Read The Darkness that Comes Before Online
Authors: R. Scott Bakker
The Darkness that Comes Before (2 page)
One night the Bard caught the boy. He caressed first his cheek and then his thigh. “Forgive me,” he muttered over and over, but tears fell only from his blind eye. “There are no crimes,” he mumbled afterward, “when no one is left alive.”
But the boy lived. Five nights later, he lured the Bardic Priest onto Ishuäl’s towering walls. When the man shambled by in a drunken stupor, he pushed him from the heights. He crouched for a long while at the fall’s edge, staring down through the gloom at the Bard’s broken corpse. It differed from the others, he decided, only in that it was still wet. Was it murder when no one was left alive?
Winter added its cold to the emptiness of Ishuäl. Propped on the battlements, the child would listen to the wolves sing and feud through the dark forests. He would pull his arms from his sleeves and hug his body against the chill, murmuring his dead mother’s songs and savouring the wind’s bite on his cheek. He would fly through the courtyards, answering the wolves with Kûniüric war cries, brandishing weapons that staggered him with their weight. And once in a while, his eyes wide with hope and superstitious dread, he would poke the dead with his father’s sword.
When the snows broke, shouts brought him to Ishuäl’s forward gate. Peering through dark embrasures, he saw a group of cadaverous men and women—refugees of the Apocalypse. Glimpsing his shadow, they cried out for food, shelter, anything, but the boy was too terrified to reply. Hardship had made them look fearsome—feral, like a wolf people.
When they began scaling the walls, he fled to the galleries. Like the Bardic Priest, they searched for him, calling out guarantees of his safety. Eventually, one of them found him cringing behind a barrel of sardines. With a voice neither tender nor harsh, he said: “We are Dûnyain, child. What reason could you have to fear us?”
But the boy clutched his father’s sword, crying, “So long as men live, there are crimes!”
The man’s eyes filled with wonder. “No, child,” he said. “Only so long as men are deceived.”
For a moment, the young Anasûrimbor could only stare at him. Then solemnly, he set aside his father’s sword and took the stranger’s hand. “I was a prince,” he mumbled.
The stranger brought him to the others, and together they celebrated their strange fortune. They cried out—not to the Gods they had repudiated but to one another—that here was evident a great correspondence of cause. Here awareness most holy could be tended. In Ishuäl, they had found shelter against the end of the world.
Still emaciated but wearing the furs of kings, the Dûnyain chiselled the sorcerous runes from the walls and burned the Grand Vizier’s books. The jewels, the chalcedony, the silk and cloth-of-gold, they buried with the corpses of a dynasty.
And the world forgot them for two thousand years.
Nonmen, Sranc, and Men:
The first forgets,
The third regrets,
And the second has all of the fun.
—ANCIENT KÛNIÜRI NURSERY RHYME
This is a history of a great and tragic holy war, of the mighty factions that sought to possess and pervert it, and of a son searching for his father. And as with all histories, it is we, the survivors, who will write its conclusion.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Again the dreams had come.
Vast landscapes, histories, contests of faith and culture, all glimpsed in cataracts of detail. Horses skidding to earth. Fists clenching mud. Dead strewn on the shore of a warm sea. And as always, an ancient city, chalk dry in the sun, rising against dun hills. A holy city . . .
Shimeh
.
Shimeh
.
And then the voice, thin as though spoken through the reed throat of a serpent, saying,
“Send to me my son.”
“Send to me my son.”
The dreamers awoke as one, gasping, struggling to wrest sense from impossibility. Following the protocol established after the first dreams, they found each other in the unlit depths of the Thousand Thousand Halls.
Such desecration, they determined, could no longer be tolerated.
Climbing pitted mountain trails, Anasûrimbor Kellhus leaned on his knee and turned to look at the monastic citadel. Ishuäl’s ramparts towered above a screen of spruce and larches, only to be dwarfed by the rutted mountain slopes beyond.
Did you see it thus, Father? Did you turn and look for one last time?
Distant figures filed between the battlements before disappearing behind stone—the elder Dûnyain abandoning their vigil. They would wind down the mighty staircases, Kellhus knew, and one by one enter the darkness of the Thousand Thousand Halls, the great Labyrinth that wheeled through the depths beneath Ishuäl. There they would die, as had been decided. All those his father had polluted.
I’m alone. My mission is all that remains.
He turned from Ishuäl and continued climbing through the forest. The mountain breeze was bitter with the smell of bruised pine.
By late afternoon he passed the timberline, and after two days of scaling glacial slopes he crested the roof of the Demua Mountains. On the far side of the range, the forests of what once had been called Kûniüri extended beneath scudding clouds. How many vistas such as this, he wondered, must he cross before he found his father? How many ravine-creased horizons must he exchange before he arrived at Shimeh?
Shimeh will be my home. I shall dwell in my father’s house.
Descending granite escarpments, he entered the wilderness.
He wandered through the gloom of the forest interior, through galleries pillared by mighty redwoods and hushed by the overlong absence of men. He tugged his cloak through thickets and negotiated the fierce rush of mountain streams.
Though the forests below Ishuäl had been much the same, Kellhus found himself unsettled for some reason. He paused in an attempt to regain his composure, using ancient techniques to impose discipline on his intellect. The forest was quiet, gentle with birdsong. And yet he could hear thunder . . .
Something is happening to me. Is this the first trial, Father?
He found a stream marbled by brilliant sunlight and knelt at its edge. The water he drew to his lips was more replenishing, more sweet, than any water he had tasted before. But how could water taste sweet? How could sunlight, broken across the back of rushing waters, be so
beautiful?
beautiful?
What comes before determines what comes after. Dûnyain monks spent their lives immersed in the study of this principle, illuminating the intangible mesh of cause and effect that determined every happenstance and minimizing all that was wild and unpredictable. Because of this, events always unfolded with granitic certainty in Ishuäl. More often than not, one knew the skittering course a leaf would take through the terrace groves. More often than not, one knew what another would say before he spoke. To grasp what came before was to know what would come after. And to know what would come after was the beauty that stilled, the hallowed communion of intellect and circumstance—the gift of the Logos.
Kellhus’s first true surprise, apart from the formative days of his childhood, had been this mission. Until then, his life had been a premeditated ritual of study, conditioning, and comprehension. Everything was grasped. Everything was understood. But now, walking through the forests of lost Kûniüri, it seemed that the world plunged and he stood still. Like earth in rushing waters, he was battered by an endless succession of surprises: the thin warble of an unknown bird; burrs in his cloak from an unknown weed; a snake winding through a sunlit clearing, searching for unknown prey.
The dry slap of wings would pass overhead and he would pause, taking a different step. A mosquito would land on his cheek, and he would slap at it, only to have his eyes drawn to a different configuration of tree. His surroundings inhabited him, possessed him, until he was moved by all things at once—the creak of limbs, the endless permutations of water over stones. These things wracked him with the strength of tides.
On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, a twig lodged itself between his sandal and his foot. He held it against storm-piled clouds and studied it, became lost in its shape, in the path it travelled through the open air—the thin, muscular branchings that seized so much emptiness from the sky. Had it simply fallen into this shape, or had it been cast, a mould drained of its wax? He looked up and saw one sky plied by the infinite forking of branches. Was there not one way to grasp one sky? He was unaware of how long he stood there, but it was dark before the twig slipped from his fingers.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth day, he crouched on rocks green with moss and watched salmon leap and pitch against a rushing river. The sun rose and set three times before his thoughts escaped this inexplicable war of fish and waters.
In the worst moments his arms would be vague as shadow against shadow, and the rhythm of his walk would climb far ahead of him. His mission became the last remnant of what he had once been. Otherwise he was devoid of intellect, oblivious to the principles of the Dûnyain. Like a sheet of parchment exposed to the elements, each day saw more words stolen from him—until only one imperative remained:
Shimeh . . . I must find my father in Shimeh.
Shimeh . . . I must find my father in Shimeh.
He continued wandering south, through the foothills of the Demua. His dispossession deepened, until he no longer oiled his sword after being wetted by the rain, until he no longer slept or ate. There was only wilderness, the walk, and the passing days. At night he would take animal comfort in the dark and cold.
Shimeh. Please, Father.
On the forty-third day, he waded across a shallow river and clambered onto banks black with ash. Weeds crowded the char blanketing the ground, but nothing else. Like blackened spears, dead trees spiked the sky. He picked his way through the debris, stung by weeds where they brushed his bare skin. Finally he gained the summit of a ridge.
The immensity of the valley below struck Kellhus breathless. Beyond the fire’s desolation, where the forest was still dark and crowded, ancient fortifications loomed above the trees, forming a great ring across the autumnal distances. He watched birds wheel over and around the nearer ramparts, flash across stretches of mottled stone before dipping into the canopy. Ruined walls. So cold, and so forlorn, in a way the forest could never be.
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