The Standing Dead - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 02

by Ricardo Pinto

  The Maruli pointed emphatically until Carnelian was forced to lift his eyes. At first he saw hanging above him only something like a scavenging bird utterly dark against the sepia sky. It resolved into the remains of the skewered man, his head pushed to one side by the idol's impaling tongue.

  There. The wound,' insisted Morunasa.

  Carnelian saw the hole torn through the pygmy's chest.

  'It was made by this spear,' the Maruli said.

  'I know.'

  Morunasa turned to Osidian. 'He confirms what I said. One of the Flatlanders took what belonged to our Lord. You, Master, know how important it is such sins should not go unpunished.'

  Osidian sighed. 'When the Plainsmen return I shall find whoever it was and give him to you.'

  Morunasa fixed Krow with an amber stare. 'Who did this, Flatlander?'

  'It was me,' said Carnelian.

  Morunasa turned on him, opening greedy jaws. Carnelian remembered how those teeth had been used to tear out throats, but he did not care: all he wanted was to get as far as he could from the impaled man.

  Osidian regarded Carnelian with a frown. 'Why did you do this, Carnelian?'

  'If you need to ask that, Osidian, then no answer I can give would make it any clearer to you.'

  Osidian grew angry. 'You have nothing more to say, my Lord?'

  Waves of nausea began surging through Carnelian. He clutched at the air for words. 'I could no longer bear the noise. I was trying to sleep.'

  Osidian stared, then laughed.

  Morunasa looked at him appalled. 'You must give him to me.'

  Osidian turned on the Maruli, incomprehension on his face. 'Give him to you?’

  Morunasa shrank away. 'He took what was the Lord's. His blood now belongs to Him.'

  Osidian regarded the Maruli as if he were a stupid child. 'If you so much as touch him, I shall burn you and your precious banyan to ashes.'

  Morunasa became a wooden man. He pointed at Carnelian. The Darkness-under-the-Trees must have his blood.'

  Osidian slapped Morunasa's arm down. 'I'll feed your god enough blood to sate even his thirst.'

  He put his arm around Carnelian's shoulders. 'Come, let us leave this place, it is beginning to turn my stomach.'

  Letting himself be led away, Carnelian was feeling too sick to care about Morunasa's look of hatred.

  Carnelian pulled himself free of Osidian as they walked deep into the baobab forest. He was glad Osidian was happy to walk in silence. The only sound was the footfalls of their Marula guards and Krow, who had followed them.

  Carnelian became aware Osidian was measuring up the trees.

  'We will have to cut them down all the way from the knoll to here. And from the edge of the chasm to perhaps up there.' Osidian pointed halfway up the escarpment.

  'Why?' Carnelian asked.

  'I need a training ground.'

  Carnelian surveyed the whole wide sweep among the leafless giants. 'But these trees are sepulchres.'

  Then empty them of their dead.' 'And do what with them?'

  Osidian shrugged. 'Did you not tell me they were desiccated?'

  Carnelian nodded. 'Well, burn them.'

  Carnelian grew uneasy. 'Perhaps you should oversee this yourself, my Lord.'

  Osidian looked away towards the island. 'Would you then take my place negotiating with the Oracles?'

  Carnelian glanced at Krow.

  Osidian shook his head. 'I want that one with me.' He motioned more than half his escort to attend to Carnelian. ‘I shall send you more.'

  Accustomed as Carnelian had become to towering over everyone, the long-limbed Manila in their bead corselets were unnerving. They stood avoiding his gaze, several with axes hanging from their hands.

  'Do any of you understand Vulgate?'

  The Manila gave no answer but only stared at him with their yellow eyes. He pointed at the baobab under whose branches they stood. While they looked on, he made a pantomime of cutting it down. After he was done he saw they were regarding him with the same blank faces. He grew exasperated. When he moved into their ranks, they ebbed away from him. Lunging, he snatched an axe from one of them and returned with it to the tree. He gazed at the monster. Stark it was, menacing, but the Plainsmen had taught him to revere all trees. Besides, he was reluctant to desecrate any pygmy dead that it might hold. Such arguments were nothing to Osidian. The baobabs would die. Carnelian put aside his feelings and swung the axe. Its flint bit deeper than he had expected. He was pulling back for another stroke when he became aware of the murmuring. Looking round, he saw the Manila were all staring at the ground. It was clear he was getting nowhere and so he went in search of Osidian.

  He found him with Morunasa and Krow upon the crown of the knoll now deserted by the Plainsmen. Osidian was crouching in an opening high in one of the trees. Morunasa and Krow were on the ground looking up at him.

  'What do you want, Master?' the Maruli asked, malice in his eyes and teeth.

  'I've come to speak to the Master.' Carnelian called out in Quya: 'My Lord?' Osidian looked down at him. The Marula -'

  'Speak in Vulgate so that Morunasa might understand you.'

  The Marula,' he said, in Vulgate, resenting Morunasa even more, 'seem reluctant to cut down the trees.'

  'Which trees?' Morunasa demanded.

  Carnelian stretched his hand out indicating the forest lying below.

  Morunasa smiled. 'But of course they'll not cut them down.'

  'Because they're sacred?'

  Morunasa raised his eyes to the sky. 'A childish belief of the pygmies, but the Lower Reachers are superstitious.'

  'You must force them to comply, Morunasa,' Osidian called down.

  Carnelian did not want to force anyone and besides, wanted to have nothing to do with Morunasa. 'It might be easier if I use the sartlar,' he called up.

  'It would reduce salt production,' said Osidian.

  'It should take only a few days to clear the area you want.'

  Osidian considered it some moments and then gave a nod before turning back to Morunasa. This tree is as empty as the others.'

  'So are all the granaries,' said the Maruli. The pygmies must have taken all the fernroot when they fled.'

  What had really happened to the pygmies, Carnelian would maintain as his secret. He would not hand over more victims to the Oracles.

  The sartlar swarmed the baobabs plucking the pygmy mummies from their tombs. Carnelian winced as he saw another fall to the ground, bones cracking like twigs. Other sartlar were gathering the mummies and heaping them in a mound.

  When all the trees had been emptied, Carnelian walked around the pyramid of mummies. He gave the order and sartlar ambled in with torches. Carnelian heard the pyre ignite but the flames were invisible in the sunlight. Rustling like dry ferns, the dead folded tighter into foetus curls. Every so often one would pop, exploding into flakes that turned almost instantly to ash. The cadavers shrank, grew reddish brown, then began to singe black. Carnelian turned away when their skulls began to push grinning out through the charring leather of their flesh. He fled from the stench of their burning hair.

  The next day he gathered the sartlar and told them they must cut down the trees they had emptied of the dead. Their reaction was to stand so still, he might have been standing in a ring of stones. 'What's the matter?' he said.

  'Kor,' he called and was relieved when she emerged from among the sartlar and came to fall before him. He waited for her to look up at him.

  'Master, the earth will rebel.'

  'What do you mean?' he asked, but for an answer the woman only flattened herself to the ground. He stared, wanting to speak to her, to explain, but he had nothing in his heart but unease.

  'It has to be done,' he said, at last. Kor rose.

  Her silence goaded Carnelian to anger. 'You will do it now.'

  'As the Master commands, so shall it be done.'

  With flint axes the sartlar chopped into the soft wood of the baobabs. There was some
thing eerie in the way each blow set the naked branches far above to trembling. Carnelian became convinced the trees were feeling pain. The first one to topple gave out a stuttering cracking and then fell, gracefully, as if it were merely lying down, but when it struck the ground Carnelian was shaken by the impact and drew back from the slow mist of dust that rose and took so long to settle. The giant lay stretched out slain upon the earth. Another two were heeling over in the background. Watching this brought back a memory of the destruction of the Great Hall in the Hold; the first step on the path that had brought him so far. As the feelings of loss for his father, Ebeny, his brothers, his people, flooded into him, he had to turn his back on the felling and go away to stand upon the edge of the chasm. He stared blind into its depths, rethreading the whole improbable sequence of events that separated him from that time. He wondered, as he had not done for a shameful length of time, whether his people had made it safely up from the sea and were now with his father in Osrakum.

  Carnelian, Osidian and Krow stood among a Marula guard surveying the clearing the sartlar had gouged from the baobab forest. For Carnelian the sight was punishment enough. With ropes, with levers cut from the branches of the fallen trees themselves, the sartlar had dragged and rolled the vast trunks towards the knoll so that they now enclosed it with a rampart of wood. This operation had ripped dark swathes through the meshing of dead ferns. All that was left of the baobabs in the clearing were the livid eruptions of their stumps.

  Osidian pronounced himself satisfied. 'All that remains to be done is to excise those roots and then we shall burn the ferns and it will all be as smooth as a legionary parade ground.'

  Carnelian could not believe Osidian was blind to the desecration. 'How do you propose we remove the stumps?'

  'Dig them out, burn them.' Osidian shrugged. 'Do whatever works. I want them all removed.'

  'Yes, my Lord,' said Carnelian, enough anger leaking into his voice to make Osidian raise an eyebrow.

  Then I shall return to my wood-walled citadel,' he said, and smiled as if he had made some great jest. Carnelian was glad his moroseness caused the smile to slip from Osidian's face. He watched him, Krow and the guards until they reached the dwarfing wall of trunks. Beyond, towering over the clearing, baobabs stood like Masters on the knoll.

  Smoke from the burning stumps was choking the air when new arrivals clambered up out of the chasm in a dark and oily flood of flesh. Hundreds more Marula warriors and, in among them, a swarm of pygmies laden with baskets.

  Carnelian had been supervising the gouging out of a stump. He had grown weary of the obstinate grip which the roots maintained upon the earth. Over the two days they had been working at it, he had grown to hate the stumps, oozing water as if they wept, each root having to be dug out, prised one by one like the fingers of a frantic hand until the mutilated tree was forced to release its grip on the earth.

  Watching the Marula pour up onto the ravaged escarpment, Carnelian saw with what horror they surveyed his work. He did not like the looks they gave him and threw himself with redoubled fury into his work of destruction.

  It was growing dark when the last stump was torn free. They rolled it so that its roots pointed up into the air in a grotesque mockery of the trees that had once stood there. Carnelian could not bear to wait until morning to order the burning.

  As night fell, the stumps became infernal heads with fiery hair. Carnelian himself helped the sartlar spread fire across the ground they had cleared. Soon flames were crackling and popping on every side, lighting up the sartlar in an ungainly shadow dance. Eventually, the heat and the choking drifts of smoke drove them all to the safety of the knoll. From behind its wall of cut-down trees, Carnelian could see the whole escarpment luridly ablaze. Fire spread from the clearing to the ragged edge of the baobab forest and licked at the trunks, making Carnelian fear all the forest might be consumed.

  Sickened, drained, Carnelian dragged his weary body up the knoll, seeking sleep. Groaning, he lay down, closing his eyes tight so that he would not see the shadows leaping on the trunks around him.

  Carnelian must have been asleep for a while, because when he was woken the night was perfectly dark. Something terrible was happening. A low fearful moaning rose up as if from the knoll itself. He lifted his head and saw shadow men all around him, pressing their hands to their ears. A scream came shrilling through the night, a sound he had prayed he would never hear again. On the Isle of Flies, the Oracles were feeding more pygmies to their god.

  The screaming continued throughout the night. Weary beyond measure, distraught, Carnelian gave up any attempt at sleep. Rising, he found a fire to feed and hunched down with his hands crossed against his chest, pulling his blanket down hard around his head. He pressed his chin against his wrists, gritted his teeth and tried to find some vision of redemption in the fire. Living the misery of each silent wait, he could not tell how long it was since the Manila had begun to gather around his fire. The black men were shivering, huddling together, their bead corselets clinking against each other like the carapaces of turtles. In their wooden faces their eyes were crazed.

  When another scream sounded, a shudder went through their ranks, and many cradled their heads in their arms. They drew comfort from seeing that Carnelian shared their fear.

  First light made him rise to gaze at it with longing. As he stretched the stiffness from his limbs he saw everyone was gazing past the grim island, hungry to feel the cleansing sunlight upon their faces. Only when the sun rose did it become possible to believe the darkness could be banished from their minds.

  'You do not look yourself.'

  Shadowed by Krow, Osidian had just found Carnelian standing on the edge of the burned clearing. Carnelian searched his eyes for any hint of horror. 'Did my Lord sleep well?'

  'Well enough,' Osidian said, his hand half forming a sign of dismissal.

  'Did the screaming not disturb you at all?'

  Osidian frowned, as if he had no idea what Carnelian might be talking about. Then he understood and looked towards the island.

  'Yes, the screaming,' Carnelian spat in Vulgate, making Krow jump. 'Don't tell me you didn't hear it.'

  The sign in Osidian's hand firmed up and with a flick of the wrist he threw the topic away. 'I have heard worse in the Labyrinth. Are you too fatigued to participate in the day's activities?'

  The question took a while to reach Carnelian who was recalling his walk through the Labyrinth. Imagining unhuman cries winding among its pillar sepulchres, he shuddered. 'What?'

  Osidian frowned. There are matters I would have you attend to.'

  Carnelian raised his eyebrows.

  'I would begin the training of my Manila.'

  Training?'

  Osidian regarded him for a while silently. 'For war.' That word pulled Carnelian's eyes fully into focus. 'Against the Plainsmen?'

  'Only those who defy me will suffer.' Carnelian shook his head.

  Osidian looked upward exasperated. His eyes fell to catch Krow in their jade gaze. 'You will make spears and shields for the Manila.'

  'Spears, Master ... ? They have spears.'

  Osidian frowned. 'I want them armed with blunt weapons.'

  Krow wiped sweat from his face.

  Osidian took hold of his shoulder and swung him round, pointing at the trunks of the baobabs. Krow tottered off towards them.

  Carnelian was confused. 'Why blunt? Are you worried they might hurt each other?'

  Osidian smiled sardonically. 'Rather that they might hurt what I intend to throw at them.'

  Under Krow's guidance, the Manila set to splintering branches into crude spears. Shields were shaped from the soft heartwood of the fallen baobabs. At last, when everyone was armed, the youth led them out onto the burnt clearing, disappearing up to the knees in a slow rolling ashen mist.

  As Carnelian watched them form up in the centre of the clearing, he was reminded of the burnt field in the Plain of Thrones where the tributaries gathered. A rumble alerted him to rid
ers coming into the clearing. They churned up so much dust they looked as if they were splashing across a ford. Carnelian narrowed his eyes. Oracles, their skin sharing the pallor of the ashen ground, with Osidian riding in their midst. A muttering rippled through the Marula ranks. He could feel their anxiety and a yearning rose in him to be among them. The riders were walking their aquar slowly into a line. He realized they were preparing to charge.

  'Form up,' he cried, 'or the Oracles will run you down.'

  Krow glanced at him, terrified, doing the best he could. The ash clouds subsiding revealed the imposing solidity of the aquar. Carnelian swallowed hard as he saw them begin to move.

  'A hornwall,' he cried.

  Krow understood him, but only a handful of his Marula copied him. The approaching aquar were making the earth shake. Krow was screaming instructions but Carnelian could see the Marula were nothing more than a mob. Then the riders let out wailing cries and he had no eyes for anything other than their charge. Grim, Osidian rode at the apex of their wedge and careered into the Marula, scattering them. Within a blink, the Oracles were through and disappearing into a cloud of their own making.

  Cursing Osidian, Carnelian ran towards the Marula. Soon he was in among them. There was a lot of blood, some limbs hanging useless, two dead. Cries of alarm from the men around him made him lift his head. Osidian was regrouping the Oracles for another charge. Bellowing, Carnelian ran through the Marula to the rear, which was now their front. He tore a makeshift shield from one man and used it to buffet them into line. Those that were nearest saw what he was doing and began bunching together. He heard Osidian's cry; felt again the rumble in the ground. Until the last moment he continued to marshal the Marula, but again when Osidian struck he pushed through easily, wounding more of the defenders.

  Carnelian realized Osidian had seen him and had taken care to bring his attack into the line as far as he could from his position. Using rage as strength, Carnelian pushed back through to the other side of the Marula. He shouted instructions at Krow. Together they shoved the Marula into blocks. Beginning to understand what he wanted them to do, large swathes of them were coalescing into dense formation. Confusion spread as those at the back tried unsuccessfully to lower their spears between the heads of those in front.