The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  Jaspar raised an eyebrow and sighed. ‘Because, cousin, since they form part of the Imperial Power, the members of the House of the Masks cannot cast their votes in the Clave. Will you allow me to continue?’

  Carnelian lifted his hand in assent, annoyed with himself. He had known that the Imperial Power was excluded from the Clave.

  ‘When Aurum announced that he would go and put the offer to your father, the other factions insisted that each would send its own representative.’

  ‘But why did Aurum come himself ? Will his faction not crumble in his absence?’

  ‘That is likely. As for why he felt the need to come himself,’ who knows, he signed. ‘At the Clave it was not considered likely the Lord Suth would return. Aurum must have hoped to persuade him.’

  ‘But what does he expect that my father can do for him?’

  ‘For too long Aurum has forced his rancour on the Clave. He caws and caws, seeming to forget that, for all its wisdom, none will give ear to a raven. Your father has a reputation for a certain old-fashioned, patrician virtue. He can remind the Clave of its ancient and glorious opposition to the Imperial Power. He can make all the traditional speeches about blood pride, responsibility, honour.’ Jaspar shrugged. ‘Besides, his voice has not been heard in Osrakum for many years. The novelty of such a voice might be listened to, perhaps by enough of the Great to shore up the breach in Aurum’s faction. Nevertheless, it was a desperate gamble.’

  ‘Not so desperate, my Lord. After all, we are here with all our old-fashioned virtue.’

  Jaspar regarded him with his wintry eyes. ‘That may be so, my Lord, but there was little reason to suppose the Ruling Lord Suth would wish to terminate his absence from Osrakum merely because we dangled the bauble of the Pomegranate Ring before his eyes. After all, the Ring has been offered him before and he turned it down.’

  Carnelian stared. ‘Offered before? But . . . our exile . . . ?’

  ‘Exiles are as varied in their kinds as precious stones. It seems in keeping with Lord Suth’s fabled eccentricity that he should choose to retire so far and to such a forbidding shore.’

  ‘Choose . . .?’ said Carnelian. It was as if lightning had flashed before his eyes.

  Jaspar drew back, his head leaning to one side. ‘Surely you knew, Carnelian, that your father’s exile has always been self-imposed?’

  Carnelian was not even sure where he was. He jerked a nod, fumbled on his mask. ‘Lord . . . excuse me.’

  Jaspar’s blue face was frowning as he watched Carnelian disappear into the funnel.

  The sea folded into hills and valleys and the ship slid heavily up and down the slopes. Carnelian lay in the cabin, falling in and out of sleep, brooding. Soon the vomit was burning up into his mouth and he forgot everything else as his stomach turned itself out onto the floor. Tain was suffering as much and Carnelian ordered him to stop trying to clean up the mess. They shared the misery, just wanting to die. They were not alone. Above the ship’s timber-groan they could hear the retching coming from the cabins round about.

  Carnelian heard the knock, then Tain talking to someone, and sat up to see who it was. When he saw his father’s huge frame squeezing into the cabin he was appalled. He was wound into his sheets. Both he and they were streaked with body paint and soaked with sweat. Filth puddled the floor. He knew the cabin stank. He tried to smooth his hair and rubbed at his face with a corner of the sheet. He swung his feet out, winced as the stuff oozed between his toes, then began to stand up, an apology on his lips.

  Stay, his father signed. He was crammed into the other half of the cabin. The ceiling crushed him down so that he was almost doubled up. ‘This is not the time for ceremony, Carnelian. I am just a father come to see his son.’ Suth looked round the cabin, then reached behind his head to release his mask. His face was haggard, his eyes bruise-rimmed red. ‘You look ill, my son.’

  Carnelian stared. His father looked terrible. He covered his dismay with a wan smile. ‘It is mostly the waves. Does the wave-sickness also ail my Lord?’ For a moment he forgot the resentment he had been feeling towards his father.

  ‘No . . . well, yes, as you say, the waves.’ Braced against the ceiling and a bulkhead, his father seemed a part of the swaying cabin. ‘It occurred to me I might bring you some relief.’ He handed Carnelian a small silver box. Its lid was wrought with a crying eye: the moon’s cypher. Opening it, Carnelian saw it was filled with a red-brown powder whose acridity stung his nose.

  ‘It is made from the juice of young poppies. Get Tain to hide its bitterness in honey. Give him some. Its dreams will deaden you both to the storms.’

  Carnelian searched his father’s weary face.

  ‘Take care you do not consume too much. Poppy has a power over men’s minds.’ His father looked as if he were seeing something far away. ‘And dreams can be as enslaving as the legions.’

  ‘You should not have incommoded yourself, my Lord. A servant could have brought me this.’

  His father almost smiled. ‘You see behind the mask, my son. You force me to own that I come to make a peace between us. This is no time for us to be at war. There are dangers coming that we should better meet with our shields locked together.’

  Carnelian felt his heart melting. He wanted to open himself up. He wanted to lean on his father’s strength, to trust him. But he wore the discomfort of Jaspar’s words like wet clothes. ‘May I ask my Lord a question?’

  His father’s brows lifted.

  Carnelian clamped his teeth together. The taste of vomit was still in his mouth but his question lay more bitter on his tongue. He spat it out. ‘Was our exile freely chosen?’

  His father’s face darkened. ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘It is true then!’

  Father and son glared at each other. Then Suth’s eyes fell as if his head had grown suddenly heavy. Cold fear flushed up Carnelian’s chest. The Master, hanging his head in shame? He had never expected to see that. He closed up, withdrawing back into the bunk in a hunch. His father looked up with dull eyes. ‘Long ago, I swore before the Wise a blood oath that brought us here. All you need to know is that I have been released from it.’

  The sadness in his father’s face punished Carnelian. The massive shoulders seemed to be curving under the whole weight of the decks above. Carnelian felt how unworthy had been his doubts.

  His father made an elegant gesture to take in the cabin. ‘Shall I send one of my servants to clean this?’

  ‘No, Father, Tain will manage well enough.’

  ‘I can see how well he is managing, but it is up to you.’ He turned to leave. ‘There is one task that Tain should be capable of. You are no longer a boy. Have him shave your head. Wait until it is calm. It is not becoming to a Lord to have his head a mass of scars.’

  Tain was mopping up the last of the vomit. His face scrunched up as he wiped it off his hands. He looked up at Carnelian hunched on his bunk. ‘You know, Crail’s worse off than either of us.’ He busied himself rubbing the cloth between his fingers.

  Carnelian dropped his hands from his eyes and glanced down. He felt a pang of guilt. He had altogether forgotten the old man. ‘Surely he’s being looked after?’

  Tain looked uncertain. ‘You know the tyadra. How likely do you think it is that they’d make good nursemaids?’

  ‘Well then, he must come here where we can look after him.’

  Tain’s eyes were all whites. ‘In here?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it might have escaped my Master’s attention but there’s very little space.’

  ‘If you don’t think that you can squeeze in here with us then you could always take Crail’s place in the other cabin.’

  Tain frowned.

  ‘Go on, Tain, I’m sure you don’t like the idea of him suffering uncared for any better than I do.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Tain. He went out and returned soon after with a sly grin. ‘He’s refused.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t try very hard.’


  ‘I did! You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Well, go back and don’t bother saying anything more to him. Tell the others in his cabin that I want him carried in here and that it’s a command not a request.’

  A little later Carnelian could hear grumbling and scuffing in the hall. He had risen, made himself presentable, and knocked together another makeshift bed on the floor. He stood shakily on the tilting floor and had to look away from the lantern’s swing. Everything was lurching. Tain came in and held the door open. A guardsman backed into the cabin. Carnelian could see another over his shoulder. The first man had to trample one of the floor beds. When they were both in they turned. Crail hung between them like a rope bridge.

  Though sallow and feverish, he still managed a scowl. The guardsmen began to lower him towards the floor.

  ‘Not there,’ said Carnelian. ‘Put him on the bunk.’

  ‘But, Carnie, you can’t sleep on the floor,’ said Tain. The faces round him were aghast.

  ‘Look at the bunk,’ Carnelian said. ‘Go on, look at it! Now look at me. I’m sure you can all see there’s a difference in our lengths. I haven’t slept comfortably since coming aboard this accursed scow. Now, if none of you object,’ he gave them all a bow, ‘I’d like to sleep stretched out on the floor.’

  Some of them blushed. It made Carnelian queasy to look at their swaying. He turned away. When he looked back, Crail had already been put in the bunk. The old man’s face puckered into a grimace that folded his chameleon tattoo into the wrinkles. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come,’ he grated. ‘I told the Master I didn’t want to be a burden.’

  Tain’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling. The other men slipped out. Carnelian and Tain arranged the beds that now took up almost all the floor. They settled down with groans of relief. The old man was still grumbling. Carnelian offered them each a morsel of poppied honey. Crail turned his face away. Carnelian forced it on him. ‘Take it. If it’s good enough for a Master it’s good enough for you.’ The old man gave in but put it into his mouth as if he were being poisoned.

  ‘Tell me, Crail, of the time you saw the dragon,’ said Tain and winked at Carnelian.

  The old man looked over, still scowling, suspecting mockery, but when he saw their expectant faces his own began uncreasing. He chewed absentmindedly on the honey. ‘Yes, it was a wonder, and I saw it sure enough.’ The grooves in his skin bunched as he spoke. ‘By the God in his Mountain and his four horns, I saw it sure enough.’

  Carnelian and Tain had heard it many times before. They settled back into the comfort of his drone. ‘. . . a tower on its back that touched the sky.’ The old hands struggled to make a pyramid of fingers. ‘Its hide was bronze. It was larger than a hill.’ His arms trembled out a volume in the air. ‘Its horns were four men long.’ He spotted the corner of Carnelian’s smile. ‘I swear it, boy, by all the hidden names of the God in his Mountain: four men long and curving like the moon.’ And four of his thick knob-knuckled fingers were hooked out around the head he’d made by pressing his calloused thumbs together.

  The lantern cast out a deeper gold. Its gilding warmed the cabin like sunlight. The rhythm of the cabin’s swaying felt like the wave surge in summer upon the beach at home. Everything was all right. They each felt it. Carnelian could see the truth of it in the blissful sleepy smiles that Tain let slip across the smooth distances that lay between them. The smile he sent back was like a dove loosed into a blue sky. He tried to speak but his words came as a surprise to him. They had acquired a breathing of their own. He lay back and listened to the drums. How deep they were and purple-voiced. That other strain, like flutes, like many flutes close-tuned and narrow-throated, singing. Voices crying like gulls. He sat up to listen. Not gulls but men, shouting. Panic in the wind. Thunder so bass it made his head bell and thrum. He tried hard to listen again. That was it, voices shrieking over shrilling wind and thunder. Locating in himself he noticed the cabin violently contracting like a womb threatening his birth. A storm, he smiled, lying back again, a storm so musical and lithe.

  For eternities he was a needle darning in and out of sleep. The difference between the two was merely an attitude of mind. Sometimes he tried to work out how long it was now since the old man had come. It was no good. There was nothing to go on. Everything was always the same: Tain lying like a sandbank on the floor, Crail up there on the bed, wearing his mask of wrinkles. The cabin slipped and turned and spun and looped and the rest of the world went along for the ride. It was a marvel that he felt so well. He had never felt so well before. He knew he glowed. Only a single piece of grit spoiled his oyster bliss. He made it smooth with pearly dreams and forgetting. He knew it was there. Let it work its own way out; he was not about to bother delving for it.

  His people. The thought popped into his dream and woke him up. There was a tempest and his people were up there, exposed between the decks. That single lucid thought was like a stone falling into a well. He was eyeless at the bottom of that well. The lantern must have run out of oil. He climbed up until he found that he was standing. He searched. He became nothing but the feelings in his fingers. Squid at the bottom of the sea. He chuckled at the idea of it. His fingers found his cloak. Finding the door was a larger quest.

  The corridor was filled with the swinging suns of lanterns. Their blaze blinded him. The door at the stairway top was rattling. Something was on the other side trying to come in. Crashing thunder, felt as much as heard. He turned to face the first step. He put one foot in front of the other. His body was a puppet he hardly remembered how to control. He took it up the stairway. The door clattered and shook. He lifted his wooden hand and watched it turn the handle. Nothing happened. He leant against the door; it struggled to push him back but then gave way and he tumbled out.

  He was kneeling in the throat of the roaring night. Its tongue sloped up wet under his hands. The pressure of its breath squeezed his eyes shut. It roared on and on and on. He felt a terror that, should it pause for breath, he would be swallowed up. The world shattered with a crash that left him deaf. Sudden white. Painful afterburn. He strained against the wind to open his eyes. When he did he squinted round him but could see nothing. He was reaching his fingers up to test that his eyes were really open when a livid crack appeared across the inky black. For a moment he saw the deck sloping up before him like a hill. The mast jutting out above his head was an axe waiting to fall. Beyond that the lurid gleaming foredeck funnelled up to the prow. Behind, the whole sky was strangely streaked and mottled and writhing like a wall of snakes. His eye could just see up to its flint-sharp top and realised that the ship was climbing an immensity of water. High above, where the wave edge touched the sky, Carnelian detected the faintest curling white. His heart stopped. The wave was breaking above them.

  The light snuffed out. Ghostly scratches printed themselves wherever he looked. He tried to listen for the roar of the breaking wave as it raced down to get them. He waited for the unbearable touch of its cold thunder. Then the deck began toppling forwards. For a moment it hung, horizontal, floating suspended in the night. Then it started angling down. His nails dug their anchors into the deck but he slid forward all the same. On and on as the deck fell away ever more steeply. He hit something hard. One of the brass posts around the mast. He hugged it with trembling desperation. The world shook again. The post rattled in his embrace. It was a kind of ecstasy waiting for the lightning. When it came it revealed far below the abyss into which they sped. That well was the starkest terror. Down into the deep it screwed its wall of circling iron.

  ‘Carnie.’

  Impossible.

  ‘Carnie.’ The word was the merest rustling in his ear. He had only eyes and they saw only the well.

  A vice gripped his jaw and swivelled his head round. Something bleared in his sight. His eyes took time to adjust back to the dimensions of a human face. His father’s face. ‘Carnie,’ it mouthed like a fish. ‘Are you all right? What’s wrong with you?’

  The circle of
his arms was torn open. His body was being dragged like a sack. He screwed his eyes closed. He could not bear to look down into the well again. His heels bobbed across the deck grating, catching like ratchets. They tugged free. The storm muffled. He realized he was inside.

  ‘Are you all right?’ a human voice asked.

  He dared to look. His father’s face wearing the chameleon. No. It was Keal, wild-eyed Keal.

  ‘My p-people . . .’

  At first Keal stared at him as if he were mad, but then he grimaced. ‘They’re lashed down,’ he shouted, ‘and safer than you or me out there.’ He looked back towards the shuddering door with terror pulling the skin taut over his skull.

  ‘The well,’ cried Carnelian, seeing it in his mind where his eyelids could not hide the sight.

  ‘Let’s get you back to your cabin, Carnie.’

  Keal took his weight and helped him stagger. Carnelian patted the bulkheads. ‘It’s better not to see what’s outside.’

  Keal opened the door into the cabin. The corridor lanterns swung their shadows inside to when a figure was lumbering around like something in a trap. It was Crail, staring blind, mumbling over and over, ‘Must get out, must get out.’ Tain had fitted his spine up a corner. There was a blanket clasped to his chest. He peeped over this with no understanding of what he saw.

  Carnelian settled them down with talk. He had to sit against the bunk because Crail would not let go of his hand.

  ‘What’s it like out there?’ asked Tain.

  Carnelian had watched his brother shudder with every thunderclap. The image of the well kept turning in his mind. ‘It’s just a storm,’ he said. ‘Now get some sleep.’ It is the poppy, he thought. Its dregs have left a stain of dread in our minds.

  Tain began a muttering whose rhythm was enough to insinuate familiar words into Carnelian’s mind: ‘. . . our Lord in the Mountain, who is two Gods but also One, whose angels are our Masters that must be obeyed, I plead my prayer . . .’

  It was part of what his father called the ‘slavish superstition’. Carnelian slid his hand out of Crail’s grip, doused the lantern and lay down. He felt that he made a poor angel. A juddering came up into him through his back. His feet were higher than his head. His mind walked him along the corridor, up the stairway, through the door, into the raging night, the deck frozen in lightning glare, the prow cleaving a way into . . .