The Third God (115 page)

Black water at his back, he shrinks away from the tree. Vast, it ensnares the sky in its branches. Its roots bind the earth, and his limbs; entwine his iron spear. He reels, gazing skywards, mouth agape, pouring a moan. His eyes misty blue cataracts
.

On the pit rim, he grips the earth with frantic fingers for fear of falling in. The world tree’s roots snake down to feed upon the Underworld. Roots awrithe with worms. O false strength! Terror that it will topple on him, tearing the sky from its circle; uprooting the earth. A small door lies open in its trunk. Strange he has not noticed it before. He and his shadow hold hands as they enter
.

Alone in the tomb. A seed crushed in a withering pomegranate. A baby in a dried-up womb. He sees the huskman. No, a woman, arms outstretched, desiring to hold him. He is willing, for she is the mother of his mother he has never known. He offers her a baby. Puzzled, he knows it is himself. Glancing up, he sees her unfleshed, eyeless face and knows she is Death
.

He woke, gasping, terrified, the dream more real than the night. He sat up, aware of the shapes of his loved ones sleeping around the fire. Silence beyond, pregnant with the multitude of children. He focused on the embers blushing with each shift of air. He had asked for a dream, for certainty. Now his heart was registering its bleak meaning. He quietened his fluttering mind. There was no room for doubt. Some part of him had known it all along. Still, it had been a long struggle to accept it.

Brooding, he was watching the food being distributed to the children that many were already packing away for the journey, when a slave shuffled into view. The slave’s painted eyes flinched as it caught sight of his face. It fell trembling to its knees, but not before Carnelian had seen its mutilation displayed within a frame of ivory.

‘Please, will the Celestial Lord deign to follow me?’ said the eunuch.

Carnelian noticed two scarlet palanquins some distance away and signed agreement. As he approached, he saw more of the eunuchs in gorgeous costumes of verdant silk ribbed and studded with jewels, but his focus was on the palanquins: boxes lacquered the colour of fresh blood. He had a premonition of whom they might contain. In a whisper his guide urged him to kneel before the first of these. Frowning, Carnelian obliged. A panel sliding back released a dark perfume of mummified rose. A glimmer like a fish in the gloomy interior made him lean forward. Inside, curled up as if in a womb, an apparition smothered in scarlet damask, a mask in her lap, her pale beautiful face staring at him with two angry, eyeless pits.

‘My Lady,’ he said.

‘Lord Carnelian,’ said Ykoriana. Her head inclined a little as if her empty sockets were giving him a sidelong glance. ‘What is it I have been watching from my palace?’

He saw no point in not telling her the truth. When he was done she dipped her chin. ‘It is as I had thought. The world is finished then?’

‘This world is.’

‘And what hope have you for life beyond, Celestial?’

Carnelian considered the dark promise of his dream. ‘For those I lead, certainly not the life they might have lived here, but one lived freely beneath the sky.’

Ykoriana nodded, her brow creasing, sadness in her face. Her brow smoothed. ‘You know why I have come?’

‘I have an idea, my Lady.’

One of her hands slid out from a sleeve and, opening like a lily, reached out to him. Carnelian took it. Though it seemed porcelain, it was soft and warm. ‘Take your niece with you.’

He was touched by her plea, but felt in his gut the danger of taking with him a child from which could be grown a brood of imperial progeny.

Ykoriana pulled her hand free. ‘Do this not for my sake, but for hers.’

She made a sign of summoning that caused the eunuchs around the second palanquin to kneel. One opened its panel, then all touched their foreheads to the ground as a tiny figure emerged into the light. A divine doll wrapped in a dark robe. The very plainness of her costume only served to accentuate the beauty of her face; the emerald slivers of her eyes.

‘She has had no reason yet to become cruel.’

Carnelian returned his gaze to Ykoriana, who had retreated back into the gloom of her palanquin. He was remembering that the girl had witnessed the bloody rituals of the Apotheosis. Ykoriana was putting on a mask. Unhuman beauty frozen in gold. A hard brittle smile, but it was the eyes that startled Carnelian. Not slits, but solid staring ovals with irises of icy sapphire. The mask made Ykoriana appear as if she was in terror of some horror just behind Carnelian. It was an act of will for him not to turn to look for it. As the little girl tottered towards them in response to her mother’s call, Carnelian leaned towards her. ‘Let her see you as you really are.’

Ykoriana shook her head violently and her staring mask made her seem as if she was crazed. The little girl was there beside him, on tiny ranga, gazing up at the mask. Carnelian’s heart ached as he saw the barrier this mother felt she must put up between herself and her daughter.

‘This is your uncle, Carnelian. Do you remember, Ykorenthe?’

The little girl looked at him with solemn eyes and gave a nod.

‘Carnie,’ he said and she rewarded him with a smile.

‘Carnie.’

He gazed at her, entranced, then turned to Ykoriana. ‘She would be raised as a barbarian.’

‘But she will be free?’ said the staring mask.

Carnelian frowned. ‘I make no promises. We may never even win our way to any kind of safety.’

Her hand found his again. ‘Promise me you will keep her close to you.’

Carnelian looked upon the beautiful child again. ‘I will if I can.’

Ykoriana let go of him. ‘That is enough. The Gods love you.’ Her hand found the child’s face, caressing her chin, then sliding up her cheek. ‘My delight,’ she murmured.

Carnelian, watching this, was touched and considered once again urging her to unmask, so that at least she could kiss her daughter one last time, but the Dowager Empress was already receding back into her palanquin. ‘I shall pray for you both.’ With that, she slid the panel back. Soon it rose into the air, turned, then began the journey back towards the Forbidden Door.

Carnelian felt a tiny hand slipping around one of his fingers. He sensed the little girl’s anxiety and, scooping her up, rose and turned to carry her back to the camp and the other children.

Standing in the entrance to the Plain of Thrones, Carnelian turned to look back. Beyond the river of children, the shadow of the western cliff was beginning to creep towards Osidian’s camp. Above the tomb colossi were the galleries of the Halls of Rebirth where, at that very moment, Ykoriana might be standing having the scene described to her. Behind her the incomparable marvel of the chambers honeycombing the rock and opening out into the underworld of the Labyrinth. Rearing above its roof, the Pillar of Heaven, its flank gilded by the sinking sun. He felt a deep melancholy at all that was to be lost, even though those wonders had fed on misery and injustice and lies. He turned away to look down the steps cascading all the way to the turquoise waters along whose new muddy shore an armada of bone boats was pulled up like so many seeds. He smiled at Poppy who was holding Ykorenthe’s hand. It gladdened his heart that Poppy seemed to like her; that she was prepared to see Ykorenthe as a child first, a Mistress second. He caught Fern watching him. Carnelian put his arm about his shoulders and grinned. ‘Let’s go home.’

BONE BOATS

And through this second birth
He created himself.

(from the myth ‘The Tale of the Three Gods’)

CARNELIAN TURNED SIDE-ON TO THE BREEZE. A BAND OF BLACKNESS
separating the glory of the heavens from its murky reflection in the Skymere was relieved only by a few pricks of light. He focused on one, telling himself it must be coming from a chamber in which his father and Ebeny were together and he sent them a benediction. Then he pulled his cloak about him, suddenly chilled by the thin light of the stars.

Carrying Ykorenthe, Carnelian led a group of children along the boardwalks the kharon had laid across the mud to their boats. He was seeing his way by means of the indigo of the dawning sky. He turned to make sure the children were keeping up. They were only the tip of one of many teeming fingers splaying out from the quay. Judging they would soon catch up with him, he set off again towards the pale hulks of the bone boats that seemed the remains of monsters washed up on the shore.

Mud up to his knees, water slapping at his waist, Carnelian handed Ykorenthe up to a man creasing a chameleon tattoo into a grimace. Carnelian had to bark at him to take a firmer hold of her, nervous as the guardsman was to touch a Mistress. An urchin was perched on the end of the nearest board, squinting with fear at the water. Carnelian waded over to him with lolloping lunges, trying to reassure the boy with a smile, cursing as one foot plunged deeper than the other, lurched free, scooped the child up, grabbed his arm to tighten his hold on his pack, waddled back with him, handed him up. He paused, panting, looking along the shore where other boats were being held bow-on to the strand. Across the mud foreshore, a deluge of children was flowing towards them whom Suth people and Marula were steadily lifting up to the boats. He frowned; this was going to take much longer than he had hoped. When he went back for the next child, he had to remember to smile.

Standing with his arm around the trunk of the prow, Carnelian looked back along the deck dense with little heads, adults rising as sparse fences at the edges. He craned over the side. The water was lapping just below the oarlocks. They were riding low, but he was sure the steersman would have said something if he thought it unsafe. He looked back towards the kharon, with his crown, standing like a startled puppet against the sternpost. Carnelian raised his arm. A moment later he heard the port oars begin to thresh the lake and, ponderously, the prow swung away from the strand.

Slowly they ran parallel to the shore. As other boats turned into open water, more slid in to take their place. He had counted more than a hundred in all, perhaps a third of which were already laden with children. Nevertheless, their throng still stretched unbroken up into the Plain of Thrones. The kharon had promised him they would manage to load them all. Carnelian had made sure Keal understood that his was to be the last boat. Still, he fretted, reluctant to set off, anxious not to leave even a single child behind. His hesitation was increasing the danger of boats fouling each other. Already, there were too many of them near the shore and these heavy and sluggish. A collision was the more immediate peril and so he gave his steersman the prearranged signal. The oars began digging into the water. They picked up speed, heading east. Leaning over the side, he saw Fern waving as his boat curved its course to follow. Several more were carving the lake to enter their wake.

As they came round the green flank of the Plain of Thrones, a view of Osrakum opened up that Carnelian had never seen before. The eastern face of the Sacred Wall rose sheer, carved with coombs wider than those he was familiar with, but all consumed by the shadow that still spilled out towards them across the water. Those dark pits showed no hint of being inhabited. In truth nowhere was there a sign this world had ever been touched by human hand. A melancholy settled over him, the threshing oars seeming to become his heartbeat as they carried them all through this empty landscape. What a strange, silent, wild place this would become once men ceased to live here.

His mood of contemplation was broken by the vast barrow mound of the Labyrinth rising from the Isle. His thoughts were haunted by the dark womb that belly concealed, by imagining its fate. The column sepulchres would fall one by one like forest giants. Light and rain would pour in, enough to nurture seedlings to uncurl and grow. Slowly the stone roof would crumble and fall to be replaced by a swaying, breathing green canopy.

He spotted some tiny figures winding down to the Ydenrim shore. No doubt kharon come to watch their boats pass. His gaze returned to the vast, black mass of the Pillar of Heaven. It appeared much wider from this side and more immense than he had seen it since Osidian and he were together in the Forbidden Garden. His gaze lingered on the cleft that seemed to threaten to divide the Pillar in two from its brow to where its feet were lost in the tiny forest of thorn trees. The ladder was there in that cleft, that they had used to visit the Yden. Carnelian closed his eyes and breathed in the earthy perfume drifting towards him across the water. A flashing vision played before him of that bright, innocent time. He opened his eyes and felt the mountain was scowling at him. He relived that second, fateful descent to capture, and expulsion from what they had both then thought paradise.

They gradually passed along the Ydenrim whose gleaming edge held back the green mirrors of the lagoons. Here, the southern sweep of the Sacred Wall was inset with coombs blazing with snowy palaces and the verdant jewels of gardens. Then Carnelian saw the scythe of the lake narrowing off towards the gape of the Valley of the Gate that squeezed up to the Canyon throat. He wished then that they could have left Osrakum along the Canyon floor, but his flood had made that impossible. Squinting, he tried to make out the row of sluices he had broken. From a distance, his plan had seemed reasonable, but the closer they came to its reality, the more it seemed madness.