Gates of Stone

by Angus Macallan

  “Major Chan,” she said, summoning the officer to her side. “We must make more haste. We are falling behind schedule. You will kindly order the men to increase the pace.”

  Chan stared at her with his moist eyes; his face was flushed pink and slicked with sweat. He seemed taken aback by her words, quite astonished, in fact.

  “It shall be done, Highness,” was all he said before bustling away to deliver his orders to his own subordinates.

  The pace did increase—but so did the level of punishment. With the sun high in the sky, the heat was like a vast weight pressing down on the toiling column. Up and down the ravines they went, Katerina’s legs protesting at every agonizing step. She was lucky, she told herself, that she was not burdened by a pack or baggage, just a light Cossack saber and a leather pouch of necessities at her waist and her water bottle. The Legionnaires labored under a full pack and harness, although she could see that many of them had removed their heavy blue coats and bundled them on the top of their knapsacks. Even the Ostrakans had small mountaineering packs strapped between their shoulder blades.

  At noon they stopped again, and she had to stop herself from emptying her water bottle in one long draft. She forced herself to take only two swigs. Then chewed down cold rice and dried meat and a final swig of cool water. And then, after fifteen minutes’ rest, they were off again, down the next steep ravine and up the other side.

  The sweat came off her in rivers; the extreme pain in her legs had by now dulled to a rubbery numbness, and there was always another ravine to scrabble down, and then haul her trembling body up the other side. She had a sense, occasionally, that they were not moving forward at all, just traversing one piece of hellishly steep rocky ground before being returned to the starting point and being forced to traverse it all over again. On and on they toiled. On and on. The dust raised by her boots was fine and choking, sticking to her sweat-drenched limbs and forming a thick kind of gray paste, almost a dough—when she looked around at her companions she saw an army of ghosts, trudging on all sides of her. Even the shiny, black-lacquered armor of the Niho knights was painted a powdery gray.

  She wondered if she had done the right thing. She could have left the attack on the Red Fort to Major Chan, or that woman-hating fool Sung. She could have sailed up to Loku Bay with her three ships to wait there in comfort for news of the success or failure of this mission. She played with that delicious but illicit idea for a while, while her battered feet automatically climbed the shifting rock of the next ravine and stumbled down the following. Waiting in comfort. What would that be like?

  No. It was far better this way. She would not put her life, the success of all her plans, in the hands of another. Particularly not Sung. Major Chan had a whiff of weakness about him. And Colonel Wang was far too old. No, it was better this way. She had to do it this way. Her way. She had to make this march, and make it all the way to the end. She would not value the siren song of comfort over the trumpet blare of victory. This was her struggle, here, now. And she would triumph.

  She stumbled and crashed down painfully to one knee. But she was up again before she knew it, hauled upright by Ari’s fist clutching a handful of her shirt.

  A vision of Vladimir, Emperor of Khev, popped into her head. He was laughing, just as he had done so many times in her dreams. If she failed now, he would laugh again; if she died miserably here on this inhospitable hillside, he would hear of it, hear of the ridiculous, impossible task she had set herself and laugh some more. A blast of rage lifted her head up. If she survived this march—and she would survive it—she would crush Vladimir and take sweet joy from his utter destruction. And the fresh anger she felt in her belly gave her a little more strength to carry on. Down one more ravine. Up one more, too.

  A brutal hour later all that had changed. She felt sick but too weak to vomit. Her head felt as if it had been split by an ax then bound together with a red-hot iron band. She felt she could not take another step forward. What she wanted now, most of all, was for it all to stop. Forget the mission. Cancel all her ambitions. Forget crushing Vladimir. Forswear the Gates of Stone. All she wanted now was to lie down, to just sleep forever. But she could not allow herself that glimpse of failure. Still she marched, on and onward, putting one foot in front of another. And then again, one foot in front of another. She was too tired to think. And thinking was useless now anyway. She needed all her will just to take one more step.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the terrible heat of the late afternoon, one Legionnaire died. He just dropped in his tracks and passed away without a word. They left him where he lay, Major Chan closing his staring eyes, and saying a few solemn words in his own language. The Legion officer collected his water bottle and some identification documents from his pockets and the whole column lurched to its feet like a vast dusty blue caterpillar and stumbled onward.

  She felt she had been on those murderous rocky slopes all her life—or rather that she had never had any other life than the existence she endured on this torture march. And, as the orange sun began to dip into the waters of the Indujah Ocean on her left, she truly felt that her soul was now sinking down into inevitable death along with that fiery orb. Come, sweet Death, come, she thought. Come now and end this agony called life.

  They struggled on into the twilight, and Katerina, to her astonishment, found a second—or was it a third or even fourth?—wind. They marched on. One more hour, and then another. The cool of night made things marginally better, and as the moon began to rise—a great, full, silver disk that made it nearly as bright as day—she ordered a halt and a two-hour rest. She was too tired to eat and collapsed into a deep sleep, asking Ari to wake her when the time was up. It was not fair, she knew, asking him to remain awake. But she did not care. The sleep, brief as it was, revived her, although her legs were stiff as spears and her tight-laced, booted feet felt as if they had been crushed in a press. Major Chan and his officers, aided by the Niho knights, roused the whole column. She ate a little, sipped frugally from her water bottle, got unsteadily to her feet, and they forged onward.

  In the moonlight, the ravines were huge pools of darkness. At one point she slipped on a loose patch of scree, thumping down on her behind and beginning to skid down into the black well of the gully’s bottom. An iron hand gripped her shoulder, stopping her descent, and then Ari was there, lifting her up to her feet and asking if she was hurt.

  “Would you like me to carry you, Lady?” he whispered, his face just inches from hers. She laughed—she actually laughed out loud—and shook her head. She would go on on her own two feet until she could go on no longer. She had heard no complaints from the Legionnaires, and while the Ostrakans never ceased their low-level grumbling, they had not fallen behind, as she had feared they might. Perhaps it was all the obat they smoked. Perhaps they could not feel the pain. She did not care as long as they remained with the column. As long as they marched. And if these awkward, silly, self-indulgent men from the most remote backwater in the Khevan Empire could continue to march, then so could she.

  In the middle reaches of the night, she was dimly aware that the ravines were becoming less precipitous, that the land was flattening out. Here and there were small bushes and stunted trees. An exhausted Legionnaire tripped over a boulder in the darkness and fell, breaking his leg. He screamed with pain, and she heard Major Chan ordering him roughly to stop his damned noise. They left him there in the lee of a large rock, with a flask of marak, a tin of obat and a loaded pistol, promising to return when they could.

  And on they marched.

  The moon was long gone but the night was no longer pitch-dark. A grayness was seeping into the air. Dawn was perhaps an hour away. And with what felt very much like the very last drop of her strength, Katerina—with Ari lending a powerful arm—climbed to the top of a stack of flattish rocks, the highest point around. She looked west toward the ink-dark sea and a bank of thick cloud on th
e far horizon, and then up at the descending peaks of the Barat Cordillera, jagged and black against the faint lightening of the sky in the east.

  And then north.

  In the distance, she saw a pinprick of light. A hearth fire, perhaps, kindled for a hot breakfast before a long day in the fields. She waited, the minutes passing, her whole body swaying with fatigue. There were other lights, red and orange, now appearing, popping up like tiny, static fireflies. She could even make out, right at the very edge of vision beyond the winking lights a thick block of ruler-straight stone stretching across the land. Something definitely man-made. A wall. A fortification

  “You know what that is, Ari?” she whispered, suddenly sagging against his hard body. The Niho knight said nothing. But she sensed his smile in the gloom.

  “That,” she said, “is the Red Fort. We have come at last to the Gates of Stone.”

  THREE

  CHAPTER 34

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

  Perhaps the most extraordinary legend of the Laut Besar is that of the Ghost Tigers of the Island of Yawa. These huge creatures, twice the size of a natural tiger, and extremely long-lived, have always been associated with the Wukarta Dynasty, and more recently with the great God Vharkash the Harvester. They were the traditional guardians of the Mother Temple in Yawa, protecting the priests from all manner of harm—although they were also said to eat the flesh of men. Their leader, called Raal, generation after generation, was the greatest of the Ghost Tigers and is descended from the first Raal who succored the first of the Wukarta line back in the time before history began. It was said that the High Priest of Vharkash was trained to speak the language of these great gray-and-black-striped beasts and that he could summon them at will to do his bidding. Of course, the Ghost Tigers are no more than a myth, although their folk memory lives on in the remote tribes of the jungles of Yawa, some of whom venerate them as the battle beast of Vharkash himself and claim a kinship with these animals, even going so far as to partake of the flesh of their enemies . . .

  Farhan had not known, honestly and truly, how much he did not want to die until this day. He was slung upside down from a bamboo pole, the blood pooling in his face and neck, the ties on his wrists and ankles cutting in agonizingly. From the corner of his eye he could see the gently swaying corpse of Sergeant Kishan. Somebody had come to the gralloching frame perhaps an hour past, a smiling, plump-faced matron in a simple hide skirt, and she had cut off the whole of Kishan’s left arm and borne it away. Farhan had vomited a sour spray onto the earth beneath his head, the liquid trickling into his nostrils and over his forehead. Horror and disgust. Sheer coldhearted fear, in truth.

  He trawled through his misspent life, the adventures, the scrapes, all the fun he had had. The bad times, too. He thought again about the Khevan girl. In his mind she had been elevated into a beacon of shining love, an ideal of pure joy. But he would never see her again, never kiss her cool lips or hold her in his arms and feel her soft skin pressed against his, feel her small heart beating under his hand. They would never share an island paradise and a life together of ease and luxury. Perhaps her Northron blood and fair skin would have reacted badly to the heat of the Laut Besar anyway. She was a child of the snows. Those few weeks with her in the capital of the Empire had been a time of happiness for him and, he believed, for her. But could they ever, truly, have been repeated? Perhaps he’d been deluding himself. Perhaps love was nothing more than a delusion. Did she ever think of him now? Did she even remember their lovemaking?

  He thought about all the other joys he would never know again. The nights of marak-fueled laughter. The obat parties. The other women he had enjoyed. The glorious, improbable wins at the tables. The losses, too. That greedy old monster Xi Gung was never going to get his money now, and it served the bastard right. It did not help to think of it: he was going to be dismembered, hacked apart like a feast-day ox and consumed by these appalling white-painted savages, and before that there would be a long red road of agony and waiting.

  What had he done to deserve this—had he angered some God? Had he angered Vharkash himself, that the Harvester should allow this cruel indignity to be his fate? He did not believe in the Gods, anyway. He’d always said so. He remembered his grand posturing at the university when he had brilliantly debated the absence of any divine beings outside the human imagination. How he wished he could take that back now.

  “Help me now, Lord Vharkash,” he mumbled through a raw throat and cracked lips. “Come to my aid and I shall sing your praises forevermore. I will devote my life to good works and spreading your Holy Name across the world. Or, if you wish it, I shall return home to the Federation and never set foot outside my family home and hearth again. Only come to me, Lord, save me, I beseech you with all my heart.”

  The placid business of the little village went on around him. Children played in the dust with sticks, straws and old bones. Fires were lit and tended. The white-caked, gray-and-black-striped warriors lounged about. He once saw the skinny old devil, Patka Du, walk slowly across the open dusty space between the huts, leaning on a staff, and tried to call out to him, thinking to beg for mercy: but the words stuck in his parched throat.

  Patka Du paid him no more attention than Farhan might have paid a ham in the larder. The headman disappeared into a large hut and did not come out. The dusk was beginning to fall, the shadows lengthening. Perhaps Mamaji would order the Dokra to sally out of the bamboo fort and rescue him: they must know that he was in trouble. But he knew deep in his heart they would not come. They would reckon him dead by now. The time of the parlay was long over. And what would be the point? They would be struck down with a hundred lethal darts before they even made it into the village. He was lost. He was a dead man, still breathing. A tethered beast awaiting the knife.

  As the day yellowed and the shadows grew, he dreaded the coming of night. His blood-filled head felt that it might burst. His wrists and ankles were on fire. The joints of his shoulders and hips ached with the strain. He did not think he could make it through twelve hours of darkness with only the ghost of Sergeant Kishan for company. But the alternative . . . the alternative was worse. Far worse. He wondered if they would kill him before they began to chop parts off his body or would they try to keep him fresh as long as possible. He wondered if he could will himself to death.

  Make an end to it all. Come to me, Lord Vharkash, if only to make my end swift.

  * * *

  • • •

  He must have passed into something of a stupor because when he next came to it was full dark and the village was lit only by the cooking fires outside each hut and long bamboo torches set around the central space. Something was happening. There were loud cries of fear or joy; he couldn’t tell which. People were pouring out of the huts, old men, children, nubile girls, all gathering at the far end of the village. The warriors were in a frenzy, leaping high in the air, shaking their blowpipes. They all seemed to be shouting one word, over and over again: “Raal, Raal, Raaaaaal!”

  He craned his neck to see the far side of the open space, where every member of the tribe was now assembled. And saw a huge gray animal shape step carefully into the torchlight. It was an animal, a tiger, but far bigger than any of the creatures he had ever seen before. Its fur was white, with black and gray stripes, and as it padded into the center of the space he saw that it had a rider, a jolly-looking little man, with wild wisps of gray hair floating around his head. And behind the first tiger, three more similar but smaller animals, also bearing humans: a huge, scowling, black-skinned woman, naked but for a white bandage on her shoulder, a girl, also wounded, her chest bound in bloody linen and, last of all, a beautiful young man, slender as a willow but muscled like an athlete.

  I am dreaming, thought Farhan. I have lost my senses at last. His faculties rebelled and he retreated back into the blackness.

  *
* *

  • • •

  When Farhan awoke next, he was lying in a bed of freshly cut leaves, a blanket covering his naked body. His head was pounding but someone had washed and cleaned his wrists and ankles. He was alone. There was daylight leaking past the edges of the blanket covering the door. He sat up. Beside his bed was a clay jar full of water; he sniffed it and smelled nothing. If it was poisoned, so what? Better dead than hanging by a pole and waiting to be eaten. He took a sip and found he could not stop himself from finishing the whole vessel, down to the last drop.

  The blanket covering the door was hurled back and a tall, white-caked warrior came in, crouching under the low lintel. Farhan found himself cowering back on the bed holding up the blanket for protection. The warrior laughed. He said something to Farhan and it took him a few moments to understand the archaic tongue. The man had said, “Come out when you are ready. We have guests—very special guests.”

  The warrior left and Farhan got very shakily to his feet. He looked about the hut for a weapon but there was nothing but the empty water jar. He left it where it was, wrapped the blanket around his waist like a sarong, and came out into the blinding sunshine.

  When his eyes had adjusted to the glare, the first thing he saw was the young man he had seen the night before in his dream. This time he seemed made of flesh and blood and he was standing with a group of white-caked warriors holding one of the long blowpipes in his hand and obviously discussing its merits as a weapon.