‘You do not look yourself.’
Shadowed by Krow, Osidian had just found Carnelian standing on the edge of the burned clearing. Carnelian searched his eyes for any hint of horror. ‘Did my Lord sleep well?’
‘Well enough,’ Osidian said, his hand half forming a sign of dismissal.
‘Did the screaming not disturb you at all?’
Osidian frowned, as if he had no idea what Carnelian might be talking about. Then he understood and looked towards the island.
‘Yes, the screaming,’ Carnelian spat in Vulgate, making Krow jump. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t hear it.’
The sign in Osidian’s hand firmed up and with a flick of the wrist he threw the topic away. ‘I have heard worse in the Labyrinth. Are you too fatigued to participate in the day’s activities?’
The question took a while to reach Carnelian who was recalling his walk through the Labyrinth. Imagining unhuman cries winding among its pillar sepulchres, he shuddered. ‘What?’
Osidian frowned. ‘There are matters I would have you attend to.’
Carnelian raised his eyebrows.
‘I would begin the training of my Marula.’
‘Training?’
Osidian regarded him for a while silently. ‘For war.’
That word pulled Carnelian’s eyes fully into focus. ‘Against the Plainsmen?’
‘Only those who defy me will suffer.’
Carnelian shook his head.
Osidian looked upward exasperated. His eyes fell to catch Krow in their jade gaze. ‘You will make spears and shields for the Marula.’
‘Spears, Master …? They have spears.’
Osidian frowned. ‘I want them armed with blunt weapons.’
Krow wiped sweat from his face.
Osidian took hold of his shoulder and swung him round, pointing at the trunks of the baobabs. Krow tottered off towards them.
Carnelian was confused. ‘Why blunt? Are you worried they might hurt each other?’
Osidian smiled sardonically. ‘Rather that they might hurt what I intend to throw at them.’
*
Under Krow’s guidance, the Marula set to splintering branches into crude spears. Shields were shaped from the soft heartwood of the fallen baobabs. At last, when everyone was armed, the youth led them out on to the burnt clearing, disappearing up to the knees in a slow rolling ashen mist.
As Carnelian watched them form up in the centre of the clearing, he was reminded of the burnt field in the Plain of Thrones where the tributaries gathered. A rumble alerted him to riders coming into the clearing. They churned up so much dust they looked as if they were splashing across a ford. Carnelian narrowed his eyes. Oracles, their skin sharing the pallor of the ashen ground, with Osidian riding in their midst. A muttering rippled through the Marula ranks. He could feel their anxiety and a yearning rose in him to be among them. The riders were walking their aquar slowly into a line. He realized they were preparing to charge.
‘Form up,’ he cried, ‘or the Oracles will run you down.’
Krow glanced at him, terrified, doing the best he could. The ash clouds subsiding revealed the imposing solidity of the aquar. Carnelian swallowed hard as he saw them begin to move.
‘A hornwall,’ he cried.
Krow understood him, but only a handful of his Marula copied him. The approaching aquar were making the earth shake. Krow was screaming instructions but Carnelian could see the Marula were nothing more than a mob. Then the riders let out wailing cries and he had no eyes for anything other than their charge. Grim, Osidian rode at the apex of their wedge and careened into the Marula, scattering them. Within a blink, the Oracles were through and disappearing into a cloud of their own making.
Cursing Osidian, Carnelian ran towards the Marula. Soon he was in among them. There was a lot of blood, some limbs hanging useless, two dead. Cries of alarm from the men around him made him lift his head. Osidian was regrouping the Oracles for another charge. Bellowing, Carnelian ran through the Marula to the rear, which was now their front. He tore a makeshift shield from one man and used it to buffet them into line. Those that were nearest saw what he was doing and began bunching together. He heard Osidian’s cry; felt again the rumble in the ground. Until the last moment he continued to marshal the Marula, but again when Osidian struck he pushed through easily, wounding more of the defenders.
Carnelian realized Osidian had seen him and had taken care to bring his attack into the line as far as he could from his position. Using rage as strength, Carnelian pushed back through to the other side of the Marula. He shouted instructions at Krow. Together they shoved the Marula into blocks. Beginning to understand what he wanted them to do, large swathes of them were coalescing into dense formation. Confusion spread as those at the back tried unsuccessfully to lower their spears between the heads of those in front.
Osidian’s next charge broke them again, and several more in quick succession. The time after that, Carnelian held his breath as he saw the aquar confronted by a dishevelled hedge of spears. For a moment it seemed as if the creatures were going to veer away, but then the wall crumpled and they broke through as before.
All day long Carnelian and Krow struggled to make their men into a hornwall, but whenever any of them managed to form up in good order, Osidian would send his charge in somewhere else and smash through.
The sun was low when, gasping for breath, beyond weariness, they formed up again. Carnelian had found he could control them better if he took position a few lines from the front and made Krow do the same on the other flank. He watched as the more remote edges of his formation began to show something like serried ranks. He shoved harder in to the man beside him so that their shields interlocked. He heard the movement clash through the formation in imitation of him. Carefully he lowered his spear between the heads of the men in front. Osidian was hurtling towards them. Carnelian gritted his teeth. The aquar struck their wall like battering-rams. He felt as much as saw it buckle. The Oracles were pushing deeper, wailing the battle-cries they had learned in the legions. Carnelian felt the pressure as the front line was forced back. Shoving, he watched it reforming, putting pressure on the aquar. The creatures were becoming difficult for the Oracles to handle. Carnelian let out his triumph with a whoop. The sound caught in the throats around him and swelled into a roar. Plumes splaying with increasing panic, the aquar began backing away. The Oracles could not stop them retreating. As Osidian led them off towards the knoll camp, the roaring around Carnelian grew deafening and he was pulled into the embraces of his men.
‘These Marula are nothing more than a rabble,’ Osidian said.
‘A rabble that beat you,’ Carnelian barked back.
Osidian looked smug. ‘I suspected you might want to help them.’
Looking at Carnelian, Krow was clearly glad he had.
Osidian gazed out over the camp. ‘They beat a handful of riders and we weren’t even using weapons.’
‘We had nothing more than sticks,’ said Carnelian. ‘Besides, you could see the idea of fighting in formation was alien to them.’
‘If I could scatter them so easily with a handful of aquar, how do you think they would fare against hundreds?’
‘Tomorrow they will be better.’
Osidian gave him a warm smile, a real smile. ‘You are sure of this?’
Carnelian glanced at Krow, igniting a smile. The youth’s excitement started Carnelian’s heart pounding. He spoke for both of them. ‘Tomorrow we’ll repulse anything you care to throw at us.’
Osidian nodded, growing serious. ‘Tomorrow then.’
Watching him walk away with his guards, Carnelian’s ardour faded. For a moment he and Osidian had become boys again, but now he remembered what these Marula were being trained for and felt he was betraying the Plainsmen. He let his gaze wander over the fires, where he could see Marula tending to their wounds as best they could. He grimaced; these were men too, and Osidian would continue to harry them until they became a weapon in his hand
.
The next day did not go as Carnelian had hoped. The Marula failed to repulse Osidian’s attacks. Several more of them died, crushed beneath the clawed feet of the aquar.
That night, tortured by the certainty he had let them down, Carnelian took Krow on a walk among them as they sat around their fires roasting fernroot. Mixing earth with water, he painted Quyan numbers upon their foreheads. With much gesture and pantomime, he eventually managed to make them understand that the men who sat around each hearth now constituted a fighting unit. From each unit he chose a lieutenant and, taking these men away, he brought them to a new hearth he had made. He made his lieutenants sit down in a ring facing the flames. He set himself to explaining what the numbers on their foreheads meant. He rubbed his fingertips with charcoal then, showing them his palm, he touched one finger to it leaving a black dot. He leaned to touch the shoulder of a man who had a single dot and held his finger up. He showed them his palm again and added a second dot, held up two fingers and identified the man who bore that cypher. He did this twice more. Then he rubbed his hand clean on the dusty ground. He coloured a finger of his other hand, held up five fingers, then slashed a charcoal line across his palm. Showing this to the Marula, he found the man whose forehead bore the line for five.
So he went on teaching them the Quyan numbers and showing them how each of them and their units had been given a single number as their badge. Then he played a game with them. Lifting his hand he punched the air with his hand splayed three times and grinned when he saw them counting. He held aloft three fingers. He looked at them expectantly. He looked at the man who bore the number eighteen upon his forehead. He urged the man to stand up. Then it was the turn of man twelve. On and on he went until he was rewarded with the white crescents of their grins as they sprang up quickly as he indicated their number.
The next day was confused. With Krow’s help, he tried to play his game with the whole force. Some of his lieutenants understood and tried to follow the commands he gave them using their numbers. Many others did not follow it at all. They put up a worse fight that day than they had the day before. Merciless, Osidian hurt many. This only made Carnelian more determined to defeat him.
After the fighting, Carnelian gathered his lieutenants on the edge of the ash clearing. Grimacing, they watched the other Marula file up to their camp. Carnelian drew their eyes to him with a bellow. He got the men to reapply their numbers themselves. Then he began to order them around. Identifying one of them by number and sending him to stand in a particular location. Soon he had them all arranged in a grid. Using their numbers, he began to make them manoeuvre. As they saw themselves advancing in lines, turning, marching and counter-marching, they began to laugh and soon were doing it with playful pleasure.
The next day, the Marula began to move together. Though they did not entirely manage to repulse Osidian’s charges, they did manage to fight them off without panic and minimal wounding. In the days that followed, they became more and more an extension of Carnelian’s will. Eventually, Osidian and the Oracles found that, from whichever direction they made their attack, they would always be confronted by an unbroken shieldwall bristling with the Marula’s makeshift spears.
The western sky began to glower. Over days this darkness came rolling towards the Upper Reach. Sometimes Carnelian would discern a trembling along the horizon and become convinced he could hear a rhythm of distant drums.
At last the black clouds came, piling in angry towers on the rising wall of advancing night. Around the fires voices hardly seemed able to pierce the sultry air. Carnelian drifted in and out of sleep until he could no longer bear the weight of the night pressing on his chest. He rose and saw the skyfire playing across the inky west and almost touched his eyes to confirm they were open. His throat was parched and when he swallowed there was a popping in his ears.
Morning was nothing more than a faint glowing opalescence in the sky. The storm curled like tar smoke, slow, rumbling. Sweat clothed Carnelian though he stood almost naked; it oiled the ebony limbs of his Marula. All day the sky pressed down as if it were collapsing. Carnelian stood with his back to a baobab, surveying the clouds from under his brows, running his finger along his scar, recalling the first night of his slavery. A flash, then the first thunderclap whiplashed him like an orgasm. The release was momentary, the air retightened its grip around his throat. He begged the sky to loose its water. Light was leaking through the heavens. Thunder hammered him to his knees. A torrid wind screamed through the encampment, whisking everything up into feverish flight. The baobabs groaned and shook their branches at the sky. Carnelian felt the first drop like an anointing. He turned his face up to catch another. More and more and more fell. Rain came hissing down, then roaring until he was sheathed in water, spluttering, blind and deaf, feeling the ground beneath him melt to mud, letting himself sink into it as the rain washed him clean of all thought, all feeling and of his sweating fear.
The sky rained down as if its angry darkness held the waters of the oceans just above their heads. Cool delight soon turned to misery. Osidian urged Carnelian to join him in the shelter of one of the granary baobabs overlooking the camp. The days of his captivity haunted Carnelian, driving him to hide from the rhythm of the rain upon his head. He chose a tree of his own. Brooding, he saw below him the Marula sitting like basalt boulders in a stream, sunk up to their haunches in the mud, their heads hanging, sometimes chewing at raw fernroot because it was impossible to kindle a fire.
From his eyrie Carnelian watched the level of the Blackwater rise. Three days after the downpour began, its waters had already risen high enough to swallow all its rocks and pools. The dark sliding water foamed in a rushing sheet which the Isle of Flies cut with its stony prow. The river became a flood. The murmur of the falls swelled to a roar that could be heard even above the tumult of the rain.
Day after day, with nothing to do but to watch the raging white cataracts, or the men miserable below, Carnelian began to feel that the rain that had washed away the days would soon wash away his mind and leave him only the emptiness he had known as a slave upon the road. He looked down upon the Marula and felt he had abandoned them. He descended from his tree. By the time he reached the mire between the roots, he was already drenched. He walked among the Marula, having to shout for them to notice he was there. Some lifted eyes that seemed dull against the varnished wood of their faces. The pressure of the downpour was making Carnelian stoop and, thinking he meant to sit down, some Marula made space for him. He could not deny their entreating eyes. He settled down into the mud holding a blanket over his head. Through the rain’s grey veils the baobabs loomed like the sepulchres of the Labyrinth in faraway Osrakum.
Carnelian woke into the ending of the world. Beneath him, the earth was shaking apart. He fought to calm the gibbering bodies round him. Arms clung to him like chains. He could hear a rush and roaring rumble as if a herd of heaveners were stampeding around the knoll in the blackness. He squinted trying to see. The knoll and all its trees were turning slowly. No, it was the escarpment flowing past, a tide of earth pouring down into the chasm. He stared in horror. Moaning blew round him in a gale. The movement slowed. The earth settled, groaning. Some lonely voices broke raggedly, then fell silent. All he could hear was the gentle hiss of the rain and the dull percussive roar of the cataracts.
Carnelian had to wait until light began to filter through the curtain rain. He blinked away water and peered. The land around the knoll seemed gouged with immense wounds. He disengaged himself from the Marula waking all around him. He rose drunkenly, staggered over the ditch and began making his way down the slope. He had to look down at his feet so as not to get them snagged in the thickets of men’s limbs.
When he reached the baobab wall he saw that under the pressure of the landslide, one of the trunks had hinged out like a door. Mud choked the gap. He clambered up the mound until he reached high enough to look out. What he saw made him gape. The ashy clearing was gone. Red sandstone showed raw through a f
ilm of mud and darkly foaming water. The earth that had once clothed it had been washed over the edge of the chasm. He remembered Kor’s warning.
He became aware of the black bodies appearing around him, hunching, crossing their arms over their chests, their eyes wide with incomprehension.
He saw Krow among them, gaping.
‘Keep them here.’
The youth looked alarmed. ‘Where are you going, Master?’
Ignoring his cries, Carnelian slid down into the streams gushing over the exposed rock. Feeling he was treading on the earth’s open wounds, he made his way carefully down towards the Ladder anchor trees. Amazingly, these had resisted the pouring mud which had piled against them. Carnelian climbed this mound. On its summit he saw what he had expected to see: the Ladder cables had snapped. Hugging the soaking hide of one of the baobabs, he inched around until his foot struck against a knot. Using the cable as a handrail, he edged towards the chasm one step at a time. Rivulets spluttered dark water out into space. Each time he slipped he would freeze, clinging to the cable. Each time he forced himself to go on, until, at last, he was close enough to be able to crane over the edge.
Far below, the Blackwater was swelling a lake behind the dam the landslide had dumped across the floor of the chasm. The Ladder had been ripped from the precipice and lay broken in the mud. The single anchor baobab for the ladder down to the saltcaves had deflected the mud. The sartlar were not marooned.
Back in the camp, Carnelian was overcome by a violent shaking as the full horror of what had happened soaked into him. In the faces of the Marula he saw fear that the downpour might wash away the rest of the world. A shout turned every eye to look up the scoured escarpment. Aquar were filing down, a march that wound away as far as Carnelian could see. He leapt to his feet.
‘Plainsmen,’ he cried, feeling a new rush of life. Marula jumped from his path as he ran down the knoll. He reached the baobab wall and clambered on to it. The riders were close enough for him to recognize Fern.
The Standing Dead (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon) Page 60
