The Darkness that Comes Before (43 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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She prayed it was the former.
The road she followed was the Karian Way—a relic of the Ceneian Empire, though kept in good repair by the Emperor. It ran straight through the province of Massentia, which in summer people called the Golden because of its endless fields of grain. The problem with the Karian Way was that it struck deep into the Kyranae Plains rather than heading directly toward Momemn. More than a thousand years before, it had linked Holy Sumna to ancient Cenei. Now it was maintained only so far as it serviced Massentia; it trailed into pasture, Esmenet had been told, after intersecting the far more important Pon Way, which did lead to Momemn.
Despite this detour through the interior, Esmenet had chosen the Karian Way after much careful deliberation. Even though she could neither afford nor read maps, and even though she had never before set foot outside of Sumna, she possessed intimate knowledge of this and many other roads.
All prostitutes ranked their custom according to their tastes. Some liked large men, others small. Some favoured priests with their hesitant, uncallused hands, while others favoured soldiers and their rough confidence. But Esmenet had always prized experience. Those who had suffered, who had overcome, who had seen far-away or astounding things—these were the men she prized.
When she was younger, she had coupled with such men and thought:
Now I’m part of what they’ve seen. Now I’m more than what I was
. When she pestered them with questions afterward, she did so as much to learn the details of her enrichment as out of curiosity. They left lightened of both silver and seed, but she had convinced herself that they took some part of her with them, that she had expanded somehow, that she, Esmenet, haunted eyes that watched and warred with the world.
Several people had cured her of this belief. There was the old whore, Pirasha, who would have starved had it not been for Esmenet’s generosity. “No, sweetling,” she once told her. “When women dip their cups in men, they draw only what’s been stolen.” Then there was the dashing Kidruhil cavalryman, the one she had thought she loved, who came to her a second time without any recollection of the first. “You must be mistaken,” he had exclaimed. “I’d remember a beauty such as you!”
Then she had given birth to her daughter.
She could remember thinking, not long after her daughter was born, that childbirth had signalled the end of her delusions. She knew now, however, that it had simply marked the transition from one set of self-deceptions to another. The death of a child: that marked the end of delusions. Gathering little clothing into a bundle, giving it to the expectant mother the floor below, saying kind words to ease her—
her!
—of her embarrassment . . .
Much foolishness had died with her daughter, and much bitterness had been born. But Esmenet was not, like some, inclined to spite. Even though she knew it belittled her, she continued to indulge her hunger for stories of the world, and she continued to prize the best storytellers. She wrapped her legs around them—gladly. She pretended to rise to their ardour, and sometimes, given the curious way pretence so often blurred into actuality, she did rise. Afterward, as their interests receded into the dark world they had come from, they became impenetrable. Even her kinder patrons seemed dangerous. So many men, she’d found, harboured a void of some kind, a place accountable only to other men.
Then the real seduction would begin. “Tell me,” she sometimes purred, “what have you seen that makes you more . . . more than other men?” Most found the question amusing. Others were perplexed, annoyed, indifferent, or even outraged. A rare handful, Achamian among them, found it fascinating. But every one of them answered. Men needed to be more. This was why, she had decided, so many of them gambled: they sought coin, certainly, but they also yearned for a demonstration, a sign that the world, the Gods, the future—
someone
—had somehow set them apart.
So they told her stories—thousands of them over the years. They smiled at their accounts, thinking they thrilled her, as they had when she was young, with knowledge of just
who
had bedded her. And with one exception, none of them guessed that she cared nothing for what their stories said about them, and everything for what their stories said about the world.
Achamian had understood.
“You do this with all your custom?” he once asked without warning.
She wasn’t shocked. Others had asked as much. “It comforts me to know my men are more than cocks.”
A half-truth. But true to form, Achamian was sceptical. He frowned, saying, “It’s a pity.”
This had stung, even though she had no idea what he meant. “What’s a pity?”
“That you’re not a man,” he replied. “If you were a man, you wouldn’t need to make teachers of everyone who used you.”
She had wept in his arms that night.
But she had continued her studies, ranging far through the eyes of others.
This was why she knew that Massentia was safe, that despite the longer distance, the Karian and Pon Ways were a far better route for a lone woman to take than the more direct routes along the coast. And this was also why she knew enough to walk with other travellers, so those passing by would simply assume she belonged.
And this was why her broken sandal frightened her so. Before, intoxicated by openness and sheer daring, she had felt unburdened by her solitude. Now it weighed against her. She felt exposed, as though archers lay hidden behind every clutch of trees, waiting for a glimpse of her tattooed hand, for a whispered word, or for some other inevitable cue.
The road climbed, and she hobbled on as best she could. A welling sense of despair only made her bare foot seem more painful. How could she walk all the way to Momemn like this? How many times had she been told that safe travel was always a matter of preparation? Each painful step seemed a rebuke.
The Karian Way gradually dropped before her, levelling over a shallow floodplain, then crossing what looked to be a minor river before spearing into the dark hills that ringed the horizon. Jutting from thickets of leafless trees, a ruined Ceneian aqueduct parsed the near distances, crumbling into small fields of debris where the locals had pillaged its stone. Mud tracks wound into the farther heights, skirting fallow fields, disappearing into climbing tracts of forest. But what held Esmenet’s hope and attention were the rustic buildings clustered about the bridge: a village of some kind, trailing thin lines of smoke into the grey sky.
She had some money. More than enough to repair her sandal.
She chided herself for her misgivings as she neared the village. One of the things that characterized Massentia, she had heard, was the fact that it possessed few of the great plantations that dominated so much of the Empire. Massentia was a land of free yeomen and craftsmen. Forthright. Honest. Proud. Or so she had heard.
But then she remembered the way such men scowled when they saw her hanging from her window in Sumna. “Men who own their drudgery,” old Pirasha had once told her, “think they own the Truth as well.” And the Truth was not kind to whores.
Esmenet cursed herself for worrying. Everyone said Massentia was safe.
She hobbled onto the packed earth of what passed for a humble market square, searching the surrounding shanties and facades for a cobbler. When she found none, she smelled the air for some sign of the fish oil that tanners hammered into their hides. A strip of leather was all she really needed. She passed thawing heaps of clay, then four interconnected potters’ sheds. In one, an old man worked his wheel despite the cold, coaxing curves from the clay with his thumbs. The mouth of an oven glowed behind him. His cough, which sounded like gurgling mud, startled her.
She idly wondered if the village was poxed.
A group of five boys mooned about the entrance to a stable, staring. The oldest, or at least the tallest, watched her with frank admiration. He would have been handsome had his eyes been even. She remembered one of her patrons telling her it was rare to find beautiful children in villages such as these, because they were so often sold to wealthy travellers. Esmenet found herself wondering whether a bid had ever been made on this boy.
She smiled as he sauntered toward her.
Perhaps he—
“Are you a
whore?
” he asked baldly.
Esmenet could only stare in shock and fury.
“She is! She is!” another boy cried. “From Sumna! That’s why she hides her hand!”
A number of soldier’s curses came to her. “Go finger your chimney,” she snapped, “you little fucking pissant.”
The boy grinned, and Esmenet immediately realized he was one of
them:
men who think more of a dog’s bark than a woman’s words.
“Let me see your hand.”
Something in his voice unsettled her.
“Don’t you have stalls to muck?”
Slave,
her tone sneered.
The casual viciousness of his look hardened into something else. When he grabbed for her hand, she struck him on the cheek. He stumbled back, shocked.
Recovering himself, he stooped to the ground. “She’s a whore,” he told his compatriots, his tone grim, as though unfortunate truths entailed unfortunate consequences. He stood, rolling a dirty stone between his fingers. “An adulterate whore.”
A nervous moment passed. The four hesitated. They stood on a threshold of some kind, and they knew it, even if they understood nothing of its significance. Rather than rallying them with words, the handsome one whipped his stone.
Esmenet ducked, dodged it. But the others were crouching, gathering missiles of their own.
They began pelting her. She cursed, drawing up her arms. The thick wool of her cloak saved her from any real harm.
“Bastards!” she cried. They paused, at once cowed and amused by her ferocity. One of the boys, the fat one, guffawed when she bent to scoop up her own stones. She hit him first, just above his left eyebrow, splitting skin and sending him wailing to his knees. The others simply stared, dumbstruck. Blood had been drawn.
She raised another stone in her right hand, hoping they would duck and run. As a child, before her body bid her to other vocations, she had worked the wharves, earning bread or quarter-coppers by throwing stones at scavenging gulls. She had been very good.
But the tall one struck first, throwing a fistful of dirt at her face. Most of it missed—the fool threw as though his arm were made of rope—but some grit momentarily blinded her. She frantically rubbed at her eyes. Then an explosion in her ear sent her staggering. Another stone bruised off her fingers . . .
What was happening?
“Enough! Enough!” a hoarse voice boomed. “What are you boys doing?”
The fat boy still wailed. Esmenet blinked at the sting, saw an old man wearing stained Shrial vestments in the boys’ midst, brandishing a fist like the knob of a leg bone.
“Stoning her!” the half-handsome instigator called out. “She’s a whore!” The others eagerly seconded him.
The old priest scowled at them for a moment, then turned to her. She could see him clearly now, the liver spots, the miserly hunch of someone who had screeched in innumerable faces. His lips were purple in the chill.
“Is this true?”
He snatched her hand in his own, which was shockingly strong, and studied the tattoo. He peered into her face.
“Are you a priestess?” he barked. “A servant of Gierra?”
She could tell that he knew the answer, that he asked only out of some perverse urge to humiliate and instruct. Staring into his bleary eyes, she suddenly understood her peril.
Sweet Sejenus . . .
“Y-yes,” she stammered.
“Liar! This is a whore’s mark,” he cried, twisting her hand to her face as though trying to shove food into her mouth. “A
whore’s
mark!”
“I’m a whore no more,” she protested.
“Liar! Liar!”
A sudden coldness descended on Esmenet. She graced him with a false smile, then wrested back possession of her hand. The sputtering old fool stumbled backward. She looked briefly at the crowd that had gathered, glanced scathingly at the boys, then turned back to the road.
“Do not walk away from me!” the old priest howled. “Do not walk away from me!”
She continued walking with what dignity she could muster.
“Suffer not a whore to live,” the old priest recited, “for she maketh a pit of her womb!”
Esmenet halted.
“Suffer not a whore to
breathe,
” the priest continued, his tone now gleeful, “for she mocks the seed of the righteous! Stone her so that thy hand shall not be tempt—”
Esmenet whirled.
“Enough!”
she exploded.
Stunned silence.
“I am
damned!
” she cried. “Don’t you see? I’m already dead! Isn’t that enough?”
Too many eyes watched her. She turned away, continued limping toward the Karian Way.
“Whore!” someone shouted.

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