Vasquez tossed the mooring rope into the boat and joined the others up the beach, leaving her uncle to mind his precious Mermaid alone.
Sinzar had once sailed with her father, Jando Vasquez, until a kraken did for him, and Sinzar could see him in her, not only in the twinkle in her eyes and the olive Castigon-cast of her skin, but also in her stubbornness and dependability.
The Captain adjusted the buckled belt across his chest that held his cured leather shoulder-guard in place, over his left-hand shoulder, and tested the scabbards of various knives and other blades – from his scimitar to a stiletto throwing-blade – weapons collected from myriad cultures across the world, a collection started when he joined Captain Bautista’s crew aboard the Daggerfysh.
‘Is everyone ready?’ he asked, eliciting nods and grunts from the party. ‘Kaseem?’
Kaseem, with a handful of dust in his fist, touched it first to his lips, then to his forehead, and back to his lips again, before letting the sand trickle through his fingers back onto the beach. His offering to the island and the Earth Mother made, he heaved his pack onto his back, adjusting the shoulder straps to balance the bundle that included digging tools and a tent, and, under its weight, staggered up the shifting sands to join the rest of the party. ‘Ready.’
‘Then we’d best not delay any longer. Let’s bag ourselves a nice little nest egg.’
* * *
As soon as Captain Sinzar’s party passed from the beach into the forest, they found themselves enveloped by a preternatural green gloom. The susurrus of the surf was replaced by the echoing cries of unseen birds and the hooting of gibbons hidden by the canopy of leaves high above.
The seven sailors, with Sinzar leading and the Shark bringing up the rear, trekked through the sweltering jungle – only Lagan having stayed behind to mind the boat – following what the Captain took to be animal tracks through the undergrowth. They hacked at the overgrown vegetation with machetes and hand-axes, keeping their swords and sabres sheathed, wanting to keep carefully honed and oiled blades clean of sap and vegetable matter, and most importantly sharp, for when those same weapons might be all that stood between them and a swift demise.
Within minutes they were drenched with sweat, their clothes sticking to their skin in the humid atmosphere.
Fat flies droned past, their bulbous bodies like iridescent jewels, their vibrating wings slivers of stained glass. Kaseem batted the insects away, both anxious and irritated in equal measure, while Haroun just sniggered.
‘Look at them!’ Kaseem snapped, already on the defensive. ‘They’re massive! You don’t want to be stung by one of them or you’ll end up with a boil as big as an ostrich egg!’
‘You think they’re big?’ Haroun laughed. ‘I’ve battled hornets as big as eagles, with stings like sabres.’
‘As multitudinous as the grains of sand upon the beach are, the swivings I do not give for your past feats of bravado,’ he muttered under this breath.
* * *
Sinzar eventually called a halt at a spot where a vast tree, its buttressed trunk having rotted away to nothing inside, had fallen in the forest, creating a hole in the overarching canopy and allowing sunlight to spear down to the forest floor. As his crew thirstily refreshed themselves from their canteens, Sinzar took his machete to the knot of ancient vines smothering an ancient carved stone, chopping the persistent tendrils free of their tenacious hold on the statue that was revealed beneath.
Time and the jungle had both taken their toll, but it was still possible to make out the exaggerated features of a great ape carved into the rectangular pillar.
Scrimshaw assiduously checked the sweat-damp parchment of the map again, tracing the path they had followed with a finger, to the scratchy illustration of what might have been a gorilla. ‘We’re still on the right track,’ he said, and a minute later the treasure-hunters continued on their way.
From the jungle-claimed stone ape, the path brought the explorers to the edge of a precipitous gorge, the sandstone cliffs gripped by the roots of more trees. A little way further on, in times past another giant tree had fallen, the liana-draped trunk now bridging the void between the towering cliffs. The party cautiously crossed the tree-bridge as a river thundered by far below, hidden by the spray-mist and shadows lurking at the bottom of the ravine.
With the party safely across, Sinzar resumed his relentless march through the oppressive forest, the air thick with the complex, layered scents of bird-eating pitcher plants, the peaty compost smell of decaying vegetation, and the droning of the ever-present overgrown insect life.
And then the Captain chopped through a last obscuring veil of vegetation and emerged from the trees into a clearing, from which rose what was left of a vine-choked temple. It seemed as if the ruins had grown from the bare escarpment of a rocky promontory, and indeed, in places, it was hard to tell where the rocky highlands of the island ended and the fractured, dressed stone blocks of the temple began. Twisted creepers, some as thick as Taboo was broad, also did their best to obscure the boundary between the endeavours of the ancient people whose gods must once have claimed dominion of this place and the mountain. But those same gods had not outlived the Earth Mother and Father Forest.
Yet the memory of them remained. The dressed blocks had been arranged to create the impression of an ape-like face, its mouth open in a roar of primal rage, the gaping maw forming the entrance to a tunnel that led into the ruins and to whatever secrets lay hidden within.
A profusion of low-growing succulents covered the floor of the clearing and beyond them, where lush vegetation gave way to cracked and parched earth, someone had staked out a line of crudely-planted posts. Adorned with the fleshless skulls of humans, primates and even serpentmen, these posts marked the boundary between the vibrant living jungle and the deathly dustiness of the temple ruins.
Not even the presence of the flesh-picked skulls caused Sinzar to stop, now that he had the forgotten shrine in his sights, and he set off across the clearing towards the open mouth of the ape, certain now that the treasure they sought lay within. But it was then that the scowling faces appeared between the trees, teeth bared in ape-like grimaces, and the indigenous population of the island made themselves known to the interlopers.
They emerged from the forest as if they were the forest, shadows taking on physical form as they slipped from between the root boles of towering trees and stepped into the clearing, growing arms and legs as they did so. One moment there was no one there and then they were, as if they had always been, a line of mud-painted warriors, wielding branch-formed clubs and arm-lengths of wood studded with napped flint teeth. In this manner they barred the explorers’ route to the ruins.
The whites of their eyes and teeth flashing in the sudden sunlight, amidst mud-smeared faces, made them appear even more threatening, and yet the threat they posed wasn’t any worse than a hundred such encounters the crew had endured between them on a dozen voyages within the so-called Ghost Archipelago.
The mystical chain of moving islands was littered with the remnants of once mighty empires, now reduced to isolated island-bound pockets of de-evolved humanity. Civilisation had reigned here, in some bygone era, with a golden rod, but where there had once been kingdoms and hegemonies, now all that remained was all that ever remained when the veneer of civilisation was scraped away, and those relics of cultures long gone were as red in tooth and claw as the wild beasts that also called the Isles home.
A figure emerged from the line of islanders, his arms bound with animal skin, and wearing a crude mask carved from tree bark and clearly supposed to make him look even more like a primate than he already did. This ape-man capered about in front of his fellows, hooting and shrieking and beating his chest in mimicry of an old silverback, directing his aggressive display at Sinzar’s crew.
‘Alright then, time to turn back,’ Haroun said, turning on his heel.
‘Are you serious?’ Kaseem exclaimed in genuine surprise.
‘Of course not,
you old goat,’ the rogue grinned, unsheathing his sword and turning to face the tribesmen’s spears with Castigon steel bared. ‘I wouldn’t miss this for all the gold in the Archipelago!’
‘Would you settle for a share of whatever lies within that?’ Sinzar pointed with his drawn scimitar at the gaping ape-mouth entrance to the temple ruins.
‘Go on then,’ said Haroun with a wry smile.
‘Very well, then what are we waiting for?’ said the Captain, his weapon raised high, feeling the blood quickening in his veins. ‘Do you want to live forever?’
With that he led the charge against the tribesmen.
The tribesmen responded in kind, racing towards Sinzar’s band on short, stubby legs, running with the gait of apes rather than that of men.
Forged steel met stone-tipped spears and flint-set clubs, as the primal, territorial fury of the tribe clashed with a trained body of skirmishers. Captain Sinzar’s crew might not enjoy the benefits of a formal military schooling but they had fought for their lives, side by side, on enough occasions that they worked well together as a fighting unit, and would even give a Drichean warrior cadre a run for their money. It really was perennially fascinating how motivating the desire for gold or the need to save your own skin could be.
Sinzar met the most eager among the savages, those with the most to prove to their fellows – either that they were worthy of joining the warrior elite of the tribe or perhaps to prove that they still deserved to join the next foray into enemy territory, and not be left alone to guard their womenfolk. But all they proved that day was that they were no match for the blade of Heritor Sinzar.
To his left, Taboo met the charge of another furious tribesman, snatching the warrior’s spear from his grasp and hurling it aside, before picking the man up, raising him above his head, and throwing him against the trunk of the nearest tree.
To Sinzar’s right, Scrimshaw met the flailing clubs of the primitives with a fencer’s grace and skill, dancing out of range of their frantic attacks before leaping back in with a lethal thrust of his own.
Manu met the tribesmen’s attacks with a bestial ferocity. Out of the corner of his eye, Sinzar saw an islander stumble back, screaming in shock and pain, a hand clamped to his throat, dark blood spurting from between his fingers with every beat of his panicked heart.
The Captain turned his attention back to the thick of the fighting occurring around him, and it was in that moment that another opportunistic primitive almost did for him; it was only his lightning-fast reflexes that saved him. He twisted at the waist, the thrusting spear passing in front of his face.
But Vaquez had his back, just as her father used to have his back when they sailed together. She ducked in under the tribesman’s thrust, her twin swords slicing through the air before her and opening the warrior’s belly just as effectively, splashing the thickly growing succulents with his viscera.
While the others engaged the enemy head-on, Kaseem hung back from the fray, taking out any who tried to encircle the party with well-aimed stones, taken from the bag that hung at his waist. He launched them from his open palm with nothing more than a thought and a gesture, but every one of the rock-hard projectiles found their target, tribesmen dropping left, right and centre as the polished pebbles struck unprotected temples with skull-cracking force.
The treasure-hunters were outnumbered at least five to one, even though they had already felled a dozen primitives between them.
Haroun suddenly cried out and his legs buckled beneath him. A descending flint-studded club had found his left leg, the razor-sharp stones opening the flesh of his calf as effectively as a butcher cleaving a joint of meat.
‘Fall back!’ Haroun cried between teeth clenched in a rictus of pain. ‘Fall back!’
‘No!’ Sinzar countered him. ‘Don’t fall back! We keep pushing forward. We can better defend ourselves inside the ruins.’
With their captain’s encouragement, the crew pushed on, forcing the thinning line of warrior tribesmen back until, with a last, almighty effort, they broke through, Taboo dragging Haroun with him as the treasure-hunters crossed the boundary demarcated by the skull-mounted stakes.
The instant they crossed the line, the indigenous islanders broke off their attack, casting uncertain looks at one another and the retreating explorers, fear writ large on their faces for the first time since Sinzar’s crew had trespassed within their ancestral lands. They began to retreat across the clearing, and just as quickly as they had appeared from the forest they melted back into the jungle, taking the dead and dying with them.
* * *
Gasping for breath, Captain Sinzar’s treasure-hunters took shelter within the cool shadows of the ape’s-mouth archway, Taboo’s belly fat rippling as he dropped onto his rump on the dusty ground beside the groaning Haroun.
Kaseem kept watch, searching the treeline for any sign that the primitives might be about to return, convinced that the warriors would be back at any moment, having overcome their fear of whatever consequences they imagined would follow as a result of the strangers’ desecration of the temple complex.
Manu kept watch from the other side of the arch. The look on his face wasn’t one of anxious anticipation but hungry expectation, a sinister glint in his almost white-less eyes and a wide smile on his face that exposed the sharpened points of his teeth. Without blinking, Manu wiped a hand across bloody lips.
Kaseem had witnessed what the Shark had done to one wretched islander and couldn’t help wondering if he had developed a taste for their blood and was hoping to drink of it for a second time.
Behind them, Haroun continued to groan as Vasquez did her best to tend to his leg and dress the wound, while the silent Taboo held him still. Scrimshaw was distractedly dabbing at a gash that had been opened in his shoulder.
‘Any sign?’ Sinzar asked, suddenly at Kaseem’s side.
‘Not yet,’ the Earth Warden said warily, not wanting to tempt whatever deities might still lurk within the ruins to prove him otherwise.
‘Then let’s get moving,’ came the Captain’s pragmatic reply. ‘Haroun, can you walk?’
The former street-rat winced, as he tried to stand, and let out a bitter gasp of pain. ‘No,’ he moaned.
‘Never mind, Taboo can help you,’ Captain Sinzar decreed.
And then they were on their way again, Taboo supporting Haroun, as he limped on, favouring his right leg. The explorers followed the high-and-wide passage as it wound into the temple and up the rugged peak from which the edifice appeared to have hauled itself, Sinzar leading the way, Kaseem’s pulse thumping in anticipation as something called to him from the heart of the ruins.
* * *
Sinzar led the party through the temple, the tunnel they were following seeming to wind up towards the summit of the peak, suggesting to him that whoever had built the temple had merely added a layer of dressed stone to either a natural cleft in the rock, or one rough-hewn from the crag by eager, pious hands.
It was never truly dark in the tunnel either, light spilling in from above as well as from the ape-mouth entrance below, and even through fissures where probing vines and lianas had pushed their way between the slumped stones that formed the ceiling. And by that half-light he could see images of apes rise in bas-relief from the more ornatelydressed stones. In some scenes, the apes appeared to be waging war against their enemies, the monkey-men clad in armour and high-domed helms, while their more human foes fled in fear. Further on the humans were shown prostrating themselves before a huge ape seated upon a mighty throne, either in adoration or because they had been subjugated into slavery.
The tunnel eventually opened out onto a large courtyard, the hot sun beating down on the stone-flagged space, while the hooting of gibbons and croaking bird cries echoed from the sculpted stone walls. It looked to Sinzar as if the courtyard might be cruciform in shape, with alcoves and transepts hidden away out of sight that would only be revealed when he advanced further into the space. Set in a geometric pattern arou
nd the shrine enclosure were carved stone columns, some of them over thirty-feet tall and not unlike the vine-clad, time-worn way marker they had come upon in the forest.
Everywhere the angry faces of apes glared at the treasure-hunters with accusatory stony stares, mouths locked in silent roars of rage that humans should dare infiltrate this holy sanctuary.
But the temple was not the glorious edifice it might once have been. The courtyard was littered with all manner of detritus, everything from fallen masonry to denuded tree branches, drifts of dry leaves, bones picked clean of flesh, and what looked like crushed pieces of plasterwork or shattered marble bowls. The courtyard was open to the sky, exposing the explorers to the unkind attentions of the blazing noonday sun, but the towering pillars and the tumbled stones gave Sinzar the impression that the space might once have had a roof, or at least more of a covering than it had now, but one that had fallen in long ago. Not all of the supporting columns were still intact. Some lay on the courtyard floor, their disassembled component parts now looking like the broken vertebrae of some colossal stone giant.
And yet, despite all the damage, detritus and decay, there was still one object that dominated the space, leaving Sinzar and the others in no doubt as to which lonely god still claimed dominion of this island.
The statue had to be twenty-five feet tall at least, both terrifying and awe-inspiring in its aspect, being, as it was, that of a giant gorilla. The great ape was standing on its hind-legs, its bunched fists raised above its head, as if it was ready to bring them crashing down and flatten the trespassers at any moment. The blunt fangs that filled its mouth were of ivory, while it glowered down at the explorers, its brow knitted in stone-locked anger, through glittering emerald eyes.
Haroun whistled through his teeth upon catching sight of the sparkling green gems, the agony of his injured leg abruptly forgotten.
‘By all the stars in heaven!’ Kaseem exclaimed.
‘They’re huge!’ Vasquez gasped.
‘And worth a small fortune,’ Scrimshaw added, gazing into the ape-god’s eyes as if hypnotised.
Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago: Tales of the Lost Isles Page 9