Gates of Stone

by Angus Macallan

  At the urging of the white warriors, the young man put the blowpipe to his lips and—ffft—a dart flew across the space to the gralloching frame, where a man-sized log of palm tree was dangling as a target. There was no sign of Sergeant Kishan. The young man had done well; the dart was now sticking out from the center of the log, and the Hantu Harimau were congratulating him loudly, cheering, slapping his back.

  On the far side of the open space he saw that the little old man was sitting in front of Patka Du’s hut, in the same place where Farhan had been given the test the day before and once again the headman was with him. However, the strange old fellow had been given the carved stool to sit upon and Patka Du now knelt before him on the mat in a position of deep reverence, head lowered. The old man spotted him and gave him a cheery wave, clearly calling him over. Farhan walked across the dusty earth, still almost unable to shake the idea that he might be in a dream, and at the old man’s urging he sat down. To Farhan’s surprise, the old man addressed him in strongly accented but perfectly serviceable Indujah. And at the sound of his own language, Farhan was almost overwhelmed by the urge to weep.

  “It is very important, friend, that you do as I tell you,” said the old man. “I use your language so that you may understand but that he may not. Unimaginable horrors await us all if you do not do exactly as I say. Can you understand me?”

  Farhan nodded. “Good,” said the old man. “First, smile—smile and bow to me as if I was your most revered grandfather. You must treat me with the utmost respect at all times until we are out of this mess. If you disrespect me, or shout out, or complain about how you have been treated—you and all your companions will be lost. We stand on a knife-edge here. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand,” said Farhan, and he went down into a deep obeisance, knocking his forehead three times on the mat before him. Then he smiled lovingly at the old man. It wasn’t hard. This wrinkled little fellow was offering him life for the price of a grin.

  “This headman tells me that you have a seagoing ship, and a couple of hundred well-armed companions in a fort not far from here. Is that true?”

  “It’s true; we have men and a ship but it cannot put to sea. It is beached and has a very large hole in the side. But who are you?”

  “Smile, smile all the time. And remember—you are speaking now to a most revered old gentleman. Think of me as someone as near a divine personage as is possible to get in human form—I’m nothing of the kind, of course, just a humble old priest—but can you do that for me?”

  Farhan smiled and made another low bow.

  “My name is Semar and—well, I’ll introduce you to my friends later. For now just tell me two things, and I must ask you to be as honest and accurate as you can: first, how long would it take to make the ship seaworthy, and second, if you were free to do so, would you be willing to take me and my companions with you to Istana Kush, if we were to extricate you from this present situation?”

  “That’s where we are heading anyway—but I believe we would be most willing to take you almost anywhere you wish if you can get us all out of this hellish place. I think, though, that it will take us at least two weeks to mend the ship.”

  “Two weeks, well, I suppose it can’t be helped. We accept. Thank you, the bargain is struck. Now bow and withdraw to your hut. You will not be molested. Wait there till I call for you. We should have you back with your companions in the fort by nightfall. Oh, one other thing, I would advise you strongly not to accept any food, particularly meat from these people. But I think perhaps that you know that already.”

  Farhan smiled, a little more grimly this time. But he knocked his head three times on the matting, got up shakily and, refusing to even look at the skinny monster Patka Du, he went back to his hut. But, as he crossed the empty space at the center of the village, in his heart, in his private and most secret heart, he was singing a half-remembered schoolboy paean to the great God Vharkash the Harvester.

  CHAPTER 35

  Jun rubbed the oiled cloth gently over the buffalo-horn-and-bamboo recurved bow that he held in his lap. He had found himself a comfortable niche in the waist of the Mongoose, under the port rail and on a mound of old sacking, and over the past few days he had made it his personal territory. The bow had survived the rigors of the escape through the jungle pursued by the Mbaru, and had shot well at the fight at the Temple of Burunya, but now he was worried about the cords. He had only two left and the sea air was bad for them; it made them swell and soften. He worried that they might be saggy and useless if it came to a fight. Not that there was much danger that he would be called on to do battle out here in the empty vastness of the Laut Besar.

  Moreover, the ship was clearly a powerful war machine, one that made a joke of a single man with a bow and arrows, and he had been awed and slightly deafened three days ago when the captain had given a demonstration of the fourteen cannon that she carried, firing broadsides and individual shots at a pair of empty pork barrels that had been heaved over the sides and used as targets for the enthusiastic Buginese crew. The cannon were cheerfully and briskly served and even fairly accurate and the pork barrels had been duly blown to matchwood. However, and Jun was by no means an expert, the ship seemed to be moving sluggishly in the water; her hastily patched hull—completed in less than ten days by the sailormen and the Dokra—made her run unevenly in the water. The water flowed more smoothly on the less damaged side, which made her continually veer off her course, and this had to be continually and carefully compensated for by the two tillermen on the big wheel on the quarterdeck. Nevertheless, she swam bravely through the dark blue water and, while the pumps still had to be manned for several hours each day, after an initial period of nervousness, Jun was confident that the Mongoose would bear him across the Laut Besar to Istana Kush without sinking.

  Jun was not entirely sure what had taken place when they met the Hantu Harimau. But they had been treated like Gods incarnate by these strange, white-caked warriors when they had arrived at their village, borne there on the backs of the four Ghost Tigers. Indeed, that whole episode had a rather foggy, fantasy-like quality.

  His shock in discovering that Ghost Tigers really existed had been profound; and that they still guarded the ancient Mother Temple; and that they had responded to the call of Semar, once the High Priest of that sacred place. He was also profoundly grateful that they had saved them from the Mbaru. And when these great beasts, who spoke in grunts and coughs that only Semar could understand, had carried them with swiftness and silence through the jungle for a night and a day to the village—more than twenty leagues, he calculated—he had been both profoundly terrified and exhilarated. And the reception there by the white-painted tribesmen, who seemed to revere Semar as some sort of deity, had been quite marvelous. Jun had not been treated with so much respect since . . . well, not even in his days in the Watergarden. He had reveled in it. A little guiltily, at first, and then with a feeling of homecoming. He was a royal prince once more.

  He grasped that Semar had persuaded the Hantu Harimau, who had been at odds with the men of the Mongoose, that they must cease hostilities and leave the incomers unmolested while they repaired their ship. He also knew that these people had irregular, even revolting, dietary habits—the eating of human flesh. But he could not truly hate the simple people who had made him feel so welcome, so honored and even perhaps so loved.

  They had gathered, the whole chattering, laughing tribe, to see them off when the Mongoose was finally launched, bedecking Semar, Jun, Ketut and Tenga with wreaths of flowers, calling out blessings and singing ancient hymns to Vharkash.

  As they chanted their farewells, and begged Semar to visit again soon, Jun could not help but notice that Captain Lodi and the whole crew of the Mongoose had been in a most unseemly, almost discourteous, hurry to depart.

  The plump merchant fellow, Farhan he was called, seemed to have been most affected by his contact with the Hantu Ha
rimau. He was now refusing to eat any kind of meat at all aboard the ship and had visibly lost weight even in the few weeks that Jun had known him. Yet he seemed to be a likable, intelligent man. Well mannered, cultured but a little distant and cool and with an air of deep, indefinable sadness.

  This Farhan was now on the quarterdeck talking with the captain of the ship, Cyrus Lodi, and the fat Indujah lady in the garish sari who seemed to be the captain’s mother or possibly his aunt. At the other end of the ship, Semar and Ketut were sitting on the prow, facing each other in silent contemplation, the wind blowing the old man’s hair out in a fluttering stream behind him. They were speaking to each other silently, Jun realized; part of a long conversation they had been having ever since they had left Taman.

  Ketut had now mostly recovered from the musket ball that she had taken at the Temple of Burunya. But it had been a close-run affair: she had barely been conscious for most of the past two and a half weeks and Tenga had attended to her for hours every day, washing her, talking to her, trickling thin soup into her mouth, cleaning up her shameful evacuations.

  Semar had removed the musket ball in a short, bloody operation in the bamboo fort and treated her injury with many poultices and prayers. Now the wound was nearly healed and a raw, pink, star-shaped scar adorned her skinny chest, above the band of cloth she wore over her small breasts. Jun had visited her only once in her sick berth on the ship, finding himself embarrassed by her weakness and revolted by the all-pervading smell of blood, shit and pus in the small cabin. He had sat with her for an hour or two, allowing Tenga to get some much-needed sleep, and Ketut had surprised him by waking suddenly, seizing his arm, pulling his face close to her blazing eyes, and saying, “You must swear to look after Tenga if I die.”

  Jun had mumbled something about her inevitable recovery, only a matter of time and rest. But Ketut had gripped him harder, surprisingly painfully, in fact, and extracted his solemn promise. “When this is all over, she can come and live in Taman with us, if she chooses to,” Jun said. “She would make a good War-Master, I think.”

  Ketut had smiled then. “She says you did very well with your bow, richboy, at the Temple of Burunya. Killed a bear-dog all on your own.”

  Jun had preened a little until Ketut added, “I’m glad there is something you can do well.” And she closed her eyes and sank back into her blankets.

  As Jun watched the recovered girl and the old man in the prow of the ship, Semar lifted his hand and placed his palm over the scar on Ketut’s chest. It was part of the healing process, he assumed. Neither of them moved or spoke but Jun thought he sensed something invisible passing between them, like a shimmer of heat in the air above a hot rock.

  “Can you spare me some of that sweet oil?” said Tenga.

  Jun looked up to see the tall Ziran Atari warrior looming over him. She held a Buginese long-hafted boarding ax in her big hands, a vicious-looking weapon with a broad blade on one side of the shaft and a curved spike on the other. The top of the haft was mounted with a spear-like prong.

  “Help yourself,” said Jun, nudging the oil pot toward her with a finger. Tenga folded herself on the deck a half pace away from Jun, and reached for the pot. Pulling a rag from her loincloth, the only clothing she wore, she began to clean the weapon.

  “Rust,” she muttered. “Iron is good, better than good, but rust is an evil red demon.”

  Jun watched her in silence for a while. She was big, clumsy and ugly, and covered in scars—her bear-dog-savaged shoulder now capped with a thick, dried scab. She was a savage brute, in truth, not the sort of person that he would have even glanced at in Taman, let alone sat down with in this comradely way, but he realized that he liked her. The fight at the temple had forged a bond between them. He respected her courage, envied her ferocity, and was simply awed by her willingness to die for her friend Ketut. Perhaps for him, too. She would make a very good War-Master. And she, it seemed, had not found him wanting in either skill or spine when battle showed its ugly face.

  Tenga lifted the ax and examined the play of sunlight on its oiled blade.

  “They tell me we will reach this place, the Gates of Stone, tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Jun. “We should be docked at the grand harbor of Istana Kush by noon, wind and tide permitting, or so the captain says.”

  “You been there before?”

  “No. But I’ve heard it’s an impressive fortress.”

  “You think your daddy’s old sword is there?”

  Jun said nothing for a moment. He knew Tenga had been told of their mission but it still made him feel a little uncomfortable to hear the thousand-year-old Kris of Wukarta Khodam, the sacred blade of his ancestors, described as “daddy’s old sword.”

  “I don’t know. But we should be able to get word of Mangku there. Semar said he was heading for the Sumbu coast and in Istana Kush the Indujah Federation spy services pride themselves on knowing about every little thing that moves in their waters.”

  Tenga grunted something unintelligible.

  “What will you do when you get there, Tenga? Take another ship back home to Ziran Atar? Or will you stay with us?”

  “I go where Tut goes.”

  Jun frowned at her. “Why?”

  “I belong to her now; she belongs to me.”

  “Do you”—Jun fumbled with the word, the whole idea—“do you love her?”

  Tenga looked directly into his face, her own expressionless. “She is so tiny, so weak. She must have someone to look after her in this world. That someone is me.”

  Jun found himself embarrassed by this declaration. Yet his own feelings for Ketut had mellowed in recent days and he realized that now he felt a certain warmth for her, too, despite her perpetual disrespect for him and her general spikiness of manner. He realized that he almost never thought of her merely as a Dewa now. She was one, of course, would always be one, and back in Taman, that stain could not easily be ignored. But, if he examined his feelings honestly, he had to admit that he felt a brotherly affection for her.

  “If Tut goes with you to find this wizard, I will come, too. I’ll help you. Maybe I will cut his head off for you!” Tenga grinned and shook the big, shiny ax under his nose.

  * * *

  • • •

  When they opened the bay of Istana Kush the next morning, turning past the Grand Mole, which jutted far out into the sea, and gliding into the huge harbor, which was packed with shipping of all kinds, Jun was once again reminded of how small and insignificant his homeland was compared with the might and wealth displayed here. This place was larger, even, than Sukatan, and a good deal better ordered and more martial.

  Jun knew vaguely that the Indujah Federation was a powerful western trading nation from a couple of thousand leagues across the ocean—and he had even met some of their merchant princes who had come to Taman to buy carved coral, pearls and polished conch shells, and huge sacks of rice from the jewel-bright paddy fields that covered most of the lowland areas of his island—but the sight of the five massively fortified batteries on the Grand Harbor, each comprised of a pair of long guns all far bigger than Captain Lodi’s little sea cannon, impressed him to an extraordinary degree. These people were soldiers as well as traders, that was evident, and even one of those batteries could destroy the Mongoose as easily and quickly as the Buginese crew had sunk those bobbing pork barrels.

  He looked to his right and saw the fabled Gates of Stone, the twin fortresses with high, forbidding rock walls that guarded the narrow Straits, once again bristling with big guns. The walls of the one on the Istana side were marked with a blotched dark red color, some kind of lichen, Jun assumed, which gave it an evil, blood-drenched look. The distant one on the other side of the Strait was a mossy, moldy green. On the Red Fort, he could see the tiny figures of soldiers on the battlements, Dokra mercenaries he deduced from their scarlet coats and turbans, and the distinctiv
e white cross belts.

  The Mongoose was intercepted by a small pilot boat long before it came anywhere near the many quays and jetties that extended from the harbor front like the fingers on a hand. A Dokra officer in a scarlet coat and black cross belts inquired who they were in the Indujah language, bellowing through a speaking trumpet and, to Jun’s surprise, it was the fat woman—Mamaji, she called herself—who answered rather than the captain. After a short, shouted exchange, it was clear that they were welcome and the pilot boat guided them into a berth in the center of the harbor.

  It was obvious, too, that Mamaji was a person of some consequence, for the instant they docked she and her maid, and a mountain of baggage, were borne away in a palanquin carried by six burly slaves, with an honor guard of a dozen Dokra soldiers trotting alongside, while the rest of the ship’s company went about the mundane process of mooring the ship securely against the stone quay.

  They disembarked soon enough, and made their way up through the crowded streets behind the harbor to the Governor’s Palace, with Ketut moving like an old woman and Tenga hovering around her, and scowling, long ax in hand, at anyone foolish enough to dawdle in their path.

  The palace was another small fortress, which had been the original bastion in Istana Kush and had stood sentinel over the Sumbu Straits long before the Red and Green Forts had been built. It was fashioned in the shape of the prow of a huge ship, with two curving sides meeting at a point where a battery of ancient brass cannon looked out over the water. A hundred paces behind the two curving sides was a flat wall—as if the stone ship had been cut in half—which was punctured with hundreds of arrow slits. The rear wall loomed over the Small Harbor, a natural cove in the rocky Sumbu shore that had been a famous pirate haven before the coming of the Federation. Now, superseded by the Grand Harbor to the north, which was four times its size, it held only the smaller pleasure boats and fishing craft of the town. Above the battery at the tip of the prow, and set a little farther back, loomed the Round House, a flat, circular, stone structure at the highest point of the fortress with glass windows on all sides that allowed the Governor and his staff a fine view of the whole of Istana Kush, both harbors and the Strait as far as the jungly Manchatka shore. One curving side of the palace, the northern side, abutted directly with the rocky shore of the sea. The other curving up from the south held the main gate—a massive, old-fashioned drawbridge the width of five men and fashioned from teak planks and iron chains. The drawbridge lay over a ditch that was once connected to the sea but which was now dry and filled with years of refuse from the town of Istana, which was spread out along the palace’s southern flank.