This Forsaken Earth Page 26
“All eaten a day or two back,” Elias Creed said. “These are city-dwellers. They brought gold and trinkets when they should have packed warm clothing and food.”
“There are reindeer herds in the high valleys, or so I’ve been told,” Gallico said. “We have quite a few firearms among us. We must hunt every chance we get, anything from deer to foxes. And if we run short, we’ll eat the dead.”
He was half smiling, but the group around the campfire looked at him in grim silence. Giffon’s eyes were wide as plums in his pinched face, and Rafa had buried her head in her knees. Rol touched her black hair.
“So be it,” he said. “Gallico, what’s our course?”
“South-southeast.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Even here, Rol, I know in which direction lies the sea. There are times, when the wind is in the east, that I think I can even smell it.”
“Then your nose is our compass, Gallico, and may it be as sharp as you say it is.”
Their daily marches were short, by necessity, as part of each day had to be given over to gathering firewood and hunting for game. Within a few days the company fell into a routine, and within it each of them found some niche to fill. Some preferred to gather firewood, others to trek out from the main body in small groups to hunt, while yet more grubbed for other forms of food in the frozen landscape around them. In the twilit hours after each day’s march they foraged like their flint-using ancestors, desperate to recoup some of the day’s expended energy. They collected tens of thousands of pinecones, roasted them in the embers of their fires, and ate the nuts within. They tapped silver birch, while those still grew about them, and heated the sap with water to make a sweet, hot drink for the weaker among them. They dug under the snow for any form of tuber they could find, and all went in the communal pots. They set overnight snares for rabbits and martens and any other beast with warm blood that might chance by, and the hunting-parties brought down a family of elk, which fed them all for three days.
But it was not enough to keep the pinch of hunger out of their bellies. The flesh began to melt from them, and the cold dug deeper into their marrow. Within a week, they had the first deaths, from cold and exposure. They stripped the dead of all their clothing, though they were not yet hungry enough to prey on the meat of the corpses themselves.
The company began to ascend the flanks of the mountains proper, and around them the thick pine woods receded like the ebbing tide of a quiet sea. Firewood became harder to come by, and often the campfires puttered out in the dark hours whilst around them hundreds lay in chaste embraces and shared their body’s warmth for want of something better.
Two weeks. Every morning there were more stiffened corpses amid the huddled crowd. The cold intensified, though mercifully the days remained calm and clear, snow blowing in powdery banners from the peaks of the mountains, but down below a windless silence, an abeyance of life. They began to dream about food, and it was discussed endlessly round the fragile campfires. The splendor of past dinners, the constitution of ideal menus, the listing of favorite delicacies. Their mouths watered on memories.
Some went blind from the glare of the sunlit snow. They tore strips of cloth from their thinner clothing and tied them about their eyes, staring out at that terrible whiteness through frayed silk or cotton or linen, stumbling myopically on numb feet. Those among them who prided themselves on their skill at stalking no longer had the strength to fare far afield in search of game. Gallico alone continued to hunt most nights, and it was rare he did not bring in a deer in the morning, its neck broken and dangling. As they climbed higher they dared not shoot the arquebuses anyway for fear of bringing down an avalanche on their heads. Some resisted this stricture, until Gallico rounded on them, eyes blazing amethyst, gaunt flesh drawn back from his great fangs. What game he brought back was sliced up and shared out with the meticulous care a miser might show to his hoard of gold. If they had no wood, the meat was eaten raw, bloody gobbets washed down with handfuls of snow.
A remarkable stoicism pervaded them. Though there might be arguments over the sharing out of food, in the main the Bionese accepted their meager portions with good grace. They were a hardy people, Rol realized. He had seen this in their soldiery, but he realized now that it pertained to all, old and young, male and female.
Of course, many of those who had followed him thus far were not Bionese at all, but, like Rafa, were foreign slaves fleeing their new master back in Myconn. These, too, were uncomplaining folk, and they trusted Gallico implicitly, for in the halftroll they sensed a great compassion for their lot in life. In the beginning, the company was divided along the lines of slave and free, but as time went on these distinctions became forgotten, and nobleman huddled up beside thrall, the distinctions of their former lives forgotten. The only differences now were between the weak and the strong, those who could stay with the column and those who were destined to fall by the wayside.
Three weeks. The dead continued to slough off from the living, their corpses turning up every morning, stripped and stiff as wood. Many of these bodies now were carved up in the dark hours of the night, and each dawn lay eviscerated, whittled down to the bone, barely human at all. None admitted to doing it, but nearly all partook of this ghastly sacrament. The anonymous meat was passed around the campfires and eaten without comment. Rol had his share of it, as had Creed, Giffon, and Rafa, but oddly enough Gallico refused to partake with them. “You must eat, and keep your strength,” Giffon told him, but the halftroll smiled and set his massive clawed hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I have more meat than most on my bones; my body can eat itself for a while yet.”
Four weeks. The weather broke at last, and the wind picked up through the peaks, the stars crowded out of the sky by a blank furious whiteout of hurling snow. The company went to ground in the sparse shelter of some contorted spruce and juniper and squatted there hour after hour as the snow piled up around them, finally muffling all in a merciful white roof that gathered inch upon inch as the hours went on, and lengthened into a day, then two. At first they took turns sitting on the outside of the tight-packed circle, for those unfortunates had it worst. But as more and more of these died, their corpses were propped up as a kind of horrible windbreak behind which the living sheltered and shivered. Drifts built up around them, and finally covered them.
They were entombed, and within their white sepulchre they feasted on the dead openly and without shame, fighting beyond rationality to keep the life in their gnawed-down souls. Some staggered out into the blizzard to end it all, hoping to find death in a place where their corpses would be left in peace, but most died in silent surprise, or drifted off into a warm sleep and left the world with meaningless smiles on their gray faces. The world slowed. Their cocoon of snow became a small, fetid space of numbing cold and butchery, a dwindling circle of faces in which only the glitter of the eyes gave any clue of life remaining. They were five days like this.
The wind fell, and they tunneled their way out of their white tomb to find a barren world in which all color had disappeared except for the violent, cerulean blue of the sky above them. Waist-deep in snow, many gave up then and there, and crawled back into the blue-dark of the cave that had built up around their bodies in the preceding days. Others stared blankly at the pitiless mountains all around, knowing they would never walk out of this place, never see grass again or hear running water. Their hearts still beat, their eyes still blinked, and the blood still pushed its stubborn way through their veins, but they were dead men all the same. The Myconians had killed them.
Gallico took Rol aside while the others crawled about the blank landscape like old men. “They are all going to die, Rol, unless we do something.”
Their eyes met in perfect understanding. “It cannot be everyone,” Rol said. “And it must be done discreetly. We’ll make a day’s march, and those who are still with us at the end of it shall partake.”
“That’s consigning half of them to death.”
The halftroll considered, then nodded at last. Broad though his shoulders were, his head appeared too large for them, and his face was a mere fanged skull with green skin stretched taut across it. Only in the eyes was there any remnant of the humanity that Rol knew still bulked large in Gallico’s heart.
“How far is left, do you think?” Rol asked.
“My nose is not what it was,” Gallico said with a wry smile, “but we’re over the spine of the mountains. I smell trees below, a whole forest of them. Another week or two, and we’ll be in the Ganesh Highlands. Remember them, Rol?”
“How could I forget?”
“It was only a year ago, or a little more.”
“Is that all? It seems like a different age of the world.”
They bullied and cajoled and cursed the survivors of the company to their feet, and Gallico led the way, burrowing through the drifts and forging a passage for those who came behind. The halftroll carried Giffon on his back, for the boy could no longer walk, and Rol and Creed took it in turns to carry Rafa. The chambermaid was in a bad way, with frostbite in pale patches on her face and her feet blackened with it. The less fortunate had to make their own way in the furrow that Gallico’s great body carved through the drifts, and when Rol looked back later that day, he saw the black shapes of their bodies dotting the snow like drops of ink on a blank page. They were above him now; the company was indeed descending.
That night he took Fleam and nicked a vein in his wrist, then one in Gallico’s. One by one those who were still able came to suck upon their blood, a few drops each, no more. Fewer than a hundred of them were still alive, but by the time it was over both he and Gallico were barely conscious. Someone had found enough wood for a single, solitary campfire, and they were laid down beside it whilst Creed, Giffon, and Rafa shared the meager heat of their bodies under piles of dead men’s clothes, the five of them in a tangled heap, their hearts beating together and the welcome flames flickering across their faces.
In the night, Rol rose without disturbing his fellow sleepers, his body as light as a breeze-borne scrap of thistledown. All around him the savage heights of the Myconians dreamed placidly under their mantles of snow, and above them the stars glittered bright and blue, windows to another world. He stood in some indeterminate space, looking down on the sleepers below with serene detachment.
“I died,” he said, wondering.
“Not dead, but dying,” a voice said. “Each day you leave behind more of this husk you inhabit, and come closer to what is at the heart of your existence.” The speaker was a dark shape, no more, an impenetrable shadow in which two green lights burned for eyes—like Gallico’s eyes, but with none of the halftroll’s compassion. No humanity.
“What are you?” Rol whispered.
“The last remnant of an older world. I am part of your conception. You and I both are only pieces of a bigger plan which even I cannot foresee entirely. You are my son, the child of my blood. I have remained upon this earth far beyond my time, waiting out uncounted centuries merely to see you born. That was my doom.”
“Who are you?” Rol repeated.
“What’s in a name? At one time I was called Cambrius Orr. In this age of the world I am known differently. Men call me the Mage-King. You are my son, blood of my blood, but it was not I who brought you into being.”
“Then who did?”
“Perhaps it was Umer herself. Perhaps Ran. I don’t know. I know more of the world’s history than any other thing now living, and I do not have the answer to that question.”
“Perhaps it was God.”
“There is no God. He has forsaken us. There is no heaven, and there is no hell except that which we make for ourselves here on earth. I know only that you were brought into this life for a purpose. And this: there is nothing human in you, nothing at all.”
“I’m a man; look at me. I—”
“I don’t know the full story of your heritage, and if I do not, then no one does. But I can smell your blood. Look at your hand.”
Rol did so. His scarred hand, a mark put there by something that might have been Ran himself, god of storms, ship-killer. The lines that whorled upon his palm seemed more prominent now, and more than ever he thought that there was a purpose to their sinuous geometry.
“It was put there for a purpose, like everything else. One day soon you will read it clearly, and when you do, it shall show you where to go. These beggars in the snow, those beggars of the sea who await you; they are all part of it. It will come to you, in time.”
Rol raised his head. “I don’t want any of this.”
“No matter. It is your fate, and cannot be outrun.”
A strung-out, staggering company, they trudged on, and about them the air began to lose the thin gasp of the high places. The trees returned, dark forests of silent pine and spruce and fir. The company were walking downhill, always downhill, back into color and life and a world they had thought lost forever. But it was too late for many.
They buried Rafa under a cairn of stones just below the snow-line, and when they had clicked the last rock on top of her somber marker, the rain came sweeping in from the east to drench them. Not snow, rain—which they stood shivering under and let run in and out of their mouths like simpletons.
Simpletons, and starveling scarecrows. Despite Rol and Gallico’s gift of blood, they continued to die in ones and twos. By the time they finally felt green grass underfoot there were barely four score of them left. They were in the Ganesh Highlands, scant leagues away from Ganesh Ka itself, and they had crossed the Myconian Mountains in a little over six weeks.
Nineteen
THE BEGGARS OF THE SEA
“IT’S STILL THERE,” GIFFON BREATHED, AND HIS RAW knuckles whitened on the staff.
“Did you think it was going to drift away into the Reach?” Gallico asked. His eyes flickered, embers of old humor.
“It just seems so long. So much in between.”
They stood and stared at Ganesh Ka’s towers looming up out of the morning, and all around them rose the scent of juniper, and thyme bruised by their feet. Rol’s eyes stung and smarted at the sight. If he called any place in the world his home, it was this. He knew that now.
“I see a ship, out to the northeast,” Creed said, voice cracking. “Ran’s arse, it’s the Revenant. Rol, I see the Revenant.”
They stood transfixed, their eyes hunting out the blue horizon. It was too far away to tell, but, “Yes. It’s the Revenant,” Rol said.
“So Artimion hasn’t gotten her sunk yet,” Gallico said.
Behind them the rest of the company was gathering in a ragged, stumbling band and staring east in their turn. Rol turned and surveyed them. Runaway slaves, Bionese soldiers and freemen, common criminals. Once they had all been inhabitants and citizens of the Imperial Capital. Now they looked like nothing so much as a crowd of haggard, malodorous beggars.
“Where is it?” one demanded. “Where is this city of yours?”
“Hidden in the rocks. The pillars of stone you see down there are not natural; they’re the towers of Ganesh Ka. I wish you joy of the sight; we have accomplished the crossing of the mountains.”
The man wiped his eyes with a black-nailed hand. His nose had been lost to frostbite but his eyes were clear. “Will they feed us there?”
“As much as you can eat. We’re all brothers now, vagabonds of the sea.”
“Aye. Until the new King sends his ships against us.”
Rol and Gallico exchanged glances. It was not something they had given much thought to, but now that it seemed they were not to die, after all, the knowledge of Canker’s hostility raised inevitable questions in their minds.
“The prevailing winds will be blowing right in the teeth of any ship trying to round Windhaw Island from the west, this time of year,” Gallico said. “And it’s by ship they must come; there’s no bringing an army over the road we’ve just foll
owed.”
“Have they ships to send?” Rol wondered.
“Canker rules all of Bionar by now. He has no one afloat to contend with save us.”
“So we must rely on the mercy of the wind.”
“And Ran. He knows all that goes on upon the face of the waters.”
It was Creed who led the company over the ruined boundary wall of the Ka, for Rol and Gallico were too exhausted to do anything else but stumble blindly after the man in front. They hardly noticed the green-tipped trees, the primroses and snowdrops sprinkling the ground at their feet. Spring was almost upon them, and the air here down by the sea seemed incredibly warm after the mountains. It was not much more than a year since Rol, Gallico, and Creed had last come this way together, the skin of their faces still peeled and blistered from the heat of the Gorthor Flats.
“I’m never walking anywhere again,” Gallico mumbled. “It’s the sea for me now; blessed Ussa shall bear me everywhere I wish to go.”
“Amen,” Rol said.
At the broken gate of Ganesh Ka there was a troop of Miriam’s musketeers, plainly taken aback by the stricken mob they saw shambling down out of the hills toward them. In the last mile or two Rol and his companions had accrued a swarm of the Ka’s inhabitants who had been working in the upland fields, or with the logging camps, and these folk were now bearing on their shoulders those of the company for whom this final mile had proved too much. Heads lolling, these unfortunates were beyond caring if they should ever eat or sleep or bear their own weight again.
Rol heard his name called, and that of Gallico, spreading in whispers and hoarse shouts before them. More people were streaming out of the towers, coming up from the sea in crowds. He had not thought the Ka contained so many. They pressed around, yelling, cheering, waving their arms. Creed tried to warn them back, but he was engulfed by people who clapped him on the shoulders and laughed out his name. The company staggered to a halt. Rol grasped Giffon’s shoulder. He and the boy helped each other remain upright as they were buffeted by the misplaced goodwill of those around them.