. . . though he consorts with man, woman, and child, though he lays with beasts and makes a mockery of his seed, never shall he be as licentious as the philosopher, who lays with all things imaginable.
—INRI SEJENUS, SCHOLARS, 36, 21, THE TRACTATE
Early Spring, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, the Northern Jiünati Steppe
Leaving the Utemot encampment behind him, Cnaiür rode north across barren grasslands. He passed the herds of cattle, waving reluctantly at the distant horsemen—no more than armed children—who guarded them. The Utemot had become a thin people, not so different from the wandering tribes to the northeast that they drove away time and again. The disaster at Kiyuth had exacted a heavier toll on them than on many other tribes, and now their cousins to the south, the Kuöti and the Ennutil, raided their pastures at will. Even though Cnaiür had accomplished much with little in the ways of small tribal war, the Utemot, he knew, were very near extinction. Something as simple as another summer drought could doom them.
He crested balding hillocks, urged his mount through scrub and spring-swollen streams. The sun was white and distant and seemed to throw no shadows. The air smelled of winter’s retreat, of damp earth beneath thatched grasses. The Steppe spread before him, swept by silvery wind-chased waves. Halfway to the horizon, the barrows of his ancestors swelled from the turf. Cnaiür’s father was buried there, as were all the fathers of his line, back to the beginning.
Why had he come here? What purpose could such a solitary pilgrimage serve? No wonder his tribe thought him mad. He was a man who took counsel with the dead rather than the wise.
The unkempt silhouette of a vulture rose from the burial mounds, floated like a kite, then dipped back out of view. Several moments passed before the peculiarity of this struck Cnaiür. Something had died here—recently. Something unburied or unburned.
He urged his mount to a cautious trot, peering between the barrows. The wind numbed his face and tossed his hair into ribbons.
He found the first dead man a short distance from the nearest mound. Two black arrows, fired close enough to punch through the wire-knitted plates of his brigandine, jutted from his back. Cnaiür dismounted and scrutinized the surrounding turf, parting the grasses with palm and finger. He found tracks.
Sranc. Sranc had killed this man. He studied the barrows once again, searching the grasses. Listened. He could hear only wind and, periodically, the squabbling cries of distant vultures.
The dead man was unmutilated. The Sranc had not finished.
He rolled the corpse over with his boot; the arrows snapped with two dry cracks. The grey face gaped skyward, arched back in rigor, but the blue eyes had not sunken. The man was Norsirai—the blond hair told him that much. But who was he? Part of a band of raiders, outnumbered and pursued south by the Sranc? It had happened before.
Cnaiür grabbed his horse’s bridle, pulled it down to the grasses. He drew his sword, then keeping low, sprinted across the turf. Shortly, he found himself among the barrows . . .
Where he found the second dead man. This one had died facing his foe. A broken arrow protruded from the back of his left thigh. Wounded, forced to abandon the flight, then murdered in a manner common to the Sranc: gutted, then strangled with his own bowel. But aside from his gaping belly, Cnaiür could see no other wounds. He knelt and grabbed one of the corpse’s cold hands. He pinched the calluses. Too soft. Not raiders after all. At least not all of them. Who were these men? What outland fools—and from some city, no less—would risk the Sranc to travel to Scylvendi land?
A change in the wind revealed how close he’d drawn to the vultures. He dashed quickly to the left so that he might approach what had to be the greatest concentration of dead from behind one of the larger barrows. Halfway to the summit, he came across the first of the Sranc bodies, its neck partially severed. Like all dead Sranc, it was as rigid as stone, its skin chapped and purple-black. It lay curled like a dog, still clutching its bone bow. From its position and the bruised grasses, Cnaiür knew it had been struck on the summit of the barrow, hard enough to very nearly roll to the bottom.
He found the weapon that had killed it a short distance above. An iron axe, black, with a ring of human teeth set into a handle of leathered human skin. A Sranc killed by a Sranc weapon . . .
What had happened here?
Cnaiür suddenly found himself keenly aware that he crouched on the side of a barrow, in the midst of his dead forefathers. In part, he was outraged at the sacrilege, but he was more frightened by far. What could this mean?
His breath sharp beneath his breastbone, he crept to the summit. The vultures were congregated around the base of the adjacent barrow, hunched over their spoils, their backs rifled by the wind. A handful of jackdaws squabbled among them, skipping from face to face. Their scavenge matted the ground: the corpses of Sranc sprawled or huddled against one another, matting the circumference of the barrow, heaped in places, heads lolling from broken necks, faces nestled in the crotches of inert arms and legs. So many! Only the barrow’s apex was bald.
The last stand of a single man. An impossible stand.
The survivor sat cross-legged on the barrow summit, his forearms resting against his knees, his head bowed beneath the shining disc of the sun. The Steppe’s pale lines framed him.
No animal possesses senses as keen as those of vultures; within moments they began croaking in alarm, scooping the wind in great ragged wings. The survivor lifted his head, watching them take flight. Then, as though his senses were every bit as keen as a vulture’s, he turned to Cnaiür.
Cnaiür could discern very little of his face. Long, heavy-featured but aquiline. Blue eyes, perhaps, but that simply followed from his blond hair.
Yet with horror Cnaiür thought, I know this man . . .
He stood, walked toward the carnage, his limbs buoyant with disbelief. The figure regarded him impassively.
I know this man!
He picked his way through the dead Sranc, numbly realized that each of them had perished as a result of a single, unerring strike.
No . . . It can’t be. This can’t be.
The pitch of the ground seemed far steeper than it was. The Sranc at his feet seemed to howl soundlessly, warning him, beseeching him, as though the horror of the man on the summit above was enough to transcend the abyss between their races.
He paused several paces below the outlander. Warily, he raised his father’s sword before him, his scarred arms outstretched. At last, he dared look at the sitting man directly, his heart thundering with something beyond fear or rage . . .
It was him.
Bloodied, pale, but it was him. A nightmare made flesh.
“You . . .” Cnaiür whispered.
The man did not move but studied him passionlessly. Cnaiür saw blood welling like pitch from a hidden wound, blackening his grey tunic.
With the deranged certainty of one who’s dreamed a moment a thousand times, Cnaiür climbed five more steps, then placed the polished tip of his blade beneath the man’s chin. With it, he raised the impassive face to the sun. The lips . . .
Not him! Almost him . . .
“You are Dûnyain,” he said, his voice deep and cold.
The bright eyes regarded him, but there was absolutely nothing in the expression—no fear, no relief, neither recognition nor the lack of it. Then, like a flower sinking on a bruised stalk, the man slumped back against the turf.
Cnaiür’s heart hammered.
What does this mean?
Bewildered, the Chieftain of the Utemot looked across the thatched carcasses of the Sranc to the burial mounds of his line, the ancient earthen record of his blood. Then, returning his eyes to the unconscious figure before him, he suddenly felt the bones in the mound beneath his feet—curled in a fetal position, buried deep. And he realized . . .
He stood atop the summit of his father’s barrow.
Anissi. The first wife of his heart. In the darkness, she was a shadow, willowy and cool against his sunburned frame.
Her hair curled across his chest in patterns reminiscent of the strange writings he’d seen so many times in Nansur. Through the hide of the yaksh, the night rain sounded like an endless breath.
She shifted, drew her face from his shoulder to his arm. He was surprised. He’d thought her asleep. Anissi . . . How I love this peace between us.
Her voice was drowsy and young. “I asked him . . .”
Him. It troubled Cnaiür, hearing his wives refer to the outlander in this way—his way—as if they’d somehow penetrated his skull and practised thievery. Him. The son of Moënghus. The Dûnyain. Through rain and hide walls, Cnaiür could feel the itch of the man’s presence across the dark encampment—a terror from beyond the horizon.
“And what did he say?”
“He said the dead men you found were from Atrithau.”
Cnaiür had already determined as much. Aside from Sakarpus, Atrithau was the only city north of the Steppe—the only city of Men, anyway.
“Yes, but who were they?”
“He called them his followers.”
A pang of apprehension clutched his heart. Followers. He is the same . . . He possesses men the way his father once possessed—
“What does it matter,” Anissi asked, “the identity of dead men?”
“It matters.” Everything mattered when it came to the Dûnyain.
Since his discovery of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, one thought had tyrannized the movements of Cnaiür’s soul, Use the son to find the father. If this man followed Moënghus, then he knew where to find him.
Even now Cnaiür could see his own father, Skiötha, thrashing and kicking in icy mud at the feet of Moënghus. His throat crushed. A chieftain slain by an unarmed slave. The years had turned this image into a narcotic, into something Cnaiür obsessively revisited. But for some reason it was never quite the same. Details changed. Sometimes, rather than spitting at his father’s blackening face, Cnaiür would cradle it. Sometimes, rather than Skiötha dying at the feet of Moënghus, Moënghus would die at the feet of Cnaiür, son of Skiötha.
A life for a life. A father for a father. Vengeance. Wouldn’t this remedy the imbalance that had unhinged his heart?
Use the son to find the father. But could he risk such a thing? What if it happened again?
For an instant Cnaiür forgot how to breathe.
He’d counted only sixteen summers the year his cousin Okyati had ridden into camp with Anasûrimbor Moënghus. Okyati and his war party had taken the man from a band of Sranc travelling across Suskara. This in itself was enough to make the outlander an item of interest: few men survived such captivity. Okyati dragged the man to Skiötha’s yaksh and laughing harshly, said, “He’s fallen into kinder hands.”
Skiötha claimed Moënghus as his tribute and gave him to his first wife, Cnaiür’s birth mother, as a gift. “For the sons you have borne me,” Skiötha said. And Cnaiür thought, For me.
Throughout the transaction, Moënghus had simply watched, blue eyes glittering from a battered face. When his gaze momentarily settled on Skiötha’s son, Cnaiür sneered at him with adolescent contempt. The man was little more than a bundle of rags, pale skin, mud, and clotted blood—another broken outlander, less than an animal.
But this, Cnaiür now knew, was precisely what the man had wanted his captors to think. For a Dûnyain, even degradation was a potent tool—perhaps the most potent.
Afterward, Cnaiür would see the new slave from time to time, twisting tendon into string, curing hides, bearing sacks of dung for their fires, and the like. The man scurried the same as the others, moved with the same hollow-limbed haste. If Cnaiür noticed him at all it was because of the man’s provenance. There . . . there’s the one who survived the Sranc. Cnaiür would glare at him for a heartbeat before moving on. But how long had those dark eyes studied him afterward?
Several weeks passed before Moënghus actually spoke to him. The man chose his moment well: the night of Cnaiür’s return from the Rite-of-the-Spring-Wolves. Reeling from loss of blood, Cnaiür had staggered home through the darkness, the wolf ’s head bound to his girdle. He collapsed before the entrance of his mother’s yaksh, heaving sputum against the bare earth. Moënghus was the first to find him, the first to staunch his pulsing wounds.
“You’ve killed the wolf,” the slave said, drawing him up from the dust. The shadowy encampment swam about Moënghus’s face, and yet his glistening eyes seemed as fixed and immovable as the Nail of Heaven. In his anguish, Cnaiür found a shameful reprieve in those outland eyes—sanctuary.
Thrusting aside the man’s hands, he croaked, “But it didn’t happen as it should.”
Moënghus nodded. “You have killed the wolf.”
You have killed the wolf.
Those words. Those capturing words! Moënghus had seen his anguish, had uttered the only words that might balm his heart. Nothing had happened as it should have, and yet the outcome was proper. He had killed the wolf.
The following day, as Cnaiür recovered in the leathery gloom of his mother’s yaksh, Moënghus brought him a stew of wild onion and rabbit. After the steaming bowl had exchanged hands, the broken man looked up, raised his face from hunched shoulders. All the marks of his slavery—the timid stoop, the shallow breath, the fear-quickened eyes—fell away. The transformation was so abrupt, so complete, that for several moments Cnaiür could only stare at him in startled wonder.
But it was an outrage for a slave to look a warrior in the eye, so Cnaiür took up the slave-stick and beat him. The blue eyes were unsurprised and remained fixed on him the whole time, tugging at his own with their disturbing calm, as if forgiving him his . . . ignorance. Cnaiür fell short of truly punishing him, just as he fell short of the indignation that should have driven his stick.
The second time Moënghus dared look at him, Cnaiür beat him viciously—so viciously his mother chastised him afterward, accused him of wilfully damaging her property. The man was insolent, Cnaiür told her, but his heart was crimped by shame. Even then he had known that desperation rather than pious fury had fuelled his arm. Even then he’d known that Moënghus had stolen his heart.
Only years afterward would he understand how those beatings had bound him to the outlander. Violence between men fostered an unaccountable intimacy—Cnaiür had survived enough battlefields to understand that. By punishing Moënghus out of desperation, Cnaiür had demonstrated need. You must be my slave. You must belong to me! And by demonstrating need, he’d opened his heart, had allowed the serpent to enter.
The third time Moënghus matched his gaze, Cnaiür did not reach for his stick. Instead he asked: “Why? Why do you provoke me?”
“Because you, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, are more than your kinsmen. Because you alone can understand what I’ve to say.”
You alone.
More capturing words. What young man does not chafe in the shadow of his elders? What young man does not harbour secret resentments, pompous hopes?
“Speak.”
Moënghus spoke about many things over the months that followed, about how Men slumbered, about how the Logos, the way of intellect, was the only thing that could awaken them. But all of it was a blur to Cnaiür now. Of all their secret transactions, he remembered only the first with any clarity. But then inaugural sins always burned the brightest. Like beacons.
“When the warriors raid the Empire across the mountains,” Moënghus said, “they always use the same trails, do they not?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“But why?”
Cnaiür shrugged. “Because the trails are mountain passes. There’s no other way to cross into the Empire.”
“And when the warriors gather to raid their neighbours’ pastures, they always use the same trails, do they not?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they ride across open ground. The ways of crossing the Steppe are without number.”
“Exactly!” Moënghus exclaimed. “And is not every task like a journey? Every accompli
shment a destination? Every hunger a point of departure?”
“I suppose . . . The memorialists say as much.”
“Then the memorialists are wise.”
“Make your point, slave.”
Laughter, flawless in its coarse Scylvendi cadences—the laugh of a great warrior. Even then Moënghus had known what poses to strike. “Do you see? You grow impatient because you think the path I take too convoluted. Even words are like journeys!”
“So?”
“So if all things men do are journeys, I ask you, why are the ways of the Scylvendi, the customs that bind what men do, like mountain passes? Why do they ride the same trails, over and over again, when the ways to their destination are without number?”
For some reason, this question thrilled Cnaiür. The words were so audacious he felt bold for simply hearing them, and so compelling he felt at once exhilarated and aghast, as though they had touched a place that ached to be touched all the more because it was forbidden.
The ways of the People, he’d been told, were as immutable and as sacred as the ways of the outlanders were fickle and degenerate. But why? Weren’t these ways simply different trails used to reach similar destinations? What made the Scylvendi way the only way, the only track an upright man might follow? And how could this be when the trackless Steppe dwelt, as the memorialists said, in all things Scylvendi?
For the first time Cnaiür saw his people through the eyes of an outsider. How strange it all seemed! The hilarity of skin dyes made from menstrual blood. The uselessness of the prohibitions against bedding virgins unwitnessed, against the right-handed butchering of cattle, against defecating in the presence of horses. Even the ritual scars on their arms, their swazond, seemed flimsy and peculiar, more a mad vanity than a hallowed sign.
For the first time he had truly asked why. As a child he’d been prone to question, so much so that any question he asked his mother, no matter how practical, had occasioned complaints and reproofs—expressions, he knew, of an old maternal grudge against a gallingly precocious child. But the questions of children were only accidentally profound. Children questioned as much to be rebuffed as to be answered, as they must in order to learn which questions were permissible and which were not. To truly ask why, however, was to move beyond all permission.
The Darkness That Comes Before Page 34