by Mark Bowsher
As night wrapped itself around the land he was glad of the cooling air. The coolness fought the heat rising from the rocks that had been baked by the sun all day as he completed his descent, but soon the heat died away altogether and Krish found he was freezing and thirsty.
He stumbled on, terrified of falling into one of the ravines he hadn’t observed from on top of the mountain. But the night was far from entirely dark. The sun had vanished to reveal a dome of shining stars twinkling in the night sky. And where the land around him was mostly flat, ‘dome’ really was the right word. He had never seen stars so vivid. He was so used to looking up to see them that he’d never thought of them being in front of him or behind him and on either side. Everywhere he looked there were pinpricks of starlight glistening in the dark to show him the way forward. Moonlight joined the sea of illumination overhead. This moon too was bigger than his own world’s, scratched and scarred and dotted with craters. But that was not all. Four more moons circled the mother moon; tiny and beautiful they danced around their parent as they journeyed towards dawn. The night had never seemed so bright and he felt at last that he could achieve what he set out to do. He would find the Myrthali. He would return home. He would see his Mum smile properly again.
There was firelight in the distance and the smell of strange food. Smoked meat and a musky, almost spicy aroma.
A few more hours of treading carefully in the relative darkness, his dry tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, and the gigantic sun had risen again after the short night to warm his tired frame. The glistening black palace ahead of him was playing tricks with his mind once more. It appeared to be shimmering in the heat but nothing else around it was moving. His brain seemed dedicated to convincing him that he was heading towards a living, breathing structure.
Krish came to a slight groove in the ground. Water flowed with a delicate, burbling sound through veins in the rock. Excitement took him over and he fell to his knees and slurped greedily at the water. The refreshment it provided was an indescribable ecstasy to his dry lips and parched throat.
Then he became aware of sounds. The scratching of wood scraping against rock. Shapes appeared. Tumbleweed-like objects rolled towards him. But these tumbleweeds were as big as cars. Collections of dusty-white, wiry branches. He backed away in fear. Although they showed no signs of life as the wind appeared to hurl them in his direction, it felt as if they were fighting. Brittle branches cracked and dropped to the ground again and again as the tumbleweeds rammed into one another. One reached the groove first. The mighty tumbleweed stopped exactly where it was the second it made contact with the water, which it instantly began to soak up. Within moments the water had vanished from the groove.
In minutes the gigantic tumbleweed creaked into the shape of a lean, silvery tree, luminous in this barren world. As he watched, hundreds of purple flowers blossomed all over the tree, grew dry, shrivelled, detached and flew off with the breeze. The tree creaked back into a ball and rolled off into the distance with its companions. Krish shook his head unbelievingly.
His shadow and those of the wire-like white branches of the dead-looking trees (all firmly planted in the ground and looking unlikely to roll off anywhere) stretched across the ground in front of him. There were a few small tents dotted about on the outskirts of the settlement. There were pens – pale branches tightly tied together with dried vines – holding animals that were both strange and familiar. Some looked like sheep but their legs were much shorter, their bodies longer and their wool short and matted. They really weren’t that much like sheep at all but his mind seemed to want to call them ‘sheep’. The same for the ‘cows’, which were darker and leaner than the cows he knew, as if someone had stretched them.
He heard the heavy rustle of canvas to his right. He saw a man emerge groggily from one of the tents and walk over to a series of shallow trenches cut in perfectly straight lines across the land. The man wore simple, practical clothes, sandy-coloured, just like everything else. He paid no attention to Krish. He supposed this man had no reason to think anything of him. His clothes might be different but now they were so caked in dust he would probably look just like everyone else.
Krish then realised that there was a woman at the far end of another trench already at work. There were several more women working silently beside the shallow trenches as well. Then he noticed that they all seemed to have lanterns of some kind (all extinguished now) on the ground next to them. They looked tired but in a different way to the man he’d just seen come out of the tent. As if they were winding down. He guessed that maybe, with the days being so short, some people simply worked all night.
The man Krish had been observing stopped at the end of one of the trenches, pulled a trowel-like implement from the ground, where it had been partially embedded, sat down, his feet in the trench, and started digging, quite clumsily. He pulled out a knobbly purple root vegetable, dropped it by his side and kept digging. Once he’d found a couple more he rolled out a small rectangle of canvas, produced a knife, peeled the purple knobbly thing, chucked the peelings away from the trench and within minutes he had three pale indigo vegetable sticks lined up on the canvas. He bashed his left hand against his trousers to get the dirt off it and proceeded to munch down the little stick of root vegetable.
‘Malka! Babu!’ the man barked through a mouthful of vegetable in the vague direction of his tent.
Panic spread through Krish’s mind; he would have no idea what anybody was saying. How would he understand the language of the people here? The thought vanished seconds later and was hastily replaced with curiosity.
‘Malka! Babu! Come here! Breakfast!’
He understood. He understood exactly what the man had just said. Malka and Babu were clearly names and their owners were just emerging from their tent. A woman and a small child, similarly attired to the man. They sat beside him and ate their vegetables. A few words were exchanged, a little bit of You sleep well? and Plenty to harvest today, plenty, and when they had finished eating, which took a minute more, maybe less, they spread out along the trench, got on their knees and started digging without another word. The child must have been only four or five but he worked as hard as his parents.
Krish watched for roughly half an hour, fascinated by this curious new land and its people. He saw them dig up only three or four vegetables between the three of them. The three the man had dug up must be part of some stash left over from the previous day for him and his family to eat.
Others now joined them while those with lanterns had mainly gone to sleep in their own tents. The night workers had wisely pitched their tents in the shade of some of the bigger trees to stay out of the daylight as much as possible although the wiry trees hardly sheltered them from the glare of the sun.
Krish looked back at the interior of Malka, Babu and the man’s tent. It was no bigger than the one-man tent he’d used during his brief spell in the Scouts last year. A hammock hung quite low in the tent and there was a small space underneath with a blanket and pillow in one corner and tools, water bottles and few packages spread out across the rest of the floor. He imagined the tired child sleeping under the blanket in the corner with hardly any space to breathe between the tools and packages scattered about him while his parents slept above. He decided never to complain about having a smaller bedroom than his sister Joshi ever again.
Krish looked on to the town in the distance and saw a whirl of dust and heard the sounds of chaos. If he was going to complete his mission (and not die of hunger and tiredness in the process) he’d better get a move on, he thought.
The settlement was a flurry of activity. As the sun climbed higher in the sky there was a human traffic jam in the street. Men, women and children in their torn old clothes, battered by the desert winds, hurried from one place to another, battling to get past other people selling all manner of goods from bags at their sides.
‘Take this one!’
‘Good craftsmanship!’
‘The King himself
uses these to sharpen his knives!’
How could he understand all of this? The devil must have done something to allow him to make sense of everything that was being said. Occasionally words didn’t seem to translate and he’d just hear some word he didn’t know, but often an object or animals or whatever that looked very similar to something from his own world would go by the same name even though it wasn’t quite accurate.
Most of the townspeople were preoccupied with the market under the khaki canopies in the centre of the town, where even more sellers tried to convince them to part with money for strange beasts or unusual fruit. Some goaded their beasts into a fury with sticks and rocks to demonstrate the strength of the creature for sale. Others were selling dead animals for meat, smoking the flesh and offering samples to prospective customers. Some offered hot fruit they had boiling in aromatic concoctions bubbling away in vast cauldrons over open fires. He saw one old man sitting on a box holding a magnifying glass over a square of wood no bigger than a coaster, using the sunlight to burn a remarkably detailed image of the palace onto the wood.
Krish tried some dried meat on a stick, which tasted to him like burnt chicken with a sweet aftertaste, like a salty version of maple syrup. This barely sated his hunger but gave him the strength to persist. He was sure he must look unusual to the people of this world but none stared too long; as if they were used to strange faces cropping up in their town every so often.
He headed on towards the black palace but struggled to get past a large crowd at the edge of the market who were watching what appeared to be magicians performing on wooden boxes. Some conjured up beasts which ran around the circle of people surrounding them to a chorus of impressed noises. Others seemed to be predicting the future, which was met with a mixture of shrieks and applause. He could barely breathe as he squeezed his way through the sweaty crowd.
He saw a smaller circle not far from the exit to the street and made his way towards it. A very young magician stood on a particularly small box. She must have only been a few years older than him. Her creased robe was of midnight blue and she wore a pointy hat like a wizard. Well, it would have been pointy if it hadn’t been bent just above the brim, the peak drooping down at the side. She had a staff made of particularly knobbly wood. Her dark hair was braided and dotted with coloured beads. Her long necklace and leather bracelets were similarly beaded.
‘And now, ladies and gents!’ said the magician. ‘Prepare to be amazed as I turn this rabbit–’ (it wasn’t actually a rabbit but it was so close to one in appearance that Krish’s mind translated it as ‘rabbit’) ‘–into an ’at!’
A hat did indeed appear. A very small one. But the crowd didn’t really get to see it as it was so small that the rabbit (which was very much still there and not a hat) had a very good view and decided that the hat looked like a rather delicious snack. Before the meagre collection of people around the magician could focus on the tiny item of headgear it was gone. The rabbit looked up at the magician.
‘Oh no, yer don’t!’ the magician replied to the hopeful-looking bunny. ‘Yer’ve ’ad enough ’at today!’
The crowd didn’t look impressed and half of them left. The magician looked momentarily disappointed and then promised that her next trick – turning the rabbit into a qualified tax advisor – would be far more exciting. It wasn’t. The rabbit appeared particularly disillusioned by the not-so-tasty-looking miniature abacus that had just appeared next to him. The only real advantage for Krish was that it gave him a moment to slip away quietly while the magician was distracted.
Krish reached the edge of the town and saw the palace now looming directly in front of him. Something about it sent shivers down his spine (and he apparently sent shivers down its spine, as the whole structure before him seemed to shake slightly). A line of guards dressed in black armour, blending into the palace somewhat, was stretched out in front of the great structure. All held long pikes, one hand on their sheathed swords. There were gaps in the ranks but the pikes were long enough to stop any unwanted visitor getting through.
He ground to a halt. It all struck him at once. That feeling he’d tried to stifle on the mountain. What was he doing? Why was he here? How could this all be real? He’d not really taken it all in. He’d got dressed that morning, awash with tiredness, scarcely a bone in his body that was fully awake and not a corner of his brain that was totally aware of what he was actually doing. And now here he was. Wherever ‘here’ was.
Krish felt lost, alone and scared. He had wandered as if in a daydream for so long – hunger and exhaustion just about driving him on – that he had forgotten that he had absolutely no idea how far away from home he really was.
He remembered driving to see Aunt Nisha in Glasgow and how it had taken two days. And when they had flown to America they had changed planes in Houston, Texas. Uncle Ravi had said that the state of Texas was bigger than the whole of Britain and there were forty-nine other states. How could the world be that big? And there were bigger planets than Earth in the Solar System, much bigger, and there were billions of planets and stars, and at this point Krish stopped trying to comprehend how big all existence was and how far away from home he was when he didn’t even know where he was right now.
Krish was frozen to the spot, dust from the heels of the townspeople passing him by gradually coating his clothes, without any comprehension of what he should do or feel. He looked about at the streets full of strange faces and strange clothes. The devil had said he needed to find a group of thieves or similar and work with them, but now he was here he didn’t feel he could approach a single one of them. What would he do? What would he say? How would he convince them to leave him the Myrthali? The devil had said no bargains. The King must have riches they’d want, surely. All he knew was that he felt like he was losing time he could be spending with his Mum, although he knew he’d lose no time and return at the moment he’d left. But he couldn’t help but feel the urgency of his situation. He had to get back. He had to bring her more time.
After some indeterminate length of time, all his thoughts of cunning, of ingenious plans to steal the Myrthali, evaporated. He decided he was only capable of one course of action. He would blag his way into the palace, demand an audience with the King and beg for a quantity of the Myrthali. Maybe just convince them to let him look at it. All he had to do was touch a single grain and all the Myrthali in this world would be transported back with him.
That was the problem with being a quiet, well-spoken kid who people just don’t notice most of the time; there were times when you had no confidence at all and times when you would gather all that unused confidence together and blunder recklessly into some pretty insane situation without any real plan. Krish was also very hungry and had thought that maybe he could touch the Myrthali pretty soon, be sent back to his own world and run to the shop and get a chocolate bar.
Have some faith in yourself, for God’s sake!
With his Mum’s words echoing in his head, Krish turned and marched in the direction of the palace. He crossed a large wooden bridge over a deep trench which wound around the palace, appearing to be a dried-up riverbed. As he looked up at the shimmering black palace he felt as if a thousand eyes were watching him approach. And, as he soon found out, he wasn’t wrong.
CHAPTER 8
THE BREATHING PALACE
‘I demand to see the King!’ Krish could sound impressively arrogant when he was hungry.
‘Oh, demand, eh?’ answered one of the guards. ‘You’ll get far in life, boy!’
Krish had realised before the words had even left his mouth that this was unlikely to work but he was too tired to come up with any kind of logical strategy. His mind raced to think of something but the second guard gave a little chortle and turned to him with an encouraging smile.
‘He’s pulling yer leg, mate,’ the second guard said. ‘Come on, kid. Let’s go.’
And somehow he found himself being ushered towards the entrance. Krish really wasn’t sure how this ha
d worked. They approached the door. But instead of swinging open like a normal wooden door, it appeared to wriggle aside to let Krish and the guard through. As he entered, he realised why the palace shimmered and shook. Why something about it seemed alive. It was because it was alive.
The smell of stale sweat filled his nostrils and the sounds of laboured breathing crept around him. The palace was not built of wood or stone or bricks and mortar. It was made of living people. A sea of dark, glistening skins, poor souls wearing little more than a few pieces of cloth, made up the walls, the ceiling, the columns, the doorways. They hung there, clinging to each other, hundreds of vaguely curious eyes following him down the wide corridor to the throne room.
All of sudden, a sickening thought shot through his body. What was he walking on? His eyes darted to the ground and he breathed a sigh of relief to see dusty yellow earth beneath his feet.
‘You’ve never set foot in the palace before, have yer, boy?’ asked the guard. ‘You’re from across The Scar, aren’t yer?’
Krish decided it was best to nod.
‘The King likes most people to see it at some point. We used to have a prison but it cost too much to maintain that and a palace as well so His Royal Highness came up with this! Ingenious, eh? Not that His Majesty ever has enough criminals to keep the place together! Has to keep coming up with new laws. Like never placing coins with the King’s head face down. Many an untalented pickpocket has made a pretty penny tipping off us palace guards about some coin he or she’s turned. Pig-pokin’s the new crime, I hear.’
Krish became aware of the occasional figure climbing down while another climbed up to take his or her spot.