Faerie Lord

Sixty-Nine

It started with a single drummer.

Henry watched as the man entered the city’s enormous central plaza. His drum was a tapered wooden tube, open at one end, covered in what might be goatskin at the other and brightly decorated with tiny painted skulls that could only have come from some small rodent.

The man walked vaguely across the cracked paving, staring up at the ruined buildings for all the world like a tourist who had stumbled on a new attraction. Then, somewhere to one side of the square, he squatted with the drum between his knees, stroked the goatskin and began to play a single tap… tap… tap with no discernable rhythm. The drum had not much resonance, either that or the under-sand environment absorbed much of its sound.

‘Do we go down yet?’ Henry asked softly. They were standing by a window in what remained of the second floor of a squat building. Blue faces were at the windows of many buildings around them.

‘No,’ Loquin said without elaboration. His eyes were very bright.

A second drummer appeared from the shadow of an alley. He moved with greater focus, walking directly to the centre of the plaza, ignoring his environment. He too squatted down and began to play, but this time there was a rhythm: both drums together sounded like a massive heartbeat, and now there was the resonance that had been lacking before. Henry fancied he heard a collective sigh from the watching tribe.

There was no change for long moments on end: thud-boom… thud-boom

… thud-boom… thud-boom… The sound was mildly hypnotic.

Two more drummers entered the square, their heads turned upwards. They moved in time with their drumbeats, but with a curious gait, taking two steps forward, one step back. They reached the original drummers and squatted down beside them. The drumbeats were now rolling across the plaza without pause.

Henry, who’d once been hypnotised by Mr Fogarty, was sinking into a torpor as the stately rhythm seized him. But he jerked upright, heart pounding, as a massive shout erupted. Eight more drummers poured into the plaza, leaping and dancing. Their bodies were streaked with elaborate designs in bright white paint that turned them into fiercely prancing human zebras. After a single circuit of the square, they joined the original four and all twelve fell into a new, sharper, faster rhythm. The sound rolled out across the ruined city like an endless peal of thunder.

Lorquin was visibly excited now, shifting from one foot to the other.

‘Now?’ Henry asked. He knew the celebrations would take place in the plaza and everything so far was a preliminary.

‘Not yet,’ Lorquin said a little breathlessly. ‘Soon.’

Women of the tribe began to dance into the square. Their bodies were painted too, but not at all like the drummers. Elaborate whorls of green and red, sun-yellow and a glowing orange, contrasted with their deep blue skins to turn them into plumaged birds. Henry had never seen anything like it before and for some reason the sight made his heart leap with pleasure.

The women paraded the square in time to the powerful drumbeats, strutting like peacocks, turning and twisting. Every one was smiling. Several looked positively delirious with joy.

‘Now,’ Lorquin said.

For some reason it caught Henry by surprise. ‘What?’ he asked, frowning.

Lorquin gave him the sort of fond look that a father might give an idiot child and said patiently, ‘Now we men go down.’

It was weird how that word we acted like a small hook into Henry’s heart. We men. Lorquin, this child with him, this child who had rescued Henry in the desert, was a man now because he’d slain his draugr. But Henry was a man as well, accepted by the tribe as a Companion, his bravery unquestioned, his maturity unquestioned. All his life, Henry had grown up in a house that was dominated by women. Even in the early days his father hardly counted against the certainties of his mother and the whining manipulations of his sister. When his father left, Henry found himself with three women to contend with after Anais moved in, and most of the time he felt under siege. But now he was one of the men, almost part of the tribe. Now he had companionship and acceptance. We men. Even though the words came from a child, Henry liked them.

‘Now?’ he asked, suddenly smiling.

Lorquin smiled back up at him. ‘Yes, now.’

They emerged from the ground floor to join a stream of tribesmen headed for the square. Henry fell into the rhythm at once, a staccato shuffle punctuated by resounding grunts timed to the distant drumbeats. Like Lorquin, the men were naked – although the white paint on their bodies made them look clothed. Henry had removed his shirt (desert temperatures were as hot as a tropical beach and here, beneath the sands, there was no possibility of sunburn), but couldn’t quite bring himself to go the distance with his trousers. He’d declined Lorquin’s offer to decorate his skin – ‘I will illustrate you, En Ri,’ Lorquin told him cheerfully – yet for all that he still felt a part of the whole celebration, probably because the tribesmen accepted him so readily.

The communal dance moved at a stately pace, the massive snake of male bodies intertwining gracefully with the women’s movements. Sometimes they were packed so closely together that their bodies actually brushed one another. Henry should have found it hideously embarrassing, but somehow didn’t… even when several of the younger, prettier girls smiled at him. For the first time in his life, he felt a part of something greater than himself.

The dance became wilder and the tribe began to chant in time with the basic rhythm. Although the chant was in a language Henry didn’t understand, he had picked up the words within minutes. Soon he was chanting with the best of them. The combination of the drumming, the rhythmic movement and the chanting made him increasingly light-headed, but he found he didn’t care. When someone passed him a gourd of yellow liquid, he drank it down without a thought.

Seconds later, the top of his head exploded. The feeling was absolutely wonderful. He was energised, powerful, intoxicated. He was as strong as any man here. He was old; he was young; he was wise. He was in love with Blue.

Lorquin materialised briefly by his side. ‘Melor!’ he called above the chanting and pointed at the empty gourd.

Henry nodded back, grinning hugely.

It became a bit of a blur after that. Henry recalled dancing faster and faster, chanting louder and louder. At some point he lost his trousers and didn’t care. His head, his whole horizon, was filled with the drumming and the chant.

Then he found he was seated, squatting on the ground watching while Ino the tattooed shaman muttered and shook and swayed and shouted in the centre of the plaza. Henry couldn’t remember whether Ino had taken anything before his performance began, but he certainly looked drugged now. The encircling tribesmen, Henry among them, swayed in time to his movements and cheered when he hurled a handful of bleached bones onto the paving. A young boy, younger even than Lorquin, rushed forward to examine them where they fell, then fearlessly trotted across to whisper in Ino’s ear. The shaman shuddered and convulsed and shouted aloud.

‘The song-lines are set,’ grinned a man squatting next to Henry. He seemed pleased with the development, but Henry himself had not the slightest idea what was going on.

I no fell down sometime after that and had to be carried away. No one seemed concerned.

The drums fell silent and a new chant broke out, soft, slow and melodious. After a moment Henry realised only the men were singing and joined in. The bass vibration of the plainsong overcame him so that he closed his eyes and swam through darkness on a raft of sound.

The men’s song ebbed and flowed for an eternity; then suddenly it stopped and there was total, utter silence. Henry opened his eyes again and looked around benignly. There seemed to be a sense of expectation reflected in the surrounding faces. The men began to sing again, softer this time, like the background hum of insects on a summer’s day. Then came the women’s voices, swelling pure and clear across the dry air. Henry felt tears spring to his eyes as they plunged and swooped like birds, carrying a melody so plaintive that it seized the heart and carried it away.

The women’s song continued for a long, long time and while he could pick out no more than a few words here and there, to Henry it seemed they were singing an ancient history of the tribe, telling of its tribulations at the time of their captivity, telling of the freedom granted by Charaxes, telling of the sorrows and the joys, holding a burden of emotion that was almost too heavy to bear.

Then, one by one, the voices fell away until only a single lone woman remained singing. Henry craned to see who she was and eventually located her, a plump girl scarcely older than himself, whose eyes were closed tight and her head flung back as she carried the remainder of the song.

The girl continued singing while four men shuffled into the plaza, carrying two long poles from which a smallish wooden box was slung on leather thongs. Henry’s heart jumped. Was this the ark of Euphrosyne? He leaned forward to get a better look, but others around him were doing the same and blocked his line of sight. As the men lowered the box reverently to the ground, he could see that it definitely looked old, perhaps even old enough to be the original ark. But beyond that, it was difficult to make out much detail.

The light was failing now and the thing itself was quite a distance from him, on top of which, the men who had carried it were fussing round it, removing the leather thongs and placing it just so in what he supposed must be its ritual position. From what he could see, the wooden surface of the box seemed to have metal inlays, possibly silver and gold, although they could just as easily be steel and brass.

The singing stopped. For Henry it was as if the entire tribe held its collective breath. The four men fanned out, taking their poles with them. To his surprise they had managed to construct a frame table and the ark now stood at chest height on top of it.

Another pause, then a scrambling movement to his right as the tribespeople parted to allow a woman through. Unlike the others, there was no paint on her body. Instead she wore a shimmering golden robe that dropped from shoulder to ankle and might actually have been cut from silk. The effect was astounding – she was the first of the Luchti Henry had yet seen who wore anything at all – and hugely enhanced by the silver mask that hid her face. She walked, head high, towards the ark.

Beside Henry, a man murmured, ‘Euphrosyne…’ He pronounced the name the way a Greek might: You-fross-sin- ee. At once his neighbour echoed the word; then it was taken up into a quiet chant: ‘Euphrosyne

… Euphrosyne… Euphrosyne…’

As the woman walked to the ark, the pole-carriers moved to escort her like proud bodyguards or priests. She reached the frame table and fell on her knees, arms stretched upwards in a gesture of supplication. ‘Charaxes!’ she called. ‘Charaxes!’ She had a light, clear voice. For some reason Henry recalled Lorquin telling him this Euphrosyne was only twenty years old.

The crowd took up the call. ‘Charaxes! Charaxes! Charaxes!’

The ark began to glow.

Henry blinked. A reaction from the ark was the last thing he expected. This was obviously a religious moment for the Luchti, but Henry, who was Church of England, had never come across glowing arks before. The cynical thought passed through his mind that it might be something engineered by Euphrosyne or her priests. Then he remembered these were the Luchti, who roamed the desert naked. They hardly had the technology for glowing arks.

Heedless of the glow, Euphrosyne leaned her head against the side of the ark as if listening. ‘Charaxes speaks to her,’ murmured the man beside Henry. There was a matter-of-fact tone to his voice as if this was more or less routine for the occasion. But then the masked woman stood up and slowly turned her head as if searching the faces of the crowd and at once there was a murmur of surprise.

The movement stopped. It was difficult to be certain with the mask, but Euphrosyne seemed to be looking at someone close by Henry. She began to walk across the plaza. In a moment of growing nervousness, Henry thought perhaps she might be walking towards him.

He swallowed. She was standing directly in front of him. ‘Charaxes wants to speak to you,’ she said.