Hero Grown

by Andy Livingstone

  He was no more than ten yards away from the corner when he saw a rider emerge, his horse dancing sideways skittishly, still infected with the hysteria of the crowd. All the man had to do was look to his left and their eyes would meet, but his attention was caught by the waiting horse and he turned to shout over his right shoulder in excitement, forcing his own beast towards the temple at a run. More followed as Brann flattened himself against the wall, head back and sucking at the hot air for breath.

  ‘I still live,’ he whispered.

  He remembered that he was expected elsewhere. The lane angled away from the temple, taking him quickly out of sight, and he ran with eyes scanning for a route back to the right, towards the temple. Within a dozen steps, a narrow street opened and he thanked the ancient city designers for their practical approach. The lane ran straight and he sprinted with renewed strength, bursting from its end a short distance from the front of the stables. Gerens was waiting in the doorway and he ran to grab Brann and hustle him inside.

  They crowded him, slapping his back and shaking him in delight. Sophaya planted a kiss on his cheek and Hakon ruffled his hair, while Cannick stood watching, a broad grin splitting his face. Brann tolerated them but frowned. These were strange people.

  ‘We are not safe yet,’ he pointed out.

  ‘The boy is right.’ Grakk was the only one who had not joined the celebrations, and he stood by the wall, the large crystal in hand, where the beam of light had crept across to almost fill the indentation he had found earlier.

  He placed the crystal against the rock, turning it until it abruptly slid to fit precisely into the niche. So snugly did it fit that he was able to take his hand away and leave it unblocked from the light by fingers.

  The light almost covered it, but nothing happened. Grakk stood impassively, staring at it as Hakon came to stand at his shoulder. ‘Should we be doing something to help this portal open?’

  ‘All we should do is wait.’ The tribesman’s voice was calm, but the tension of his companions was plain.

  Cannick tried to be encouraging. ‘And hope that camel shit does its trick and leads those bastards to the marks in the temple wall and lets them think we are already away. With some fortune they will spend time trying to work out how to open the gateway they think we went through before they start looking in other buildings.’

  Gerens drew his sword and strode to look from the doorway. ‘Then we should make ready to fight in case they don’t.’

  ‘It would be more helpful to ready the camels.’ There was an excitement in Grakk’s tone that none had heard before, and it stopped their conversation dead. Gerens sheathed his sword and all eyes turned to the crystal.

  The light crept to cover the crystal and a flash of brightness drew gasps as it glowed with a brilliance that was startling. It seemed to fill the aperture and curiosity drew Brann closer, crouching to look up at it. Where Grakk had previously inserted his fingers, the crystal seemed to angle the light, the cut of it focusing the beam and turning it vertically. Just at the edge of his hearing, he thought he heard a faint click and he squinted his eyes, but was unable to see through the crystal other than to tell that it lit some sort of shaft about the width of his closed hand.

  ‘Above, maybe twice the height of this building, there is another stone like this, but set within the rock,’ Grakk said quietly. ‘It turns the beam of light again to follow the channel straight into the cliff. No one knows how they cut such channels and inserted the crystal at all, let alone so precisely, nor is there any record of the means by which the light achieves what it does.’

  ‘And just what does it achieve?’ Marlo was anxious, and with good reason. Shouts could be heard back at the temple. Whatever the intruders believed had happened, it seemed unlikely they would leave without searching the surrounding area.

  Grakk smiled, and walked ten strides along the wall. ‘This.’ He placed one hand against the rock face and pressed gently. With barely a sound, a section of the cliff opened in on itself, revealing a tunnel large enough to take a well-laden cart and lit softly by what they could only imagine were further channels cut subtly into the cliff.

  They needed no further invitation. Grakk retrieved his crystal and the camels were led into the passage with alacrity. Once all had passed, Brann cast about the stables for any sign of their presence, and his eye fell on the part of the wall that Grakk had pressed. Six dimples in the stone formed a triangle – the same triangle that Marlo had drawn in the dirt at Cassian’s school.

  ‘The Balance of Six.’

  Grakk smiled. ‘Those who taught it to those who enlightened Cassian did not invent it. He benefited from an older wisdom. Much older.’

  Cannick appeared beside them. ‘Young Marlo did well by us, keeping the animals calm until he had to go shoot arrows for you. Then he soothed them on his return. He has a way with beasts, that one.’ He grinned at Brann. ‘Maybe that’s why he likes you.’ He glanced around. ‘No dung here to lead them. Come on, lad, let’s go.’

  He took Brann by the arm and they stepped into the tunnel. He watched with interest as Grakk swung the massive rock doorway, the slab as thick as a man’s outstretched arms and half as much again, as easily as if it were made from paper.

  ‘What sorcery is this?’ Hakon breathed.

  ‘No sorcery,’ Grakk smiled. ‘Engineering beyond compare, my boy. The product of clever minds and precise construction.’ The door whispered shut and settled into place with a soft click, the fit as seamless as the set of the stonework throughout the marvellous city. ‘And so we are gone. I suspect, young Brann, with this portal, your subterfuge and the violence, we may well have contributed greatly to the myths of this being a haunted city.’

  Brann stood near to the closed door, but such was its thickness that no sound could penetrate it. He would never know if the men who had chased them had ever entered the stables or not. He turned and walked away. It mattered not.

  They followed the tunnel in silence but for the occasional snort of a camel. The animals’ feet padded on the smooth rock with virtually no noise, and likewise those of the humans, who wore the boots of the desert travellers: hardened leather soles and uppers of a soft fabric that let through what air there was and wrapped around their feet, bound with straps for security, and slouched about their ankles. The unusually cool temperature and gentle light joined with the silence to bring a surreal atmosphere, as if no other world existed. The quiet, in particular, Brann found comfortable. What was there to say? What was done was gone; what would be was unknown; all they could do was be ready.

  The apertures admitting the light became close, directly piercing the ceiling of the tunnel a man’s height again above them. They must have cleared the cliffs and either the tunnel had risen imperceptibly or the ground level had dropped. The thickness of the rock above increased again, suddenly this time, so it seemed that the surface was what varied. Still, though, step after step, the rock was as dark as ever and the tunnel ran as straight as a spear, with no branches, no junctions, no deviation. One destination alone seemed to have been in mind for the builders.

  Hakon broke the silence. The nature of the builders appeared to be concerning him also.

  ‘Dwarves.’ Several quizzical glances turned his way. ‘This was undoubtedly dwarven-built. It is clear.’

  Cannick laughed. ‘Next you’ll be deciding this was a lair for dragons.’

  Hakon shrugged. ‘Why not?’ He looked at the others defiantly. ‘What? The stories have to come from somewhere, don’t they?’

  ‘Most likely from the mead you Northerners drink, eh?’

  Hakon stared ahead, a glower settling over his broad face, and they walked in silence.

  ‘I still think it was dwarves,’ he rumbled. A loose piece of rock lay on the floor and he kicked it against a wall. ‘And a dragon.’

  The roof opened to the sky and the tunnel became a man-made crevice, boring straight through the relentless black jagged landscape. The endless blue depth of the h
eavens, so familiar for so long, seemed a novelty and the heat struck them as if the air had become thick as soup. It was only a short stretch, though; before long the ground level rose again like a god’s sculpture of a swelling wave and their passage bored relentlessly once more into the rock.

  When the roof disappeared again, the sides dropped until they were only knee-height above the passage floor. They effectively walked along a road in a plain of spiked rock scattered, to their surprise, with flowering shrubs and trees. What held their attention, however, was directly ahead where the road arrowed at a conical mountain that rose, like a crowd of others in every direction, from a landscape that seemed itself alive, great plumes of breath bursting from the ground in myriad spots.

  They stopped, unnerved at the sight. The effect of such alien terrain was overwhelming and Brann felt disorientated enough to steady himself against his camel’s neck.

  Grakk smiled.

  ‘Our destination.’

  The road stretched what looked a mile to the foot of the mountain, and they climbed upon their camels to finish the journey, pulling their hoods up as shade from the sun.

  Marlo looked across. ‘Why did we not ride them in the tunnel? It was high enough.’

  Cannick frowned. ‘I don’t know.’

  Hakon looked equally mystified. ‘It just didn’t feel right.’

  ‘Yes.’ Cannick mused on it. ‘It didn’t feel right.’

  ‘People,’ Grakk said, ‘stick to the familiar, the normal. Have you ever ridden underground? Or only with space around you?’

  Brann shrugged. ‘I once rode a wolf underground. But only to cut its throat without it biting me.’ He looked at them. ‘It was in the pit,’ he offered helpfully.

  ‘I’d never have guessed,’ Sophaya said drily.

  ‘The camels,’ Grakk said, ‘are used to the expanse of the desert. They are uncomfortable underground and in these enclosed passages and only their training maintains their co-operation as it is. If we lead them, their attention is on us. Were we to be on their backs, there is less reassurance for them and more chance of injury to us should they succumb to panic.’

  In that case, it was good that Grakk had enlightened her. Brann settled into his saddle, satisfied, feeling that he was at last fitting in with the strange conversations these people enjoyed.

  He turned his attention to the road ahead, the mountain rising higher and drawing closer with each languid stride of the camels. The road ran straight towards its base, and Brann looked in vain for a pathway that would take them up its side. Perhaps they were yet too distant for it to be visible. After all, a path formed of the very black rock it was cut from would not stand out particularly clearly.

  On their approach, however, his puzzlement grew. There was no path. The sides of the mountain rose in towering, dizzying, belittling majesty of vastness, unaltered by the hand of man. The road ran its final stretch, the length of two mighty bowshots, across a wide bridge as the ground dropped into a deep chasm, a bridge crafted as strongly as all else they had seen this side of the desert, and held by cleverly angled supports. Cleverly angled because their design enabled them to be slender in construction. Slender enough, he mused, to be easily shattered by defenders.

  The road ended in a wide circular area, as if for carts to turn or travellers to stop for an ascent, but there was clearly no path: to the naked eye, it was nothing more than a terminus at the base of a mountain, and an inhospitable mountain at that. His thoughts drifted back to the other extreme of this pathway, and the way by which they had passed onto it. There would be balance were a doorway of rock at one end to be mirrored by one at the other. He peered at the bald man, Grakk, looking for him to fetch another crystal from his pack.

  No such key was necessary. As they reached the end of the path, a section of the rock face swung inwards as silently and smoothly as they had witnessed back in the stables. The hand that had moved it and, indeed, the person attached to that hand was not revealed to them. Still, entry was preferable to scaling a peak whose surface looked as if it would tear the skin from them before they had climbed the height of themselves, so he gladly rode in among his companions. A tunnel stretched before them. Was the city on the far side of this mountain?

  This time they were already upon their mounts when in the tunnel, and this time they remained upon them. The tunnel was identical to the one they had travelled already except that, after a while, there must have been too much rock between them and the sunlight even for builders of such inconceivable abilities, and torches burnt to light the way. There was another difference: a slope. They climbed as they rode, the camels pacing with steady quiet.

  Movement caught Brann’s eye, and he stared at Grakk. In the pits, he had become accustomed to noticing voices of the body, involuntary and often unconscious movements that betrayed a thought or an attitude. More than a few times it had saved his life, or at least enabled him to serve up death sooner than he might otherwise have done. The tribesman hid it well, but he was agitated. Whether it was positive or negative was impossible to tell, but there was definitely a tension about him. There was another feeling, too. He could not say how he knew, but know he did that they were being watched, over every inch of their progress.

  The passage lasted a fraction of the distance of the last tunnel, its end heralded by natural light that grew quickly in brightness as they rode closer. Surely they had not passed through an entire mountain in that space of time? Perhaps they had angled unnoticed and cut across a side of it. But without doubt they had climbed, and the terrain around the mountain had not looked to be of varying level. Certainly not to this extent. Something strange was afoot here.

  The truth was revealed as they emerged from the tunnel, the great door here lying wide in a lack of concern. And the truth stunned each of them with as much unexpected wonder as they had experienced at the feet of the great stone gods.

  They were at the side of a great circular area, a valley encased in steep walls of stone, the very heart of the mountain open as though a god had sliced off the top and scooped out the insides. The floor was carpeted in life, not only trees and shrubbery, but crops of uncountable variety and livestock quietly grazing. Streams and pools caught the sun in myriad sparkles. The doorway where they stood in mute astonishment opened onto a broad platform cut from the mountain, around a quarter of the way up from the valley floor. Brann moved to the foremost edge, drawn to absorb as much of the scene as his eyes could find. After a journey of sand and rock where not a seed grew, this was a vision that would match the description of heaven in any religion.

  His hungry gaze swept to the valley sides, the walls of the hitherto ubiquitous dark rock. But not all was black here. Brilliant in their contrast, buildings of pale stone had been built into the sides that started with a gentle slope but quickly angled to a much steeper incline: a city of soft curves and simple beauty that climbed towards the summit, black roads hewn from nature winding their way between stacked dwellings like ribbons draped about boxes of secret treasures. It was a place of tranquillity, of infusing peace, of contentment. For the first time that he could remember, he felt relaxed, free from danger, in no need to seek a threat. A calm flowed through him. How could anyone ever want to leave this place?

  He looked at Grakk. ‘How could you leave this place?’

  The man said nothing, but his eyebrows rose.

  Brann pointed out over the valley wherever he saw movement. ‘There. There. There. Everywhere.’ His finger stabbed at people, some closer than others, but all, young or old, men or women, dressed simply. And all of shaven head. And all of those close enough to reveal it had pates swathed in tattoos of intricate designs. ‘Your people.’ He stared at the man. ‘Why would you wish to leave this place?’

  Grakk’s expression was unwavering. ‘Perhaps I did not wish it.’

  ‘They do not know?’ Every member of the group started at the voice – soft, deep and seeming to come from the mountain itself. ‘You have not told them?’
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br />   A man, taller than Grakk, more portly and a score or more years further advanced in age, stepped from the rock. Two dozen more appeared around them, unarmoured but each bearing a pair of curved swords in the same manner as favoured by Grakk. The bare steel caught the light as the weapons were held casually, but Brann’s assessing gaze knew from the first instant that it was an ease born of innate confidence, a surety that only comes from intense training and revealing testing. Grakk’s fingers stilled the boy’s hand before his sword had cleared more than an inch from its scabbard, and he nodded upwards at a ring of archers, arrows nocked to short powerful bows, and every one with a clear shot at the group. Brann slid the sword back home. He had known of them already; it was his own movement he had been unaware of.

  Grakk knelt, head bowed, and the others awkwardly followed suit. If he who had led them to this wondrous place deemed that action suitable, then it was suitable.

  ‘I have not, Father.’ Hakon caught Brann’s eye with a grin at the discomfort in the tone of their normally imperturbable companion. ‘Beyond the walls of my home, my past is my own.’ He rose and the others did so with him, but his head remained bowed.

  The older man’s voice was still soft. ‘Within this place, however, your past belongs to all of us. You did not return when you could have, Guarak-ul-Karluan. Your time has passed.’

  Grakk’s hand rubbed his neck where a slave’s collar would sit. ‘I was otherwise engaged. Our choices are not always our own to make.’

  ‘In truth, they are seldom so. Yet now you do indeed return,’ he looked around the group, ‘and you bring outsiders with you.’

  Grakk glanced at Brann. ‘I only guided our path. We all brought one.’