Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

The Ancestor House of the Bluedancing seemed a bone boat run aground upon the crags. The flight of steps that climbed to it divided and swept up on either side towards the summit. Carnelian bowed his head as he climbed, feeling the presence of the ancestors weighing down on him. As he passed their House he dared to peer at its ivory traceries, at the buttresses of femurs that anchored it to the rock.

It was a relief to come up into the sky. He breathed deep, seeking to free his heart from despair. Voices made him turn to see Plainsmen hurrying across the rock towards Osidian. Carnelian moved to intercept them. Their whitened faces betrayed them as Osidian’s acolytes. They were gaudy with the salt trinkets with which he had seduced them. Carnelian held his spear horizontal in front of him to bar their way. Craning round him to see Osidian, they spoke all at once. Carnelian gleaned enough of what they were saying to answer them. ‘It was I who summoned you.’

They fell silent, staring at him. ‘At the Master’s command?’ said one.

Carnelian shook his head slowly. More consternation broke out, but he ignored it. Smoke was rising in the north from the Koppie. Enraged, he silenced their clamour with a glare. Some started to kneel. ‘I’ll speak when all the tribes have assembled here and not before nightfall.’

Some were brave enough to threaten leaving. Seeing their fear of him, he felt compassion for them. That must have softened his expression for they relaxed a little.

‘All must combine their strength if that,’ he pointed to the Koppie, ‘is not to be the fate for all your homes.’

Defiance left them as they looked upon the Ochre pyre.

‘Please go now and set your men to gathering fernwood. We’ll meet in council here and will need a good fire to warm us against the coming night.’

Like everyone else Osidian sat upon the summit gazing at the Koppie burning. Carnelian searched his face, looking for satisfaction, anger, a glimpse of cunning, but found nothing. All he saw was Osidian’s beauty marred by defeat and the pain and sickness caused by the maggots burrowing in his flesh.

He rose and went to crouch beside Poppy. Grime from the burials grained her skin. She looked up at him. ‘Can you really save them from that?’

Though he wanted to take away the fear in her eyes, the most he could say was: ‘I hope so.’

She gave him a pale smile then turned her gaze back to the Koppie. Sitting near her, Krow shot him a grim look to which Carnelian responded with a nod before going off to sit beside Fern.

He had chosen a promontory away from the others. His gaze was fixed, sightless, on his burning home. The creases of grief in his face deepened Carnelian’s misery. He longed to comfort him, but did not know how. Touch would not reach Fern, nor words. At that moment Fern turned to look at him, tearful as he shook his head. Carnelian’s own grief welled up. He understood what Fern’s eyes were telling him. Whatever they had had, or could have had, was gone. The dead stood between them like a wall.

Carnelian walked around the rim of the summit on the lookout for more Plainsmen on the plain below, but could see none. He was having to pick his way around funerary trestles bearing bones so sun-bleached they resembled carved limestone. It seemed a sterile imitation of the stinking mess they had left behind in the Koppie. The Koppie. Its dying exerted a horrid fascination over him. He had stood watching past the point where he could bear it. Even now that he had managed to tear free he felt its pull. It was as if the heart of the world was failing.

He was sure he now knew how Osidian had intended to cover his flight with the Marula, picking the salt up on the way. Osidian had coaxed Aurum to the Koppie and offered it up with his Plainsmen as a sacrifice. Osidian had made certain Aurum was aware the Koppie was the centre of his power. From the tattooed hands of the Plainsman veterans he had killed, the old Master would have already learned the names of the tribes defying him. He would know he had now reached within striking distance of their homes. Torching the Koppie was a warning for all to see. Aurum would now make camp in their midst, send messengers with threats and rely on the Plainsmen to bring him Osidian alive. Such methods came naturally to all Masters.

Loathing for Osidian, for Aurum seeped into Carnelian, swelling into hatred of all the Masters, chief amongst them himself. He and they were responsible for this misery, these atrocities. The Masters were a curse, a cancer that had fed off the world for millennia. Desperate fantasies possessed him that he might find a way to cut out their disease.

Suddenly, Poppy leapt to her feet. Others joined her. Aurum’s legion was swarming out from the Koppie like ants fleeing a burning nest. Carnelian watched, heart pounding. Was his reasoning flawed? If Aurum came for them now, all was lost. Across the summit, people were turning to look at him. It was Morunasa who spoke. ‘Do we flee?’

Carnelian knew he must hold firm. ‘Hookfork moves towards the lagoons. He intends to make a camp and will need water for his host.’

His words appeared to soothe many, but Morunasa, for one, did not seem convinced. As the legion crept across the plain, Carnelian watched, affecting unconcern. Shadows were stretching east when it became clear that Aurum was indeed heading for the lagoons. Carnelian’s relief was soured by the realization that Aurum’s camp would be sited on the shore where the Ochre had been accustomed to fetch their water.

Plainsman fires formed constellations in the ferngardens, but were a poor imitation of the stars. Carnelian was only intermittently aware of the scuffling and muted voices behind him as the representatives of the tribes came up onto the summit. What he intended to say to them might lead him back to Osrakum, back to his father and the rest of his lost family. It felt like a betrayal that, for so long, they should have been so far from his thoughts. The pattern of lights below resembled any one of so many of the stopping places he had seen from the watch-towers on his way to the election. He was reminded also of when he had stood with his father upon a spur of rock high in the Pillar of Heaven surveying the tributaries gathering on the Plain of Thrones. Both seemed more fairytale than memory.

He gazed north as if his sight might pierce the night all the way to Osrakum. It was the glimmering wheelmap of Aurum’s camp that caught his eye. Three concentric rings inscribed into the earth by the ditches Aurum’s dragons had ploughed into the fernland. The outer, bright with the fires of the auxiliaries, enclosed a dimmer ring where the dragons formed a wall around a flickering hub. That flicker showed where Aurum and his Lesser Chosen commanders no doubt were enjoying the exquisite pleasures they could not deprive themselves of even on campaign.

The citrine splendour of that camp contrasted with the murky smoulder of the Koppie that appeared, strangely, the same size, so that the two seemed to form a pair of unmatched eyes. The Koppie too was a wheelmap in form. Osidian had been right: in that design the Plainsmen aped the Chosen, but it seemed clear to Carnelian now that it was not a wheelmap, but rather military camps they copied. It saddened him that the Plainsmen had shaped their homes in imitation of the military mechanisms of their oppressors. The thought awoke his longing to free them, instead of which he was going to urge them to return to slavery.

The bonfire roaring behind him was spilling his shadow over the summit edge. He turned to face it and at first could see nothing but its great circle and, for a moment, stood again before his father’s hearth in the Hold. That its light must be clearly visible from Aurum’s camp thrilled him with fierce defiance. Approaching the flames, he began to be able to see the people gathered round it. Plainsmen, mostly legionary veterans, no doubt chosen by their men because they spoke Vulgate; others were youths, many with white-painted faces that shone too brightly. Here and there he saw some wrinkled faces, ears flaccid without their gleaming ear spools, chests bare without the pectorals; those salt treasures now bedecked the young. As his gaze touched each of these ancients, he gave a nod of respect and was warmed by their cautious smiles. He completed the circuit near him, with Poppy’s grim face, and Fern staring blindly, Osidian at his side, head bowed. Some vestige of the love he had had for Osidian disturbed him, but he crushed it. A part of him yearned for death for them both.