In my lifetime I have never heard of a living soul – with the exception of the guardian monks – willingly passing into the land of ghosts.
Until now.
Aram glanced back over his shoulder. He could not see the valley where the refugees waited, but then, with the endless downpour, he was lucky to be able to see his own hand before his face. The monsoon had begun days ago. The mass of travellers, now numbering many thousands with the occasional hopeless wanderers collected along the journey south, had watched nervously as the great wind had come up suddenly, sweeping in from the south-east. The clouds gathered like hungry raptors over the central Inda hills, great boiling blue-grey waves in the air. Then the rains came.
Aram and his people were largely unprepared. The monsoon season barely touched the northern hills, and few of those in the huge throng of humanity travelling south had ever encountered such precipitation.
Within hours the small seasonal streams they had been lightly crossing had become torrents of churning water carrying pieces of vegetation along with them. Slowly, wearily and carefully, the army of humanity moved on, keeping parallel with the great River Nadu.
They had come upon the war zone rather suddenly after the sixth day of torrential rain. The mass of bodies had been slogging through the jungle along one of the trade paths, feet sinking into churned mud, when the western empire’s pickets found them. There had only been fifty or so imperial troops in the group, compared with the vast number of travellers, though few of those among the Inda refugees were armed or trained for war and so Aram had held his hands up and approached in peace. The soldiers had demanded to speak to the leader of this great column. Aram, along with the officers Mani and Bajaan and a few warriors, had bowed to the pickets, and had been escorted to the imperial commander in his headquarters not far from the walls of the city.
Aram’s heart had gone out to each and every human at Jalnapur, be they Inda, western or eastern. The locals were suffering in that they were trapped within their city with war raging outside the walls, likely starting to feel the privations and hunger as well as the danger. And the two great armies were to be equally pitied as they slowly and systematically pounded each other into ruin across the great river. If Aram had still maintained any hope for the future, the sight of Jalnapur stripped it away.
The monsoon had not put an end to the fighting, but it had clearly changed its nature. The vast majority of the imperial manpower rested in sullen, sodden camps on ridges and high bluffs around the Jalnapur basin, the flat lands near the river little more than an uninhabitable quagmire. The same had happened on the far side of the river among the Jade Emperor’s men. And yet there were small pockets of soldiers on the causeways and the raised platforms watching the bridge and manning artillery. Despite the conditions, imperial catapults threw their great rocks through the downpour in a futile attempt to dislodge the small parties of eastern soldiers. And occasionally a noise like the splitting of a mountain would ring out across the river as the Jade Emperor’s cannon discharged and pounded naught but sodden earth on this bank.
Aram had been escorted to the general, one Flavius Cinna. The man had been courteous and polite, if a little formal. He had expressed a desire to address the refugees in an attempt to persuade some of them into joining the war on his side. Aram had refused. These, he said, were the poor victims of war seeking refuge and peace, not a place to die for a foreign power. To his credit, the imperial general had been quite accepting and understanding. He had been contrite that he could offer no help to the refugees. His provisions were barely adequate for the men under his command, since the monsoon had disrupted his supply lines back to the west. In the end, Flavius Cinna had sent Aram on his way with good wishes and the somewhat unnecessary advice to move swiftly out of the war zone and find somewhere safe.
An argumentative fellow in Aram’s small party had voiced the possibility of staying in the west, waiting out the war to see if perhaps the westerners might be victorious and grant them some kind of a future. Aram had, with a heavy heart, discounted that possibility. Even if the westerners did triumph at Jalnapur, it would bode ill for the Inda. General Cinna might offer concessions, but he was just a soldier in the army of a madman who would then rule the Inda world. Besides, with the depredations the war had wrought in the region, how would they survive so many months’ wait? Many would starve. No. Moving on was the only option.
And so Aram had returned to his weary people and they had moved on, skirting the great miasma with its downhearted armies and their pointless attempts at mutual destruction. So vast was the war zone that it took three days to pass before they reached an area that was not filled with camps and pickets and foragers.
The copious food stocks the refugees had brought from their homelands had swiftly dwindled on the journey and, while the jungles, forests and lakes of the Inda Diamond were replete with sources of nourishment and the column packed with farmers, fishermen and hunters, the days spent journeying through the lands of Jalnapur were hungry ones, for the soldiers had already farmed, fished and hunted the region almost bare.
It came as a relief when the column once more moved into relatively untouched lands, and meat, fish and foraged fruit and vegetables became sufficient once more to support the refugees. It had quickly become apparent that they were not the only occupants of the south. Throughout their journey they repeatedly came across small scout units from both empires. While it was not feasible for a huge force like the Jade Emperor’s army to cross the Nadu here where it ran to almost a mile wide, small units had crossed in boats in order to rove, scout, spy and forage. Here and there as they moved south, Aram and his people would come across the evidence of engagements between the enemy forces. A clearing full of bodies, skin white as marble, agonised expressions locked onto their faces in death. Blades lying around, discarded and coated with mud and blood, slowly rusting in the corrosive atmosphere of monsoon season. Elsewhere a collection of bloated grey-blue uniformed bodies had jammed up against a log, forming a dam in a small river, washed down there from some unknown conflict upstream.
It filled Aram with dismay to see so many untended dead. He was no guru or deep philosopher, and couldn’t have said whether because the foreigners did not adhere to the Inda’s beliefs their afterlives worked in a different manner. But in his experience, no matter what a man believed happened after the moment of death, almost all cultures advocated a respectful and ceremonious disposal of the body. Would this endless slew of violent deaths and the abandoned, unattended corpses it created eventually turn the entire Inda Diamond into an extension of the land of ghosts? It was a horrifying concept. An empire of the dead.
Nine more days they journeyed, keeping back from the river and moving warily, waiting and moving around patrols when they encountered them. Finally Aram had spoken to a local fisherman, who had told him that the line of markers which heralded the edge of the dead lands was less than an hour’s good walk away. Aram had suspected as much. For the last day or more of travelling, they had gradually passed fewer and fewer settlements, not because they had been cleared due to the war as further north, but because they had never been founded in the first place. Few people were comfortable living so near the land of ghosts.
Knowing how close they were, and still close to choking on fear at the very prospect of moving into the dreaded southern lands, Aram had left the column resting in a wide valley nearby while he and a small party of his trusted men moved south to examine the way ahead.
The rain, which had been incessant now for many days and had turned the world into a quagmire, battered down upon his head, and the constantly drumming thunder of heavy drops on waxy leaves made even loud conversation difficult. Thus they almost walked into the midst of disaster completely unwittingly. In fact, Aram had stepped out of the undergrowth onto the bank of the tiny racing stream before Mani grabbed him and hauled him back. The small party ducked into the lush greenery and peered out at the scene before them.
A party of
twenty or so Jade Empire scouts had stumbled upon a group of western soldiers of smaller number. The Inda watched in sickened dismay as the fight unfolded. Half a dozen men were already dead, most of them western, though two Jade soldiers in their grey uniforms lay gurgling and crying among them. As they watched, a Jade Empire officer hefted a long spear with a crimson streamer trailing just below the gleaming head and rammed it down, punching through the leather protection of his opponent’s armour, grunting and heaving as the point found a soft spot between ribs, and pushing down until the weapon stood proud of the screaming victim. The easterner simply let go of the shaft and ripped his sword from its sheath – a delicate blade with a slight curve, the hilt of carved ivory. The transfixed, dying western soldier clutched at the weapon rising from his chest, howling and crying as his killer leapt into the fray to butcher another.
The rain washed away the vast torrents of blood, but the death and carnage was still there to see. An arm severed below the elbow. A leg transfixed with a spear, the wounded man yelling his pain as he toppled to the ground to flounder in agony in the mud. Swords punched through leather, linen, flesh, muscle, organs.
Men screamed and swords clashed, all oddly muted and barely audible over the thunder of water on foliage. Aram was uncertain what to do. He and the half dozen men with him remained still and silent, watching as the last few western soldiers were done away with. Nine eastern scouts remained as they began to move round the clearing, administering swift and precise killing blows to any wounded man. Aram risked a whispered question to the Inda warrior by his side.
‘Why are they killing even those with light wounds?’
It was horrifying, but Aram watched as an eastern scout with a flesh wound on his leg that would leave him with little more than a limp was quickly and efficiently dispatched. Bajaan, his face creased in disgust, gestured towards the great river, just visible through the trees. ‘They are in unfamiliar lands and cut off from their people. They cannot afford to be slow and careful for the sake of one wounded man, so they kill him and continue to move swiftly and subtly. It is barbaric, but in their eyes it is sensible.’
‘And there is also the possibility in these conditions of infections in the wound,’ Mani added. ‘Many of those who survive the injury will die from disease unless they are treated by a man of medicine, and these scouts will have no such luxury.’
Aram nodded his own sadness at such a thing, trying not to feel angry at these foreigners who would now leave the bodies of their dead in the dell to become yet more restless spirits roaming the world of the Inda. But what did he care now how many new ghosts there would be, when he was bound for a land already filled with them?
His heart lurched as he took in the brutality and suddenly found his eyes locked in a mutual gaze with one of the Jade Empire scouts. Even as the soldier shouted and started waving a warning to his companions, Aram felt Mani and Bajaan grabbing him and hauling him backwards into the jungle.
Then they were running as behind them the scout tried to make himself understood in the torrential and deafening rain.
‘Where are we going?’ Aram managed between breaths as they pounded across a narrow churning torrent of water and onto a muddy trail between heavy-hanging boughs.
‘South.’
‘South?’
‘You’d prefer we went north and led them to the civilians?’ Bajaan asked harshly, and Aram nodded and ran on, the sounds of pursuit just audible through the roar of the monsoon rains as the half dozen Inda thundered along the wet track.
‘Wait,’ hissed Mani, coming to a sudden stop. The others slithered to a halt behind him and looked at the ground ahead to which their companion was pointing. The muddy track was covered in boot prints. A group of people had already been along here at some point.
‘You think there are more ahead?’ Aram whispered.
‘I don’t care. Whoever they are, they’ve helpfully laid us a false trail. Come on.’
Mani jumped sideways into the thick grass and then hurried into the deeper foliage. Bajaan did the same, gesturing for Aram to follow. The old man did so, with little grace and some difficulty, and the other warriors followed suit until the whole group were off the path. They shuffled ten paces from the trail and huddled behind the splayed bole of a tree, creepers and shrubs growing up around it and helping hide them.
They saw the enemy scouts before they heard them. Aram and his men hunched down and tried to make themselves small and invisible as the grey-clad eastern soldiers pounded along the trail, following the footprints south. They shouted to one another in their strange, sing-song language as they ran, disappearing from sight after a few moments. Mani and Bajaan shared a look, counting under their breath. When they reached a sufficiently high number, they gestured back to the trail.
‘That was all of them. Now we go.’
And that was that. In a matter of heartbeats the small Inda party was back on the muddy trail and moving north towards the valley a couple of miles away where the refugees waited. Half an hour later the great flood of humanity began to flow south once more and, despite his own words of reassurance and the comments from Mani and Bajaan, Aram felt increasingly tense and nervous with every footstep. He half-expected a spear to lance out of the undergrowth and rip into him, or screaming easterners to leap onto the path.
Nothing happened.
Slowly, they moved south, the path widening to allow as many as three or four people to walk abreast. Gradually the column shortened as the walkers gathered as close as they could for safety. Even moving three or four abreast the column was over a mile long, such was the number of souls travelling south, and the pack beasts at the end dragged it out even further, though only the fittest of the beasts remained. The carts had long since gone, and the slower beasts had become casualties of hunger as they passed the depleted war zone.
The vegetation was gradually changing now, more exotic and unusual plants proliferating as they moved ever further from Aram’s home in the northern hills. Aram, as nervous about their destination as he was about those they might meet on the way, almost turned round as they reached the markers. Some things were less palatable even than dreadful war.
Placed here before any living memory, the markers drew a stark line between the living and the dead. They said, with their bleak, stone faces, that no man could live beyond them, that the dead ruled here. Oh, there were the monks, of course, who looked after the markers, but they were holy men, protected by the gods. No common man ever passed these markers. The old stories were terrifying.
This particular marker was ancient, even by Inda standards. It was a pillar of stone standing four times the height of a man. The main column was carved into narrow pilasters, each filled with grotesque faces and grasping, stony hands. The base was covered in the script of the ancients who had first learned the ways of the Inda gods, a language only monks and holy men learned these days. But the top…
Aram shivered. The top of the column had been carved into two figures, one facing south and the other north. The one he could see, glaring in his direction, was a human figure, with a handsome, if rather stylised face. But the carver had done something odd. The eyes were not simply shaped stone orbs like the rest. They were matt black. It was like looking into nothingness. Even the light sank into them without a hint of reflection. It was quite simply the eeriest thing Aram had ever seen. Questions assailed him, though the loudest and most insistent was why in the name of everything sane had he agreed to come here?
Of course he knew the answer to that well enough, and it still held true. To the east, the Inda were now under the dominion of the Jade Empire, little more than slaves to a strict and harsh regime. To the north the bandits held sway with little care for human life, and beyond them the horse lords with even less. And to the west? For all the civility displayed by the general at Jalnapur, they had seen how the lands near the war zone had been plundered of all resources. The same would be true all the way back to the imperial border at the Oxus Rive
r. And whatever the general personally intended, all men knew that the emperor Bassianus was not to be trusted. Even if the west won against such terrible odds, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the mad emperor’s troops were here to stay.
South was the only way.
He looked at that statue again and shuddered uncontrollably. Monks lived there. Only in the northern peripheral area, of course, but they managed to live there and not go mad. If monks could do it, Aram assured himself, then surely the gods would look favourably upon their beleaguered people and protect them in the same manner. Had not the last guru taught that men could live there when he set the guardian monks to their task?
‘I don’t like this,’ Bajaan said quietly.
‘No one does,’ Aram replied, ‘but we have little choice, and if the monks can survive here, then so can we.’
‘Have the monks survived?’ Bajaan asked.
‘What?’
‘Look around you.’
Aram did so, more intently this time, and what he saw sent fresh waves of panic through him. The stone of the statue was slightly green with algae and moss and was dirty and stained. The undergrowth had been allowed to grow close to it, and saplings and shrubs grew off to either side.
‘The monks are supposed to maintain the markers,’ Bajaan noted. ‘And the way between each marker is supposed to be kept clear and empty so that every marker can be seen from its neighbours. This is not a good sign.’
No, thought Aram, it most certainly wasn’t. Images of sharp-fanged ghosts stripping the flesh from his bones flooded his mind and threatened to send terror rushing through him. He could not cross the boundary. No man could. Yet they had to. He had to. His legs shook, yet seemed rooted to the spot, unwilling to take that single, dreadful step.
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