The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  To question everything. To ride the trackless Steppe.

  “Where no paths exist,” Moënghus had continued, “a man strays only when he misses his destination. There is no crime, no transgression, no sin save foolishness or incompetence, and no obscenity save the tyranny of custom. But you already know this . . . You stand apart from your tribe.”

  Moënghus’s hand had drifted out to clasp his own. There was something lethargic, something thick and swollen, in his tone. His eyes were soft, plaintive, wet like his lips.

  “Is it a sin for me to touch you thus? Why? What mountain pass have we strayed from?”

  “None . . .” Breathless.

  “Why?”

  “Because we ride the Steppe.” And there is nothing more holy.

  A smile, like a father or a lover suddenly struck by the violence of his adoration. “We Dûnyain, Cnaiür, are guides and trackers, students of the Logos, the Shortest Way. Of all the world, we alone have awakened from the dread slumber of custom. We alone.”

  He drew Cnaiür’s young hand to his lap. Thumbs probed the spaces between his calluses.

  How could bliss ache so?

  “Tell me, Chieftain-son, what do you desire before all things? What circumstance? Tell me, one who is awake, and I’ll show you the trail you must follow.”

  Cnaiür wet his lips and lied, “To become a great chieftain of the People.”

  Those words! Those heartbreaking words!

  Moënghus had nodded in the weighty manner of a memorialist satisfied by powerful omens. “Good. We shall ride together, you and I, across the open Steppe. I shall show you a track like no other.”

  Months later, Skiötha was dead and Cnaiür had become Chieftain of the Utemot. He had attained what he had pretended to covet, the White Yaksh—his destination.

  Though his tribesmen begrudged him the path he had travelled, custom bound them to him. He had walked forbidden trails, and his kinsmen, constrained by the deep tracks of stupidity and blind habit, could only scowl and mutter behind his back. What pride he had felt! But it was a strange pride, wan, like the lonely sense of exemption and impunity he’d experienced as a young boy watching his brothers and sisters sleep by firelight, thinking, I could do anything.

  Anything. And they would not know.

  Then, two seasons later, the other women strangled his mother for giving birth to a blonde girl. As they raised her corpse on the vulture poles, he began to understand what had actually happened. His mother’s death, he knew, was a destination, the outcome of a journey. And Moënghus was the traveller.

  At first, he was baffled. The Dûnyain had seduced and impregnated his mother, that much was clear. But to what end? What further destination?

  And then he understood: to secure access to her son—to Cnaiür urs Skiötha.

  Thus began his obsessive rehearsal of the events that had brought him to the White Yaksh. Step by step, he recounted the skid of small, juvenile treasons into patricide. Soon the reedy sense of gratification at having outwitted his betters evaporated. Soon the jaw-tight jubilation at having destroyed someone hapless changed into stunned incredulity, desolate disbelief. He had taken pride in transcending his kinsmen, in being more, and he’d exulted in the demonstration of that transcendence. He had found the shortest way. He had seized the White Yaksh. Was this not proof of his superiority? So Moënghus had told him before leaving the Utemot. So he had thought.

  Now he understood: he had done nothing except betray his father. Like his mother, he had been seduced.

  My father is dead. I was the knife.

  And Anasûrimbor Moënghus had wielded him.

  The revelation was as breathtaking as it was heartbreaking. Once, when Cnaiür was a child, a whirlwind had roared through the Utemot encampment, its shoulders in the clouds, yaksh, cattle, and lives swirling like skirts about its feet. He had watched it from a distance, wailing, clutching his father’s rigid waist. Then it had vanished, like sand settling in water. He could remember his father running through the hail to assist his kinsmen. He could remember beginning to follow, then stumbling to a halt, transfixed by the vista before him as though the scale of the transformation had dwarfed his eyes’ ability to believe. The great rambling web of tracks, pens, and yaksh had been utterly rewritten, as though some mountain-tall child had drawn sweeping circles with a stick. Horror had replaced familiarity, but order had replaced order.

  Like the whirlwind, his revelation regarding Moënghus had blasted a different, far more horrifying order from what he had known. Triumph became degradation. Pride became remorse. Moënghus was no longer the greater father of his heart. Instead he was an impossible tyrant, a slaver masquerading as a slave. The words that had elevated him, that had revealed truth and rapture, became words that had abased him, that had forced obscene advantages. The expressions that had comforted him became chits in some mad game. Everything—the look, the touch, the endearing mannerism—had been taken up by the whirlwind and violently rewritten.

  For a time, he’d truly thought himself awake, the only one who did not stumble and grope through the dreams foisted on the Scylvendi by the customs of their forefathers. For them, the Steppe was ground not just to their feet and their bellies but to their souls as well. And yet he, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, knew and lived the truth of the Steppe. He alone was awake. Where others filed through illusory canyons, his soul ranged the trackless plains. He alone was truly of the land.

  He alone. Why was there such terrible power in standing not apart from but before one’s tribe?

  But the whirlwind had seized this as well. He could remember his mother weeping after his father’s death, but did she weep for Skiötha, whom she had lost to death, or, as Cnaiür himself had done, for Moënghus, whom she had lost to the horizon? For Moënghus, Cnaiür knew, the seduction of Skiötha’s first wife was but a waystation, a point of departure for the seduction of Skiötha’s first-born son. What lies had he whispered as he speared her in the dark? That he did lie Cnaiür was certain, since he neither spoke nor loved for her. And if he lied to her, then . . .

  Everything that happened was a quest, as Moënghus had said. Even the movements of one’s soul—thought, desire, love—were journeys across something trackless. Cnaiür had thought himself a point of departure, the origin of all his far-travelling thoughts. But he was nothing more than a muddied track, a trail used by another to reach his destination. The thoughts he had called his own had all along belonged to another. His wakefulness was but one more dream in a deeper slumber. By some unearthly cunning, he had been tricked into obscenity after obscenity, degradation after degradation, and he had wept with gratitude.

  And his tribesmen, he realized, knew this, if only in the dim way that wolves smell frailty. The scorn and laughter of fools meant nothing when one dwelt in the truth. But when one was deceived . . .

  Weeper.

  Such torment!

  For thirty years Cnaiür had lived with this whirlwind, intensifying its thunder with further insight and endless recriminations. Seasons of anguish had been heaped upon it.

  Awake, it moved through him without breath, with the curious flatness of performing a task with empty lungs.

  But asleep . . . He had suffered many dreams.

  Moënghus’s face rises from the depths of a pool, pale through the greenish cast of the water. Throughout the surrounding darkness, caverns intertwine, like the thin tunnels one finds beneath large stones pulled from the grass. Just beneath the surface, the pale Dûnyain pauses as though tugged by some deep restraint, smiles, and raises his mouth. With horror, Cnaiür watches as an earthworm presses through the smiling lips and pierces the water. It feels the air like a blind finger. Watery and obscene, the bland pink of hidden places. And always, his own inarticulate hand drifts over the pool and, in a quiet moment of insanity, touches it.

  But now Cnaiür was awake, and the face had returned. He’d found it on his pilgrimage to the barrows of his ancestors. It had come from the northern wastes, wracked b
y exposure, riddled by Sranc wounds. Anasûrimbor Kellhus, son of Anasûrimbor Moënghus. But what did this second coming mean? Would it provide an answer to the whirlwind, or would it merely redouble its fury?

  Dare he use the son to find the father? Dare he cross the trackless Steppe?

  Anissi raised her head from his chest and studied his face. Her breasts skimmed the hollow of his belly. Her eyes glistened in the dark. She was, Cnaiür thought, far too beautiful to belong to him.

  “You still haven’t spoken to him,” she said, dipping her head to the fall of her hair, then lowering her lips to kiss his arm. “Why?”

  “I told you . . . He has great power.”

  He could feel her think. Perhaps it was the closeness of her lips to his skin. “I share your . . . misgivings,” she said. “But sometimes I don’t know who’s more frightening, you or him.”

  Anger stirred in him, the slow, dangerous anger of one whose authority is unquestioned and absolute. “Frightened of me? Why?”

  “I fear him because already he speaks our tongue as well as any slave of ten years. I fear him because his eyes . . . do not seem to blink. He has already made me laugh, made me cry.”

  Silence. Scenes flashed through his thoughts, a string of broken and breaking images. He stiffened against the mat, tensed his limbs against her softness.

  “I fear you,” she continued, “because you’ve told me this would happen. Each of these things you knew would happen. You know this man, and yet you’ve never spoken to him.”

  His throat ached. You’ve cried only when I’ve hit you.

  She kissed his arm and touched his lips with a finger. “Yesterday he said to me, ‘Why does he wait?’”

  Since he’d found the man, events had moved with such certainty, as though the smallest happening was soaked in waters of fate and portent. There could be no greater intimacy between him and this man. With his bare hands he had choked him to death in dream after dream.

  “You never mentioned me?” he asked—and commanded.

  “No. I didn’t. Again you know him. And he knows you.”

  “Through you. He sees me through you.” For a moment he wondered what it was the outlander saw, what image of him would leak from the beautiful expressions of Anissi. Much of the truth, he decided.

  Of all his wives, only Anissi had the courage to hold him when he cried out in his sleep. Only she whispered to him when he awoke weeping. The others were stiff, dead in the pretence of sleep. Which was good. The others he would have beaten, beaten for daring witness such weakness.

  In the dark, Anissi grabbed his shoulder and tugged as though to pull him from some great danger. “Lord, this is sacrilege. He’s a witch. A sorcerer.”

  “No. He is less. And he’s more.”

  “How? How do you know?” The caution was gone from her voice. She was insistent.

  He closed his eyes. Bannut’s grizzled face flashed from the darkness, surrounded by the furore of Kiyuth.

  Weeping faggot . . .

  “Sleep, Anissi.”

  Dare he use the son to find the father?

  The day was sunny, with a warmth that spoke of summer’s inevitability. Cnaiür paused before the broad cone of the yaksh, following the patterns of stitching across its hide faces. This was the type of day when the last of the winter would be dried from the leather and wood crevices of the yaksh, when the smell of rot would be replaced with that of dust.

  He squatted before the entrance flap and touched two fingers to the ground, bringing them to his lips as was custom. He took comfort in this act, though the reasons for it were long dead. He hooked the flap and slipped into the dim interior, where he sat cross-legged with his back to the opening.

  He struggled to sort the chained figure from the dark. His heart thundered.

  “My wives tell me you’ve learned our language with a swiftness that’s . . . mad.”

  Pallid light filtered from behind him. He saw naked limbs, grey like dead branches. The smell of urine and bowel crowded the air. The man looked and reeked of frailty and sickness. This, Cnaiür knew, was no accident.

  “I learn quickly, yes.” The shadowy head lowered, as though dipping to . . .

  Cnaiür suppressed a shiver. So much alike.

  “My wives tell me you’re a witch.”

  “I’m not.” Prolonged breath. “But you already know this.”

  “I think I know.” He pulled his Chorae from a small pouch fixed to his girdle, then tossed it in a low arc. Fetters clattered. The outlander snapped the sphere from the air as though it were a fly.

  Nothing happened.

  “What’s this?”

  “A gift to my people from very ancient times. A gift from our God. It kills witches.”

  “The runes across it?”

  “Mean nothing. Not now.”

  “You don’t trust me. You fear me.”

  “I fear nothing.”

  No response. A pause to reconsider ill-chosen words.

  “No,” the Dûnyain finally said. “You fear many things.”

  Cnaiür clamped his teeth. Again. It was happening again! Words like levers, shoving him backward over a trail of precipices. Rage fell through him like fire through choked halls. A scourge.

  “You,” he grated, “know I’m different from the others. You felt my presence through my wives because of my knowledge. Know that I will do the contrary of many things you say, simply because it is you who say it. Know that each night I will use the entrails of a hare to decide whether I shall let you live.

  “I know who you are, Anasûrimbor. I know that you’re Dûnyain.”

  If the man was taken aback, there was no indication. He simply said, “I’ll answer your questions.”

  “You will relate everything you’ve concluded about your present circumstance. You will explain your purpose in coming here. If you don’t do so to my satisfaction, I’ll have you put to death—immediately.”

  The threat was powerful, the words thick with certainty. Other men would brood over them, weigh them in silence in order to gauge their reply. But the Dûnyain did not. He answered immediately, as if there could be no surprise in anything Cnaiür might say or do.

  “I still live because my father passed through your lands in your youth and committed some crime for which you seek redress. I don’t think it possible for you to kill me, though this is your desire. You’re too intelligent to find satisfaction in substitutes. You understand the danger I represent, and yet you still hope to use me as the instrument of your greater desire. My circumstances, then, are of a piece with your purpose.”

  Momentary silence. Cnaiür’s thoughts tumbled both in shock and in affirmation, then he recoiled in sudden suspicion. This man is intellect . . . War.

  “You’re troubled,” the voice said. “You’d anticipated this appraisal, but not that I would speak it, and because I’ve spoken it, you fear that I merely cater to your expectations in order to mislead you in some deeper way.” A pause. “Like my father, Moënghus.”

  Cnaiür spat. “Words for your kind are knives! But they don’t always cut, do they? Crossing Suskara nearly killed you. Perhaps I should think as a Sranc.”

  The outlander began to reply, but Cnaiür had already rolled to his feet and bowed out into the clear Steppe air, crying out for assistance. He watched impassively as his people dragged the Norsirai from the yaksh, then bound his naked form to a pole near the centre of the camp. For hours the man sobbed and howled, shrieked for mercy as they plied him in the old ways. His bowels even relaxed, such was the agony.

  Cnaiür struck Anissi when she began weeping. He believed none of it.

  That night Cnaiür returned, knowing, or hoping, that the darkness would protect him.

  The air still reeked beneath the skins. The outlander was as silent as moonlight.

  “Now,” Cnaiür said, “your purpose . . . And don’t think I’m deluded into believing I’ve broken you. Your kind is not to be broken.”

  There was a rustle
in the blackness. “You’re right.” The voice was warm in the dark. “For my kind there’s only mission. I’ve come for my father, Anasûrimbor Moënghus. I’ve come to kill him.”

  Silence, save for a gentle southern wind.

  The outlander continued: “Now the dilemma is wholly yours, Scylvendi. Our missions would seem to be the same. I know where and, more important, how to find Anasûrimbor Moënghus. I offer you the very cup you desire. Is it poison or no?”

  Dare he use the son?

  “It’s always poison,” Cnaiür grated, “when you thirst.”

  The wives of the chieftain ministered to Kellhus, rinsed his broken skin with ointments made by the old women of the tribe. Sometimes he spoke to them as they did so, calmed their frightened eyes with tender words, made them smile.

  When the time came for their husband and the Norsirai to depart, they congregated on the chill ground outside the White Yaksh and solemnly watched as the men prepared their horses. They sensed the monolithic hatred of the one and the godlike indifference of the other. And when the two figures were encompassed by distant grasses, they did not know for whom they wept—for the man who had mastered them or the man who had known them.

  Only Anissi knew the source of her tears.

  Cnaiür and Kellhus rode southeast, crossing from Utemot lands into those of the Kuöti. Near the southern limit of the Kuöti pastures, they were overtaken by several horsemen with polished wolf-skull pommels and plumed cantles. Cnaiür spoke with them briefly, reminded them of the Ways, and they rode away—eager, he imagined, to tell their chieftain that at last the Utemot were without Cnaiür urs Skiötha, breaker-of-horses and most violent of men.

  Once they were alone, the Dûnyain again tried to engage him in conversation.