ELEVEN

RULE

“There,” he whispered. “Did you hear that?”

“Ola, please.”

“Don’t Ola please me. I heard it. We must be close now.”

Joram sighed. He turned, tapping a fist on Marin’s shoulder, who’d become distracted watching the gleam of moonlight on the water. The brook ran unusually thin in this part of the forest. “You paying attention, Marin?”

Marin turned and nodded numbly.

“I definitely heard something,” Ola insisted.

“What did it sound like?” Djuri asked.

“Scratching, like the time we had rats in the granary.”

“I hate rats,” Marin said.

“You and me both.”

“Listen,” Joram interrupted. “I’m saying I’ll go over by that clutch of trees, across the clearing there. If you three wait a while then follow – Djuri this way along the east, Marin and Ola the other way – it might be we’ll know the truth of what you say you did or didn’t hear.”

“I did hear,” Ola said.

“Fine. Now, perhaps we ought to take a look? Good?”

“Good.”

“Marin?”

Marin’s gaze had wandered back to the stream. It was so shallow, no more than a wet glaze over the sloping silt underfoot.

“Marin?”

Marin, eyes still on the stream, nodded; which Joram found concerning. He’d seemed distracted for almost the entire way here, daydreaming, pondering. Scared perhaps. To be caught here, trying to enter the Magadar uninvited – a privilege almost only ever extended to those whose arms and shoulders were thick with ink from neck to knuckle – would mean death.

Joram, a little nervous himself, clapped Marin on the back and turned to look at the others. “You ready?”

They stared back at him grimly.

“Alright then,” Joram said, pulling the strap of the sack he was carrying his offerings in onto his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“But what about him?”

“Gods, Marin.”

“What? I’m nervous. And you haven’t explained who he’ll be going with.”

Marin, along with the others, was looking at the dull-eyed brute squatting next to Joram in the undergrowth. Ola, for her part, had seemed comfortable enough with his presence throughout the journey here but Joram had been able to tell for a while that the man’s docile and occasionally drooling, vacant look had been bothering both Djuri and Marin for at least the last day or so, and in the case of the latter probably longer. Which was fair enough. Joram had never held a man’s sha for this long before, and although he felt confident the man would remain sleepily obedient, possessing him for this long was still new, and anything new would always provoke doubt, especially with Marin.

Joram reached out and touched the man’s sigil again to be sure, feeling for his sha. Oren, his clansmen had called him, although even if Joram hadn’t heard them shouting his name as he hid him in Marin’s tent in the nights following the scuffle at Saramak, chances were he’d have been able to learn it himself by probing his sha. In the end, it was surprising how brief the search for him turned out to be – three nights of roaming about the camp bellowing his name, and a few jaunts around the outcrops surrounding the Seat of Saramak, and his clansmen were satisfied to move on, unwilling to linger any longer whilst their herds continued to grow restless for new pasture. As far as they were concerned, he was either dead, drunk or, most likely, with a woman. If it was the latter, he’d have to find his own way back to them. Otherwise they’d give it a month before lighting fires for him and making a few songs. Which would do, Joram supposed. If all went to plan Oren would be back at the Seat within a day, with little to no memory of the past week he’d been duped through.

“He’s fine,” Joram decided, after probing him a little. “He’s still well under. Nothing to worry about.”

“Makes me nervous,” Marin complained. “It’s like he’s looking at you sometimes, but he isn’t. It’s spooky.”

“I’d have thought you of all people would be comfortable with it,” Ola said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ola opened her mouth to answer, but then stopped, apparently thinking better of it.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Here, wait now… Have you ever done that to me?” Marin asked, nodding to Oren’s docile frame as he continued to squat beside Joram, staring at nothing.

Joram didn’t answer.

“You have, haven’t you.”

“Did I say I have?”

“I can tell by the look on your face.”

“What look?”

“You’re smiling.” He turned to Djuri and Ola. “Djuri look at him. He’s smiling.”

“Forget about it,” Ola answered. “It’s nothing.”

“Easy for you to say. It’s not your head he’s been messing around in.”

“He tried once, funnily enough. I asked him to. Wanted to see what it’d be like. Didn’t work though. Not suggestible enough, he says. That right, Joram? Suggestible? That how you put it?”

Joram ignored her and peered through a clutch of cedars to the west, trying to plot the path he’d take down the slope and through the wood. It was a cloudy night. Unlikely the moon was going to be enough to see properly with, and there’d be no risking lamplights once they neared the bottom if they wanted to avoid being seen. In the end they were just going to have to find their way and hope for the best.

Joram breathed deep, exhaled. “It’s time. And you needn’t worry about big gentle Oren here, he’ll be coming with me. You just make sure you don’t lose your footing, or your offerings. None of us can afford to be empty-handed when we reach the altar.” He looked them over a final time to see if they were ready. “Alright. Let’s go.”

Moving off in different directions, they each began to make their way down through the oaks and cedars toward the basin and the waiting volcano beneath them.

It was archaic really, a contest to the death, but it had been that way for centuries, or so Joram had been told; the annual gathering at Magadar providing the arena for the fights that would determine who’d be chieftain for the next year to come.

Joram worked his way along a gulley beyond the stream with big Oren following behind him, staying low as they scampered through the knot and tangle of the trees toward the volcano’s foot. From here he could just make out the dark volcanic rock, a wall of night beyond the trees, with craggy edges glinting faintly in the beclouded moonlight. Joram slowed as they reached the bottom, checking the sack on his shoulder and scanning the dark for guards. He was about to move southwest to track around the mountain’s arc when he heard the whistle from the other direction, a short hollow hoot, just as they’d agreed, so as to imitate a forest owl and not arouse suspicion.

“Well, well. Looks like they’ve found it, Oren.”

Joram adjusted the sack of offerings on his shoulder and began moving towards it, skirting northeast around the mountain’s blackstone foot as the duped Oren followed behind.

He found Djuri, after another whistle, crouching by the base of a wide tree stump, gazing into a lamplit clearing where men were wandering around, chopping heat-seared meat they’d dragged off of an altar onto a nearby bench of stone. Joram almost stumbled over the dead guard, covered in leaves with an arrow lodged firm through the left eye, lying beside where Djuri squatted.

“Good aim,” Joram remarked, crouching beside him. Which did no more than provoke an unhappy and anxious glance.

“This had better work, Joram. The things we’ve done… We’ll be quartered seven times over if they find us.”

“It will work,” Joram answered. It had to. It’s what the voice had promised. “Have you seen Marin?”

“He heard me. He’s on the other side of the clearing with Ola. He’ll come out when we do I think.”

“Good. That’s good.”

The altar lay in a brief clearing beyond a break of gum trees and thickets fifty feet away, surrounded by priests handling the meat, prodding the chunks of beef and lamb as they hissed and sizzled in their fat on the altar, whilst a chief priest stood a pace or two away, mumbling chants and supplications to the sky. Beyond them, Joram saw others standing or sitting close by – a pair of them upwind from the altar, clothed in rags of fur and with identically tonsured scalps: the pates of their pale shaven heads daubed white and red from the tops of their skulls to their foreheads and down the bridge of the nose. Each held torches whilst others sat on benches repeating the chants of the chief.

“I think it’ll be best if I do the talking,” Joram murmured.

“Funny. I was about to suggest the same thing.”

Joram could feel his heart pounding as he stepped out from behind the stump and bushes and walked slowly into the clearing with the sack in his hand, Oren at his shoulder. Only as he stepped clear of the undergrowth did he see their full number, perhaps as many as thirty men, bowing and rocking and chanting in their skins and ragged scarlet robes.

The chief priest saw Joram first, followed by the rest, their gazes turning eerily as one toward him as their chants died. Joram walked slowly, his arms spread wide, and came as close as possible before lowering the sack to the floor. The man, beardless, couldn’t have been more than thirty years. He eyed the bare skin of Joram’s forearms cursorily before addressing him. “You should not be here.”

Joram, blood thundering through his ears and chest, breathed deep again and gestured to the sack on the ground. “I have brought a gift.” He nodded to Djuri, who placed his own sack next to his as Ola and Marin emerged from the bushes on the other side to join them. “We all have.”

Gesturing sharply to one of the congregants, the chief continued to watch Joram as a shaven headed boy came forward to take the sacks. They all watched as the boy reached in and pulled out a thick slab of raw meat and lifted it to the priest, and then, somewhat showily, to the other congregants, parading it like the results of a hunter’s first kill.

“A generous offering,” the priest remarked.

“May the gods show us favour,” Joram answered, bowing his head.

The boy had already taken the sacks over to the priest by the altar, who immediately began to toss the pounds of flesh onto it, each chunk hissing in the flames as they slapped onto the fat-greased stone. The priest looked at Oren and Marin, now standing next to each other just behind Joram, and glanced over the ink markings that covered their arms as Joram stepped aside to allow him to get a better look at their sigils and the stories of their lines, and, most importantly, Oren’s priestmark.

“The gods do show favour,” the priest said, catching sight of the small winged eye on Oren’s shoulder before returning his attention once more to Joram. He again stared at him for a long moment before eventually inclining his head and motioning toward a craggy pocket at the foot of the mountain behind them. “And they show you your path… Go.”

Joram bowed, and then, with the others, moved toward the mountain’s foot, following the white-daubed boulders marking the path up. They moved quickly, stepping from boulder to boulder until they reached a verge where the path turned in and opened a tunnel through the rockface into the cavernous interior on the other side.

“Gods old and new…”

They stood on a ledge overlooking the vast cavity. The walls, huge dam-like blockades of red rock, stretched up toward the opening where the cloudy night stared down from above. The whole place like a massive enclosed ravine and then there, at the centre, the huge mythic structure all their childhood tales had spoken of – a colossal stone monolith, streets wide in every direction, dominating the space and reaching to the broad opening above like some kind of god-made tower.

“Magadar,” Joram whispered as he stared up at it – god-fort in the old tongue – the giant column of stone that had lent the yearly contests their name.

The others remained speechless, gazes cranked to the sky, trying to digest the incomprehensible scale and magnitudes around them before eventually unlocking from their frozen stares to venture down to the ground and across the yawning chasm’s floor. By the time they’d finally made it to the column their perspectives were warped, stretched and bent by the volcano’s huge dimensions. The gathering crowd of people toward the column’s foot seemed meagre and distant.

“Takes some getting used to doesn’t it.” Anika, an elder of Shurapeth and one of the few who’d spoken up for Joram as a child when he’d fought for admission to the tribe, had sidled up to him almost without his noticing, jolting him from his trance. There were close to a hundred people here, less than half a tenth of the tribe – the heads of clans, elders, and the most highly esteemed hunters and warriors, all here to try their hand at claiming the seat of Shurapeth, or watch as others attempted to.

“Beautiful, some might even say,” Anika added. She inhaled as though breathing in spring’s first rose and planted her great tribestaff in the dirt, making the talismans at the top rattle as she turned to face him with that annoyingly wry, maternal look she always seemed to favour him with.

“It is beautiful,” Joram agreed.

“My forefather scaled the face of this column, near two hundred feet of sheer cliffside, handholds so small a child can hardly clasp them. Clawed his way up there at the risk of every limb, the risk of his life, to claim the Seat. The last true chieftain of Shurapeth.”

Joram craned his neck to stare up at it.

“Quite something isn’t it, at least more so than those who’ve claimed themselves chieftain since.”

“I’d forgotten your dislike of the contests.”

“It’s not the contests I dislike, Joram. It’s the lies that are told against the old ways to make them. Some say four hundred men died here, fell from the wall and splattered their skulls here on these rocks beneath like cracked eggs.” She gestured, prodding the tribestaff vaguely in the direction of the bed of serrated edges that covered the ground at the vast column’s foot. “A thing that never happened, Joram; a thing that would never be allowed. Just like your presence here. Why are you here?” She glanced behind to the others standing with him. “Why are any of you here?”

“The priests allowed us passage like everyone else.”

“Nothing with you is ever like everyone else, Joram. You are here for mischief.”

“I’m here to contest the headship of the tribe.”

Anika stared at him. “You’re an outsider.”

“I’m of the tribe. I’ve a right as everyone else.”

“You’ve no ink. You’re not a warrior. Gods, you’re barely more than a child, and you want to stand before Uruq?”

“I do.”

She just stood there, staring at him for a long while, before eventually moving away to inform the rest of the gathering. From there, Joram watched it all play out the way the voice had told him it would – the confusion, the debate, the arguing – before the elders finally acquiesced to their law, determining that any man or woman at the Magadar was permitted to contend the headship.

Moments later Joram was being conducted to the casket-shaped cage at the foot of the column by Gurat, another of the elders, who, despite his clear dislike of Joram, at least had the probity to check the rope before hinging the cage’s front open for Joram to step inside.

“Hold tight,” the elder advised as Joram ducked to enter. “It is not always a smooth ride.”

And then Joram was being winched upwards, staring down on Ola, Marin and the others as the rope tugged and lifted him away from them and toward the waiting Uruq atop the column’s vast height.

He clung to the bars of the cage, holding tight as it gently swung with each winch of the pulley above. After a while he could see the counterbalance – a door-sized boulder – passing along his axis several feet away as it lowered to the ground to aid his ascent. Some of the crowd that had been at the column’s foot had migrated to the walls now, climbing the stepped paths to seat themselves above the purview of the column’s peak. Joram watched them, and then looked out to the overwhelmingly broad angles of the volcano floor as it widened beneath him. The people that had remained there were barely visible now, no more than specks.

Joram reached into his pocket for the black pearl, nervously rolling its smooth orb between his fingers until the cage finally shuddered to a halt, the rope’s knot bumping against the scaffolded pulley-guard above as it reached the top. Slowly, the cage swung in from the edge of the column to a sort of plinth, and an elder waiting there. Tall. Grey. Stubbly hair and beard.

The man assessed Joram grimly before moving forward to unhinge the door and help him out. It was as though Joram could feel the height all around him now, a thinness to the space, as though the air itself had somehow become more precarious. Joram couldn’t help thinking back on it all as the elder led him across the choppy terrain – the planning, the waiting. Twelve years languishing in the Reach, the hungry and cold nights, the things he’d had to do to fight his way into the tribe, the things he’d patiently and painstakingly learned, and endured, all so he could reach this moment atop a two-hundred-foot-high crop of rock in a volcano. This was it. There was no going back. This would be everything.

He could feel the persistent knock of blood through his ears and chest as he caught sight of Uruq waiting for him beyond the rugged terrain in an evenly planed rink of polished stone. The arena’s floor was perfectly smooth, the stone almost ice-like, the work of gods as was often said.

Uruq was heavily armoured, decked in cured leather shinguards, wristguards and a solid looking breastpiece. He stared contemptuously at Joram, watching him enter into the rink, and then, noticing he’d come dressed in nothing more than woollen garments and an overcoat, pulled a face that could almost have been pity. Perhaps in some small way it was, but smeared beneath smug smiling disdain as he watched Joram walk with the elder toward him at the centre.

The choice of weapons lay on the arena floor. The predictable options – axe, a spear, a sword. Uruq squatted to claim the axe, of course, thumbing the worn metal stained with the gritty coppery residue of old blood. Joram crouched to pick up the sword, which didn’t look much better, leaving the elder, as the contest’s overseer, to take the remaining spear.

“The Magadar is simple,” the elder began. “Two begin, one will fall. He who remains, will be chieftain.” He swung an arm, indicating those gathered along the walls of the volcano to spectate. “And he shall lead Shurapeth.” The elder then planted the spear hilt down like a staff, gazing out beyond the column and across the empty space between it and the volcano’s high walls to where the people had gathered on the stepped paths to observe the contest. “It is time,” he announced, and then directed each man to stand at opposing ends of the arena.

The voice, when it finally came, almost made Joram jump, which was something he hadn’t done since he was a child.

“There shall be a cost,” was all it said, allowing a silence so distracting to open in the wake of its words that Joram almost failed to notice Uruq moving toward him. The man walked slowly, nonchalantly swinging his axe in one hand as he strode across the polished empty space, his great grey-flecked beard and head pushing toward him like a bull as his thick arms drew the axe up.

Joram gripped the sword and held out the bladetip like a torch, trying to ignore the way Uruq was smiling at the tremor in his arms. The man was drawing closer, step by slow menacing step, almost dragging the axe as he lumbered forward.

“I’ll be merciful,” he murmured, smiling. “And quick… Maybe.”

And then…

Nothing.

The moments that followed passed by in a hazy blur, strung together by stretched fragments, isles of clarity amid a shimmering fog – the hot sting of Uruq’s axe as it bit into Joram’s flank, shoving through his attempted block to draw blood. Uruq’s crazed eyes, bearing down on him like a madman, his bloated sweaty face inches away and locked in angry grimacing mania as he leaned down his ample weight, pushing the belly of his axeshaft against Joram’s sword. The noise of the crowd seemed to swell and shrink, swaying like a pendulum as Joram fell to his knees. And then he was on his back, gasping for breath as the axeshaft pressed in on his windpipe. Joram clasped the other man’s weapon with both hands, trying to keep Uruq from burying it in his throat. But it was no use. Joram could feel it coming, sinking in, the beginning slow crunch of cartilage as the shaft crushed down on his neck, the burn of bile in his lungs, the hammered thump of his heart as he began to give way to delirium and black out.

But when he came to again there was only silence. Deathly silence.

He was crouched, down on one knee with one fist against the floor, staring at the glossy whorls of copper and grey rock trapped within the rink’s perfect smooth pane. And that was when he noticed the blood, there by his pressed fist, whether his or another’s he couldn’t tell. So he tried to get up, still woozy, a little out of breath, and see more. Rising to his feet, he felt a strange ache gathering around his ribs and back, as if his entire torso had swollen and was beginning to bruise. The crowd were still in their places on the wall, but silent, and still, staring across the void toward the arena; toward him. It was only then Joram noticed the heat in his fist, and unclenched it, allowing the black pearl to roll free from his palm onto the smooth stone floor. It sizzled a little like the meat that had been tossed onto the altar from their offerings outside as it landed, without bouncing, onto the rink. The amulet and chain were gone now, somehow burned away, leaving only the jewel. But why? How? Still dazed, Joram crouched and reached out to gather it, then slowly tried to straighten and rise to his feet once more. Which was when he saw what everyone else had been staring at.

He moved toward the heap of tangled garments and splayed limbs lying on the ground a few yards away. Uruq’s axe lay discarded, several feet from the crumpled mass, beyond what may have been an outstretched arm. Joram could hear himself breathing now, tides of air sweeping in and out as his thoughts scattered loose within him, rattling to the tumultuous thump of his own heart like dust atop the skin of a beating drum.

The strange angle of the body, face down and with a cruel grim twist to the spine. The legs positioned at odd slants, the toes of one almost touching the ear. And then the pool of blood beginning to gather on the other side beneath the outstretched arm and axe.

Joram prodded at the knotted heap with his foot, redundantly checking to see if there was any life left under the piled folds of clothing. When he saw no movement, he placed his booted sole onto the meat and pushed, rolling the body. Limbs flopped and splayed, tangled and awkward, as the body tumbled slowly onto its side. Joram stared, momentarily fascinated by the muddle of blood and swelling that used to be a face. Uruq’s face. He stared for a moment longer before noticing the elder standing opposite at the edge of the arena’s rink, watching Joram with stunned, fearful awe.

“My gift to you,” the voice said then, suddenly close, near as a lover, resounding from within and over Joram as though entombed in his ears. “They will listen now,” it added. “They will listen to anything we say. They will listen to all we have been waiting to say for so long.”

Joram looked at the elder’s face and studied the expression there. And suddenly he could feel the thrill of it lifting him, guiding him away from Uruq’s bloodied prone flesh and to his feet as the elder, standing before him, stumbled back as he moved.

Joram opened his palms to him, holding his arms out on either side. “What needed to be done is done. We are brothers now.” He looked beyond him, gazing out again to the shocked silent crowd along the walls as he lifted his voice. “I am the brother of you all…” He walked from the rink, toward the cliff edge of the column. “You have called me outcast. Alien. Stranger. Names I bore without complaint because I knew why you used them. I’ve always known. For fear. Fear of what you don’t understand. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. The same fear I see in your eyes now. And the very fear that has imprisoned you, kept you bound, scrounging and foraging in lands that refuse to feed you, whilst your lands, the lands of your fathers, feed the bellies of the oppressors who stole them from your forbears three hundred years ago.

“The Five Land Sovereignty is a thief. A bandit that now calls its theft law. But theft does not cease to be what it is when enough time has passed. What was done then cannot now be counted law by those who have benefitted from it, and who continue to benefit from it, whilst we starve and shiver in these wastelands.”

Murmurs from the crowd, people recovering their tongues as they listened to what he was saying. They were hearing him now; for the first time in all his long years of being here, they were really hearing him.

“The Sovereignty is a thief,” he pressed on. “A bandit that takes as it wants. It took your lands, and everyday takes the food due your children whilst they shiver and die, and all the while it calls these things law. Nature. The way things ought to be. But it is not, brothers. This is not the way things ought to be. This is not the way Markúth desires it to be.

“It is the sins of your fathers that have visited you. It is they who forgot Markúth, they who forgot their god. They who ceased to acknowledge him at their harvests and wedding feasts. They who allowed their hearts to grow cold toward him, until he was no more than an icon on their doorposts, a sigil on the arm or at an annual ritual, and for some even less than that…

“You have forgotten him. But he has not forgotten you. He sees your suffering. He has heard your cries. And he beckons you once more to embrace him, trust him. Give place to his ways and become his people again.

“This is why he has sent me to you – an outsider. To teach you his ways, show you his paths. And he has promised, that if you follow me this day then what you have witnessed here shall be the fate of your enemies, the thieves to the south who took the lands that rightfully belong to you.”

Joram stepped beyond the rink onto the outer edge of the column, spreading his arms.

“You are not a horde of scattered tribes and beggars. You were not born to dwell in cold, famine and disease. You were born to live and breathe in strength, as a nation, in your own land, just as Markúth has willed it. That is the law your god gives you. That is the way things are supposed to be.

“So, brothers, will you cast off your fear to follow your god? Will you go with him to take what belongs to you? Will you turn and embrace the lands you were born for? Tell me, brothers… What do you now say?”