Farlander (37 page)

The chatter in the room fell silent. Indeed, the sound of the crowd had now risen to a percussive chant that Kirkus could feel in his stomach.

‘Then let us go and please them,’ said Sasheen, her smile brightening in an instant.

Kirkus wiped his hands against his robe again, and sighed as he followed her outside, the high priests trailing behind them.

At the appearance of Sasheen, a hundred thousand voices roared approval from the stands of the vast arena. She raised a hand aloft to acknowledge them, and for a moment Kirkus forgot his personal grumbles as he felt a rush of excitement rising within him.

It was cooler in the imperial stand reserved for the Holy Matriarch and her high priests, the sky above it cloudless and bright. On the sandy floor of the Shay Madi arena, a host of naked men and women huddled together in chains, looking like the refugees from some natural devastation. They were heretics from around the Empire, caught in the act of practising the old religions – a furtive sign made to one of the spirit gods, a prayer to the Great Fool – and informed on by a neighbour or even by their kin.

Their ranks included the poor, too; the homeless and the crippled, those who could barely fend for themselves let alone thrive. These were people seen as failures in the eyes of Mann, parasites and carrion all, as far from the divine flesh as they could be.

One by one, they were being branded by white-cassocked members of the Monbarri, Cinimon’s dour inquisitors, their heavy piercings hanging darkly in the sunlight. Some would be sent from here to the salt pans of the High Char, to serve out the rest of their short lives in heavy labour. But most would become slaves within the Empire’s cities, as manual labourers or even sex workers. The useless would serve as sport for the crowd’s entertainment here on the arena floor.

The work of branding quickly ceased, now that Sasheen stood with both arms held aloft. The Monbarri stood ready with their loops of rope and smoking irons, sweating from their exertions, and waiting for her spoken words. The crowds fell to silence around them.

Sasheen called out in a high clear voice that rebounded around the other stands of the arena. She told the crowds what they wished to hear most from their Holy Matriarch: how, in their devotions, they were all of Mann together; how in their loyalty they had built this great empire as one. They were the victors in life, she declared, for they had helped spread the true faith, and when death came to take them they would all be victors still.

All of it nonsense, Kirkus knew, as he gazed out over the herded masses; though still he swelled with pride in the force of the moment. His gaze dropped to the arena floor, and hungered after the white flanks of the naked women huddled in a flock at its centre, each stood facing inwards as though to hide her shame and to shield her eyes from their surroundings. Kirkus could hear their exhausted sobbing, and in the distance, the shrill cry of gulls in the bay of the First Harbour.

His mother suddenly gripped his wrist, startling him as she jerked it into the air and shouted his name out to the crowds. Another roar sounded.

Kirkus felt a moistness in his eyes. The soft sting of goosebumps upon his flesh. He was filled once more with Mann, with a sense of his own self-importance.

His divinity.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘Have you informed Master Ash of this?’ Aléas asked him.

Nico, a pitchfork in his hand, tipped a scattering of dung into a bucket and shook his head. ‘I have not seen him since.’

‘Perhaps it’s better he does not know,’ responded Aléas, with a pitchfork in his own hand, as he stood in a spear of sunlight cast through the open doors of the stable where they had both been sent by Olson, the monastery disciplinarian, due to a poor performance of their kitchen cleaning duties the previous evening.

Around them the stalls were empty, the mules and the few zel owned by the monastery out grazing in the lower slopes. Their task here was to gather dung for use as fuel. Aléas yawned, as tired as Nico from their previous night spent out in the open, while the apprentices served their regular turns at sentinel duty. ‘It would only antagonize the two of them even further. My master was playing with you, Nico, but I did warn you what might happen. It could have been worse.’

‘But I only talked with her . . . and for a moment.’

Aléas stretched his back, the bones of his spine cracking. ‘Of course you did,’ he said. ‘And let me guess. When my master came across you both, just
talking
, you were likely standing close to her, with your tongue hanging loose, your eyes fixed on her pumps, and your prick as stiff as my little finger beneath your robe. A man like Baracha, where his daughter is concerned . . . he will notice these things.’ And Aléas feigned a solemn raising of his eyebrows, and turned to find more fodder for his pitchfork.

Nico lent him a hand, in the form of a scoopful of dung tipped over his head.

‘What did you to that for? I’ll have to wash this shit off now!’

‘Sorry, my little finger must have slipped.’

The young man scowled, wiping at the fresh smears on his robe. He in turn, swung a load of dung at Nico, but Nico blocked most of it with his pitchfork.

At that, they were suddenly duelling.

It was hardly serious: a pretend fight almost, having switched their weapons around so as to aim them shaft first. They were grinning to begin with but, as they hacked and stabbed at each other, pressing forward or falling back, the in-overturn of it grew into something more competitive.

Even when using a simple pitchfork, Aleás was a finer swordsman than Nico by a factor of at least ten. Nico improvised, however, as he had learned to do while living rough on the streets of Bar-Khos. He threw a wet lump of dung at Aleás, so that the young Mannian tried to dodge it, and since Nico had been anticipating this response, and Aleás merely reacting, Nico was able to follow it up with a strike aimed at his rival’s head. Except, in his enthusiasm and lack of ability, Nico swung his weapon much too hard and much too wildly, catching Aleás on the mouth and splitting his top lip open, so that blood swelled from the gash.

‘I’m sorry!’ Nico held up his free hand.

‘Sorry?’ Aleás spun and ducked and, out of this blurring motion, launched a sweeping one-handed lunge at Nico, cracking him smartly across the side of his skull.

Nico staggered back, his head ringing.

Now it was Aléas who held up a hand, before he cast his pitchfork to the straw-covered floor and flopped down next to it. He dabbed a finger to his wounded lip, his wry smile only increasing the flow of blood ‘Not too hard, I hope?’ he inquired, with a double tap to the side of his head.

Nico collapsed to the floor too, out of breath. Dust motes danced in the sunlight between them, settling slowly as the two apprentices regained their breath.

‘Have they always been this way?’ Nico asked.

‘Who?’

‘Master Ash and Baracha, of course’

Aléas sucked on his lower lip for a moment. ‘The older hands would say so. But, myself, I believe it got worse after Masheen. It is mostly my master’s fault. He cannot tolerate being bested by anyone.’

‘Ash bested him?’ The surprise was clear in Nico’s voice. He thought of Ash with his thin frame and ageing skin, his frequent headaches; he thought of Baracha practicing with his blade, the man massive and quick.

‘Not in that sense.’ Aléas shrugged, leaned to one side, and spat blood. ‘Ash had the temerity to rescue my master, when he could not rescue himself.’

‘What? Well, tell me more!’

‘Make yourself comfortable. It’s a long story.’

*

Six years ago, shortly before Aléas had arrived here to begin his training, Baracha had run into the kind of trouble that every R
shun in the field dreads most of all. He had been caught.

Baracha had been committed to a vendetta in Masheen. Or, more precisely, in the mountainous country known as Greater Masheen, which surrounded that great eastern city on the delta of the Aral river, where the ice-melts from the High Pash ranges drained themselves, languid and wide, into the Midèr
s.

Baracha had been there to kill the ‘Sun King’, a man claiming to be the living incarnation of Ras, their sun deity and, incredibly, had gained credence among the mountain people there, who were as devoutly superstitious as all eastern peoples, if not more so.

They held to a prophecy in those parts: that when the mountain should fall, and crush the World Serpent coiled in its lair within the mountain’s rocky heart, a god would appear in human form from the lands of the rising sun, and walk amongst them to herald a new age of enlightenment. Even with the subjugation of their native religion by the Mannian Empire – which had, several decades ago, annexed Masheen as the furthest province of their eastern conquests – the local people’s belief in this prophecy remained prevalent.

They did not even know which mountain the legend spoke of. To them, all mountains held evil at their core, and were to be trodden with care. Still, when an earthquake shook long and hard enough for a certain peak to collapse in its entirety, save for one free-standing column rooted in a colossal mound of rubble, like a marker for a grave . . . and when out of the east came a man with gold skin leading a train of disciples celebrating his divinity . . . the peoples of Masheen knelt at his feet and offered him all.

This Sun King reigned from a sprawling palace perched on the highest shoulder of a mountain overlooking the port city of Masheen. The Cloud City, they called it. The Sun King was old and in his decline by then, from what Baracha had been able to discern during his first week within the port city. It seemed this new age of enlightenment had changed little for the people, save for imposing an even higher burden of taxation. Some had inevitably become cynical about this deity of theirs, who squatted high over their labours and demanded tributes equal to any tyrant. The Sun King now lived as a recluse, seeing only those few he trusted most completely. Once a year he would release a pronouncement of his Most Glorious Wisdom, offered to the population in the form of thousands of parchments each lovingly transcribed by hand. Always, they tended merely to rant, to threaten.

Within the Cloud City, it was said not a week went by without some official or priest being put to death by scalding alive for reasons of treachery. The Sun King had banned all weaponry within the walls of his palace complex, save for those in the hands of his hitees, the Glorious Virgins – female bodyguards chosen young from among his harem for their love of him. In his paranoia he had outlawed the wearing of hats, and even garments with sleeves. At nights, from the depths of his inner sanctum, his howls could be heard on the far reaches of the Midèr
s sea, so mad was he become, they said.