Gates of Stone

by Angus Macallan

  At noon, Farhan roused himself and joined Mamaji, Captain Ravi of the Dokras and Captain Lodi in the main cabin for a council of war. Mamaji sat at the head of the table, with Lila in the background wielding a big ceramic teapot and serving each of them with tiny cups of piping hot Han tea flavored with dried jasmine, which in the close jungle heat was surprisingly refreshing.

  “You’d better tell us, dear, how bad it is,” said Mamaji gravely, looking at Lodi.

  Cyrus took a deep breath. “We are holed on both sides,” he said. “But by far the worst is the breach on the starboard bow, where it seems two balls struck almost the same spot and staved in a large portion of the hull. We fothered it last night, that is, ma’am, we got an old sail stretched over the gap in the planks, but the Mongoose is not fit for a long sea voyage until that is timbered—and the other smaller breach, too—and the best way to do it would be to careen her so that our carpenters can get at the hull. And that means beaching her.”

  “How long before she would be fit for sea service, Captain?”

  “Two weeks, maybe three at most—if we are unmolested and if I may make use of the Dokra troopers as a workforce.” He looked at Captain Ravi, who shrugged, and looked at Mamaji, then said, “I expect I shall need my men to look to the land defenses of the ship.”

  “You can spare, say, twenty troopers, Captain Ravi dear, can you not?”

  Lodi said, “Three weeks, then, it could be done in that time. With luck.”

  “We are going to need a fortification on land,” said Farhan. “And we’ll need some of the ship’s guns, and gunners to man them. This is lawless country. The city of Sukatan to the east of here is the nearest large settlement where we might find a representative of the Federation. But that’s about thirty or forty leagues away. Two or three weeks’ hard march, even perhaps longer, as we would have to cut our way there through thick jungle—even if we could actually find our way to Sukatan and not become hopelessly lost. I don’t think land travel is a viable option. The forests here are almost virgin and contain many wild animals, not to mention escaped slaves, outlaws, bandits. There are remote tribes hereabouts who’ve never heard of the Federation, or the Lord of the Islands: some are barely aware of the existence of the Laut Besar.”

  “So we must remain and repair our ship,” said Mamaji. “We will need a week to build a fort of some kind. Captain Ravi dear, that is your department, I believe, and Captain Lodi will provide you with cannon. And then we need another three weeks to careen the ship and mend her timbers. We are here for a month, it seems. How are we off for food and water?”

  “Not good,” said Lodi. “Most of the rice became waterlogged and is spoiled, and the fresh tack is now all but gone but, on the other hand, we did plan for a long voyage. With half rations, and a little fishing, we should be able to survive for one month—maybe.”

  “There should be game in the forest,” said Farhan. “If I could have a couple of men to carry for me, I might be able to bring in some fresh meat.”

  “Very good,” said Mamaji. “Then let us proceed. Captain Lodi—you will repair the Mongoose as best you can, as quickly as you can. We need only to be able to get safely back to Istana Kush in her—the more extensive repairs can be done there.”

  “We are going home?” said Farhan.

  “Yes, due to this unfortunate delay here we will miss the gold shipment leaving from Sukatan by two weeks,” said Mamaji, “and the next is not for another three months.”

  “But the plan was to take the gold shipment—our rewards, our bonus payments are based on us taking the gold shipment from the Han convoy.” Farhan knew he was whining. But this was truly appalling news.

  “The plan, you will surely recall, dear Farhan,” said Mamaji kindly, “was to foment a conflict between the Celestial Republic and the Lord of the Islands. We are agents provocateurs, not gold thieves. Surely you recall your orders from the Amrit Shakti. If it has somehow slipped your memory, let me refresh it for you. The plan—the reason why you, dear, so cleverly acquired Ongkara’s flag—was to pose as a ship filled with the Lord of the Island’s rascally pirates and to create so much outrage in the Conclave of Venerables that it would lead inevitably to war between our two chief rivals in the Laut Besar.

  “Whichever side emerges as victor, after the regrettable slaughter when the pirate fleet of Ongkara meets the might of the Celestial Navy in battle, does not matter in the slightest because we—the Federation—will be the stronger either way. We’ll be in a position, when the smoke clears, to take the Lordship of the Islands into our own safe hands. And we have already achieved our primary aim.”

  Mamaji beamed at the table. “We have surely created sufficient outrage among the Venerables by the attack on Kulu—not to mention the sinking of two of their new cruisers—and that was partly, I must now admit, why I encouraged you to do it. There is absolutely no need to attack the Han gold convoy now, dears—our mission is accomplished. All we need to do is bide our time while we mend this vessel then sail home to Istana in triumph. You’ve all done very well! All of you. General Vakul, I believe, will be extremely pleased.”

  Farhan felt a void open up beneath his ribs. His debts . . . oh Gods! He was a dead man! Ongkara must know now that he had been tricked into handing over the Lion Standard—and he would make a bad enemy if he survived the coming war—but that was not the worst of it. He’d always known that he would anger the pirate lord. The real problem was his massive, unpayable, ever-growing debt to Xi Gung—which could not now be settled with his portion of gold from the convoy. Unless the Federation was successful in its attempt to seize the Lordship of the Islands, and he managed to persuade the new ruler to banish Xi Gung from Singarasam, unless that could be achieved, Farhan would not dare to show his face there ever again. Owing what he did, if Xi Gung ever laid hands on him, if he was caught . . . it did not bear thinking about. He would not be safe anywhere in the Laut Besar for the rest of his life. Perhaps not even in the Federation. His whole strategy, everything he had privately planned, had been predicated on achieving a degree of protective wealth. He tried once more.

  “Surely, we could wait out the three months and attack the next gold convoy. By sea, Sukatan is not so far away, just a few days’ sailing. Think how impressed General Vakul would be if we were to present him—and the Amrit Shakti treasury—with a shipload of pure Han bullion! And we would be greatly impoverishing our enemies, too!”

  “We are going home, Farhan. Captain Lodi and I agree, and that is the end of it.”

  As Farhan still looked mutinous, Mamaji said, “If you are concerned about your mission bonus, I believe I can reassure you on that point. I am authorized to grant a supplementary payment of one hundred ringgu in silver for your part in this mission, Farhan, on top of your usual monthly stipend, and the same amount for each of you, too.” Mamaji beamed at Lodi and Ravi. “Each of the Buginese sailors and each Dokra trooper will receive ten ringgu, too—all payments to be made immediately after we have safely dropped anchor inside the harbor at Istana Kush.”

  Farhan wanted to strangle the fat, grinning bitch: a hundred ringgu would not pay one-tenth of the debts he owed to Xi Gung, even before the interest had been calculated. He bit his tongue. Courage, he told himself. Get a grip: he wasn’t in the old monster’s clutches yet.

  * * *

  • • •

  Captain Ravi, although his tiny frame, dashing air and extravagant vanity might suggest otherwise, was a more than competent fort-builder. He had his men hard at work tracing the outline of a reasonably capacious square fort in a jungle clearing a hundred yards from the ship within an hour of the meeting breaking up. And, by nightfall, eight of the Mongoose’s cannon had been winched out of the hull and set up, one at each corner of the fort and one in the center of each putative wall. Dokra axmen were busy chopping down the bamboo forest on all sides, clearing fields of fire for the cannon and providing building
materials. Captain Ravi had eighty-three surviving musketeers, and none of them were idle. By the time supper was served out—a watery rice soup studded with scraps of iron-hard salt pork—the shape of the fortress was clear and even a short section of the south wall, the wall farthest from the river, had been erected.

  Captain Ravi’s design was simplicity itself: four walls of twelve-foot-high double-thick bamboo palisade, with a walkway on the inside that allowed a man to fire a musket over the wall without exposing his own body. There was a single entrance in the northeast corner that was only a little wider than a man is broad. The cannon were to be mounted on specially reinforced bamboo platforms, with the cannonball, canister, wadding and powder stored underneath and the guns served by means of a clever pulley system that raised a square pallet through a small trapdoor.

  Inside the fort, tents made from extra sailcloth had been set up—two smaller ones, one for Farhan, Captain Lodi and Captain Ravi, and one for Mamaji and Lila; and two very large ones, one for the Buginese sailormen and another for the off-duty Dokra troopers. Areas had been demarcated for cooking, stores, officers’ baggage, washing and two long latrine trenches had been dug against the northern wall. Captain Ravi had even begun digging a deep well in the center of the camp—for, as the energetic little officer said, you could never be too careful, and while they were only to remain in the fort a month, having a good supply of fresh water could sometimes mean the difference between life and death.

  The next morning Farhan slept past the rising of the sun and was awoken some hours afterward by the noise of saws and hammers busily at work. He came stumbling out of his tent, yawning and scratching, and found himself to be the only unoccupied man in an ants’ nest of activity: the walls of the fort were already half-completed, and looking north to the river, Farhan could see that the Mongoose was in the process of being dragged up the muddy bank by gangs of sweat-gleaming Buginese sailors hauling on a complex network of ropes to the shouted commands of Lieutenant Muda.

  Farhan was aware of an embarrassing sense of his own uselessness—he had slept in while others toiled. And no one had thought to wake him to ask him to join in their labors. No one considered his efforts to be worth rousing him. With a feeling of humility, he splashed his face with water, drank down a glass of cold tea and wolfed a single sweet rice ball. Then, collecting his double-barrelled rifle, ball and powder, a freshly sharpened parang, his tea flask, and a pair of Dokra troopers, borrowed with Captain Ravi’s grudging permission, he set off out into the jungle.

  Least he could do was to put some fresh meat in the pot for the workmen.

  Farhan’s spirits lifted as he stepped away from the bustle and noise, the clanging and the hammering of the clearing and entered the cool, quiet shadows of the jungle. Within a hundred paces he could no longer hear the shouts and cries of his shipmates and the green closed in around him like a vast cloak. The jungle was not especially dense here: the trees were mostly tall, spindly affairs a few paces apart, with thick undergrowth that tangled the feet and, once in a while, a massive trunk with a sprawling ridged base—one of the giants of the jungle, one that had climbed high enough to break through the canopy and reach the life-giving sunlight. There were no tracks, as such, but the feet of animals had created faint pathways through the undergrowth, which Farhan carefully widened with the parang, and every ten paces or so he cut a little notch on the trunk of a tree at waist height, so that he should not have any difficulty retracing his steps at day’s end.

  The jungle was full of life: the crick and saw of insects, the high-pitched cries of bright-plumed birds hidden in the branches and, from time to time, Farhan heard the sound of stealthy movements of large creatures in the foliage at ground level. Each time he heard something like this he stopped, waved the two following Dokra into stillness and leveled his rifle—but nothing showed itself. Once he glimpsed a burly, red-furred ape, clutching a baby, in the branches above his head but the animal swung away hooting madly with laughter and disappeared into the endless green.

  It was suffocatingly hot, and Farhan found himself dripping, itching and craving the cool tea in his bottle. Yet he knew that he had to ration himself: he had been gone no more than an hour and it might take the whole day for him to find and kill something worth eating. They passed orchids of extraordinary variety growing in the crevices of the biggest, grayest trees—from brilliant green to riotous scarlet and yellow, sometimes cascading down out of their niches like party decorations. They stopped and watched spellbound as tiny jewel-like butterflies delicately battled each other in the rare shafts of sunlight, their miniature wings flashing like winking lights. They passed by giant ferns, twice as tall as a man, waving like long, green Manchu banners in the lightest breeze. Something huge growled at them from the undergrowth, a bass rumbling that stood their short hairs to attention and had Farhan hefting his rifle in sweaty hands and scanning the green wall with his heart in his mouth, but then they heard the great beast padding off, the foliage whispering like silk as it moved away. A huge ratlike creature hopped up onto a tree root, stared at him inquisitively for a moment, and then whisked off about its business with a rustle and flash of its long pink tail.

  After three hours of fruitless searching, Farhan called a halt and he and the two Dokra sat down gratefully on the tree roots of a mighty banyan tree.

  “Might as well wait for the game to come to us,” said Farhan jovially, and he stretched out his legs and sipped frugally from his tea flask. The two Dokra nodded and smiled knowingly, leaned their muskets against the tree’s massive trunk and reached for their own bottles. In truth, Farhan was already pinched by the dread of failure. He was exhausted and longed to do nothing more than return to the camp by the swiftest route and throw himself on his camp bed—perhaps after taking a cooling dip in the river. Only fear of the scorn of his shipmates kept him in this torrid hell.

  A drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto the silver barrels of the rifle across his knees, and he wiped it away angrily with a thumb. He would have to remember to oil the long gun the moment he got back to camp or risk its tarnishing, he thought.

  Then he felt a Dokra hand gently touch his elbow and he slowly raised his head to see a fawn standing not ten paces from him nibbling at a shrub. It was a delicate creature with long spindly legs, pinky-brown mottled fur dotted with white, and huge brown eyes framed with impossibly long lashes. It was almost too beautiful to shoot, but Farhan knew his duty and slowly, very slowly he raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  Just then its mother stepped out from behind a bush, bigger, more wary, rightfully suspicious of the three men seated on the banyan roots. Farhan eased back the right-hand cock on his rifle, and at the click, so loud in the hot silence, the adult deer leaped forward, putting its body between Farhan and the fawn. He pulled the trigger. There was a snap as the flint hit the steel and a spark lit in the pan. Then nothing. Misfire. The deer and the fawn were gone—and Farhan cursed his luck. The powder in the frizzen pan must have become damp—hardly surprising given the conditions that day.

  The two Dokra looked reproachfully at Farhan. He opened his mouth to explain himself and saw that their gaze had shifted to beyond him. Now they were both leaping to their feet. Farhan whirled and saw a man—at least a man-shaped thing—standing not ten paces away beside the trunk of a palm tree.

  The body was naked but for a brief belt and loincloth and thickly slathered with white clay, overpainted with broad gray and black stripes. The face was painted black and white to resemble a skull, with a black scythe painted on the forehead between the eyes. The fellow’s hair, a matted mass of thick gray ropelike strands, was piled on top of his head, and in his right hand he carried what looked like a long pole painted with gray stripes half as tall again as the man holding it.

  One of the Dokras, standing to Farhan’s right raised his musket to his shoulder. Farhan half expected the man to dart away like the frightened deer and the fawn—but he di
d not. He gave a low grunting cry that sounded like an insult or a foul oath to Farhan’s half-comprehending ears; his hand flashed to his belt from where he plucked a long, needlelike object with a ball of fluff at one end from a small pouch. All in the space of two heartbeats, he tipped the pole in his hands, shoved the missile into the end, lifted it to his lips, pointed it at the Dokra and blew.

  Ffft.

  Farhan turned in amazement to see the elder Dokra drop his musket—which went off with a flash and a loud bang—and clutch at his throat, where the needlelike object with its jolly little ball of fluff was protruding from his Adam’s apple. Farhan turned back to the painted man and saw that he was in the act of loading another dart into his blowpipe. Farhan lifted the rifle, cocked the left-hand hammer and, as the savage brought the long pipe up to his mouth, he pulled the trigger.

  The hammer snapped down, the flint hit the steel, the spark ignited the powder in the pan. The rifle roared and the ball tore across the ten paces between the two men, smashed into the man’s chest high on the right and ripped his shoulder and his right arm completely free of his body. The painted man was knocked back against the palm tree, down, looking in awe at the bloody mash where his right arm had been. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and his body sagged.

  Farhan looked for the first Dokra who had been struck in the throat—and a dash of cold horror, tempered by the burning mixture of fear and rage, began to moil in his belly. The dart had clearly been poisoned with some powerful swift-acting toxin, for the trooper was already blue-faced and frothing at the mouth, his body convulsing. His comrade tried to help him but the victim was convulsing so hard that his body was bending almost double. He thrashed and spasmed and bent like a fish on land, now wildly arcing his back, now curling his body in a tight ball. Incredibly, his head was now bent all the way back almost to the soles of his boots. The white froth was spattered all about him. The cords in his neck stood out like iron ridges.