Gates of Stone

by Angus Macallan

  “Hey, you, Mudskipper, get your dirty Dewa finger out of my soup,” a senior novice called Lallat had shouted at him as he was serving out the bowls for their dinner at the long communal table in the Hall of Eating.

  Lallat was the second son of the hereditary steward of the rulers of the Island of Molok. A snobbish oaf. But his skin was light, his nose beautifully thin and his hair long and auburn, with flecks of red in the sunlight. He was a novice and captain of the dormitory in which Mangku slept, and he never allowed an opportunity for mockery of the new boy’s evident racial inferiority to pass him by. Lallat’s family were New People, way back for twenty generations, they even boasted a little Wukarta blood—and the novice captain never tired of mentioning it. On the other hand, Mangku—well, he told the other boys and girls at the Temple that his folk were rice farmers from Western Yawa, humble people but honorable. And he lied: his father was a Dewa gravedigger and his mother an obat-addicted occasional buffalo herder who could find no better-blooded husband to share her dilapidated, filthy two-room hovel on the very outskirts of their village.

  His Dewa father had never been an issue before now. His part of Western Yawa was very sparsely populated and a worker was valued as a worker—all hands were needed to bring in the rice crop safely—and this had been the case for generations, so the distinctions between the races were blurred and vague. But Mangku’s black hair was tightly curled, his nose was flat and broad, and his skin was dark—his looks proclaimed unmistakably his Ebu heritage. And somehow that seemed to matter to people a great deal more in his new home.

  He had left his village and traveled all the way to the Mother Temple because he wanted to escape the poverty and tedium of a life in a dusty, forgotten corner of the world. He had heard that the Mother Temple accepted boys and girls from all over the Laut Besar and that if they worked hard, were obedient and devout, they might one day be made priests. That had been his dream—to gain himself a position of respect and spiritual authority in the community. But his first years at the Temple had been closer to a nightmare.

  Led by Lallat, the boys and girls had mocked him pitilessly: calling him Mudskipper, Dung Blood and Jungle Boy. But that was not the worst of it. He could have borne a little name-calling, if that was all it was. But they made him do all the menial tasks: the jobs that the Dewa servants attached to the Temple would ordinarily have done. He slaughtered buffalo and stripped off their skins to make leather in the urine pits—he would never forget the smell of those rancid, eye-watering pits for as long as he lived—he butchered the meat for the kitchens, he buried the dead—just like his father did back in his home village.

  The other boys told him he was polluted, that he was inherently dirty and that the touch of his hands would contaminate them with his filth. In the recreation hour, they made a game of running away screaming from him, holding their noses when he came near, as if his body perpetually smelled foul. Although he scrubbed his dark skin with soap and stiff brushes till it was raw every night. The other novices told him that Vharkash despised him and his kind—and that he could never be a priest. Lallat moved his bed out of the dormitory and into the dank ablutions block attached to the sleeping hall.

  He complained once to the deputy in charge of the novices and was threatened with a beating if he made a nuisance of himself. “You are here to work and to learn,” the deputy had said. “If you do not like it, go back to whatever dung pile that you crawled out from.”

  Mangku began to hate.

  His hatred grew month by month. It was not just his chief tormentor Lallat that he hated—in fact, he dispatched that boy to the Seven Hells with a large dose of a discreetly administered poison just sixteen months after his arrival. He was allowed to move his bed back into the dormitory when he was finally accepted as a novice, and the name-calling and humiliating games eventually stopped. But their effect was indelible. He feared deep inside himself that he was inferior. The hatred took root in his heart like some grotesque and evil fungus, feeding on darkness and decay. And it grew. Every year it grew a little stronger. He hated them all—all the carefree descendants of the New People. He hated them for their privilege and their light skins and small noses, for their air of natural superiority. They were all the enemies of his blood, he told himself.

  Then, one day, he met his Master.

  He recognized him immediately for what he was. And gradually, over many weeks and months, he opened his heart, and he showed him the hatred inside. In turn, his Master showed him the way.

  * * *

  • • •

  The hollow log bells of the Sukatan Temple boomed again. It was the Hallowed Day today, Mangku recalled, the sacred time that occurred once a month when the Gods were most attentive to the desires of mortals, most amenable to their prayers. It was the day of power, when men and women possessing even the smallest degree of spiritual ability dared to welcome the divine into themselves and become strengthened and purified. Gods walked the Earth on the Hallowed Day and sometimes took on human form.

  But Hiero Mangku had finished with the Gods a long time ago. The Gods were not a reliable source of power—sometimes they listened to the pleas of men, sometimes they were deaf. It depended on their childish whims. They could not be commanded, merely cajoled or pleaded with. You approached them on your knees like a beggar whining for alms. That was not Mangku’s way. He relied on something far stronger, a secret knowledge, the ancient forbidden practices that his Master had introduced to him early on in his time at the Temple: blood magic. The sorcery of his Ebu forefathers. The wild power that the original inhabitants of the Laut Besar had wielded.

  Mangku settled himself on the floor in the center of the Jade Tower chamber. He had already drawn the seven-pointed star in red chalk on the wooden floor. He gripped his left hand over the blade at the top of his staff—grimacing with the pain of the new wound opened in his much-scarred palm, then making a fist, he squeezed a gout of blood onto each of the star’s points.

  He rubbed the bloody left hand against his right and said the ancient words of power, pronouncing them clearly but quietly without a single mistake. He reached up to his uncovered head and plucked a single, black, curling hair from his scalp, then cradled it in the gore of his cupped hands. He said the words again, and breathed gently onto the twist of hair. As he watched, the strand shriveled, curled in tighter on itself, forming a bloody ball that coalesced, coagulated and slowly changed from dark red to an iridescent green. He opened his hands completely and a tiny black-and-green beetle rattled its shiny wing cases, unfurled the wings inside and humming contentedly flew up from his palms, hovered at the top of the room and then out of the open window into the warm Sukatan night.

  Mangku got up stiffly and washed his bloodstained hands. He recalled then the day they had expelled him from the Mother Temple, when his hands had been slick with the blood of another. The diminutive High Priest standing there looking solemn and sad, a knot of young burly lesser priests and novices with their arms folded across their chests, trying to look intimidating. Necromancer, they had called him. Foul traitor to the Holy God.

  He was a fully fledged priest by then, and had given twenty years of loyal service to the Temple. It had been a long time since people had called him names.

  For twenty years, he had hidden his hatred of them—as his Master had instructed him to do—he had studied hard, absorbed the lessons the priests taught with ease and made his own secret investigations, too, often late at night in the Great Library, reading scrolls written by people who had been dead for centuries. He studied the old magic, strictly forbidden by the High Priest, hiding the cuts to his own body whence he had drawn the necessary fluids. He had sacrificed animals for practice, mice and rats he caught, then newborn lambs and once a fully grown cow, although the power to be drawn from them was so much weaker.

  He read about his own folk, too, the histories of his race—about the many Ebu rebellions, brief bloody
affairs that always ended with a brutal crushing of the natives’ hopes and dreams. He came across a manifesto—a call to arms from one long-dead Ebu general called Ksajak, who said that there could be no peace until all the New People—every one of them—were expelled from the Laut Besar. His enemies, the very same New People, burned Ksajak alive. But the general’s manifesto changed his life. A dream was born, a sacred mission—the total cleansing of the Laut Besar of all these arrogant incomers, every one. It was an impossible task. The dream of a long-dead madman. To rid the Laut Besar of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants? It was absurd. Or was it?

  On that last night, though, it was he who was got rid of, Mangku remembered wryly. They had all burst in while he was in the middle of the summoning ritual. His first attempt to harness the lifeblood of another human to unleash pure magical power. The victim was a dim-witted serving girl, a Dewa nobody attached to the Temple kitchens, someone who would scarcely be missed. He had drugged the girl senseless, and strapped her facedown to a table in an abandoned rice barn a few miles outside the Temple complex. He had hesitated over using a Dewa; she was of his blood, she was his kin, in a way. But she was of no importance to the Temple hierarchy, and her disappearance would not cause an uproar. And it was fitting, in a way, that her sacrifice should allow him to gain precious knowledge that would eventually help all her people, his people, everywhere. Her little death would not be in vain.

  He had anointed the four corners of the barn with the girl’s fresh blood, drawn the four complicated sigils on the walls and chanted the required words perfectly. Then, with the air already humming with magical power, he peeled open the girl’s back and tore both her kidneys from her body and, gripping the slippery organs, he had summoned Klotha, the bat demon, from the deepest of the Seven Hells. It had worked. He had triumphed. And he would have bound that great flapping, leathery thing to his will, had he not been interrupted.

  The New People had come barging in, beating gongs, torches ablaze, shouting Murder! Sacrilege! Priests and novices, people he had known all his life. The little High Priest to the fore—stern as stone. Klotha had flapped away shrieking into the darkness, never to be seen again. And he had been seized and bound and lectured by the High Priest for hours, told in no uncertain terms the evil of his ways. But they were not permitted to shed his blood. Instead, they made him dig the grave of the novice he had sacrificed—dig it like a Dewa—and forced him to stand penitent at the graveside, silently hating all of them, and himself, too, while they prayed earnestly for the dead girl’s soul and for the God Vharkash to forgive his so-called sins. And then, when it was over, they dismissed him. Told him to go. Exiled him from the Mother Temple that had been his home for so long.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mangku finished cleaning his hands, salved the fresh cut on his left hand and bandaged it tightly with a clean white cloth. He felt drained, as usual, empty and weak—the normal effect of performing any feat of blood magic. But he would eat heartily and sleep in a while and all would be well. The beetle was dispatched, and the Dragon’s Eye would be brought out tomorrow for him to view. Everything was unfolding just as he had planned it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jun followed Ketut along the waterfront, staying a good thirty paces behind her and ducking behind the thick wooden poles of the tall lamps that lighted the street whenever she half turned to get her bearings. Dusk had lowered its gray veil over Sukatan and the lamplighters were out, dozens of pairs of men and boys, who refilled then ignited the bowls of oil at the top of the posts against the coming darkness, the man issuing unnecessary instructions to the boy who climbed the wooden pole as nimbly as a squirrel before drawing up the lit bamboo torch on a cord and setting off the oil blaze.

  Ketut stopped to ask one of these pairs something and at that moment the wooden tubular bells of the Temple of Vharkash began to toll; a series of dull, almost moaning booms that echoed across the still water of the harbor. Ketut and the elder lamplighter chatted for a few moments and then shared a laugh about something, the little boy joining in from a dozen feet above their heads, but Jun could not make out what they had been joking about, and when he passed he gave the man a ferocious scowl that would have meant, “No dillydallying, on with your work, little man,” had he been at home in Taman. Here it meant nothing. He was met by a blank stare.

  He followed Ketut into a darkened side road, heading uphill from the harbor front, and it soon became clear where Ketut was going. The tolling of the bells became louder and a stream of people joined him, thickening to a crowd, all seemingly going the same way. The alley opened into a courtyard and Jun looked up at the wide sweeping tiled roof of the Temple of Vharkash. It was full dark now and the courtyard was lit by four burning lamps on poles, one in each corner. The doors of the Temple had been flung open and Jun caught a glimpse of Ketut heading inside.

  He stopped at the doors and a young shaven-headed priest in black robes made the holy sign of the scythe with the crooked index finger of his right hand touched to the center of his forehead. The ground at Jun’s feet was littered with offerings in tiny woven grass baskets: a few flower petals, a pinch of salt or rice, sometimes a little wooden or paper figurine and a smoldering incense stick. Many of the offerings had been trampled by the hurrying feet of the worshippers. The smell of the incense caught in his nostrils and he sneezed, but suddenly he felt comforted, safe and oddly at home. This was familiar territory for Jun, not so very different from the temples on Taman where he and his father had worshipped on Hallowed Days. What was different here was the crush of the crowd. In Taman, Jun would have been seated on cushioned rattan chairs in the royal enclosure. Here Jun was swept inside by the press of humanity and, tall as he was, he had to crane his neck over the heads of the hundreds of people in front to see anything at all.

  There was no sign of Ketut. But no matter; after a little while, the air of familiar expectation in this holy place began to soothe him and he forgot all about her. At the back of the Temple was a stone table and above it an ornately carved plinth with a stone box, open at the front and empty, but draped with bright cloths and streamers of red and green, the entrance covered in curtains of strung flowers. Two huge glowing incense burners stood at either side of the altar, tended by novices in black robes; they fed the coals and wafted the thick gray smoke they produced toward the congregation. Jun took a deep breath, held it in for a count of ten and felt the familiar joyous tingle of obat smoke reaching down deep into his lungs.

  A gaggle of old men filed in from the side of the Temple, into a roped-off area on the left, and took their places, cross-legged in front of their instruments: a set of wooden and bamboo drums and several round bronze gongs of varying shapes and sizes. After a long while, after the musicians had chatted with each other, and greeted several members of the congregation, they got up and changed places with each other, passed each other cushions, sipped small earthenware cups of black tea and smoked long obat pipes—then, finally, they began to play. And with the first lambent notes, Jun felt a shiver run down his spine. This was the music of the Gods—in particular the music of this God: Vharkash—the greatest of them all. A gentle but thrilling booming of the big bass gong was like the beating of a giant metal heart; then, a light rhythm tapped out with padded mallets on the bamboo drums over the top, and the simple sad melody taken up by the smaller gongs, and repeated, and embroidered upon by others. Each note sounded to Jun like a splash of sound, as if the music were water dripping from a gutter into a beautiful sunlit pond. He stopped feeling the heat and sweat and push of his fellows, all packed around him, the elbow in the ribs, the trodden-on toe; he felt himself transported back to the Watergarden, to the delights of his home, to the liquid music of the summer palace of his ancestors.

  The hours lost their meaning in the Temple that night. This was the time and place of Vharkash the Sower, Vharkash the Reaper and Vharkash the Harvester. Vharkash
who brought the crops forth from the soil. Vharkash who fed the whole world. This was the time and place of mighty, all-knowing Vharkash and his beautiful but deadly consort Dargan—who was, in fact, no more than the female side of divine Vharkash himself.

  A short, fat, elderly male priest wearing a red-and-black mask and accompanied by two unmasked women acolytes shuffled out from behind a curtain and into the space before the altar, their arms filled with offerings: a haunch of pig, a pair of golden roasted chickens, a bowl of saffron rice, fruits of all kinds from prickly green durian to brown snake-skinned nut-apples, garlands of red and blue flowers, jugs of rice wine. They made the crooked-finger sign of the God to their forehead and mumbled inaudible prayers, then anointed their heads with dabs of saffron and rice. The two old women were twins, Jun noted, with a delicious little shiver of awe—identical to each other in dress, manner and feature, and therefore so beloved of the God that he created two people from a single soul.

  The orchestra’s tempo increased. Jun felt the obat singing in his veins. The crowd swayed back and forward in time to the beat. Some were shouting out Vharkash’s name now. Jun had the curious sensation that he was underwater, everything being muted and fluid but perfectly clear. Then the first dancer emerged from the packed crowd, almost vomited out into the small space before the altar and the three priests. It was a man of middle years, naked apart from a blue-and-white-checkered sarong and lean and brown from labor in the sun, the muscles of his chest and arms corded and powerful. His eyes were closed but his body jerked and twitched in time to the music. He hunched his back and brought his hands up to his temples, index fingers pointed like a pair of horns. The crowd gave a murmur as they recognized Bantung, the great bull buffalo that was Vharkash’s legendary mount. As he danced, Jun felt he could see the shadow of the buffalo as an aura around the man’s true body; now he could see only a huge, dark, snorting bovine, now a man cleverly imitating an animal. He knew the obat was at work in him, and the power of the music and the holiness of the Temple itself were making magic in his mind, yet when he relaxed and allowed himself to see the divine beast that possessed the dancing man’s soul, he felt a sense of exhilaration, a pure and soaring joy: the great God was truly among them.