There are five of us.
The magician leads the procession. How he picks his path I do not know; the sand comes up early most days and blots out the horizon. We walk bent over against the wind, eyes open only to slits. We each wear a white burnouse in the style of the Moors to hide our armour, but it does nothing to stop the heat. I can smell my sweat, and the leather is glued to my skin. I’d shuck it off but there are raiders in the dunes, and we have learned they aren’t above attacking their own.
I follow Corm. He follows the captain. The captain follows the magician, and the magician leads us to the Ant Tower.
***
I speak to the magician some nights. Things are different between us now, since the night in Gail.
I remember when he inspected us on the Lontoa parade ground. We were a full century then, half retired soldiers and half farmboys. Shoulder to shoulder, whispering, jostling. The magician walked the line with Captain Brales, whispering in his ear, desperate to win the commission. I didn’t know he was a magician, then. Just a dusky man in a workman’s tunic, nails crusted with dirt. I straightened up as he passed, staring straight ahead. Half a year since we last fought, and we were all hungry.
At the end of the row the magician said, “They’ll do. We leave in three days for Amir.” All along the line I could hear the relief. Corm nudged me. “Just in time, Parkin?”
“Always a saviour when we need it most.”
“True.” He shivered, and I knew he was remembering the walls of Tinnarim. “True enough.”
Yussef took with spotted fever halfway to Amir. There was no cure. I cradled Yussef’s head as he spat his guts over my tunic. He told me not to weep. I prayed that the night would stretch on forever, but dawn came much too soon.
We buried Yussef and ten others with their swords clasped to their chests, points down, brothers fallen on the march. Our century was now eighty-nine. Captain Brales blamed bad provisions, and we marched on hungry.
***
The storms have stolen away the horizon and the wind smells of sulphur. Corm Swift is stopped up ahead, shapeless under the flapping burnouse. I wave. “Corm.”
“Parkin.” He holds up a hand. “Listen.”
The magician and Captain Brales are just ahead, shouting to be heard over the storm. Their voices carry. “What?” says Brales. “What?” The wind changes direction and sand spatters against my hood; the weave stops the spray but not the sound. It rattles in my skull. “You never paid us for that!”
“I haven’t paid you at all yet,” says the magician, and I know he meant for us to hear. Then he tugs up his kaffiyeh and advances into the cacophony, guided by some compass far beyond the reckoning of little men like me. I watch him go and feel a burning in my gut, in my groin.
The captain comes to us. Officer Slopes is caught up now as well, and we huddle in a square, shoulder to shoulder. “He wants us to climb it,” says Brales. “Climb the damned Ant Tower.” A second of silence. “I’m no climber.”
“Nor I, sir.”
“Well,” he says. “Better learn fast. And you.” He prods Corm in the chest. “We’ll be there by noon.”
We march.
Even under the robes it’s clear how thin we’ve all become. When we left Lontoa Captain Brales was a stocky man, stomping about the parade ground. Now when he points to some feature on the horizon I see the bones of his wrist jutting, knuckles almost arthritic. I know I look the same.
Corm tugs my sleeve. “Is that it?”
“Looks like.”
A finger of shadow in the distance. Some in Pushka said it was a thousand feet high, that when the sun dipped below the dunes the shadow of the tower was the shadow of God’s hand. They said a man who slept in those shadows would dream his own end.
It’s not a thousand feet tall. I’m no surveyor but I see that much. Maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred at most. Not even the softest sands will cradle a man who falls from the top. I imagine the fall, the tatter of wind. It makes me shiver. “We can’t climb it,” says Corm. “He’s insane.”
I shake my head. “You underestimate him.”
“You love him too much,” says Corm, and spits into the sand.
It’s almost noon and the Ant Tower is close enough that I can see the spires running up towards the sun, the pits and scars where termites scurry from daylight to darkness. I squint and see the Cathedral of Saint Ramona, arches and pointed peaks, the sun making the stained glass maquette of the Risen Daughter glow from within. But this cathedral is built from sand and spit, and its hollows are black as night.
The closer we get the greater it grows. When I imagine climbing it my hands tremble.
We march with our heads down and suddenly we are at the base. The magician presses his ear against the mud while I circle the tower: forty paces around makes it about thirty feet wide. I look up. The sun sits just behind the peak as a fiery halo but the tower itself is all shadow. I feel a child again, tiny before my father, waiting for the swing of his fist.
A whistling of sand in the distance. Another storm. The magician gently pats the slope of the tower like the flank of a horse. “Let’s not waste time.”
Slopes leads us in stripping off our greaves, our swords, our gauntlets. “What do you think?” he asks the captain. “Boots or no?”
“Better the boots,” says the captain. “Termites might mistake your pale little toes for their own. Carry ‘em right off.” He laughs, but his eyes are cold. I don’t blame him. The tower scares me too.
We line up at the base. The mud writhes as a million million termites wriggle blind across the shell of the tower. They build even as we watch, all the tiny rivulets and hidden chambers weaving upwards from the dunes. It is pockmarked and scabbed by tunnels. Those will be our handholds. The thought of digging my fingers into those pits and feeling termites squirm and pop…
The magician dusts his palms. He looks back at me and grins, and my breath sticks in my throat. “Catch me if I fall.”
***
A dark-eyed woman with silks draped around her hips and ribbons through her hair beckoned from a doorway. “Corm,” I whispered. “What do you know of women in Amir?”
“They’ll bite unless you soften them with coin.” He grinned. “You owe me.”
“You’re sending me bankrupt, you know?”
The woman led Corm into a shadowed doorway and I went back to the campground to take the night guard. The magician’s tent stood silent at the back of the grounds. Three days in Amir and the flaps of his tent were still shut. Corm said that the magician was a demon, that he’d burst into flame if he stepped into the sun. Sometimes I suspected Corm was right.
My companion for the night was a skinny-faced boy called Dory, flinching and scrabbling for the hilt of his sword every time a bird called in the darkness. He whispered that it was his first time on the road with a real captain. I told him to hush. The Amir nights were warm, pleasant on the skin, and I set my feet so I wouldn’t stumble if I fell asleep.
Dory tugged on my sleeve. “Parkin! Look! Is it on fire?” I turned to watch the sputter and flash behind the cloth of the magician’s tent, like a dying gas lamp.
“Stay.” I slid my sword free and took slow, careful steps towards the tent. The flickers behind the canvas grew to yellow flashes, like bursts of daylight. A long wedge of light trembled through a gap in the tent flap and across the campground. In that sliver was a silhouette.
“Sir?” No reply. I pushed the tent-flap aside.
He was on his knees, hands cupped around something shimmering like dawnlight on water, head bowed as if to kiss it, or whisper to it like a lover. It spat light in stutters and fits. “Sir?”
The magician clapped his hands shut. The tent went dark. Bright spots danced across my vision. “Why are you here?”
“The lights…” I swallowed. His eyes were still alight, as if a tiny fire burned inside his skull. “I was worried for you. Sir.”
“Well. Thank you. But don’t bother me
again when the tent is closed.”
“Sir.” Shapes swam into focus. A chest with brass locks. Scrolls with wooden handles bound tight in leather. “Would you be alone?”
“Yes,” he said. “Please. And do mind. When the tent is closed…”
“Sir.”
I pulled the flap down and returned to the watch. Dory asked me questions I couldn’t answer.
Two men deserted in the night between Amir and Pushka. Captain Brales didn’t fuss. There’d been worse before, and there would be worse again. Corm spent the march telling me of the girl in silk. “Young, but the things she knew, Parkin! You should have joined us. Might have cured you. Will they have such girls in Pushka?”
“Better, perhaps. If you know where to look.”
Pushka was the last great city before the desert nations. We climbed the walls at the southern gates and pointed out the line where the grass died, and was consumed by rock and sand and bone. Brales gave us three days’ leave. Our employer had business to attend to.
I hadn’t told Corm what I saw in the tent. Not yet.
I spent my days in the souk, crushing spices between my fingertips, breathing in cinnamon and cumin and long pepper. Men in tall headdresses babbled from street corners. Some knew my language. They thrust curiosities at me: ivory daggers, sashes woven with gold thread, a shard of crystal as big as my palm. Some men kept their daughters on leashes of red string and proffered them to me when I passed. Some did the same with their sons.
There was a low stink hanging over Pushka that made my stomach coil like a cat in a basket. I would call it heathenism but for the temples, the masjid, golden minarets twisting high over the rooftops, prayers ringing from a thousand tongues. No land with such temples could be a land of heathens. And children were often sold on the streets of my own city, years ago. I was one of them.
When the men left the grounds to find company for the night I waved them off and stalked the courtyard, staving off sleep. My boots pinched my feet. I wished for home.
The flap of the magician’s tent was pinned open.
“Come in.” His voice was low and soft. He sat on his trunk, papers curling at his feet. The candles flickered, scented with turmeric. He tweaked his beard, grown since Lontoa, long enough to twine around one finger. “You’re alone for the night?”
“Sir,” I said. “The city by night is the same to me as the city by day.”
“But this is Pushka! Good coin buys anyone a good night.”
“I’m saving my coin.”
“For? A farm?” He grinned. “A wife?”
Did he see my hands twitch? “Sir.”
“Well.” He looked back to his papers. “Do you know where we go next?”
“I don’t, sir.”
He flattened a map across the floor, furrowing his brow. “I need you to do something for me. Parkin, yes?”
“Sir.”
“I need you to tell everyone where we’re going. It’s a hard trip, and a man unprepared will die. I’m telling you this because I don’t need eighty-seven men. I need fifteen. Maybe ten. A good small bodyguard is better than a hundred, but the only way to find a good small bodyguard is to cull them from a hundred. Besides…a crowd attracts attention. Yes?”
“Sir.”
“Good. Tell them where we’re going, and those that would leave may leave. I’ll pay them out.”
“Sir.” I paused. “Where are we going?”
Candlelight flashed in his eyes.
***
I can’t tell how long we’ve been climbing. The rock flakes away beneath my boots. We’re about halfway up. It was easy to begin with. Many handholds, many ledges. The tunnels were wide enough for me to jam in my arm and catch my breath. The handholds are small now, big enough for a finger and no more. They will only grow smaller.
The termites are albino white, their bodies swollen, legs thick as matchsticks. They crawl over my hands and between my fingers, leaving sticky trails. It makes my stomach roil as they march up the sleeve of my burnouse and along my arm, catching in my hairs. I slap at one in disgust and its body breaks against my skin.
The wind squeals in the distance like a petulant child. The stirring of the sand is a cloud hanging low over the desert. It could be morning mist, if mists were ever so dark and furious. The magician is somewhere far above, burnouse snapping in the breeze. “Parkin! Are you safe?”
“Sir! I am!” My cheeks burn with embarrassment. Did he have to single me out?
“Good,” he says, and pushes on. I hear Corm snicker below and I blush harder.
Further and further. We’re closing on the peak. The wind rises to a banshee howl. Not long now. I free one hand long enough to pull my kaffiyeh back over my face.
Captain Brales yells, “Dig in, men!” and the storm pounces with claws bared.
It’s impossible. There’s no way the storm could move so fast. I twist my fingertips into the fluting as the sand whips my hands, my face. The burnouse cracks around my cheeks and the sandstorm shrieks like a man on the rack.
Corm calls to me from below but his words are snatched away. There is nothing but the tumble and the screams. I crane upwards and open my eyes to slits. The magician is still there, a few feet above Officer Slopes. I can’t see his face but I feel the echoes through my fingers as the wind slams him into the side of the tower over and over. He clings on despite it all, and I am so proud.
The wind is so loud it aches in my skull. All I can smell is the sourness of my own breath and sweat. I grit my teeth and endure. It’s been too long to let myself fall.
Slopes shouts from overhead but I can’t make anything out… His kaffiyeh flaps free like a flag of surrender. His eyes are squeezed shut tight against the storm and he shakes with the effort of keeping his hold on the tower.
No. Something worse.
Slopes arches his spine and throws his head back like he’s been speared through the middle, and he claws at his face with one hand, shoving fingers into his mouth. I know what’s happening. The sand is in his lungs and he’s trying to dig it from his throat. I turn away.
He doesn’t scream as he falls. Instead he makes a guttural choking sound, like a man drowning in hot oil, the same sound I heard on the battlements of Tinnarim. Somehow it carries through the storm, and that chills most of all.
Corm and Captain Brales pull into the tower as Slopes tumbles past. They press their faces against the mud and let the termites crawl through their hair. I watch him hit the ground. A cloud rises around him and then settles, and before I can take another breath Slopes is swallowed by the sand.
I shut my eyes. “He won’t let me fall,” I whisper. “He won’t.”
The sands whirl around me, cackling, triumphant.
***
People in Pushka knew the Ant Tower. They didn’t speak of it in the alleys or temples, but there were places. I found a bazaar where men draped in silk crowded around a hookah, smoke bubbling against the glass. They tweaked their moustaches and I thought of the magician, and how he twined his beard. The men told stories, hushed and hesitant.
They said the Ant Tower had existed five or six generations now, growing year after year by inches and hands and feet. Traders never stop there, and when a caravan passes they make sure to stay on the east side in morning and the west side in afternoon, so its long finger-shadow will never cross their path. I offered coin to the men crouched around the hookah, smoke roiling in the shadows of the tent. “Why would anyone visit it?”
“There is no reason,” they said. “It is cursed.”
“The tower is evil?”
Silence. Then a young man dressed in scholar’s robes leaned forward. He spat his words, like my language tasted foul. “The tower is not evil,” he said. “Something evil lives inside. There are many mounds in the desert. They are as tall as a man.” He waved above his head, to demonstrate. “No taller. Or they would fall over.”
“But this one is different?”
He shook his head dismissively.
“The mound is no different. It is the insects. They build up and up. There is no reason for it. Something makes them crazy. They build forever, I think. Until they reach the sky.”
“And how high is it?”
He shrugged. “Two hundred, three hundred hands. I saw it years ago. It will be taller now. It will grow forever.”
Two hundred hands? Just over a hundred feet. Impossible. Superstition and heathen tales. But I knew better than to say so. “So it houses something evil.”
He shrugged again. “Maybe not evil. But powerful, yes. It is building a monument to itself, I think. It is vain. It uses the insects, the termites, for its own pride. That is what I think.”
I slept badly that night, but I didn’t expect otherwise.
I wasn’t the only one to ask after the tower in the dark corridors of the bazaar. By the time we left Pushka there were only eight men left besides myself. We looked at each other as we advanced into the wastes. I walked slumped, like a man crushed beneath his regret. There was no reason for me to press on. Better money elsewhere, and every city housed a mercenary captain hoping to fill his ranks.
Perhaps it was Corm that put it best. We made camp one night by a tributary to burn the nightly offerings and he leaned over the fire to take the smoke into his lungs. “Parkin. Try it. You’ll like it.”
“Will I?”
He coughed, then laughed. “No. But you’ll keep coming back.”
Even the tributary died, in the end. The grasses became hard-packed dirt, the earth cracking underfoot like pottery forgotten in the kiln. Captain Brales let us rest one night in Recca, a small town glad to see foreign gold. Beyond Recca the earth became sand.
All These Shiny Worlds Page 9