The Tower of Bones (34 page)

‘How long have I slept?’ she asked Shaami, who kept her company across a table constructed out of a single piece of red coral.

‘You were very tired.’

‘A whole night and a day?’ She watched how the artificial lights had begun to twinkle and glow in the streets around her.

Just how old might Ulla Quemar be? The interwoven labyrinths of land and reef couldn’t have been constructed in years and probably not even in centuries. This complex ecosystem must have evolved over thousands of years. The Cill were exquisitely sensitive to beauty and harmony. The construction, the evolution, of Ulla Quemar wouldn’t have been hurried. But there was more, much more, to wonder at.

Oh, my!

Her heart beat so in her breast as she paused to reflect on the nature of the Cill themselves. So powerful were the emotions this place evoked, and these beings in particular! Kate had marvelled at how delicate the Cill appeared on land. Watching a group of them swim by underwater, with their undulating limbs and streaming fins, she was all the more impressed by their exquisite natural grace, their streamlined bodies gliding like sylphs between the
corals. They appeared so gentle, their world so well ordered, she couldn’t imagine a Cill wanting to hurt anyone. It made it all the more monstrous that such gentle beings should be exposed to the cruelties of the Witch. All her life, Kate had loathed fighting, aggression, war and the grief it caused to ordinary people. It was the stupidity of war that had killed her parents. She had always believed, deep in her heart, that their deaths had served nothing, no purpose at all.

‘Greeneyes is feeling better?’

‘In more ways than one. Your world is so lovely – and the air seems so clean, so pure, it’s a pleasure just to breathe it.’

‘Evening is restful, when the day closes its eyes. Yet look – see the large leaves, with bubbles rising from the water beneath.’

Kate looked at the surface waters around her, assuming that Shaami was referring to plants that looked like water lilies. But now she looked more closely there were no flower heads, just broad leaves of a dappled green.

‘You see the opening at the centre of the pad? This is the nostril for a sunstealer tethered to the coral below.’

‘A sunstealer?’

Kate had to leave her seat by the table and lie flat on the sand with her eyes only an inch or two from the surface water to peer into the shadowed depths. ‘What am I looking for? Is it that enormous greeny-yellow balloon?’

‘You can follow the bubbles?’

‘Yes – I see them. They’re rising from its surface.’

‘This is the sunstealer.’

‘That’s an odd name.’

‘It isn’t really a plant – or even a single creature – but many plant-animals that join together to make the hollow balloon. A single balloon can grow to the size of a small house. It must hold onto the coral to prevent it rising up and floating away. Through their green leaves, sunstealers consume the daylight falling onto the sunlit waters – in doing so they also clean the air.’

Kate clapped her hands. ‘Back home – on Earth – we have green plants, and the algae in the oceans, which do the same thing. They capture sunlight and make the oxygen we breathe.’

‘Are there witches also in your world?’

‘Well … No. Not like the one you’re thinking of.’

‘How fortunate you are. I would love to hear more of your world. But for now the Momu waits … If Greeneyes is sufficiently refreshed?’

With a start Kate recalled something Driftwood had said, when he was desperate about his nautilus shell, his shiny thing.
Gift from Momu – mine – my gift!
The dragon had known all along about the Cill. He must have watched them dress her on the island as she slept. And he had brought her here, to the landward entrance to the city.

She sighed: ‘I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be!’

Turning around to face the square she walked, barefoot, to where he was waiting for her. ‘Come,’ he said,
with another of those strange expressions of his irises. ‘Long has the Momu dreamed of this meeting.’

‘She knew that I was coming?’

‘The Momu is knowing. She has cared for her people even from the ancient times, when Ulla Quemar was first created.’

‘Gosh – she must be very old.’

His eyes performed the movements, a slow close followed by a rapid opening, that Kate now recognised as ‘Yes’.

In the falling dusk she was reminded of how Shaami’s eyes actually glowed. And now she saw that everything about her was also glowing in a variety of soft pastel shades and colours.

Shaami led her through the city, where none of the buildings took the boring rectangular forms she was used to back home. Here every house, temple or garden followed exquisitely naturalistic shapes. Oyster-shells the size of a three-storey building gaped ajar. Periwinkle shapes clustered in diminishing sizes into a spiral. Gigantic five-limbed starfish rose out of floral gardens, or the whorled organic loveliness of the shapes of nautilus shells, or the ears of conchs. And even now in the quiet of evening she saw the abundance of plants, fluttering birds, the flight of butterflies, bees and other insects. Her fingers brushed against the velvety surface of toadstool-like growths, pungently fragrant, that must be cultivated foods. There was a sense of oneness with life, its needs and balances respected in
a way she would have loved to have seen back home. She wasn’t sure where the boundary lay between architecture and what was natural any more, such was the weave and flow of one into the other.

Shaami showed her inscriptions on walls that she would have passed by without noticing had he not reached out and brushed them into awareness. Hieroglyphs of their history, or murals, or simply artwork for its own sake – it was all so exhilarating Kate just let the wonder of it flow around her, and through her. A door irised open with the flat of a hand pressed against a hieroglyph and a chant – Shaami was allowing her to catch a little of what he must be hearing within his mind, the melody of interacting voices – so delightful when two or more were communicating with each other, a language far more complex than her own, one in which subtleties of insight and emotion were conveyed in music as much as in the words. Sometimes she noticed, and thought it must be significant, that many Cill voices chanted in unison, as if fusing into a single melodic symphony. And she realised what should have been immediately obvious, yet was so alien to her human perspective and senses, that she had probably resisted the notion. The city was a hive. A living, thinking, overwhelmingly interactive hive, in which the Momu …

Oh, lord … Can it really be true?

Kate hardly dared to think this through, it so startled her. Yet there was only one logical conclusion. The Momu was the hive queen.

And now, as Shaami took her deeper into the city, she began to notice more. None of the buildings was new. Looking more closely, she saw signs of decay. Some of the streets were collapsing in on themselves. Even amid the decorous shapes there were places where the rainbow glitter over the dome of a shell-home had mouldered to lifeless grey, as if the gorgeous structures were withering and perishing.

Then she saw armed figures. Cill who were half as tall again as Shaami and much more warlike. Although their bodies had the same streamlined contours, these were heavily muscled. Their eyes were cold, a steely grey, and their heads were elongated front to back, with bulging brows and heavy jaws, curiously ugly in the faces of Cills, with large overlapping canines. Their armour was shelllike – like the carapace of a lobster – and lobster-like claws had replaced their right forearms and hands. The blades on the claws were curved and overlapping, perhaps nine inches long, and fearsomely sharp. They would sever a limb, or a neck, with a single snip.

Kate couldn’t help but imagine such warriors in combat, combining implacable ferocity with the Cill potential to become invisible.

Shaami’s voice seemed incongruously gentle in comparison. ‘It is not by accident that Ulla Quemar has survived where all other cities have fallen.’

‘You believe that, sooner or later, the Witch will find you?’

‘She has discovered every other city. One by one, she has destroyed them all. No matter how well we conceal it, she will discover Ulla Quemar.’

Kate was still staring at the warriors, alarmed by what Shaami had told her, when he sang open a new entrance. From out of the entrance two Cill appeared, each taking one of Kate’s hands and leading her in. Although they too were devoid of breasts, Kate wondered if they might be the equivalent of female – though she was no longer sure that the Cill had anything like the male and female sexuality of humans. They so closely resembled each other they could have been twins.

Shaami’s eyes did the courtesy blink of his eyes again before he left her.

‘Won’t you stay?’

‘Shaami cannot enter here.’

The handmaidens – if she interpreted them right – began to remove Kate’s dress.

‘What are you doing?’

Their eyes irised, as one, in what Kate now recognised as an apology. ‘All must be natural in the Momu’s presence.’

‘Then I’ll undress myself.’ Kate removed her dress and underwear and handed it to the maidens, who bowed. With exactly synchronous waves of their sinewy arms, carrying through to the slim, nail-less webbed fingers, they ushered Kate towards an inner wall where
another door morphed open, and, tentatively, she stepped through.

Immediately her body was bathed in a warm mist of brine. The maidens, moving with a languid ease, washed her body and anointed her with a scented oil. A more powerful, echoing voice addressed her:

‘Come! The Momu would see you!’

Kate stepped further into a large, softly illuminated chamber, flushing with embarrassment at her own nakedness. The chamber appeared to be a natural cavern within the much larger cave that housed the city. There were clusters of stalagmites, sparkling with embedded crystals, and high overhead she saw that the corresponding stalactites sprouted from the roof. The light rose from a broad, deep pool of faintly luminescent water behind which, only vaguely outlined within the shadows, stood a tree. The tree astonished Kate, who had seen no other within the plants and flowers that decorated the city. As her eyes became accustomed to the half-light, she realised that it was enormous, with boughs and branches that ramified all over the roof of the cave. She sensed even more extensive roots – roots that spread, perhaps, more widely throughout all of Ulla Quemar. And the leaves were not what one would expect of a tree. They were pink – and distinctly fleshy. She knew of no tree that could grow within a cavern in the absence of sunlight. Immediately in front of the tree, within the throne of its roots, a figure was reclining, a woman as naked as any other Cill, but
considerably taller. Her face was a foot higher than Kate’s even though she was half-reclining and Kate was standing erect.

A movement in the misty air caused Kate to spin around. The chamber was scented with a floral sweetness, and its surfaces, which were as complex as the reef she had seen earlier, were pierced with water-filled hollows so that sea creatures, like crabs, sea urchins and starfish, could make their homes within them.

‘Come closer, child. Cross through the waters of the birthing pool. Only in the mind of Shaami has the Momu witnessed the life-giving gift in your brow. Come – let me see you in the flesh.’

The birthing pool!
Kate hesitated, shrinking into herself.

‘Please – do not be afraid.’

The voice, deep and musical, was soothing to her mind, yet behind the gentleness Kate sensed great determination and, very likely, power.

Kate waded into the cool, still water and then swam across, blinking as she emerged before the Momu. She sat where the Momu indicated with a wave of her hand, within the intimate tangle of roots.

‘Are you comfortable?’

‘Yes.’ Indeed she was perfectly comfortable. The temperature of the humid air was exactly right for her naked body.

‘I know you will have many questions.’

Kate’s eyes lifted to gaze into a face many times the
size of an adult human face, and much longer again from brow to chin; a slender and perfectly regal face with the longest ears that Kate had ever witnessed. The skin of the Momu had that strangely ethereal look, like all of the Cill, but there was some additional greenish-bronze hue. The lobes of her ears were greatly elongated and widened to take spools, like those that wrapped cotton, but these were artworks in ivory, a full six inches in diameter, dangling down on either side of her cheeks. With a slow blink, the enormous eyes sprang open, and with jaw-dropping shock Kate saw that the irises, performing that beautiful slow movement of welcome, were a silvery mother-of-pearl.

‘Come – sit close beside me.’

Kate hesitated before moving closer to the Momu, who was surrounded by platters of berries, nuts, tiny confections of sushi-like raw fish, a salad of fruits on a bed of three different-coloured seaweeds – and more – such a variety of tidbits she couldn’t even begin to identify them.

‘Would you care to taste?’

Although it had only been an hour or so since her evening breakfast, Kate couldn’t help but stare at the extraordinary feast that had been laid out before her. She understood now why that breakfast had been so light. Shaami knew that there would be a more substantial feast to follow. Her fingers shaking with nervousness, Kate picked up a tiny morsel of what looked like caviar on a biscuit. The caviar was probably exactly that – Kate had never actually tasted caviar in her life – and the biscuit tasted of roasted nuts.

‘You like it?’

‘It’s delicious.’

‘Ah – I see now that you are more radiant in the flesh than even I had imagined. I weep a hundred thousand tears of gratitude for your courage and kindness in saving the life of my child.’

‘Shaami is your child?’

‘My last-born – and most precious.’

‘All the Cill, they’re all your children, aren’t they?’

‘Of course.’

The long, webbed fingers of the Momu extended, with a languid grace, to stroke Kate’s cheek. Though the hive mother, she too was devoid of breasts. It was a reminder, if Kate needed any such reminder, that the Cill were not human. A crystal of power, pellucid but tinted a greenish blue, hung on a gold filigree chain around the Momu’s neck. Flickering sparks pulsated and metamorphosed in its depths.