The Chosen

The marble of his father's skin was stained around the eyes. 'When we came here this place was a perfect mirror to my mood. That first winter was terrible. Many died. When they did not think I heard them, our people whispered that I had brought them across the black water to the Isle of the Dead. I think I almost shared their belief. As bleak and colourless as the Underworld is said to be, this island was worse. Perhaps if you had not been there swaddled in Ebeny's arms I might have let it remain always so. For your sake I let the household work upon the Hold. So far from Osrakum my hopes were ailing and wont to die. And yet in the years that have passed this desolation has become my home. It sits deep in my affection, perhaps more even than our palaces in Osrakum, of which all this' – he curved his arms out and round as if he were embracing the Hold – 'is not even a reflection in dull brass.' His father shook his head again. 'If my memory gives me true recollection.' He frowned and muttered, 'Sometimes that other life I had seems an impossible dream. Strange transformations have come upon me in this shrinking compass of my world. You know, my son, I have played roles that not even a Lord of the Lesser Chosen would stoop to. I have been brought closer to our barbarian children than I would have thought possible. So, in spite of all I am, all I know and all that I have been taught to feel, I must say, yes, I am desolated by this loss.'

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 window. Through its panes of cuttlefish 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.'