The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  Carnelian decided it might be better to say nothing more.

  The noisome walk ended at something like a low smooth wall.

  ‘Jump up,’ said Osidian.

  Carnelian felt him lurch past. He slid his hands up the wall, over the edge. The ledge above it was damp. He brought his fingers near his nose. They smelled of nothing worse than must. He pulled himself up and found that he was sitting on a narrow flat space. He could feel a column backing it, an ankle of stone, with another beside it. He slid his hand up to the knees.

  ‘Will you stop fidgeting around! Lie down and sleep,’ said Osidian.

  Carnelian lay down. His tunic and trousers clung to him. The air around him was as moist as breath. ‘What is this place?’

  There was no answer, just the sound of Osidian breathing. He supposed there was no point in telling him that, fishy stench or no fishy stench, he was hungry. Carnelian waited until he could hear Osidian’s breathing slow and then he shifted closer to him, buried his nose in the sweaty-smelling cloth of his back and quickly fell asleep.

  FORBIDDEN FRUIT

  Clutch my warmth

  Until day comes

  For then we must part

  (from the poem ‘The Bird in the Cage’ by the Lady Akaya)

  THE RAVEN HOPPED INTO THE AIR, FLICKING OPEN ITS FAN-FEATHER wings. Carnelian tried to catch it, his fingers shredding the air like its black pinions. The other distinct half of him was there without a face, touching the whole surface of his skin. He clenched the anchor grip of their hands but its fingers were squeezing to blood. The raven’s eye stared white as an egg. A red tear leaked from the corner with each blink.

  ‘Flee with me away from here,’ the raven screeched. Its beak was the pin holding everything together.

  But Carnelian would not abandon the faceless half of him. Looking round, he tumbled falling. The red earth caught him. Grit in his eye. Sinking. He struggled to stay perfectly still. Every movement trembled pebbles and scratched his skin deeper in.

  ‘Away from Her.’

  The earth brimmed over him like honey round a stone. Warm pulsing red darkness beating him like a heart. Buried alive. Opening his mouth to scream let dust pour into his stomach, into his lungs. Drop by drop, moisture sucked out of his husk till his organs rattled inside him like seeds.

  Carnelian jerked awake to see a creature hovering over him, its wings splayed like hands to grab him.

  ‘What is wrong?’ said the creature. Carnelian recognized Osidian. As his friend crouched, Carnelian saw the idol of stone behind him, a winged man, looking as if he had only at that very moment descended from the heavens.

  ‘The Black God,’ he breathed.

  As Osidian looked up, his shoulders relaxed. ‘The Wind Lord.’

  Carnelian could not stop staring. The idol’s empty eye sockets were terrible. From the left eye, tears dribbled down the stony cheek. ‘An avatar of the Black God.’

  Osidian shook his head. ‘A false Quyan deity. The only true gods are the Twins.’ He smiled. ‘Besides, our friend here poses no threat. Has he not given us the comfort of his hospitality?’

  ‘The comfort . . .?’ Carnelian said, stretching the stiffness from his arms, arching his back. Osidian was gazing towards the light. The narrow shrine with its corbelled vault ended in a triangle of morning so bright it hurt his eyes. Its sloping walls were stiff with the carved wings of wind creatures. Rubbish clotted the floor. ‘Do we have to wade back through that?’

  ‘Unless, in the night, my Lord has been gifted with a sprouting of wings,’ said Osidian. He made a pantomime of looking for them.

  Carnelian slapped the hands away from his shoulders. Osidian grinned. Carnelian was embarrassed by the look in his eyes.

  As they slid down to the floor, the filth oozed up between their toes till it seemed they stood on the stumps of their legs. They exchanged looks of disgust and began to squelch off to the entrance.

  When they reached it Carnelian glanced back. The winged god looked like a great raven. He realized something. ‘His altar was our bed.’

  ‘You would agree that it was better than the floor,’ said Osidian. ‘Do you think he begrudged us it?’ He did not wait for an answer but walked out into the morning.

  Remembering his nightmare, Carnelian looked back into the shrine uneasily, then followed him.

  He stopped. At their feet was a tangling, as if a net had been cast over a skyful of birds leaving only their bones and tattered green feathers. ‘Thorn trees,’ he said, his voice loud with disappointment. He had expected the Yden to be more lush.

  The air tore with screams and something like a shaking of many blankets as the cliff of the Pillar came to pieces round them. He ducked with Osidian as a vast shape wafted over them. He glanced up to see the air screeching with leather kites.

  ‘It seems you have woken our fishy friends,’ cried Osidian. ‘Come on.’

  Half crouching they fled, laughing, down the wide steps crusted white, through a shimmering stink of ammonia and rotted fish. Above them, the creatures circled on fingered wings, slicing the air with their pickaxe heads. Soon the white on the steps was only a splatter, the air cleared, cracks became jagged with weeds.

  The trees formed a wall of thorns. Through their knotting branches, the sky was a mosaic of blues. Looking back, Carnelian could see nothing of the steps. Up the cliffs he found the nodules of the sky-saurian nests and perhaps, though he could not really be sure, the Ladder’s zigzag. The Pillar soared up to fill the sky. Somewhere up there were the Halls of Thunder.

  Carnelian’s gaze came back down to earth. Osidian was walking off clothed to the waist in dust clouds. Carnelian followed him, frowning. Here and there an angled paving stone showed where a road lay under the dark earth. Peering into the thorns he saw the cracked carvings running along its edge. The road curved off to the north but Osidian turned off it and ducked into the thicket.

  ‘Hold on,’ Carnelian shouted after him.

  Osidian’s head poked out from the thicket as if from a hut.

  Carnelian pointed. ‘The road goes this way.’

  Osidian smiled. ‘So it does, into the Labyrinth. We, however, go this way.’ He pointed into the thicket. ‘Be careful of the thorns,’ he said with a grin and disappeared again.

  Carnelian frowned when he reached the place where he judged Osidian had gone into the thicket. After much squinting, he managed to see him there, moving away through the tangle along something like a tunnel. Carnelian gave the road one last envious glance before ducking in among the thorns.

  The tunnel forced Carnelian to bend his back. Thorns snagged his clothes so that he often had to stop to unhitch the cloth. Several times, mockingly, he muttered, ‘Be careful of the thorns,’ and then growled.

  He struggled to catch up with Osidian, wanting to berate him, but when he began Osidian turned and lifted up his hands to show his own red scratches and Carnelian had to give him a grudging smile and close his mouth.

  At last they came to a lofty wall. Its massive blocks were irregularly shaped but fitted together with remarkable precision.

  ‘What now?’ asked Carnelian, exasperated.

  ‘We climb over,’ Osidian replied and slipped sideways along the wall, going down the gradient, in the wedge of space that was free of thorns.

  Carnelian followed. Osidian found something like a ladder whose footholds were the edges of blocks. Carnelian watched him climb higher and higher and then, with a vault, he was sitting astride the wall, waving him up.

  Muttering, Carnelian began the climb. Some handholds he had to stretch for. He missed one, slipped and grazed his arm. Osidian offered him his hand and grinned when it was refused. Carnelian insisted on scrambling his own way up. He made sure he was secure, then turned to Osidian.

  ‘You are—’ He fell silent, gaping at the view. Below them was a terrace of black earth divided neatly into plots. Further down the slope there was another terrace and further down from there, another and another, until he
had counted almost twenty in all, the most distant of which looked like chequered cloth. Beyond, a forest stretched for a great distance, turning at last into polished jade and then the purpling turquoise of the Skymere.

  Osidian touched his shoulder. ‘It gets better.’

  They slithered down, dropping the last bit into a thick bed of giant cabbages that squeaked and snapped as they fell in among them. The musk of wet earth and the green bruising smell of the leaves filled the air. They clambered out onto a path and wandered along a maze of them, each walled by vegetables. Here and there Carnelian glimpsed a glitter of water running in stone channels. They crossed several by means of little bridges. Every so often the vista would open out and he would see the terraces again.

  ‘A kitchen garden?’ he asked at last.

  ‘For the court,’ Osidian answered him, pointing at the black craggy cliffs of the Pillar.

  As they strolled, Carnelian was filled with wonder. He asked Osidian the names of everything. Osidian always had an answer and even added what he knew of their uses or plucked some for Carnelian to smell or taste.

  Carnelian glimpsed movement and found himself scrabbling for his mask. Osidian’s hand restrained him.

  There is no need, he signed. Here there are no eyes but ours.

  They walked out into a clearing in which a number of creatures were harvesting leaves with sickles, or turning the rich black earth with hoes. Carnelian tried to see what kind of beings they were. Nut-brown, with hands and feet like spades, but not tall enough to come up to his knee.

  They move as if they had eyes.

  The sylven have keen ears and well-honed touch.

  They look like little men.

  Animals. ‘Let me show you,’ said Osidian. As he spoke the sylven stopped their work and turned their wizened heads. Osidian clapped his hands. ‘Attend me.’

  The sylven came, forming round them, their heads bowed, their huge ears sticking up like horns.

  Osidian crouched and took one in his hands. The little wizened creature flinched and whimpered. Carnelian began protesting even as Osidian cooed and said, gently, ‘You will not be hurt.’

  He held the creature’s little brown head carefully like a ripe fruit. Carnelian crouched, to stroke it. Osidian angled it back to reveal a tiny face. A wide gashed mouth, a nose flat and splayed. Osidian squeezed apart the wrinkles that closed its eyes. At the bottom of the pit was a colourless bead like the raisin of a pale grape. Osidian let the creature go.

  ‘It seems very much like a tiny man,’ said Carnelian.

  Osidian shrugged. ‘The world is filled with man-like creatures. What is a man? Are these men? Are the sartlar?’

  ‘The barbarians are men.’

  ‘Perhaps, but if so, not like you or me.’

  ‘I suppose, then, that you would claim that we are angels.’

  ‘Is that not what the Wise teach?’

  As they wandered further into the garden they saw sylven everywhere like clods of earth. The sun began to pour its fire into the day. They came to a region where each tree was inside the square of a low wall.

  ‘Ahaa,’ said Osidian. He leapt onto one of the walls, and reaching up into the branches of its tree he plucked a fruit. He turned and offered Carnelian its red-streaked gold. ‘Smell it.’

  Carnelian obeyed and closed his eyes as he drew in its perfume. He bit into it. Its flesh was creamier than a peach, filled with seeds that had the flavour of almonds. Osidian beamed at his reaction. Carnelian took another succulent bite. ‘Why the wall?’

  ‘It reserves the fruit for those of the House of the Masks.’

  Carnelian stared at the forbidden fruit. His sin was there, cut into its flesh. He felt its juices dripping down his chin.

  ‘Who will know?’ said Osidian. He took a bite of his own fruit. ‘Come on, finish it. Have you ever had a better breakfast?’

  Carnelian ate it, quickly, swallowing every last bit of it.

  Osidian dramatically widened his eyes. ‘Maybe we should consume the whole tree. It might be perilous to leave any evidence.’

  Carnelian made a face at him and they both laughed.

  The terrace took them round the Pillar until they came at last to another wall in which there was a gate. Through its frame lay another wonder. In the morning shadow of the Pillar of Heaven there were as many terraces but these were arranged in a design so complex that it confused the eye. It seemed to move, rotate, like some fantastic mechanism. The patterns were bewildering and on every scale. The whole glinted darkly, chinked and shimmered.

  Osidian was smiling at him, reading his face. He jabbed his thumb back in the direction of the gate. ‘My Lord thought that was the Forbidden Garden of the Yden, did he not?’

  Carnelian had to admit that he had.

  ‘Well, let me show you the real one,’ said Osidian and strode through the gate.

  Carnelian joined him, walking by his side. He fingered his mask hanging at his hip. ‘Will we come across anyone?’

  ‘Perhaps more sylven but none of the Chosen. This late in the year, we will have the garden to ourselves.’

  Carnelian allowed himself to be carried along by the gleaming, iridescing pavements. They wandered down avenues of dragon-blood trees, like upturned brooms, their trunks striped with bands of jasper and carnelian. They dangled their hands in pools in whose green water white, gold-patched carp slid, each larger than a man. Osidian pointed out their mouths and fins all pierced with silver rings. Other pools had tiny fish that glistened hither and thither like sun flecks on a sea. The pools poured into each other through great spouts, sometimes arching water over their path so that they could feel its flash and mist on their skins. Everywhere the walls were carved into grotesques, grimacing or pouting gargoyles spitting fountains or bristling with trees. A pavilion of salmon-striped green marble tempted them into its murmuring recesses. Steps banistered with cascades led down to the next terrace. They dallied in other pavilions. Those of heart-stone, quarried from the Pillar of Heaven itself, Osidian told him, were rainhalls, their roofs and pillars contrived to convert rain to music. Others had walls so thin they could make out the vague languorous shapes of the trees beyond. In places the air darted with parrots more brilliant than butterflies. Quetzals shuttled emerald between trees. Sawing their cries, peacocks pulled trains of staring feathers.

  It was the vast and sombre pillared hill of the Labyrinth that brought them back to earth. Its mound ran along the edge of the terraces, tumbling its frowning façade down into the distance. Where the Labyrinth and the Pillar met, the latter folded into a crevasse that rifled all the way up to its dark and brooding summit. Carnelian searched there and found the jagged line.

  ‘The Rainbow Stair,’ he said.

  Osidian appeared to be looking for somewhere to hide. ‘We have come too far round. Come on.’

  He took them down a stair and another and so they descended the terraces, running for pleasure through the perfumed air. At last they reached the last terrace, which ended at a high glistening wall. They turned to look back. The garden was a colossal staircase rising up to where the Pillar stood like the Black God Himself, hefting the blue of the sky upon His shoulders.

  They explored along the wall until they found a bronze trellised gate through which they could see a shadowy world under the trees. Carnelian was surprised when Osidian produced a key. He thrust it into the centre of the gate, turned it, and then using the weight of his body he swung it open and beckoned Carnelian to go through.

  Trunks were spaced like the pillars of a ruined hypostyle hall. Here and there the canopied roof had collapsed into a clearing. They wandered into it as if they were afraid of waking the trees. Scented air encouraged slumber. Soft mulch muffled their steps. Birds flitted across the corners of their vision. Several times they saw saurians, two-legged, as small and curious as children, that when approached slipped away like memories.

  This shadowy world was terraced too. Every so often they would descend a shallow stair,
then behind them they would see a wall of rough-hewn stones. In some places this had burst allowing the red earth to spill down, revealing the black layers beneath.

  They did not talk. Something about the forest encouraged silence. A resinous breeze wafted constantly in their faces. It grew even hotter. Peering ahead, Carnelian had the impression a fire was burning towards them. The tops of the trees around them burst into flame. Light shot over their shoulders from above, growing ever brighter, and suddenly it was stabbing all around them. He turned and saw the shadow of the Pillar of Heaven ebbing away from them as the sun melted up out of its black brow. He was struck by how much it looked like a Master in a court robe.

  They walked in the hazing air. It grew torrid, humid, thick with an odour of mouldering. They were by this time following a trickle of water running in the bottom of a crumbling channel. The brightness showed them that the trees were filled with fruit, and it seemed to Carnelian that they walked in an orchard long ago abandoned. Then he noticed the spaces between the trees were all aglitter and he saw, against the band of the Sacred Wall, the blinding sheets of the lagoons stretching to the Skymere.

  Osidian clasped his shoulder. ‘Behold, the mirrors of the Yden.’

  Carnelian watched Osidian sleep in the stultifying heat. Even hiding in the deepest shade they had found no coolness. Through the trees he could see the alluring shimmer of the lagoons. Their glaring silver was animated by the scratches of flamingos wading. There was a lazy buzzing of flies. Everything seemed to be pulsing in time to his slow heart. Osidian had told him that they must wait out the heat of the day. Even with their paint the sun, in the last month of the year, was a danger to their skin.

  Carnelian licked his lips, remembering the delicious melting sweetness of the forbidden fruit. He looked up into the branches that were their parasol. The apples there were as brown and wizened as the stony fruits that they had cleared to give them space to lie down. He wanted something filled with juice. He rose, his tunic sticking to his skin. Osidian swatted a fly from his face.