The Third God

by Ricardo Pinto

  They emerged into open space, both still mesmerized by the mass of redness. This was surmounted by a halo of darker red. Crusted and ridged, like a dried puddle of blood, at whose centre was a face of gold, so beautiful it stopped Carnelian’s breath.

  ‘Mother,’ said Osidian, coming to a halt at the entrance to the tunnel, half emerging into the light, half remaining in shadow. His mask fell with his hand, exposing his pallid face. Carnelian registered the movement, but his attention could not long be diverted from the scarlet apparition. She was clothed in rose petals. A countless number of them sewn together in drifts, each like a tiny gouge of bloodied skin. The whole robe seemed almost to bleed, in contrast to the deathly, perfect mask that sat above it.

  ‘My son,’ the mask said, in a rich, melodious voice. The jewelled halo flashed and coruscated as Ykoriana gave Osidian a nod. ‘Carnelian,’ she said, giving another nod.

  The rose robe whispered, tore red, shedding petals as she raised an arm. A porcelain hand emerged and formed a gesture of invitation. Drawn by its command they both stepped further into the light. Carnelian raised his mask as a screen, breaking the compulsion of fascination long enough to be able to look up and round. They were emerging from an opening set into a staircase that rose precipitously, lit with lamps, to a great height. On either side tiers shelved off into the gloom. He was becoming aware of the vastness of the cavern they were entering when a flash of light momentarily illuminated its entirety for a moment. An immense space backed with a ladder of tiers set with stone seats. A dull rumble caused the world to quiver as he looked down. He waited until another flash revealed the Plain of Thrones below. They were standing in the Pyramid Hollow. When the darkness returned, the only thing he could see out there was, far away, something like a star fallen burning to the earth.

  ‘On your head is all the destruction, all the deaths, even among the Chosen,’ Osidian said, pointing to the fallen star. Carnelian regarded the point of light. It was located near the rim of the Plain of Thrones, where the Chosen dead had been carried. That light was likely a pyre made from the palanquins that had brought them there. He remembered other pyres.

  He dropped his mask and gazed once more upon Ykoriana. She towered above them; no doubt she stood on ranga. Her robe gave off an intoxicating perfume.

  ‘I played my part in the destruction of the Balance, but let us not pretend, my Lord, I brought it down alone.’

  ‘My part in it was also your doing, Madam,’ snarled Osidian, his sword rising in his hand so that Carnelian feared he might impale his mother. ‘You snatched from me what was rightly mine.’

  ‘I too have lost much, had much taken away from me,’ said Ykoriana, oblivious to the blade aimed at her. Carnelian remembered that she was blind.

  ‘The Chosen chose me to become the Gods. What you did was a crime, a sin.’

  The jewelled halo winked and ran with light as it jerked back. Ykoriana laughed. ‘A sin? You turn the world upside down to right a wrong committed against you and that is perfectly justifiable but, when I act against the wrongs done to me, you name that a sin.’

  The point of Osidian’s sword slowly fell. Carnelian was relieved. He gazed up at Ykoriana’s face of gold trying to work out what it was he felt. Whatever it was, he did not want her slain there, now, in cold blood.

  Osidian’s face saddened. ‘Years I endured living among filthy barbarians.’ Tears lensed his eyes. Carnelian felt that sight awakening his own grief.

  ‘I was a slave,’ Osidian said, bleakly, gazing up at his mother through tears. ‘A slave.’ Horror paled his face. ‘It was a living death within the funeral urn.’

  The halo dulled as the gold face inclined towards them. ‘You forget, Nephron, to whom you speak. All my life I have been confined, much of it in darkness.’

  Osidian grimaced. ‘But it was not I who did that to you,’ he pleaded.

  Ykoriana straightened. ‘That hardly matters. What I did to you was not out of hatred. It was simply a tactic in the slow, cold war that has been fought within the House of the Masks for centuries. We are all casualties of that war.’

  But not the only ones, thought Carnelian. He flinched when he saw Osidian’s face changing. So would Ykoriana had she been able to see his barely contained fury. Many who had seen it had died. ‘Unnatural mother,’ he hissed.

  The gold mask above them moved a little to gaze down on them with imperious scorn. ‘I deny your right to make a claim on me. I know you not who hardly ever saw your face, who never felt your mouth upon my breast. Even your voice is a stranger’s. You were taken from me at birth so that I did not even have a touch of you to salve the pain of your release.’

  Her head fell. ‘But you cannot know what it is to carry a child within you, to have it torn bleeding from your womb, knowing it is born to die in sacrifice, to be imprisoned, to be used as I have been used. Yet I have done what I could to protect those of my children that I love.’ She raised her head. ‘You know, Carnelian, how far your father was prepared to go to protect you.’

  Carnelian, even while he wondered at the softness of her voice, felt a barb in those words that tore at him.

  She pulled herself up and became imperial again. ‘A mother’s love is stronger by far than a father’s. To save her child, she would destroy the world.’

  There was a terrible edge to her voice that shook Carnelian, not only with fear, but also with a twinge of desire to be that child.

  ‘And, yet, you gave yourself and the Masks to the murderer of your daughter.’

  Carnelian looked at Osidian, stung by the venom in those words, but saw no rage burning in his eyes, only . . . was it hope?

  The petal robe, shivering, gave off a wall of perfume. ‘Would seeking revenge against her murderer have brought my daughter back from her tomb?’ Her voice was as cold as the metal of her mask. ‘Women are forced to see life as it is. In contrast, you men are so ready to believe in your fantasies, to have your every expectation confirmed. In spite of hating your brother for what he had done, I protected him because he was my path to power. You prefer to believe women victims to their passions, but we can be at least as calculating as you. Love does not make us weak, but strong. Do you remember, Carnelian, when your father brought you to see me? He did so hoping that, through love of my sister, I would stay my hand against you and, even, against him.’ She laughed. ‘Why do men prefer to make themselves blind to who we really are? Perhaps this is why you use us as you do, but be certain I will not let it happen again.’

  Carnelian, who had felt he was being reduced to a stupid child, could not follow her. ‘Let what happen again?’

  Her mask seemed to regard him for a while. ‘Molochite, I lost control of; you, Nephron, I will not.’

  There was doubt and confusion in Osidian’s face. Carnelian felt no doubt, only fear, but also a longing for the relief of at last confronting what he knew was coming.

  ‘I shall wield not only the power I once had but, now the Balance is broken, vastly more; not only here in Osrakum, but in the world beyond.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Osidian said, anger and anxiety warring in his face.

  ‘About the power I will have after your Apotheosis, once you wed me.’

  Osidian gaped at her, incredulous. ‘Wed you?’

  ‘I shall be your wife, as I was your brother’s and your father’s before him.’

  Osidian stared at her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. He looked at Carnelian, seeking confirmation of her madness, but Carnelian only managed a shrug. Osidian swung back towards his mother, grimacing. ‘Recent events must have un-witted you, my Lady.’

  In response, her hands emerged from her robe. The sleeves tore, revealing inner layers of sewn petals more intensely red that released an overpowering odour of roses. The porcelain fingers reached behind her head and her mask came loose. Carnelian flinched as her naked face was revealed.

  At first he was aware of nothing but her eyes: tapering, oval perid
ots as limpid as dew caught in the calyx of a flower. Her pale skin reddened where it met the stones so that they seemed to have been forced into wounds. The lips were thin and pursed as if from the strain of biting back too many bitter words. It was a beautiful face, but one that betrayed suffering impatiently borne.

  Osidian was gazing at his mother, seeming to seek someone he knew, or thought he knew, or remembered and had lost. ‘I shall lock you away. No one will ever see you again.’

  Ykoriana smiled. Though it seemed that tears might at any time squeeze from under her stone eyes, those lips bore the certainty of victory.

  Osidian rubbed his face, blinking, as if wiping cobwebs from it. ‘I have no need of your blood, mother. To produce an heir, I shall mate with my sister-niece, Ykorenthe.’

  Ykoriana’s face hardened to ice. Her eyes flashed as she pointed over their heads to the steps that rose behind them. ‘We watched your father’s Apotheosis from up there, your grandmothers, your great-aunts and I.’

  Carnelian had a feeling Ykoriana was addressing him as much as she was her son. They were his grandmothers, his great-aunts too.

  ‘All the women of our House watched. We had all taken leave of our brothers, our cousins, our sons. Since the election of your father, they had been held as captives. For days, they had been starved so that they would not pollute the rituals. Even as the Chosen took their places . . .’ She swept her arms up, taking in the tiers that rose in a cliff behind them. Carnelian looked up and, even though they were in darkness, he imagined the Masters in their glory taking their places on their thrones. ‘. . . our kin had already been placed within the torsion devices.’

  She pointed to the nearest of several peculiar contraptions that hung from posts up both sides of the stair. In the lamplight they looked like the dried carcasses of huge squid, their heads hanging from the posts on hooks, their tentacles dangling almost to the ground.

  ‘You have not seen these in operation,’ she said, ‘but you will. An ingenious invention of the Wise.’ She raised her left hand with the long fingers drooping. ‘The man or boy is strapped inside.’ She formed her right hand into a beak as if she held a plum stone between the tips of her fingers. She moved this up into the cage of her left hand and withdrew it, closing the cage as if she had left the stone within it. ‘The thongs are all pulled together.’ She drew imaginary threads from the ends of her left fingers. ‘And tied to a capstan.’ Carnelian glanced and saw a capstan beneath the nearest device. ‘Then it is turned, twisting the thongs.’ She spiralled her fingers. ‘Turn after turn, the tentacles above tightening, digging the barbs that line their inner surface deeper and deeper into flesh.’

  Carnelian grimaced, glancing at the device. He saw the barbs like fish teeth.

  ‘When they can twist it no further, the capstan is locked. Then, at the right time during the ritual . . .’ The silence made him turn to see Ykoriana frowning. Her hands formed two cones touching at their points. ‘. . . they are released.’ Her hands spiralled apart in opposite directions so violently her sleeves shed a mass of scarlet petals into the air. ‘The bodies within them, ripped apart. Their flesh sieved through an obsidian-bladed mesh. Scattering blood across the Chosen. Creation through blood sacrifice.’

  Carnelian remembered his father speaking those very words when they had sighted a turtle, as they stood together in the prow of the baran on the approach to Thuyakalrul. Right after the massacre he had sparked off by appearing on deck unmasked.

  ‘Kumatuya, your father . . .’ Ykoriana lingered, gazing down with her fiery green eyes upon neither of them, but both. ‘. . . stood there.’ She pointed at the plinth that rose between them to their waists. ‘The Twelve about him, bearing the Masks and the Crowns and all the other divine insignia. As this chariot rose to the apex of the pyramid and they transformed him into the Gods . . .’

  Carnelian could not see why this was a chariot, but he noted for the first time the cables that ran up the steps.

  Her rose-petal robe sighing, she moved to one side, revealing a slab of iron rising at an angle behind her in which there was the impression of a man spreadeagled. ‘In which procedure my other brother played the Turtle.’

  Her hand lingered for a moment, tracing the edge of the man-shaped hollow in which some petals lodged like spots of blood. Her brow knitted and the lids narrowed her stone eyes. ‘The Wise gouge out his eyes to be the sun and moon. They take his tongue, his hands, his feet. Each portion plays a role in the ritual. Finally, as your father watches . . .’ Carnelian was as close to the hollow now as Kumatuya had been. ‘. . . the closed doors of his ribs are broken open one at a time.’ She spread her fingers. ‘His still beating heart is torn out and held above him. The warm blood gushes, from which your father drinks, so that as he takes the life of his brother, two become one. From death, divine life risen.’

  She regarded them both, her face blank with horror. She had seen this with her own eyes before they were taken from her.

  ‘My uncle was drugged,’ Osidian declared. He swung his arm round to take in the torsion devices. ‘They were all drugged. They felt nothing.’

  Ykoriana frowned. ‘That certainly is what the Wise claim. It is true my brother made no movement; he did not cry out.’ She leaned towards them. ‘But your father, who witnessed his mutilation at close hand, told me afterwards he had seen in our brother’s eyes, before they were plucked out, a terrible, animal fear. It haunted him.’ She grew aged beyond her years. ‘It haunted me.’

  Her hand strayed back to the hollow in the iron, caressing its edge as if the fingers wished to reach inside but dared not for fear of what they might touch. ‘It was I who had to make the choice between them. It was I who chose who would lie here . . . and who would stand there.’ She pointed towards them. ‘Suth Sardian with his exile saved your father from lying here.’ She tapped the iron. Her brows knit again. ‘I demanded this proof of love from your father, Nephron. I loved him, though I had reason to hate all men. I submitted myself to his touch, though it brought me little joy.’ Her face grew sour with remembered pain. ‘For an unripe fruit will carry any early touch as rot when it ripens. And though Sardian was no longer there between us, your father hated me for it.’ She clinked one of her stone eyes. ‘And he took my sight.’ She frowned. ‘Once I thought it was in revenge for depriving him of his lover; now I am not so sure. Perhaps it was vengeance for what he was forced to witness.’ Her face darkened. ‘Though it was the Wise he should hate, and the Great who cast their votes but hazard nothing.’

  She put on a smile. ‘Still, that is politics.’ She raised her head and her green eyes glittered as if she was seeing something far away. ‘But then Sardian chose to stay away.’

  Carnelian tensed.

  ‘Year after year when he could have returned, he chose not to. Almost I had forgotten him when that fool, Aurum, had the Clave elect him He-who-goes-before. I was confident Sardian would not return; but then he did and the minion I sent to find out why now, why not before, came back to me with nothing.’

  ‘What has this to do with anything?’ Osidian said, looking weary, upset. Carnelian gazed at him, wondering if it could possibly be the description of the blood rituals that had penetrated to his heart. He had looked on massacres unmoved, but this was bloodshed and torture among his own.

  ‘It has everything to do with your Apotheosis. To save himself, Aurum told me at last. For he had seen it when he arrived on Suth’s island.’

  ‘Seen what?’ Osidian cried, exasperated.

  Almost Carnelian answered him, but felt a need to hear it told by Ykoriana. ‘Aurum was intimate with that old monster, my father. He was often at court.’

  ‘Please, tell me what you are talking about.’

  Carnelian saw the weariness in Osidian’s face, but saw also how he had to listen, because this woman was still his mother.

  ‘That Carnelian here is the living image of your father.’

  Osidian’s face folded in confusion.

  ‘The
living image of his father.’

  Carnelian watched the realization smooth Osidian’s face. For a moment, shocked, he looked like a stupid child. Then he gazed at Carnelian as if he were seeing him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘You knew this already.’ His face darkened. ‘How long have you known?’

  Carnelian explained how his father had told him when he came secretly to their camp.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell—?’

  Carnelian watched the realization dawn.

  ‘That’s why you deserted me.’ The blood left Osidian’s face and he looked at his mother, then beyond her to the hollow man, in horror.

  Ykoriana smiled. ‘That you ignored Sardian’s warning, that you are here, proves, Carnelian, does it not, that you know to what lengths my son will be prepared to go to save you.’

  ‘On the contrary, my Lady, it proves only that I came here knowing what you would threaten and to make sure Osidian does not submit to you.’ Carnelian turned to find Osidian staring at him and smiled at what was left in him of the boy in the Yden. ‘For I would not wish him enslaved again.’

  Osidian’s lips seemed to be trying to return the smile, tears starting, but then his chin fell and there was a twitching at the corners of his eyes, his mouth, as if he were seeing scenes in rapid succession, or having fleeting conversations. Almost imperceptibly, his head sank further, his shoulders rounded, so that instinctively Carnelian glanced at Ykoriana, fearing that, by not even trying to mask his feelings of defeat, Osidian was making her victory over him, over them both, more complete.

  But then Carnelian remembered that her eyes were stones and saw, besides, no trace of victory in her face, but only confusion and a pale fear. In his bones he felt it was not for herself she feared. ‘So as you see, Celestial’ – he paused, ready to gauge every nuance in her face – ‘your son will have no need to wed you. I will die at his Apotheosis and, afterwards, he will take Ykorenthe to be his empress.’

  There! At the mention of her daughter’s name, he had seen the blade of fear cut deeper into her heart. It was the girl she sought to protect. Carnelian regarded Ykoriana afresh. Perhaps she had wed her other son for power, but what she sought now was to put her body between Osidian and her daughter. She was trying to protect the girl in the way no one had protected her. He no longer saw a terrible empress in her bitter pomp, but only a woman, aged by suffering beyond her years, who had dressed herself in a robe of rose petals in her attempt to seduce her own son, to protect a child; to protect what was left of the child that she had been.