All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  The magician left his tent open at night. I sat, cross legged and wide eyed, watching him dabble with elixirs and wortroots and beakers filled with light. I didn’t speak unless he asked me a question. His hands were quick and deft, measuring boiling liquids between vials with uncanny precision. Dark hairs curled out from his sleeves, up the length of his wrists.

  “I’m crafting a spell,” he told me one night. “I’ll use it at the tower. It’ll see us through safely.” He cocked his head towards me. My signal to speak.

  “It’s a termite mound…but they call it the Ant Tower?”

  “Old names and superstition are stronger than facts.”

  I recalled the words of the old swami in Pushka. “Why are we going if it’s so dangerous?”

  The magician lifted a beaker, examined the colours silting inside, set it down. “Don’t put trust in men with heads full of grass-smoke. I admit, the tower is strange. Maybe powerful. Not dangerous. It’s the trek that will cause us trouble.”

  “And this…” I motioned towards the scrolls covered from end to end in tiny chicken scratch script. “This will keep us safe?”

  “Yes. Old magic, but the old stuff is best.” He smiled again. “Don’t worry, Parkin. You worry too much.”

  “But why are we going?”

  He stared at me for a moment, lips pursed. Then back to his potions. “There was something buried long ago that our king wants retrieved. Something stolen.”

  “Valuable?”

  “Yes,” he says. “To some. To others, not at all.”

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “Not for you to know, Parkin. Not tonight.”

  ***

  “Keep going!” shouts Captain Brales. “If you stop I’ll throw you off myself!” So I climb on.

  Handholds are getting rare. The termite tunnels are now too thin for me to jam even my little finger inside. I wedge myself between two buttresses and shake out my hands. Sharp rock has peeled away the skin of my right hand, the flesh beneath spongy and soft. Blood runs down my wrist in streams and dries in the folds of my elbow. I barely feel the pain.

  Corm taps me on the heel. “Are you alright?”

  I show him my hand. He secures himself against one of the buttresses and pulls a knotted strip of linen from his robes. “Wrap it up before the ants get at you.”

  I bind my hand tight; the sting fades into a dull, distant heat. “Did you see Slopes?”

  “I saw. Shame. Better him than us. How much farther?”

  “Far enough.”

  He shakes his head. “Just don’t fall. If you do, Brales will climb all the way down just to piss on your corpse. And besides, your magician would be heartbroken.”

  I duck away. Sometimes Corm says too much.

  The wind is picking up again. The magician calls faintly from overhead. “Listen. Listen to it!” Then the sands are back, and my burnouse flaps against my skinny legs. The rock is so hot it burns. I press close to the tower and wish I could just let go.

  I understand the magician now. I heard it faintly when I first started climbing and thought it was an echo of myself, but since Slopes fell it has grown. When I push my ear against the dried mud-brick of the tower it’s as loud as a war drum, rumbling up my arms and into my ribcage.

  The tower has a heartbeat.

  “Parkin! Don’t stop!”

  I’m past the point where Slopes fell. I keep my eyes on the next handhold, trying not to look up. The sky is hidden behind a sheet of spinning sand, so thick I can’t tell the difference between it and the desert below. It doesn’t feel like climbing, but rather crawling head first down a precipice. My guts are a tangle.

  We pass the vertical buttresses. Now we must climb ridges like the threads of a screw. Close to the top. Twenty feet to go, maybe less. My arms are lead. When I reach upwards for the next termite hole my right shoulder screams. I can’t ignore it much longer.

  The magician’s words somehow slice through the storm, clearer than Corm’s or the captain’s. “Parkin! Trust! We’re almost there!”

  Then, below me, a shout. Even though the words are fuzzed by wind I recognise the voice. I press against the face of the tower, the heartbeat that should not exist buzzing against my chest.

  Corm is only a body-length below me. I see where he should go next: one hand right, towards a thin shelf, his left foot sideways into a crack just wide enough for the toe of his boot. He sees this too. “Parkin! How much farther? I can’t see through your flapping dress.”

  If it were Slopes or Brales making the joke it would have ended in blood, but because it’s Corm I laugh. “Not much. It’s easy from here.”

  “Maybe I should race you to the top!”

  “Would you wager?”

  “If I win, you buy the whores!” he says, and reaches for that little shelf of rock.

  The crack is sharp and high. He stares, eyes wide, refusing to believe. The nubbin of stone is loose in his hand. “Merciful…” Then he swings free, wind-tossed, his left hand gripping white-knuckled to a ledge barely a finger wide, both feet dangling in the air. It is a hundred feet to the dunes, maybe more.

  “Merciful Daughter!” he says. “Help, Parkin, help!” I want to move but my arms are frozen. I can barely breathe. The beat of the tower grows louder. “Help!” He kicks for purchase but his boots only gouge out strips and stones that rattle down in the captain’s face. “Grab me, damn you!” I stare, slack jawed. “Parkin!”

  I start to move, then stop. I look to the magician. His eyes catch the light even in the shadow of his cowl. Very slowly, he shakes his head. First to one side, then the other.

  “Come on, Parkin!” says Corm, and that is when the little hook of stone snaps. My throat starts working again. I scream his name.

  I had no love for Slopes, but watching Corm going end over end brings bile to the back of my throat. I choke it back and wait, eyes squeezed tight enough to hurt, the sand slapping at the hood of my robe. It echoes like applause.

  ***

  We’d been riding four days through sand and heat haze when Dory tumbled backwards off his horse. He hit the ground headfirst with a brittle snap, like dried twigs. The dark feathers of arrow fletching hung from his throat.

  “Raiders! Get down!”

  The sleeve of my tunic tugged as an arrow ripped through close enough to score the skin, and I threw myself off the horse, sand spraying up in my face. I spat it out and clawed for my sword as the horses bolted. Someone screamed. I prayed it wasn’t Corm.

  I couldn’t see anything but the roll of dunes, gentle crests like a woman’s belly as far as the horizon, the great desert, the oldest desert. A heat shimmer hung over the sands. I wiped sweat from my eyes and tried to calm the hammering of my heart. All I could hear was wailing as one of our men bubbled out the last of his strength.

  Please, I thought, not Corm, or the magician. Anyone but them.

  Shapes rose from the sand. Men in long dusky robes the colour of earth, shadows under their cowls, curved blades flashing. Seven, eight, more. The morning sun threw wavering shadows across the dunes, so long I could almost touch them, and I shied away, remembering tales of the Ant Tower.

  These are only men. They’ll fight like any other.

  They charged, howling, scimitars above their heads, and suddenly I was back on the battlements of Tinnarim with the hordes battering at the gates. I felt the weight of the oil pots as I tipped them over the edge and watched the flesh fall from the faces of those below. The deep satisfaction in my gut as they screamed.

  They’ll fight like any other, I thought again, and picked my man.

  Our blades hit so hard that I tumbled backwards in the sand, rolling and coming up on my knees, and only luck brought my sword up in time to meet his second swing. It glanced off and the ring of steel on steel was so sharp it stung my ears. Then I was on my feet, sword up, trying to stop fear from catching my breath. The man grinned, teeth shining gold in the tangle of his beard. Then he moved too fast t
o judge and I lashed out with my eyes closed.

  I opened my eyes. The man thrashed with his guts coiled on the sand, flies already settling on the ropes of his intestines. The sound of clashing steel was ending.

  Three of ours dead to four of theirs. Dory was the first. There was sand in his eyes that we couldn’t brush free. The second was a man called Yurik. He spoke often of children scattered throughout the five duchies, born of as many as eleven mistresses. He had an arrow through his liver and died a day later, whispering his daughters’ names.

  The third was Antony, a boy whose voice still cracked when he sang on the march. He was back-to-back with Corm when a scimitar caught him across the thigh. He bled out on the sands, still slashing at the raiders, never screaming or crying. Corm said he didn’t realise Antony was hurt until he went limp.

  We buried them side by side, swords on their chest, points up. Brothers fallen in battle.

  Corm was very quiet the nights that followed.

  ***

  The tower has hushed with Corm gone. I can hear it if I press my ear hard against the mud and let the termites crawl over my cheek and tangle through my hair. Otherwise it is silent.

  Every time I shift handholds I wait for the splintering sound that will send me flailing, robes beating around my ears. The tip of the tower will shoot upwards towards the sun. Will I feel the impact? Not from this height.

  But they don’t break. The outcroppings are secure.

  The world becomes quieter without warning and sunlight brings tears to my eyes. I blink stupidly. The sands whirl and eddy below. I’ve climbed out of the storm.

  Four, five, six more long stretches, nooks just large enough for me to jam in my fingers, the palm of my left hand blistered and weeping, my right hand painted with blood, legs no longer hurting but simply dead weight. The tower is levelling off. I’m at the summit. The magician kneels on the plateau. “Parkin! Grab hold!”

  He hauls me up as if I weigh no more than a child. My lungs feel torn. Breathing is like swallowing knives. Behind me I hear the captain dragging himself over the edge. “Damned close thing,” he puffs. “Damned close.”

  “Imagine,” says the magician. “The first to stand here in near three hundred years. Pilgrims in a foreign land.”

  I spit. The metallic taste at the back of my throat is blood. I look at the cloth wrapped around my right hand. Thin chequered cotton. I recognise it now. Corm’s old handkerchief.

  I didn’t cry for Yussef. I won’t cry for Corm.

  It’s easy to make promises.

  ***

  The magician had a burnouse for each of us in his chest. “I brought these to keep us safe from the storms,” he said. “If I’d given them to you earlier, perhaps those raiders…” He trailed off. I slipped the burnouse over my armour, scratchy against the nape of my neck. The magician closed his chest. In the moment before the lid slammed down I saw inside. Empty but for velvet lining and ribbon-bound scrolls.

  He sat us down in a valley between two dunes. The sky was clear and blinding. There were no birds. Perhaps they were northward, scratching at the graves of Yurik and Antony and poor nervous Dory. The magician pulled a map from his robe and spread it flat.

  “That’s the tower.” He pointed to a black square. “We’re here. We’ll pass through Gail and Kurnsk. A week’s march, or less.”

  “Are you sure?” Captain Brales’ eyes were dark and sunken. He stared with the same weary finality I saw at Tinnarim, when two centuries of men armed with arrows and oil peered over the walls at two thousand file-toothed fanatics.

  “One week,” he said. “Watch for raiders. Watch for shadows.”

  Corm and I walked at the back of the line. Sweat ran into my eyes until my feet and the sands blurred into one. “Did you see?” Corm whispered so the captain and Officer Slopes couldn’t hear. “In his chest?”

  I shook my head.

  “The chest,” he said again. “He only brought five of these damned robes.”

  “Luck.”

  “No! I don’t trust him. He’s too strange.”

  “He’s a magician.”

  “You have eyes for him.”

  I shrugged. “You know I don’t hide it. Not from you.”

  “Pfeh.” He kicked at the sand. “Yussef was a better man than him. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t carry a sword. He won’t fight for you, Parkin.” Again he lashed out, and sand sprayed in both our faces. Corm wiped his eyes. “Damn this place. Damn this desert. Damn you for telling me to come.”

  Gail was thinned by plague. The corpse pit just north of the gates was close to overflowing, bare legs jutting skywards, shrivelled by desert sun. I pulled the hood of my burnouse tight over my nose.

  We lodged in a tumble-down boarding house owned by a squat Moor woman, eyes milky with cataracts. Captain Brales waited for the magician to leave before calling everybody into his chambers and locking the door.

  “Officer Slopes,” he said. “Men. We have five days march left, if what our employer tells me is correct.” His upper lip curled in distaste. “Our employer…is not forthcoming about certain details.” He leaned in close. “If the bastard tries to run, cut him down.”

  Corm and I explored the streets at night, faces hidden in the shadows of our cowls, peering in the windows of empty houses. Shutters swung limp in the wind. Some still stank of the dead. “Plague comes to all places,” said Corm, in the low voice he reserved for when something weighed heavy on his mind. “Are we safe here?”

  “As safe as on the plains.”

  “Think there are any whores to be bought?”

  “None that would suit me.”

  He laughed. Then, without warning: “The sword was meant for me, not for Antony.”

  I stopped. Dust settled around my boots. “What do you mean?”

  “The raider was swinging for me.”

  “Antony got in the way?”

  “I pushed Antony into the way,” he said. “I grabbed him. Around the neck, like this.” He demonstrated in the air, hooking one arm around an invisible foe. “He didn’t fight. I don’t think he knew what was happening. Then…” His other hand chopped down.

  I licked around my teeth. “Did…did the captain see you?”

  “What?” His hands dropped and curled into fists. “I killed him, Parkin. I think he had a girl.”

  “Then he was a fool. If you keep a woman, plan to leave her a widow. I’d rather you alive than Antony a hundred times over.”

  “Why?” His voice echoed in the laneway. “Am I so special to you? Do you love me like Yussef? Or like that damned conjurer? You want this?” He grabbed his crotch. “Is that it?”

  “No! You hurt me, Corm.”

  “I killed him.”

  “Yes. You did.”

  He hunched his shoulders and turned away. For a moment he was silent and I saw his shoulders shake. Then he walked away, footsteps ringing. Something fell away inside my chest and left an aching hunger.

  I took the long route back to the lodgings, half hoping Corm would be out buying company for the night, half hoping to run into him on the steps so I could apologise. When I closed my eyes I saw him squeezing his crotch. It made me ill.

  There was a figure on the steps. I didn’t know whether I was glad to see him or terrified.

  “Parkin,” said the magician.

  ***

  The peak of the Ant Tower is a plateau of sand ten paces across but the outer edge is solid as brick. Even so, we cower in the centre, where the sand is softer. Not even Captain Brales dares stand at the edge. I feel like I should be shouting our triumph, planting a flag in the sand. Perhaps if Corm were here I would. Instead I feel old and brittle. There’s no victory here.

  The storm still thrashes below. Looking over the edge is like standing above a whirlpool, the waters beating into foam, tunnelling down into darkness. The skin along my arms goose-bumps despite the heat.

  The magician pulls an endless succession of vials and scraps of paper from i
nside his burnouse. The captain stands over him. “I don’t want to be up here come night. Those birds…” The buzzards are black specks against afternoon sun. “How long will this take?”

  “Don’t worry,” says the magician. “They won’t attack. They prefer meals that don’t move.” I think of Corm. We were only paces apart. Had I been following him instead…

  The magician pours two vials on to the sand in the very centre of the plateau. They hiss. Bile-green steam rises in a plume. “Hold your breath.”

  The captain leans over. “What’s this? Tricks? I thought we’d be digging.”

  “Quiet.”

  “Sir,” Brales growls, “nobody tells me when and when not to speak.”

  The magician ignores him. He takes a handful of sand and crushes it in his palm, sifting it through the gaps between his fingers. It seems to shimmer and evaporate in the air. “You know what I’m here for,” he whispers. “You know what it takes to unlock. Leave me.”

  Brales sits beside me, head in hands. He pulls back the hood of his robe. The desert has aged him. He is dry and shrunken. I see my father in his face. Rotten gaps in his gums, hair falling away in silver wisps. The man who raised and sold me.

  “Did you ever think you’d come here?”

  I wet my lips. “No.”

  “Nor I.” He lets out a long, shuddering sigh. “And then we have to climb back down. I don’t know if I can do it. You might have to carry me.”

  “Sir.”

  “He was your friend, wasn’t he?”

  I flinch. It seems hours ago I watched him fall. “Corm. Yes.”

  “Mm.” Brales traces a circle in the sands. “I’ll have a lot of pension slips to sign when we get back. Perhaps you can help me with that.”

  “Sir.” The lump in my throat is painful. “I can do that.”

  The magician stands. The skin around his eyes is dark and sagging. Raising his arms seems to take a terrible effort. “Almost done. One more step.”