The Darkness that Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker

Author:R. Scott Bakker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
Published: 2011-03-02T18:00:55.064000+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Momemn

Reason, Ajencis writes, is the capacity to overcome unprecedented obstacles in the gratification of desire. What distinguishes man from beasts is man’s capacity to overcome infinite obstacles through reason.

But Ajencis has confused the accidental for the essential. Prior to the capacity to overcome infinite obstacles is the capacity to confront them. What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays.

—EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

Late Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Momemn

Prince Nersei Proyas of Conriya stumbled then steadied himself as his men rowed the boat through the breakers. He’d resolved to come to the beaches of the Nansurium standing, but the Meneanor, which had resolved to pound the coasts until all the world was sea, was making things difficult. Twice now, frothing walls of surf had almost tossed him overboard, and he found himself debating the wisdom of his resolution. He scanned the sand-barren shoreline, saw that only the standard of Attrempus occupied the immediate beach, and decided that arriving dry and sitting was far better than arriving half-drowned.

At last!

But as profoundly as this thought moved him, it was accompanied by a certain apprehension. He’d been the first to kiss Maithanet’s knee at Sumna, and now, he was certain, he would be the last of the Great Names to join the Holy War.

Politics, he thought sourly. It was not, as the philosopher Ajencis had written, the negotiation of advantage within communities of men; it was more an absurd auction than an exercise in oratory. One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded. One sullied himself in order to be cleansed.

Proyas had kissed Maithanet’s knee, had committed himself to the course that faith and principle demanded of him. The God himself had sanctioned this course! But from the outset it had been mired in politics: the endless wrangling with the King, his father; the infuriating delays involved in assembling the fleet; the innumerable concessions, contracts, pre-emptive strikes, retaliatory strikes, flatteries, and threats. A soul sold, it seemed, in order to be saved.

Has this been your test? Have you found me wanting?

Even the voyage at sea had been a trial. Always fickle, the Meneanor was especially tempestuous in winter. Struck by a storm off the coasts of Cironj and driven out of the Meneanor altogether. Forced by unfavourable winds to venture dangerously close to heathen coasts—at one point they had been mere days from Shimeh itself, or so his fool navigator had told him, as though the irony would thrill rather than gall him. Then the second storm as they laboriously tacked north, the one that had scattered the fleet and robbed more than five hundred men of their lives. At every turn it seemed something must conspire against him. If not men then the elements, and if not the elements then men. Even his dreams had tormented him: that the Holy War had already marched; that he would arrive, share a bowl of wine with the Emperor, then be told to go home.

Perhaps he should have expected this.

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