The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  As he drifted slowly across the bridge, Carnelian could not help drinking in the thrill bubbling up around him. His eyes flitted from one bright face to another until they stumbled on some that looked sick and grim. In that carnival, the Marula had the faces of mummies. Only their eyes showed any life as they scrutinized the wall of Osrakum. Carnelian followed them there and he too grew troubled. Its slope filled the lower sky like a storm. The sun rising above was burning a halo round the head of the leftmost gatehouse, making its shadow fall across the bridge as a cold diagonal. Light bathed the other inner flank and spilled out onto the bridge and along the wall that carried the leftway up to the gatehouse. Its face was studded with the cypher of the five-spot quincunx. Carnelian wondered what the device might mean. His eyes slid down to where the gatehouse tenoned into the rock of the Wheel’s plateau. The plateau’s edge curving away in each direction was fringed with cranes that leaned over to dangle their lines into the moat. Down on its water, a barge was being poled while others were moored receiving goods from above. The moat’s outer wall rose to support a cliff jigsawed together from the building of the city that crowded up to its edge. This cliff followed the curve of the Wheel and was boned with wood, quoined and buttressed with brick. Mouths opened here and there where sewer throats and alleys broke through to vomit their rubbish down into the moat. The filth streaking down from the countless windows made them look like weeping sores.

  A scratching trumpet blast made Carnelian whisk round. One of the Masters was looking up to the leftway. The trumpet shrieked louder, closer, and one of the gatehouse towers answered it with a clanging bell. When the air stopped reverberating other bells could be heard sounding from the further reaches of the Wheel.

  Carnelian saw the messenger flashing past above. He searched the black huddles of the other Masters for some reaction. One of them was making signs clumsied by his gloves, . . . as expected. She will soon know . . . we are somewhere in the Wheel.

  The gatehouses loomed up on either side. A double arch passed a leftway between them. One of the inner walls was snagging sunlight. Carnelian held the edges of his cowl and craned up to see that the gatehouse was sheathed with brass almost to the top. He was aghast at such profligate use of metal. The sun smouldered the wrought surface. Ledges trapped blue from the sky. Carnelian could not at first believe there could be so much metal in the world. Faces in the brass were larger than wagons, with eyes like wheels. Only when he saw the hinges, and the rollers as tall as men that lined its lower edge, did he realize that it was a gate.

  He looked away and saw his wonder on other faces, but there was only fear on the faces of the Marula. They reminded him of his own misery and of the danger. The sun beat full upon their sweat-gleamed faces as they looked fixedly at Osrakum’s dark wall. The focus of their terror was plain to see. Off a little to the left, the Wheel squeezed the slurry of its crowds into the funnelling canyon. Standing flanking that funnel throat were the guardians, the two Gods of the Masters, each a quarter of the height of the mountainous Sacred Wall.

  Beyond the towers the carriageway fanned out to meet a cordon of toll posts. They had to wait their turn. Holding their billhooks upright, the toll-keepers looked out from under conic wooden helmets into which the five dots of the quincunx were inlaid in bone. Their leather jerkins bore the glyphs of gate and sea.

  Aurum sent a Maruli forward to drop a pouch into a toll-keeper’s hand. The black man then leaned back to take in the whole of their party with a gesture. Nodding, the toll-keeper emptied the pouch out and began to count the bronze, double-faced coins off against the Marula and then the Masters. While he was doing this, one of his companions nudged him and pointed up at the Maruli. The black man’s face was slick with fear. The toll-keepers narrowed their eyes and began shouting at the Maruli, gesturing with their billhooks that he should dismount. The man looked back at the Masters, begging instruction; his brothers’ lance blades were lifting. The billhooks were now clattering against the Maruli’s saddle-chair. ‘Get down!’ cried one of the soldiers.

  The Maruli’s aquar sank to the ground and he was dragged out of the chair groaning. More toll-keepers had come up. One was barking questions. Hunched, the Maruli slapped the man back only to find the billhooks shaking around his head. The Marula around Carnelian were growling. Nervously, he scanned the crowd beyond the toll cordon.

  Aurum surged forward. The toll-keepers drew back from him, their billhooks lifting like cobras. Aurum’s glove beckoned one. The man came reluctantly. The Master leant over and opened a slit in his cowl so that the man could peer in. The man’s face turned to clay. As he began sagging to his knees, Aurum grabbed the billhook to hold him up. They exchanged a mutter, then the toll-keeper fled back to the others who all began nodding, almost bowing as they opened up a way and let them pass through, between the posts of brass and into the roaring crowd.

  They were forced to wait while some man-drawn carts rolled by, then they swam into the shifting currents of the Wheel. A tinker clinked kettles on a branched pole that looked like a tree flocked by earthenware birds. A party of northerners lumbered past on large-headed aquar, each saddle-chair holding three or four of them, skin marbled with dirt, matted hair pebbled with amber.

  As the Marula thrust a way into each new current they looked back with questioning faces. Each time Aurum shook his shrouded head. At last they came to where a river of people was flowing along a black paved road. Aurum gave a nod and the Marula led them in.

  Carnelian reeled in his father’s aquar while all the time searching for enemies. They were in a soup at a rolling boil. Faces, hand-clasped bags and sacks and pouches, fruit-filled baskets, bubbled in and out of sight. Mottled beasts, some with feathers, some without, panniered, loaded, yoked to wagons, to chariots or swinging palanquins like soft humps. Painted eunuchs, women in gaggles, swaying on carried chairs, swollen with child, their menfolk trying to make way for their bellies. Toll-keepers rode through like lords at a fair. Merchants marshalled their caravans with whips and bellowing. Urchins ran weaving, screaming, playing hide and seek among the angling thickets of legs. The roar never ceased. The air was never free of the bristle of poles, the slap and billow of canopies, of swagging ropes. The ground rarely showed its slimy mush of peelings and feathers, of flowers and dung.

  Tortuously, they worked their way round the Wheel on the black road and then, abruptly, turned in towards its centre to climb a wide ramp. Through a gap in the crowd, Carnelian saw a snatch of its balustrade where an old woman sat amongst a rot of melon rinds, offering up trinkets, her toothless grin tracking passers-by.

  At the summit of the ramp a roar of water drowned out the crowds. Over the balustrade Carnelian saw a wide channel thrashing white, rushing water round in a wide arc. The water spilled out from the channel all along its length into cisterns mobbed by people.

  When he looked up he realized the whole vast mosaic of the Wheel was laid out around him. He twisted to look back. The gatehouses they had come through now looked smaller than his hand. Behind them was the irregular rim wall. He followed that round and found another pair of gatehouses at a greater distance, then round to another pair further still, and to where yet another gateway touched the edge of the canyon’s mouth. Across on the canyon’s other side he found one more gate that closed the ring. The quincunx cypher made sense to him. Not counting the way into the canyon, the Wheel had five gates in all.

  The shadow of the Sacred Wall was still dulling colours over half the Wheel. Where the sun had reached, delicate patchwork stretched its hues off towards the moat. Far away it was stitched together from tiny lozenges, closer it resolved into neat rows of vendors sitting among their baskets and their blankets, green-heaped with herbs, and all manner of vegetables and fruit. Dark cuttings toothed the Wheel’s rim showing where channels cut into it from the moat. A ring shearing in the human flow showed the road they had left. Inside that, the water channel and its cisterns formed a glittering circle. Six ramps crossed this. Five of th
em lay on one of the spokes that led to a pair of gatehouses. The sixth led to bridges over the moat and on into the canyon and the crater of Osrakum.

  As they descended into the inner Wheel, Carnelian was beginning to believe they had managed to elude their attackers. He could hear music. Flags proclaimed the trades of the bonesmith, the featherer, the copper-beater. The weavers were there with their cottons, the pigmenters with their dyes. Lacquered boxes rather than baskets held every kind of precious commodity. One man was rolling out leathers rippled like water and another displaying cylinders of ivory as thick as his arms. Among them strolled buyers, their face tattoos proclaiming them the servants of the Masters. Behind them swung chests with their treasure of coined bronze.

  The music of horns and cymbals was coming from somewhere up ahead. Carnelian tried to see round the riders blocking his view. They were nearing the ring of poles that he had seen from the ramp defining the hub of the Wheel. From each pole hung strange fruit. The fetor of decay swelled with the carnival music. Carnelian could see dancers cavorting between the poles, snaking yellow ribbons through the air. People were poking sticks into the things hanging from the poles. Squinting, he was appalled to see that they were men dangling in the air spread-eagled on diagonal crosses. As he came closer, Carnelian flinched away from one man’s agonized face. A hawker was selling makeshift spears to his tormentors. Carnelian had to pass so close to the crucified man that he could smell his sweat and the excrement that streaked his legs.

  The Wheel’s hub was fenced in by these crucifixions. Carnelian was looking round in disgust when his aquar began to be jostled. The crowd was milling. One Maruli’s aquar was shoved into his. Angry voices were drowning out the horns. His aquar’s plumes flared. Carnelian pulled his father’s saddle-chair as close as he could, then stretched over to grab its rim. His father jigged like a sack. A surge was rushing towards them across the mass of heads. It struck. Although Carnelian was almost unseated, he still managed to keep hold of his father’s chair. Aurum’s voice was shouting commands over the riot. Carnelian watched the Marula stabbing at faces with their lances. Panic was ripping gaps in the crowd as Carnelian watched hands reach up to one Maruli’s saddle-chair. The man had a sword out and was chopping at them. For each hand that was stung away two more grabbed hold. The chair was toppling. The aquar was struggling against the bodies pressing round it. Suddenly the Maruli was yanked into a surf of hands and disappeared. For a moment he resurfaced, bloodied, then the crowd closed over him. Carnelian looked round in shock and saw another Maruli being dragged to his death. He tried to edge his aquar and his father’s round to shield him. His own chair lurched suddenly to the left. Hands were grasping the rim. His father’s chair bobbed free as Carnelian was forced to let it go. Faces grimaced up at him as he fumbled for one of his ranga shoes. He stamped at their fingers and heard bones crack but still they clung on.

  Master voices crying out in wrath made Carnelian look up. They were revealing themselves, huge and golden-faced. He pushed his own hood back. Instantly most of the hands released their grip as if his mask were shooting flames at them. His chair righted a little, but fingers still gripped like grappling hooks. The faces over the rim showed doubt as round them the crowd was falling to its knees. Still they pulled, gnashing their teeth as he struck repeatedly. His chair’s lean was increasing. Soon he would fall out. He could see enraged men waiting below with their flint knives.

  A voice boomed so loud it made the crowd seem quiet. ‘Brothers of the Wheel.’ The assassins looking up at Carnelian faltered. He was jolted to one side as his saddle-chair was released. He looked round and saw the gold-faced figure sitting tall in his father’s saddle-chair. ‘I am the voice of the Masters.’

  Carnelian stopped breathing. His father had come back to life. The crowd stilled.

  ‘The Mountain knows who you are, Oh Brothers of the Wheel, and what . . . you do here . . . today. Slip . . . slip . . .’ His father crumpled.

  A voice could be heard giving commands in thin Quya but Carnelian could see the blood lust returning to the eyes below. Fingers curled slowly over his chair’s rim. Carnelian watched them, his ranga shoe held high. He allowed his arm to sink and put the shoe across his knees. He lengthened his back, lifted his chin. He moistened his lips. ‘Slip away.’ He felt his mask quivering with the words. ‘Slip away, Oh Brothers of the Wheel.’ His voice was finding its strength. ‘Slip away now and this sin’ll be forgiven you.’ He felt the power. He was a spindle of iron. He raised his hand to point up at the sky. ‘Persist and you may be certain that as surely as that sun’ll set tonight, so shall the vengeance of the Masters find you to exterminate you root and branch even to the remotest of your kin.’

  His words had turned the crowd to stone. A lone voice warbled a command. Carnelian saw his attackers fleeing, chasing the ripple of prostration that was spreading away through the crowd. Around him the marketplace might have been a plain of ferns flattened by a whirlwind. A murmur came from those distant parts of the Wheel that the silence had not reached. As Carnelian looked round he felt the power drain away. An aquar was wandering with what was left of his father crumpled in its saddle-chair. The moaning of the crucified was a wind through winter trees.

  The THREE GATES

  Three lands

  Three gates

  And three tall crowns

  (nursery rhyme)

  ‘SUTH HAS KILLED HIMSELF,’ SHRILLED VENNEL.

  Jaspar’s mask was surveying the further reaches of the crowd. ‘I had thought him already dead.’

  Aurum rode to stoop towards Suth’s cloak.

  Vennel looked at Carnelian. ‘Grieve not, my Lord, your father’s death was not in vain. He saved us and now you are the Ruling Lord Suth.’

  The reins sagged in Carnelian’s hand. His aquar began ambling.

  Jaspar looked round. ‘We must haste to the gates. This is no place to linger.’

  Carnelian felt as if he were bobbing in icy water.

  ‘He yet lives.’

  They all turned to Aurum.

  ‘He lives, you say?’ cried Vennel. ‘Are you sure?’

  Aurum straightened. ‘Though his blood grows cold.’

  Carnelian yanked his aquar back into control and moved to his father’s side. He reached over to touch him. His father’s cloak could have been stuffed with clay. No sound of breathing came from behind his mask. Carnelian rummaged among the cloak’s folds for a hand. He lifted the lank flesh and placed his finger to the blue cord bridging the wrist. There was a flutter like a taper flame. He sighed and stroked it, before replacing it in the folds. He felt a shadow fall on him and looked up. It was Jaspar.

  ‘Are we safe?’

  Aurum’s mask seemed to melt and flame as he nodded. ‘The danger has passed for now. Her web is torn a second time.’

  ‘And the Marula?’

  The crowd’s tide had crept away, stranding the corpses of three of the black men in their puddling blood. Aurum ignored the question and began barking commands at those still alive. Carnelian’s eyes lingered on their pinched faces. They seemed not to have heard. Their red eyes slid sidelong to their fallen comrades.

  ‘On, I say, on!’ cried Aurum.

  Marula eyes glanced off the mirror of the Master’s face to stare up to the faces of the Gods sneering down at them from the canyon’s throat.

  Aurum swept his hand around his head like a blade to indicate the encircling crucifixions. ‘If you don’t want to end this day hanging on a cross, you’ll move on.’

  The Marula hunched reluctant, then first one and then the rest urged their aquar forward towards the prostrate edge of the crowd. Their lances stiffened as they coughed battle cries and began to pick up speed. There was a screaming scramble as people splashed out of their way like water at a ford.

  Aurum looked over at Carnelian. ‘Come, my Lord.’

  Carnelian tied his father’s aquar to his saddle-chair, then, with a lash of his reins, he crashed after the Marula, pulling his fathe
r and the other Masters in his wake.

  The feet of the colossus appalled the Marula. Great wedges of scabrous stone. Toenails like the roofs of houses. An instep that was a cave. Each foot narrowed up several storeys to an ankle thicker than the gatehouses of the Wheel. The legs barrelled up their leprous towers, leaning towards each other, swelling towards the knees that were bending the mountainous thighs towards them. They shuddered imagining the kneeling avalanche of so much stone. The waist and belly seemed a more remote and solid part of the mountain. A fist supported an arm that in turn buttressed the slab of a shoulder. Strangely, the head looked no bigger than a human head. The head of the other colossus leaned close as if they might be talking together, oblivious of the ant world milling at their feet. The eyes of the Marula were forced to scale further up the Sacred Wall. Crag piled on crag up the slope. The whole skyful of rock leaned out as the canyon walls came together. The black men stared unblinking at the narrow ribbon of blue nipped between them. It was like tottering on the edge of an abyss in whose remote depths a brilliant river ran. They could imagine falling. They screwed their eyes closed, dropped their heads, dizzy, their nails gouging a grip on the rims of their saddle-chairs.

  Wind acrid with smoke blew hard against Carnelian’s mask. He felt his aquar slowing. He could make out that the ramp he had been riding up from the canyon floor ended abruptly in a promontory. His aquar’s narrow head angled up and back, flaring plumes, as he yanked it to a halt. Its plume fans folded and he saw the gloomy nave of the canyon. Its slope milled with traffic. Far above, the sky was an improbable painted ceiling.