Gates of Stone

by Angus Macallan

  “You awake, richboy?” whispered a voice beside him. He had never thought that hearing her voice could bring him so much joy. It suddenly anchored him in a space and time. He was alive. This was real.

  “Where are we?” he said, his voice rough from lack of use. He realized he was very thirsty.

  “Keep it down, will you? We’re in a condemned holding cell. Southern district of Sukatan.” And then as an afterthought, Ketut said, “Underground.”

  “What? Why?” he said, too loudly.

  Suddenly the cell was filled with a blinding light. The roof lifted open, a trapdoor, and Jun saw a dark man shape looming above.

  “No noise in the cell—unless you want the boiling water again.”

  Ketut’s fingers gripped his upper arm, hard as claws. “Hold your tongue,” she breathed in his ear. In the sudden blinding light, Jun saw that there were a dozen men and women, of all shapes and sizes but all filthy, villainous, in rags, crammed into a small space the size of one of his private bathing pools in the Watergarden, and not much deeper. Six paces wide, by four. Seated, a man had only inches to spare before his head touched the low ceiling.

  Above Jun’s head, the intense whiteness of the sky. A second black figure came to join the first. There was a mumble of words and a laugh and then a trickle of liquid arced out of the glare and began to spatter down over Jun’s head and chest. He caught a waft of the familiar smell, and was stricken immobile by his sudden and quite overwhelming disgust. Every other person in the cell, including Ketut beside him, struggled to get out of the way of the stream, some yelping in terror.

  “Only piss this time, you filthy animals. Any more noise and I’ll bring the kettle.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Jun’s mind could not quite grasp that he had just been urinated on. For several long moments, once more plunged into blackness by the dropping of the trapdoor, he thought he must be in some terrible nightmare from which he would shortly awake. But after a little time the pressure from his own bladder assured him that this was all quite real. He felt the damp, spongy earth beneath his buttocks and the soles of his feet and realized that there was one slender consolation to having just been pissed on: with a long sigh of relief, he released his own bladder and he let the hot stream flow down the inside of his thigh.

  Hours passed, and through a crack in the boards of the trapdoor above his head Jun could see that the day was ending. Ketut pressed her lips very close to his left ear and in short sentences, spoken at an almost imperceptible level of whisper, she told him what had befallen the two of them since the exhibiting of the Dragon’s Eye in the Sukatan Arena.

  The two of them had been seized by the Palace Guards—Jun unconscious after the mace blow to the back of his head. Semar had disappeared, melted into the crowds and, while the guards had spent most of an hour searching for him, he was long gone. They had both been bound and Ketut had been gagged and they had been dragged to a small chamber behind the Arena where the Raja and his honored guest—Mangku—had looked them over. The sorcerer said nothing during the whole interview. He seemed preoccupied, staring into space or down at his interlinked hands and only once looking at Jun and smiling oddly.

  Ketut had told the Raja who they were and had insisted that Jun was his cousin, a member of his own family, but the Raja had said that he did not believe them, he had never before set eyes on Jun—who was slumped in an unconscious heap. They were imposters, tricksters out to gull the Raja with their lies. Furthermore, they were troublemakers, rabble-rousers who had tried to start a riot among the people of Sukatan.

  The Raja declared that he was minded to be generous. Despite their lies and their foul crimes against himself and his people, he would not condemn them to death, as they richly deserved. Instead, he sentenced them to only five years’ servitude in the Konda Pali mines.

  Jun flinched at that. He knew what it meant: it was equivalent to a death sentence only longer, slower and more painful. He had heard only a little of the mines, and save that they provided a steady stream of gold fingers for the Rajas of Sukatan, he’d heard nothing good. The slaves who worked underground in the heat and squalor were the most unfortunate wretches in the Laut Besar. Jun recalled a visitor to the Watergarden saying that the life expectancy of a mine slave was just six months.

  “It must be a mistake,” he whispered in Ketut’s ear. “My cousin would not treat me like that.”

  “No mistake,” she hissed back. “He looked right in your stupid face and said he did not know you. Now be quiet or they will scald us with the kettle.”

  “I will tell them who I am . . .” began Jun.

  “Quiet. Just sit still and keep your mouth shut.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In the gray morning, after a long, hellish and, for Jun, sleepless night, the trapdoor was pulled open and first Ketut and then Jun and then all the rest of the prisoners were pulled out of the cell and lined up against a dirty whitewashed wall. They were in a dingy courtyard and watched over by a score of spear-armed Palace Guards. The two slave-masters, both shambling orangutan-like men, astoundingly alike, with straggling reddish beards but no mustaches, long, powerful arms and legs and coiled leather whips over their shoulders, splashed the prisoners with several buckets of dirty water and fed them salty rice porridge and foul black tea from huge, dirt-crusted cauldrons.

  As they ate and drank the filthy provender, it became evident that they were now allowed to talk, and Jun was surprised to see Ketut strike up a conversation with a tall, broad-shouldered, well-muscled prisoner with a broad flat nose, dark angry eyes, dark almost-black skin and tightly cropped curly black hair. There were long pink scars that looked like old sword cuts on the prisoner’s shoulders. And other fresher cicatrices that looked like bite marks from a large animal. It took Jun a few moments to realize that she was a woman. Her chest was a bulging slab of muscle. Her carriage spear-straight and proud. A female warrior, then, fallen on hard times.

  There was no sign of Semar.

  Jun wondered how he should broach the subject of his identity to the slave-masters: he did not want to be punished for insolence, but enough was enough. He was a prince of Taman, shortly to be the Son of Heaven. He was blood of the Wukarta. They could not hold him a prisoner here as if he were some lowborn Dewa trull. He had hoped to choose his moment carefully but when the slave-masters began to roughly harness the prisoners together, two by two, he knew he had to speak.

  “Excuse me, good sirs,” he said. The slave-masters ignored him: they were strapping the prisoners into wooden contraptions made of a stout log with two Y-shaped end pieces. One prisoner’s head went into one Y-shape and was secured there with leather straps; another head went into a similar shape on the far side of the log. Thus, two prisoners were yoked together like oxen, with a yard of thick wood separating their two bound heads. Their arms were bound to the yoke pole but their legs were free; even so, they could only move with the cooperation of their yoke mate.

  “Excuse me,” said Jun again, louder this time. He saw that Ketut had broken off her conversation with the huge, scarred black warrior and was glaring at him. She made the universal sign for silence, a finger held to her lips. He ignored her.

  “Good sir, I hope you will forgive me for addressing you,” he said as one of the slave-masters shambled by him, “but I believe that a terrible mistake has been made. You could not possibly know, of course, but I am Prince Arjun Wukarta . . .”

  The slave-master stopped and turned to look at him. He slid the coiled whip off his shoulder. “What you say, pretty boy?”

  “There has been a dreadful mistake, sir, although I am quite sure you are not to blame. But I am of royal blood; indeed I am a cousin of your own Raja Widojo . . .”

  The first lash curled around his ribs in an explosion of agony. He screamed and fell to his knees. The whip struck again, slicing into his
shoulder. He gave a bubbling gasp of shock.

  “What’s ’at, pretty boy? I didn’t hear you,” said the slave-master, drawing back his long, hairy arm once more. But Jun could not speak for the pain. He saw Ketut start to get to her feet, perhaps to come to his aid, but the big black warrior gripped her right shoulder and forced her back down, speaking urgently into her ear.

  The whip struck again, splitting Jun’s skin, blood flicking across the dingy courtyard with the backstroke. He found himself curled in a tight ball as the whip slashed agonizingly across his back and shoulders, each blow like a line of fresh fire. Mercifully, it did not last long. After a half dozen or so blows the slave-master lost interest and moved on to continue his work. The pain for Jun was overwhelming—a pulsing mass of fire throughout his whole body. But worse yet was the shock. He had never been treated like this before. Never imagined that he could be so abused. Ketut came over to him, with a dish of water and some whispered words—not of comfort but of pure scorn: “Idiot. Imbecile. Why can’t you ever just do what you’re told?”

  A half hour later, Jun was forced to his feet; his head was roughly shoved into the Y-shaped wooden harness and lashed into place. His hands were tied to the bar of wood between him and the prisoner who occupied the other half of his yoke. He was still dizzy from his whipping but he managed to clear his sight long enough to look at his partner—and saw an ugly, grinning yellow face on a bull neck, small dark eyes and a wide slack mouth. The man was roughly the same height as Jun but twenty years older and twice his weight, thick in the chest and shoulder and very heavy in the belly. A line of coarse black hair ran across his shoulders and down the muscled valley of his back.

  “Mm-mm-mee,” said the man, running a purple tongue lasciviously across his brown fleshy lips, “aren’t you the tastiest little morsel. I bet you clean up nice and juicy . . . Mm-mm-mee, yes, so very, very delicious. Oh yes. Mmmmm. I likes you, boy, I does. Kromo likes you very much.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The sound of hard fists hitting bare flesh came so frequently that it sounded like applause. But the crowd of Ostrakan sailors and off-duty Legionnaires that surrounded the rope circle was largely silent. Only the occasional shout of “Come on, Toma!” or “Hit him, Birku!” rose above the meaty impacts as the two nautical pugilists inside the rope, both naked to the waist, pummeled each other without fear or mercy.

  Katerina sat on a canvas stool on a little dais by the starboard rail and watched the fighters labor. She felt nothing much for either of the men, except perhaps a vague appreciation of their courage and hardiness coupled with a growing sense of boredom, as each smashed blows as fast as he could into his opponent’s bruised body. An occasional fist would strike a face, and the fighter who received it might step back with a grunt of pain, before the mutual, ritual pounding began again.

  It was so much cruder than the previous bouts she had seen on this day of games and sport, a mere display of strength and endurance. She had watched with great enjoyment as two of her Niho knights had given a demonstration of their sword-art with bamboo practice katanas—a series of lightning strikes and lunges, almost faster than the eye could see, which were parried and blocked with equal skill until one of the knights had been rapped on the shoulder of his black-lacquered armor, conceded defeat and bowed to his partner before retiring. Even the three wrestling matches between Legionnaires had shown more grace than this brutal bare-knuckle onslaught. But she knew she was obliged to watch attentively and show a feigned pleasure as the Ostrakan sailors and gunners of the three ships’ companies battled it out with their fists. She assumed that both pugilists had dulled their senses with obat before the match but it could be merely exhaustion or the pain breaking through the fug of the drug—for the blows were coming more slowly now, both men, blood-streaked, bruised, groggy and weaving a little before delivering the next powerfully swung fist.

  She looked at the crowd and saw that whatever she felt about this savage brawl, the throng around the circle of rope was deeply appreciative of the spectacle. Every man was rapt, some clenching their own fists and aping the blows of their champions. They deserved this day of entertainment. After three unbroken weeks of tedious sailing, the three ships forging through the vast empty ocean with only the occasional squall to break the monotony, the men were due some recreation. She made a mental note to double the ration of marak allocated at mess tonight. And they might slaughter some of the pigs that were penned in the hold, too. A little celebration would raise their spirits at this stage in the voyage. After all, they were approximately halfway there; in three more weeks, two if they were lucky with the prevailing winds, they would reach their destination.

  Two men in the crowd, however, did not seem to be as engaged as the rest. A huge, redheaded fellow, who looked like he might himself have been a suitable candidate for the ring, kept sliding glances over at her. And his companion, a shorter, fair-haired fellow in a bulky canvas jacket, despite the heat of the day, was also showing an unusual interest.

  The two men—their coloring marking them out as possessing an ancestry from far to the north of Ostraka—intrigued her. They clearly wished to communicate with her in some manner and yet perhaps lacked the confidence to approach the dais. That, even more than the light shade of their hair, made them stand out. Katerina had become used to the general indifference of her Ostrakan subjects—indeed she rather enjoyed it. The Niho almost never spoke. And the Legionnaires were far too well disciplined to gawp openly at her. The only conversation she had was with her two maids Sara and Ilana—and their prattle was often irksomely girlish. She liked silence—it allowed her to think. But these two, these two big Northron men clearly had something they wished to say to her. What could it be?

  She glanced down at Ari Yoritomo, who was standing to her left at the foot of the dais, clad in a light silk kimono and the bare minimum of armor, his hand as ever on the handle of his katana. Ari was watching the two men, too. He shifted his stance slightly, moving a little closer to her. There were three other Niho standing around the deck watching the fight.

  There was a huge roar from the crowd. One of the fighters—a man named Birku, she had been told—had landed a good, solid belt on his opponent’s jaw and the other man was down on his knees on the wooden deck, his head lolling between his shoulder blades, a stream of red drool running from his mouth. He had, she knew, a count of twenty heartbeats to climb back onto his feet and put the big toe of his right foot on the chalk line drawn on the deck. Otherwise, he was done and the fight was over.

  The crowd shouted words of encouragement or jeers of derision. She could see bright coins changing hands among its members as bets were placed. As the crowd chanted out the numbers of the count, the downed pugilist climbed awkwardly to his feet, swaying, staggering, and tried to come up to the chalk line. Katerina could see that both his eyes were nearly closed by bruising, his face and body red-purple, puffy and blotched. The man had only just managed to come up to the line, placed his bare foot just so, when his opponent smashed another hard right directly into his face. The blow lifted him off his feet and slammed him down onto his back on the wooden deck. This time he did not move.

  The cheering of the crowd was deafening and, as one of the gun captains who had been acting as referee raised the victor’s hand, Katerina rose herself and began to clap politely. A space was cleared and the triumphant pugilist—almost as battered, bloody and bruised as his still-unconscious opponent—was led forward to the dais to receive a slim purse of golden crowns and a few words of praise from Katerina.

  As she made the required noises of approval to the battered, swaying hulk of a man before her dais, complimenting him on his exceptional skill and valor, she saw that the two fair-haired men had drawn closer to the dais. The big redhead was only a pace from Ari, who was now watching the huge pugilist receive his reward with a wary eye.

  Then it happened.

  The big redhead lunged at Ari, wrapping hi
s long, muscled arms around the Niho’s chest, pinning the knight’s limbs to his sides. At exactly the same time, the smaller blond man swept open his bulky jacket to reveal several rows of small gray plump canvas bags strapped around his middle like a girdle and a pair of what looked like pistols attached one on each side. In a horrible instant of clarity, Katerina saw that they were not full pistols, just the handles, cocks and firing locks of two cut-down weapons. The barrels were entirely missing; and furthermore the man did not attempt to draw them. Leaving them at his sides, using both thumbs he merely pulled the cocks on the pistol locks back to full, while his fingers slid into the trigger guards.

  Katerina was frozen. She knew exactly what this meant—she had read about this tactic in The Craft of Combat—the man was planning to blow himself, and her, into a thousand pieces. The ranks of gray bags around his waist were filled with gunpowder and loose musket balls, and the half pistols were the mechanism for firing them.

  She knew all this and yet she could not move.

  Ari, however, was not so inhibited. His pale forehead flashed forward, cracking into the big red face of the man pinning him, smashing the bridge of his nose and loosening the fellow’s grip. Ari then sank a two-knuckle punch into the man’s solar plexus, and plunged an open hand, stiff-fingered into his throat, crushing his larynx with a surprisingly loud pop and dropping the huge redhead to the floor.