wind lulled and the sounds swelled. He could hear the step of horses and the periodic rustle of gear. At least two men, mounted. The aristocratic inflection in their speech suggested they were officers. They approached, but from what direction? He smothered the mad urge to sit up and look around.
“Since the days of Kyraneas, the Scylvendi have been here,” the more refined voice was saying, “as relentless and as patient as the ocean. And unchanged! Peoples rise and peoples fall, whole races and nations are blotted out, yet the Scylvendi remain. And I’ve studied them, Martemus! I’ve plodded through every report of them I could find, ancient and recent. I even had my agents break into the Library of the Sareots! Yes, in Iothiah!—though they found nothing. The Fanim have let it crumble to ruin. But here’s the thing: every account of the Scylvendi I read, no matter how ancient, could have been written yesterday. Thousands of years, Martemus, and the Scylvendi have remained unchanged. Take away their stirrups and their iron, and they would be indistinguishable from those who destroyed Mehtsonc two thousand years ago or those who sacked Cenei a thousand years later! The Scylvendi are just as the philosopher Ajencis claimed: a people without history.”
“But so are all illiterate peoples, are they not?” the other man, Martemus, replied.
“Even illiterate peoples change over the centuries, Martemus. They migrate. They forget old gods and discover new ones. Even their tongues change. But not the Scylvendi. They’re obsessed with custom. Where we raise vast edifices of stone to conquer the passage of years, they make monuments of their actions, temples of their wars.”
The description made Cnaiür’s heart itch. Who were these men? The one was definitely of the Houses.
“Interesting, I suppose,” Martemus said, “but it doesn’t explain how you
knew
you would defeat them.”
“Don’t be tedious. I despise tedium in my officers. First you ask impertinent questions, then you refuse to acknowledge my answers as answers.”
“I apologize, Lord Exalt-General. I meant no offence. You yourself praise and castigate me for my forthright—”
“Ah, Martemus . . . always the same charade. The demure general from the provinces, without any ambition other than to serve. But I know you better than you think. I’ve seen your interest quicken when I mention matters of state. Just as I see the greed for glory in your eyes now.”
It was as though a great stone had been dropped upon Cnaiür’s chest. He could not breathe. It was him.
Him!
Ikurei Conphas!
“I’ll not deny it. But I swear I didn’t mean to question
you
. It’s just that . . . that . . .”
These words brought the two men to a stop. Cnaiür could see them now, mounted shadows through the blur of eyelashes. He breathed shallow breaths.
“Just what, Martemus?”
“Through the entirety of this campaign, I’ve held my tongue. What we did seemed lunacy to me, so much so that . . .”
“That what?”
“That for a time my faith in you faltered.”
“And yet you said nothing, asked nothing . . . Why?”
Cnaiür tried wrenching himself from the ground, but he could not. In his ears the disembodied voices had become mocking thunder. Murder him. He must!
“Fear, Lord Exalt-General. One does not rise from the bottom as I have without learning the lethality of questioning one’s betters . . . especially when they’re desperate.”
Laughter. “So now, surrounded by this”—Conphas’s shadow gestured to the fields of ruined dead—“you assume I’m no longer desperate; you think it’s safe to ask these festering questions of yours.”
A sudden awareness of himself and his environment struck Cnaiür. It was as though he saw himself from far away, a cringing man huddled next to the body of a horse, surrounded by ever-widening circles of dead. Even these images triggered recriminations. What kind of thoughts were these? Why must he always think one thought too many? Why must he always think?
Kill him!
“Exactly,” Martemus replied.
Rush them. String their horses. Cut their throats in the confusion!
“Should I indulge you?” Conphas continued. “Should I allow you one more step toward the summit, Martemus?”
“My loyalty and discretion, Lord Exalt-General, are yours without reservation.”
“I’d already assumed as much, but I thank you for the reassurance . . . What you would say if I told you the battle we’ve just fought, the glorious victory we’ve just won, is nothing more than the first engagement of the
Holy War?
”
“The Holy War? The
Shriah’s
Holy War?”
“Whether the Holy War is the Shriah’s or no is the very point at issue.”
Move! Avenge yourself! Your people!
“But what about—”
“I’m afraid it would be irresponsible for me to disclose more, Martemus. Soon, perhaps, but not now. My triumph here, as magnificent, as
divine
as it is, will be sackcloth and ashes compared with what follows. Soon, all the Three Seas will celebrate my name, and then . . . Well, you’re more soldier than officer. You understand that oftentimes commanders require their subordinates’ ignorance as much as their knowledge.”
“I see. I suppose I should have expected this.”
“Expected what?”
“That your answers would stoke rather than sate my curiosity!”
Laughter. “Alas, Martemus, if I were to tell you all I know, you’d still suffer the same deficit. Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”
“At the very least, you might explain to me—dullard that I am—how you could have known we’d win.”
“As I said, the Scylvendi are obsessed with custom. That means they
repeat,
Martemus. They follow the same formula time and again. Do you see? They worship war, but they have no understanding of what it truly is.”
“And what, then, is war truly?”
“Intellect, Martemus. War is
intellect
.”
Conphas spurred his horse ahead, leaving his subordinate to wrestle with the import of what he’d just uttered. Cnaiür watched Martemus remove his plumed helmet, run a hand through his cropped hair. For a breathless moment he seemed to stare directly at him, as though he could hear the thrum of Cnaiür’s hammering heart. Then he abruptly spurred after his Exalt-General.
As Martemus closed on him, Conphas called out: “This afternoon, when our men have recovered from their revels, we start collecting Scylvendi heads. I’m going to build a road of trophies, Martemus, from here to our great diseased capital of Momemn. Think of the glory!”
Their voices faded, leaving only the rush of cold waters against buzzing silence and the pale smell of chopped turf.
So cold. The ground was so cold. Where should he go?
He had fled his childhood and had crawled into the honour of his father’s name, Skiötha, Chieftain of the Utemot. With his father’s shameful death, he’d fled and crawled into the name of his people, the Scylvendi, who were the wrath of Lokung, more vengeance than bone or flesh. Now they too had died shamefully. There was no ground left to him.
He lay nowhere, among the dead.
 
Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.
The death of Cnaiür’s father, Skiötha, was such an event.
Cnaiür sits in the gloom of the Chieftain’s great yaksh as it stood twenty-nine years ago. A fire waxes in its centre, bright to look at but illuminating little. Draped in furs, his father speaks to the other ranking tribesmen about the insolence of their Kuöti kinsmen to the south. In the shadows thrown by the hard men, slaves loiter nervously, bearing skins of
gishrut,
fermented mare’s milk. When a horn is raised by a scarred arm, they refill it. The enclosure reeks of smoke and sour liquor.
The White Yaksh has seen many such scenes, but this time, one of the slaves, a Norsirai man, abandons the shadows and steps into firelight. He lifts his face and addresses the astonished tribesmen in perfect Scylvendi—as though he himself were of the land.
“I would make you a wager, Chieftain of the Utemot.”
Cnaiür’s father is dumbstruck, both by such insolence and by such a transformation. A man hitherto broken has become as august as any King. Only Cnaiür is not surprised.
The other men, who hedge the dark, fall silent.
From across the fire, his father replies: “You have already made your gambit, slave. And you have lost.”
The slave smiles derisively, as though a sovereign among a callow people.
“But I would wager my life with
you,
Skiötha.”
A slave
speaking a name
. How it overturns the ancient ways, upends the fundamental order!
Skiötha gropes through this absurdity and finally laughs. Laughter makes small, and this outrage must be made small. Fury would acknowledge the depth of this contest, would make one a contestant. And yet the slave
knows
this.
So the slave continues: “I have watched you, Skiötha, and I have wondered at the measure of your strength. Many here so wonder . . . Did you know this?”
His father’s laughter trails. The fire wheezes softly.
Then Skiötha, fearing to look into the faces of his kinsmen, says, “I
have
been measured, slave.”
As though fuelled by these words, the fire flutters bright, and presses farther into the pockets of darkness between the assembled men. Its renewed heat bites at Cnaiür’s skin.
“But measure,” the slave replies, “is not something accomplished and then forgotten, Skiötha. Old measure is merely grounds for the new. Measure is unceasing.”
Complicity makes unforgettable, carves scenes with unbearable clarity, as though the extent of condemnation is to be found in the precision of detail. The fire so hot that it might be cradled in his lap. The cold of the earth beneath his thighs and buttocks. His teeth clenched, as though grinding sand. And the Norsirai slave’s pale face turning to
him,
the blue eyes bright, more encompassing than any sky. Summoning eyes! Eyes that yoke, that speak:
Do you remember your part?
Cnaiür has been given a script for this moment.
From among the seated men, he says, “Are you
afraid,
Father?” Mad words! Treacherous and mad!

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