Slaves of the Mastery (21 page)

‘The Master has heard of Ira Manth?’

‘Yes, certainly. But even the Master can’t read the old texts.’

Hanno’s mind began to spin. How would the Master have come to know of the first prophet of the Manth people? Why would he care? Preoccupied with these thoughts, Hanno followed the little
professor through a door in the gate, and down a long cloister-like passage; and so found he had arrived at the Great Library without taking in anything of the High Domain.

‘This,’ said Professor Fortz, ‘is our rare documents archive. We keep all the manuscripts in excellent condition, which is yet another benefit of war. Many of them were
mouldering and unread in their original homes. And here’s the old Manth section. Take a seat.’

Hanno Hath took a seat at the wide table, and stared at the carefully-wrapped bundles being opened before him. As he looked, he felt his heart begin to hammer with excitement. Never in all his
life had he dared to hope he would find such treasure.

‘There! Make any sense to you?’ The professor tossed manuscript after manuscript onto the table. ‘There’s another!’

‘This is extraordinary,’ marvelled Hanno. ‘You have some of my people’s most precious documents here.’

‘What’s precious about them?’ boomed Fortz.

‘We lost so much, in the tribal wars long ago,’ said Hanno. ‘We thought they were destroyed.’

‘Well, you thought wrong. Now you can stop thinking, and copy them out in a form I can read. No one can read that wretched Manth scribble.’

Hanno sorted through the papers, eager to begin.

‘Do you want them transcribed in any particular order?’

‘How can I, when I don’t know what’s in them? Do try to think before you speak. So few people do these days.’

‘Maybe I should start by listing the documents for you.’

‘Do as you think best. Just get on with it. Let me know if you find anything of any significance.’

He then left Hanno alone. Hanno said nothing, but he knew already that he had found something of very great significance indeed. He had recognised it as soon as Professor Fortz had tossed the
manuscript so carelessly onto the table.

It was the Lost Testament.

Bowman slept during the day, while the others worked. He was just waking when the soldiers came for him. He was alone in the barracks, but for the grey cat.

They checked his wrist number.

‘Bowman Hath?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put your boots on and come with us.’

‘Where to?’

‘You’re wanted.’ They would say no more.

The early autumn dusk was already gathering as he followed the soldiers down the road to the lake. Ahead, where the causeway joined the shore, a man stood waiting. As they came near, Bowman saw
that it was Marius Semeon Ortiz.

The soldiers saluted. Ortiz studied Bowman carefully.

‘Yes, he’s the one.’

He dismissed the soldiers with a wave of one hand.

‘Come with me.’

He set off over the causeway towards the High Domain. Bowman accompanied him in silence. On either side lay the placid waters of the lake, reflecting the lights of the city. Above, stars were
beginning to show in the evening sky. All was at peace.

‘I picked you out on the march,’ said Ortiz.

Bowman remained silent. He was trying to sense Ortiz’s mood, so that he could prepare himself for whatever was to be done with him.

‘You’re a quiet one,’ said Ortiz. ‘I like that.’

They walked on. Bowman found the causeway was longer than it appeared from the land side. The walls of the High Domain grew ever more immense as they approached them. Behind, he heard the soft
pad of the grey cat, following in the shadows.

‘I find I need a servant for a particular duty,’ said Ortiz. ‘The task is not a menial one. I have chosen you. Are you willing to serve me?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘No.’

Bowman said no more.

‘You don’t ask the nature of the particular duty.’

‘You’ll tell me, when I need to know,’ said Bowman. ‘I must do it, whether I want to or not.’

Ortiz glanced at him, and for a few moments they went on in silence, their footsteps sounding softly on the boardwalk.

‘You hate me, of course.’

‘Yes,’ said Bowman.

‘I burned your city. I drove you from your home. I enslaved you. Why would you not hate me?’

They were now close to the great gates in the city walls. In one corner of the left gate there was a small door, of a size to admit people entering singly and on foot. Ortiz now rapped on this
door. He turned his handsome young face to Bowman and said,

‘But I’m also your liberator. I’m the man who has set your people free. One day you’ll understand this.’

The small door opened from the inside. Bowman said nothing, but secretly he was astounded by what Ortiz had just said. He had assumed this brutal young warlord was no more than a fighting
machine in the service of a cruel state. Now here he was speaking aloud the belief that he shared with his mother and father, but which even they had not dared to put so plainly: the destruction of
Aramanth, and this time of enslavement with all its cruelties, was somehow necessary. The Manth people had to leave, in order to arrive. But where?

Ortiz had gone through the low door into the city. Bowman followed. The door closed again before the cat could reach it.

The first and strongest impression was the sound of music. From all sides came the jaunty melodies of fiddles, and the sweet lament of pipes, and the carolling of voices in
song. It was the time of evening when the people have done with their day’s work, and have not yet settled down to sleep; when night has fallen, but every lamp is shining. The clustered
buildings that crowded the alleys before him all glowed from within, the soft lamplight making the many-coloured glass with which the walls and roofs were set shine like jewels. Through and behind
and before these splashes of red and amber moved the people of the High Domain, paying their evening calls, meeting in groups to talk or to dance, making music and singing. A sweet confusion of
sound filled the air.

Bowman looked round in a daze. Could such cheerful kindly people know that across the lake, on the night just gone, others had been burned alive? If they knew, surely they would rise up in
horror and overthrow the Master who commanded it. Ortiz was ahead, beckoning Bowman to follow him up the broadest alleyway. They passed a small food market, where stalls displayed sweet cakes and
wines, outside the entrance to a tea house. From within the tea house came eager laughing voices, raised in debate. A little further on, the windows of an upper room were thrown open, and inside a
choir could be heard practising a set of harmonies. Bowman heard the conductor rapping on his music stand, and calling out, ‘Keep in time, please, ladies! Once more!’ They passed a
little piazza surrounded by lime trees, where old men sat playing chess in the night air. Beneath the arches of a covered arcade a dancing master was leading a class in an intricate series of
steps. ‘You must concentrate, please! Give your mind to your feet! Think with your toes!’

The alleyway opened up suddenly into a wide space, on the far side of which stood, or floated, an immense exquisite building, roofed by four domes. Each dome rested a little way above the next,
with a poised lightness that seemed impossible in so great a structure; each fashioned out of a delicate filigree of stonework, each glazed in a different colour, pale gold and orange, rising to
red and violet, so that the many lights within its different levels caused it to shimmer like a sunset sky.

‘Oh!’ said Bowman. ‘How beautiful!’

Ortiz watched him, nodding with approval.

‘This is how men were meant to live,’ he said.

He led Bowman through arches into the great hall. Here, in the centre of the pillared space, a fountain played.

‘Look at the fountain,’ said Ortiz.

The fountain represented a platform of rocks on which stood a cage, all carved from the same single block of translucent grey-white marble. The door of the cage stood open, and from beneath it,
up through its marble bars and out of its open marble door, there burst a rising gush of water. At the point where the arching water fell back to earth there hung three birds, seemingly sustained
in midair by its power alone. Their wings were spread in upward flight, to show that they had just, mere moments ago, sprung from the imprisoning cage. The birds were carved from the very same
block of pale stone, but the ribs of stone which supported them were concealed by the flow of water. The spray that broke beneath their wings created the illusion that they were in motion, forever
on the point of flying free.

‘The man who made that,’ said Ortiz, ‘had worked all his life as a stonemason before he came here. All he had ever cut was square blocks for buildings. And all that time, this
was locked up inside him, waiting to be released.’

‘Is he a slave here?’ asked Bowman.

‘Of course.’ He gestured around him, at the great glowing vaulted space. ‘Everything here is the work of artists. This whole city is a work of art. There’s nothing like
it in all the world.’

Bowman was awed, and confused.

‘What’s it all for?’ he said.

‘For us who live here. The Master says men were made to live in beauty.’

‘Except for the slaves.’

‘The beauty exists for the slaves as well. You’re a slave. You feel it.’

He set off across the hall, followed by Bowman. On the far side, a series of arcaded passages led to a smaller hall, where several people sat on tiered seats watching a training session. Sixteen
fighters from the manaxa school were being drilled by their trainer, in a display that was designed both to hone their skills and entertain spectators. The half-naked manacs glistened in the
lamplight as they executed their crouching turns and sudden high springs, working in matched pairs.

Ortiz and Bowman lingered a few moments to watch.

‘There’s to be a festival manaxa on the day of the wedding,’ said Ortiz.

‘Will they kill each other?’

‘It’s possible.’

Bowman found it hard to believe that these graceful movements could be the prelude to brutal death. But he had seen it for himself. When the manacs entered the arena, they danced to kill. It was
all part of the riddle that was the Mastery: beauty and slavery, civilisation and terror, dancing and death.

Suddenly Bowman realised he knew one of the manacs.

‘That’s Mumpo!’

‘Don’t call to him. He won’t hear you.’

Bowman knew Mumpo had gone away to be trained: but how was it possible that so quickly he had been so changed?

‘But it’s Mumpo!’

Mumpo, whom he had known since he was five years old, whose nose had dribbled, who had always been at the bottom of the class, who had followed his sister Kestrel like a pet dog, who had grown
tall but still spoke with that same slow look of bafflement – how could he have turned into this sleek dangerous manac, who was scissoring the air with his limbs just below him?

Ortiz knew none of this. But he did know how the Mastery found and exploited the talents of its captives.

‘Everyone changes when they come here,’ he said. ‘Even you will change.’

He moved on, and Bowman followed.

Now they were in a passage off which opened many smaller halls. From each came the tap-tap-tap of dancing feet, and the brisk commands of dancing instructors. Ortiz paused outside one set of
doors.

‘I’m to have a lesson now,’ he said. ‘The dance called the tantaraza.’

‘A dancing lesson?’ It was all so unlikely. This soldier, this conqueror, this destroyer, evidently cared how well he danced.

‘The Master has taught us that we come closest to perfection in dance.’

He entered the room. A slender lady was waiting inside, talking quietly to two musicians, a pipe player and a drummer. She rose at once, and made Ortiz a delicate curtsey.

‘My dance teacher, Madame Saez,’ Ortiz told Bowman. ‘How old do you think she is?’

Bowman hardly knew how to answer without giving offence. The lady wore a tight-fitting slip and light skirt, that revealed clearly a lissom body in its prime; but the lines on her neck and face
told a different story.

‘Under or over forty?’ prompted Ortiz. The dance teacher dimpled with pleasure.

‘Perhaps around forty?’ said Bowman.

‘She’s sixty-eight!’ Both Ortiz and the lady enjoyed Bowman’s surprise.

‘And I’ve never danced better in my life,’ added the lady. ‘But come, we have work to do. Remove your outer garments.’

Ortiz stripped off his cape and his jacket, and prepared to dance. Bowman realised that he was to watch. Ortiz had still said nothing to him about why he had singled him out, or what he was to
do.

Madame Saez adopted the opening posture of the dance.

‘Play! Acha!’

The musicians played, and the dancers danced. Bowman knew nothing of the tantaraza, but he could see at once that Ortiz was an excellent dancer, and extremely well practised in the steps. They
spun and parted before him, following the intricate patterns of steps, slowly increasing in speed and variation, until –

‘No, no, no!’ The teacher stamped her elegant shoe in irritation. ‘How is it possible that you miss that turn? If you truly know the tantaraza, such mistakes are unthinkable!
You speak words in the order that makes sense, don’t you? So dance the steps in the order that makes sense. Acha!’

The musicians began again at the beginning, and the dance unfolded once more. Bowman watched, and allowed his feeling mind to enter the dance. Without knowing anything of the steps, he could
tell where the problem lay: the teacher was dancing without premeditation, as if her body was a spring that was unwinding of its own volition. Ortiz was dancing by following a script in his mind.
Inevitably he was falling behind his partner, following where he should lead, if only by a fraction.

‘Stop! Stop!’ The lady was not pleased. ‘You do not improve. You must take more care.’

‘No,’ said Bowman. ‘He must be careless.’

Madame Saez stared at him.

‘Well!’ she said. ‘You are the dance teacher now? I have been instructing pupils for nearly fifty years. But no doubt you know better.’