The Darkness that Comes Before (60 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Punishment for punishment.
She was helpless. Utterly alone. Even the Gods had forsaken her.
Dread.
Serwë stood in the morning chill, numb, exhausted in ways she would never understand. The Scylvendi and his strange Norsirai companion had packed the last of the looted supplies on the surviving Munuäti horses. She watched the Scylvendi stride to where he had staked the other twelve captive women of the Gaunum household. They clutched their chains for comfort and huddled in abject terror. She saw them, knew them, but found them unrecognizable.
There, the wife of Barastas, who had hated her almost as much as the wife of Peristus. And there, Ysanna, who had helped in the gardens until the Patridomos had deemed her too beautiful. Serwë knew all of them. But who were they?
She could hear them weeping, pleading, not for mercy—they had crossed the mountains, and they knew they were far beyond mercy’s reach—but for sanity. What sane man destroys useful tools? This one could cook, that one could couple, and this one could fetch a thousand slaves in ransom, if he would just let her live . . .
Young Ysanna, her left eye swollen shut from a Munuäti blow, was crying out to her.
“Serwë, Serwë! Tell him I don’t look like this! Tell him I’m beautiful! Serwë, pleeease!”
Serwë looked away. Pretended not to hear.
Too much dread.
She couldn’t remember when she’d ceased feeling her tears. Now, for some reason, she had to taste them before realizing she wept.
Deaf to their cries, the Scylvendi stomped into their midst, clubbed those that clutched at him, and unlocked the two curved prongs of the ingenious stake the Scylvendi used to anchor their captives to the ground. He heaved first one stake then the other from the earth, dropped them with a clank. The women wailed and cringed around him. When he drew his knife, some of them began to shriek.
He grabbed the chain of one shrieker, Orra, a plump scullery slave, and yanked her toward him. The shrieking stopped. But then, rather than killing her, he began prying at the soft iron of her manacles, as he had done for Serwë the previous night.
Bewildered, Serwë glanced at the Norsirai—what was his name? Kellhus? He regarded her for a grave yet somehow heartening moment, then looked away.
Orra was free, just sitting, rubbing her wrists, dumbfounded. The Scylvendi began freeing another.
Suddenly Orra began running up the slope, absurd with pounding girth and desperation. When no one pursued her, she stopped, her face anguished. She crouched, wildly looking around, and Serwë was reminded of the Patridomos’s cat, who was always too fearful to stray far from its dinner bowl no matter how the children tormented it. Eight others joined Orra in her wary vigil, including Ysanna and Barastas’s wife. Only four continued running.
Something about this made it difficult to breathe.
The Scylvendi left the chains and stakes where they lay, walked back to Serwë and Kellhus.
The Norsirai asked him something unintelligible. The Scylvendi shrugged and looked at Serwë.
“Others will find them, use them,” he said casually. He had said this to her, Serwë knew, because the one called Kellhus did not speak Sheyic. He leapt onto his horse and studied the eight remaining women. “Follow,” he shouted in a matter-of-fact tone, “and I will put out your eyes with arrows.”
Then, madly, they began wailing again, begging him
not
to leave. Barastas’s wife even sobbed for her chains. But the Scylvendi seemed not to hear them. He bid Serwë to mount her horse.
And she was glad. Glad of heart! And the others were envious. “Here, Serwë!” she heard Barastas’s wife shriek. “Come back here, you filthy, rutting sow! I own you!
Own!
Fucking peach!
Come back here!
”
Each word both struck Serwë like a fist and passed right through her, leaving her untouched. She saw Barastas’s wife marching toward their train of horses, her hands sweeping in deranged gestures. The Scylvendi yanked his mount about, pulled his bow from its case. He nocked and loosed an arrow in one effortless motion.
The shaft caught the noblewoman in the mouth, shattering teeth and embedding itself in the moist hollows of her throat. She fell forward like a doll, thrashed amid grasses and goldenrods. The Scylvendi grunted with approval, then continued leading them into the mountains.
Serwë tasted tears.
None of this is happening,
she thought. No one suffered like this. Not really.
She feared she might vomit for dread.
 
The Hethantas massed above them. They negotiated steep granite slopes, picked their way through narrow ravines, beneath cliffs of sedimentary rock pocked with strange fossils. For the most part, the trail followed a thin river hedged by spruce and stunted screw pine. Always they climbed higher, into colder air, until even the mosses were left behind. Fuel for their fires grew scarce. The nights became viciously cold. Twice they awoke covered by snow.
By day the Scylvendi walked ahead with his pony, alone, rarely speaking. Kellhus followed Serwë. She found herself talking to him, compelled by something in his demeanour. It was as if the man’s mere presence betokened intimacy, trust. His eyes encompassed her, as though his look somehow mended the broken ground beneath her feet. She told him about her life as a concubine in Nansur, about her father, a Nymbricani, who had sold her to House Gaunum when she turned fourteen. She described the jealousy of the Gaunum wives, how they had lied to her about her first child, saying that it had been stillborn when Griasa, an old Shigeki slave woman, had watched them strangle it in the kitchens. “Blue babies,” the old woman had whispered in her ear, her voice cracked by an outrage almost too weary to be spoken. “That’s all you’ll ever bear, child.” This, Serwë explained to Kellhus, became the morbid joke shared by all the members of the household, especially among those concubines or slaves proper fortunate enough to be visited by their masters.
We bear them blue babies . . . Blue like the priests of Jukan.
At first she spoke to him in the way she’d spoken to her father’s horses as a child—the thoughtless talk of one heard but not understood. But she soon discovered that he
did
understand. After three days, he began asking her questions in Sheyic—a difficult language, one that she had mastered only after years of captivity in Nansur. The questions thrilled her somehow, filled her with a longing to do them proper service. And his voice! Deep, wine-dark like the sea. And the way he spoke her name. As though jealous of its sound.
Serwë
—like an incantation. In mere days, her wary affection became awe.
By night, however, she belonged to the Scylvendi.
She could not fathom the relationship between these two men, though she pondered it often, understanding that her fate somehow lay between them. Initially, she’d assumed that Kellhus was the Scylvendi’s slave, but this was not the case. The Scylvendi, she eventually realized, hated the Norsirai, even
feared
him. He acted like someone trying to preserve himself from ritual pollution.
At first this insight thrilled her.
You fear!
she would silently howl at the Scylvendi’s back.
You’re no different from me! No more than I am!
But then it began to trouble her—deeply. Feared by a
Scylvendi?
What kind of man is feared by a Scylvendi?
She dared ask the man himself.
“Because I’ve come,” Kellhus had replied, “to do dreadful work.”
She believed him. How could she not believe such a man? But there were other, more painful questions. Questions she dare not speak, though she asked him with her eyes each night.
Why don’t you take me? Make me your prize? He fears you!
But she knew the answer. She was Serwë. She was nothing.
The fact of her nothingness was a lesson hard learned. Her childhood had been happy—so happy that she now wept whenever she thought of it. Picking wildflowers on the prairies of Cepalor. Thrashing like an otter in the river with her brothers. Romping around the midnight fires. Her father had been indulgent, if not kind; her mother had showered her with adoration. “Serchaa, sweet Serchaa,” she would say, “you’re my beautiful charm, my bulwark against heartbreak.” Serwë had thought herself something then. Loved. Prized above her brothers. Happy in the immeasurable way of children who have no real suffering to throw upon the balance.
She had heard many tales of suffering, to be sure, but then the hardships related had always been ennobling, encased in morals, and containing lessons she had already learned. Besides, even if fate did betray her, and she was certain it would not, she would be steadfast and heroic, a beacon of strength for the flagging souls about her.
Then her father sold her to the Patridomos of House Gaunum.
Her first night as the property of House Gaunum had seen much foolishness knocked from her. She understood quite quickly that there was nothing—no viciousness, no depravity—she would not commit to stay men and their heavy hands. As a Gaunum concubine, she lived in perpetual anxiety, pinned between the hatred of the Gaunum wives and the capricious appetites of the Gaunum men. She was nothing, they told her. Nothing. Just another worthless Norsirai peach. She almost believed them.
Soon she began praying for this or that son of the Patridomos to come visit her—even those who were cruel. She flirted with them. Seduced them. She was the delight of their guests. Other than pride in their ardour, pleasure in their gratification, what else did she have?
In the great villa of House Gaunum, there had been a shrine filled with small idols to the ancestors of the House. She had knelt and prayed in that shrine more times than she could count, and every time she had begged for mercy. She could feel the dead Gaunum in every corner of that place, whispering hateful things, moving her with dreadful premonitions. And she had begged and begged for mercy.
Then, as though in answer to her prayers, the Patridomos himself, who had always seemed a distant, silver-haired god to her, accosted her in the gardens. He grasped her chin and exclaimed: “By the Gods! You’re worthy of the Emperor himself, girl . . . Tonight. Expect me tonight.” How her soul had danced that day!
Worthy of the Emperor!
How carefully she’d shaved herself and mingled the finest perfumes in anticipation of his visit.
Worthy of the Emperor!
How she had wept when he failed to arrive. “Don’t weep, Serchaa,” the other girls had said. “He prefers little boys.”
For several days afterward, she had despised little boys.
And she continued praying to the idols, even though their squat little faces now seemed to laugh at her. She, Serwë, had to mean something, hadn’t she? All she wanted was some sign, something, anything . . . She grovelled before them.
Then one of the Patridomos’s sons, Peristus, took her to bed with his wife. Serwë had pitied the wife at first, a girl with the face of a man who’d been married to Gaunum Peristus to secure an alliance between Houses. But as Peristus used her to build up the seed he would plant in his wife’s womb, Serwë could feel the woman’s hatred, as though they shared the bed with a small fire. Just to spite the prig, she had cried out, had fanned Peristus’s lust with whorish words and deeds, and had stolen his seed for herself.
The ugly little wife had wept, ranted like a madwoman, and no matter how many times Peristus struck her, she would not stop. Though troubled by the glee this occasioned, Serwë had rushed to the shrine to thank the Gaunum ancestors. And shortly after, when she realized she carried Peristus’s child, she stole one of the hostler’s pigeons and sacrificed it to them.
During the sixth month of her pregnancy, Peristus’s wife whispered, “Three months till the funeral, hmm, Serchaa.”
Terrified, Serwë had gone to Peristus himself, only to be slapped and dismissed. She was nothing to him. So she returned to the Gaunum idols. She offered anything, everything. But her child was born blue, so they said. Blue like the priests of Jukan.
Even still, Serwë continued to pray—this time for vengeance. She prayed to the Gaunum for the destruction of the Gaunum.
A year later, the Patridomos rode from the villa with all his men. The gathering Holy War had grown unruly, and the Emperor had need of his generals. Then the Scylvendi arrived. Panteruth and his Munuäti.

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