Authors: Ricardo Pinto
When the Oracles stirred he leapt up. They yielded to him when he pushed through them. Osidian, blinking, shaded his sunken eyes with an emaciated arm. Morunasa leaned down and began interrogating him in a tense whisper. The Oracles craned forward, struggling to listen. Osidian shook his head, pushed Morunasa away and, with a groan, sat up.
His face lit up as he saw Carnelian. ‘Where . . . ?’
Looking for a moment like the boy in the Yden, though so wasted, he caused Carnelian’s heart to trip. ‘Do you remember the battle?’
Osidian went blind, looking within himself. ‘My Father was there . . .’ He frowned. ‘Everywhere . . .’
‘The Darkness-under-the-Trees?’ Morunasa asked, his eyes like flames.
Osidian glanced at him, confused.
Carnelian caught Osidian’s gaze with his. ‘The auxiliaries were destroyed, my Lord.’
Osidian frowned. ‘And Aurum?’
Carnelian ignored Morunasa, who was baring his teeth at their Quya. He felt this was an opportunity to make a move in the game. Carefully he began describing their flight north; Aurum’s disappearance; the thunder in the night. He watched with fascination as Osidian’s eyes betrayed his struggle to make sense of it all. He fought to suppress a thrill of excitement as he saw the pattern settle in Osidian’s mind, certain he was drawing the same conclusions as he had himself. Osidian was now alight with confidence, evident in the smile that he turned on the Oracles. ‘Consider the confluence of events. Can you not see the hand of our Lord behind these developments? Is battle . . .’ – his eyes burned – ‘not one of the clearest instruments of divination?’
As he rose, the Oracles stepped back, awe in their faces. The birthmark on Osidian’s forehead creased as the light dimmed in his eyes. ‘He was with me and in me and about me.’ He looked into the shadow still lingering around the nearest cedar trunk.
‘We must return south before the dragons come,’ Morunasa declared, but the way he searched Osidian’s face belied his tone of confidence.
Osidian seemed not to hear him. He looked at Carnelian. ‘Where are the Plainsmen now?’
Morunasa narrowed his yellow eyes. ‘They’ve deserted you.’
Osidian ignored the Oracle and waited for Carnelian to answer him.
‘They’ve gone to gather their dead from the battlefield,’ Carnelian said. ‘And then, I believe, they’ll go home.’
Osidian frowned. ‘I need them to come with me.’
‘Go where, my Lord?’ Carnelian said, playing the game and then striving to forget that he knew the answer, to keep his face from betraying him.
Osidian looked around him. ‘Where are the aquar?’
Carnelian knew he could say nothing more without revealing himself. He looked to Morunasa, urging him to say what he could not. Almost as if under his control the man obliged. ‘With our Lord behind you what need have we of the Plainsmen? We’re still yours, my Master.’
Osidian would not be deflected. ‘We ride to the battlefield.’
Carnelian nodded and followed him as he strode off to the nearest rootstair. When Fern joined them, Carnelian dared not look him in the eye and clung on to Fern’s belief that the Plainsmen would not be swayed by Osidian’s words.
Carnelian covered his mouth and nose against the fetid air. The ground was foul with corpses. Everywhere ferns were trampled, clotted with dried blood. Dense, swirling mats of flies gave twitching life to the dead. The sky was darkened by wheeling clouds of ravens, by sky-saurians gliding in arcs. The raveners had left, perhaps having eaten their fill. However other, smaller scavengers swarmed the battlefield. Against such numbers the attempts the Plainsmen were making with their whirling bullroarers to drive them from their feast were futile.
As he rode Carnelian’s gaze snagged on a glint here, another there. His eyes found the brass of a service collar bright among the dun and rusty carnage. Its familiar gleam and colour made him turn to see its like around Fern’s throat. He regarded the vastness of the slaughter. He had so easily fallen into thinking of the auxiliaries as merely an extension of Aurum’s malice. Now he was seeing them as men. Each had been recruited from some tribe that was probably not so different from those of the Earthsky. The next Plainsman he passed he stared at. Hunched, the man was picking his way through the mesh of arms and legs, searching. Carnelian scrutinized his face. Its sadness and the misery in the darting eyes was not restricted to his own people. So close, the man could not help seeing that the rage he had sought to turn against the Standing Dead had fallen on men like himself. Carnelian felt the confidence he had drawn from his plotting leak away. This was another massacre: a slaughter of brother by brother. All his defences crumbled. He drank in the horror unmediated by excuses, by judgement, by any consideration of context. A sort of wonder rose in him, a bleak, surprised contemplation of how it was that he and his kind could wreak so much horror, but pass through it unscathed.
Voices raised in anger broke through his trauma. Morunasa was shouting and other Oracles were joining their commands to his. At first Carnelian could not understand their anger, but then he saw the Marula streaming across the battlefield, defiantly gathering up their own dead.
A bellow drew all attention to its source. Osidian rode in among them brandishing a spear. In stentorian tones he summoned the leaders of the Plainsmen to attend him. For a moment everyone stared, as stunned as Carnelian, but then his heart died as he saw men, from all across the plain, disengage from what they were doing and begin trudging towards the Master. Morose, Carnelian urged his aquar forward.
Even before anyone had reached him Osidian began haranguing them. ‘There’s no time to gather the dead!’
Carnelian was appalled by the depth and volume of his voice. He was transfixed by the wasted beauty of his face so bright against a halo of flies. Enringed by Plainsmen Osidian raked their ranks with his emerald gaze. ‘We must fly north.’
Carnelian tore his eyes away from him, expecting to see awe in the faces round him. Instead there were only frowns of confusion. He noticed that not a single face was painted. He realized he could not remember the last time he had seen a whitened face among the Plainsmen. Osidian continued to explain that Hookfork was fleeing north. That if they reached the Leper Valleys before him they would achieve victory. That the victory they had won the day before was as nothing to that which awaited them should they obey him now. Carnelian watched the Plainsman faces sour. His heart leapt as they began to turn away. Osidian, confident of triumph, was blind to his audience. Carnelian almost felt sorry for him. When Osidian became aware, with a look of surprise, that he was losing them, the pitch of his voice rose and he tried to buy them with promises. Shriller and shriller it grew as more and more of them turned their backs on him. Even his wrath when it came was not enough to turn their tide. His threats indeed produced some sour laughter. The joy that had burned up into Carnelian’s chest quickly turned to ice. The Plainsmen had ceased to fear the Standing Dead. They had seen behind their mask, had seen them weak, had seen they were just men. At that moment their power seemed fallible, broken at their feet. Carnelian recognized with chill horror that this was what the Wise feared most. Before the cancer of such a liberation from fear should spread through the body of the Commonwealth, the Wise would strike to eradicate it, to cut out even the memory of such freedom.
Contemplating this bleak scenario, he was slow to notice that it was Morunasa now speaking, not Osidian. The Oracle, realizing that Aurum’s threat was receding and having witnessed the desertion of the Plainsmen, clearly felt confident enough to voice his own demands. He was describing a vision of the theocracy Osidian could build in the south. How he could bring the Marula up from the failing ruin of the Lower Reach. How he could build a new power centred on the Isle of Flies. A new power with which he could conquer the Earthsky and bring all under the sway of the god they both served.
As Morunasa fell silent Carnelian focused on Osidian. His thinned lips began distorting. ‘You believe, Morunasa, that, offered a way back to the heart of the world, I would be content to bury myself in the squalor of this wilderness?’
Morunasa looked for a moment as if he had been slapped, then quickly hooded his amber glare.
‘Your Lower Reach is dead,’ Osidian said. ‘Be thankful you have your lives and, if you follow me, I will make a place for you and your god at the heart of the world.’
As Morunasa seemed to ponder this a while, Carnelian sensed how desperate the man was in spite of all his bravado.
Morunasa fixed Osidian with baleful eyes. ‘That is not enough, Master.’ He indicated the receding Plainsmen. ‘Now that they reject you, all the power that remains to you are our Marula.’ He glanced at the other Oracles. ‘And we are the key to them.’
Osidian gazed northwards as if he were seeing all the way to Osrakum. Morunasa watched him. Perhaps it was doubt bringing a twitch to the corner of his mouth. ‘The Marula here will not follow you much longer. They must be told what’s befallen their people, their kin. Then you must give them a reason to follow you.’
Carnelian saw it was Morunasa who most needed a reason. The other Oracles fretted, not understanding what was being said, but sensing the tension. At last Osidian turned. ‘What reason would suffice?’
‘An obvious one: you must promise to save our people.’
Osidian smiled. ‘You believe I can?’
Morunasa nodded. ‘The Masters know how to wed bronze to rock. You can build a new, imperishable ladder between the Upper and Lower Reaches.’
And there it was, Carnelian thought. Morunasa had had no choice but to reveal how dependent he was on Osidian, who clearly had known this already. His smile seemed carved upon his bony face. ‘We couldn’t permit your salt to disrupt our economy.’
Morunasa frowned.
‘Further, the Isle of Flies would have to become a vassal of the Labyrinth.’
Morunasa’s frown deepened as he looked at his knees. He raised his yellow eyes. ‘We must have freedom to run our affairs as we wish.’
‘We’ll allow you enough salt to meet the needs of the Lower Reach and to hire enough Plainsmen to defend the Upper Reach.’
‘Is there more?’
‘You will send me a tithe of Marula children.’ Osidian smiled. ‘I have a whim to make myself a guard of black men.’
Slowly, Morunasa gave a nod of defeat.
Carnelian approached Osidian. ‘I will go with you, my Lord.’
Osidian glared at him. ‘From whence comes such unexpected loyalty?’
Carnelian shrugged. ‘To remain here would serve only to bring down more disaster upon these people. Besides, it was the Ochre that I loved.’ He could see the Tribe in the battlefield dead.
Morunasa was arguing with the other Oracles.
‘I had hoped to free you from this unseemly . . . attachment.’
Carnelian saw Osidian was ready for a fight, but he would not allow himself to be goaded. ‘I have motives of my own, Osidian. I wish harm to come to my Lord Aurum.’
Osidian’s eyebrows rose. ‘Indeed?’
‘I do not believe you will regain your throne, but there is a chance that we shall reach the Guarded Land.’ He smiled. ‘I imagine that, were news to reach Osrakum that the Lord Nephron has been sighted, it might cause some consternation, some realignment of the Powers.’
Osidian looked suddenly serious. ‘Not only would my mother be discomfited but, most likely, Aurum would fall victim to the wrath of the Wise.’
Carnelian nodded. ‘Be aware I seek to bring as much mayhem as I can to Osrakum.’
‘In the hope that thus you might make the Wise forget to punish your precious Plainsmen?’
Carnelian let the question hang unanswered as he watched the Oracles riding among the Marula. Where they passed, there rose a wailing. Many of the warriors turned to glare at the two Masters. Carnelian was glad of their hatred. It was well deserved. He found no consolation from knowing that the Marula were now suffering something like the same loss they had inflicted on others.
He turned to Osidian, making no attempt to hide his feelings. ‘Surely the massacre of the Ochre is punishment enough?’ Osidian’s face was unreadable. Carnelian turned away again to watch the Plainsmen gathering their dead. ‘Their fate will become a myth of horror and warning among all the tribes,’ he said.
He felt a touch on his arm and found that Osidian was regarding him with something like hope in his eyes. ‘Then we are once more on the same side?’
Carnelian suppressed revulsion; he had to play the game. ‘Fern, Poppy and Krow are coming with me. In the unlikely circumstance that we win I intend to induct them safely into my House.’
Anger and sadness mingled in Osidian’s expression, but he lifted his hand in acquiescence.
They became aware Morunasa was approaching. He looked grim. ‘They’ll follow you, Master. But, be warned, we’ll hold you to our agreement.’
Osidian controlled anger at being addressed thus. ‘Make ready to ride north.’
Morunasa almost smiled as he shook his head. ‘They’ll not leave until they’ve burned their dead.’
He was demonstrating to them both that they were not going to command unquestioning obedience. The Marula might need Osidian, but he was in their power.
As they watched him ride off, Osidian said: ‘I wish there were a way to communicate with the creatures other than through that man.’
Carnelian glanced at Osidian, uneasy. Marching north with the Marula it was not only Osidian and he who would be in their power, but also his loved ones. And Osidian was right: it was not the warriors who were the real danger, but their masters, the Oracles. It must surely be possible to find a way to speak to the warriors direct.
Marula corpses being thrown on pyres were pumping smoke up into a sky choked with scavengers. The Plainsmen were loading their dead onto drag-cradles they had improvised from the battlefield debris. Tending to the dead seemed such familiar work that Carnelian was drawn to help. What held him back was his reluctance to diminish the Masters any further in Marula eyes.
His thoughts turned to the auxiliaries, and what their beliefs might have been. That their bodies should be left for the scavengers would doubtless be as abhorrent to them as to the Plainsmen or the Marula. Eventually he sent for Kor and her sartlar and set them to piling the auxiliary dead upon blazing saddle-chairs. Soon they were adding their smoke to that of the Marula.