The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  “I turn,” Kellhus cried, “and I see you in your thousands, the Holy War, the great Tribe of Truth. But I also see thousands upon thousands more, assembled in gleaming ranks, filling the plains, the distant slopes…I see the ghosts of the fallen, standing among us, watching with pride those who will make good their heartbreaking sacrifice.”

  There could be no forgetting. They had paid for this moment in terror and blood.

  “Those who will reclaim my brother’s house.”

  He could remember, perfectly, what it had been like those three years past, stepping from the shadow of Ishuäl’s Fallow Gate. Countless tracks had fanned out from his feet, leading to countless possible outcomes. But unlike a tree, he could war only in one direction. With every step he murdered alternatives, collapsed future after future, walking a line too thin to be marked on any map. For so long he had believed that line, that track, belonged to him, as though his every footfall had been a monstrous decision for which he alone could be called to account. Step after step, annihilating world after possible world, warring until only this moment survived …

  But those futures, he now knew, had been murdered long before. The ground he travelled had been Conditioned through and through. At every turn, the probabilities had been summed, the possibilities averaged, the forks impossibly predetermined … Even here, standing before Shimeh, he executed but one operation in the skein of another’s godlike calculation. Even here, his every decision, his every act, confirmed the dread intent of the Thousandfold Thought.

  Thirty years …

  A soft-eyed grin. “I’m reminded of our first Council,” he said, “so very long ago on the Andiamine Heights.” They smiled at his rueful scowl. “I recall that we were fat.”

  Laughter, at once thunderous and intimate, as though they were dozens instead of thousands, listening to a beloved uncle tell well-worn jokes. He was their axle, and they were his wheel.

  “Proyas,” he called, grinning like a father at a son’s beloved foibles. “I remember you were bent upon winning your contest with Ikurei Xerius. You mourned the straits that forced you, time and again, to sacrifice principle for convenience, scripture for politics. For your entire life you sought a purity you thought you could glimpse but could never grasp. For your entire life you yearned for a bold God, not one who skulked in scriptoriums, whispering the inaudible to the insane.”

  Now you rail at the old habits, and mourn the toll of the new …

  He looked to the Earl of Agansanor, who sat like a youth, his knees held in the burly circle of his arms. “Gothyelk, you wished only to die absolved. The water of your life was running dry, and it seemed all you could taste was the salt of your sins. What old caste-warrior doesn’t turn to counting his crimes? And you, looking back on your life, decided that the hoard was too great, that only your blood could tip the scales of redemption.”

  Now, thinking my finger on the balance, you dare dream of a quiet death …

  “And Gotian, sweet Gotian, you desired only to be told, not out of some base desire to grovel at the feet of another, but to shape your life into the very mould of God’s will. Despite your power and prestige, you were forever haunted by your ignorance. You could not, like so many others, take comfort in the pretence of knowledge.”

  I have become your rule and revelation, the very incarnation of the certainty you seek.

  This exercise had become a custom of his. By calling out the truth of a few faces, he made them all feel known—watched.

  “Each of you,” he continued, sweeping his gaze across the assembly, “had your reasons for joining the Holy War. Some of you came to conquer, some to atone, some to boast, to avenge, to flee … But I wonder, can any one of you say that you came for Shimeh alone?”

  For several moments he heard nothing but the discordant hammering of their hearts. It was as though their breasts had become ten thousand drums.

  “Is there no one?”

  What he wrought here had to be perfect. There had been no mistaking the words of the old man who had accosted him in Gim. The sails of the Mandate fleet could appear any day now, and the Gnostic Schoolmen would not yield their war lightly. Everything had to be complete before their arrival. Everything had to be inevitable. If they had no hand in the work that they witnessed, they would be that much more reluctant in advancing their claims. “Your father bids me tell you,” the blind hermit had said, “‘There is but one tree in Kyudea …’”

  The question was whether the Men of the Tusk could prevail without him.

  “None of you!” he cried in a voice like a crossbow bolt. “None of you came simply for Shimeh, because you’re Men, and the hearts of Men are not simple.” He looked from face to face, inviting them to see the obvious. “Our passions are a morass, and because we lack the words to name them, we pretend our words are the only true passions. We make our impoverished schemes the measure. We condemn the complicated and cheer the caricature. What man does not yearn for a simple soul, to love without recrimination, to act without hesitation, to lead without reservation?”

  He saw the recognition sparking in a thousand eyes.

  “But there is no such soul.”

  To speak was to pluck the lute strings of another’s soul. To intone was to strum full chords. He had long ago learned how to speak past meanings, to mine passion with mere voice.

  “Conflict is what we are in truth. Conflict. We think it an affliction, an obstruction, an adversary to be overcome, when in fact it is the very quintessence of our souls. Think back on your life. Have any of your motives been pure? Ever? Or is this one more lie you use to appease your gluttonous vanity? Think! Is there anything you’ve done for the love of God alone?”

  Again silence, both shamefaced and willing.

  “No. There’s nothing simple in your hearts. Even the adoration you bear me is marbled with fear, avarice, doubt … Werjau worries he’s lost my favour because I’ve laid eyes upon Gayamakri thrice. Gotian despairs, for he’s aspired to purity his entire life.” A smattering of laughter. “The shadows of conflict darken all of your faces! Conflict. Does this mean that you’re impure, wicked, or unworthy?”

  The final word rang like an accusation.

  “Or does it mean that you are Men?”

  A wind had dropped into the silence, and the scent of the onlookers filled his nostrils: the bitter of rotting teeth, the ink of armpits, the honey of unwashed anuses, all shot through with strands of balsam, orange, and jasmine. And for a moment it seemed he stood within a great circle of apes, hunched and unwashed, watching him with dark and dumbfounded eyes. Then he glimpsed another circle, this one far different, where the Men of the Tusk stood as they stood now, only with their backs turned to him so that they looked outward, while he occupied the shadowy heart of them all—unseen, unguessed …

  He knew their incantations. The words that could burn them, that could bring down their cyclopean walls. But more importantly, he knew the words that could wield them, that spoke from the darkness that came before. He need only speak to make men blubber, to make them cut their own throats. What did it mean to make instruments of men? And what did it matter, so long as they were wielded in the name of the God?

  There was only mission.

  “There’s nothing deeper,” he said with a sudden, apologetic melancholy. “There’s no undiscovered purity lying obscured in our souls. We are legion, both within and without. Even our God is a God of warring Gods. We are conflict—to our very pith!

  “We. Are. War.”

  Towering above the heads of his wild countrymen, the giant Yalgrota, his hair crazed in the humidity, raised his bloodstained axe and howled. Within moments the air shivered with cries, and brandished weapons dazzled the hillside with reflected sunlight. Everywhere Kellhus looked, he saw honed edges and clenched teeth, beating fists and rolling eyes. Even Esmenet daubed tears from the kohl about her eyes. Only Achamian stood apart from the spectacle …

  “The Book of Songs,” Kellhus continued, “tells us th
at ‘war is heart without harness.’ Or think of Protathis, who says that ‘war is where the gag of the small is cut away.’ Why do you think the only true simplicity we ever find—the only peace—is on the field of battle? The blow fended. The blow struck. The howling chorus. The bestial dance. The pendulum of horror and exultation. Can’t you see? War is our soul made manifest. In it we are called out and condensed, and we burn so very bright.”

  He held the Holy War in the palm of his intent. The Orthodox had all but dissolved in the face of his manifest divinity. As his Intricati, Esmenet had effectively silenced the remaining dissenters. Both Conphas and the Scylvendi had been removed from the plate …

  Only Achamian yet dared look at him in alarm.

  “Tomorrow you shall descend upon the last of a wicked people. Tomorrow you shall wrest my brother’s house from their depraved fury.” He looked directly to Nersei Proyas. “Tomorrow you shall raise arms to Shimeh! And I, the Prophet of War, shall be your prize!”

  For months now he had trained them, teaching them cues that they recognized without realizing. When to speak, and when to hush. When to cry out, and when to cease breathing.

  “But Most-Blessed!” Proyas exclaimed, using one of the many honorifics that he and others had devised. “You speak as though …” A guileless frown. “Are you not leading the morning assault?”

  Kellhus smiled as though caught withholding a glorious secret.

  “Every brother is a son … and every son must first visit my father’s house.”

  Again the look from Achamian. Again the need to subdue the man’s endless misgivings.

  Gathered on the slopes above the encampment, the Lords of the Holy War unanimously agreed they must assault the city. Starving the Sacred City to force her defenders—both arcane and mundane—to battle outside the walls wasn’t an option. The Inrithi no longer possessed the numbers to effectively surround Shimeh. Any determined heathen sortie, they knew, could win their way through. And even though Shimeh’s harbour was silted in due to the neglect of her Kianene masters, supplies still could arrive by sea.

  The only points of contention turned on the Warrior-Prophet’s demand that they attack the city on the morrow, and the dismaying revelation that they must do so without him. Of the latter he refused to speak, but of the former he said: “We attack a foe still reeling from disaster, a foe who are many. But now that we’ve arrived … Think on your experience: in the face of enemies, time welds the hearts of men. Certainty, righteousness—these things strike first!”

  The previous day, outriders had scoured the surrounding hills, searching for any sign of Fanayal and the reassembled Fanim host. The Amoti, as a rule, knew nothing, and those Kianene they captured told tales of varying outlandishness: Cinganjehoi, the Tiger of Eumarna, waited in the Betmulla, ready to descend upon them at any moment. Or the Kianene fleet, which supposedly had been destroyed, had stormed the Xerashi coast, disgorging an army that even now approached from their rear. Or Fanayal had commanded a mass exodus, and even now retreated with the Cishaurim to the great city of Seleukara. Or all the strength of Kian lay coiled in Shimeh like a snake in a basket, poised to strike the instant the Inrithi raised the lid …

  No matter what the tale, the idolaters were either assured victory or doomed.

  The consensus among the Great Names was that none of these tales were true. The Warrior-Prophet disagreed, pointing out that the captives repeated the same half-dozen stories. “Fanayal has planted these rumours,” he said. “He makes noise to obscure truth’s call.” He admonished them to remember the man who strove against them. “Don’t forget his daring on the fields of Mengedda and Anwurat. Fanayal may be the son of Kascamandri,” he said, “but he’s a student of Skauras.”

  The decision was made to confine their assault to Shimeh’s westward walls, not only because the encampment lay to the west of the city but because the Juterum lay on the west bank of the Jeshimal, and everyone agreed that the Sacred Heights must be their first objective. So long as the Cishaurim remained undefeated, they knew, all was jeopardy.

  Proyas and Gotian then petitioned the Blessed One, begging to lead the assault in advance of the Scarlet Spires. Though the Tusk’s condemnation of sorcery had been rescinded, they still loathed the thought of sorcerers being the first to set foot in the Sacred City. But Chinjosa and Gothyelk vehemently disagreed. “I’ve lost one son to Scarlet sloth,” the old Tydonni Earl exclaimed, referring to the death of his youngest in Caraskand. “I shall not lose another!”

  But as always, the Warrior-Prophet decided the issue. “We—all of us—will attack together,” he said. “Who attacks first, who stands where in the order of battle: these things mean nothing. Surely, after so much suffering, success can be our only point of honour … Success.”

  Meanwhile, the Men of the Tusk occupied themselves with preparations, threw themselves at their tasks with sweat and song. Parties were sent into the hills for timber—though not much was required. Raiders were dispatched down the Amoti coast, ordered to secure what supplies they could. Knights wove mantlets from olive branches; for miles, surrounding groves were stripped to their gnarled trunks. Haphazard ladders were constructed of poplars and palm. Great stones were gathered from the shoreline to be used as ammunition. The siege engines built at Gerotha, which the Warrior-Prophet had ordered disassembled and borne by Xerashi captives in the host’s train, were brought forward and rebuilt, some even in darkness.

  Late that night, as they stretched their limbs before their fires, they talked long of the strangeness of it all, their words and manner somewhere between exhaustion and exultation. They traded accounts of the Warrior-Prophet’s words at the Council of Great and Lesser Names. And though they took heart, many Men of the Tusk found their haste troubling, as though they, like the inconstant and the irresolute, had lost heart at the moment of consummation, and sought only to bring the ordeal to a swift conclusion.

  And as the fires went out, leaving only the most stubborn and thoughtful awake, the sceptics dared argue their misgivings.

  “But think,” the faithful retorted. “When we die surrounded by the spoils of a long and daring life, we will look up to those who adore us and we will say, ‘I knew him. I knew the Warrior-Prophet.’”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SHIMEH

  Some say I learned dread knowledge that night. But of this, as with so many other matters, I cannot write for fear of summary execution.

  —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

  Truth and hope are like travellers in contrary directions. They meet but once in any man’s life.

  —AINONI PROVERB

  Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh

  Esmenet dreamed that she was a prince, an angel fallen from the dark, that her heart had beaten, her loins had ached, for tens of thousands of years. She dreamed that Kellhus stood before her, an outrage to be blotted, an enigma to be dissected, and above all a burning question …

  Who are the Dûnyain?

  When she awoke, several moments passed before she recognized herself. Reaching out through the gloom, she clutched only cool sheets where Kellhus should have been. For some reason she was unsurprised, as well as uncommonly concerned. There was an oppressive sense of finality in the air, like the smell of drying ink.

  Kellhus?

  Ever since reading The Sagas, a foreboding had grown within her, an accumulation that had filled her heart and limbs with a sense of rolling heaviness. The night in the Nansur villa—the night of her possession—had stained this listless dread with a bewildering urgency. Every time she blinked, she saw things penetrated and penetrating. She could still feel the creature’s hands upon her flesh, and the memory of her obedient lust seemed ever-present. The hunger she had suffered that night! A thirst that only terror could touch, and that no horror could slake. At once bestial and remote, it had been a wantonness that eclipsed obscenity … and became something pure.

  The Inchoroi had taken her, but the want, th
e insatiable desire … those had been hers.

  Of course, Kellhus had tried to console her, even as he plied her with endless questions. He said much the same thing Achamian had said when explaining Xinemus’s torment: that the self never stood apart when one was compelled, because it was the very thing possessed. “You can’t distinguish yourself from him,” Kellhus explained, “because for a time, he was you. That’s why he tried to provoke me into killing you, because he feared the memories you might have of his memories.”

  “But the things!” she could only reply. “The things I ached for!” Grimacing faces. Grinning orifices and gaping wounds. The rush of hot fluids.

  “Those desires weren’t yours, Esmi. They only seemed to be yours because you couldn’t see where they came from … You simply suffered them.”

  “But then, how does any desire belong to me?”

  When she learned of Xinemus’s death, she told herself that he had been the cause of her distress, that her sense of encroaching doom was nothing more than concern for his well-being. But the lie was too obvious for even her to believe, and she spent hours cursing herself for her inability to mourn the man who had been such an uncompromising friend. And when, shortly after, Achamian moved with his things out of the Umbilica, she once again tried to wrap explanations around the chill morass of her heart. And even though this lie, through force of partial truth, had lasted a day and a night, it collapsed the instant she had laid wondering eyes on the actual origin of her misapprehension.