The Faerie Lord (26 page)

from Egypt,
Henry thought, frowning. It was spooky the way some things in the Faerie Realm reflected the history of his own world. But Brenthis was still talking and Henry dragged his attention back so he wouldn’t miss anything.

Thanks to the marvellous ark, Brenthis was saying, Charaxes journeyed with the Luchti and when they reached a desert flatland that seemed to hold no hope of life, they learned a secret practice of the mind that permitted them to alter certain aspects of reality. It was a difficult discipline that took them long months to perfect, but when they did so the entire tribe sank beneath the desert sands to discover the ruins of a mighty city, the like of which had never been seen by anyone before. And there, in the ruins of the city, they had lived ever since, though they roamed the desert wilderness on quests as Lorquin had done and to celebrate their release from slavery.

It sounded to Henry like the sort of legend that was a misunderstanding of actual events. Perhaps Lorquin’s people really had been held captive in the distant past. Perhaps their captors, the Buth, had been defeated in war or fallen afoul of some natural disaster. But who had built the city? And how was it maintained in this impossible bubble beneath the sand? How was it – even now, in ruins – supplied with light and air and copious supplies of water? Most mysterious of all, how had the Luchti found the means to reach it? Whatever mental discipline they used was far beyond Henry. When he wanted to travel to the surface, he had to be accompanied by Lorquin or some other obliging member of the tribe.

But the city was only the start. He still could not understand how the Luchti survived. From everything he’d seen, there simply was not enough water, not enough food, not enough shelter to sustain them. Difficult enough for Lorquin and himself (and impossible without Lorquin’s special skills) but the Luchti, he discovered, was an extensive tribe. How did the desert support them? When he asked the question of Brenthis, the storyteller only shrugged and remarked, ‘Are we not as skilful as the vaettirs?’ Which was true enough in that the vaettirs and their draugr obviously survived as well, but not very helpful as an explanation.

Henry got no explanations for several other matters that concerned him either. The Luchti didn’t know why their skin was blue, beyond saying it was the ‘will of Charaxes’. (Henry’s own skin didn’t seem to be changing any more than it had when he first noticed a bluish tinge.) They didn’t know anything about the Analogue World, or Queen Blue and her Empire in the Faerie Realm. They didn’t know the name of their own country (it was just ‘The Wasteland’). They didn’t know how Henry had come to be in the desert or, far more importantly, how he might get back.

What they
did
know was that the tribe was overdue a celebration.

Lorquin was full of it. ‘It’s really
my
celebration, En Ri,’ he said. ‘Because they couldn’t hold it until I slew the draugr. But it’s not
just
about me. It sets the tribe’s song-lines for the next year and it gives thanks to Charaxes and everybody gets to eat a lot and dance and I might find a wife and -‘

‘Wife!’
Henry exclaimed. ‘Lorquin, you’re only ten years old!’

‘I know,’ said Lorquin happily. ‘And Ino will consult the bones and Euphrosyne will speak with Charaxes and there’ll be drumming and everyone will drink much melor.’

Henry frowned.
Euphrosyne?
Ino was the squat man with tattoos and seemed to be some sort of witch doctor, but Euphrosyne was the woman who had found Charaxes’ mysterious ark at the very dawn of tribal history. ‘How old is Euphrosyne?’ he asked curiously.

‘Twenty years and seven months,’ said Lorquin promptly.

‘She’s not the same Euphrosyne who found the ark, is she?’

Lorquin favoured him with a strange look. ‘If you were not my Companion, En Ri, I might think you were a little simple. Euphrosyne is the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the -‘

‘I get it!’ Henry told him hurriedly. There was clearly some sort of priestly line going from the original Euphrosyne, passed from daughter to daughter in the service of Charaxes. He wondered if they’d preserved the actual ark. It would be interesting to see.

‘- of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter ...’

Henry crept away and left him to it.

It started with a single drummer.

Henry watched as the man entered the city’s enormous central plaza. His drum was a tapered wooden tube, open at one end, covered in what might be goatskin at the other and brightly decorated with tiny painted skulls that could only have come from some small rodent.

The man walked vaguely across the cracked paving, staring up at the ruined buildings for all the world like a tourist who had stumbled on a new attraction. Then, somewhere to one side of the square, he squatted with the drum between his knees, stroked the goatskin and began to play a single tap … tap … tap with no discern-able rhythm. The drum had not much resonance: either that or the under-sand environment absorbed much of its sound.

‘Do we go down yet?’ Henry asked softly. They were standing by a window in what remained of the second floor of a squat building. Blue faces were at the windows of many buildings around them.

‘No,’ Loquin said without elaboration. His eyes were very bright.

A second drummer appeared from the shadow of an alley. He moved with greater focus, walking directly to the centre of the plaza, ignoring his environment. He too squatted down and began to play, but this time there
was
a rhythm: both drums together sounded like a massive heartbeat, and now there was the resonance that had been lacking before. Henry fancied he heard a collective sigh from the watching tribe.

There was no change for long moments on end:
thud-boom
...
thud-boom
...
thud-boom
...
thud-boom
... The sound was mildly hypnotic.

Two more drummers entered the square, their heads turned upwards. They moved in time with their drumbeats, but with a curious gait, taking two steps forward, one step back. They reached the original drummers and squatted down beside them. The drumbeats were now rolling across the plaza without pause.

Henry, who’d once been hypnotised by Mr Fogarty, was sinking into a torpor as the stately rhythm seized him. But he jerked upright, heart pounding, as a massive shout erupted. Eight more drummers poured into the plaza, leaping and dancing. Their bodies were streaked with elaborate designs in bright white paint that turned them into fiercely prancing human zebras. After a single circuit of the square, they joined the original four and all twelve fell into a new, sharper, faster rhythm. The sound rolled out across the ruined city like an endless peal of thunder.

Lorquin was visibly excited now, shifting from one foot to the other.

‘Now?’ Henry asked. He knew the celebrations would take place in the plaza and everything so far was a preliminary.

‘Not yet,’ Lorquin said a little breathlessly. ‘Soon.’

Women of the tribe began to dance into the square.

Their bodies were painted too, but not at all like the drummers. Elaborate whorls of green and red, sun-yellow and a glowing orange, contrasted with their deep blue skins to turn them into plumaged birds. Henry had never seen anything like it before and for some reason the sight made his heart leap with pleasure.

The women paraded the square in time to the powerful drumbeats, strutting like peacocks, turning and twisting. Every one was smiling. Several looked positively delirious with joy.

‘Now,’ Lorquin said.

For some reason it caught Henry by surprise. ‘What?’ he asked, frowning.

Lorquin gave him the sort of fond look that a father might give an idiot child and said patiently, ‘Now we men go down.’

It was weird how that word
we
acted like a small hook into Henry’s heart.
We men.
Lorquin, this child with him, this child who had rescued Henry in the desert, was a man now because he’d slain his draugr. But Henry was a man as well, accepted by the tribe as a Companion, his bravery unquestioned, his maturity unquestioned. All his life, Henry had grown up in a house that was dominated by women. Even in the early days his father hardly counted against the certainties of his mother and the whining manipulations of his sister. When his father left, Henry found himself with three women to contend with after Anai’s moved in, and most of the time he felt under siege. But now he was one of the men, almost part of the tribe. Now he had companionship and acceptance.
We men.
Even though the words came from a child, Henry liked them.

‘Now?’ he asked, suddenly smiling.

Lorquin smiled back up at him. ‘Yes, now.’

They emerged from the ground floor to join a stream of tribesmen headed for the square. Henry fell into the rhythm at once, a staccato shuffle punctuated by resounding
grunts
timed to the distant drumbeats. Like Lorquin, the men were naked – although the white paint on their bodies made them look clothed. Henry had removed his shirt (desert temperatures were as hot as a tropical beach and here, beneath the sands, there was no possibility of sunburn), but couldn’t quite bring himself to go the distance with his trousers. He’d declined Lorquin’s offer to decorate his skin – ‘I will
illustrate
you, En Ri,’ Lorquin told him cheerfully – yet for all that he still felt a part of the whole celebration, probably because the tribesmen accepted him so readily.

The communal dance moved at a stately pace, the massive snake of male bodies intertwining gracefully with the women’s movements. Sometimes they were packed so closely together that their bodies actually brushed one another. Henry should have found it hideously embarrassing, but somehow didn’t … even when several of the younger, prettier girls smiled at him. For the first time in his life, he felt a part of something greater than himself.

The dance became wilder and the tribe began to chant in time with the basic rhythm. Although the chant was in a language Henry didn’t understand, he had picked up the words within minutes. Soon he was chanting with the best of them. The combination of the drumming, the rhythmic movement and the chanting made him increasingly light-headed, but he found he didn’t care. When someone passed him a gourd of yellow liquid, he drank it down without a thought.

Seconds later, the top of his head exploded. The feeling was absolutely wonderful. He was energised, powerful, intoxicated. He was as strong as any man here. He was old; he was young; he was wise. He was in love with Blue.

Lorquin materialised briefly by his side. ‘Melor!’ he called above the chanting and pointed at the empty gourd.

Henry nodded back, grinning hugely.

It became a bit of a blur after that. Henry recalled dancing faster and faster, chanting louder and louder. At some point he lost his trousers and didn’t care. His head, his whole horizon, was filled with the drumming and the chant.

Then he found he was seated, squatting on the ground watching while Ino the tattooed shaman muttered and shook and swayed and shouted in the centre of the plaza. Henry couldn’t remember whether Ino had taken anything before his performance began, but he certainly looked drugged now. The encircling tribesmen, Henry among them, swayed in time to his movements and cheered when he hurled a handful of bleached bones onto the paving. A young boy, younger even than Lorquin, rushed forward to examine them where they fell, then fearlessly trotted across to whisper in Ino’s ear. The shaman shuddered and convulsed and shouted aloud.

‘The song-lines are set,’ grinned a man squatting next to Henry. He seemed pleased with the development, but Henry himself had not the slightest idea what was going on.

Ino fell down sometime after that and had to be carried away. No one seemed concerned.

The drums fell silent and a new chant broke out, soft, slow and melodious. After a moment Henry realised only the men were singing and joined in. The bass vibration of the plainsong overcame him so that he closed his eyes and swam through darkness on a raft of sound.

The men’s song ebbed and flowed for an eternity; then suddenly it stopped and there was total, utter silence. Henry opened his eyes again and looked around benignly. There seemed to be a sense of expectation reflected in the surrounding faces. The men began to sing again, softer this time, like the background hum of insects on a summer’s day. Then came the women’s voices, swelling pure and clear across the dry air. Henry felt tears spring to his eyes as they plunged and swooped like birds, carrying a melody so plaintive that it seized the heart and carried it away.

The women’s song continued for a long, long time and while he could pick out no more than a few words here and there, to Henry it seemed they were singing an ancient history of the tribe, telling of its tribulations at the time of their captivity, telling of the freedom granted by Charaxes, telling of the sorrows and the joys, holding a burden of emotion that was almost too heavy to bear.

Then, one by one, the voices fell away until only a single lone woman remained singing. Henry craned to see who she was and eventually located her, a plump girl scarcely older than himself, whose eyes were closed tight and her head flung back as she carried the remainder of the song.

The girl continued singing while four men shuffled into the plaza, carrying two long poles from which a smallish wooden box was slung on leather thongs. Henry’s heart jumped. Was this the ark of Euphrosyne? He leaned forward to get a better look, but others around him were doing the same and blocked his line of sight. As the men lowered the box reverently to the ground, he could see that it definitely looked old, perhaps even old enough to be the original ark. But beyond that, it was difficult to make out much detail.

The light was failing now and the thing itself was quite a distance from him, on top of which, the men who had carried it were fussing round it, removing the leather thongs and placing it just so in what he supposed must be its ritual position. From what he could see, the wooden surface of the box seemed to have metal inlays, possibly silver and gold, although they could just as easily be steel and brass.