by Jack Geurts
The captain said something to them, but received no response. He gestured to one of his men, who got down from his camel and asked the Zends in their own tongue who they were.
“My name is Kurosh,” said the corpse-bearer, seeing no point in lying. “And this is Babar.”
The man then translated this for his captain, who gestured to the tower and seemed to ask what it was. Once this was verified by the translator, Kurosh explained, “It is a sacred tower. And cursed.”
The captain seemed intrigued by this, confirming with his translator that that was indeed what the Zend had said.
“Are there any soldiers in the tower?” the captain asked, via his translator.
Kurosh swallowed, trying to stay calm. “No,” he said. Then he corrected himself, “Well, there is one, but he’s dead.”
The captain stared at Kurosh a little while, as if determining whether or not he could trust him. Finally, he said, “All Zends tell the truth, do they not?”
“Indeed, they do. And if they do not, then they are not Zendish at all.”
“By that logic then, do you consider yourself a Zend?”
“I do indeed, sir.”
The captain nodded, apparently satisfied. He then turned to address two of his men by name and pointed to the other tower on the neighbouring hill, no doubt instructing them to go examine it. The soldiers obeyed immediately, riding at a gallop away from the circle and off toward the tower.
The captain then gestured for Kurosh and Babar to follow him, then mounted back up and set off toward the nearest hill whereupon stood their tower. The Zendish corpse-bearers didn’t see they had much of a choice in the matter and they trailed his camel on foot through a gap in the ranks. Presently, they were joined by the interpreter, back atop his own camel.
As they reached the bottom of the hill and began to climb, Babar looked out at the riders approaching the other tower.
“What will happen to Daryush and Arshad?” he whispered.
Kurosh glanced over at those same riders, then at the ones in front of him. “I am more worried what would happen to us, my friend.”
Babar fell quiet then, presumably thinking the same thing.
Both the captain and his interpreter had a spear, and a short sickle-sword dangling from either belt. Kurosh and Babar were unarmed. Not that a weapon would do either of them any good – they didn’t know how to fight. And they weren’t fast enough to outrun a camel. All they could do was follow, and pray.
“If I might ask,” Kurosh said, about halfway up the hill, “what has brought you here, to our land?”
The interpreter was offended by his boldness, and did not relay the question until the captain asked to hear it. When he had been told, the captain looked down over his shoulder and studied the Zendish captive.
He then faced forward and began to speak at length, pausing to allow the interpreter to do his job. “We are Kemites,” said the captain. “We come in the name of Bast, the Dead God, the Buried God. The sun who is soon to be risen. There is no god but he. Under command of the Falcon King, your people will submit to Bast or they will die. For you see, I bring the men who desire death as much as the Zend desire life.”
Kurosh frowned. “I am sorry, sir. I do not understand.”
“Our god dwells in the land below. In the Pit, where the Shades of men are gathered to him for eternity. We long for nothing more than to be gathered to our god, and we will gladly die in service of him.”
“Then why not simply take your own life?” Kurosh said, before he could stop himself. “Will you not then join your god sooner?”
The interpreter glared at him, but when his questions were relayed, the captain gave a weak smile.
“In time, we will all be joined to him. You and I alike. But it is not for us to decide when we do so. That is up to him, and him alone. While we live, it is our sole purpose to establish his kingdom on earth, so that he might rule both the land below and this land as well.”
“The land above?” Kurosh said, venturing a guess.
The captain shook his head. “This is the land between. The land above is ruled by the great enemy of our god – his brother, Pethor, who cast him down into the underworld and stole their father’s throne. Once Bast has conquered this land, he will lead his armies on the sky palace of his brother and take his final revenge. Then it will be done.”
Kurosh didn’t know what to make of that, and neither did Babar. From what he knew of the Kem, they worshipped many deities. He had even heard stories of people being sacrificed upon the altar of a sun god. Apparently now, they were loyal to just the one.
At the top of the hill and the base of the tower, the captain dismounted and his interpreter followed suit. They looked around for some place to tie their camels, but there was no hitch to be found. The locals had no need of one.
In the end, they resolved to stake their camels to the ground and the captain took a moment to survey the tower. He studied the staircase hugging its outer wall – the only apparent means of entrance and exit. He heard the thin, screeching call of a vulture and looked up to see a number of them circling the tower.
A tower both sacred and cursed. He rubbed his chin, thought about it.
“What is this tower for?” he said.
Kurosh hesitated, then explained, “It is the place we take our dead.”
The captain frowned once it had been relayed to him. He discussed briefly with his interpreter, and Kurosh wasn’t sure if that meant the captain didn’t believe him or he did and was troubled by it. In any case, he soon gestured for the Zends to lead the way up the stairs.
Neither man moved to obey.
The captain frowned and repeated his order, but Kurosh said, “I mean no disrespect, sir, but only my companion and I are permitted to enter the tower. Anyone else who does is likely to incur some form of divine wrath.”
Once this was translated for the captain, his eyes bulged with indignation and he lowered his spear until its point was level with Kurosh’s nose. The corpse-bearer felt himself go a little cross-eyed as he looked down the flat, steel blade and the wooden shaft beyond. He followed it all the way to the captain’s hand and his hard eyes, which had seen death before and would not hesitate to do so again.
The captain said, “I have protection of Bast and need not fear the wrath of false gods.”
So up they went.
Kurosh led the way, and after him was Babar, then the captain, then his interpreter. The Kemites stuck close to the wall as they climbed, fearful of the ever-widening gap between them and the earth. They were Riverfolk, after all, used to being low to the earth, amidst the reeds and the fertile soil of their country. Kurosh supposed that he would be equally terrified if his job did not necessitate him making the trip on such a regular basis.
Still, he couldn’t help but smile a little as the Kemish men swapped panicked words behind him. At one point, he looked back and saw them pressing their bodies against the tower wall and taking slow, measured steps.
“Do not worry, you’ll be alright,” Kurosh said. “Provided the steps hold.” He paused and pretended to contemplate something. “Though, they are in need of repair. In fact, I’m quite surprised one or two of them haven’t given out yet, come to think of it.”
This only led to more fearful chatter, and Kurosh looked back at Babar to see if he was smiling too. But he saw no smile – only pale, wide-eyed terror – and they climbed the rest of the way in silence.
As they neared the door, the smell of death came down upon them like a misting rain. So foul was the odour that the captain covered up his mouth and nose with the tail of his head cloth. His interpreter did the same.
No doubt they were used to the smell of rotting flesh on battlefields, but nothing perhaps as putrid as it was here. Kurosh didn’t know how anything could be. Even he had
to squint and scrunch up his nose, and guessed that his friend wore a similar expression.
He came to the top of the stairs and stopped. He touched his palm to the smooth, wooden door – a strange thing for him, occupied as his hands often were with the bodies of the dead. Normally, he would open the door with his back, otherwise Babar would if he were going first, and they would only lay hands upon the door to exit the tower.
Now, as he prepared to enter unburdened, Kurosh felt as if something terrible was about to happen. As if each entry to the tower necessitated the payment of a body, and if they did not bring one already dead, then one of them would have to take its place.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said, turning back to the captain. “Are you sure you want to violate the highest of our laws?”
The captain frowned when this was relayed to him. “Open the door right now, or both you and your companion will be cast from this very tower.”
Kurosh looked down at the craggy hillside against which his body would be broken. He was not certain that the fall would kill him – on darker days, he had contemplated making such a leap voluntarily. Only the shame and agony of surviving had stopped him, and the thought of it now was enough to make him comply.
Kurosh pushed the door open and stepped inside through a wall of heat and stench and to the sound of buzzing flies. Babar followed him in and they stood to the side so the Kemites could enter with their spears and shields raised, and behold what was contained within the tower.
They realised very quickly that there were no enemies here. Kurosh had at least been honest about that. He had been honest about everything, it turned out.
The floor beneath their feet was an immense platform set lower than the height of the walls and open to the sky. It was ringed around a wide central pit and on the platform were bodies.
Dozens of bodies. Maybe over a hundred.
Bodies in various states of decay and presently being picked clean by vultures, who far outnumbered the dead. Some of them had already been eaten, so only their bones remained, while others were ignored in favour of fresher meat, and were in the grisly process of liquefying. Soft and bloated, the skin seemed to melt off their bones like wax off a candle, exposing the teeth of wide-open mouths and ribcages jutting up through tears in the paper-thin membrane. Their skin a hideous mottled green or otherwise red or black. The eyes quite literally hollow, empty sockets watching an empty sky.
And everywhere, the buzzing of flies. The writhing of maggots in every putrid orifice, feeding and pulsating like one single organism. Everywhere, nature was working to strip the flesh from these bones until they were safe to cast down into the central well.
The platform was divided into three concentric circles – men on the outer ring, women in the middle and children closest to the pit. The whole surface sloped gently down toward that ossuary, where the sun-bleached bones would gather and eventually crumble into dust. Rainwater would then wash the slab clean of fluids oozed from the festering corpses, aided by shallow channels cut into the platform’s surface.
Down below, the accumulated residue of human lives was filtered through layers of sandstone, charcoal and sand. The water then passed into underground wells, each with their own base filters, so that when it seeped out through those, it was perfectly clean again.
Up above, however, nothing was clean. The bodies had been stripped of their clothes by Kurosh and Babar, so no part of their rotting forms were hidden. Naked as the day they were born, leaving the world in much the same way they had entered it.
It would appear to the uninitiated, Kurosh thought, like something out of a gruesome nightmare. A fever dream made real. And indeed, once he’d had a good look at the place, the interpreter staggered backwards on weak knees and retched violently against the wall. He stood there, doubled over, heaving the contents of his stomach to mingle with those of the dead.
The captain, on the other hand, just stood there. He had seen men die and he had seen men dead. He had seen women and children dead. He had seen people burnt and crushed and hacked and drowned.
But this was something else entirely.
Kurosh and Babar had been staring at the captain, awaiting his response. When it came, it came quickly.
The captain dropped his spear and shield and turned with his hand raised and Kurosh instinctively moved back. A nearby body caught his heel and he tripped, falling over one corpse and onto another. Thankfully, it was one of the newer arrivals and hadn’t yet decomposed too horribly.
Kurosh rolled off the man and looked up. He saw Babar’s feet an inch off the ground, kicking, the captain’s hand around his throat and holding him up.
His first thought was that the captain was strong. Impossibly strong. He wasn’t a big enough man to be able to lift another clean off the ground with one hand.
His hand...
There was something strange about his hand. He seemed to be suddenly wearing an iron glove that Kurosh hadn’t noticed before, on him or any Kemite. A glove that seemed to give him the strength of ten men.
He would not have believed it if he hadn’t borne witness with his own eyes, and figured the captain must have pulled on his magic glove as they climbed the tower, in preparation for such an act. But then Kurosh began to suspect that he wasn’t wearing a glove at all. It was too tight, too well-fitted. It looked too much like a bare hand painted to resemble steel, and in fact, it was. Not painted, but certainly bare. And not a hand made of flesh and bone, but solid steel halfway to the elbow.
Babar’s eyes bulged along with the veins in his neck and face as the vice-handed demon choked the life out of him. He stared into the corpse-bearer’s eyes with contempt, his jaw clenched and trembling with rage.
Kurosh was about to get up and wrest his friend from the demon’s horrible grasp when Babar suddenly burst into flames.
Kurosh froze.
He didn’t move forward, didn’t move back. Just froze where he’d fallen on the body of a dead man. He heard Babar scream as the fire ate away his skin and muscle, as it boiled his blood and cooked his bones. He watched his friend thrash wildly, kicking and clawing at the captain, but the captain did not move either.
He just stood there, staring at the burning man, holding him off the ground with a hand made of steel and seeming almost to savour it. The avenging of some nameless sin the corpse-bearer had committed.
Then the captain turned, and with all his strength, hurled Babar across the platform and into the pit, where he vanished, flaming, from view. It was a mighty throw, an impossible throw – far beyond the strength of any man. Kurosh could still hear the screams echoing up the sheer walls of the hole, and then there was a thud, and then silence.
Merciful silence.
Kurosh turned back toward the captain and found him already starting to calm. Starting to regain control of himself and perhaps even regretting the action he had taken. His hand was flesh and bone once more as he collected the weapons he had dropped.
He glanced impassively at Kurosh, then did another sweep of the platform and said something to himself, perhaps a prayer. Then he turned and left, the tiger-skin flapping behind him like a cape.
By now, the interpreter had steadied himself and was standing by the door with his spear raised and pointed, albeit shakily, at Kurosh. He gestured with his head for the corpse-bearer to follow the captain down.
But Kurosh, his eyes wet and his face pale, and not seeming to care anymore whether he lived or died, scrambled down the sloping platform toward the edge of the pit. He felt the sticky blood and human gruel between his fingers and he had to stop once to retch beside a woman he had put there only three days prior.
He swatted flies and flapping vultures, peering down into the hole where the charred remains of his friend lay spread-eagled on a bed of bones.
Nothing to say he was the man Kurosh had kn
own. No face, no skin, no clothes. Nothing but the fact that he had seen the man burn with his own two eyes.
Kurosh looked down at his friend laying there, looking back at him. Looking back at him without eyes – only black, hollow craters where they once had been. Looking skyward like all the bodies arrayed above him, and soon to join him in the pit. His friend who had imagined so many different lives for himself and never lived any of them, who had stayed in this accursed place purely because Kurosh refused to leave.
Had he left when Babar wanted him to, they never would have been here when these riders showed up. They might have been drinking in a brothel somewhere, laughing and gambling without a care in the world. They might have been sailing across the sea or riding through a forest to the sound of birds.
They might have found themselves in a similar situation – Babar lying dead on a battlefield somewhere and Kurosh weeping over him. But even then, it would have been on his own terms. Not here, not now.
The interpreter had not tried to chase him through the mass of mouldering flesh, standing as he did by the only point of ingress and egress. He had resolved to wait until the corpse-bearer returned, and when he did, covered in the reek and filth of death, the interpreter did not harm him. He did not skewer the man upon his spear as the man expected and perhaps, hoped for.
He might have felt sympathy for the Zendish heathen. He might have been repulsed by him. Whatever his motive, the interpreter didn’t appear to have the stomach for killing, nor the inclination to add to the multitude of corpses festooning the tower-top. He gestured once again for Kurosh to follow the captain and he did.
When they reached the hilltop down below, the captain was already leading his camel away from the tower. He caught sight of Kurosh and halted, waiting while his translator brought the corpse-bearer to him.
The captain glanced back up at where the vultures were circling overhead or otherwise perched on the rim of the tower. They could pick a body clean within a matter of hours, provided there were enough of them. And here, he assumed, there was never any shortage. Here, they were always guaranteed a meal.