The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)
Page 27
The heat became more oppressive as they climbed the winding trail. At noon of their tenth day out from Kai-yin, they reached the highest point of the pass. Here U’Sumi got his first real look at the Desolation of Nhod.
The bare Kharir Umara split off into rocky crags in either direction northwest and south to leave a wide table land filled with nothing but gray pumice sand. On the horizon, dead ahead about four days’ journey distant as the crow flew, lay a great crater of stagnant yellow-brown muck.
U’Sumi asked, pointing to the gigantic mountain-rimmed ring in the west, “So that’s where Umara hit?”
“Distance fools the eye from up here,” answered Dragon-breath. “It be a day’s march from one side-a that scummy cup-o-filth to the other, straight across. It take six days to walk around the rim full circle.”
U’Sumi surveyed the wastes. “Imagine what it was like for Father Qayin to watch from some vantage point, maybe this very pass, while the great comet struck—smoke and flame for as far as the eye could see.”
His father said, “The impact instantly reduced a wide fertile plateau to a flaming desert of toxic salts. Ancient records describe it as so fierce that people felt it all the way to Sa-utar. The fallout even reached there in concentrations enough to kill an entire year’s crops. The sky was black for a month. For another three hundred years afterward, Atum-Ra had thought his roaming son destroyed for having murdered his brother.
“Atum should have known better. E’Yahavah had placed a mark on Qayin to warn men not to kill him. Why do that, if he intended Qayin to die so swiftly in a distant land before any other men had reached it? Qayin and his wife must have hidden in some ravine, maybe here, as you say.”
They began the long descent into the desolation. The road widened out for a stretch, where the unicorns could maintain double-file until they reached the first switchback.
Yafutu asked, “How did Atum find out that Qayin had survived?”
“Qayin’s original wife, his sister Lilitua, founded a great civilization north of the gray wastes, in a place less tainted by Umara—by Lake Mataq—the first land also where packs of wurms did not drive them away. Once allowed to settle, Qayin began to build a city, which he named for his firstborn son, Q’Unukku. It was completed and later enlarged by Y’Raddu, Q’Unukku’s son—the earliest city in the world.
“In many ways, as a city, it existed even before Sa-utar—Q’Unukku had to be architecturally designed and built, while Sa-utar was merely a system of natural caves where people lived for the first few generations. I guess it depends on your definition of city—a community of people, or a cluster of buildings. Either way, it was in the land of Y’Raddu that ‘kingship first descended from heaven,’ according to their chronicles—which I have in my library at home. Unfortunately, they had an utterly man-centered view of both heaven and authority. The first murderer was also the first tyrant.”
T’Qinna said, “He must not have been a very effective one.”
“No tyrant ever is in the long-run. Eventually Q’Unukku and his mother overthrew Qayin. They drove him back into the Desolation, along with a few of his youngest sons and some under-aged daughters whom he had perversely taken as concubines—though some of these were allowed to remain when they pleaded that Qayin had forced them. The exiles fell to savagery, spawning the mottled tribes of Nhod. Some wandered into the far southeastern jungles above Zhri’Nikkor, where doubtless floating jungle mats growing from the swamps along those coasts cut off a few clans from the mainland. These became the Qingu.”
T’Qinna asked, “Is anything more known of father’s people?”
A’Nu-Ahki said, “Unfortunately, Qayin was an even less effective chronicler than he was a tyrant. History has little record from the mottled tribes because they were illiterate. Back in Y’Raddu, it was different. Lilitua invented Lilithuform Runes and her son even made three crude laws, which Y’Raddu wrote down as The Code of Three. They claimed the Code had descended from heaven as the basis for Q’Unukku’s kingship.
“Things were not good, however. By this time, Lilitua had only dim memories of her parents and of E’Yahavah. She fashioned their religion to her own liking. Eventually her people suffered a great plague after some of her priestesses concocted a crude agrarian fertility cult to bring in more income for the city. Lilitua tolerated this because she feared becoming a tyrant, as her husband had been. Much evil would come of this for many centuries, even down to our own day, but that’s too long a story for now.
“Some of these younger priestesses had been of Qayin’s concubines that Lilitua had allowed to remain because they had been forced by their father. After King—El Q’Unukku died of the plague, along with half the city, Lilitua sent out an expedition to search out Atum-Ra for aid. Most died along the way, but a few got through and re-established contact. Seti and Mother Khuva went to them and brought relief. Lilitua received them gladly, to the saving of her civilization and of the one to follow it—Lumekkor.
T’Qinna’s eyes went bleak as the Desolation. “So it all started here —even fertility worship. My family tree bears only poisoned fruit!” she said.
A’Nu-Ahki smiled at her. “Don’t feel bad, child. We all come from a tainted line. The Great Curse came from Atum’s rebellion and that was bigger even than Qayin’s bloodshed. It brought death to everything—even someday, the stars. If Qayin hadn’t been the first to murder, some other one would have. You mustn’t despair—my wife is a direct descendant of Qayin. You are no more a child of Qayin in genealogy or character than U’Sumi is.”
She smiled back at him, but quickly averted her distant eyes.
Yafutu asked, “Did Qayin ever return?”
The Seer gazed over the blazing sands far below. “After Lilitua and Q’Unukku cast him out, he was never heard from again—at least not by reliable history. Much later, L’Mekku the Great claimed to have killed an old man in a hunting accident near Kai-yin. The first Emperor of Lumekkor believed to his dying day that he had slain his own ancestor. However, as L‘Mekku lived to a ripe old age and passed on a great empire, I doubt my long-dead father-in-law suffered E’Yahavah’s seven-fold curse against the one who killed Qayin. Or else the curse may not have applied to an accidental killing.”
“Yeah,” U’Sumi said, “even if Qayin lived out his full years, I doubt he could have lasted to see L’Mekku’s expedition. Look at this place! The cursed soil must have worn him down long before his time.”
Dragon-breath broke his long silence with a hyena laugh. “Nice story, Ol’ Man. You think you know ‘bout my people. You don’t know nothin, ‘cept what some dead Wester-men made up in his cumfy palace!”
A’Nu-Ahki asked him, “What do your own legends say?”
Dragon-breath spat. “Eh? Nothin’ worth weaving many tales over—Fire-salt lands too hard! Red men come through western gap and kill some, take others as slaves. Pale nomads come down from north and slaughter more. They rape the women, like my mudder. Hey, a’least the ol’ man make her into a cunk-bine so she not starve, or work salt pits. Same story far back as it goes! Some go marry wit cannibals in south jungles. They be animals—cannibal mannibal animals!” His oversized jaws dragon-chomped the air, while he screech-laughed like some creature being eaten alive in the night.
U’Sumi asked, “Then where do your people say they came from?”
Dragon-breath reigned in his hysterics and stared morosely at the great crater of putrid yellow-brown scum. “Earth-mudder spread herself over the hills all rutty an’ crazed with sky-fire. Laughing sky-demons come, beat her, rape’er, an’ leave her half-dead. She become Umara and curls herself up all womb-baby—weepy in the Cup of Bitterness out there to die. Instead she birth twins that crawl up outa the crater muck—spotty girly an’ spotty boy.”
T’Qinna scowled at him. “That’s horrible!”
“Yeah, girly, ‘orrible! You ast!”
They reached the first switchback, where Dragon-breath pulled ahead again as the road narrowed.
U’Sumi’s father hung his head. “Their origins I’ve told you as best as I know them. As time went on, the Desolation couldn’t hold them. Better weapons and planning always repelled attempts made by the mottled tribes to push into Ufratsia, Assuri, Zhri’Nikkor, or back up into Y’Raddu. Only in the jungles and islands now held by the Corsairs did some of them escape the poisoned sands. Unfortunately, some there really sank into cannibalism.”
Dragon-breath called back at them without turning around. “Tell’er the rest, Ol’ Man, or I will!”
A’Nu-Ahki continued, “Some sages say that the cannibals were first to contract Short-lifer’s Syndrome—a hereditary disease that soon spread north via the slave trade. Children born with it aged and died in less than a hundred years—some even sooner. Its spread eventually forced Lumekkor, with their Y’Raddim forebears, to divide the mottled and even some of their own pale and red peoples, in an attempt to isolate the infected clans. The Archons of Seti—with the Seer Clan—tried to give relief and to ensure that this was done as humanely as possible—at first.”
“What do you mean; ‘at first?’”
“The Zhri’Nikkor War broke out between the unsanctioned slave-trading factions from what was then Seti-controlled Assuri, the Lumekkorim slavers, and the independent Nhoddic slave-traders we now call the Corsairs. The Seer Clan did not know that Archon Maha’Lahl-aey’El was secretly funding Lumekkorim interests in the slave industry for fear of an unlikely war from the north, all under the guise of relief to the poor. But we knew something was wrong; that the war against the slave traders was being waged half-heartedly by politicians rather than by arch-straticons.
“This double-dealing undercut Seti’s ‘official’ war to stamp out the slave trade altogether in Assuri and Zhri’Nikkor and to protect the Gate of the Rising Sun. It ended with the slave traders irreversibly strengthened on all sides and the loss not only of Seti’s Far East outposts, but Assuri itself. It also ended with unrestrained systematic oppression of the Nhoddic Tribes.”
Dragon-breath turned and wagged his obscenely long tongue at them, making wheezy chuckles. “You ast, girly, you ast!”
T’Qinna straightened herself on the saddle. “I did. The truth is best, even when it’s terrible. No illusions.”
U’Sumi reached forward and touched T’Qinna’s shoulder in admiration. He wanted to say something empathetic. All he came out with was, “I can’t imagine what it must be like for parents to watch their children grow old and die in less than a century, while they themselves stay young and healthy to live on in grief.” He instantly realized that he’d probably just made her feel worse. She didn’t pull away from his hand, though.
A’Nu-Ahki just shook his head. “This, too, is the legacy of Nhod.”
T
he switchbacks wove through the lower mountains as A’Nu-Ahki’s party descended to the desert floor. Two days passed from the summit to the place where the trail emptied onto the gray sands. A land of living death sprawled before them, dotted with sparse, thorny vegetation, and stunted scrub trees that reached up to the bronze sky like the mummified hands of half-buried giants.
The salt works of Dragon-breath’s uncle lay at the head of the valley. As they approached the small tent community, U’Sumi saw parties of living skeletons led in and out of the compound by well-fed soldiers that marched them back and forth to the pits.
One of the salt holes became visible when the unicorns rounded the last bend in the road before it descended into the settlement. Malnourished men, women, and children dug through the caustic sand with red, swollen hands. Their bellies, distended from hunger and toxemia, made them look like human beetles that crawled up and down the sides of the pit.
Mottled faces stared up at the passing unicorns with sunken, yellow eyes. Blistering chemical burns marred their near-naked bodies, leaving scars and festering fly-filled sores. U’Sumi turned away helplessly when the stench from the workers assailed his nostrils. Shadow-mind rose from his private abyss, even more strengthened for U’Sumi having deluded himself into thinking that he had actually defeated it beneath the Setting Sun Gate, and that it had finally been de-fanged by his deliverance from the Qingu.
Down in the center of the nomad compound, a well-furnished tent shaped like a squared U straddled a heavily guarded stockpile of barrels and foodstuffs. In a pen next to the structure, fat-fleshed sheep and goats bleated with mocking content, fed on imported grain by a lean, pale-skinned youth.
A pudgy middle-aged man emerged from the tent’s center flap. He hailed A’Nu-Ahki’s unicorns. “Ay, Dragon-breath, what’choo doing picking up southies?” he asked, curling his upper lip.
Their guide said, “They don’t be southies, Uncle-Sarv. I thinks they herd from wester-lands. Girl half-spotty in back, but westy by speech. Elder say he’s got message.”
“Message?” Uncle-Sarv said, as if A’Nu-Ahki were not even there.
“’Nuf words to do pass and cross waste.” Dragon-breath’s enormous jaw line curled into a broken toothed grin.
Uncle-Sarv said, “Go stable yer ‘corns. I’ll take the guests.”
U’Sumi and Yafutu helped T’Qinna and A’Nu-Ahki dismount, while the Nhoddic Chieftain regarded them sourly. Unlike his nephew, “Uncle-Sarv” had unspotted pale skin, like the peoples of Lumekkor and Y’Raddu.
A’Nu-Ahki hobbled to his host and introduced himself and his party.
The chubby Nomad responded in like form, departing from his heavy accent. “I’m called Sarvin Angrost, Trustee to the Northern Sector by the Lord of Y’Raddu at Q’Unukku. Who sends me a message?”
A’Nu-Ahki smiled disarmingly. “Actually, as I tried to explain to your nephew the other day, my message is not for you only.”
Angrost said, “Who sends?”
A’Nu-Ahki’s eyes hardened to blue steel. “E’Yahavah, the Great God and Judge, who created the Ten Heavens and the Earth; who once smote this land in his anger against a single murderer. He sends.”
The Salt Miner did not seem to expect this answer. Nor did he look pleased by it. “Yava?” he said.
“That’s right. E’Yahavah has commissioned me to warn of the approaching World-end. Are you familiar with that term?’”
“No. But Yava I know!”
“Then please allow me to explain…”
“No, let me s’plain to you!” Sarvin interrupted. “Yava, to the short-lifer spotty-man, is arch sky demon who curses ground with stinging poison. Look about! Your World-end is now something worse than this? Short-lifer spotties sacrifice their children to ole Basilisk, who they think protects’em from Yava. Samyaza worshipers with red skin like you come up from Assuri and speak Yava to short-lifers too. The ones who follow them always kill many people before they get killed themselves either by my soldiers, the Corsairs, or the Iya’Baalim nomads!”
“I’m not here to incite violence.”
“Doesn’t matter what yer here for! Violence comes!” Sarvin said. Then his tone softened slightly. “Now I try to make peace with red men always, but they act like Yava-demons, always shrieking, jumping up and down, an’ telling short-lifer spotties to revolt, while they beg for gold. You seem more reasonable’n them, wester-man, so try to make peace with me.”
A’Nu-Ahki said, “I want there to be peace.”
“Then don’t say Yava to spotties.”
“Perhaps if I called him ‘the Great God’ generically…”
“Just don’t say nothing!” roared the Salt Miner. Then again, in a more conciliatory tone, “They’re not like white and red-brown man, or even spotties with normal life span, like my brother’s son, Dragon-breath. They be half animal. You only be wasting time. Now I will make peace with you like this: I send you off with water provision to the western mountains. My guards escort you to beyond the Bitter Cup, follow my orders, and keep you out of trouble
on way. Dragon-breath takes you to where it is you go. You must make peace by keeping mouth shut to spotties.”
“I don’t think I can agree to that.”
Sarvin Angrost’s eyes bulged like angry sores. “I’m not askin’, I’m telling! No Yava talk! You leave me tomorrow!”
T
he days stretched on, long and bumpy. U’Sumi’s eyes stung from the alkaline dust the unicorns kicked up into the acrid winds. Along the way, he had seen many shanty compounds as bad as or worse off than Sarvin Angrost’s. Commonly they passed human skeletons strewn along the beaten roadside and twice had happened upon public exterminations of “aged” mottled people with Short-lifer’s Syndrome, who were actually not much older chronologically than U’Sumi was.
Prematurely aged and decrepit bodies had earned such people the status of “surplus population” with their land managers. Mercenaries herded them around great pits then mowed them down in rows with chattering bursts of chain cannon fire. Nobody even tried to hide the camps, or wall them in. Where in the waterless wastes could an escapee go? U’Sumi instinctively wanted to pull out his own weapon and open up on the mercenaries, but there were far too many of them.
All the endless days of plodding gave U’Sumi time to contemplate in a thought-environment as toxic to contemplation as the caustic grit was to his lungs. He had felt like he could defeat anything after the battle with the Elyo, and especially beneath the Gates of the Setting Sun. And if a battle were too many worlds beyond him, as on the Floating Lands, then the whales and porpoises of E’Yahavah would come. Now Shadow-mind reasserted itself with the realization that there were no whales and porpoises in the desert—only dragons. The inner fire of his battle frenzy had somehow deserted him.
The road bent around a third extermination hole that emerged when they rounded a hill. Stick-figure people again lined a vast pit, dull and exhausted from a life of hopeless toil. Once the chain cannons stopped chattering, younger—still useful—spotted tribesman went down into the piles of tangled limbs and snaking entrails to retrieve the valuable projectiles and other baubles before their masters forced them to cover the holes.