The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 (9 page)

They looked at each other, drawing a pale comfort from sharing their misery.

'Will Crail go with us?' asked Carnelian.

His father nodded.

Tain?'

Another nod.

'And Ebeny?'

'She has asked not to go and I will not command her.'

Carnelian considered this. She was more mother to him than nurse and, besides, his father's favoured concubine. He knew his father had feelings for her. 'I shall speak to her myself.'

'As you wish,' his father said and there was something like hope in his eyes. 'Now let us return to the problem of selecting which of these worlds we shall take as an accompaniment to our journey.'

Carnelian turned to the books. He looked sidelong at his father. The beautiful, tired face seemed intent upon the jewelled oblongs. A wave of dread washed its ice over Carnelian. His father was powerless. The Master, powerless. The Hold seemed suddenly precarious, as if a single wave might wash it into the sea.

That night, Carnelian slept hardly at all. Tain was having difficulty too. They played dice so as not to have to talk. They both played badly. Neither dared confess his dreams.

With first light Carnelian woke. He had left the shutters open just a chink and set a table against them to keep them from flying open. A thin light slipped into the room. Tain had turned away from it. In the corner, his blankets held him in their tight knot. Carnelian lay for a moment thinking. Noise carried up from the ship. Hammering. Voices. He rose and woke Tain to help him dress in his Master's robes.

From the alleyway, the Long Court looked like the carcass of one of the sea monsters that sometimes washed up in the bay that the gulls soon turned into a basket of bones. The remains of his home stood as stark against the colourless sky.

There was a sickening smell. Cauldrons had been set up from which palls of steam were spiralling into the air. Beyond, the cobbles were red with slaughter. Dread drew Carnelian to look closer. One cauldron was filled with bird-like heads and three-fingered hands jiggling in the boil. The long narrow saurian heads quivered white-eyed on pillows of pink-brown scum. He looked across to where they were skinning them, hacking the flesh free from the bones. Red hunks were being wrapped in leaves, and pushed into jars, and the spaces between were packed with icicles. Carnelian was horrified. He surveyed everything with pain-ringed eyes. All around him the mottled bodies lay, their gashed necks bleeding puddles over the stone, their arms and legs and tails curled stiff. This flock had been one of their chief treasures, the only source of eggs. He had loved to feed them from his hand. He recalled their bustle and their chatter.

He snatched at someone walking past. This was done for the meat?'

The man was all fear. He tried to fall to his knees but Carnelian held him up by one shoulder. 'And for glue, Master.' The man pointed crookedly at another of the cauldrons.

Carnelian let him go and went to look. Bones, and skin, the few feathers, all boiling up in a thick translucent broth. He recoiled from the stench. Through the steam he could see parchment laid out on the ground being glued up into sails.

He turned away, disgusted. Once more he plunged past the visitors' doors and onwards, but before he reached his father's steps he turned right. A small door gave onto a passage lit by a slit in the end wall. Once this had been his way to and from the Hold. It led to his old room overlooking the sea. Ebeny would be there. She had always been there.

He rapped on the door in the special way so that she would know it was him, then opened it gently. The room was large, frescoed with squid-headed ammonites and saurians with paddle limbs. The floor was scented grey-wood. This was his room. It would always be his room. Her room was off to the left. He took off his shoes to feel the whorls of the greywood with his toes. He unmasked and drank in the smell of the place. He walked across to the w
indow. Through its panes of cuttl
efish cartilage he could see the sea and the familiar curve of the bay. He frowned when he saw the ship there, sucking onto the quay like a slug.

She called out. He went through the doorway. 'Carnie, it is you.' Her brown, chameleoned face was filled by her bright smiling eyes. She stood up. She was less than half his height and had been beautiful. With a pang he remembered something his father had said about a barbarian's beauty being but a spring flower and quick to wither. He went forward and knelt before her.

'Come, come. You mustn't kneel to me, and certainly not in your Master's robes.'

He stiffened, stood up and moved to sit on a low stool beside her.

Ebeny looked at him, her eyes large and round. She reached out and touched the samite of his robe. 'You carry it well, Carnie.'

He blushed.

'You're upset.'

They have slaughtered the laying flock.'

Her lips pressed together, then she forced them into a smile. There's been much destroyed. But you can't make mosaic without breaking stone.'

'If it were only the stones of the Hold.'

She nodded. 'I know.'

'And yet you won't come with us?'

The Master told you?'

'Why won't you come?'

'Because, little one, I'm too old to travel on that sea.' She waved her tiny hand vaguely. It was the colour of sun-dried leaves and marked with the green of a child
-
gatherer's tattoos. Those tattoos had been among the first glyphs he had ever read. Eight Nuhuron. The God Emperor's name and the reign year when she had been compelled to come to Osrakum as part of that year's flesh tithe. He reached out, took it, covered the tattoos. Her hands were always warm.

'You are not so very old.'

She gave him a quizzical look. 'But I am so very afraid of the sea.'

He laughed, too loudly. 'You? When have you ever feared anything? You don't even fear the Master.'

'But still I'll not go. Your father came here before you and I gave him the same answer.'

He almost asked her what encouragements Suth had offered, what threats, but he did not. She had never broken his father's confidences.

'What's the real reason you won't come with us?'

She lifted up his chin and looked into his eyes. 'What I have become here, I cannot be in the Mountain. There, I will be nothing but a faded concubine to be thrown away like a worn shoe.' She made a throwing gesture. 'Would you hasten me to that?'

'My father'll protect you.'

'Even he must bow to the customs of your House. No. The journey'll be hard and your father's been long away. There might be problems and I don't want to be a burden to him.'

He drew her hand to his lips. 'But I might never see you again.'

'Fie,' she cried. 'It'll take a lot more than a little famine to rid you of me.'

He laughed though his eyes were filling with tears. He leant forward again. The coral pins of his robe rasped along the floor. He nestled his head into her lap. 'I can't leave you behind,' he mumbled into her thigh.

She ran her hands through his hair. 'Sush, sush, little one. You must do your duty to your father and your blood. You're a Master and can't allow yourself to get upset over an old barbarian woman.' She lifted his face up with both her hands.
4
Do you remember when your father took you and Tain from me to live with the tyadra?'

He nodded his head in her hands.

Then you were leaving me to become a man. Now you'll leave me to go off and become a Master, one of the Skyborn. Would you waste your life out here so far from the centre of the world?'

He stood up. While she adjusted the stiff folds of his robe, he looked around her room, a room of treasures. He counted the plain waxed chests where she kept her robes and the ochre blankets that she made herself with their blue embroidery. He still slept with the blankets she had made for him though he had far finer. Even in the depths of winter something of the summer seemed to linger in their folds.

He turned round to look down at her. 'Will you give me one of your blankets to take with me?' 'You've several already.'

'But they've lost their smell of this room
...
of you.'

She smiled and kissed him and together they chose one. She pressed it into his hands. It was dull and crude against the beauty of his Master's robe. He pressed his nose into the blanket and breathed in. It gave him a chance to wipe away the tears. This'll do, old woman.' Once she would have boxed his ears. He realized now that even if she had wanted to she could not reach. He lifted her in his arms and kissed her neck. He left it wet with more tears. She was crying too. He put her down.

He made to leave but then her hand clasped his. 'Will you do something for me, Camie?'

'Anything.'

Take care of my Tain.'

Tain was her youngest child. Carnelian nodded. 'I swear on my blood, Ebeny, that I'll keep him by me and look out for him as best I can. Have you forgotten Keal?'

'He's a man now. He can take care of himself. One last thing.' She reached her hands behind her neck. They undid a thong and drew an amulet out from her robe.

'Your Little Mother?' Carnelian looked at her uncertainly.

She held it out for him. 'Wear her for me.' 'But she's all you've left of your mother.' 'As she gave her to me, now I give her to you.' 'Why do you not give her to Tain, Keal, one of your sons?'

Tish! You're as much my
son as they are. Besides, if
she protects you, you'll be able to take care of my boys. Take her. She has power over water.'

'My father will disapprove of her.'

'Well then, wear her where he won't see her.'

Ebeny kissed the Littl
e Mother and put it in his hand. The carved stone was all belly and breasts with stump limbs and head. Carnelian closed his fingers over her.

The next day he went off into the pavilions but found no solace. He climbed up into the East Tower to survey the leaden sea. There, where he had first seen the ship, he spat curses into the wind that she had ever come. He longed for the old comforts, the old certainties. Yet, although he tried to deny it, Osrakum was drawing him with her siren call.

Masked, he returned to the pillage to see it all: the fallen halls, the gaping windows, the blood-rusted cobbles. He went out from the Holdgate and stood against the parapet. Handcarts creaked down to the ship, his people strained under barrels and boxes. He wanted to rail at them that they were collaborating with their own rape. The compulsion froze him to that spot for fear of what he might do. The ship became the entire focus of his vision. She wallowed down there, gorging herself on the general misery.

At some point he became aware of an ache in his knees. He looked down. Brackish water had soaked up from the hem of his samite robe. The silk was discoloured, spoilt. He remembered what Grane had said. His people had had shame enough. As he turned away the robe swung against his legs like an apron of lead.

He went back to his room. He lit neither fire nor lamp but chose to brood in the blackness, his robes a
nd mask discarded, staring sightl
ess, letting the misery torrent through him.

When Tain crept into the room, he raked the ashes but there was no glow left to find. He fumbled for a lantern that they kept in a corner. It fluttered into life. He jumped back startled. Carnelian was sitting cross-legged, black eyes narrowed against the glare.

‘I’ll
not go,' Tain cried at his ghostly brother.
‘I’ll
not leave my mother here, nor all the others. I'd rather die with them.'

Through the glare Carnelian could vaguely see that Tain's eyes were red and swollen. 'If I go, you'll go,' he said. He had neither love nor energy left to put any caring into his voice.

Tain stared at him blankly for a while and then ran away. Carnelian felt nothing. It was as if the winter had numbed him to the heart.

Later, a blindman brought him a casket of leather, ribbed and water-stained, which he put into Carnelian's hands. The Master bade me tell his son that he should attend him in his hall attired in the robe that has now been given to him.'

Carnelian asked him to leave one of his escort behind and then sent the man off to find Tain. When he looked round, the blindman had gone. Carnelian took the casket near the window to look at it. Outside, the twilight seemed to be sucking its darkening up from the sea.

When Tain arrived, Carnelian had already pulled the cloth out from the casket. It was the colour of spring leaves. It did not seem a robe at all, even though it had the hollow tubes for arms. The central band was plainly woven silk. The edges were brocaded in panels and fringed with eyes and hooks of copper. Carnelian ran his fingers over one of the panels. He peered close, feeling the beads. Rows of them. Jade, minutely carved.

Carnelian heard the door closing. He looked up and saw Tain's sullen face. His brother stared back at him. Neither spoke during the cleaning. At first they tried to put the robe on so that the panels were to the front. With much cursing they found that only when they put them to his back could Carnelian put his arms into the sleeves. Tain hooked the robe closed from top to bottom. It fitted well enough, though it was not sufficiently thick to keep out the cold. Carnelian did not allow his body to shiver. He took his mask from Tain's hands and put it on. 'I'll see you later.'