The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  ‘You will leave him be,’ Suth said.

  ‘And what will you do, Sardian, if I do not?’

  Carnelian waited for his father to confront the old Master in his defence, but once more his father dropped his head and said nothing.

  Aurum stood with his legs planted wide like a conqueror. ‘I shall go now to ready what people I have left. See if you can find a way to keep your son under some measure of control.’ He put his mask up and strode away.

  Carnelian turned to his father, red with shame. ‘My Lord—’

  ‘It is my fault, Carnelian. I had thought you better trained. I blame myself.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You will stay here, my Lord, until Tain shall come with your mask. After that you will return to your cabin and remain there until I give you leave to come out.’

  Carnelian hung his head. ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  He heard his father move away. Feathers were sticking to his chin. Their smell was sweetened by the crusting blood. Carnelian lurched to the rail from where his stomach pumped vomit out over the threshing oars.

  Tain came up with the mask. Carnelian watched his brother eye the bloody deck. ‘We heard the noises . . . below.’ His face was pale. ‘Why did it happen?’ he whispered.

  Carnelian looked down at his hands. ‘It was my fault, Tain. I forgot to wear my mask.’ He could feel his brother’s eyes. He looked up but could not read their expression. Was it pity? He took the mask from him and put it on. He was glad to have it to hide behind. Through the eyeslits, he watched Tain regard the deck as if it were something dangerous.

  ‘Look, there’s the land,’ Carnelian said, to wrench his brother’s eyes from the blood. He took some steps towards the prow. His foot slipped. ‘You’ll see it better from here,’ he called back. He felt that Tain had not moved. He turned. Tain was still there, looking very small.

  ‘I can see it well enough from here, Carnie.’

  Carnelian nodded, returned defeated.

  In the cabin they stripped him to the skin. Carnelian bundled everything into the feathered cloak, thrust it into Tain’s hands and told him to go and throw it in the sea.

  Tain packed quietly. They had said nothing to each other since he had returned without the bloody bundle. Carnelian woke Crail and told him that he would have to start thinking of getting ready. Then he tried to help Tain. Each time their hands touched Tain flinched as if he were being burned.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Keal, grim, haggard. ‘The Master’s sent me to escort you up on deck. He wants to talk to you.’

  Carnelian’s stomach churned. ‘I’ll be ready in a moment.’ He asked Tain to touch up the paint on his face and hands. He shook out his black cloak and put it on. He took the mask from Tain’s hands, thanking him, and grimaced. The smell of blood was still on his fingers.

  He followed Keal up the stairway. When he reached the top, he closed his eyes, sucked some deep breaths through the mouth of his mask, then stepped out onto the deck.

  Slaves were scrubbing the grating. A path through the blood had already been cleaned from the stairway to the prow. There Carnelian saw the huge rectangle of his father’s back among the smaller shapes of their guardsmen. Carnelian followed Keal along the path. His father turned as they approached. His mask lent him a cruel look. He moved to one side and the guardsmen cleared a way. ‘Come, stand beside me, my Lord.’

  Carnelian moved into the space and immediately their men formed a wall of screens that separated them from the rest of the ship. His father reached up to unfasten his mask. Carnelian’s hand shook as he was forced by protocol to do the same.

  His father’s grey eyes fell on him. ‘How are you feeling, my son?’

  Carnelian forced back the tears. He was no longer a child.

  Suth reached out and touched Carnelian’s cheek. ‘You will have to get used to death. Perhaps I have erred to keep you so shielded from it these long years. The Chosen are great dealers in death. You would have found this out in Osrakum had you been raised there. I fear you have acquired an unnatural sensitivity to it.’

  Suth looked out across the sea. Carnelian followed his gaze. He let the strain out and it saddened his face. A blue wall of cliffs had risen before them that edged the whole horizon. The wind washed him. It squeezed some tears out of the corners of his eyes and ran them back along his head to his ears.

  ‘Behold,’ said Suth. He was careful not to look at his son lest he should weaken the boy’s self-control. ‘Behold the shore of the province of Naralan, the edge of the Three Lands.’ He shook his head slowly as if he did not believe what he saw. ‘Once you set foot upon her brim, Carnelian, your life will be for ever changed. You cannot know, my son, who and what you are. It is not your fault. It will come slowly at first. You will see such beauty, and such terror, but the wonders.’ He sighed the last word. ‘Such wonders as not even your mind’s eye has beheld.’

  He dared to look at his son. He had sensed that his words were soothing the boy. ‘But though you shall acquire the freedom and the thrill of power you shall always be restricted by the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. Today’s bloody lesson you will not soon forget.’ He waited for a reaction but his son merely nodded. He continued, ‘Duality is the essence of creation. As certainly as night follows day, all gain is balanced with loss.

  ‘Now, listen. There is a perilous game. The Law forms the matrix in which it is played. The Emperor, the Great and the Wise are its players. We must all play. I have almost forgotten how to. My moves are unsure, but it is coming back to me. You too must learn to play. There are such forces ranged against us . . .’

  Carnelian had at first been glad of the distraction of politics but now he felt as if a shadow was being cast over them.

  His father made a sign of dismissal. ‘Still, by the grace of the Two we shall yet prevail. Remember the warnings I have given you. All is not always as it seems. A knife is often concealed behind a smile.’ He looked back towards the cliffs. Suddenly he lunged forward, bracing himself on one of the curving horns of the prow figurehead. He was searching the sea before them. ‘Look,’ he cried and pointed.

  Carnelian leant out and saw the shadow in the sea moving ahead of them. ‘A turtle,’ he said. The creature must have been as big as the ship. Its vast oval wavered just under the water. Its paddles rowed like huge oars. The Wise taught that the world had been made from the dismembering of the Lord Turtle. His eyes had become the sun and moon. His carapace formed into the firmament of the sky. His flesh was the earth that floated on the sea. All life had sprung from his blood. Now that ran pure only in the veins of the God Emperor, and in Carnelian’s own veins, as in those of the other Chosen, tainted by mortality.

  They watched the turtle veer away. ‘For a moment it was guiding us home. Creation through sacrifice,’ his father said. ‘The best of omens.’

  Creation through blood sacrifice. Behind him, Carnelian could hear the slaves’ brushes rasping at the deck. Was it not also an omen that his first sight of the Three Lands should be an occasion of massacre?

  ‘See there,’ his father said. He pointed off across the starboard bow to where a narrow feather of smoke seemed pinned to the cliff wall. ‘That is the Jamb Rock where a fire burns night and day to guide ships into the Grand Harbour of Thuyakalrul. Do you see that lower, darker band of cliff that spreads on either side of the beacon? Well, that is the outer wall of the harbour. Thuyakalrul is well named; she is indeed a ring of blue stone lying in the sea. Within her circle lies the harbour. It has but a single door: a breach in the northern curve of the ring. The town itself is set into a depression in the southern wall. From there a causeway crosses a lagoon to the mainland and the road climbs a valley up to join the Great Sea Road.’

  ‘And that road leads eventually to Osrakum,’ said Carnelian.

  Suth almost sighed with relief as he saw the colour come back into his son’s face.

  ‘But if all this is so, my Lord, why then do we not sail directly towards the beac
on?’

  Suth smiled. ‘Because, my son, Thuyakalrul is ringed about by another yet greater wall and even now we seek one of its gates.’

  ‘My Lord speaks in riddles.’

  From the stern they heard the captain barking commands.

  ‘You shall see soon enough, but first we should remask.’

  They did so, and then his father dissolved the wall of screens. Keal was there with the others. He shot Carnelian a look of sympathy. In the rigging slaves were closing up the fan-sails. Under the curving fish-tail of the stern, the captain stood between the two steersmen with their oars. He said something to the man standing behind him. The man operated one of the levers set into the stern post, and in response the pounding of the drum slowed to breathing pace. The threshing of the oars slowed. The wind fell and with it their cloaks which had been surfing on it. The captain spoke to another man and pointed up the ship. There was an argument as the other man refused to do what he was told. The captain shoved him out of his way and then came forward himself.

  ‘Now you shall see,’ said Suth.

  The captain came closer. Carnelian saw the twitch in the man’s eyes, his mouth pinching into a quivering smile. The man fell to his knees and did not move.

  ‘Up, man, up. Get on with your business.’

  The captain’s face came up gaunt. He rubbed his mouth with his hand. Muttering something he crept past them, nodded unconsciously to the altar of the Gods and then went to the starboard bow. He scanned the water ahead. Carnelian leant on the rail to see what it was he sought. He noticed a darkening in the sea in front of them. The captain looked back anxiously and shouted something. The steersmen leaned on their oars. The ship turned her head slowly in response. The bruising in the water rushed towards them.

  ‘A wall under the sea,’ gasped Carnelian.

  ‘Even when it is submerged, few channels lead through it and only one is deep enough to allow the passage of a baran,’ his father said.

  The captain kept whisking round to shout frantic commands. Then the black water was upon them. The ship jolted as if she had hit something and then the blackness was pouring past them.

  ‘How do they find it?’ Carnelian asked, amazed.

  His father pointed to where Carnelian could see a tiny spine jutting up from the cliff. Then he pointed back the way they had come. A crooked bronze post rose out of the sea. ‘The post and the cliff tower in a line will bring a baran safely through the reef.’

  Other posts went past like green men standing on the waves, pointing out the way. In some places the reef came up almost into the air. Sinuous filaments of light quivered over it. At the captain’s cries the steersmen nudged the ship first one way then the other. At last she was through into the green water beyond. The captain passed them and jerked a bow before rushing back to the stern.

  Carnelian chewed his lip. ‘He is terrified of us.’

  ‘With good reason,’ his father said grimly. ‘But come, let us resume our places at the prow. I would share this homecoming with you, my son.’

  Keal and the others remade the wall of screens, allowing Carnelian and his father once more to unmask. Carnelian rubbed at the side of his face where his mask had pressed into his skin. ‘I will never get used to this thing.’

  His father took the mask from Carnelian’s hand and looked at its edge. ‘This is poorly made. In Osrakum we shall have our craftsmen fashion you better ones.’ He handed back the mask. ‘A well-crafted mask should fit its wearer as comfortably as an eyelid does its eye.’

  The drum beat faster and with it Carnelian’s heart. The banks of oars hissed the sea. The cliff loomed up. From far away, it had seemed mottled white. Closer, Carnelian could see that its corrugated face was peppered with birds. They wove the air with their flight and pierced it with cries. High above, sky-saurians described wide arcs in the sky. Carnelian took a step back as one fell towards them like a dart. Its dive veered and it seemed that it would crumple into the sea. At the last moment it pulled up and its huge grey-feathered anvil-headed shape flashed past as it skimmed the surface on its fingered wings.

  Behind Carnelian there was a consternation of mechanical sounds and voices. He turned reluctantly from the dance of birds and looked over the screen. He let out a cry, ‘The mast falls.’

  ‘Calm yourself, my Lord,’ snapped his father. ‘One should observe before giving voice. Look how slowly it comes down. We simply strike the masts for which we no longer have any use.’

  Putting his mask before his face, Carnelian parted the screens to look through. The forward mast swung upon a cradle of ropes that hung between the brass posts that had ringed its base when it was upright. The nearest rigging sagged. The rigging on the other side was straining and a gang of sailors was squealing it out through pulleys. Slowly, the mast settled to the deck. Other sailors began swarming the central mast. They wove a cradle of rope between its brass posts. They fitted new ropes that came over the pulleys on the posts. They pulled on these and the mast began to rise. Up it went while others kept its rigging in tension so that it would not topple. Once its base had cleared the deck they let it fall to one side and the rope cradle caught its weight and lowered it towards the deck.

  Carnelian pulled the screens closed. ‘I cannot see, my Lord, why it should be necessary.’

  ‘Where we are going there will not be the height clearance for masts.’

  Carnelian turned his gaze back to the cliff. At its foot, rocks ripped white tears in the green hem of the sea. The rock piled crag upon crag up into the sky, the whole mass veiled behind a mist of birds. They wheeled and dived and circled round and it seemed a miracle to Carnelian that they did not collide.

  For a while there was a view down the lagoon to a bluish valley cutting up into the cliff. Then the harbour swept its basalt wall across the scene.

  ‘In all the lands this wall is surpassed in towering majesty only by the cliff of the Guarded Land and by the Sacred Wall of Osrakum itself,’ his father said.

  The ship moved near enough to allow Carnelian to see the cracked, jointed surface. Craning he could just see the sky. The rock mass slid past the ship’s port rail. As it came closer it washed its cold shadow over the ship, spilling ink into the water round about. Carnelian shivered. In the shadow the waves frothed their lips up the rock but could find no grip.

  Further along, the wall ended in a headland. Beyond that the sea was apple-green and gleaming as though some vast door had been left open in the cliff. They came round the headland. Light swelled and burned on every side. Carnelian could hear the captain shouting. The ship was swinging round on the coruscating mirror of the sea. He had to screw his eyes shut.

  ‘Behold, Thuyakalrul, the Blue Ring of Stone,’ his father intoned, ‘greatest of the Cities of the Sea, gateway to the Three Lands.’

  The colours in Carnelian’s vision oozed slowly back from whiteness. He gasped. The sea was so green it might have been liquid jade. Two long arms of cliffs embraced the bay, the eastern a curving sweep of stone made turquoise by the sun, the western dark in its own shadow. Sunk between them he saw a many-towered citadel. Above that, a misty blue valley faded up into the sky.

  The deck rolled up and down as the ship passed through the doorway in the cliff. Its starboard jamb, a stone column, rose shadowy-vast from a collar of rafts floating chained around its foot. Ropes dangled down from above and ladders formed a dizzying scarring up its flank. Shadowing his eyes, Carnelian looked up and narrowed his gaze in disbelief. Cranes and other machines formed a crown of spikes around the column’s head, which was plumed with a billowing of smoke that made Carnelian sway with vertigo.

  ‘The beacon seemed so slight from out at sea, did it not?’ his father said.

  Carnelian gripped the rail, closed his eyes and nodded. He felt the ship’s bucking calm. He opened his eyes and saw that they were through into the bay. The cliffs on either side were banded with grey houses. A filigree of walkways traced across the stone. Here and there a palace formed a si
lver crust mossed with the heads of tiny trees. His eyes darted everywhere.

  ‘Here people nest like gulls,’ he cried in delight.

  ‘They flee the stench of the town,’ his father said.

  There it lay, crowding the depression in the cliff and tumbling down to fill the further side of the bay with brown confusion.

  ‘It is warmer here,’ sighed Carnelian in a trance. The drumbeats shook up from the deck and pulsed the air. From across the bay there came a distant murmur like summer bees. Everything appeared to stand still, trapped motionless in the sun’s amber.

  ‘The ring traps the sun’s rays,’ his father said remotely, making a circular motion with his hand to take in the cliffs. His fingers fell to stroking his mask as if he were thinking of hiding his face from the sun. He turned to check that all of his son’s skin was painted. Carnelian was smiling closed-eyed, basking in the sun’s warmth.

  ‘You should take care, my Lord,’ Suth said. ‘The sun can taint even painted skin.’

  Carnelian opened his eyes. His father was like an ivory carving of a god seeing the future. The more Carnelian looked the more he could see the man. With a pang he saw that the face had lost some of its beauty. The paint could not hide the faded youth. It made him melancholy.

  His father came back to life with a sigh. ‘See the ships.’

  With each thump of the baran’s heart her oars sliced into the syrup of green water. She was making for the wharves of the town. Carnelian could just make out the moorings, the masts like a stand of reeds, the clusters of white tenements that rose up behind. ‘So many ships,’ he said.

  ‘They sleep now, but soon they will slip out from this harbour and sail up the coasts, navigate rivers, cross to islands and fetch back for us all that is curious and wonderful.’

  And our people, Carnelian thought. He said nothing. He did not want to take the brightness from his father’s eyes. He watched his white hand point here and there among the nesting ships. Some were large, some small, some as brightly painted as kites.

  ‘In less than a month this whole bay will be filled with a waft of sails.’ His father’s hands made airy gestures that were almost words. ‘As a boy I came here and passed disguised through the markets. The smells . . . aaah, the smells and the shimmer and the play of colour. So many people.’ He looked down with his cloud-grey eyes. ‘Sometimes, however mean and squalid, however poor, sometimes I have almost envied our subjects their earthy lives.’