Gates of Stone

by Angus Macallan

  The room was stunned into silence. The Ashjavat nobility had not ridden to war in two generations; only a handful of the men in the room had ever seen blood spilled in anger.

  Katerina stepped forward again. “This has been most unfortunate. We are all suffering grief at the loss of our beloved Prince Khazeki. So unless anyone else has anything they wish to say, I think we should draw this doleful audience to a close.”

  She scanned the crowd for a moment. “Does anyone have anything to say?”

  She tapped the scroll against her left leg. A small movement but enough to draw every eye in the room; enough to make her point.

  She sat back down on the massive wooden throne and watched as the aristocracy of Ashjavat shuffled out of the audience chamber, some looking back at her fearfully. Three slaves were dealing with the blood and meat and mess before the dais that had once been her mother-in-law. She felt light, free. It was accomplished. Her course was now set.

  She turned her head to the faceless, gleaming, lacquered bulk of Murakami standing beside her, his right hand on his sheathed katana.

  “I think that went rather well, all things considered,” she said.

  CHAPTER 8

  Extract from Ethnographic Travels by Professor Tolmund K. Parehki of the University of Dhilika

  The ancient Wukarta dynasty of Yawa has many myths and legends that are still recalled in the public shadow-puppet performances and told in the markets by professional storytellers to this day. Perhaps the most famous concerns the family’s acquisition of the Kris of Wukarta Khodam.

  One day many centuries ago, a young prince named Arjun was watching the heavens from his palace in the hills of central Yawa and he saw a star fall to Earth. The prince was a bold fellow and bored with his soft life so he gathered his bow and quiver and journeyed far to the west to the place where the star had landed near the roots of the Black Mountain. When he came there he found that a crater had been gouged into the vegetation, the plants blackened and dying all around the rim, and in the center was a vast shell the shape and color of a mussel, smoking hot and cracked to reveal its pink interior. As he drew near, Arjun saw, in the glowing heart, a beautiful maiden lying asleep on a mound of silken pillows. Her naked body was the color of silver, her hair like a sheet of red flame spread out upon the pillows. Arjun saw her and knew love for the very first time. He knelt beside her and kissed her. She opened her eyes, and seeing his strength and beauty, she loved him in return. Without words, for the lady could not speak in the tongues of men, she embraced him. And they made love in the shell’s glowing heart.

  Inside the mussel shell, time had no dominion. In its shelter the human frame required no food and no water; and for nine days Arjun and the star princess lay together in joy. And on the ninth day, a baby was born to them, a beautiful boy with hair the color of flame.

  Arjun named the boy Karta, which means “gift from the heavens” in the old Yawa language, and he would have been content to stay with the child and his star princess forever. But it was not to be. The arrival of the shell had roused Grandfather Pande from his Black Mountain lair above the valley. The blacksmith set down his hammer, banked his forge, and gathering his many sons, he came down and approached the shell in stealth. While Arjun and his star princess made love, the Pande watched from the darkness outside, and he desired her. Yet the great Pande had no regard for the love of a woman; he made his own children in his forge, from fat and blood and bone. He desired the star princess for the matter she embodied. He desired her flesh to make a magical sword. The first kris.

  On the tenth night, Grandfather Pande and all his sons rushed into the shell. They beat Arjun with iron clubs, breaking his bones. Then, believing him to be dead, they cast his body out into the jungle to be carrion for the Ghost Tigers. But when the Pande’s sons struck the star princess with their clubs, they found their blows left no mark. The iron weapons rang like bells against her silver skin. So, instead, they seized her and bound her with silk ropes and, singing their triumph, they carried her up the Black Mountain.

  Yet Arjun did not die. He lay for a day and a night in the forest. The Ghost Tigers came and taking pity on him, they licked the blood from him with their rough tongues, and with the power of their saliva they healed his broken bones. Their leader, Raal, brought him fresh meat to eat and watched over him while he healed. And Arjun came back into his strength.

  On the twelfth day Arjun came out of the jungle, whole and hale, and he went back to the mussel shell to find the baby crying for his parents. He picked up his son, Karta, and gave him to the Ghost Tiger mothers, setting him to suckle at their teats. Then he collected up his bow and quiver and full of rage he climbed the Black Mountain in search of his love.

  Arjun crept to the entrance of the Pande’s fortress and, shooting from the darkness, he slew many of the blacksmith’s sons. And when the rest had fled in terror, Arjun entered his enemy’s lair, the lust of vengeance upon him. He found the Pande alone in the heart of the mountain, standing before his roaring forge with a beautiful kris in his hands. Its blade was the color of the star princess’s skin; the wood of the handle was the color of her eyes.

  “I forged her,” the Pande said. “I threw her living into the flames. I took her flesh, blood and bone and made it steel and wood—and the world shall never know a blade like this again. It is filled with her soul, her Khodam, filled with the essence of the stars, and no Earth-made material can stand against it. Look!” The Pande took a bar of iron and threw it spinning high into the air. Before it landed, he sliced once with the kris and cut through the falling metal as if it were no more than a cobweb, the two pieces clanging to the forge floor.

  Arjun’s eyes were filled with tears. He nocked an arrow but so blinded was he by his grief that the shaft missed his mark and sank deep into the Pande’s thigh. The blacksmith screamed, dropped the sword and, spouting blood, he hobbled away, fleeing into the warren of his mountain realm. Arjun picked up the kris, he kissed the handle, his tears falling on the silver blade. And as his finger touched the keen edge, a drop of red blood bloomed and the metal began to glow with a fiery hue, the color of the star princess’s flaming hair.

  In that manner, the Kris of Wukarta Khodam came into the possession of the Wukarta. Arjun took the baby home, riding on the back of a Ghost Tiger, and in time his son grew and had children of his own, and his children called themselves Wukarta, the people of Karta.

  They decided to make camp there that night, although there was still a good hour left of daylight. Semar had not been too difficult to find. Jun had taken a dozen steps into the jungle and called his name twice and the little man had appeared, grinning, from behind a large rock. Jun had been alarmed to find his servant gone and had asked him with more than a touch of hauteur where he had been hiding.

  “It’s not a good idea, my prince, to shelter under a coconut tree in a rainstorm—or at any other time for that matter,” said Semar.

  “Why not?” asked Jun. “It seemed as good a place as any other.”

  Semar bent down and picked up a yellow coconut pod from the leaf litter of the forest floor. It was twice the size of the little man’s head. He tossed it at Jun, who caught it easily.

  “When the wind blows, it shakes the trees and they drop their fruit,” the old man said. “They also drop their fruit when the wind doesn’t blow.”

  Jun held the coconut in his hands. He could hear the water sloshing around inside. He imagined the heavy nut falling on his body from the top of the tree as he sheltered against the trunk—and shuddered.

  “Why did you not warn me?” Jun asked the old man. But his imperious tone had disappeared. Semar took him by the hand and led him back to the beach, where Ketut had already got a fire going. Semar indicated that Jun should sit and the old man took the coconut from him, went to the boat and after fishing around in its depths for a moment emerged with a parang, a long, broad, steel kn
ife used for cutting back jungle greenery. As Jun sat and watched, Semar, with a few deft strokes of the blade, hacked the top from the coconut and passed the decapitated fruit to Jun, who drank deeply of the sweet juice. Semar sat down beside him.

  “I must tell you, my prince, that I have certain skills that perhaps you did not know I possessed. It is one of the few benefits of a long life that one accretes wisdom. You pile it up over the years. I can trim up a coconut neatly, as you see.”

  He gestured to Jun and the prince found himself handing the heavy fruit to the old man who took a long drink. Jun could never have imagined himself sharing a drinking vessel, even one as crude as this, with a servant at the Watergarden. But much had changed—and although it felt rather strange, it did not feel entirely wrong to him.

  “There are certain other things that I can do as well.” Semar passed the coconut back to Jun. “I can make a tasty stew from dried fish. I can sew up a tear on a jacket so you would never know the damage had been done. And I can read destiny on people’s faces.”

  Jun was aware that Ketut had joined them beside the fire. She stood looking down at the two men, her hands on her hips.

  “Did you say destiny?” Jun asked, slightly confused.

  “I can look into people’s faces and see their future,” Semar said.

  Jun frowned at him.

  “I am rarely wrong,” said Semar. By some trick, some combination of bright sun coming off the sea and the shadows thrown by the trees, his eyes now seemed to be entirely black, the white swallowed up by the iris and pupil.

  “You saw my destiny?” Jun said. “You know what will happen to me in the future?”

  “Not all of it,” said Semar. “But I saw enough of it to know that you would not be killed by a coconut falling on your head.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw you sitting on the Obat Bale. I saw you sitting in splendor on the throne of the King of Singarasam.”

  Jun did not know what to say. He hid his face in the coconut. He drank and passed it to Ketut. The silence stretched out and became unbearable.

  “So I am to be the Lord of the Islands one day?”

  “So it would seem,” said the old man.

  “Well, if I am to be the ruler of the whole Laut Besar, you had both better start treating me with a good deal more respect,” said Jun. He meant it as a joke. But it came out merely as childish petulance. Neither Semar nor Ketut said anything at all.

  Jun said, “I suppose that explains why you didn’t tell me to move in the storm. You knew a coconut wouldn’t fall on me. But why did you move?”

  “I can see your future,” said Semar. “I cannot see mine. For all I know it may be filled with falling coconuts.”

  And, mercifully, they all laughed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Semar proved his second boast that night: he made a quick and easy stew out of dried fish and spices from their provisions, translucent coconut flesh and wild green papaya that he tracked down and plucked from the jungle. It was extremely good, Jun admitted to himself, but as he had not eaten since a rushed bowl of rice at breakfast before they had set sail he was ravenously hungry, and that perhaps made all the difference.

  As the sun began to sink, the three of them sat drowsily by the fire, which Semar had fed with green leaves and grasses so that curtains of smoke wafted to and fro in the light sea breeze and kept the mosquitoes at bay. After the delicious fish stew, Ketut had made tea in an old battered iron pot and they passed it around and sipped the fragrant liquid as they lay watching the shadows lengthen and the sky turn from orange to pink to milky gray.

  “Can you truly see the future in a face?” Ketut said. “It is not trickery or a joke or some such piece of nonsense to amuse children?”

  “Would I admit it if it were a trick?” Semar said.

  Ketut smiled, a quick twisting of one side of her mouth. It made her look much older and more cynical, Jun thought.

  “Do me then,” she said. “Prove yourself. Tell me what you can see in my face.”

  “Come and sit before me,” said the old man. And when Ketut was settled cross-legged in front of Semar, the old servant stared into her face, and lightly traced her brow with one gnarled finger. Jun, watching from the other side of the fire, noticed that his tiny servant’s eyes appeared to have turned entirely black again, but with the drifting smoke and dying light it was difficult to be sure.

  “I see love. I see a great passion in your future,” Semar said.

  Ketut sprang to her feet as if she had been insulted. The transformation in her was extraordinary: she seemed instantly filled with a boiling rage.

  “Don’t! Don’t you do that,” she snarled. “Don’t do that to me!”

  “I only tell what I see.”

  “Love is for credulous fools. Love leads women to their own destruction. Love is slow poison for the soul.”

  Semar shrugged. He loosened the sarong around his waist and pulled it up to his shoulders. He lay down beside the fire and settled himself, covered from neck to knee by the sarong, his staff by his side, his head pillowed on a bundle of his spare clothes.

  Ketut was pacing up and down on the other side of the fire.

  “I think you are a fraud, old man,” she said. “I think you tell people what you think they want to hear. I say you are a liar.”

  Semar said nothing. Jun could see that his eyes were closed.

  “And you, richboy—” Ketut was pointing an accusatory finger at Jun. “You useless puppy, you will never sit on the Obat Bale of Singarasam. Much as you might wish to.”

  Jun was about to protest that he had no such ambitions but by the time he opened his mouth, Ketut was gone, striding away from the fire into the dark jungle.

  “Let her go, my prince,” said Semar, without raising his head or even opening his eyes. “She won’t desert us. She’ll be back before the morning.”

  “Did you read that in her face, too?” Jun’s tone was contemptuous.

  Semar opened one dark eye. “No, not in her face. In that.” He jerked his chin over at the long, low form of the boat drawn up on the sand. “She won’t abandon her only means of livelihood just because I blew on her feathers a little.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Semar began to snore shortly after that. Ketut did not return. And Jun, although as tired as he had ever been, did not feel disposed to sleep. He resented being called a “useless puppy” but he knew that looking out through Ketut’s eyes he must seem fit for very little. There was not much call for poetry on a fishing boat, and the fact that he could recount all the names of his ancestors back a hundred generations now seemed a less-than-astounding feat. He got up and went over to the boat and, fumbling slightly in the dark, he found the recurved bow that he had hurriedly packed before they set sail. The bow was already damp and he dug in his pack for a tub of wax and a clean cloth and took them all over to the fire, where he sat down and began to wipe the horn-and-bamboo bow free of salt and sand.

  He dumped a little more wood from the pile onto the fire, so the flames flickered higher and he had light to work by. It was full dark by now and moths and bats flitted through the trees behind him. He wondered, as he worked on the bow, rubbing wax into all the grooves and corners, what Ketut was doing out there in the black jungle. Probably crying, he thought. Probably blubbering up snot and slime like the dirty Dewa that she was. And all because an old man had told her that someday some dolt would take a shine to her.

  But then who was he to sneer at her for weeping? He recalled his own night of shame. He thought about his father, drowning in a sea of flies, his nose and mouth filling until tightly packed with their crawling bodies; he thought about the flames of the burning pavilions, the hacked bodies of the dead servants; he thought about the gray-cloaked demon with his dark face and high cheekbones,
that slash for a mouth and the hooded eyes

  Jun found he was staring into the flames; the blaze danced and flickered before his eyes, the color of the fire seeming to turn a greenish tinge, and slowly an image of the dark man appeared in its heart. The demon seemed to be looking directly at Jun. He saw that the demon’s eyes were in fact gray, the iris veined and cracked with black lines. It was some trick, Jun thought, some horrible deception of his senses. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The cruel face still stared out at him from the heart of the green fire. Without his headdress, Jun saw that his head was covered with a cap of tiny black curls of hair.

  “Who are you?” the demon said. His voice was cold and sharp as a blade of flint.

  Jun was too surprised to speak. All over his body the fine hairs stood up.

  The demon smiled. “I know you now. You are the son, the milksop heir to the Wukarta, who stood and looked on terrified and helpless as your ancient sire fought me.”

  Jun straightened his shoulders. “I am Prince Arjun Wukarta and I will make you pay for my father’s death, demon. I will follow you to the ends of the world . . .”

  “You are—what?—you are pursuing me? For vengeance?”

  The demon began to laugh, and the horrible sound made Jun want to run away, far, far away into the jungle. He felt hot and cold at the same time. He felt his bladder loosening.

  “You are chasing after me. Of course you are. You seek revenge and the return of the Khodam. So where are you, my young vengeance-seeker? Still on Taman, I’d guess . . .”

  The green fire was suddenly extinguished. The demon disappeared. Snuffed out like a candle. And there was Semar, standing over him with an uptipped bucket of seawater. The bizarre contact with the demon and the sudden loss of light made Jun dizzy. He sensed rather than saw Semar squat next to him in the new, chillier darkness, and felt the old man’s gentling hand on his shoulder.