The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Ever had he been used, exploited! Ever had he been a fool! A fool!

  Ever had he fallen thus …

  He fell to his knees among the shag-hide tents of the Nangaels, raised fists to the catamite images that clogged his eyes. Upon this ledge he huddled, sobbing for loss and degradation …

  Faith was the small aping immensity, the remote painted across the near, the triumph of conceit over terror.

  The most blessed ignorance.

  And it was no more.

  Terror had been a drug when Proyas was young.

  Ever had he been a hero as a youth, dazzled by the great souls of legend; ever was he bent on proving his bravery, not to others, but to himself. His mother would sometimes weep for the hazards he dared: scaling the mortices of the Atikkoros, taunting the bulls used by a troupe of Invitic acrobats, and climbing every tree opportunity afforded, not simply into the bower, but to the skinny peak, where the wind would pitch him as an iron ingot upon a stalk of milkweed.

  His favourite had been a grandiose oak that everyone called Wheezer for the hoarse noise it made when the wind possessed the proper temper. The tree’s original peak had been sheared away, leaving the lesser half of what had been a fork, an upward arching branch that provided the footing he used to surmount Wheezer the way he could no other tree. There he would hang swaying, his heart racing, his hands and head fuzzy for floating exhilaration, Aoknyssus reaching out in grim and intricate stages, and it would all seem to be for him—him! He must have climbed the hoary old beast at least a hundred times without incident. And then, one dour, autumnal day, it simply cracked. He still felt the twang of mortal terror recalling it, the clutch of cold sweat across his skin. He still caught his breath …

  Swinging out and dropping down, doomed until a skein of lower branches miraculously caught the broken bough. He found himself hanging, legs kicking out over void. The entire palace would hear his scream (he would spend some three months hating Tyrûmmas, his older brother, for endlessly mimicking his cry. He could remember pondering, in the first few instants, which was the greater horror, dropping to his death, or hanging exposed as more and more shocked and scowling faces gathered beneath …

  “Are you daft, boy? I said take my hand.”

  And then, from nowhere it seemed, there was Achamian, standing as though upon invisible ground, floating, reaching out with ink-stained fingers.

  “Never!”

  “You would rather break your neck?”

  “I would rather splint my soul!”

  Even in extremis, the portly Schoolman’s look betrayed the same exasperated wonder that the boy so often provoked on flat ground.

  “I fear you’re too young to die for your scruples, Prosha. One must have a wife to widow, children to orphan.”

  “You’re damned! All Schoolmen are damned!”

  “Which is why your father plunders his treasury to pay us. Now take my hand. Take it!”

  “No!”

  He was regularly astounded pondering this incident as a grown man. Perhaps others would find cause for pride in bravery, but not Proyas. If terror had been a plaything for him as a boy, a thing to be baited and teased, it was out of ignorance far more than for courage, the preposterous assurance that nothing truly untoward could happen to him. Tyrûmmas’s watery death would ignite the pyre beneath that confidence, teach him the terror of terror.

  “Well …” the canny sorcerer had said, “you can wait for the God of Gods to reach down to save you …”

  “What do you mean?” Proyas had cried, too breathless to be clever. Some twenty cubits clacked its jaws beneath him. The bark had already begun to bite.

  “Or …” Akka continued, pausing for effect.

  “Or what?”

  Drusas Achamian splayed his inked fingertips wider still, and Proyas noticed that he chewed rather than pared his nails. “You can take the hand He has put before you.”

  There had been love in the sorcerer’s look, a father’s bottled fear. He would never admit to the flare of love he had felt in that moment, and he would cringe from its memory the way he cringed from thought of carnal shames.

  He dared raise a hand, shifting the entirety of his weight to his other grip, snapping the branch …

  He had no recollection of the ground slapping him unconscious. He would get his splint, but for his left leg, not his soul. Everyone said it was a miracle that he had survived. His mother told him that Achamian had cried out louder than she had as he plummeted. For years following, various caste-nobles would mimic the cry—a kind of effeminate whoop—when the Schoolman barged by …

  Neither he nor Achamian so much as mentioned the episode.

  And now he fell once again.

  Proyas staggered through the slums of the Shigeki, the parasols of the Antanamerans, the scissoring timbers of the Kurigaldmen. The ways were largely abandoned, so he had little need to conceal his distress. Still, a consciousness of his appearance rose whenever he neared the battered pavilion of some Lord. Shame and … a gloating. What had happened? What was happening? He began cackling. It seemed his heart would combust, leap into open flame, for the merest remembrance of what had transpired!

  The Whore smiled, and no soul hailed him.

  Stars dusted the black bowel of the void. The Ordeal matted the visible world beneath, a mosaic broken to the contours of the land, each contingent a tessera set in the mortar of labyrinthine paths. It all seemed mad to him now, the heaps of Sranc parts, particularly crooked hands and horned feet, the countless versions of the Circumfix, gold, crimson, and pitch. It all seemed … frail, fraught with a simmering licentiousness, as if there were a greater Ordeal beyond the one he could see. He could feel strewn across nocturnal miles, the wrack of a more profound host, one senseless of pious decrees and righteous declarations, bound by nothing more than the coincidence of low appetites …

  I …

  A bestial impatience.

  He crouched in a ravine and wept for a short time, gagged for memory and human offal.

  I am forsaken.

  That faith belonged to the foundation was a truth that Proyas had lived more than fathomed. It was the human ground, a thing too onerous not to be broken and divided between names: “love” in the union of disparate souls, “logic” in the union of disparate claims, “truth” in the union of desire and circumstance …

  “Desire” when it reached out, seeking.

  All I have known …

  He huddled against rock and clay, a little place, croaking alone in the dark, wracked with grief, assailed by fear and imagery.

  False.

  The sun, he thought, would bring flies.

  The Enathpanean district of the camp was a crowded helter clustered across the break and heave of the land, notable only for the admixture of Galeoth tents, crude and sturdy, and the rambling Khirgwi marquees of the native Enathpaneans. He found Saubon’s pavilion before realizing he’d been searching for it. The Red Lions splayed across its canvas panels glowered black in the Nail of Heaven’s soulless light. The glimpse of golden illumination about the entrance flap heartened the Exalt-General, though he had yet to understand what had brought him here.

  Given the dearth of fuel, all fires were forbidden after the prandial watch. Nevertheless, three men, Knights of the Desert Lion by their soiled surcoats, leaned about a small fire set several paces before the pavilion, bent like boys dripping wax on ants. Proyas recognized all three as Saubon’s captains: his Swordbearer, Thipil Mepiro, a diminutive Amoti famed for his duelling prowess; his towering Shieldbearer, Ûster Scraul, a thin, stammering Kurigalder called “the Bard” for his eloquence in battle; and his famed Spear-bearer, Thurhig Bogyar, a red-maned Holca warrior, apparently descended from Eryelk the Ravager no less.

  Something about their manner—an inward leering, a hunching against—troubled Proyas.

  “What happens here?”

  Even their response to his challenge troubled him, the way they shared looks between themselves, as if no
authority could matter outside their small circle.

  A Sranc head gleamed in the lap of the enormous Holca.

  “I said,” Proyas repeated in abrupt fury, “what happens here?”

  All three turned to him as if upon the same slow swivel. The Law demanded they fall to their faces; instead they fixed him with murderous looks. Bogyar drew a cloth across his grisly prize. Knights of the Desert Lion were notoriously ill-mannered: “Saubon’s Brigands” some called them. Where almost every Believer-King built their household from caste-noble stone, Saubon, who had never forgiven the Whore for making him the seventh son of foul old Eryeat, had made the gutter his quarry.

  “The Law awaits your ans—”

  A powerful and familiar voice called from the pavilion just beyond—the Desert Lion himself.

  “Proyas? What are you doing here?”

  Saubon stood before the swaying entrance flap, his grey hair still flattened for his helm, but stripped to his leggings otherwise.

  “I’ve come to confer with my brother, Brother,” Proyas said, sparing him little more than a glance. “But these dogs ne—”

  “Answer to me,” Saubon snapped. He hooked open the flap of his pavilion on a long arm. “We all make our own way.”

  “And they have chosen the one with whips,” Proyas said evenly. He glared at Saubon in the ruthless, New Imperial manner, the one that brooked no exceptions. The habits of command, at least, had not abandoned him.

  The Believer-King of Caraskand muttered some kind of Galeoth curse. Mepiro, Scraul, and Bogyar had watched the exchange like the overweening sons of a doting and unscrupulous father. But their arrogance—or, more likely, their failure to disguise it—was too much. Saubon’s scowl faded into something remote. They had over-played their sticks, and Proyas watched the realization knock the presumption from their faces with no little satisfaction.

  The covered head forgotten, the three Bearers scrambled to press their foreheads against the packed earth. Their fire dwindled as if for the absence of attention—sputtered …

  First the first time, Proyas wondered that he could see so well in the dark.

  Whence had such an ability come?

  “Come,” Saubon called, motioning him to the entrance flap. “They will know the Law on the morrow. You have my assurance, brother.”

  When it came to treating with subordinates, Ketyai caste-nobles were more remote and summary than their Norsirai counterparts. Vassals who made themselves visible with some trespass became invisible the instant their punishment was meted. No pleas were heard, no remonstrations of penitence or innocence. And unless the affair was public or ceremonial, no crowing displays were made, no gloating declarations …

  Nevertheless, Proyas paused above the prostrate knights, at once perplexed and trembling for outrage.

  Saubon scowled at the indecisive spectacle, but said nothing.

  Winded and dismayed, Proyas barged past his counterpart, found himself standing within the lantern-illumined pavilion, utterly abandoned by the confidence he’d commanded but moments before. Pale light climbed the walls, the canvas so blotted and weather-stained as to resemble maps scraped of names and ink. Something like Zeum loomed over the lantern set beside his simple bed. Nilnamesh hung skewered by the centrepost. The floor was bare, dead and earthen, and only the most rudimentary furnishings populated the golden gloom. The air was close, smelled of sweat, lamb, and hay rotted to dust. A blond youth stood meekly beneath the two hanging lanterns, his cheeks neither nude nor bearded.

  Saubon strode past Proyas, barked, “Leave!” at the youth, who promptly fled. With a groan, the Galeoth warrior dropped to his rump on his cot, glanced at Proyas for a heartbeat before lowering his face to a broad bowl between his feet. He scooped water across his brow and cheeks.

  “You’ve been to see him again,” he said, blinking into the basin. “I can tell.”

  Proyas stood speechless, not knowing why he had come.

  Saubon raised his face in scowling appraisal. He absently clutched the rag at his side, began towelling his beard and chest. He nodded to the platter of greying meat on the camp table to Proyas’s right.

  “Be-before …” the Believer-King of Conriya stammered. “Y-you said he told you the truth.”

  A careful look. “Aye.”

  “So he told you that he wasn’t … a …”

  Saubon drew the towel down his face. “He told me he was something called ‘Dûnyain.’”

  “That all of this was some kind of vast … calculation.”

  The bitten eyes gazed forward. “Aye. The Thousandfold Thought.”

  It seemed the lanterns should wink out for the absence of air.

  “So you know!” Proyas cried. “How? How is it you can be … be …”

  “Untroubled?” Saubon said, tossing the rag to the ground. He studied Proyas, elbows propped on his knees. “I’ve never been a believer like you, Proyas. I have no need to know what lays at the bottom of things.”

  They breathed.

  “Even to save the world?”

  A scowl and a grin warred for possession of Saubon’s face. “Is that what we do?”

  Proyas choked on the sudden impulse to scream. What was happening?

  What was happening?

  “Wha-what is he doing?” he cried, flinching for the unmanly crimp in his tone, and yet finding himself compounding the treachery with a rush of more white-skinned words: “I-I ne-need … I need to know what he’s doing!”

  A long, inscrutable look.

  “What is he doing?” Proyas nearly screeched.

  Saubon shrugged his shoulders, leaned back. “I think he tests us … prepares us for something …”

  “So he is a Prophet!”

  As intelligent as he was, a kind of barbaric immodesty had always characterized Coithus Saubon, a vulgar need to lord over those who were his equals. Even in the presence of their Holy Aspect-Emperor, his inclination was to smirk. Now the first spark of genuine alarm humbled his gaze.

  “You’ve dwelt in his shadow as long as me …” A bark of laughter that was supposed to sound confident. “What else could he be?”

  Dûnyain.

  “Yes …” Proyas replied, nausea welling through him. “What else could he be?”

  Some Men are like this. They would rather scoff, turn aside the plea they hear in other voices to better disguise the penury of their own. It takes them time to set aside the ephemeral arms and armour of the court. For twenty years he and Saubon had dwelt in the revelatory light of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. For twenty years they had discharged his commands with thoughtless obedience, delivering innumerable Orthodox to the sword, setting the fleshpots of the Three Seas alight. Together they had done this, the Right and Left Hands of the Holy Aspect-Emperor. Forsaking wives and children. Breaking all the Laws that had come before. And in all that time they had wondered only at the tragic folly of those they had killed. How? How could Men turn aside their eyes, when the God’s light was so plain?

  They were in this together as well. Not even the proud and impetuous Coithus Saubon could feign otherwise.

  “The way I see it,” the Galeoth Exalt-General said slowly, deliberately, “he’s preparing us for some kind of crisis … A crisis of faith.”

  It seemed sacrilegious, even blasphemous, taking a … tactical attitude to their Lord-and-Prophet. But it also seemed far more canny, far more awake—certainly more than the caged slurry of his own thoughts.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Saubon stood, absently raked his fingers across his scalp.

  “Because we are living scripture, for one … And scripture, if you haven’t noticed, dwells on grievance and disaster …” Again he expressed the attitude of second-guesses, the one that looks past what words mean to consider what they accomplish. “And because he says so himself, for another. He scarcely speaks without referencing Celmomas and the doom of the Great Ordeal’s ancient namesake … Yes … Something is coming … Something only he knows about.” />
  Proyas stared breathless. It seemed he could not move without stirring the memory of his bruises.

  “But …”

  “After all this time, you still don’t fully understand him, do you?”

  “And you do?”

  Saubon swatted the air the way Galeoth were prone when irked by questions. “You think me stubborn,” he said. “Mercenary. Your lesser counterpart. I know this—he knows this! I take no offense because I think you stubborn and insufferably pious. And so we counsel one against the other continuously, each heaving upon the rope of disparate reason …”

  “So?”

  “This is theatre!” Saubon cried, throwing wide his strapped arms. “Can’t you see? We are all mummers here! All of us! Prophet or not, our Holy Aspect-Emperor must control what Men see … All of us have roles to play, Proyas, and no one gets to choose which.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That our parts remain to be written. Perhaps you’re to be the fool … or the traitor … or the long-suffering doubter …” A bleary gaze, filled with hilarity and rheumy spite. “Only he knows!”

  Proyas could only stare at the man.

  Saubon grinned. “Perhaps you must be weak to survive the catastrophe to come.”

  Proyas shuddered—the substance of him rippled like water in a kicked pan. His exhalation was audible, ragged with turmoil. Lantern-light pricked. Tears spilled hot down his cheeks. He glared angrily at Saubon, knowing the sight would astound him.

  “So …” he began, only to stumble upon a crack in his voice. “So what is your role then?”

  Saubon watched him carefully. It would be the first and only time Proyas would see pity on his face. The man’s blue eyes, which had become all the more fierce for the rutting of his skin and the greying of his brows, clicked to his bare toes, which he flexed as if to better grip the ground. “The same as you, I suspect.”

  Proyas wondered at the belt cinched about his chest. “How could you know this?”

  Saubon shrugged. “Because he tells us the same things.”

  A stabbing shame accompanied these words. All breath and motion fell from the Believer-King of Conriya.