The Standing Dead (The Stone Dance of the Chameleon Book 3) by Ricardo Pinto

Author:Ricardo Pinto [Pinto, Ricardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ivory Tower Press
Published: 2020-05-09T22:00:00+00:00

THE BLOODWOOD TREE

Wife, you are the earth,

the giver of gifts,

the blessed mother of blood.

Come, sate my hunger.

(from a marriage ritual of the Plainsmen)

BLUE WOKE HIM. ‘DO YOU still want to come with me?’

It was too dark for Carnelian to see his face. ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

As he rose, a hand pulled him back. ‘Where are you going?’ said Osidian.

Carnelian explained the decision he had made to share Blue’s punishment. Osidian withdrew his hand and turned away.

‘I brought you breakfast,’ said Blue, pushing two crumbly discs into Carnelian’s hand.

‘Rootflour cakes,’ said Blue, giving him two more. ‘Those are for your brother.’

Carnelian leaned over Osidian and put the cakes down on the ground in front of him. ‘One of us at least must work.’

‘Lead the way,’ he said, to the shadow that was Blue.

As he followed him down the Blooding rootstair, he thought about Osidian and only noticed he was chewing the cake when it released its peculiar bitterness in his mouth.

•

A breeze blew from the indigo east. Shadows gathered by a wicker gate, speaking low with women’s voices. The gate creaked open and let in enough light under the cedars for the women to notice Carnelian, and the tempo of their talk rose.

He crossed the earthbridge with Blue and was glad the women remained behind. The easterly ruffled a swell into the fern-garden. They walked alongside a drainage ditch beneath the dark overhanging masses of the magnolias. Laughter carried towards them over the sighing of the ferns, and Blue redoubled their pace. They crossed a smaller earthbridge, where the ditch forked to enclose a meadow dominated by a huge tree with leaves the colour of old blood. Blue’s grim expression did not invite conversation.

The meadow ended at a double wall of soaring magnolias that flanked one of the concentric ditches Carnelian had seen from the summit of the Crag. Through the first line of trees was another bridge. The roots of the magnolias buttressed the ditch so thickly they forced it into a jagged course. Further out, the trees that defined the outmost ditch were not so ancient. It gave him something to ask Blue.

His friend pointed. ‘This is the Outditch, that long ago defined the limits of the Koppie, before the Newditch was dug out there.’

They entered the wider expanse of the outer ferngardens. The drainage ditch they followed forked again. Its tines curved off to meet the Newditch, enclosing another triangular fern meadow, larger than the first, with another russet tree. Something gigantic was heaped beneath its branches, wafting the sweet beginnings of decay. A wisp of laughter came from figures on the earthbridge they had just crossed. He and Blue reached the tree. It was a saurian that lay at its foot. With its horns and sweeping crest, it was much like those that pulled wagons along the roads of the Guarded Land. ‘A huimur.’

‘An earther,’ said Blue in Ochre.

The flank of the creature had been cut away, exposing the grimy architecture of its ribs. A stench rose from the blood-soaked earth.

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