The Standing Dead - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 02 (25 page)

'You may as well know that my mother told me the Elders will, most likely, want to have you killed.'

'Does she also wish our deaths?' said Carnelian.

Fern turned to look at Carnelian. 'I told her what I believe; what I know about you. She might even try to save you, but I can't see how ... I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought you here.' Squinting deep into the fire, he shook his head. 'I don't know what possessed me to let you come.'

They're burning,' said Ravan. Fern plucked the skewers out from the fire. When he distributed the food, Osidian refused any.

The Elders won't kill us.'

Ravan looked at him sharply. 'How can you be so certain, Master?'

Osidian ignored the youth's question and looked instead at Fern. They want to see us before they make their decision, don't they?'

The Plainsman narrowed his eyes and then dipped a nod.

Carnelian watched Osidian, who seemed to be looking through Fern, seeing something beyond him in the night. Carnelian worked out arguments that suggested it would be perilous for the Plainsmen to kill a Master, but nothing he could come up with was anything more than an argument.

'When?' Osidian asked at last.

'In the morning,' said Fern.

Carnelian disliked seeing the way in which his friend was obviously awed by Osidian's manner.

Carnelian was shaken awake by Fern. Fronds hung over" him, black against a starry sky. He sat up. Ravan was rolling up the blankets he had slept in.

'It's still dark,' Carnelian said, in a low voice.

Crouched over the embers of their fire, carefully dabbing them out, Fern spoke without turning. The Elders wish to avoid us causing more unrest in the Tribe.'

Carnelian nodded and rolled his bedding. Soon the four of them were walking towards the corner of the fern-garden. They opened the gate and crossed the crumbling earthbridge. Their guards were lying on the ground asleep and grumbled as Fern roused them.

As they waited, Carnelian approached Osidian.

'Have you an idea what we shall do?' he whispered.

Osidian turned a shadow head. They are barbarians,' he said in Quya. They will not dare to raise their hands against us.'

Fern led them back along the path they had taken the day before. They reached the place where the crowd had stood and found a wider, more solid earthbridge which they crossed to a gate. Once through this, they were looking across a starlit meadow towards the mass of the koppie hill.

The path took them straight across the meadow. A faint blue was appearing in the east as they came under the first branches of the cedars. Carnelian peered into the blackness that hid their trunks. Looking up he saw stars winking through the canopy. Fern led them into the night the trees were still nursing and soon the bodies of two cedars emerged standing sentinel upon a high wicker gate. Carnelian breathed their resin perfume and felt more than saw the heavy rafters of their branches hanging above him. The gate rose on the other side of another earthbridge and was set into a rampart. A ditch curving away on either side moated the hill with darkness.

Fern was the first to cross. He approached the gate and Carnelian heard the murmur of his voice, which was quickly followed by the creaking of the gate opening. As he passed through, Carnelian saw the shapes of the gate wardens and, though he could not see their eyes, he could feel them watching him.

In the near darkness, Carnelian could just make out the hill rising before him pillared with the black trunks of trees. Fern made sure they were still following him and led them up an irregular stair that Carnelian discovered with much stumbling to be formed by tree roots clinging to the slope. The Plainsmen, who even in the twilight seemed to know each step, slowed to let the Standing Dead feel their way up with their feet.

At last they reached a narrow clearing which terminated at a pitchy rising mass of rock. Looking up

Carnelian saw the head of the Crag glowering in the sky's starless indigo and discovered an ivory house nestling halfway up.

Hearing Fern and Ravan arguing in whispers, Carnelian drew closer.

'I want to stay,' Ravan was pleading.

'I said, go to the hearth and see mother before she comes up here,' said Fern.

The youth seemed to be waiting for some intervention from Osidian, but the Master seemed unaware of him and so he trudged off along a path that hugged the Crag. There were stirrings among the cedars on either side. Carnelian could hear a clink of earthenware, some voices, a lazy drawn-out yawn.

Fern urged them forward. The night still lingering at the foot of the Crag engulfed them. Carnelian felt the presence of others. A light came to life and showed them three Ochre standing guard at the bottom of steps cut into the rock.

'Are we to go straight up?' Fern asked.

Their eyes wholly on the Standing Dead, the guards nodded. Fern beckoned Carnelian to follow him. The steps were steep and uneven. Taking care not to lose his footing, Carnelian managed to catch glimpses, past Fern, of the pale house they were approaching. He followed him onto a porch on which guards stood to either side of a doorway. Peering, Carnelian realized with a shudder that the guards were huskmen. Fern was staring at the doorway, gathering his resolve. He pushed its leather curtain aside and led the Standing Dead into the blackness within.

Falling back into place, the curtain shut out the light so that Carnelian had to put a hand up to feel his way. His fingers found Fern motionless. Carnelian moved round to stand to his left. The floor felt strangely uneven under his makeshift shoes. The dullness of the scuffing echoes made him aware of how small the room was. His head brushed the ceiling. Reaching up, he touched cold, smooth ridging interlocking in some complex pattern. He let his fingers slide along one ridge and felt it swell into a double knob. His hand recoiled. 'Bones.'

This is our Ancestor House,' said Fern's voice in a reverential tone.

Carnelian became convinced he could detect a faint mustiness of death. 'Your people?' he breathed.

'Under our feet, what remains of the Tribe's mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters after the tree roots have eaten their flesh, drunk their blood. Between us and the sky, the ceiling is formed from what the ravens have left behind of our fathers and grandfathers, our uncles, our brothers.'

'A tomb, then,' Osidian said, contemptuously.

'Not so,' said Fern, outraged. 'Our ancestors inhabit the earth and sky. These are nothing more than the bone cages that once held their souls.'

'A house of death,' whispered Carnelian.

'Rather, one where we, the living, commune with our dead. Their discarded bones make this place familiar to the souls of those who have gone before. They seep in here like the scent of the magnolias so that the Elders might breathe in their wisdom.'

'Wisdom, you say?' said Osidian. Then -'

'Hush, bow your heads, they're here.'

The curtain lifting let in enough light to spill the three men's shadows across the floor. Carnelian registered the tracery of the design before resolving one into the roundel of a woman's pelvis. Up through the opening the skull of a baby was squeezing, its bony face upturned, its eye-sockets welling red earth. More oozed everywhere into the cracks of the mosaic so that it seemed to Carnelian he stood upon a raft afloat on blood. The floor swept up into a wainscot of ribs. Bony buttresses reinforced a wall that was an undulating gleaming mass of femurs jointed into each other. Halfway up, more tiny skulls patterned a band with their eye and nose holes. From this band a dense leg-bone arabesque rose to a ceiling of shoulder-blades and arm-bones knitted together in a swirling spiral. Carnelian imagined this must be what it would be like to be in the hold of one of the kharon bone boats that ferried the Masters across the lake in Osrakum. Darkness suddenly returned and he was left blinking a fading, ghostly impression of the scene.

Thin morning light entered again while, at the same time, something was shuffling past so close Carnelian could feel its clothing brush against his leg. He became aware of the shape's odour of sweat and ferns; of the smell of hair. The light pulsed with each lift and drop of the curtain. The women rustling past were bent forward, swathed in blankets so that he could not glimpse even a sliver of their faces. Among them, uncovered, men revealed their matted hair all pebbled with salt and tangled with feathers. A clinking drew Carnelian's eyes down. Above their brown and calloused feet, the ankles of the women were swollen white by carcanets of salt.

Carnelian realized he was staring. Looking sideways he could make out that Fern had his head bowed. Carnelian turned enough the other way so that, the next time the room lit up, he was able to see Osidian, his chin up, striving to put imperiousness in his eyes. Seeing that struggle to deny humiliation, Carnelian chose from love to emulate Osidian's powerless defiance and, lifting his head, stared out fiercely.

More and more Elders were crowding in. Women were helping each other to sink to the floor. Their wrists were knobbed, their gnarled fingers ringed with more salt.

In the niches sunk between the wall buttresses of bone, the men were seating themselves cross-legged on platforms and removing their shoes.

A nudge from Fern urged Carnelian to shuffle to the left. He reached his hand up to Osidian's arm and gently urged him to move. Leaning forward, Carnelian looked past Fern and saw Loskai had joined the end of their line.

The curtain behind them fell closed and did not lift again. Cradling fire, flickering-faced girls stepped carefully among the sitting women touching to life lamps that hung around the walls. When the girls flitted away, Carnelian was faced with the aged, perhaps thirty of them, the lamplight trembling shadows in the folds of their robes and skin, glinting their wealth of adorning salt, pricking points of light into their eyes. He itched under their silent scrutiny. Without releasing him, their heads drew together setting off a rustling of talk. Many pointed and there was much shaking of heads that set the salt discs in their ears tinkling.

Carnelian could feel the rage swelling up in Osidian and sought to release its pressure by turning to Fern for help.

'Please give us . . .' he began whispering to his friend. The room fell silent.

'... their words,' said Carnelian, excruciatingly aware everyone was listening.

An old woman directed a mutter at Loskai, to which he replied before turning to Carnelian, barely concealing a smile. The Elders forbid you to speak to Fern for he stands before them accused.'

'I've no doubt who did the accusing,' said Carnelian, and was pleased to see the man's face sour.

A woman rattled out angry words Carnelian struggled to understand. Something about keeping silent.

Loskai gave a nod and looked first to one then the other of the Standing Dead. 'Here you'll speak only if you're spoken to.'

Carnelian tried to keep from his face any sign he had understood anything of what the woman had said. A glance reassured him Osidian was managing to contain his anger.

A woman Carnelian recognized as Harth fixed Fern with bird-bright eyes. 'Why have you endangered the Tribe by bringing us these Standing Dead?'

She spoke slowly, with emphasis, so that Carnelian found her words easier to decipher.

'Have you nothing to say, child? Have you no explanation for why you have betrayed us?'

Fern curved as if the woman were piling stones on his back.

'Why?' she barked, jerking her chin up when he hesitated.

Fern answered her in a low voice. 'I'm no longer sure, my mother.'

Carnelian knew that last word well enough for, as a child, it was what he had called Ebeny.

'You're no longer sure?' said Harth, mimicking his tone. She looked round at a woman, Fern's mother, head bowed, hands clasped in her lap. 'Do you hear, Akaisha? Your son's not sure why he's brought the Tribe to the brink of disaster.'

Harth pointed here and there among the Elders. 'Ginkga and Mossie, Galewing and Kyte all waited for you in Makar until they could wait no longer. You realize they were forced to come through the Leper Valleys without protection?'

As many of the Elders pursed their lips with disapproval, Fern and Loskai hung their heads.

Ginkga spoke up. Tell us what happened, children, so that we might not judge you unfairly.' Her fierce eyes belied her gentle words.

The Elders cocked their heads to listen as, hesitantly, Fern and Loskai took it in turns, sometimes interrupting each other, to tell their tale of robbery all the way down the road from the City at the Gates.

'We were moving along the high road,' said Fern, sliding his hand through the air as if it were in a groove. 'We'd no reason to suppose there was any special danger.'

Loskai stabbed a finger at him. 'It was his brother, Ravan, who saw the Bloodguard and Fern himself who found the Standing Dead among the sartlar.'

Many of the Elders recoiled at those last few words.

'All
the bloodshed stemmed from that,' said Loskai, looking eagerly into their faces.

'Among the sartlar, you say?' a woman asked, her eyes wide with disbelief.

Fern joined his nod to Loskai's. Carnelian could see as well as they that the Elders did not believe them.