The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  ‘Stay where you are,’ the voice hissed.

  Carnelian put an arm up as the light climbed to his face.

  ‘What have we here?’ said the voice as Carnelian tried to back away.

  The lantern clunked down on a bench that opened to expose its burning heart. Carnelian blinked and saw the shape standing behind it. Long, pale Master feet stepped into sight. Carnelian looked up. The face reflecting the light made his eyes hurt. He narrowed them and saw a Chosen face, its beauty only marred by a birthmark on the forehead like the impression of a kiss. The eyes were diamond nails pinning the face to the darkness.

  ‘Are you going to get up?’ the face said, offering Carnelian a hand.

  It was a boy not even his age. Carnelian slapped it away. ‘I can stand without your help.’

  The boy’s eyes moved over him as if he were reading glyphs inscribed over Carnelian’s body. It made him feel uneasy.

  ‘You surprised me,’ said the boy, now scanning Carnelian’s face.

  ‘You were the one lurking in the blackness like an owl. What by the burning blood were you doing?’

  The boy’s nostrils flared. ‘Reading.’

  Carnelian stared into his eyes, fascinated. There was something familiar about this boy. For some reason, Carnelian became embarrassed.

  ‘In the dark?’ he said, affecting a derisive snort.

  ‘In the dark.’

  Carnelian frowned, wondering if the boy was making fun of him. The boy’s eyes moved elsewhere, allowing Carnelian’s shoulders to lose some of their tension.

  The boy stooped to pick up Carnelian’s sword. He angled the blade, weighed it in his hand, looked up. ‘Hardly a princely weapon, my Lord.’

  Carnelian blushed.

  ‘What did you intend to do with it?’

  Carnelian felt silly. ‘Protection.’

  The boy raised his eyebrows. ‘From?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Carnelian said loudly.

  The boy turned the sword round and gave its hilt into Carnelian’s hand. Carnelian laid it down on the edge of the bench. ‘What were you reading?’ he asked, to say something.

  ‘This.’ The boy held up a necklace that sagged off into the gloom. He pulled, making more of it appear. He offered it to Carnelian who took it in both hands. The beads felt like teeth.

  ‘Beaded rope?’

  ‘Beadcord.’

  Carnelian held it closer. Stone, and shell, and pink coral all carved into different shapes. ‘The colours?’

  The boy raised an eyebrow. ‘In the dark?’

  Carnelian grimaced. ‘The shapes, then?’

  The boy nodded. ‘Run your fingers along it. No. Without looking at it.’

  Carnelian closed his eyes and rolled a bead round in his fingers. ‘A little ridge.’

  ‘And the next one?’

  Carnelian moved his fingers to the next one. ‘Another ridge.’

  ‘Feel again.’

  ‘Three ridges,’ said Carnelian, feeling round the bead.

  The boy nodded approvingly. ‘The first one is “earth”, the second, “flower”.’

  ‘Jewel?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Carnelian gaped at the beads. ‘This is a story?’

  ‘Rather a historical treatise.’

  ‘Then we are in a library of the blind,’ said Carnelian, looking round him at the bobbins on their spindles.

  ‘Of the Wise,’ corrected the boy.

  ‘Are they here?’ Carnelian asked, suddenly alarmed, searching the darkness.

  The boy’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Bound to be, somewhere.’ He waved his hand. ‘But there are many, many chambers and the Wise are preoccupied at present.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ said Carnelian, lapsing into Vulgate.

  ‘No,’ the boy said in the same language, with the beginnings of a smile.

  ‘And you?’

  The boy looked amused. ‘I’m as elusive as an owl.’

  ‘I should leave.’

  The boy shrugged, turned round and sat on something like a chair that was in a niche in the wall. He draped the beadcord over his knee and began counting its beads through his fingers.

  ‘I think I’m lost,’ said Carnelian.

  ‘Yes, you would be,’ the boy said without looking up.

  Carnelian grew angry. ‘If it would not incommode you very much, my Lord, I would appreciate it if you were to show me back to the moon-eyed door.’

  The boy looked up and hooked Carnelian with his eyes. Carnelian withstood their brilliance with some difficulty. ‘Give me your lantern,’ the boy said.

  Carnelian obeyed. He watched the boy walk off between the benches in a ball of light that was fringed with the glitter of bead-cord. He followed him. They passed through seemingly endless numbers of chambers with the boy a black shape always in front of him haloed by the light. At last, they reached a door, its silver scarred with locks.

  ‘Your moon-eyed door,’ the boy said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Carnelian.

  The boy gave a nod.

  As he was turning away, Carnelian reached up and touched his shoulder. The boy looked at the hand as if it were the mouth of a snake. Carnelian withdrew it and found himself blushing.

  ‘I was wondering . . .?’

  The boy gazed at him.

  ‘Would you consider teaching me to read the beads?’

  The boy frowned. He stared down at his hands. They were long-fingered, clever hands. They looked so like marble that Carnelian was startled when a finger moved.

  The boy was gazing at him. ‘Be here at the rising of the sun and forget the sword.’ He gave Carnelian the lantern, turned and disappeared into the darkness.

  As Carnelian came back up into the Sun in Splendour, he felt as if he were returning from the Underworld. He looked back down the steps. The meeting with the boy seemed almost a dream. What had possessed him to arrange to go back and see him? As he made his way back to his chamber, Carnelian realized that he did not even know the boy’s name.

  BEADCORD

  Fingers will read what eyes cannot see

  With hands the deaf shall hear

  Mutes shall speak with borrowed tongues

  When the storm clouds draw near

  (a Chosen riddle)

  BEFORE DAWN, CARNELIAN LOST HOLD OF THE EDGE OF A DREAM AND woke. He rose, cleansed himself, dressed, put on his mask and went out from his chamber. The watch guardsmen looked up at him with weary eyes. He stopped them kneeling with a gesture. They began to shuffle together an escort. He told them he had no need of them. When they sneaked glances at each other, he gave assurances that he would be safe.

  He encountered no-one on his way to the trapdoor. He lit the steps with his lantern. Removing his mask to see more easily, he made his way down and then along the dark nave. All the way he kept telling himself that this was madness. The moon-eyed door was closed. He widened the lantern’s beam and raked the shadows with it looking for the boy. No-one was there.

  As he lowered the lantern its light washed around his feet. The door’s huge eye stared tearfully over his head into the hall’s black heart.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he lied, as the disappointment washed over him.

  The silver trembled as one of the leaves slid away, slicing the eye in two. Someone came out through the gap. It was the boy. His bright face made the door’s silver look like lead. For a moment they gazed at each other. Then, saying nothing, the boy turned and disappeared. Unease blew out of the gap like a draught but still Carnelian followed him.

  Through the mazing library Carnelian followed, watching the boy’s white feet tread the edge of his lantern’s light. They stopped between a wall and a beadcord bench where a niche cut back into the stone. Lifting his light, Carnelian saw one of the curious chairs on which the boy had sat the previous day.

  The boy took the lantern from Carnelian and indicated that he should sit on the chair. Carnelian sat. He fingered the spike that rose from the end of th
e chair’s left arm. The boy put the lantern down and turned to face one of the bench’s spindles. He took hold of its topmost reel, lifted it free and then threaded it down onto the empty spindle next to it. He lifted the second reel from the original stack and turned with it in his hands. It could have been a human head wrapped in a jewelled cloth. Hoisting it, the boy impaled it on the chair arm’s spike.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Carnelian.

  The boy’s hands were moving over the reel’s beadcord. ‘Hush!’ He saw Carnelian’s frown. ‘In a web, a single vibration can bring the spider.’

  ‘You mean the Wise?’ whispered Carnelian.

  ‘Do not look so fearful. I would know if one of them was near.’

  ‘I am not fearful,’ protested Carnelian, glancing over the boy’s shoulder to scan for any movement in the chamber.

  ‘Haaa,’ the boy muttered with satisfaction as he found the bead-cord’s end. He pulled at it and the reel turned smoothly, glittering.

  ‘First, we must teach you the basics. This is the most elementary beadcord I could find.’ His fingers slid along from the end until they reached a faceted ring of bronze. ‘This bead is where the reel’s text begins.’

  Carnelian peered at it.

  ‘No, close your eyes. It is your fingers that must see.’

  Carnelian held it then closed his eyes.

  ‘What do you feel?’ whispered the boy.

  ‘It is angular, regular.’

  ‘And?’

  Carnelian shrugged.

  ‘Is it not also cold? That shape with coldness will always tell you that you are at the beginning.

  ‘This here is the title of the reel.’

  Carnelian opened his eyes to see the boy running his finger from the bronze bead along the twenty or so beads to the cord’s end. The reel rattled as the boy yanked a long length of it, hand over hand. He coiled it up in his left, felt along it with his right.

  ‘Here.’ He offered Carnelian another bead to feel. ‘This bead marks the beginning of a section and can be used to move accurately and rapidly backwards and forwards along the cord.’ The boy pointed down to Carnelian’s feet. ‘You can respool the cord with that treadle.’ Carnelian could see nothing, so he felt around with his toes until he found a plate. As he pushed, it gave way and the reel beside him turned a little, sighing some beads through the boy’s hands.

  ‘Here, take it.’ The boy gave the loops of beadcord to Carnelian who pushed down with his heel then with his toe, and as he did so felt the cord spitting out of his grasp as it wound onto the reel.

  ‘It is like a spinning wheel,’ Carnelian whispered, smiling.

  The boy nodded, all the time watching the reel. Reaching forward, he closed his hand over Carnelian’s, lifting and dropping it in a smooth rhythm. ‘Move it up and down so that it winds back evenly.’ He examined the reel. ‘If it is done untidily, a Sapient would know that someone unauthorized had been reading it.’

  The soft warmth of the boy’s hand contrasted with a hardness at its edge. As the boy took his hand away, Carnelian saw the blood-ring. He had thought him too young to have one.

  ‘The bones of the beadcord,’ the boy whispered, once the cord was again taut and Carnelian had hold of nothing but its end, ‘are the syllable beads.’ He found some examples. Carnelian tried to memorize their shapes as the boy sounded them for him. ‘Any text could be coded just with these, but perhaps to speed up reading – though I suspect more for secrecy – many words are represented by a single, special bead.’

  ‘Like glyphs,’ whispered Carnelian.

  ‘Very much like glyphs. I have chosen this reel because it is composed mostly of syllabic beads. You must learn these before you progress on to the more esoteric ones.’

  ‘Were you taught the beadcord by the Wise?’

  The boy smiled enigmatically. ‘You think that likely?’

  Carnelian shrugged.

  ‘Well, I taught myself.’

  ‘They allow this?’

  The boy looked up at him with raptor eyes. ‘They cannot forbid what they do not know. It is one of the arts the Wise keep jealously to themselves.’ He rotated his hand to take in the surrounding gloom. ‘I have counted more than six twenties of these chambers. Each has an average of twenty benches. Each bench can hold two dozen reels on its spindles. There is enough beadcord here to weave a garment that would clothe the Osrakum’s crater.’

  Carnelian touched the reel. ‘Each of these is a book?’

  The boy wavered his hand. ‘Three or four together can form a book. In contrast, a single reel can contain a dozen reports.’

  Carnelian tried to imagine it all. ‘A vast accumulation,’ he sighed.

  ‘The exquisite distillation of millennia of dreaming and analysis.’

  ‘And you can read all of it?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘If only I could. Much is hidden from me. This blind reading is a deep art. Some of the beadcord is as smooth as a snake.’ He displayed his finger ends. ‘These ten are like the eyes of fish in a muddy pool. The eight of the Wise see further than eagles. I have read a reel claiming that only the blind can see past the bright, false and shifting mirages of our mortal world into the immortal and immutable truth of the divine. It is said that the Wise do not only see what has been but what is yet to be. As in the glyph that represents them, they look over their left shoulder into prophecy.’

  ‘Are they born blind?’

  ‘No. At first they are like you and me, though of imperfect blood. They rise up from the flesh tithe that the Wise themselves impose upon the impure, marumaga children of the Great. After gelding, the candidates begin their studies in the Labyrinth. Those with winged minds soar up into the rarefied regions of the Wisdom. At every height there are those who can climb no further. Failing, they fall. They become the quaestors, the higher ammonites, the eunuchs of the forbidden house.’

  ‘Blinding seems a poor reward for such a struggle. I had thought it punishment.’

  ‘You are not completely wrong. The mutilations were imposed long ago when one of the Wise betrayed his trust. The imperial Commonwealth has her foundation in their silence.’

  ‘They are mute?’

  ‘They have only a single sense. Touch.’

  ‘Surely they can taste and smell.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘It is rumoured that they retain a faint capacity to taste bitterness. That aside, they are in our world only by their skin. When they have achieved the highest wisdom that is allowed to those with eyes and ears, they are locked away. Each eye is sliced out like a stone from a peach. The red spirals of their hearing are cored from their heads and the fleshy shells shorn off. Caustic inhalations burn away their smelling and afterwards the useless meat of their nose is discarded. Their tongues are drawn out and harvested like the saffrons of a crocus. Once his mutilations are complete, a Sapient is left only feet and hands as the primary organs of his perception. Remote from seductive sensation, they can be entrusted with the deeper secrets. In the caverns of their cool uncluttered minds they are made capable of measuring the currents of our vast world minutely.’

  ‘They have their homunculi,’ whispered Carnelian, seeking some salve for his pity, his revulsion.

  The boy nodded. ‘For each Sapient, his own, unique homunculus is a bridge into the outer world that if once removed leaves him as isolated as a rock in the midst of the sea.’

  Carnelian looked off, understanding. ‘No treasure chamber could be made more secure.’

  The boy gazed at him, then snapped his eyes away to look at the beads. ‘I thought you wanted to learn touch reading.’

  Carnelian flinched at the harshness in the boy’s voice. He took the beads and, slowly, they continued to work through the bead shapes. Concentrate as hard as he could, he still had to go back many times. His fingers became as raw as his mind, but the boy was relentless and Carnelian swallowed his complaints.

  At last, the boy moved to the lantern and closed its shutter. For a while Car
nelian could still see him standing there, but with each blink, his ghost image dimmed until Carnelian was in perfect darkness.

  ‘Why . . .?’ he whispered.

  ‘Here in the library, darkness is the beginning of true seeing.’

  Carnelian fumbled on through his lesson, coaxing words from the beads till he began to hear them speaking in his mind as if the beads were calling up through his hollow fingers.

  ‘The lesson is at an end,’ said the darkness.

  Carnelian was in a dream. As his fingers lost hold of the beads their voices went silent in his mind. ‘But I have learnt so little,’ he whispered.

  ‘You can learn more, tomorrow. Wind the cord.’

  When he pushed the treadle it gave an alarming rattle. Carnelian stopped.

  ‘Why have you stopped?’ whispered the dark.

  ‘The noise . . .’

  ‘Our voices and not the treadle are alien here.’

  Carnelian worked the treadle until he felt the end of the beadcord in his hand. Something brushed his finger and the cord was gone. He heard the reel being replaced on its spindle and then the other two being slipped down over it.

  Carnelian felt another’s skin link its warmth to his.

  ‘Take my hand,’ whispered the boy.

  Carnelian closed his fingers over the hand as carefully as if it were a throat. ‘The lantern . . .?’

  ‘I have it,’ whispered the boy, firming the grip.

  Carnelian was pulled off the chair. He became a ship being towed through a starless night. At first his steps were tentative, anticipating collision, but after a while they grew confident in the boy’s impossible ability to see in blackness. Their footfalls dulled as they passed each archway and swelled again towards the centre of each new chamber.

  The boy loosed his grip. Carnelian felt adrift, frightened. The lantern flared to life. He hid his eyes until he could bear it. With his free hand, the boy opened the silver door. Carnelian followed him out into the round hall. The boy held out the lantern and Carnelian took it.

  ‘The same time tomorrow?’ Carnelian said quickly, as the boy turned away.

  The boy looked back, nodded.

  ‘I am Suth Carnelian,’ Carnelian said before the boy could turn away again.