Shallows of night, p.32
Shallows of Night, page 32
One entire side of the building was choked with the inevitable influx of the returning jungle. Green moss across the steps like an unkempt carpet.
Something flickered at the periphery of his vision and he went closer. The white spark came again and now he saw that before the building stood a statue under the shadow of an overhanging tree. As the wind swung the heavily laden branches, a sliver of moonlight caught the statue’s top.
It was incomplete. Someone had deliberately hacked away the head. It towered over him, perhaps six and a half meters high.
It was a warrior.
With breastplate and high boots, thickly muscled arms. Two scabbards hung at its waist, one filled, the other empty. One arm was raised. That, too, had been vandalized. It ended in a severed wrist.
A cool wind fluttered the massed treetops some meters away; the night insects were calling to each other. No other sounds.
For long moments he stood staring in dumb fascination at the statue, hearing, perhaps, some dark, faraway call. He felt an unknown power seeping into his body as if from the glade itself or his proximity to the stone structures. Too, he became aware of an incipient urgency.
Then he turned slowly away, into the rustling, steamy shadows of the jungle.
He lifted his eyes for one last look.
Somewhere close, above his head, feathered wings spread and took off into the clear, calm night.
Outside, away from the overhanging foliage, the vast geometrical plain was lit below the black bowl of heaven by the full moon and the myriad dancing stars. Away to the east, far down near the horizon, the wide belt of thickly clustered stars stretched in an attenuated arc. Far, far away was fragrant Sha’angh’sei and the yellow citadel to the north, Kamado, where the Kai-feng had already commenced.
In the building on the north edge of the acropolis, Ronin closed his eyes, waiting for Moichi to return.
Angrily he stalks the corridors of a corroded, forgotten house. The way is narrow and dark so that he is continually forced to peer ahead in order to guide himself. Because of this, he has no time to look into the doorways which parade past him mockingly on either side, although this is what he wishes to do. Or perhaps not. But in any case, as he strides along, his anger grows, a deep, fierce, nonrational rage. He sees himself in a mirror then and recoils from his image, stumbling away.
He plunges onward, downward into blackness, along the corridor. There are no others. Soon the doorways end and solid walls rush by him as he begins to run, faster and faster, his boot soles echoing, echoing like drumbeats, a strange cadence to some long hidden song. This is not prudent, he thinks in the lightlessness. Chill take it! As the rage burns like a spreading fire. Out of control; a rush of doom like black, leathery wings. Faster he rushes down the narrow corridor.
Down and down all in a blur as he feels slightly vertiginous. And now he realizes that the ceiling has been lowering. Stooped and bent uncomfortably, he stumbles forward. Faster.
He trips, tumbling head over heels through the blackness. Fetched up suddenly, his arms flung over his head, his fingers gripping tightly.
He hangs, suspended in space, grasping a bar which is the nethermost lip of the corridor-tunnel-funnel, arcing downward like a spout, trying to spit him out. And down.
Hot and sweating, he holds desperately on while below him a space of incalculable depth and width. Yawning.
Great clashings and groanings issue forth from the deep. A dimly seen scaffolding somewhere below him, too far to drop, perspective dwindling it to the width of a sword tip.
Explosions, dull and booming, rising towards him, painful to the ears.
Still he peers downward, fascinated, terrified, unable to break his gaze away.
A writhing form appears, glutinous, tentacled, writhing upon a translucent ellipse. A great dark form materializes from out of the deep. Formless, it bends over the monstrous creature, encysting it within its corpus. The tentacles emerge with the thing’s great head, shivering. Two eyes burn, lidless, their pupils jagged shards of obsidian.
Then, far too rapidly for him to comprehend, the face flickers with changing features, ten thousand within each instant until a single eye is formed long enough for him to be lashed to its baleful unblinking gaze, bound and broken and helpless.
Heat like a cry. His eyeballs seared, his struggling body cooked and blackened; burning, burning. And a stench, rising …
‘I heard you cry out,’ she said, bending over him. He stared sightlessly at her great furred head, grotesque, distorted shadows racing across its pelt in the flickering, dim light of the reed torches in the corridor beyond his doorway.
Ronin rose to one elbow on his straw pallet, wiped the sweat from his face.
‘Are you ill?’
‘No. No,’ he said slowly, still far away. ‘A dream only.’ His voice sounded thick and furry.
‘A dream.’
‘Yes.’
Kin Coba knelt beside him.
He stared at the fresco on the wall in front of him. Men in plumed headdresses ran at each other across a rectangular field bordered along each long side by obliquely angled stone stands surmounting sheer walls. From each side wall, at the field’s center, at a height of perhaps five meters, protruded a carved stone ring.
‘What are they doing?’
Her head turned with a rustle.
‘The Majapan play the sacred ball game.’
The sloped stands rose on either end to form a clawing Chacmool.
‘They were originally farmers,’ she said softly. ‘The Majapan loved the land, the huge harvests of maize and beans and fruits. But always there were other tribes, fierce, powerful, decadent in their religion. Thus the Majapan were forced to become warriors.’
He watched the wan light caress her naked thigh.
‘Yet they would have no part in war. Thus the priests devised the sacred ball game and the Majapan constructed the courts, and the tribes who would war upon them were forced to pick a team of their best warriors. Nineteen men, each side was allowed, and they played the sacred ball game upon the stone courts in complex and ritualistic patterns, using flat stone paddles. The object was to get the ball through the stone ring while effectively blocking the opposing team from doing the same.
His gaze swept back to the fresco.
‘So there was no war.’
‘The Majapan way.’
‘And all the tribes abided by your rules.’
‘All feared—’ She paused as if she had committed a transgression.
‘Feared what?’ He watched her face now, half in shadow, searching for some hint of emotion, some small betrayal, in the eyes behind the mask.
‘A—god. A god we once worshiped.’ Her voice had turned somber. ‘But,’ she continued more brightly, ‘that was in the time-that-was; it is not important now for that false god was banished from this land many katun ago.’
An overgrown building, partially destroyed; a headless statue; a plumed serpent.
‘Only the Chacmool has reigned in Xich Chih,’ she said. ‘His priests devised the sacred ball game-’
‘So the Majapan avoided bloodshed by playing the game,’ said Ronin.
Her head swiveled and the light caught her eyes, shining, tawny, like perfect topazes.
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ said Kin Coba, startled and indignant at the same time. ‘The heads of the losing team were delivered into the arms of their tribal chieftains as a warning against further aggression. Their steaming hearts were used to fertilize our crops. The Majapan were a very practical race.’
There was a small silence while he digested this, then:
‘You mean the Majapan never lost a game?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’
A peculiar depression had descended upon him. In an effort to break it, he said: ‘What lies behind that Chacmool mask, Kin Coba?’
Her slender hands, which had been in her lap, rose into the still air, a silent explosion, more truthful than words could ever be.
‘Do you wish,’ she said, ‘to possess me?’
He thought her choice of words curious.
‘You mean make love.’
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About the Author
Eric Van Lustbader is the author of numerous bestselling novels including the Nicholas Linnear series, First Daughter, Blood Trust, and the international bestsellers featuring Jason Bourne: The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Betrayal, The Bourne Sanction, The Bourne Deception, The Bourne Objective, The Bourne Dominion, and The Bourne Retribution. For more information, visit www.EricVanLustbader.com. You can also follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1978 by Eric Van Lustbader
Cover design by Erin Ladd
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7090-3
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Eric Van Lustbader, Shallows of Night
