An excited muttering rippled between their urmen escorts. Mathers saw the reason for it. A totem. The mouldering body of an urman lashed to a carved post by liana vines, his chest split open, its soft tissues eaten long ago, leaving only a mummified husk. Echoing the hollow-eyed stare of the PH helmet on the top of his staff, its eye sockets were empty but for shadows and its jaw hung slackly as if in an eternal scream. Was it a sacrifice, a warning, a boundary marker or all three? It didn’t funk the urmen. If anything, they seemed relieved to pass it. It no doubt marked the edge of their territory.
Transfixed by it, Mathers watched as darkness seemed to seep from the skull’s sockets with a malicious intent, threatening to drown him in the rising shadows. Yet he could not take his eyes from it.
A voice reached out to him and he used it to pull his attention away from the deepening shadows about him.
“A sacrifice.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“A sacrifice,” said his urman guide. “He was jundurru. Now he’s a warning to other bad spirits that come to tempt or trick the Gilderra Clan. They will face the same fate. Jarak’s magic is strong. You will see.”
Mathers swallowed dryly, his tongue rasping against the roof of his mouth. He caught the tortured thing out of the corner of his eyes as he walked past it. If there was a chance to turn back, this was it. But now he felt no fear, no guilt. After all, he thought, why should he? Was he not under the aegis of the god of the underworld? Urged on by its whisperings in his mind, he took the first defiant step beyond the grisly totem. That broke the spell, and from thereon his fate was sealed.
The Ivanhoe rumbled past it, oblivious to its petty magics. The ground shuddered under its passing and the totem trembled in the wake of its iron tread.
AS THE TREES thinned, Mathers saw the urmen escort waiting expectantly on their edge. Beyond, a great wall of living bark rose up before them. Great thick sheets of it spanned the spaces between rising tree trunks, forming a stockade. They were not cut and hewn by crude tools, but grafted by some esoteric form of arboriculture from the very trees themselves, shaping and training the living wood so that planes of thick rough bark, some twenty or thirty feet high, grew from one tree to the next to form a natural living barricade, supported and strengthened by pleached boughs. Roots thrust out from the base of the living bark wall like natural buttresses. In spite of himself, and anything he expected to find on this world, Mathers was impressed. This was obviously a much older enclave than they had visited before. Established, less nomadic than those of their previous encounters. The gnarled and cracked bark fortification told of decades of growth, if not a century or more. This looked promising.
The jungle had been cleared from around the stockade and overhanging boughs cut back, right up to the canopy, which spanned out high above to become a natural vault.
Their urman escort called out with a yodelling cry towards the bark-walled enclave. A single great crack echoed around the clearing, followed by a succession of dry creaks. Two large gates of bark opened, revealing the compound within. Stood in the open gateway was a small party of urmen, who moved aside out of deference and fear as Mathers entered the clearing, the tank waiting in the jungle shadows behind him.
Cerulean trees, their trunks ten or twenty feet in diameter, rose high above into the vaulted canopy overhead, many stripped of their bark to a height of some fifty or sixty feet. Mathers soon saw why. The dwellings clustered below within the stockade were themselves made of great curved sheets of bark. Crepuscular fingers of light sliced down through the canopy, illuminating the clearing with an almost ethereal glow. There, he found nearly a hundred urmen women and children, watching him in silence.
He threw out his arms and, almost as one, the urmen dropped to their knees.
“I offer you a blessing in the name of Skarra!”
Behind him, the tank came to a halt, cresting a mammoth tree root where it squatted like some monstrous toad. There was a muttered response from the gathered enclave, who looked afraid and uncertain.
Mathers strode forwards towards the small central group, where a man wore a headdress made from an Yrredetti facial plate. He was dressed in a mottled fur cloak over a chest plate assembled from the carapace of some dead creature, scraped clean and now inscribed with symbols.
Next to him stood a smaller, wiry man, patterns of ritual scarification obvious on his face even under the ceremonial daubings of white clay smeared across his skin. Mostly naked, he wore only a loin cloth and bands of chitinous exoskeleton, harvested from some arthropod’s limbs, decorating his wrists, upper arms and ankles. The man regarded him with a sullen stare. This must be Jarak.
A group of tense and jumpy warriors stood behind them.
“I am Dranethwe of the Gilderra,” said the headdress wearer. When he spoke it was with the same inflections but a more heavily accented English than any other urman Mathers had heard before. It was recognisable, however, if a little hard to follow at first. “My clan is honoured by your presence,” the urmen went on. “We are grateful that the gods have heard us and that our offerings did not go unheeded.”
“Skarra hears all,” replied Mathers. Really, it was no more difficult communicating with them than with any other foreign subject of the British Empire. Learning a few words of their lingo always helped, but above all, keep it short and keep it simple. That way there would be no misunderstandings. Failing that, they always had the Ivanhoe. He turned back towards the tank. With great pomp, he anointed each track horn with the tip of his staff, while hissing out a command to Clegg.
“It’s showtime.”
ALFIE WATCHED AS the others grinned and struggled to put on their rain capes, helmets and splash masks in the confines of the tank, with all the eagerness of actors in the wings. Alfie wanted to speak out, to take one last chance to persuade them, but now wasn’t the time. That time had long since passed, he realised. They were committed to a course of action, and he felt very uneasy about it.
Handing out the ‘turtle shell’ bruise helmets, Norman thrust Alfie’s into the mechanic’s chest and held it there. He leaned in close, his mouth close to Alfie’s ear.
“Don’t funk it. If you mess this up for us, I’ll have you.”
Alfie felt his face smart as if he’d been struck. As if he would. As if he’d put his crewmates in jeopardy. How could he even question that? He said nothing, but met his gaze with a sullen silence. Then, with Norman still watching, he put on his splash mask and helmet. Norman nodded, apparently satisfied, before popping something into his mouth and putting on his own splash mask.
Wally cut the engine and the tank’s growling died in its throat as if pleased by the enclave’s submission to its will. He lit the hurricane lamps and hung them before the driver’s visors then opened the front visor hatches. The light from the lanterns flooded out as Skarra’s piercing gaze lit the clearing. As quietly as possible, the crew bundled out of the hatches in the rear of the sponsons, hidden by the bulk of the Ivanhoe. At the rear of the tank Cecil and Reggie lit torches with a Lucifer. They fell into Indian file.
Glumly Alfie fell in with the others behind Mathers as they began intoning their version of a mock liturgical chant, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. Like Mathers’, their rain capes were daubed with symbols, only less ornate. Wally and Frank were in front carrying rifles, bayonets fixed, in the present position, like crucifixes. Behind them came Cecil and Reggie, bearing the flaming torches. Alfie and Norman brought up the rear of the procession. Alfie knew it was so that Norman could keep an eye on him, and he resented the fact. Jack stayed in the tank, ready with a loaded gun, should the urmen require the ultimate demonstration. Alfie felt nauseous. The Padre would be spitting feathers if he could see them now.