Ricardo Pinto - The Standing Dead

Osidian considered it some moments and then gave a nod before turning back to Morunasa. This tree is as empty as the others.'

'So are all the granaries,' said the Maruli. The pygmies must have taken all the fernroot when they fled.'

What had really happened to the pygmies, Carnelian would maintain as his secret. He would not hand over more victims to the Oracles.

The sartlar swarmed the baobabs plucking the pygmy mummies from their tombs. Carnelian winced as he saw another fall to the ground, bones cracking like twigs. Other sartlar were gathering the mummies and heaping them in a mound.

When all the trees had been emptied, Carnelian walked around the pyramid of mummies. He gave the order and sartlar ambled in with torches. Carnelian heard the pyre ignite but the flames were invisible in the sunlight. Rustling like dry ferns, the dead folded tighter into foetus curls. Every so often one would pop, exploding into flakes that turned almost instantly to ash. The cadavers shrank, grew reddish brown, then began to singe black. Carnelian turned away when their skulls began to push grinning out through the charring leather of their flesh. He fled from the stench of their burning hair.

The next day he gathered the sartlar and told them they must cut down the trees they had emptied of the dead. Their reaction was to stand so still, he might have been standing in a ring of stones. 'What's the matter?' he said.

'Kor,' he called and was relieved when she emerged from among the sartlar and came to fall before him. He waited for her to look up at him.

'Master, the earth will rebel.'

'What do you mean?' he asked, but for an answer the woman only flattened herself to the ground. He stared, wanting to speak to her, to explain, but he had nothing in his heart but unease.

'It has to be done,' he said, at last. Kor rose.

Her silence goaded Carnelian to anger. 'You will do it now.'

'As the Master commands, so shall it be done.'

With flint axes the sartlar chopped into the soft wood of the baobabs. There was something eerie in the way each blow set the naked branches far above to trembling. Carnelian became convinced the trees were feeling pain. The first one to topple gave out a stuttering cracking and then fell, gracefully, as if it were merely lying down, but when it struck the ground Carnelian was shaken by the impact and drew back from the slow mist of dust that rose and took so long to settle. The giant lay stretched out slain upon the earth. Another two were heeling over in the background. Watching this brought back a memory of the destruction of the Great Hall in the Hold; the first step on the path that had brought him so far. As the feelings of loss for his father, Ebeny, his brothers, his people, flooded into him, he had to turn his back on the felling and go away to stand upon the edge of the chasm. He stared blind into its depths, rethreading the whole improbable sequence of events that separated him from that time. He wondered, as he had not done for a shameful length of time, whether his people had made it safely up from the sea and were now with his father in Osrakum.

Carnelian, Osidian and Krow stood among a Marula guard surveying the clearing the sartlar had gouged from the baobab forest. For Carnelian the sight was punishment enough. With ropes, with levers cut from the branches of the fallen trees themselves, the sartlar had dragged and rolled the vast trunks towards the knoll so that they now enclosed it with a rampart of wood. This operation had ripped dark swathes through the meshing of dead ferns. All that was left of the baobabs in the clearing were the livid eruptions of their stumps.

Osidian pronounced himself satisfied. 'All that remains to be done is to excise those roots and then we shall burn the ferns and it will all be as smooth as a legionary parade ground.'

Carnelian could not believe Osidian was blind to the desecration. 'How do you propose we remove the stumps?'

'Dig them out, burn them.' Osidian shrugged. 'Do whatever works. I want them all removed.'

'Yes, my Lord,' said Carnelian, enough anger leaking into his voice to make Osidian raise an eyebrow.

Then I shall return to my wood-walled citadel,' he said, and smiled as if he had made some great jest. Carnelian was glad his moroseness caused the smile to slip from Osidian's face. He watched him, Krow and the guards until they reached the dwarfing wall of trunks. Beyond, towering over the clearing, baobabs stood like Masters on the knoll.

Smoke from the burning stumps was choking the air when new arrivals clambered up out of the chasm in a dark and oily flood of flesh. Hundreds more Marula warriors and, in among them, a swarm of pygmies laden with baskets.

Carnelian had been supervising the gouging out of a stump. He had grown weary of the obstinate grip which the roots maintained upon the earth. Over the two days they had been working at it, he had grown to hate the stumps, oozing water as if they wept, each root having to be dug out, prised one by one like the fingers of a frantic hand until the mutilated tree was forced to release its grip on the earth.

Watching the Marula pour up onto the ravaged escarpment, Carnelian saw with what horror they surveyed his work. He did not like the looks they gave him and threw himself with redoubled fury into his work of destruction.

It was growing dark when the last stump was torn free. They rolled it so that its roots pointed up into the air in a grotesque mockery of the trees that had once stood there. Carnelian could not bear to wait until morning to order the burning.

As night fell, the stumps became infernal heads with fiery hair. Carnelian himself helped the sartlar spread fire across the ground they had cleared. Soon flames were crackling and popping on every side, lighting up the sartlar in an ungainly shadow dance. Eventually, the heat and the choking drifts of smoke drove them all to the safety of the knoll. From behind its wall of cut-down trees, Carnelian could see the whole escarpment luridly ablaze. Fire spread from the clearing to the ragged edge of the baobab forest and licked at the trunks, making Carnelian fear all the forest might be consumed.

Sickened, drained, Carnelian dragged his weary body up the knoll, seeking sleep. Groaning, he lay down, closing his eyes tight so that he would not see the shadows leaping on the trunks around him.

Carnelian must have been asleep for a while, because when he was woken the night was perfectly dark. Something terrible was happening. A low fearful moaning rose up as if from the knoll itself. He lifted his head and saw shadow men all around him, pressing their hands to their ears. A scream came shrilling through the night, a sound he had prayed he would never hear again. On the Isle of Flies, the Oracles were feeding more pygmies to their god.

The screaming continued throughout the night. Weary beyond measure, distraught, Carnelian gave up any attempt at sleep. Rising, he found a fire to feed and hunched down with his hands crossed against his chest, pulling his blanket down hard around his head. He pressed his chin against his wrists, gritted his teeth and tried to find some vision of redemption in the fire. Living the misery of each silent wait, he could not tell how long it was since the Manila had begun to gather around his fire. The black men were shivering, huddling together, their bead corselets clinking against each other like the carapaces of turtles. In their wooden faces their eyes were crazed.

When another scream sounded, a shudder went through their ranks, and many cradled their heads in their arms. They drew comfort from seeing that Carnelian shared their fear.

First light made him rise to gaze at it with longing. As he stretched the stiffness from his limbs he saw everyone was gazing past the grim island, hungry to feel the cleansing sunlight upon their faces. Only when the sun rose did it become possible to believe the darkness could be banished from their minds.