Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘You don’t believe you will die?’

Carnelian did and longed for it, as the only remaining way out. The Leper leaned close enough for Carnelian to see bandages stretched over a mouth and chin and all the way up the bridge of a nose. The eyes were remote stars reflected in a midnight sea.

‘I’m wrong. I can feel your fear.’ The bandages deformed as the Leper spoke. ‘Beg for your life!’

The scene lost cohesion, dissolved.

‘You’ll beg sure enough when we torture you.’

Carnelian felt he was overhearing a faraway conversation.

‘I saw many plead as they were broken. Cut, crushed, impaled, burned. You watch it, because you can’t turn away. Hard to believe they could still be alive. A mere rag of a thing, blood and piss and shit leaking away, but still watching its tormentor with animal eyes, pouring a scream so sharp it’s nothing more than a gasp.’

Silence. A silence that made Carnelian come back, that made the Leper solid again.

‘Stripped of your power you’re not so different from us.’ She lifted a shrouded arm from which hung a ball of stained cloth. ‘You foul yourself as a man does.’ The arm dropped. ‘Though your beauty is unearthly; your eyes. I can see why you hide behind a mask. Your face is more terrifying than leprosy. But don’t imagine that weakness.. .’ The Leper waved an arm over Carnelian. ‘It won’t save you. My people were more helpless than you look now. We’ll show you we can be as merciless.’

Silence and Carnelian enduring it, trying to stay in the cave.

‘Why did you do it? We offered you submission.’

Carnelian tried to find words.

The Leper jabbed a foot into his ribs. ‘Why?’

Carnelian moistened his mouth to speak. ‘Do Masters need a reason to be cruel?’

The Leper was there again. ‘Where’ve you hidden your auxiliaries?’

Carnelian strung the words together. Auxiliaries?

‘You’re hoping we’ll go back to our homes. You call us vermin. Extermination is a Master’s word.’

Carnelian remembered the pyres and the stench of death in his nostrils as familiar as his own smell.

Light thrust into his face, searing his eyes closed. ‘Where?’

Carnelian tried to turn away, but fingers digging into his cheek forced his head back.

‘Dead,’ he said, moving his jaw against the Leper’s grip. ‘All dead.’

The grip released. ‘Do you take us for fools?’

‘It’s true.’

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘We killed them all.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

Carnelian tried to describe the battle as he recalled it, in snatches. As each jewel-bright impression flashed into his mind he tried to hook words to it. He fell silent, aching for his loved ones.

‘Are you trying to tell me the Plainsmen defeated you?’

Carnelian registered the Leper’s incredulity as it mixed with his confusion. Clarity came as a vision of a landscape columned by rising smoke.

‘Are you?’

Carnelian managed a nod.

‘All were destroyed?’

‘All,’ Carnelian said, as memory dug its roots into him. Pyres burned the smiling dead. Trees burned. The Koppie Crag with darkness coiled around it like a snake. Poppy’s face striped by tears. Flashes of light, smothering dark, faces, familiar, strange. The living and the dead. Enmeshing memory and dream.

When he surfaced again in the cave the Leper was gone. A lamp guttering was causing shadows in the walls to shudder like mourners.

‘You were travelling with Marula. We followed you. We’re sure they had no brass around their necks.’

Carnelian groaned. ‘I told you before: the auxiliaries are all dead.’

The Leper shifted her shapeless shrouds. ‘There was a girl with you, a Plainsman girl.’

Carnelian’s heart leapt. ‘Poppy.’

‘Your slave?’

Carnelian tried to shake his head.

‘Why weren’t you wearing a mask? Why the rags? Were you disguised? It doesn’t make sense.’

Carnelian began rambling, discovering his past even as he was coining it into words.

‘Living with them? You were living with Plainsmen?’

Carnelian brought the Leper into focus. ‘They gave us sanctuary.’ That last word chimed like a bell, then he was overwhelmed with loss, with the horror of what he had allowed to happen.

‘Why are you crying?’ said the Leper, her voice huskier with alarm.

Carnelian staunched his tears. The dead demanded not tears, but atonement.

‘Sanctuary from whom?’

Carnelian responded to the gentleness in the Leper’s voice. ‘Other Masters.’

Carnelian sensed her surprise.

‘You fought with the Plainsmen against the auxiliaries?’ she whispered. ‘You were fighting the Master who is our enemy…?’

‘Aurum,’ Carnelian said, tasting the syllables as if his breath had become that of a corpse.

‘Au-rum,’ the Leper repeated. ‘It’s strange to know our enemy by name.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You hate him too. I can see it in your face.’

‘I hate all the Masters. All.’

The Leper waited for the echoes to fade. ‘But him most of all.’

Carnelian almost explained how Aurum had had his uncle put to death, but that did not feel right. The Lepers had primacy when it came to loss at Aurum’s hand.

‘Then you weren’t involved in… in the atrocities…?’

Carnelian managed a dry chuckle, almost a cough. ‘You’re wrong. I am involved. Aurum came down here searching for… for me.’

The shrouded head nodded. ‘But if he’s your enemy why are you prepared to die in his place?’

Carnelian grew suddenly fatigued, worn out, despairing that he could not find enough energy to confess his crimes.

His buttocks were raw. The discomfort he could bear, but he was enough himself to feel the humiliation of being cleaned like a baby. When the Leper had finished she brought a bowl of water to his lips. He drank, trying to pierce the shadow in her shrouds.

‘There’s no need for you to have to keep doing this,’ he said. He lifted his ankles to show their bindings. ‘Loose me then I can relieve myself decently.’

The Leper drew back. ‘So you can try to escape?’

Carnelian’s heart leapt at the thought of rejoining his people. He shook his head. He had been a prisoner for days; they must be long gone.

‘Even if you managed to pass through our caves, you’d be lost in our land. We’d hunt you down.’

Carnelian smiled. ‘Well then.’

The Leper looked down her cowl at him for a while. ‘Roll over.’

Carnelian did as he was told. He felt her working at the knots and bore the pain as the rope peeled away from his wounded flesh. His arms seemed wood as he brought them round in front of him. He grimaced as he saw his wrists; the colours of bronze and so swollen that they did not seem to belong to him at all. He sat up to watch the Leper free his legs. Her bandaged hands were nimble. He imagined the skin beneath the bandages with its sores, its thickened plaques. It quickened fear in him that he must now be a leper.

When his feet came loose, he gingerly drew them apart, grimacing at the ache and stiffness.

The Leper laughed. ‘You’ll have difficulty standing on those, never mind escaping.’

Her laughter was a warm sound. Not meant unkindly. Relief perhaps.

‘What’re you called?’ he said.

The Leper regarded him in her motionless way. ‘Lily.’

His face must have betrayed his surprise because she added: ‘Do you think a leper has no right to a pretty name?’

Carnelian shrugged, discomfited.

‘And you?’ Lily said.

Carnelian told her and was charmed by how she pronounced it. ‘Do you wear those shrouds even among your own kind?’

Lily turned her head to one side. ‘Why do you ask?’