When the last children walked past, Carnelian sighed in relief, then left the bloody aura of the rusting chariot and attached himself to the rear of the march. Sthax was there with a couple of Marula herding the children with the hafts of their lances, all the time their yellow eyes darting fearful glances out over the sartlar-clad earth.
The children did not need to be told to be quiet. Dread spread from those on the edge of the road into the heart of their march. All eyes able to look out could not help doing so. Sartlar smothered the land like locusts. Stick women wound their way through the squatting multitudes, bowls of brackish water on their heads that looked as if they must snap their necks like twigs. Men huddled around pots from which steam billowed, wafting a stench of cooking meat towards the road, mixing with the odour of shit and urine, of rotting, of indescribable filth. Many of those passing on the road above were fighting nausea. Below, among the multitude, some rose to watch them pass with enormous eyes. Their sagging, disfigured faces might have been angry, or sad, or in shock. Few looked as if they would survive the day, but Carnelian remembered the rafts and he shuddered at the thought of this army of the near-dead, determined to force their way into the Land of the Dead. He sought solace in the healthy faces and bright eyes of the flesh-tithe children. For moments at a time he managed thus to avoid being aware of the sea of despair and hatred through which they were winding their thread.
They came into a region of pink dunes. Dazed with horror, Carnelian thought for a moment they must have reached some sea shore. Then he saw how pallid were the ridges and knew they were composed of the piled-up remains of the sartlar dead. Upon that battlefield, the matrix of their bones was ensnaring great drifts of ruddy sand. The road carried them through that eerie landscape in whose valleys sartlar crouched, in places having delved hollows in which they hid like crabs. Here too cauldrons bubbled their noisome stench. Carnelian slipped into a dream rhythmed by the movement of his legs, in which everything in the world was or had been a body that they were crossing on a causeway of human bone.
He became aware the world was turning red. A clean, dry russet red. He looked around. At last they were leaving the sartlar camp! Behind them Osrakum was lit from the west. How low the sun was. He squinted against the glare from which the road emerged: the flood-lake, around which there lay a stain that merged with the Sacred Wall to form a black ring. Kor, the sign of death. He turned away and saw their march like a bleeding cut in the raw meat of the Land. Gently, he began to push his way forward through the children.
Shadows were long when they reached a watch-tower. Carnelian glanced up and saw, beneath a disc, a bar and four spots. Nine. He stared, stunned. Watch-tower sun-nine. This was where they had received the Wise. Where he had met his father and brothers. Where he had deserted Osidian. He could make no sense of that memory, nor of the intervening time. That other, Chosen reality no longer seemed credible. Just a story in which he had imagined he had played a role.
When Tain came up to him, Carnelian asked him to get the children settled down for the night; find places for them to sleep, draw as much water as they could, light fires where possible.
Carnelian caught hold of Fern’s arm. ‘Come with me.’
Fern was about to ask where, but when he saw Carnelian was looking up at the watch-tower, he nodded.
Standing upon the heliograph platform, they gazed south. A vast land spread out before them, shapeless behind drifting red veils of dust.
‘It’ll all soon be desert,’ Fern said and turned anxious eyes on Carnelian. ‘How can we hope to get them all through?’
They both gazed down at the stopping place overflowing with children. Carnelian set his jaw. ‘We’ll have to manage somehow, there’s no going back.’
They looked round. Osrakum was a sombre crust rising from the rotten heart of a land that soon would die. Death would pursue them all the way to the Ringwall. Carnelian felt Fern’s arm around him. They smiled at each other, then together peered south as if trying to glimpse the Earthsky.
CODA
Suddenly the red fog clears.Carnelian stares. He lifts Ykorenthe down from his shoulders because he fears his legs might buckle. If he were not so desiccated, tears would be running down his face. The verdant vision hurts his eyes. Green veined with silver. Intimidating colours. Hues so strange, so unreal. A vast stretch that in his dreams would have been the lush water meadows of the Leper Valleys. Everything was turned upside down. Could the dust ocean of the dying Land really have washed them up on this wet and smiling shore? Unbelievable glitter of free, running water almost enough to quench the thirst that long ago had dried up his mouth and eyes. On his tongue the ever-present taste of death.
Slowing his heart against the fear he will lose his vision, he dares to look away. He gazes at Fern beside him and finds some confirmation he is not mad in the look of wonder upon his sweet face. Poppy is there in Krow’s embrace as they gaze, gaping. His brothers grin like idiots. Sthax and the other Marula, frozen in a stare. The homunculus, his eyes gauging, judging; he alone seems to be certain what he is looking at is real. All around them their children, encrusted in the red dust of the Land that has slowly been drawing the living moisture from their flesh; each sandstorm hiss and scrape progressing their mummification. Every eye blinks red in a red face. Breathing is coughing that barely flutters each pair of blistered, thinned lips. Love for them rises, threatening to overwhelm him. It seems he has been witnessing their struggle along the road all his life. Trudging on through a red world. Driven south and ever south along the empty road by the screaming, gasping fury of the Land in Her death throes. Cowering in the feeble shelter of their rags and arms and bodies; huddling together against the raging dust. Sipping the trickles that they found in cisterns, or delved for in the black honeycombed depths of wells.
Carnelian gazes back at the long, long column of children that is swallowed up into the red smoky throat of the Pass. Moments ago he was putting one foot in front of the other, seeing nothing, deaf to the scratching air, following the memory of a desperate hope that, somewhere, something of life has survived the death of the world. Makar is up there, a piling-up of the Land’s bones snaring Her red dust so that, along its duned road, they had walked almost at the level of the rooftops. Its people had abandoned the lost city as if it were a ship run aground. That he had seen no evidence of violence anywhere in the houses, or the alleys, was the first sign that had stirred hope in him.
He turns back to the vision and laughs joyously when he finds it is still there. Fern is grinning at him, offering him his hand. Carnelian smiles back, lighting up at the happiness releasing the beauty in Ykorenthe’s face. He lifts her back onto his shoulders, grips Fern’s hand and, with a smile to his family, leads them down onto the sward, drinking the clean, bright air until it hurts, eyes narrowed against the shimmer of the beckoning streams; the blaze and mercy of the clear, blue sky.