The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01

by Ricardo Pinto

  In the gloom he could make out the immense shapes of the Masters on their aquar. In his anguish he had almost forgotten Tain. He tied the reins of his father's aquar to his own saddle-chair and then joined the Masters' line. When his turn came he turned his aquar onto the first ramp and his father's followed after. Halfway down one of the ramps he managed to get close to Jaspar. He forced his pain aside, his anger, his hatred and reached out to pull the Master's sleeve.

  We must talk, he signed when he had Jaspar's eyes. The Master pointed inquiringly at Suth. Carnelian shook his head. They let the others move round the landing and begin descending the next ramp. Carnelian moved his hands into the light of a lantern.

  If I pay your price, he signed, you will forget my brothers sin?

  Your slave will keep his eyes, signed Jaspar with eager fingers.

  'Swear on your blood.' 'You challenge my honour?' 'Swear!'

  Jaspar protested but swore the oath.

  Carnelian signed the lie his father had given him. He hoped that Jaspar would interpret the tremble in his signs as guilt at the betrayal.

  As they moved out onto the road, it was like walking into a crowded room. Carnelian resisted putting his hands over his ears lest their brightness should betray them. He ground his teeth. All around, people were packing up and getting ready to move on. Feet were smudging fires to smoke. Uneven walls shoved in on every side, echoing the clatter.

  Aurum ordered the Marula forward through the encampment. They sat in their saddle-chairs like dummies. Carnelian's aquar was disturbed by all the commotion. He looked round to see his father's shy away from some children and almost cried out when his father slumped over. More and more people were gathering to look at them. Soon they would be revealed as Masters. The news would pass all along the road and choke it. Their attackers would know where they were. Seeing the danger, Aurum moved into the Marula and woke them with his anger. Their uncurling seemed as slow as ferns. The Master's hand flashed a jab into the ribs of one of them. The man jerked up into a grimace and threatened the Master with his lance. Aurum grew larger in his chair. The man withstood his menace for a moment before bowing his head and going to join the others.

  The Marula began pummelling their way through the crowd. Their stiff arms rose and fell as they cleared a path for the Masters. People grumbled out of their way. Some fell, losing their bundles to be trampled by the aquar. Others were pushed onto those behind and came to blows. Anger rippled out into the crowd. Carnelian could see the Marula were wasting what little strength they had left. Their hands lifted less frequently, less high. In one place a Maruli was driving some men back against a huimur whose driver struck at their backs with his goad. One man turned to fight. Another was shoved forward by the stump of the huimur's horn as it tossed its head. His companions turned on the Maruli, shouting, threatening him with sticks. The black man's aquar shied back, plumes jittering, as he struggled to control it. Two of his brothers raised a baying in which Carnelian could hear weary desperation. Their mouths stretched in a fixed gape. They gleamed with sweat and pain and anger. They began a feverish stabbing. Throats in the crowd pumped out cries of panic. People tried to escape. Carnelian watched one of the Marula breaking his lance in a woman's body. Her face registered surprise as she plucked at the wood poking from her breast before slumping into the arms of the people around her.

  They are out of control,' Vennel cried over the roar.

  Jaspar backed away and his posture suggested he was looking for some direction in which to flee.

  It was Aurum who rode forward into the carnage, his shrouded figure serene in the midst of fury. His huge hands pulled the Marula back. Carnelian looked on nervously as the Marula mobbed him. Aurum's cowled head looked around at them. The Marula hesitated and their mouths' rictus slacked. When Aurum came back through the roar the Marula were about him, obedient, menacing only those who came too close.

  The Masters and Marula percolated through the crowds. Campfires and wagons forced wide detours. The Marula angled their lances up and the gore ran down the shafts. Carnelian turned his face just enough to see their eyes darting and the way their faces twitched as if under their cloaks something were eating into them. When they scowled and showed their teeth they looked like demons but mostly they looked like old men.

  Each slow step made Carnelian despair. His father's time was running out. He was letting go of what little hope he had left when a clamouring of bells drifted from somewhere up ahead. Like ice on a spring river the crowd broke into chunks and began to drift forward along the road. Their exhalations overpowered the stench of the city. Wheel-creak, footfalls and chatter drowned the bells. They picked up speed. Hope returned like an ache. Carnelian searched ahead for the dawn. The sky above the dark wall of Osrakum was already blue but the sun still hid behind her rampart. The light that filtered down into the canyon only served to reveal the contempt with which its guardians were looking down on the toy towers of the city.

  Visions of the termite city interwove his weary vigilance. Yellow walls mottled like the flanks of lizards. The tunnel of an alleyway; glimpsed shadowy doors; a brilliant flutter of doves; light slicking on a scum-fringed canal. Bridges swagged everywhere and the faded bunting of clotheslines. Tenements rose higher, opened shuttered mouths and breathed out the perfume of a thousand rooms. Carnelian glimpsed the face of a girl looking down at them. A child swung on a beam end. People melted off into alleyways. Once the dirty curtain of tenements parted and he saw the long mound of another road rising faintly off across the hut-pebbled mirrored fen, angling towards them so that he guessed that they converged somewhere up ahead like the spokes of some gigantic wheel.

  He was startled by a swell of sound, as if a door had opened nearby. A width of steps cascaded the crowd down to a harbour jostling with punts. Water lapped the lower steps where barefoot, half-naked people were unloading barges. He darted his gaze over the bobbing heads on the road about him, looking for assassins. He peered round past the mesmerizing circling of spokes, the pendulum palanquins, to see his father's chair. The body sagging in its curve looked already dead.

  Barbarian voices babbling made Carnelian raise his eyes, see fingers pointing ahead and follow them to a pale rectangle flanked by two massings of shadow. As he drifted closer he began to hear a sound like swarming bees. The carpet of their march dragged slowly on. The shadows solidified into two gatehouses like sentinels standing guard upon the road. The buzzing had become a distant roar. He passed the last tenement whose sharp edge defined the beginning of airy space. Voices broke out around him in excited exclamation. From the babble he gleaned the single word, 'Wheel.'

  Carnelian's eyes widened with wonder as he reached the threshold of a moat canal. A bridge carried the road across to the gatehouses looming to receive it. These gave entrance to a plain; a vast roaring marketplace; a seething mass grained with countless heads whose sluggish currents carried toy-like palanquins and the stalks of aquar heads. Skinned with crowds, the Wheel stretched off to vague distance half-darkened by the shadow of the Sacred Wall.

  As he drifted slowly across the bridge, Carnelian could not help drinking in the thrill bubbling up around him. His eyes flitted from one bright face to another until they stumbled on some that looked sick and grim. In that carnival, the Marula had the faces of mummies. Only their eyes showed any life as they scrutinized the wall of Osrakum. Carnelian followed them there and he too grew troubled. Its slope filled the lower sky like a storm. The sun rising above was burning a halo round the head of the leftmost gatehouse, making its shadow fall across the bridge as a cold diagonal. Light bathed the other inner flank and spilled out onto the bridge and along the wall that carried the leftway up to the gatehouse. Its face was studded with the cypher of the five-spot quincunx. Carnelian wondered what the device might mean. His eyes slid down to where the gatehouse tenoned into the rock of the Wheel's plateau. The plateau's edge curving away in each direction was fringed with cranes that leaned over to dangle their lines into
the moat. Down on its water, a barge was being poled while others were moored receiving goods from above. The moat's outer wall rose to support a cliff jigsawed together from the buildings of the city that crowded up to its edge. This cliff followed the curve of the Wheel and was boned with wood, quoined and buttressed with brick. Mouths opened here and there where sewer throats and alleys broke through to vomit their rubbish into the moat. The filth streaking down from the countless windows made them look like weeping sores.

  A scratching trumpet blast made Carnelian whisk round. One of the Masters was looking up to the leftway. The trumpet shrieked louder, closer, and one of the gatehouse towers answered it with a clanging bell. When the air stopped reverberating other bells could be heard sounding from the further reaches of the Wheel.

  Carnelian saw the messenger flashing past above. He searched the black huddles of the other Masters for some reaction. One of them was making signs clumsied by his gloves, ... as expected. She will soon know ... we are somewhere in the Wheel.

  The gatehouses loomed up on either side. A double arch passed a leftway between them. One of the inner walls was snagging sunlight. Carnelian held the edges of his cowl and craned up to see that the gatehouse was sheathed with brass almost to the top. He was aghast at such profligate use of metal. The sun smouldered the wrought surface. Ledges trapped blue from the sky. Carnelian could not at first believe there could be so much metal in the world. Faces in the brass were larger than wagons, with eyes like wheels. Only when he saw the hinges, and the rollers as tall as men that lined its lower edge, did he realize that it was a gate.

  He looked away and saw his wonder on other faces, but there was only fear on the faces of the Marula. They reminded him of his own misery and of the danger. The sun beat full upon their sweat-gleamed faces as they looked fixedly at Osrakum's dark wall. The focus of their terror was plain to see. Off a little to the left, the Wheel squeezed the slurry of its crowds into the funnelling canyon. Standing flanking that funnel throat were the guardians, the two Gods of the Masters, each a quarter of the height of the mountainous Sacred Wall.

  Beyond the towers the carriageway fanned out to meet a cordon of toll posts. They had to wait their turn. Holding their billhooks upright, the toll-keepers looked out from under conic wooden helmets into which the five dots of the quincunx were inlaid in bone. Their leather jerkins bore the glyphs of gate and sea.

  Aurum sent a Maruli forward to drop a pouch into a toll-keeper's hand. The black man then leaned back to take in the whole of their party with a gesture. Nodding, the toll-keeper emptied the pouch out and began to count the bronze, double-faced coins off against the Marula and then the Masters. While he was doing this, one of his companions nudged him and pointed up at the Maruli. The black man's face was slick with fear. The toll-keepers narrowed their eyes and began shouting at the Maruli, gesturing with their billhooks that he should dismount. The man looked back at the Masters, begging instruction; his brothers' lance blades were lifting. The billhooks were now clattering against the Maruli's saddle-chair. 'Get down!' cried one of the soldiers.

  The Maruli's aquar sank to the ground and he was dragged out of the chair groaning. More toll-keepers had come up. One was barking questions. Hunched, the

  Maruli slapped the man back only to find the billhooks shaking around his head. The Marula around Carnelian were growling. Nervously, he scanned the crowd beyond the toll cordon.

  Aurum surged forward. The toll-keepers drew back from him, their billhooks lifting like cobras. Aurum's glove beckoned one. The man came reluctantly. The Master leant over and opened a slit in his cowl so that the man could peer in. The man's face turned to clay. As he began sagging to his knees, Aurum grabbed the billhook to hold him up. They exchanged a mutter, then the toll-keeper fled back to the others who all began nodding, almost bowing as they opened up a way and let them pass through, between the posts of brass and into the roaring crowd.

  They were forced to wait while some man-drawn carts rolled by, then they swam into the shifting currents of the Wheel. A tinker clinked kettles on a branched pole that looked like a tree flocked by earthenware birds. A party of northerners lumbered past on large-headed aquar, each saddle-chair holding three or four of them, skin marbled with dirt, matted hair pebbled with amber.

  As the Marula thrust a way into each new current they looked back with questioning faces. Each time Aurum shook his shrouded head. At last they came to where a river of people was flowing along a black paved road. Aurum gave a nod and the Marula led them in.

  Carnelian reeled in his father's aquar while all the time searching for enemies. They were in a soup at a rolling boil. Faces, hand-clasped bags and sacks and pouches, fruit-filled baskets, bubbled in and out of sight. Mottled beasts, some with feathers, some without, panniered, loaded, yoked to wagons, to chariots or swinging palanquins like soft humps. Painted eunuchs, women in gaggles, swaying on carried chairs, swollen with child, their menfolk trying to make way for their bellies. Toll-keepers rode through like lords at a fair. Merchants marshalled their caravans with whips and bellowing. Urchins ran weaving, screaming, playing hide and seek among the angling thickets of legs. The roar never ceased. The air was never free of the brisde of poles, the slap and billow of canopies, of swagging ropes. The ground rarely showed its slimy mush of peelings and feathers, of flowers and dung.

  Tortuously, they worked their way round the Wheel on the black road and then, abrupdy, turned in towards its centre to climb a wide ramp. Through a gap in the crowd, Carnelian saw a snatch of its balustrade where an old woman sat amongst a rot of melon rinds, offering up trinkets, her toothless grin tracking passers-by.

  At the summit of the ramp a roar of water drowned out the crowds. Over the balustrade Carnelian saw a wide channel thrashing white, rushing water round in a wide arc. The water spilled out from the channel all along its length into cisterns mobbed by people.

  When he looked up he realized the whole vast mosaic of the Wheel was laid out around him. He twisted to look back. The gatehouses they had come through now looked smaller than his hand. Behind them was the irregular rim wall. He followed that round and found another pair of gatehouses at a greater distance, then round to another pair further still, and to where yet another gateway touched the edge of the canyon's mouth. Across on the canyon's other side he found one more gate that closed the ring. The quincunx cypher made sense to him. Not counting the way into the canyon, the Wheel had five gates in all.

  The shadow of the Sacred Wall was still dulling colours over half the Wheel. Where the sun had reached, delicate patchwork stretched its hues off towards the moat. Far away it was stitched together from tiny lozenges, closer it resolved into neat rows of vendors sitting among their baskets and their blankets, green-heaped with herbs, and all manner of vegetables and fruit. Dark cuttings toothed the Wheel's rim showing where channels cut into it from the moat. A ring shearing in the human flow showed the road they had left. Inside that, the water channel and its cisterns formed a glittering circle. Six ramps crossed this. Five of them lay on one of the spokes that led to a pair of gatehouses. The sixth led to bridges over the moat and on into the canyon and the crater of Osrakum.

  As they descended into the inner Wheel, Carnelian was beginning to believe they had managed to elude their attackers. He could hear music. Flags proclaimed the trades of the bonesmith, the featherer, the copper-beater. The weavers were there with their cottons, the pigmenters with their dyes. Lacquered boxes rather than baskets held every kind of precious commodity. One man was rolling out leathers rippled like water and another displaying cylinders of ivory as thick as his arms. Among them strolled buyers, their face tattoos proclaiming them the servants of the Masters. Behind them swung chests with their treasure of coined bronze.

  The music of horns and cymbals was coming from somewhere up ahead. Carnelian tried to see round the riders blocking his view. They were nearing the ring of poles that he had seen from the ramp defining the hub of the Wheel. From each pole hung strange
fruit. The fetor of decay swelled with the carnival music. Carnelian could see dancers cavorting between the poles, snaking yellow ribbons through the air. People were poking sticks into the things hanging from the poles. Squinting, he was appalled to see that they were men dangling in the air spread-eagled on diagonal crosses. As he came closer, Carnelian flinched away from one man's agonized face. A hawker was selling makeshift spears to his tormentors. Carnelian had to pass so close to the crucified man that he could smell his sweat and the excrement that streaked his legs.

  The Wheel's hub was fenced in by these crucifixions. Carnelian was looking round in disgust when his aquar began to be jostled. The crowd was milling. One Maruli's aquar was shoved into his. Angry voices were drowning out the horns. His aquar's plumes flared. Carnelian pulled his father's saddle-chair as close as he could, then stretched over to grab its rim. His father jigged like a sack. A surge was rushing towards them across the mass of heads. It struck. Although Carnelian was almost unseated, he still managed to keep hold of his father's chair. Aurum's voice was shouting commands over the riot. Carnelian watched the Marula stabbing at faces with their lances. Panic was ripping gaps in the crowd as Carnelian watched hands reach up to one Maruli's saddle-chair. The man had a sword out and was chopping at them. For each hand that was stung away two more grabbed hold. The chair was toppling. The aquar was struggling against the bodies pressing round it. Suddenly the Maruli was yanked into a surf of hands and disappeared. For a moment he resurfaced, bloodied, then the crowd closed over him. Carnelian looked round in shock and saw another Maruli being dragged to his death. He tried to edge his aquar and his father's round to shield him. His own chair lurched suddenly to the left. Hands were grasping the rim. His father's chair bobbed free as Carnelian was forced to let it go. Faces grimaced up at him as he fumbled for one of his ranga shoes. He stamped at their fingers and heard bones crack but still they clung on.