Burying the Shadow (43 page)

My mouth felt
thick. It was hard to speak, but somehow I got the words out: ‘Burn
it!’

He did not ask
me what I had seen, nor could I have spoken of the foulness I had
encountered in that poor creature’s soulscape. In fact, it had not
really been a soulscape at all, but only the reflection of a
memory, haunted by a confused fragment of deteriorating
consciousness.

Keea carried
out the grisly deed while I packed away our things. Afterwards, we
fled from that place and, from that moment on, every movement in
the grass beside the road had both of us jumping in alarm. At any
moment we expected to come across another ragged remnant of
humanity that the nomads had, quite rightly as it turned out,
dubbed the walking dead. I was relieved to find that I felt a lot
better, my mind did not seem so strained and fearful. This, I
think, was simply because I now
knew
the strange,
conflicting feelings I’d been having, the presentiment of
weirdness, were real and outside of myself. Before, I had not been
sure.

After the
encounter with the dead thing, I noticed that Keea began to
meditate for up to an hour at a time, once every few days, at
sunfall. He shut himself away in his tent, tying its entrance flaps
together firmly, so I could not glimpse what went on inside.
Afterwards, he would seem tired and irritable, and refused to
answer my questions.

Several times, we
caught sight of the mysterious riders in the distance. On one
occasion, we were trailed for nearly an hour, but we were never
accosted. Keea tried, unsuccessfully, to hide how much these
figures worried him; I noticed his jumpy unease whenever we saw
one. I asked him if he knew who the riders were, but all he would
say is that he believed they came from the Strangeling.

‘And the
person who employs you, do they come from the Strangeling too?’ I
asked.

‘I can’t tell
you about them,’ he answered.

‘You are
anxious to reach the Strangeling. Is that the place where we will
learn the truth? Does everything come from there?’

‘Wait and
see.’

He was so
impenetrable. At times, it drove me to distraction and once I had
to physically restrain myself from striking him. ‘Tell me what you
know, Keea.’

‘In time
you’ll know it too.’

He would never
tell me.

Rayojini

‘
So strange thy
outcry, and thy words so strange…’

Paradise Lost,
Book II

Before a traveller
passes onto Bochanegran soil, the fertile plains of Khalt diminish
into the bizarre landscape known as the Strangeling. I had never
visited it before, although I had heard much about it from other
soulscapers. Legends told us that the Strangeling had once been a
collection of thriving and affluent small kingdoms which, at some
distant point, had become involved in an unusually extensive
conflict with another country; a war that the Strangeling kingdoms
had lost dramatically. The victors of this war had obviously
attempted to erase all evidence of the race they had vanquished,
for no information remained in any library I had visited, or even
within the oral tradition of other races, concerning the
civilisation that had existed there. The old kingdoms of the
Strangeling, however, were not the only ones to suffer such
expunction from human history. In primitive times, it had not been
unusual for warmongers to put all the surviving conquered,
including civilians, to the sword. Some of the ancient Delta Kings
had been fanatical about how certain races, whose philosophies and
religions were widely different from their own, were so abhorrent
to them that it was nothing more than a Deltan duty to obliterate
their genetic lines. There had been special phalanxes within the
Deltan army whose sole purpose had been to march in after a war was
over and clean up, by methodically scouring the land and butchering
any natives they came across. At first, I had believed this to be
an exaggeration, but the records were so cold-bloodedly descriptive
of these acts, and full of such detail, I had eventually (and
reluctantly, because the ancient Deltans were my ancestors)
acknowledged it as fact. Nowadays, the Deltans were embarrassed
about this aspect of their history, and treated such records with a
kind of whimsical unease. As part of my initial training, I had
spent time studying the Deltan archives in Ahmana, and was
therefore familiar with much of their history. Deltan records,
however, did not mention the Strangeling specifically, although the
extent of its devastation would suggest Deltan interference, but
the country would undoubtedly have been known by a different name
in the past.

Whereas other
countries had recovered from earlier ravagement, the Strangeling
had never resumed its former glory. Perhaps that was why it had
been dubbed the Strangeling; it
was
strange. Now, it was
nothing more than a vast wilderness of ruins and ancient highways,
most of which had been over-run by the forces of nature. A great
and impenetrable intensity of superstitious fear seemed to have
prevented anyone - Deltans included, oddly enough - from reclaiming
and utilising this land. There were stories of enterprising
agricultural pioneers who had set up farming homesteads, but these
people had become absorbed by the peculiarities of the area they
had come to inhabit. It was said they had descended into primitive
ways and shunned the civilisation they had left behind. In some
places, the remains of towns still stood, although they were badly
dilapidated. Over the years, they had become occupied by people who
had either been expelled from more civilised areas, or who had just
wandered there of their own accord and taken root. Tappish records
suggested that the Strangeling was inhabited by rogues, degenerate
nomad tribes, and misfits of all types. It was reported that
inbreeding had resulted in mutant lineages, but whoever had
compiled the information was clearly sceptical about this, because
no specific details were given. The natives of the Strangeling were
rarely described as being hostile, but there was evidence to
suggest that some of them were cannibal, in support of some bizarre
religion or another. Although there was no hard proof that they
killed and ate strangers, any soulscaper travelling through the
area was advised not to consume any food they might be offered by
natives.

The boundary
between the Kahra Flats and the Strangeling is very narrow. Some
say that it is possible to experience a physical sensation of
weirdness as one’s feet pass over it, a tingling tremor in the
muscles of the legs. If such a phenomenon does occur, I am sure it
is merely generated by the imagination rather than any real power
in the land. The imagination is definitely encouraged to excesses
by the fetishes erected by Strangeling inhabitants among the rocks
beside the road. We saw wooden poles, painstakingly polished and
carved, topped by the bleached skulls of large birds, given painted
stones for eyes and crowned with hanks of (what we hoped) was
horsehair. In other places, poppets of rag and straw, fashioned in
the semblance of men and women, wore deer’s antlers on their
foreheads, or sprouting from their chests.

Keea and I
reached the boundary in the early evening. Before us, immense
boulders formed a natural barrier between Khalt and the Strangeling
lands, some of which were carefully painted with pictorial
warnings: travellers being murdered in their sleep by beast men and
other sweet delights. Neither Keea nor I considered it a good idea
to make the crossing so late in the day. Laughing nervously about
possible hazards, we set up camp among a tumble of rocks, erecting
our tents very close together. We hardly slept, and during the
night we sat together, listening to strange calls coming from the
west that might have been human or animal in origin. In the morning
(both of us relieved that nothing unusual had occurred during the
dark hours) we set off once more. The next night would be spent
upon dangerous ground.

Bearing in
mind all that I had learned about the place, I had prepared myself
for a bleak and depressing panorama, and the possibility of
hazardous encounters. What we did find filled me with awe and,
despite the depredations of time and dissolution, I fell in love
with the Strangeling after very short acquaintance. It is a land of
the dead, yes, but the memory of their lives lingers on in the
fantastic faded lines of their roads and towns. Much art has been
left behind, which the present inhabitants, for all their imputed
derangement, hold precious and have not destroyed.

After a few hours’
scrambling over an uninhabited rocky area, we found an old road
heading west. Both Keea and I were alert for the presence of hidden
strangers, but it seemed that no one was about. Cold, morning light
came down through the reddening foliage of tall trees beside the
road, the surface of which was a beautiful carpet of gold and
crimson leaves. We walked past a broken tower, whose dark entrance
was guarded by the crumbled and dismembered statue of a huge stern
god, who had undoubtedly once perched atop the tower. Later, we
walked between three pairs of lichened stone lions, whose broad
ancient backs were saddled in bright fallen leaves. The lions
pulled snarling and argumentative faces at one another across the
road. It was a dispute that had been maintained for centuries.
Nearby, among the trees, was the haunted facade of a ruined villa.
Deer stood in the gaping windows, pulling, with delicate lips,
leaves from the creepers that shrouded the roofless walls. They did
not scatter as we passed them.

‘This place is
nothing like I imagined,’ I said. ‘It’s so
peaceful
, so
beautiful, so lush!’

‘The land can
be grateful humankind has not come to spoil it,’ Keea said, in a
cynical way. I supposed he rather liked the place too.

By late
afternoon, we discovered that the road we were following led to the
ruin of an old town. At first, I thought the place was made of some
fabulous crimson metal, for the low beams of the sinking sun seemed
to reflect a metallic gleam. Then, as we grew nearer, I could see
that the ruins had been overtaken completely by vines, whose fading
leaves were shiny and small, clinging like fish-scale armour to
what remained of the buildings. In this place, we encountered our
first Strangeling natives.

It was clear
that the ruins were occupied, for many small fires were burning
among the rubble and inside some of the less ruined and therefore
more habitable buildings. We noticed dark shapes flit nervously
away from us. If the natives were timid and afraid of us, all the
better: it was preferable to being attacked or harangued. We walked
up and down what remained of the streets for a while, both of us
enchanted by what we saw. Where the ruins were not blanketed by the
shiny vines, they were bursting with massive ferns, whose fronds
must have been well over ten feet long. Bright blue birds nested
among the ferns and chattered to each other in shrill voices. In
some places, fern-fronds reaching out across the street, from high
positions, had met and become entwined, creating a canopy from
which long aerial roots dangled in feathery curtains.

Eventually, we
chose a place in which to shelter for the night, in the lee of a
half-crumbled wall, surrounded by root-curtains. I collected dead
fern fronds to build a fire, while Keea sorted through what
remained of our provisions to make a meal.

‘Have you been
here before?’ I asked him, dumping an armload of fronds in front of
him.

‘No, have
you?’

‘You know I
haven’t. I can’t understand why people are so nervous of this
place.’

‘Some ancient
legends tend to leave a lingering smell,’ Keea said.

‘There are
very few ancient legends about the Strangeling actually,’ I said.
‘All the ones I’ve come across are fairly recent. There are no
historical records for this area.’

‘There are, if
you know where to look,’ Keea replied, and smiled up at me.
‘Where’s your tinder?’

I found it for
him. ‘What do you know about this place, then?’ He was
concentrating on getting the fire alight, and I doubted whether he
would answer me properly.

‘What do I
know? Well, it was once a great and powerful civilisation.’

‘That much
everyone knows! What else?’ I helped him feed the flames.

‘It is a holy
place. It’s protected. That’s why only certain people can live
here.’ He beamed at me again. ‘Under different circumstances, you
might feel very uncomfortable here.’

‘What
different circumstances?’

He shrugged.
‘If you were alone, perhaps.’

‘All right, I
understand. Only crazy people can bear the ghosts of this place.
And I have gone crazy to travel with you!’

‘You get so
annoyed when you don’t know things, Rayo. Why not accept there are
always going to be things you can’t know, or understand.’

‘I can’t help
but get annoyed when you so obviously enjoy mystifying me,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe you know anything more about the Strangeling than
I do!’ That was a lie, but I hoped to provoke him.

‘You might be
right...’ he said, and then pointed across the smoke of our fire.
‘What’s that?’

There was a
crouching shape in the shadows. Realising they had been noticed, a
shabby figure scuttled out of a veil of roots and into the meagre
light of our flames. My hand shot to my belt where I kept my knife,
but Keea made no move other than to drag a package out of my
carryback. Our visitor was nothing more terrifying than a gnomish
old woman; spry as a goat. She peered at us fearlessly through a
tangle of greasy hair. I relaxed and folded my arms.

‘Wisdom I have
to give!’ announced the hag, squinting sideways at the package of
meat Keea was unwrapping.