MOTHER DEATH
The heaviest burdens are carried in the heart.
(Plainsman proverb)
‘ We’re unarmed,’ Carnelian said into the darkness that he sensed was filling with bodies. ‘We’ve come to offer ourselves up to you, willingly.’ He had not managed to keep his voice steady. The scuffling grew louder. He could smell their sweat, their filthiness, the foulness of their breath that seemed a contagion he wanted to shrink from. He stood his ground, however, drawing what reassurance there was in feeling Fern against him, but he did not fool himself. He was afraid. If this was the fulfilment of his dream, it was not how he had imagined it. What had he done? How could he have brought them to such a squalid end?
The scuffling ceased. The smell of fear was sharp in his nostrils. At first he thought it was rising from his own body, or from Fern’s, but then he realized it laced the stench wafting towards them. This sharpened the panic to an insistent throb in his temples. Frightened, the sartlar could be as dangerous as raveners.
Sudden light stabbed his eyes. He threw his arm up to shield them. Gasps were followed by the sound of the creatures in the darkness recoiling. Carnelian lowered his arm slowly, squinting. He could make them out, a shapeless mass crowding the chamber; all hair and rags. A single crooked, bony arm holding aloft the light. He glanced round at Fern. Each saw the other’s fear. The skin around Fern’s eyes creased. Carnelian read this as a sign of acceptance. It calmed his heart a little. Disengaging from him, he turned back to the sartlar and raised his arms, pressing the wrists together in a sign of submission. ‘We’ll not fight you.’
Heads lowered, the sartlar shuffled closer, some edging along the walls to surround them. Carnelian could not help searching through their manes for their eyes, seeking the light of any humanity that might have descended to them from their Quyan forebears, wanting to find that part of them that was like him; but they ducked as his gaze fell on them, wincing as if he were hurting them.
Suddenly, with a shriek, one of them lunged towards him, swinging at him. Carnelian raised his arm, but not fast enough. Something hard crashed into his temple. Next thing he was on his knees, groaning. Fern’s anguished cry made Carnelian try to focus. He became aware of them pounding Fern with their clubs. He gaped at him falling to the ground bleeding, certain he must be dead. A groan from Fern caused Carnelian’s paralysis of grief to melt into tears. He fought down rage and an urge to violence and allowed his arms to be wrenched behind him. He bore the cruel binding as if his forearms had been someone else’s. He watched them trussing up Fern. What hope was left in Carnelian died as he saw them tie a rope around Fern’s neck, so that he hardly cared when one was put around his own.
Sartlar shoved and yanked them down the ramps like sacks of roots. It was easier once they tumbled out onto the road. Then they were marching, stumbling at each tug of the ropes around their necks, crashing to their knees to be jerked up again. Remotely, Carnelian remembered his last slavery upon this same road. This time there could be no Fern riding to the rescue.
Lurching along, Carnelian fell against one of the sartlar, who threw him off. They had come to a halt. The sartlar growled words to each other he could not make out. Though he could just see their shapes around him, it was their stench that gave them a more solid presence. There was a sound of footfalls running off along the faint road. Trying to make out the runner, he found instead a black mass cut out from the starry sky. At first he could not imagine what it might be, then he knew. Half off the road, what else could it be but the Iron House?
A slackening of the rope at his neck distracted him. He sensed the sartlar around him relaxing and took the opportunity to shuffle towards where he guessed Fern to be. His shoulder touched something that shuddered, but then pressed back against him. As their point of contact warmed, Carnelian felt a little safer. His gaze returned to the malevolent mass of the Iron House. Was that odour of blood oozing from its iron skin? He gave a shudder and looked away, soothing his fear with the view into the water below the road, with its dusting of stars. He became aware its southern margin was dull. Squinting, he could see nothing but darkness in that direction. A susurration came across the water as if they were near the sea. He shivered, turned back to the brooding blackness of the Iron House. That the flood should have reached here and no further seemed an evil omen. Then he remembered something and turned to search for the edge of the road near him. Sure enough, a curve of shadow rose there, so close that, had his arm been free, he imagined he could reach out and touch it. It was the upper edge of Molochite’s fallen standard leaning against the road. It had given them shelter the first time they had made love. He chose to see in this a more hopeful omen.
‘Follow,’ said a voice in the darkness. Carnelian had heard the footfalls approaching. The rope jerking at his throat forced a groan. Through the rage surging into his head he was aware Fern behind him was crying out. There was a struggle.
‘Just you,’ said the sartlar.
Carnelian’s anger froze to fear. He would never see Fern again! It was no good. They had both chosen this. He let go of hope and followed the sartlar into the darkness.
A torch flared. Its light revealed a shallow slope of sharp-edged undulations, one side of which was wedged into the road. He recognized the hinged, partially lowered flight of steps that gave entry into the Iron House. Its leaning wall of scales faded up into the night. Becoming aware of its bulk haloed by stars, for a moment he was certain it was toppling towards him. Someone was behind him. The bindings on his arms fell loose. He brought his arms forward, rubbing at his wrists as he felt the prickle of blood returning to his fingers. He was shoved forward. A sartlar holding aloft a torch was negotiating the steps. The man seemed to be leaning so much to one side it looked as if he must fall. Carnelian followed, slipping his feet into the angle of the steps.
The torchlight defined the leaning rectangle of the great doorway. The darkness of the Iron House swallowed much of the light so that Carnelian stumbled several times reaching the sloping floor within the doorway. The tang of old conflagration made him remember what had happened here. To his right the sartlar was climbing a flight of steps that leaned towards him precipitously. Carnelian followed, edging towards the wall so that his feet would not be in the sartlar’s shadow.
Concentrating on not slipping from the angled steps, he was not immediately aware of the other odour. Dry, dusty with a sickly meaty tang. Slowly he came up into cavernous space that seemed partially open to the sky. The floor sloped up towards a wall, but the light was moving the other way. Carnelian turned and looked down the slope of the throne-hall and stared. The place was crowded. On either side of the raised central walkway, dark figures packed together leaned with the slope of the chamber.
It was their stillness that convinced him these were not living men. In the wavering light of the torch that was moving steadily away from him, he saw what seemed expressions shifting as the shadows ran across the hollows of their faces. Sunken cheeks, gnarled dark skin. At first he thought they must be barbarians of some kind, but then he realized how, even standing in the pits on either side of the walkway, they dwarfed the sartlar shambling through their midst. Chosen, then, in some way mummified. He became aware that those he could see had empty pits for eyes. Scared, he hurried down the slope after the edge of the torchlight aware of the corpses’ stares.
By the time he reached the steps that rose to the throne dais, the sartlar was already climbing them. The light stopped moving and the man returned down the steps without the torch. Carnelian stepped aside to let him pass. He listened to the footsteps receding behind him. Soon an eerie silence descended, made thicker by the delicate guttering of the torch up on the dais. The shadows of the crowd of Standing Dead slipped up and down the walls as if they were bobbing in some solemn dance. He began to climb the steps. Slowly the throne came into sight. The two gods rose behind it, their faces sinister and glowering. He stepped up onto the dais that sloped down to the throne, empty sav
e for a mound of discarded rags. Carnelian’s heart jumped as a voice spoke from their midst.
‘Master.’
Among the rags, Carnelian located a pair of eyes; eyes that were gazing at him from within the ring scar of a deep branding. A face whose wrinkles seemed a continuation of the folds in the sacking that clung to the head. Carnelian was trapped in a waking dream, gazing upon that red face.
The eyes widened. ‘You?’
He stared back. ‘Kor?’ Could this be the same sartlar woman? He tried to remember when he would have last seen her. Had she even made it as far as the Leper Valleys? He peered at the mutilated face beneath the coating of red ochre. The obscene nasal cavity in her skull had widened, but her eyes had a glint of cunning that was familiar. Was it a vestige of the Quyan humanity millennia of subjugation had crushed from her kind?
He froze. Unlikely as it was that she was here, it was his dreams that had brought him to her. Was it possible that she was the answer to all the riddles; the factor missing from the calculations of the Wise? Was hers the single mind behind the swarming sartlar? Her red face was certainly an echo of his dreams and there she sat upon the throne of the Gods. They stood behind her, Father and Son. Her face marked for the Mother, she completed the Triad. He sounded again the Quyan word for death, ‘kor’. He swallowed past a parched throat. This, then, was where he must offer himself in exchange for the children. He sought mercy in her face, but all he could see in its ruin was a leathery indifference. Any life there had been in her eyes had been murdered by what she had seen.
‘Why have you come here?’ she said.
Carnelian tried to find something artful to say, but only the truth came out. ‘I’m following a dream.’
Her brows eclipsed her eyes as she frowned. Her lower lip consumed the upper. Carnelian wanted to catch her emotion before it sank beyond reach. Frantically, he tried to sort images in his mind. She was slipping away from him. ‘The dream came…’ he said, saw her red face, read the branding, ‘from the earth.’
As her face uncrumpled, the brand became circular again. ‘All are clay in Her hands.’
Enough tension left Carnelian’s chest for him to be able to take a deep breath. It was a start. He regarded her, trying to find the next step. ‘What brought you here?’
Kor squinted at him. ‘You.’
Carnelian thought he could see a path. ‘You mean, because I freed the sartlar from the land?’
Kor’s mouth sagged open, leaving Carnelian uncertain of his footing. He explained the dream that had led him to free the sartlar. As he spoke her head sank into her chest. He realized something. ‘You didn’t know it was me.’ Why should she? All she could know was that a command had come to her people from a watch-tower.
The sartlar raised her head and Carnelian saw a glinting in the grooves around her missing nose. Was she crying? His shock that she might be made him realize he had still been thinking of her as some kind of animal. It made him angry at himself that, in spite of everything that had happened, he was still that much a Master. However mutilated, this was a woman.
‘Clay in Her hands,’ she said.
Carnelian sensed his news had somehow lightened her burdens. ‘What did you mean… before?’
‘Your blood,’ she said, grimacing away the tears.
‘My blood…?’ He was confused.
She frowned. ‘You don’t understand? We believed you to be the Dead.’
‘The Dead…?’
‘Our Dead, whom the Horned God had led up from the Underworld to enslave the Living.’
Carnelian stared at her. ‘The Masters-?’ Seeping insight overtook his tongue. Her words were a shadowy reflection of the revelations Osidian had given him in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. The same events seen, murkily, from the point of view of the sartlar, from that of the Quyans.
‘When you appeared unmasked…’
As Kor gazed at him in wonder, he glimpsed the child she might once have been.
She squeezed her eyes closed, grimacing again, shaking her head. ‘The monstrosity we imagined you hid behind your masks from shame.’ Then her eyes opened. ‘But such beauty…?’
Carnelian was struck by the irony: those that the beautiful considered monstrous, believing the beautiful monstrous. Of course the sartlar had been right in so many ways.
She was scowling. ‘Clouds darkened my mind. The world had been turned inside out. When you claimed to be angels, we had had no doubt that you lied.’ She appraised Carnelian. ‘You even showed compassion. I came to believe that perhaps it wasn’t you who were cruel, but the overseers and their masters.’ Her blistered lips curled into a sneer. ‘The other Master showed me otherwise.’
Carnelian knew she meant Osidian.
‘He proved to me that your beauty was indeed a lie; that, though you had the power to take on a pleasing form, beneath it you were being consumed by worms. Things became once again as they had always been. And how could the Living ever hope to fight the Dead?’
Understanding broke over Carnelian like an icy wave. ‘My blood.’
From under her brows, Kor regarded him with baleful eyes. ‘I tasted it.’
‘You discovered we were just men.’
Her voice flat, clipped: ‘I discovered you could be killed.’
So much seemed clear to Carnelian then. The purpose of the Law, the Wise, what the true Great Balance had been. He saw in his mind’s eye how the world had whirled into destruction. He was appalled. ‘From a single drop of blood?’
‘It took more than that spark to ignite our rebellion. When I came up to Makar, of those of my people I found there, few believed me. As for our multitudes across the Land, they were beyond my reach. Generations it would’ve taken to pass on this new creed.’
Carnelian saw what he and Osidian had done to make the disaster inevitable. Gathering the sartlar together. Marching them to the heart of the Commonwealth, and there destroying not so much the legions as the Masters’ aura of invincibility.
‘When, in obedience to the Mother, you gathered up Her Children, my creed found many willing listeners.’ Her face became a dead mask. ‘Those who opposed me, we fed upon.’
Carnelian must have shown his disgust, for she lashed out: ‘Does the Master forget who it was taught us to feed on man-flesh?’
Hatred rose in him against the ugly, filthy creature. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You really do not know?’
It was her surprise that tamed him. His hatred was a defence against the realization rising in him with the vomit: that render was sartlar flesh. He struck the floor with his knees, pumped his stomach out in acidic convulsions.
‘So you’ve eaten from the same pot,’ she said, gleefully. ‘Did you really believe it was only the barbarians who paid you flesh tithe?’
Carnelian wiped his mouth, recalling the mounds of render sacs, glimpsing something of the scale of horror she was revealing to him. Looking up he watched her rage cool until she seemed to be wearing a leather mask.
‘I was born in the rendering caves. It was well after I grew into a woman that I first breathed the Mother’s sweet air. Mostly it was the old who were sent down to us, but also “troublemakers”, rebels, any and all who showed any spirit of defiance. The overseers even sent us children.’ Her glassy eyes slid to meet his gaze. ‘We tried to drug them before smashing out their brains with rocks.’ Her nose cavity changed shape. ‘I’m never free of the stench of their cooking.’
Carnelian cradled his stomach, tears and phlegm running together down his face. He withstood the contempt in her eyes.
‘How did you expect us to stay alive on the march to the Mountain? And on what do you imagine we feed now?’
He wiped his eyes, his nose, lost in horror, desperate to find light somewhere. ‘The meat from the dragons?’
Kor stared at him, then threw her head back and let forth a raucous coughing noise he realized was laughter. The convulsions slowed, and she lowered her head, shaking it. ‘That was barel
y enough to provide each of us with one meagre meal. Even the City’s inhabitants only fed us for a single day.’ She frowned. ‘We can’t escape hunger, nor do we wish to. Our Mother’s dying. She’s been dying since you enslaved us. Only our love and care have slowed Her decline. Still, each year She’s given us less.’
‘Surely some of the Land can still be saved?’
Kor glanced at him with a misery beyond sadness. ‘Too late. She turns to dust. Once we’ve consumed what lies here at Her heart, our dust will mix with Hers.’
‘Surely you must want something to survive? What about your children?’
As she turned away, he glimpsed a gleam of madness in her eyes. ‘We consumed them all,’ she whispered. ‘I, their mother, made my people do it. I asked them why they didn’t wish to spare their little ones more suffering.’ She gave him a desperate, furtive glance. ‘I feared they were so tired of killing, of dying, that they might give up, settle down to starve to death or attempt to find survival’ – her huge hands flailed the air – ‘somewhere.’ Her gaze fixed predaciously on Carnelian, her face filled with disgust. ‘So I stoked up their hatred. Now they hate me, but they hate you more.’ She leaned closer and spat words at Carnelian with her filthy breath. ‘We shall all die, but first I’ll rid the world of your cancer.’
She subsided, became just a strange, misshapen, mutilated woman. Carnelian was too weary for strategy and so let his heart speak. ‘But what will be left of that world?’
Her madness abated; Kor gazed at him with human eyes. She shrugged. ‘The lands beyond?’
‘The barbarians…’
Kor shrugged again.
Carnelian put his trust in his certainty that she was a woman, with a woman’s heart. ‘I have their children here.’
She looked at him, strangely still.
‘I brought their flesh tithe out from the Mountain. Thousands of children.’
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