Morunasa became a wooden man. He pointed at Carnelian. The Darkness-under-the-Trees must have his blood.'
Osidian slapped Morunasa's arm down. 'I'll feed your god enough blood to sate even his thirst.'
He put his arm around Carnelian's shoulders. 'Come, let us leave this place, it is beginning to turn my stomach.'
Letting himself be led away, Carnelian was feeling too sick to care about Morunasa's look of hatred.
Carnelian pulled himself free of Osidian as they walked deep into the baobab forest. He was glad Osidian was happy to walk in silence. The only sound was the footfalls of their Marula guards and Krow, who had followed them.
Carnelian became aware Osidian was measuring up the trees.
'We will have to cut them down all the way from the knoll to here. And from the edge of the chasm to perhaps up there.' Osidian pointed halfway up the escarpment.
'Why?' Carnelian asked.
'I need a training ground.'
Carnelian surveyed the whole wide sweep among the leafless giants. 'But these trees are sepulchres.'
Then empty them of their dead.' 'And do what with them?'
Osidian shrugged. 'Did you not tell me they were desiccated?'
Carnelian nodded. 'Well, burn them.'
Carnelian grew uneasy. 'Perhaps you should oversee this yourself, my Lord.'
Osidian looked away towards the island. 'Would you then take my place negotiating with the Oracles?'
Carnelian glanced at Krow.
Osidian shook his head. 'I want that one with me.' He motioned more than half his escort to attend to Carnelian. ‘I shall send you more.'
Accustomed as Carnelian had become to towering over everyone, the long-limbed Manila in their bead corselets were unnerving. They stood avoiding his gaze, several with axes hanging from their hands.
'Do any of you understand Vulgate?'
The Manila gave no answer but only stared at him with their yellow eyes. He pointed at the baobab under whose branches they stood. While they looked on, he made a pantomime of cutting it down. After he was done he saw they were regarding him with the same blank faces. He grew exasperated. When he moved into their ranks, they ebbed away from him. Lunging, he snatched an axe from one of them and returned with it to the tree. He gazed at the monster. Stark it was, menacing, but the Plainsmen had taught him to revere all trees. Besides, he was reluctant to desecrate any pygmy dead that it might hold. Such arguments were nothing to Osidian. The baobabs would die. Carnelian put aside his feelings and swung the axe. Its flint bit deeper than he had expected. He was pulling back for another stroke when he became aware of the murmuring. Looking round, he saw the Manila were all staring at the ground. It was clear he was getting nowhere and so he went in search of Osidian.
He found him with Morunasa and Krow upon the crown of the knoll now deserted by the Plainsmen. Osidian was crouching in an opening high in one of the trees. Morunasa and Krow were on the ground looking up at him.
'What do you want, Master?' the Maruli asked, malice in his eyes and teeth.
'I've come to speak to the Master.' Carnelian called out in Quya: 'My Lord?' Osidian looked down at him. The Marula -'
'Speak in Vulgate so that Morunasa might understand you.'
The Marula,' he said, in Vulgate, resenting Morunasa even more, 'seem reluctant to cut down the trees.'
'Which trees?' Morunasa demanded.
Carnelian stretched his hand out indicating the forest lying below.
Morunasa smiled. 'But of course they'll not cut them down.'
'Because they're sacred?'
Morunasa raised his eyes to the sky. 'A childish belief of the pygmies, but the Lower Reachers are superstitious.'
'You must force them to comply, Morunasa,' Osidian called down.
Carnelian did not want to force anyone and besides, wanted to have nothing to do with Morunasa. 'It might be easier if I use the sartlar,' he called up.
'It would reduce salt production,' said Osidian.
'It should take only a few days to clear the area you want.'
Osidian considered it some moments and then gave a nod before turning back to Morunasa. This tree is as empty as the others.'
'So are all the granaries,' said the Maruli. The pygmies must have taken all the fernroot when they fled.'
What had really happened to the pygmies, Carnelian would maintain as his secret. He would not hand over more victims to the Oracles.
The sartlar swarmed the baobabs plucking the pygmy mummies from their tombs. Carnelian winced as he saw another fall to the ground, bones cracking like twigs. Other sartlar were gathering the mummies and heaping them in a mound.
When all the trees had been emptied, Carnelian walked around the pyramid of mummies. He gave the order and sartlar ambled in with torches. Carnelian heard the pyre ignite but the flames were invisible in the sunlight. Rustling like dry ferns, the dead folded tighter into foetus curls. Every so often one would pop, exploding into flakes that turned almost instantly to ash. The cadavers shrank, grew reddish brown, then began to singe black. Carnelian turned away when their skulls began to push grinning out through the charring leather of their flesh. He fled from the stench of their burning hair.
The next day he gathered the sartlar and told them they must cut down the trees they had emptied of the dead. Their reaction was to stand so still, he might have been standing in a ring of stones. 'What's the matter?' he said.
'Kor,' he called and was relieved when she emerged from among the sartlar and came to fall before him. He waited for her to look up at him.
'Master, the earth will rebel.'
'What do you mean?' he asked, but for an answer the woman only flattened herself to the ground. He stared, wanting to speak to her, to explain, but he had nothing in his heart but unease.
'It has to be done,' he said, at last. Kor rose.
Her silence goaded Carnelian to anger. 'You will do it now.'
'As the Master commands, so shall it be done.'
With flint axes the sartlar chopped into the soft wood of the baobabs. There was something eerie in the way each blow set the naked branches far above to trembling. Carnelian became convinced the trees were feeling pain. The first one to topple gave out a stuttering cracking and then fell, gracefully, as if it were merely lying down, but when it struck the ground Carnelian was shaken by the impact and drew back from the slow mist of dust that rose and took so long to settle. The giant lay stretched out slain upon the earth. Another two were heeling over in the background. Watching this brought back a memory of the destruction of the Great Hall in the Hold; the first step on the path that had brought him so far. As the feelings of loss for his father, Ebeny, his brothers, his people, flooded into him, he had to turn his back on the felling and go away to stand upon the edge of the chasm. He stared blind into its depths, rethreading the whole improbable sequence of events that separated him from that time. He wondered, as he had not done for a shameful length of time, whether his people had made it safely up from the sea and were now with his father in Osrakum.
Carnelian, Osidian and Krow stood among a Marula guard surveying the clearing the sartlar had gouged from the baobab forest. For Carnelian the sight was punishment enough. With ropes, with levers cut from the branches of the fallen trees themselves, the sartlar had dragged and rolled the vast trunks towards the knoll so that they now enclosed it with a rampart of wood. This operation had ripped dark swathes through the meshing of dead ferns. All that was left of the baobabs in the clearing were the livid eruptions of their stumps.
Osidian pronounced himself satisfied. 'All that remains to be done is to excise those roots and then we shall
