by Paul Kearney
“He cannot keep it up much longer,” Hawkwood said. “I don’t believe he’s had more than an hour’s sleep a night since we left the coast.”
Murad looked less like an officer administering to his men than a ghoul preying on the sick. His lank hair fell in black strings across his face and the flesh had been pared away from nose and cheekbones and temples. His scar now seemed an extravagant curl of tissue, like an extra thin-lipped mouth on the side of his face. Even his fingers were skeletal.
“We have been ashore scarcely a month,” Hawkwood said quietly. “We have buried five shipmates in that time—maybe more back at the fort by now—and the rest of us are close to breaking down. Do you really believe this land can ever be fit for civilized men, Bardolin?”
The mage shut his eyes and turned away. “I’ll tell you after tomorrow.”
T HAT night the dream came to Bardolin again.
But this time it was the woman Kersik who came to him in the night, nude, her skin a flawless bloom of honey. She was incandescently beautiful despite the two rows of nipples that lined her torso from pectoral to navel and the claws which curled at the tips of her fingers. Her eyes blazed like the sun behind leaves.
They made love on the yielding ground beyond the camp. This time Bardolin was atop her, grinding into her firm softness with the vigour of a young man. And all around the straining couple a masque of fantastic figures danced and capered madly, spindle-thin, cackling, with green slits for eyes and hornlike ears. Bardolin could feel their feet, light as leaves, dancing in the hollow of his back as he pushed into the woman below him.
But there was another presence there. He arched his head to see, despite the grip of her hand on the nape of his neck, a tall darkness towering above the frolics.
A shifter in wolf form.
N ONE of them had slept well. Bardolin ached as though someone had been kicking him all night. The company dragged themselves erect, Sergeant Mensurado hauling men to their feet. Kersik looked on like an indulgent parent.
Murad appeared from the trees. He had shaved, the blood on his chin testimony to the effort it had cost him. His straggling hair had been tied back and he had changed into a clean shirt which was nonetheless dotted with mould. He looked almost fresh, despite the sunken glitter of his eyes.
“So we are to see this city of yours today,” he said to Kersik.
The woman seemed amused at some private joke, as she often did. “Why yes, Lord Murad, if your comrades are fit to march.”
“They’re fit. They’re Hebrian soldiers,” Murad drawled, and he turned away from her with such languid contempt that Hawkwood actually found himself admiring him. The woman’s smile took on a fixed quality for a second, and then became pure sunshine again.
They set off after a frugal meal of the inevitable fruit. It was weeks since any of them had tasted meat, and they were becoming nostalgic even at the thought of the ship’s salt pork.
Another day of labour. Though they were tramping a passable road, they still had to take it in turns to carry the two delirious soldiers. Even Murad did his share.
There was more life in the jungle here, if that were possible. Not the squeakings and scurryings of before, but the crash and thump of larger beasts moving off in the vegetation. Kersik appeared oblivious to them, but the company travelled with loaded weapons and drawn swords. They were aware of a subtle change in their surroundings. The trees were smaller, the canopy less dense. Almost the forest here looked like secondary growth, a reclaiming of land once cleared.
To reinforce this opinion they came across the remains of huge stone-built buildings half hidden at the sides of the narrow road. Bardolin wanted to pause and examine them, for they seemed to be liberally dotted with carved writing, but Kersik would not allow it. When he asked her about them she seemed even more reluctant to give out information than she had throughout the journey.
“They are Undwa-Zantu,” she said at last, surrendering to Bardolin’s badgering.
“What does that mean?” the mage asked.
“They are old, from the earlier time, the first peoples.”
With that one sentence she let loose a torrent of questions from both Bardolin and Hawkwood, but would answer none of them.
“You will learn more when we get to the city,” was all she would say.
T HEY had reached the foot of the mountain to the north of their anchorage. They could see it clearly, even through the canopy overhead. It reared up like a grey wall above the jungle, the forest struggling to maintain itself at its knees but gradually thinning and clearing all the same.
“How far do you think we have come?” Bardolin asked Hawkwood.
The mariner shrugged with one shoulder. He had taken bearings as often as he could—Kersik had been inordinately fascinated by the compass—and he’d had both Masudi and big Cortona pacing to check his own count, but in the day-to-day labour it was probable that major inaccuracies had crept in.
“We’re walking almost due north now,” he said. “Since we met the girl, I’d say we’ve come some sixty leagues, but we’ve changed course several times.”
They were far back in the file. Kersik was twenty yards in front, Murad striding beside her like her consort. Bardolin lowered his voice. Her hearing was better than a beast’s.
“She slips past questions like a snake. She knows everything, I’m sure of it—perhaps the whole history of this land, Captain. For it has a history, you can be sure of that. These ruins look as ancient as the crumbling Fimbrian watchtowers you can see up in the Hebros passes, and they are six centuries old and more.”
“Maybe we’ll find answers in this city she keeps talking about, though where it might be I’m sure I don’t know. The way she talks it must be on the slope of this damned mountain; but how could one build a city on slopes so steep?”
“I don’t know. It may be that if there is a city there somewhere we’ll find more answers in it than we bargained for.”
The file halted. Murad called for them at its head and the wizard and the mariner hurried past the line of soldiers.
The way was blocked by a trio of figures so fantastic that even Murad had momentarily lost his poise.
Two were inhumanly tall, eight feet perhaps. They were black-skinned, a black so dark that it made Masudi’s skin appear yellowish. Their limbs were bare and they wore simple loincloths, but where their heads should have been were incredible masks. One was of a leopard-like creature, only heavier and more muscular. The other had the head of a great mandrill, with bright blue patches of ridged flesh on either side of the flaring nose.
But the masks were not masks. The leopard-head licked its teeth and the eyes moved. The mandrill sniffed the air, its nostrils quivering. In their human hands, the two creatures carried bronze-bladed spears twice the height of a man, wickedly barbed.
The third figure was tiny by comparison, shorter even than Hawkwood. He seemed entirely human and his skin, though deeply tanned, was as pale as a Ramusian’s. He wore a shapeless bag of supple hide for a hat, and white linen robes which concealed his entire body except for small, broad-fingered hands. His face was pouchy and bejowled, eyes bright and black shining out of puffy sockets. Were it not for the strange garments, he might have passed for a well-to-do merchant of Abrusio with too many rich meals and too much good wine under his belt. His only ornament was a pendant of gold in the shape of a five-pointed star which enclosed a circle. It hung from his wattled neck on a gold chain whose links were as thick as a child’s finger.
“Gosa,” Kersik said, and she bowed. “I have brought the Oldworlders.”
The leopard head growled deeply.
“Well done,” the man in the linen robes said. “I thought I’d provide you with an escort into Undi. And my curiosity was consuming me. It’s been a long time.” His glance strayed to the members of the company who stood silent behind Kersik, even Murad at a loss for words.
“Greetings, brother,” Gosa said to Bardolin.
The mage
blinked, but did not reply. His imp uttered a single little yelp which sounded almost interrogative. The leopard head growled again.
Murad stepped forward, clearly angered by being left out of the exchanges. Immediately mandrill head levelled the spear until it touched his chest, stalling him.
A series of clicks. Sergeant Mensurado, Cortona and the other soldiers had their arquebuses in the shoulder, the wheel-locks cocked back, the muzzles pointed squarely at the exotic trio in the middle of the track. Powder-smoke eddied about the company. Gosa sniffed at it, and smiled to show yellow teeth, canines from which the gums had retreated.
“Ah, the very essence of the Old World,” he said, not at all put out by the weapons pointed at his ample belly. “Put up your weapons, gentlemen; you will not need them here. Ilkwa—for shame—can’t you see the man is merely trying to introduce himself?”
The tall spear swung back to the vertical. Murad nodded at Mensurado and the arquebuses were uncocked, though the men kept their slow-match lit.
“Murad of Galiapeno at your service,” the nobleman said wryly.
“Gosa of Undi at yours,” the plump, berobed man said, bowing slightly. “Will you follow me into our humble city, Lord Murad? There are refreshments waiting, and those who wish to can bathe.”
Murad bowed in his turn. Gosa, Kersik and the two outlandish beast-men led off. The company fell in behind them, still hauling the two litters with the fever-ridden soldiers.
The world changed in a twinkling.
The jungle disappeared. One moment they were walking under the shadowed shelter of the forest, and the next it had vanished. Uninterrupted sunshine blinded them. The borderline between the riotous vegetation and barren emptiness was as clear-cut as if a giant razor had shaved the mountainside clean of all living things.
Now they could see the true size of the peak which soared above them. Its head was lost in cloud, and though from a distance it had seemed perfectly symmetrical, closer up they could decipher broken places in its cone, ragged tears in the flanks of stone, petrified waterfalls where long-cold lava had once gushed forth. The place was a wilderness, a desert leached of colour, defined only in greys and blacks. There were dunes of what looked like ebony sand, weird bubbles of basalt, outwellings and holes and the stumps of solidified geysers. A landscape, Bardolin thought, like that which he had glimpsed through Saffarac’s viewing device long ago. Lunar, dead, otherworldly.
The going was harder, and the men puffed and panted as they laboured up the steep slopes. There was still a road of sorts here, a crude pavement of tufa blocks. Cairns marked its twistings and turnings as it zigzagged up the face of the mountain. The men gasped in the withering heat, choking on volcanic dust, their faces becoming black with what looked like soot and tasted like ash. It dried out their mouths and gritted between tongue and teeth.
“I see no city,” Murad rasped to Kersik and Gosa. “Where are you taking us?”
“There is a city, trust me.” Gosa beamed at him, a benevolent gnome with obsidian shards for eyes. “Undi is not so easily chanced across unless one is led there by one of its inhabitants. And this is Undabane whose knees we clamber across. The Sacred Mountain, heart of fire whose rages have been tamed.” He stopped. “Have patience, Lord Murad. It is not much farther.”
The company became strung out despite all that Murad and Mensurado could do. It was a line of antlike figures struggling up the monstrous mountainside, the soldiers pausing to catch their breaths, the litter-bearers changing every hundred yards. So it was Hawkwood and Bardolin, at the front, who saw it first.
A cleft in the mountain’s conical top, a huge rent in its perfect shape. The summit was still some six or seven thousand feet above, but here they were working slowly around its western face, and the cleft was invisible from the northern approach. A glimpse of dark walls within shooting to incredible heights, and something else.
At the base of the cleft was a monumental statue weathered almost into shapelessness by the elements. It was perhaps a hundred and twenty feet high, and vaguely humanoid. A stump of a spear in one crumbling fist. Deep eyes visible in a face which had a snout for a nose. The impression of a powerful torso. The thing had been built out of tufa blocks bigger than the carrack’s longboat and they were eroding at their joints so that it seemed to have a grid imposed upon it.
The rest of the party caught up as Gosa, Kersik and the two beast-men paused. There was only one litter.
“Forza died,” Murad said to the questioning looks. “We don’t know when—no one noticed. We built a cairn over him.” He seemed angry with himself, as though it were his fault. “God curse this pestilent country.”
Gosa pursed his lips disapprovingly, but did not comment. The company moved on again, the soldiers sullen and silent, even Mensurado cast down. The sick man’s death seemed like an omen.
Rocks clattered under their feet, and their sodden boots were full of ash, blistering their heels and toes. They were down to their last swirl of water in the canteens, and Murad would let no one finish it.
Into the shade of the massive statue, their heads hardly reaching to its ankles.
The world contracted. They were trudging through a narrow place whose walls soared up hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet on either side, a snake-thin gap in the wall of the mountain through which the wind whistled and hissed like a live thing. Water dripped down in glittering fringes from the gorge sides, and the men stood under the drips with their tongues out, begging. Flat, iron-tasting water full of grit, it nonetheless enabled their tongues to move about inside their mouths again.
The world opened once more, or rather exploded upon them. Like the change from jungle to ashen desert on the slopes of the mountain, the transition was abrupt and astonishing.
They found themselves on a shelf of rock, maybe a thousand feet up inside the mountain. Undabane was hollow, a vaster version of the crater which Murad had named the Spinero. They could look up and see the walls of the mountain rearing on all sides, sheer as cliffs, unscalable. The blue unclouded sky was a semicircle of pure colour above the rock.
And below there was a disc of brilliant jungle, as though someone had lifted it whole, a small, flat world of it, and placed it inside Undabane after knocking the summit off the hollow mountain. The view stupefied them. There was a dark curve across the crater floor, the shadow of the mountain’s lip dragging in the wake of the sun. Looking at it, Bardolin understood in an instant the phases of the moon.
There were buildings down there amid the trees: pylons of black basalt monumental in size but dwarfed to insignificance by their setting, flat-roofed houses built entirely of stone, a stepped pyramid as tall as Carcasson’s spires, the step faces painfully bright with gold. Avenues and roads. A city, indeed. A place utterly alien to anything they had seen before or imagined. It took speech out of their parched mouths and left them gaping. Even Murad could find nothing to say.
“Behold Undi,” Gosa said with quiet satisfaction. “The Hidden City of the Zantu and the Arueyn, the Heart of Fire, the Ancient Place. Worth a trek, is it not?”
“Who built this?” Bardolin asked at last. “Who are these people you name?”
“All questions will be answered in the end. For now, we have but a little descent and then you will be able to rest. Word of your coming has gone ahead of you. There is food and drink waiting, and succour for the sick amongst you.”
“Take us down there, then,” Murad said with brutal directness. “I’ll have no more of my men die in this hellhole because you stand there preening yourself.”
Gosa’s eyes flared with an odd light, though his face did not change. He inclined his head slightly and led the party onwards, down a track which had been hewn out of the side of the mountain. Kersik shot the nobleman a look of pure venom, however.
They stumbled and stared and cursed their way down to the floor of the crater, which by this time was nearly all in shadow. There were dark clouds gathering in the circle of sky thousands of feet abov
e them, the beginning of the daily downpour. They found themselves walking along a wide, well-paved road which had rain gutters on either side. It was a street of sorts, for there were more of the flat-roofed buildings set back from it amid the trees. As they hobbled deeper into the heart of the city the trees grew sparser and the buildings closer together. And there were people here.
They were tall, lean and black and were dressed in a white linen-like cloth. They were delicately featured, with sharply chiselled noses and thin lips. The women were as tall and stately as queens, their breasts bare, gold pendants ornamenting them. Many had their bodies decorated with some form of intricate ritual scarring which swirled in circles and currents around their torsos and on their cheeks. They regarded the company with interest, and many pointed especially at Masudi, who was like them and yet not like them. But they were restrained, dignified. The company passed through what could only be a market place, with stalls of fruit and meat set out, but there was little hubbub. The people there halted to stare at the ragged soldiers of Hebrion, and then went on about their business. To Hawkwood, who knew the crazed, chaotic bazaars of Ridawan and Calmar, the orderliness was unnerving. And there were no children anywhere to be seen. Neither were there any animals, not even a stray dog or lounging cat—if they had such things in this country.
The pyramid towered above the rest of the buildings, its gold dulled now as the sun was hidden and the afternoon rain began to tumble down inside the mountain. Gosa and his inhuman companions led the company to a tall, square house off the market place and thumped upon a hardwood door. It was opened by a tall old man whose hair was as white as his face was black.
“I have brought them, Faku,” Gosa said. “See they are well cared for.”
The old man bowed deeply, as inscrutable as a Merduk grand vizier, and the company trooped into the house.
“Rest, eat, bathe. Do whatever you wish, but do not leave the building,” Gosa told them cheerfully. “I will be back this evening, and tomorrow . . . tomorrow we will see about answering some of those questions you have been harbouring for so long.”