Ricardo Pinto - The Standing Dead

Carnelian remained behind to watch the Oracles resume their march. He threw away the sodden weight of the blanket and turned his face up towards the glowering sky and prayed the rain would wash him clean. When absolution did not come, he forced himself to stand there long enough to watch the captives being ferried across the swollen river in narrow boats.

When night fell, the screaming began. Carnelian had prayed the storm would drown it out. His first thought was to reassure Poppy, to comfort her, but the look of accusation in her eyes was a wall of thorns between them. He cursed the weakness that had made him keep her in the Upper Reach. He tried to hide away in sleep. The rain lessened. Exposed by the silence, the sounds of agony formed an infernal harmony with the roaring Thunderfalls. Poppy joined her whimpering to the nightmare until Carnelian could bear it no longer and crushed her in his arms. Rocking together, they tried as best they could to survive sane until the dawn.

For many nights, the horror was repeated. Then it stopped. The rainfall began to ease. Carnelian descended with Poppy and they found a salve for their nightmares in lighting fires upon the crown of the knoll. Huddling round them with Plainsmen, they exchanged stories of their peoples, yearning to return home.

Often, Carnelian would find Poppy staring at the Isle of Flies. He would try to draw her away, but the girl always returned as if she had some need to keep a watch upon that awful place. She was the first to observe the shapes slipping from the Isle of Flies into the flood. As he watched them tumble amidst white fury down into the chasm, Carnelian tried to pretend they were logs, but Poppy turned to him and bleakly said, 'No, Carnie, they're the corpses of our tortured dead.'

The sky cleared to an infinite blue. Rain, when it fell, was diamond bright from clouds as pale as wood smoke. As the Thunderfalls lost their fury, they became sheathed in rainbows. The days sank into a pregnant murmuring in which, stealthily, the world came back to life. Even the ridges of earth that were all that was left upon the scoured rock of the clearing began to uncurl ferns. With his back to the Isle of

Flies, in the clean sunlight, Carnelian found it hard to deny hope and a fragile joy. He summoned Kor and had her bring the sartlar blinking up from their caves and begin the vast ' labour of lifting the Ladder from the chasm floor. He and Kor together supervised the lowering of the first sartlar down into the chasm. Soon they were drawing the Ladder up from where it had fallen, unrolling it up the cliff face, pegging it with new posts they carved from the fallen baobabs.

The busy rhythm of their lives allowed them momentarily to forget the Isle of Flies. It was an illusory reprieve. Every twenty days or so, convoys of Plainsmen would appear with supplies. Carnelian's men would welcome them up onto the knoll and there the visitors would tell of the battles they had fought; of the tribes they had conquered. Carnelian would sit among them concealed, his back to the sun so as to hide his alien green eyes. The visitors would speak of the Master as if he were a god. The following day, they would leave with the slabs of salt the sartlar brought up from the caves. Sickly anticipation would come as a fever in the succeeding days. When the next batch of captives were spotted coming down from the Earthsky, people became busy with the tasks they had reserved for the occasion. None would look up in case they saw the new victims being ferried across to the Isle of Flies. Carnelian might have shared their cowardice, except that Poppy seemed compelled to witness the whole sickening business and he could not bear that she should do so alone. In the nights that would follow, unable to sleep, it became their habit to join the men around the fire trying to drown out the screaming with their talk.

Marula poured down the escarpment following a host of riders. The rumble, their slipping movement, recalled for Carnelian the night of the landslide. In their midst, any of the shrouded Oracles might have been the Master.

Carnelian turned to Poppy somewhere in the darkness behind him. 'Our people have returned.'

She gave no reply, though he knew she was there. He looked down again from their tree at where the massed aquar were sinking into their own dust. He would have to go and meet the host, however reluctant he might be to see Osidian.

'I'll return as soon as I can,' he said over his shoulder and then descended to the ground.

His appearance among his Plainsmen produced a clamour as they asked him what they should do. He shook his head, watching the black tide breaking against the baobab wall. One of the shrouded figures broke through, pulling behind him a ragged entourage. Carnelian recognized it was Osidian by his rangy stride, and had to move sideways to keep him in sight as he wove up through the trees.

'My Lord,' Carnelian said when Osidian was almost upon him.

'Carnelian,' said Osidian, his face wholly concealed in the shadow of his uba.

Carnelian noticed for the first time the tall man coming up behind him. The curled hair told him it was Fern, though it was difficult to see him in the man looking at him with a white face. As their eyes met, Carnelian became almost distraught enough to ask Fern if that covering of ash meant that he had become a disciple of the Master.

'I would speak to you, my Lord,' Osidian said.

Confronted with the menace of his voice, his great height, the Master drove thoughts of Fern from Carnelian's mind.

'Here?'

'Anywhere else but here.'

Carnelian looked up at his tree and remembered Poppy. He feared the consequences for her if she and Osidian should meet.

Osidian cut through Carnelian's indecision. 'We'll walk together in the baobab forest.'

He turned to Fern. 'Make sure no one follows us.'

Carnelian sensed that Fern was making an effort not to look at him. His friend bowed his head.

'As you command, Master.'

Carnelian and Osidian stood among the baobabs alone. Carnelian looked back the way they had come. Across the bare rock of the clearing, the knoll appeared to be a many-masted ship, becalmed. 'Come,' said Osidian.

His gentle tone made Carnelian feel more uneasy than if Osidian had used his customary, imperious manner.

'Are you not afraid to be with me alone?'

'I have made the Ochre the hated masters of more than thirty tribes. I do not believe you would threaten their only protector.'

Osidian's sadness produced in Carnelian something like shame. They walked on, Osidian looking blindly before him, Carnelian reluctantly crushing the reborn green spirals of the ferns beneath his feet. As they penetrated deeper into the forest, brooding baobabs rose ever more massive on either hand. Glancing up, Carnelian expected to see a face in the wood, but the trunk was smooth right up to the branches that held a bowl of blue sky.

Carnelian spoke to dispel the smothering silence. 'Why have you returned?'

Osidian sighed. 'My host is grown weary of conquests.'

'And bloodshed?'

Osidian glanced at him but made no answer, instead leading them into the cool shadow of a baobab.

Their edge is blunted, I will resharpen it by letting them return to their homes.'

'I see,' said Carnelian, unable to grasp the nature of Osidian's mood.

Unwinding his uba, Osidian revealed a face thinner than Carnelian remembered. The green eyes were seeing him but there was something distracting them, a haunting presence of pain.

'You are changed, my Lord.'

Osidian smiled bleakly. 'All the world is changed.'

Carnelian. registered Osidian's vulnerability with disbelief. 'I had thought everything was progressing as you would wish.'

'All moves according to my will, but…'