The Heretic Kings

THIRTEEN

Eighteen days they travelled through the unchanging jungle. Eighteen days of heat and rain and mosquitoes and leeches and mud and snakes.

Looking back on it, Hawkwood found it remarkable how quickly the men had been worn down. These were hardened campaigners who had seen battle in the dust-choked furnaces of the summer Hebros valleys. On board ship they had seemed swaggering veterans, hard men with rough appetites and constitutions of iron. Here they sickened like kittens.

They buried the first six days after they had met their new guide, the woman Kersik.

Glabrio Feridas, soldier of Hebrion. He had crouched shakily in the jungle to ease his overworked bowels, and it seemed to those who came across his corpse that he had voided all the blood that the mosquitoes and leeches had left in him.

After that, men ate the leaves that Kersik had brought for them. They avoided the fruits she told them to avoid, and they boiled their water every evening in their rusting helmets. There was no more flux, but many of them continued to feel feverish and soon the stronger men were carrying the armour of those who could no longer support its weight.

On the tenth day, Murad was finally prevailed upon by Hawkwood and Bardolin to allow the soldiers to take off the armour and cache it. The men piled it up and covered it with fallen branches and leaves, blazed a dozen trees around it and marched on the lighter by fifty pounds, clad in their leather gambesons.

They made better time after that. Hawkwood calculated they were travelling roughly nor’-nor’-west, and they were covering perhaps four leagues a day.

On the twelfth day Timo Ferenice was the second man to die. A snake had sidled up to his ankle as he stood nodding on sentry duty and bit quickly and efficiently through boot, hose and skin. He had died in convulsions, spraying foamy spittle and calling on God, Ramusio and his mother.

The following day they hit upon a road, or track rather. It was just wide enough for two men to walk abreast, a tunnel of beaten earth and close-packed stones seemingly well cared for, which led them farther to the north. They had bypassed the cluster of lights Murad had seen from the Spinero and were travelling almost parallel to the far-off coast.

All the while they travelled, Kersik strode along easily at the front of the column, frequently pausing to let the gasping men behind her catch up. The land rose almost imperceptibly, and Bardolin hazarded that they were nearing the southern slopes of the great conelike mountain they had sighted on the first day of their landfall.

Their pace should have quickened upon hitting the road, but it seemed to the members of the company that their strength was ebbing. Lack of sleep and poor food were taking their toll, as was the unrelenting heat. By the seventeenth day, the twenty-first out of Fort Abeleius, the soldiers were stumbling along in linen undershirts, their leather gambesons too rotten and mouldering to be of any further use. And medicinal leaves or no, two of them were so far gone in fever they had to be carried in crudely thrown-together litters by their exhausted comrades.

“I believe I have yet to see her sweat,” Hawkwood said to Bardolin as they sat in camp that night. Kersik was off to one side, her legs folded under her, face serene.

Bardolin had been nodding off. He started awake and caressed the chittering imp. The little creature ate better than any of them, for it happily gorged itself on all manner of crawling things it found in the leaf litter. It was just back from foraging and was contentedly grinning in Bardolin’s lap, its belly as taut as a drum.

“Even wizards sweat,” the old mage said, irritated because he had been on the verge of precious sleep.

“I know. That is why it’s so odd. She doesn’t seem real, somehow.”

Bardolin lay back with a sigh. “None of it seems real. The dreams I have at night seem more real than this waking life.”

“Good dreams?”

“Strange ones, unlike any I have known before. And yet there is an element of familiarity to them too. I keep feeling that everything here I have come across splices together somehow-that if I could but step back from it I would see the pattern in the whole. That inscription on the statue we found-it reminds me of something I once knew. The girl: she is Dweomer-folk, certainly, but there is something unknown at work in her also, something I cannot decipher. It is like trying to read a once-known book in too dim a light.”

“Maybe there will be a brighter light for you once we hit upon this city. Tomorrow, she says, we’ll arrive there. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it, but the discoverer in me has lost some of his relish for our expedition.”

“He has not,” Bardolin said, and he waved a hand to where Murad was doing his nightly rounds of the camp-fires, checking on his men.

“He cannot keep it up much longer,” Hawkwood said. “I don’t believe he’s had more than an hour’s sleep a night since we left the coast.”

Murad looked less like an officer administering to his men than a ghoul preying on the sick. His lank hair fell in black strings across his face and the flesh had been pared away from nose and cheekbones and temples. His scar now seemed an extravagant curl of tissue, like an extra thin-lipped mouth on the side of his face. Even his fingers were skeletal.

“We have been ashore scarcely a month,” Hawkwood said quietly. “We have buried five shipmates in that time-maybe more back at the fort by now-and the rest of us are close to breaking down. Do you really believe this land can ever be fit for civilized men, Bardolin?”

The mage shut his eyes and turned away. “I’ll tell you after tomorrow.”

That night the dream came to Bardolin again.

But this time it was the woman Kersik who came to him in the night, nude, her skin a flawless bloom of honey. She was incandescently beautiful despite the two rows of nipples that lined her torso from pectoral to navel and the claws which curled at the tips of her fingers. Her eyes blazed like the sun behind leaves.

They made love on the yielding ground beyond the camp. This time Bardolin was atop her, grinding into her firm softness with the vigour of a young man. And all around the straining couple a masque of fantastic figures danced and capered madly, spindle-thin, cackling, with green slits for eyes and hornlike ears. Bardolin could feel their feet, light as leaves, dancing in the hollow of his back as he pushed into the woman below him.

But there was another presence there. He arched his head to see, despite the grip of her hand on the nape of his neck, a tall darkness towering above the frolics.

A shifter in wolf form.

None of them had slept well. Bardolin ached as though someone had been kicking him all night. The company dragged themselves erect, Sergeant Mensurado hauling men to their feet. Kersik looked on like an indulgent parent.

Murad appeared from the trees. He had shaved, the blood on his chin testimony to the effort it had cost him. His straggling hair had been tied back and he had changed into a clean shirt which was nonetheless dotted with mould. He looked almost fresh, despite the sunken glitter of his eyes.

“So we are to see this city of yours today,” he said to Kersik.

The woman seemed amused at some private joke, as she often did. “Why yes, Lord Murad, if your comrades are fit to march.”

“They’re fit. They’re Hebrian soldiers,” Murad drawled, and he turned away from her with such languid contempt that Hawkwood actually found himself admiring him. The woman’s smile took on a fixed quality for a second, and then became pure sunshine again.

They set off after a frugal meal of the inevitable fruit. It was weeks since any of them had tasted meat, and they were becoming nostalgic even at the thought of the ship’s salt pork.

Another day of labour. Though they were tramping a passable road, they still had to take it in turns to carry the two delirious soldiers. Even Murad did his share.

There was more life in the jungle here, if that were possible. Not the squeakings and scurryings of before, but the crash and thump of larger beasts moving off in the vegetation. Kersik appeared oblivious to them, but the company travelled with loaded weapons and drawn swords. They were aware of a subtle change in their surroundings. The trees were smaller, the canopy less dense. Almost the forest here looked like secondary growth, a reclaiming of land once cleared.

To reinforce this opinion they came across the remains of huge stone-built buildings half hidden at the sides of the narrow road. Bardolin wanted to pause and examine them, for they seemed to be liberally dotted with carved writing, but Kersik would not allow it. When he asked her about them she seemed even more reluctant to give out information than she had throughout the journey.

“They are Undwa-Zantu,” she said at last, surrendering to Bardolin’s badgering.

“What does that mean?” the mage asked.

“They are old, from the earlier time, the first peoples.”

With that one sentence she let loose a torrent of questions from both Bardolin and Hawkwood, but would answer none of them.

“You will learn more when we get to the city,” was all she would say.

T HEY had reached the foot of the mountain to the north of their anchorage. They could see it clearly, even through the canopy overhead. It reared up like a grey wall above the jungle, the forest struggling to maintain itself at its knees but gradually thinning and clearing all the same.

“How far do you think we have come?” Bardolin asked Hawkwood.

The mariner shrugged with one shoulder. He had taken bearings as often as he could-Kersik had been inordinately fascinated by the compass-and he’d had both Masudi and big Cortona pacing to check his own count, but in the day-to-day labour it was probable that major inaccuracies had crept in.

“We’re walking almost due north now,” he said. “Since we met the girl, I’d say we’ve come some sixty leagues, but we’ve changed course several times.”

They were far back in the file. Kersik was twenty yards in front, Murad striding beside her like her consort. Bardolin lowered his voice. Her hearing was better than a beast’s.

“She slips past questions like a snake. She knows everything, I’m sure of it-perhaps the whole history of this land, Captain. For it has a history, you can be sure of that. These ruins look as ancient as the crumbling Fimbrian watchtowers you can see up in the Hebros passes, and they are six centuries old and more.”

“Maybe we’ll find answers in this city she keeps talking about, though where it might be I’m sure I don’t know. The way she talks it must be on the slope of this damned mountain; but how could one build a city on slopes so steep?”

“I don’t know. It may be that if there is a city there somewhere we’ll find more answers in it than we bargained for.”

The file halted. Murad called for them at its head and the wizard and the mariner hurried past the line of soldiers.

The way was blocked by a trio of figures so fantastic that even Murad had momentarily lost his poise.

Two were inhumanly tall, eight feet perhaps. They were black-skinned, a black so dark that it made Masudi’s skin appear yellowish. Their limbs were bare and they wore simple loincloths, but where their heads should have been were incredible masks. One was of a leopard-like creature, only heavier and more muscular. The other had the head of a great mandrill, with bright blue patches of ridged flesh on either side of the flaring nose.

But the masks were not masks. The leopard-head licked its teeth and the eyes moved. The mandrill sniffed the air, its nostrils quivering. In their human hands, the two creatures carried bronze-bladed spears twice the height of a man, wickedly barbed.

The third figure was tiny by comparison, shorter even than Hawkwood. He seemed entirely human and his skin, though deeply tanned, was as pale as a Ramusian’s. He wore a shapeless bag of supple hide for a hat, and white linen robes which concealed his entire body except for small, broad-fingered hands. His face was pouchy and bejowled, eyes bright and black shining out of puffy sockets. Were it not for the strange garments, he might have passed for a well-to-do merchant of Abrusio with too many rich meals and too much good wine under his belt. His only ornament was a pendant of gold in the shape of a five-pointed star which enclosed a circle. It hung from his wattled neck on a gold chain whose links were as thick as a child’s finger.

“Gosa,” Kersik said, and she bowed. “I have brought the Oldworlders.”

The leopard head growled deeply.

“Well done,” the man in the linen robes said. “I thought I’d provide you with an escort into Undi. And my curiosity was consuming me. It’s been a long time.” His glance strayed to the members of the company who stood silent behind Kersik, even Murad at a loss for words.

“Greetings, brother,” Gosa said to Bardolin.

The mage blinked, but did not reply. His imp uttered a single little yelp which sounded almost interrogative. The leopard head growled again.

Murad stepped forward, clearly angered by being left out of the exchanges. Immediately mandrill head levelled the spear until it touched his chest, stalling him.

A series of clicks. Sergeant Mensurado, Cortona and the other soldiers had their arquebuses in the shoulder, the wheel-locks cocked back, the muzzles pointed squarely at the exotic trio in the middle of the track. Powder-smoke eddied about the company. Gosa sniffed at it, and smiled to show yellow teeth, canines from which the gums had retreated.

“Ah, the very essence of the Old World,” he said, not at all put out by the weapons pointed at his ample belly. “Put up your weapons, gentlemen; you will not need them here. Ilkwa-for shame-can’t you see the man is merely trying to introduce himself?”

The tall spear swung back to the vertical. Murad nodded at Mensurado and the arquebuses were uncocked, though the men kept their slow-match lit.

“Murad of Galiapeno at your service,” the nobleman said wryly.

“Gosa of Undi at yours,” the plump, berobed man said, bowing slightly. “Will you follow me into our humble city, Lord Murad? There are refreshments waiting, and those who wish to can bathe.”

Murad bowed in his turn. Gosa, Kersik and the two outlandish beast-men led off. The company fell in behind them, still hauling the two litters with the fever-ridden soldiers.

The world changed in a twinkling.

The jungle disappeared. One moment they were walking under the shadowed shelter of the forest, and the next it had vanished. Uninterrupted sunshine blinded them. The borderline between the riotous vegetation and barren emptiness was as clear-cut as if a giant razor had shaved the mountainside clean of all living things.

Now they could see the true size of the peak which soared above them. Its head was lost in cloud, and though from a distance it had seemed perfectly symmetrical, closer up they could decipher broken places in its cone, ragged tears in the flanks of stone, petrified waterfalls where long-cold lava had once gushed forth. The place was a wilderness, a desert leached of colour, defined only in greys and blacks. There were dunes of what looked like ebony sand, weird bubbles of basalt, outwellings and holes and the stumps of solidified geysers. A landscape, Bardolin thought, like that which he had glimpsed through Saffarac’s viewing device long ago. Lunar, dead, otherworldly.

The going was harder, and the men puffed and panted as they laboured up the steep slopes. There was still a road of sorts here, a crude pavement of tufa blocks. Cairns marked its twistings and turnings as it zigzagged up the face of the mountain. The men gasped in the withering heat, choking on volcanic dust, their faces becoming black with what looked like soot and tasted like ash. It dried out their mouths and gritted between tongue and teeth.

“I see no city,” Murad rasped to Kersik and Gosa. “Where are you taking us?”

“There is a city, trust me.” Gosa beamed at him, a benevolent gnome with obsidian shards for eyes. “Undi is not so easily chanced across unless one is led there by one of its inhabitants. And this is Undabane whose knees we clamber across. The Sacred Mountain, heart of fire whose rages have been tamed.” He stopped. “Have patience, Lord Murad. It is not much farther.”

The company became strung out despite all that Murad and Mensurado could do. It was a line of antlike figures struggling up the monstrous mountainside, the soldiers pausing to catch their breaths, the litter-bearers changing every hundred yards. So it was Hawkwood and Bardolin, at the front, who saw it first.

A cleft in the mountain’s conical top, a huge rent in its perfect shape. The summit was still some six or seven thousand feet above, but here they were working slowly around its western face, and the cleft was invisible from the northern approach. A glimpse of dark walls within shooting to incredible heights, and something else.

At the base of the cleft was a monumental statue weathered almost into shapelessness by the elements. It was perhaps a hundred and twenty feet high, and vaguely humanoid. A stump of a spear in one crumbling fist. Deep eyes visible in a face which had a snout for a nose. The impression of a powerful torso. The thing had been built out of tufa blocks bigger than the carrack’s longboat and they were eroding at their joints so that it seemed to have a grid imposed upon it.

The rest of the party caught up as Gosa, Kersik and the two beast-men paused. There was only one litter.

“Forza died,” Murad said to the questioning looks. “We don’t know when-no one noticed. We built a cairn over him.” He seemed angry with himself, as though it were his fault. “God curse this pestilent country.”

Gosa pursed his lips disapprovingly, but did not comment. The company moved on again, the soldiers sullen and silent, even Mensurado cast down. The sick man’s death seemed like an omen.

Rocks clattered under their feet, and their sodden boots were full of ash, blistering their heels and toes. They were down to their last swirl of water in the canteens, and Murad would let no one finish it.

Into the shade of the massive statue, their heads hardly reaching to its ankles.

The world contracted. They were trudging through a narrow place whose walls soared up hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet on either side, a snake-thin gap in the wall of the mountain through which the wind whistled and hissed like a live thing. Water dripped down in glittering fringes from the gorge sides, and the men stood under the drips with their tongues out, begging. Flat, iron-tasting water full of grit, it nonetheless enabled their tongues to move about inside their mouths again.

The world opened once more, or rather exploded upon them. Like the change from jungle to ashen desert on the slopes of the mountain, the transition was abrupt and astonishing.

They found themselves on a shelf of rock, maybe a thousand feet up inside the mountain. Undabane was hollow, a vaster version of the crater which Murad had named the Spinero. They could look up and see the walls of the mountain rearing on all sides, sheer as cliffs, unscalable. The blue unclouded sky was a semicircle of pure colour above the rock.

And below there was a disc of brilliant jungle, as though someone had lifted it whole, a small, flat world of it, and placed it inside Undabane after knocking the summit off the hollow mountain. The view stupefied them. There was a dark curve across the crater floor, the shadow of the mountain’s lip dragging in the wake of the sun. Looking at it, Bardolin understood in an instant the phases of the moon.

There were buildings down there amid the trees: pylons of black basalt monumental in size but dwarfed to insignificance by their setting, flat-roofed houses built entirely of stone, a stepped pyramid as tall as Carcasson’s spires, the step faces painfully bright with gold. Avenues and roads. A city, indeed. A place utterly alien to anything they had seen before or imagined. It took speech out of their parched mouths and left them gaping. Even Murad could find nothing to say.

“Behold Undi,” Gosa said with quiet satisfaction. “The Hidden City of the Zantu and the Arueyn, the Heart of Fire, the Ancient Place. Worth a trek, is it not?”

“Who built this?” Bardolin asked at last. “Who are these people you name?”

“All questions will be answered in the end. For now, we have but a little descent and then you will be able to rest. Word of your coming has gone ahead of you. There is food and drink waiting, and succour for the sick amongst you.”

“Take us down there, then,” Murad said with brutal directness. “I’ll have no more of my men die in this hellhole because you stand there preening yourself.”

Gosa’s eyes flared with an odd light, though his face did not change. He inclined his head slightly and led the party onwards, down a track which had been hewn out of the side of the mountain. Kersik shot the nobleman a look of pure venom, however.

They stumbled and stared and cursed their way down to the floor of the crater, which by this time was nearly all in shadow. There were dark clouds gathering in the circle of sky thousands of feet above them, the beginning of the daily downpour. They found themselves walking along a wide, well-paved road which had rain gutters on either side. It was a street of sorts, for there were more of the flat-roofed buildings set back from it amid the trees. As they hobbled deeper into the heart of the city the trees grew sparser and the buildings closer together. And there were people here.

They were tall, lean and black and were dressed in a white linen-like cloth. They were delicately featured, with sharply chiselled noses and thin lips. The women were as tall and stately as queens, their breasts bare, gold pendants ornamenting them. Many had their bodies decorated with some form of intricate ritual scarring which swirled in circles and currents around their torsos and on their cheeks. They regarded the company with interest, and many pointed especially at Masudi, who was like them and yet not like them. But they were restrained, dignified. The company passed through what could only be a market place, with stalls of fruit and meat set out, but there was little hubbub. The people there halted to stare at the ragged soldiers of Hebrion, and then went on about their business. To Hawkwood, who knew the crazed, chaotic bazaars of Ridawan and Calmar, the orderliness was unnerving. And there were no children anywhere to be seen. Neither were there any animals, not even a stray dog or lounging cat-if they had such things in this country.

The pyramid towered above the rest of the buildings, its gold dulled now as the sun was hidden and the afternoon rain began to tumble down inside the mountain. Gosa and his inhuman companions led the company to a tall, square house off the market place and thumped upon a hardwood door. It was opened by a tall old man whose hair was as white as his face was black.

“I have brought them, Faku,” Gosa said. “See they are well cared for.”

The old man bowed deeply, as inscrutable as a Merduk grand vizier, and the company trooped into the house.

“Rest, eat, bathe. Do whatever you wish, but do not leave the building,” Gosa told them cheerfully. “I will be back this evening, and tomorrow. . tomorrow we will see about answering some of those questions you have been harbouring for so long.”

He left. The old man clapped his hands and two younger versions of himself appeared, shut the doors of the room-which the company saw was a kind of foyer-and stood expectantly.

Murad and his soldiers were glaring about them as if they expected an armed host to rush out of the walls. It was Hawkwood who smelled the cooking meat first. It brought the water springing into his mouth.

Kersik said something to the old man, Faku, and he clapped his hands again. His helpers swung open side doors in the big room, and there was the gurgle of running water. Marble pools with fountains. Clean linen. Earthenware bowls of fruit. Platters of steaming meat.

“Sweet Saints in heaven,” Bardolin breathed. “A bath!”

“It might be a trick,” Murad snarled, though he was swallowing painfully as the smell of the food obviously tantalized him.

“There is no trick.” Kersik laughed, darted into the room and snatched a roasted rib of the meat, biting into it so the juices ran down her chin. She came over to Bardolin and stood close to him.

“Will you not try it, Brother Mage?” she asked, offering him the rib.

He hesitated, but she thrust it under his nose. That secret amusement was in her eyes. “Trust me,” she said in a low voice, vixen grin on her face, mouth running with the meat juices. “Trust me, brother.”

He bit into the rib, shredding meat from the bone. It seemed the most delicious thing he had ever tasted in his life.

She wiped the grease out of his silver beard, then spun from him. For an instant he could see her eyes in the air she had vacated, hanging as bright as solar after-images.

“You see?” she said, holding up the rib as though it were a trophy.

The men scattered, making for the piled platters and bowls. Faku and his colleagues stood impassively, looking on like sophisticates at a barbarian feast. Bardolin remained where he was. He swallowed the gobbet of meat and stared at Kersik as she danced about the gorging soldiers and laughed in Murad’s livid face. Hawkwood remained also.

“What was it?” he asked Bardolin.

“What do you mean?”

“What kind of meat?”

Bardolin wiped his lips free of grease. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” His ignorance suddenly seemed terrible to him.

“Well, I doubt they brought us this far to poison us.” Hawkwood shrugged. “And by the Saints, it smells wholesome enough.”

They gave in and joined the soldiers, wolfing down meat and slaking their thirst with pitchers of clear water. But they could not manage more than half a dozen mouthfuls ere their stomachs closed up. Bloated on nothing, they paused and saw that Kersik was gone. The heavy doors were shut and the attendants had disappeared.

Murad sprang up with a cry and threw himself at the doors. They creaked, but would not move.

“Locked! By the Saints, they’ve locked us in!”

The tiny windows high in the walls, though open to the outside, were too small for a man to worm through.

“The guests have become prisoners, it would seem,” Bardolin said. He did not seem outraged.

“You had an idea this would happen,” Murad accused him.

“Perhaps.” Even to himself, Bardolin’s calm seemed odd. He wondered privately if something had indeed been slipped into the food.

“Did you think they would leave us free to wander about the city like pilgrims?” Bardolin asked the nobleman. The meat was like a ball of stone in his stomach. He was no longer used to such rich fare. But there was something else, something in his head which disquieted him and at the same time stole away his unease. It was like being drunk; that feeling of invulnerability.

“Are you all right, Bardolin?” Hawkwood asked him, concerned.

“I–I-” Nothing. There was nothing to worry about. He was tired, was all, and needed to get himself some sleep.

“Bardolin!” they called. But he no longer heard them.