The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  The stream bled into the sea, darkening the water, making the waves froth pink. Its artery-red channels fanned out across a stretch of beach, bruising the sand purple.

  With the others, Carnelian had slowed his aquar to a walk. In the east the Tower Crag lay black beneath a rind of sun. Westwards the sand stretched to the next bright headland. Carnelian looked upstream to where there was a wide gap in the cliff wall. Narrowing his eyes, he was sure that he could see the valley it gave into cutting upwards to the land above. Sunlight had not reached into it. A powdering of birds flew up and caught fire in the dawn.

  The reek of rotting was forcing itself even through his filter. Carnelian looked out across the reddened delta, wondering at the gulls that mobbed it. He watched them land with several hops, wings snapping open and closed, fighting, screeching, dropping soft sodden lumps when retreating.

  The party milled around him. Aurum was marshalling the Marula into formation. Feeling a desire to lose himself in the morning, Carnelian urged his aquar into a jog. Soon the red sand was all around him. The stench grew as if he were approaching a catch of fish left for days in the sun. He began feeling queasy as he came among the gulls and saw them tearing at hunks of flesh. Chunks clumped together, piling up into mounds like oozing gums around which the sluggish bloody waters flowed. Stained sand jiggled with sand-fleas. Mats of flies rustled up as his aquar’s long shadow drove them from their feasts. Carnelian drew his cowl over his mask and fought the vomit down.

  Voices thinned by distance rose above the rumble of the waves. Carnelian peered down the tunnel of his cowl. Further along the beach some scows had been dragged up onto the sand. Another was still in the sea, bucking amidst a slick of heads. He watched as it nudged closer to the shore. Dark arms clung to its sides. As its prow dug into the beach, the creatures dragging it came up out of the sea. They were brown jerking things like distorted men. He watched them strain together and the scow lunged up the sand to join the others. Around the scows, more of the distorted men were milling, each hunched under a basket. Carnelian watched them, curious, certain they must be sartlar. Naked, well-shaped men stood above them on the bows unloading something into their baskets. The burdened creatures then hobbled off to join the line wavering its way up the delta towards the valley in the cliffs.

  Carnelian decided that he might as well take a closer look. He was about to ride on when the air around him was sprayed with blood from the stream. He turned to see two Marula calming their creatures from the run. The gulls that had risen around them were hacking out their calls. One of the black men bowed. The act of subservience did not feel like one. Carnelian caught a flicker of yellow eyes and glimpsed their hatred. The man lifted his lance up and pointed back to where the party was formed up in good order.

  Carnelian returned, a Maruli on either side. As he came closer to the other riders, he spotted Tain clinging to the top of their baggage flushed and grimacing. Then he heard Vennel’s voice, ‘. . . but I have been deceived. Why do we not ride for the road?’ Jaspar replied that this was hardly the place to hold a discussion. They fell to arguing. Aurum signed with his hand. The sun caught his rings. The hand pointed and the Marula drummed off in a dark knot up the delta. The Masters and baggage straggled after them, their voices lost in the rumble of footfalls.

  Carnelian watched the riders undulate away. It was a strange relief to be left alone with the buzzing flies. He glanced back to the Tower Crag where his people were. He might have fled with them if he had known a way to return to the Hold. He turned to the carnage. It seemed Crail’s dismembered body that was clogging up the stream. He tried to remember the old man’s face. He remembered that last kiss he had given him, that kiss of betrayal. The tears began dribbling down the inside of his mask. Carnelian longed to throw it away, to fly along the beach, to have the clean sea-wind scour the tears from his eyes.

  Far away the riders were flowing towards the valley. There was no returning. Carnelian cursed, sniffed, then lashed his aquar to race after them.

  He splashed along the rivulets as they joined, deepening into browner streams. The triangle of the delta narrowed and he saw that he was drawing ever closer to the shambling file of creatures coming up from the scows.

  The streams wound together until Carnelian was riding along the edge of a single channel. On the other side the creatures struggled with their baskets, which brimmed over with things like wheels. Their crooked bodies were grained like wood. Whatever faces they might have were hidden behind lank sheets of hair.

  He reached the Masters where they had come to a halt. A stiff back betrayed his father. Height revealed Aurum. Vennel was precariously balanced in his chair. Jaspar’s aquar was perched on the bank seeming to look across to the other side. Carnelian coaxed his aquar towards him.

  They both looked down at the clots swirling in the purpled water. ‘What carnage is this?’ Carnelian said and ground his teeth.

  ‘A poetic name for such filthy commerce.’

  ‘Commerce . . . ?’ The word was unexpected. Carnelian gazed across the stream.

  ‘And a fitting occupation for the Wise.’

  Carnelian watched the creatures struggling on the other bank. ‘Are those sartlar?’

  ‘Of course. Repulsive, neh?’ He pointed an arm upstream. ‘No doubt we shall have to follow their stinking march through that.’

  Carnelian followed his finger. The valley was still in shadow but he could see that it seemed to be set with dark jewels. The stream came out of it through something that looked like a wall stretched across its mouth.

  Aurum sent the Marula into the stream with his hand. As they crumbled the banks into the water their aquar stumbled, jolting their riders. Then they were wading up against the flow with the water foaming red against their legs. The baggage animals were next. Seeing it was safe, the Masters urged their aquar after them.

  Carnelian followed Jaspar. He watched him sway as his aquar slid down the bank. Then it was his turn. He gripped the chair rim but was still thrown about and almost pitched forward into the eddying stinking water. Soon he was making his way up the channel with the others.

  They reached the sartlar and pushed into their march. He could see that it was spiral ammonites that filled their baskets. The aquar jostled the sartlar out of the way. Carnelian saw shells knocked out of the baskets being trodden into the water by the sartlar’s spade feet. He wanted to see their faces but not a single one turned to watch them pass.

  The wall was close now, so close Carnelian could see it was a scree. Little avalanches clinked down and he realized the whole slope was made up from fragments of ammonite shell.

  He felt a change in his aquar’s footfalls. Each impact was sharper. Peering down into the water he saw the channel was now lined with stone. Two buttresses rose up to hold back the hills of shells. Between them was a gap through which the stream flowed. Soon masonry had risen on either side. The other Masters were in the noisy space with him, being carried along by the sartlar tide whose burdens formed a mosaic that hid them from view. Carnelian saw a leathery hand fumble up to steady a basket. One of the sartlar became entangled in the legs of Jaspar’s aquar and was knocked down. Its shellfish load pattered into the water like stones. Other sartlar bleated and tried to get out of the way. The aquar’s plumes flared. It trumpeted. Its claws churned the sartlar’s body into the stream as it tried to keep its footing. There was a gurgling shriek, some crunching sounds that might have been crushing shells. Jaspar pulled his aquar back into control, then moved on.

  Carnelian’s aquar stepped around the floating mess. He glimpsed a face into which a spiral had been branded so deeply, the nose was in several chunks. He could not look away, even though he had to lean out dangerously to keep the corpse in sight. The baskets meshed and it was gone. He looked ahead, troubled, to find that they had come through the gap into a valley that was carved and gouged into a complex honeycomb awrithe with sartlar.

  Jaspar affected a cough. ‘It is unusual to find oneself
in a drain.’

  The channel swelled into a great sink whose walls were streaked abattoir-brown and pierced by many dribbling mouths. Gutter lips wedged into the top of the wall were disgorging thick dark jets. Meaty chunks made them spit and splutter. Carnelian watched a hunched sartlar using a paddle as if it were a broom to brush a sodden lump over the edge so that it splashed into the pool below. That pool poured its bloody mixture past their aquars’ feet. Carnelian felt as if he were choking.

  Sartlar were hauling their baskets up a stairway that rose out of the channel. The Marula were sent to clear a way. With the other Masters, Carnelian urged his aquar up the steps.

  As his aquar neared the top, Carnelian emerged into a red world, an amphitheatre with tiers of cisterns, walkways, channels. The air hazed with flies. Everywhere there were piles of ammonite shells. As each sartlar emptied its basket on a pile it caused a rattling avalanche. Sartlar sat surrounded by baskets like women at a market. They cracked the ammonites open on rocks, used their claws to scratch out the creatures inside and then discarded the empty shells. These were gathered by other sartlar who shuffled off towards the rubbish wall. There, amidst a frenzy of gull wings and screeches, the shells were thrown away.

  ‘Filthy industry,’ Jaspar cried above the clatter.

  The Marula were trying to wave away the flies. As these spat against him, Carnelian became thankful for his mask and cloak.

  A brown man was battering his way towards them through the sartlar using the handle of a bladed whip. He made his hands into a tube and shouted through it, ‘You’ve come the wrong way.’

  The lances of the Marula pricked him out of their path. They started moving through scattering sartlar, spilling baskets. Other overseers confronted them, shaking their whips, slapping the lance heads away from their faces. ‘Wrong way,’ they cried. ‘Wrong way.’

  ‘We should return,’ shrilled Vennel in Vulgate. ‘Clearly there’s no road through here.’

  Suth said something to one of the Marula. The man advanced and lifted his lance to point up the valley. ‘Show the way to upper land.’

  The overseerers shook their heads and showed grimaces of brown teeth. Any sartlar that bumped into them they cracked upon the head.

  Aurum pushed his way through the Marula. ‘Show me the route.’ His voice carried even over the noise.

  They waved their whips and scowled at him. A whip handle clacked against Aurum’s saddle-chair, causing his aquar’s eye-plumes to flutter. The Master lunged forward past its neck. The men drew back, loosening their lashes ready to strike, but the beginnings of fear distorted their faces. Aurum slipped back his cowl to reveal his gold face. They hid behind their arms as if that face were brighter than the sun. They cringed back, dropping their whips, tripping over baskets and sartlar. Aurum straightened, hid his face within the shadow of his cowl. The overseers cowered till he commanded them to approach. Then they fawned on him and strained to hear his every word.

  Cringing guides led them up the valley. They wound through a maze of vats and channels. Carnelian watched sartlar stir a rot of shelled ammonites. Each stir gave off a stench and oozed out more yellow liquid that darkened as it flowed. Sluices let water in from above or allowed the liquid to filter down from one tank to the next. With each descent the colour deepened. In one tank he saw it had become almost black but that its edges were the colour of blood. He understood and looked around with wonder. The whole valley was a dyeworks for extracting fabled, precious purple.

  A whole run of tanks was flushed clean by a flood released from higher up. Red to their waists, sartlar leaned against the current as they scraped at the rotting matter that was sticking to the sides. Carnelian knew this sewage would be channelled down to the sink from where it would stream red off to the sea.

  ‘Do my Lords think it reasonable that I should now be given explanations,’ Vennel said over the scrabbling of aquar claws.

  Carnelian was exhausted by the effort of keeping in his seat. During the long, hard climb his saddle-chair had been giving him a constant bruising batter. He would be glad to stop even for a short time.

  Aurum looked up at the sun. ‘We must be far from here before we camp tonight.’

  ‘Camp . . . ?’ said Vennel.

  ‘Aurum, we have almost reached the land above,’ said Suth. Carnelian saw his father turning round to look for him. ‘And it might profit us to rest our beasts before we go much further.’

  ‘As my Lords wish,’ said Aurum with a tone of resignation. ‘I will seek out a suitable place to stop.’

  They continued to climb up the valley side. Carnelian strained to look over the juddering back of the saddle-chair and glimpsed the shimmer of the sea.

  He was crossing a weir when he saw Aurum on the other side bringing his aquar to a stop. The Master set five Marula aside and divided the rest into two groups. The first he sent back down the way they had come. The second was sent ahead to spy out the land. Aurum made his aquar kneel, fastened on his ranga shoes and then climbed out of his saddle-chair. Carnelian bound on his own shoes. Aurum towered over the Maruli to whom he was handing his aquar’s reins.

  The river formed a lake below the level of the path. The aquar stooped to drink and the Marula bent down beside them lapping like beasts. Tain and the other slaves stood apart from the Masters who were like a copse of trees.

  Jaspar struck a pose. ‘One is certainly relieved to have escaped that foul factory. Though not without cost.’ He pinched up his robe as if it were dung. ‘In civilized circumstances one would insist on having this immediately torched. This rag could not be sweetened by all the perfumes of Osrakum.’

  ‘The wind will cleanse it well enough,’ snapped Vennel.

  ‘One fears the smell of those putrid molluscs will remain for ever in one’s nostrils.’

  Suth looked at Jaspar. ‘The road’s perfume will make my Lord soon enough forget his putrid molluscs.’

  ‘At last,’ said Vennel.

  ‘At last, my Lord?’ said Jaspar.

  Vennel’s mask regarded him disdainfully. ‘We come at last to knowledge of our destination.’

  ‘Our destination has always been the same, my Lord,’ said Suth.

  ‘But not the means by which we might reach it, my Lord.’

  ‘We all agreed we should proceed along the road disguised.’

  ‘I recall a mention of palanquins, of the Legate’s banners.’

  ‘It has become necessary, my Lord, that we should adopt a different disguise,’ said Aurum.

  ‘Why did the palanquins fall out of favour?’

  ‘We can no longer risk using the leftway,’ said Suth.

  ‘Why by the Two can we not, my Lord?’

  ‘We have reasons to believe that were we to do so we should be attacked,’ said Aurum.

  ‘These reasons were no doubt contained in the Clave’s letter?’ Vennel waited for confirmation but received none. ‘Do these reasons justify this preposterous choice of route?’

  ‘Many eyes would have seen us leaving the tower if we had joined the road, there,’ said Suth.

  Vennel pointed up the valley. ‘This will bring us up onto the road, no doubt?’

  ‘It will, my Lord.’

  Carnelian could see Vennel’s fury in the cast of his shoulders.

  ‘What is this new disguise, my Lords, this wonderful concealment that will draw a veil of shadow over the eyes of our enemies?’

  Aurum indicated the Marula. ‘We will hide ourselves among these barbarians.’

  Vennel looked at the Marula as if he were counting them. ‘These creatures are of a type rare within the borders of the Commonwealth. Do my Lords think it wise that we should attempt to conceal ourselves in such a conspicuous hiding place?’

  ‘Marula are rare, my Lord,’ said Aurum, ‘but here, by the sea, black men from round the coast are not unknown. We shall masquerade as chieftains making a trade pilgrimage to the Guarded Land.’

  ‘One had understood the coastal blacks to be far
more diminutive than these Marula.’

  Suth broadened his shoulders. ‘My Lord is not listening. Black men are uncommon on the road and thus few will know enough to make a distinction between their kinds.’

  Vennel nodded. ‘My Lords seem to have woven their schemes with some care. I can only wonder why I was excluded.’

  ‘I too,’ said Jaspar, but Carnelian noted that his voice held no edge of resentment.

  Vennel’s mask turned its imperious gaze on him. ‘You seem not much concerned, my Lord.’

  ‘We are here now. It would seem foolish, not to say unpleasant, to return down this valley.’

  ‘The Ruling Lord Suth and I thought it more prudent that we should keep our own counsel,’ said Aurum.

  Vennel made a gesture of exasperation. ‘This prudence was not, it seems, extended to the Legate of the Tower in the Sea.’

  ‘We needed his assistance,’ said Suth.

  ‘A great quantity of it, my Lord, judging by our collarless and poisoned escort and these starvelings with their grimy chairs, not to mention the cut-down ranga. Tell me, Aurum, how did you persuade our dear Legate to give you so much assistance? Did you perhaps bind him to your cause with the promise of one of your blood-high daughters?’

  Aurum opened his hands in a threat gesture. ‘Perhaps my Lord should consider choosing his accusations with more care.’

  Vennel turned away to look at Suth. ‘What of the much vaunted need for haste, My-Lord-who-goes-before?’

  ‘There is still time enough to reach Osrakum before the election,’ said Suth.