He stood, stretching up on his toes, and saw nothing but the featureless stony riverbed stretching away in every direction.
She had taken the choice, if choice there ever was, out of his hands.
CHAPTER 15
VALLEY OF THE DAMNED
TORVE KNELT AT THE fatherward end of the expedition’s old campsite, poring over footprints in a small sandy hollow. Gentle night breezes had softened the many once-sharp ridges made by soldiers’ boots. In one place, however, the fresher prints of bare feet overlaid the blurred ridges.
A number of explanations came to mind. Lenares may have wandered here during the night. In a hopeful rather than realistic gesture he turned and looked in the direction of the well, out of sight over a gentle rise. His shoulders slumped. She would have gone directly fatherback towards the house of the gods; he doubted, in her obsession with that place, she would even have stopped by the well on her way, let alone come further in this direction. Besides, these footprints were too large for her delicate feet. And she had not left her shoes behind. He sighed. Equally unlikely was the possibility that one or more of the camp followers had returned to pick over the abandoned campsite. So little of value remained, which could be an indication either of successful scavengers or rigorous tidiness. Torve, knowing Captain Duon, suspected the latter.
Which left a further possibility. Spies. Of anyone in the expedition, Torve had the most reason to know that the desert was not empty. His dream-children wandered the desert freely, and he knew that, no matter what else they were, they left footprints behind. And they were surely not the only inhabitants of these harsh lands. Might his dream-children have shadowed the expedition fatherwards through the stone plain, trying to satisfy their strange, unexplained curiosity about him?
Another thought came to him, and as he let it fill his mind he cursed his foolishness; his foolishness and Lenares’, and especially that of Captain Duon. How could they all have forgotten? The Emperor had often discussed the geography and history of Elamaq with his pet Omeran; why had Torve not thought to review that knowledge as he travelled fatherwards? Because you sought another kind of knowledge came an unwelcome voice in his mind, one with the ring of truth about it. You thought of yourself and your desires before those of your Emperor. And as a result the expedition may already be lost.
Belatedly he considered what he knew. It was a favourite Amaqi tale, standard fare for the travelling players. Many years ago the twenty-third Emperor of Elamaq, the bookish but rightly feared Pouna III, sent a team of engineers into the mountains far to the sonback of the desert, with an Omeran labour force numbering in the thousands. There, over a period of twenty-four years, they constructed a great earth dam and diversion race, thereby capturing the headwaters of the Marasmos River. The purpose of this vast expenditure, which came close to bankrupting the empire—the Emperor had shown Torve copies of the original accounts—was twofold. First, to capture the water as part of the development of Talamaq as the Emperor’s capital; and second, to consequently deprive the Marasmians, the last remaining sovereign opponents of the empire, of the water source upon which they depended.
The first the unfortunate Marasmians knew of the Emperor Pouna’s engineering coup was when their ever-dependable river dried up. Foolishly they spent a season sacrificing to their gods in an attempt to encourage their river to relent, before finally sending an expedition sonback. That expedition did not return, though the Marasmians never found out why as by that time they had been surrounded by the Emperor’s well-provisioned army. In the ensuing siege the weakened Marasmians were wiped out, their city of delicate spires and colleges of learning torn apart. Not one stone was left on top of another, and the ground was salted against any chance of future habitation.
It was said that Emperor Pouna III himself came fatherwards to witness the death of the last Marasmian, a symbolic act. The unfortunate woman, a nameless scholar, was captured early in the siege, forced to watch the death and destruction of everything she loved, then impaled, encased with salt and left on a hill overlooking the sterile plain.
It was said that Emperor Pouna remained with her until she died in great agony. Said by Torve’s master, anyway, with great relish. Emperor Pouna III, forever after known as Pouna the Great, had been everything the current Emperor of Elamaq aspired to: intelligent, ruthless and, above all, long-lived. But not eternal.
How much of this was exaggeration or hearsay Torve could not know. His master had often speculated about the degree to which the story of Pouna the Great’s life was the fanciful invention of subsequent storytellers, though the dry scrolls of the accountants and clerks alluded to even more horrific and ruthless events: revolts and repressions, cullings of the aristocracy, fratricide and worse. All of interest to his master. Whatever the reality, Torve now stood in the dry bed of what had once been the Marasmos River.
In the centuries since the sack of Marasmos there had been no attempt to resettle the area, so the Emperor’s advisers had said. There were a few impoverished fishing villages on the Skeleton Coast, fatherwards and fatherback of the mouth of the former Marasmos River, but these were of little consequence to the empire. Tax collectors had long ago given up visiting the area, as the haggard fishermen accumulated no wealth. Torve wondered when last any accurate census or economic data had been collected from coastal regions. Captain Duon had seen no sign of inhabitants on his previous journey through the area, though this observation had little real value as the fatherward paths avoided the Skeleton Coast, taking routes many leagues inland of the desolate former city. Duon had reported nothing unusual, though there had been a mention of a man vanishing on the return journey. He had wandered from his tent one night, people said, his tracks leading into the heart of the stone plain.
A suspicion began to form in Torve’s mind.
Lenares brushed the sand from her grubby dress, then stood and surveyed the result of her efforts. The sandy slope was spread out around the edges of the pool, and the stone stair she had been certain existed now rose before her: granite-grey, steps far too large for human feet, but climbable nonetheless. She had simply continued the process she and Torve had begun, undermining the slope until the sand had slumped in one final cascade. If the gods sat on chairs, they also used stairs. It had been a recurring mantra in her mind, one of the things that had driven her back here despite Torve’s timid insistence on obedience to the bully-Emperor.
How much else did the sand cover?
Unable to contain the thrill rising within her, she ran, swam and waded her way from room to room. Oddly, the rooms were not exactly as she remembered them, nor were they in the same sequence, a fact she put down to having been without her fixed centre and her numbers on her earlier visit. Perhaps the shapes and colours and patterns and meanings pulsing and singing through her enlivened mind had laid bare things that had previously been hidden from her.
Here was the room with the chairs. Much larger than Lenares recalled, and much further from the first room, but last time they had backtracked in their explorations, perhaps explaining the discrepancy. To her surprise the jewel-like lake was still there, the focal point of the three chairs. She had expected…Patience, she told herself. Easy to ask of oneself was patience, but impossible to exercise. By the time the sun stood overhead, shining directly down on the still water, she had paced around the room over a hundred times. One hundred and seven times; twenty-one thousand, five hundred and seven steps, her mind said. She brushed the thought aside impatiently. Two hundred and one steps per circuit, her inner voice prattled on. Sixty-seven steps for a god. And then a strange thought: three gods equals one human. Surely it was the other way around?
She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Sometimes she was prepared to admit that her numbers annoyed even her. So it was she missed the moment when the pool cleared and the image she knew had to be there revealed itself.
It was a map like none she had ever seen. Perfectly circular, it appeared to consist of a series of concentric ci
rcles designed to draw the eye to the centre. Asymmetrical detail lay underneath the circular grid; she ascended one of the chairs to get a better view of the image.
The map appeared to lie just beneath the surface of the pool, though she was not fool enough to test this theory. In the house of the gods her numbers took on shapes and patterns too complex for simple reflection; she laughed at the double meaning, her mind aflame with insight. The image seemed to have been carved from, or etched into, a burnished sheet of bronze, though that might have been the effect of the sun. Three great continents dominated the image, the largest centred on the map’s own centre.
As she stared at the unsettling combination of symmetrical grid and random coastline, the pattern shifted in her head and she was suddenly able to see it for what it was. Oh, so simple, so elegant.
No one else would be able to understand it, she crowed. No matter how many others came to stare at this map of the world, none of them would appreciate the singularity of vision that had created it. In the middle of the map, drawn at a scale out of all proportion to the rest, was a detailed plan of the very room she occupied. Three chairs surrounded a small pool, a minute mimicry of the real pool it lay at the centre of. Thinking about it threatened to turn Lenares’ mind inside out. The other rooms were visible on the map, but the ones further from the Map Room, as she already called it, were smaller. Not in reality, but a trick of scale. Scale is everything on this map. Things get smaller the further they are from the centre. The further they are from this pool. Just like in real life, where objects were foreshortened, appearing smaller the further they lay from her viewpoint. So at the margins of the map she could see jagged coastlines, mountain ranges and rivers, whole countries shown smaller than the Map Room. Elamaq may not be bigger than the other two continents, after all; it just seems so because it surrounds the centre of the map.
Such an odd scale…a logarithmic scale! She exulted in her further discovery. Working from the centre outwards, each concentric circle was slightly closer to the next larger one that enclosed it, until at the outer edge they blurred into invisibility. The decreasing gap between the circles reflected the progression of logarithmic numbers. The effect was to create a constant foreshortening of scale from the centre in every direction; the result, a map that at once showed the detail of one room and the spread of the whole world around it.
Now she had unlocked the secret, the name of any feature she concentrated on began to appear, floating above the map as though on the surface of the water. Elamaq, Bhrudwo, Faltha. Three continents, one central, two peripheral. Three chairs, three gods, three continents.
She wondered on whose chair she sat. What if she were to climb up and sit on one of the two remaining chairs? Would she see with the eyes of another god? Would the centre of the map shift? Would she see the plan of a second god-house, with another continent enlarged at the expense of its fellows?
More thoughts followed, racing through her mind like starving wolves behind their pack leader. What would it be like to see oneself as the very centre of the world, and know it for truth? Was this a reflection of her own desire, her own need for a centre? Had the pool merely made real the patterns of her mind? Or was she seeing as the gods saw? She was not sure whether the answers mattered, but knew she hungered for them with all her soul.
A sort of glory settled on her. Here, expressed on one elegant map, was the very essence and sum of a cosmographer’s life’s work. Staring down at the world, with herself at the secret, sacred heart, she found herself imbued with…with the very presence of a god. Goddess. Her skin prickled with power; she seemed about to burst. As though the ability to see as the gods saw, to see oneself at the centre, conferred…Daughter, a rich contralto whispered, moving tenderly through the rooms of her mind, you should not be here. This is too much even for you. In your pursuit of knowledge you have left wisdom behind. You must leave this place—a hesitation, a catching of divine breath, a new urgency—I must take you from here. My brother knows. He comes.
Torve found Lenares on her haunches beside the well, eyes wide and wild, rocking back and forth as though in the throes of pain or ecstasy. For some time she could say nothing, unable to respond to his frantic questions. Where have you been? How did you get back to the well without me seeing you? He picked her up; she shivered in his arms.
‘I, I, I,’ she said, then repeated the sound in brackets of three. ‘Eye, eye, eye.’ Torve could not tell whether she referred to herself or her vision; certainly her eyes were glazed, her face puffy. She took three deep breaths, gulped, then retched weakly. He lowered her to the ground.
‘Lenares?’ he asked gently.
She looked up at him and smiled; then her face changed and an unearthly look came into her eyes.
‘I…I need parchment,’ she said incongruously.
‘Parchment?’ Torve’s weak echo reflected the confusion he felt. ‘Lenares, where have you been?’
‘Don’t talk to me. Don’t—I can’t hold it in.’ She pressed her hands against her temples.
‘Lenares, am I not to talk to you? Is that what you ask of me?’
‘Please, please, leave me, let me—come with me. We have to find the expedition.’ Her eyes filled with desperate hunger.
What has she seen?
So many things he could say; so much frustration and heartache to deal with as she demanded he do what she had refused to do up until now. Yet she wanted his silence.
He took her hand; she gripped his compulsively. ‘We must hurry,’ she said.
‘At least let me draw more water,’ said Torve. She nodded, but her mind was somewhere other than on such mundane concerns.
Later that day they made camp under a lone acacia tree. Lenares had led him down the Marasmos riverbed, making no comment as to her choice of direction. Torve knew the expedition had followed the valley for a league or so and then turned fatherwards—the desert stone and sand offered ample evidence of this, as did items discarded intermittently—but did not ask her why she persisted sonwards. Events had moved beyond his comprehension, and he was forced to take Lenares on faith.
The sun set, enormous and oval in a bronze sky, as they made their pitiful camp. It wavered in the heat as it neared the horizon, the land seeming to clutch at it as though grasping for warmth in preparation for the coming cold of the desert night. Torve shared his water gourd with Lenares, then handed her a filthy blanket he had scavenged from the remains of the expedition. She took it without comment and found herself a spot on the far side of the tree, giving the appearance of avoiding him, which no doubt she was.
Later that night Torve gave up trying to sleep and, by the light of a pale yellow half-moon, crept over to where Lenares lay. She was clearly asleep, but next to her a strange pattern had been drawn in the sand. As he looked more closely he saw her right arm lay outstretched across the pattern, as though sleep had claimed her before she could finish it. It was a circular shape, filled with squiggles, blurred somewhat by the cool night breeze. He stared at it until his eyelids drooped, and when it was clear understanding would not come, he returned to his own patch of sand.
Hunger and its attendant weakness were their main adversaries over the next two days. Torve continued to hope they would find a grove of the red-berried bushes that had so nourished them in the canyon; on occasion he left Lenares’ side and searched promising side valleys, but found nothing. No sign of animals and no means of hunting them. Lenares said nothing, preoccupied with whatever had driven her back to the well, and now drove her towards the expedition that had shunned them both. He had no idea whether she suffered hunger pangs, though she drank from the gourd whenever he offered it.
At the end of the third day sonwards of the well she reached for the gourd, forcing him to tip it upside down to indicate it was empty.
They would not last long if they continued without food and water.
The next morning Torve awoke to find himself alone. A glance sunwards was enough to locate Lenares a few hundred
paces downvalley, her walk almost a totter. His eyes prickled with tears; licking dry lips, he hauled himself up on weak legs and made off after her.
Much of the day was forever blanked from Torve’s memory. Whenever he came to himself he saw Lenares still some distance in front; his best efforts failed to make up any ground. Some time in the afternoon he stopped sweating and was still lucid enough to know what this meant. How was Lenares able to maintain her pace? The next time he regained awareness the cosmographer was a small speck in the hazy distance.
‘Lenares,’ he croaked, forgetting he was not supposed to be speaking to her. ‘Lenares…’ But his plea was swallowed by the desert.
A fifth day followed, the substance of an Amaqi nightmare. To be caught in the desert unprepared, drained by the sun, emptied of fluid and left as a desiccated husk, was an ever-present possibility to anyone whose business took them beyond the city wall. One that was meticulously planned for or carefully avoided. Torve’s skin reddened, then blistered, drawing even more precious fluid away from his body. He learned to keep his swelling tongue in his dry mouth, as his thick, salty saliva stung his cracked lips whenever he licked them. His only salvation was Lenares’ blanket, which shaded his head in the afternoons. If they had been walking daughterwards, Torve would have been dead by now.
He awoke from a standing doze to find himself surrounded by gnats. I’m not dead, he growled at them, but he wasn’t certain. Tap, tap, tap, the insects blundered into him, always on his left side; they were flying from his left to his right in a large cloud.
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