The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  Three days ago he’d been astonished and appalled by this sight. For the Nansur to trespass was outrage enough, but to sink posts and raise walls as well?

  Now, however, it filled him only with foreboding.

  Baring his teeth, he barrelled into the midst of his brother chieftains.

  “Xunnurit!” he bellowed. “Why wasn’t I summoned?”

  The King-of-Tribes cursed and yanked his roan about to face him. The morning breeze dimpled the fox-fur trim of his Kianene battlecap. Regarding Cnaiür with undisguised contempt, he said, “You were summoned like the rest, Utemot.”

  Cnaiür had met Xunnurit only five days earlier, shortly after arriving with his Utemot warriors. Their dislike had been mutual and immediate, like that of suitors for the same beauty. Xunnurit’s contempt, Cnaiür had no doubt, was rooted in the scandalous rumours of his father’s death long ago. The grounds of his own animosity, however, eluded him. Perhaps he’d simply matched disdain with disdain. Perhaps it was the silk trim of Xunnurit’s fleece tunic or the ingrown vanity of his smile. Hatred needed no reasons, if only because they were so many and so easily had.

  “We shouldn’t attack,” Cnaiür said bluntly. “This is juvenile foolishness.”

  Disapproval hung like musk in the morning air. The other chieftains scrutinized him, their faces guarded. Despite the rumours they had doubtless heard, Cnaiür’s flayed arms demanded a grudging deference. Not a man among them, Cnaiür knew, had murdered half as many as he.

  Xunnurit leaned forward and spat across the grasses—a gesture of disrespect. “Foolishness? The Nansur shit, piss, and poke asses on our hallowed land, Utemot. What would you have me do? Parlay? Capitulate and send Conphas tribute?”

  Cnaiür debated whether to discredit the man or to discredit his scheme. “No,” he replied, opting for wisdom instead of slander, “I would have us wait. We have Ikurei Conphas”—he raised a thick-fingered hand and clenched it into a fist—“trapped. His horses need rich fodder, ours do not. His men are accustomed to roofs, to pillows, to wine, and to the comforts of lax women, while ours sleep in their saddles and need only their horse’s blood for sustenance. Mark me, as the days pass, the fawn will begin sprinting through their hearts and the jackal through their bellies. They will fear and they will hunger. Their fortifications of earth and timber will smack more of captivity than safety. And soon, desperation will drive them to a ground of our choosing!”

  A low-throated rumble passed through the assembled chieftains, and Cnaiür glanced from face to weathered face. Some were young and eager to shed blood, but most possessed the sturdy wisdom of many campaigns—older faces, such as his own. They were men who had survived the many impatiences of youth and yet remained in the prime of their strength; they could see the wisdom of his words.

  But Xunnurit looked unimpressed. “Always the tactician, eh, Utemot? Tell me, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, if you entered your yaksh and found men assaulting your wives, what tactics would you adopt? Would you wait in ambush outside, where you’d be most certain of success? Would you wait until after they’d desecrated both hearth and womb?”

  Cnaiür sneered, noticing for the first time the two missing fingers on Xunnurit’s left hand. Could the fool even draw a bow? “The foot of the Hethantas is a far different thing than my yaksh, Xunnurit.”

  “Is it? Is this what the memorialists tell us?”

  It wasn’t so much the man’s cunning that shocked Cnaiür as the realization that he’d underestimated him.

  Xunnurit’s eyes flashed with triumph. “No. The memorialists say that battle is our hearth, earth our womb, and sky our yaksh. We’ve been violated, as surely as if Conphas had quickened our wives or cracked our hearthstone. Violated. Desecrated. Humiliated. We’re beyond measuring tactical advantages, Utemot.”

  “And what of our victory over the Fanim at Zirkirta?” Cnaiür asked. Most of the men present had been at Zirkirta eight years before, where he himself had struck down Hasjinnet, the Kianene general.

  “What of it?”

  “How long did the tribes fall back before the Kianene? How long did we bleed them before we broke their back?” He graced Xunnurit with a macabre smile, the one that so often reduced his wives to tears. The King-of-Tribes stiffened.

  “But that—”

  “Is a different thing, Xunnurit? How can a battle be like a yaksh and yet not be like another battle? At Zirkirta, we practised patience. We waited, and by doing so, we utterly destroyed a powerful foe.”

  “But it’s not simply a matter of waiting, Cnaiür,” a third voice called out. It was Oknai One-Eye, the chieftain of the powerful Munuäti tribes from the interior. “The question is one of how long we must wait. Soon the droughts begin, and those of us from the Steppe’s heart must drive our herds to summer pasture.”

  Numerous shouts followed the remark, as though this were the first sensible thing said.

  “Indeed,” Xunnurit added, rallied by this unsought support. “Conphas has come heavily laden, with a baggage train larger than his army. How long would you have us wait for the fawn and jackal to gnaw at their hearts and bellies? One month? Two? Even six?” He turned to the others and was rewarded by a swell of guttural assent.

  Cnaiür ran a hand over his scalp, sorted through the hostile faces surrounding him. He understood their worries because they were also his. An overlong absence possessed many perils. Neglected herds meant wolves, pestilence, even famine. If one added to this the threat of slave revolts, wayward wives, and for tribes on the Steppe’s northern frontier such as his own, Sranc, then the incentive for a hasty return became irresistible.

  He turned to Xunnurit, realizing the decision to attack was not something the man had foisted on the others. Even though they knew that haste was the curse of wisdom, they wanted to bring this war to a quick conclusion, far more so than they had at Zirkirta. But why?

  All eyes were on him. “Well?” Xunnurit asked.

  Had Ikurei Conphas intended this? It would be easy enough, he supposed, to learn the different demands the seasons placed on the People. Had Conphas deliberately chosen the weeks before the summer drought?

  The thought dizzied Cnaiür with its implications. Suddenly, everything he had witnessed and heard since joining the horde possessed different meaning: the buggery of their Scylvendi captives, the mocking embassies, even the positioning of their privies—all calculated to gall the People into attacking.

  “Why?” Cnaiür abruptly asked. “Why would Conphas bring so many supplies?”

  Xunnurit snorted. “Because this is the Steppe. There’s no forage.”

  “No. Because he expects a war of patience.”

  “Exactly!” Xunnurit exclaimed. “He intends to wait until hunger forces the tribes to disband. Which is why we must attack immediately!”

  “Disband?” Cnaiür cried, dismayed that his insight could be so easily perverted. “No! He intends to wait until hunger or pride forces the tribes to attack.”

  The audacity of the claim provoked shouts from the onlookers. Xunnurit laughed in the rueful manner of one who’d mistaken naïveté for wisdom. “You Utemot dwell far from the Empire,” he said, as though indulging a fool, “so perhaps ignorance of imperial politics is to be expected. How could you know that the stature of Ikurei Conphas grows while that of his uncle, the Emperor, falters? You speak as though Ikurei Conphas were sent here to conquer, when he’s been sent here to die!”

  “Do you jest?” Cnaiür cried in exasperation. “Have you looked at his host? Their elite cavalry, their Norsirai auxiliaries, well nigh every column in the Imperial Army, even the Emperor’s own Eothic Guard! They’ve stripped the Empire to assemble this expedition. Treaties must have been struck, fortunes of gold promised and spent. This is an army of conquest, not a funeral procession for—”

  “Ask the memorialists!” Xunnurit snapped. “Other emperors have sacrificed as much, if not more. Xerius would have to fool Conphas, would he not?”

  “Pfah! And you say the Utemot kn
ow nothing of the Empire! The Nansurium is a place besieged. She could ill afford to lose a fraction of such an army!”

  Xunnurit leaned farther forward in his saddle, raised his fist in a threatening manner. His brows pinched over glaring eyes. His nostrils flared. “Then what better reason to smash it now! Afterward, we shall sweep to the Great Sea like our fathers of yore! We shall pull down their temples, impregnate their daughters, cut down their sons!”

  To Cnaiür’s alarm, shouts of agreement rifled the morning air. He silenced them with a killing look. “Are you all dog-eyed drunks? What better reason to let the Nansur languish! What do you think Conphas would do if he were in our midst? What—”

  “Pick my sword from his ass!” someone cried out, prompting an explosion of hearty laughter.

  Cnaiür could smell it then, the good-humoured camaraderie that amounted to little more than a conspiracy to mock one and the same man. His lips twisted into a grimace. Always the same, no matter what his claim to arms or intellect. They’d measured him many years ago—and had found him wanting.

  But measure is unceasing . . .

  “No!” Cnaiür roared. “He’d laugh at you as you laugh at me! He’d say a dog must be known to be broken, and I know these dogs! Better than they know themselves!” A plaintive cast had crept into his tone and expression; he struggled to squelch it. “Listen. You must listen! Conphas has gambled on this very council—on our arrogance, on our . . . customary thoughts. He’s done everything in his power to provoke us! Don’t you see? We decide his genius on the field. Only we can make him a fool. And by doing the one thing that terrifies him, the one thing he’s done everything to prevent. We must wait! Wait for him to come to us!”

  Xunnurit had watched him intently, his eyes bright with gloating amusement. Now he smiled derisively. “Men call you Man-killing Cnaiür, speak of your prowess on the field, of your endless hunger for holy slaughter. But now”—he shook his head in a scolding manner—“where’s that hunger gone, Utemot? Should we now call you Time-killing Cnaiür?”

  More heart-gouging laughter, deep-throated and coarse, at once honest in the way of a simple people and yet bruised by an unsavoury glee, the sound of lesser men revelling in the degradation of one greater. Cnaiür’s ears buzzed. Earth and sky shrank, until the whole world became laughing, yellow-toothed faces. He could feel it stir within him, his second soul, the one that blotted the sun and painted the earth with blood. Their laughter faltered before his menace. His glare struck even the smirks from their faces.

  “Tomorrow,” Xunnurit declared, nervously yanking his roan toward the distant Nansur encampment, “we shall sacrifice an entire nation to the Dead-God. Tomorrow we put an empire to the knife!”

  Swaying silently upon wooden saddles, innumerable horsemen paced through grasses chill and grey with morning dew. Nearly eight years had passed since the Battle of Zirkirta, eight years since Cnaiür had last witnessed such a gathering of the People. Great congregations trailed their chieftains, enveloping slopes and heights nearly a mile distant. Screened by thickets of raised lances, hundreds of horsehide standards jutted from the masses, marking tribes and federations from across the Steppe.

  So many!

  Did Ikurei Conphas grasp what he’d done? The Scylvendi were fractious by nature, and aside from their ritual border raids on the Nansurium, they spent the majority of their time murdering one another. This penchant for feud and internecine warfare was the Empire’s greatest bulwark against their race, greater even than the sky-gutting Hethantas. By invading the Steppe, Conphas had welded the People together, and so had delivered the Empire to its greatest peril in a generation.

  What could prompt such a risk? For no apparent reason, Ikurei Xerius III had staked the Empire itself on his precocious nephew. What promises had Conphas made him? What circumstances had driven him?

  All was not as it seemed; of this, Cnaiür was certain. And yet, as he stared across fields of armoured horsemen, he could not help repenting his earlier misgivings. Everywhere he looked, he saw grim, warlike riders, pelts nailed to their circular shields, their horses caparisoned in skirts stitched with plundered Nansur and Kianene coins. Countless thousands of Scylvendi, made terrible by cruel seasons and never-ending war, now united as in the days of legend. What hope could Conphas possibly have?

  Nansur horns blared from beneath the mountains, startling man and horse alike. All eyes turned to the long ridge that obscured the valley. Cnaiür’s grey snorted and pranced, swishing the scalps that adorned his bridle.

  “Soon,” he muttered, stilling his horse’s romping head with a firm hand. “Soon the madness will break.”

  Cnaiür always remembered the hours before battle as unbearable, and because of this, he was always surprised whenever he actually endured them. There were moments when the enormity of what was about to happen seized him, left him stunned like one who’d just avoided a mortal fall. But such moments were fleeting. By and large the hours passed like any others, more anxious, perhaps, and punctuated by flashes of communal hate and awe, but otherwise as tedious as the rest. By and large he needed to remind himself of the insanity to come.

  Cnaiür was the first of his tribesmen to gain the summit of the ridge. Smouldering between two incisor-shaped mountains, the rising sun blinded them, and several moments passed before Cnaiür could discern the far-away lines of the Imperial Army. Phalanxes of infantry formed a great segmented band across the open ground between the river and the fortified Nansur encampment. Mounted skirmishers ranged the broken slopes before them, poised to harass any Scylvendi attempting to cross the Kiyuth. As though greeting their ancient foe, the Nansur horns pealed once again, shivering through the raw morning air. A mighty shout rose from the ranks, followed by the hollow drum of swords pounding shields.

  While the other tribes mustered along the ridge line, Cnaiür studied the Nansur, a hand raised against the sun. The fact that they occupied the middle ground rather than the east bank of the river did not surprise him, though he imagined Xunnurit and the others were now scrambling to alter their plans. He tried counting the ranks—the formations seemed extraordinarily deep—but had difficulty concentrating. The absurd magnitude of his circumstances weighed against him like something palpable. How could such things happen? How could whole nations—

  He lowered his head, rubbed the back of his neck, rehearsing the litany of self-recriminations that always consummated such shameful thoughts. In his soul’s eye, he saw his father, Skiötha, his face blackening as he suffocated in the muck.

  When he looked up, his thoughts were as vacant as his expression. Conphas. Ikurei Conphas was the focus of what was about to unfold, not Cnaiür urs Skiötha.

  A voice startled him: Bannut, his dead father’s brother.

  “Why are they deployed so close to their encampment?” The old warrior cleared his throat—a sound like a horse’s low-chested nicker. “You’d think they’d use the river to deny us our charge.”

  Cnaiür resumed his appraisal of the Imperial Army. The giddiness of imminent bloodshed floated through his limbs. “Because Conphas needs a decisive battle. He wants us to draw our lines on his side of the river. Deny us room to manoeuvre and force an all-or-nothing confrontation.”

  “Is he mad?”

  Bannut was right. Conphas was mad if he thought his men could prevail in a pitched battle. In desperation, the Kianene had made a similar bid at Zirkirta eight years before; they had purchased only disaster. The People did not break.

  A laugh surfaced through the mutter of his surrounding kinsmen. Cnaiür jerked his head around. At him? Did someone laugh at him?

  “No,” he replied distantly, watching profiles over Bannut’s shoulders. “Ikurei Conphas is not mad.”

  Bannut spat, a gesture meant, or so Cnaiür assumed, for the Nansur Exalt-General. “You speak as though you know him.”

  Cnaiür glared directly at the old man, trying to decipher the disgust in his tone. He did know Conphas, in a manner. While raiding the Empire
the previous autumn, he’d captured several Nansur soldiers, men who prated about the Exalt-General with an adoration that had captured Cnaiür’s interest. With hot coals and harsh questions, he’d learned much of Ikurei Conphas, of his brilliance in the Galeoth Wars, of his daring tactics and novel training regimens—enough to know he was different from any he’d ever met on the field. But this knowledge was wasted on old snakes such as Bannut, who had never forgiven him the murder of his father.

  “Ride to Xunnurit,” Cnaiür commanded, knowing full well the King-of-Tribes would have nothing to do with an Utemot messenger. “Find out what he intends.”

  Bannut was not fooled. “I’ll take Yursalka with me,” he said hoarsely. “He married one of Xunnurit’s daughters, the deformed one, just last spring. Perhaps the King-of-Tribes will remember that generosity.” Bannut spat one last time, as though to cement his meaning, and spurred into the surrounding Utemot.

  For a long time, Cnaiür sat desolate upon his horse, numbly watching bumblebees dart between the bobbing heads of purple clover just below him. The Nansur continued pounding their distant shields. The sun slowly gathered the valley in its hot clasp. Horses stamped in impatience.

  More horns rang across the interval, and the Nansur ceased their clamour. The rumble of his muttering kinsmen waxed, and a kindling rage crowded the grief from his breast. Always they spoke to one another and never to him; it was as though he were a dead man in their midst. He thought of all those he’d killed the first few years after his father’s death, all those Utemot who’d sought to wrest the chieftain’s White Yaksh from the dishonour of his name. Seven cousins, one uncle, and two brothers. Stubborn hate brimmed within him, a hate that ensured he would not yield, no matter how many indignities they heaped upon him, no matter how many whispers or guarded looks. He would murder all and any, foe and kinsmen alike, before he would yield.