The catch over his shoulder slithered loose and landed with a thump as he released it and walked forward to the canoe, calling out in the same tongue through a further series of bubbling coughs.
“Who art thou?”
The coughs broke off and now he saw a low shape lying in the canoe and a glitter of eyes in the starlight.
“Nay, boy, come not closer,” said the voice in an accent he struggled to decipher, “lest thou too die of this cursèd star-murrain.”
“Who art thou?” he repeated, stopping in his tracks, and an answering laugh from the canoe turned midway to a cough. He could see sparks of light on flying mucus around the mouth, and took a step backward, though fourteen or fifteen paces separated him from the canoe.
“I, boy, I am, I was, the priest Qaden-Thamwë, master of the watery tsvau and warden of the sacred yiuorr.”
For a moment he could not remember the meaning of the words, then they came to him: master of the watery pyramid and warden of the sacred gems.
“And now,” the voice went on, “I ask in my turn, who art thou and whither have I come to die?”
Iahh-Tleqam told him, stumbling over the words a little, and the priest laughed and coughed and laughed again, then began to answer the questions that crowded Iahh-Tleqam’s tongue. There was a city upriver, deep in the jungle, the city of Qsemmtsualh, struck two weeks before by a ngluë (again Iahh-Tleqam had to grope for the word a moment before remembering that it meant “star”) that had spawned a lung-corrupting murrain. He, Qaden-Thamwë, thinking to escape the ruin of the city, had deserted his duty and fled by river, but the gods had already marked him for destruction and a day into his flight he had felt the first tickle in his mla’udz that told him he carried the seeds of the contagion with him.
“Now, boy, I die, and must face the wrath of my abjured gods. It is a strange meeting, this of thee and me, but doubtless it too forms a thread of their eternal weft. We spring of a common root natheless, or else you would not know the tongue of Qsemmtsualh.”
“It is a sacred one with us, master priest,” Iahh-Tleqam told him, and he laughed again and said, “And rightly so, rightly so, corrupted though it be in thy mouth.”
Now Iahh-Tleqam asked him whether he wished a physician to be fetched to him from the town whither he, Iahh-Tleqam, had been returning, but he saw the head of the priest swing slowly from side to side.
“Nay, boy, nay. He could do nothing for me and would only succumb himself to the contagion. Nay, I die and gladly so, though I regret that never again will I see the yiuorr catch the light of dawn on the watery pyramid. When thou comest to this spot tomorrow thou shalt find me dead, and I ask that thou heap my rhenth with wood and set it afire, to serve the double purpose of easing my passage to the afterlife and cleansing the spot of the star-murrain.”
Having promised that he would do so, Iahh-Tleqam retrieved his fish and returned to his master’s house, resolved to say nothing of the meeting, for a huge purpose was now beating in his brain. If the priest spoke true, upriver lay a deserted city wherein waited atop a pyramid a treasure of sacred gems that perhaps he now alone knew of. If he were prepared to risk the jungle and the star-murrain, and he thought the coming rains would dull or destroy its virulence, here was his chance to retrieve his family’s fortunes.
When he came again to the spot in the early morning, his fishing line coiled on his hip, he found the canoe busy with glittering flies and craning his neck he could see Qaden-Thamwë lying dead within, hands folded on his dark beard. He gathered sticks and dried moss and, throwing from a distance at first, filled the canoe with them, slowly covering the priest’s corpse. Then he laid branches criss-cross atop them and finally, with the flint and tinder he had brought, set the pyre alight and watched as it consumed canoe and priest, sending up a cloud of grey smoke that climbed high into the windless sky. It would be seen from the town, but fires were common this late in the dry season and none would remark it.
When the last embers had fallen hissing into the river, the priest’s corpse was wholly consumed and he set off on his day’s fishing, already impatient for the rains to begin. They came late and lingered unseasonably, and it was not till after the vernal equinox that he could set off for the city of Qsemmtsualh, outlawing himself by his desertion of his master’s service, but caring little if he could retrieve the gems that awaited upriver. He traveled by canoe as Qaden-Thamwë had done, but against the current made a week’s journey of what with the current might have been an hour’s. So it was that he came to the city after two months had passed, much thinner than when he had started and heartily sick of his unrelieved diet of fish and riverside fruit.
Already the jungle had begun to reclaim what once had been its, pushing green tongues in among the tall stepped pyramids that loomed through the haze of late and polliniferous afternoon, and he startled many small creatures as he passed over the broad avenues of dressed stone, having drawn his canoe up on the bank and secured it. Here and there he came across well-picked skeletons clung with shreds of cloth or fur, but they were fewer than he expected till he climbed the tallest of the pyramids and found many hundreds clustered on its flat summit around a stone altar stained, despite the succeeding rains, with the blood of futile sacrifice. Similar conclaves glimmered atop the lesser pyramids around him, and now he could see where the star had fallen on the city’s southern boundary: a vast circle of burnt earth as yet unencroached by jungle.
Hence too he saw the pyramid for which he had come: one of the smallest, but glittering with streams of water that poured down its narrow steps. When he descended and hastened to the place, hard by the river, he heard a muffled thump as of a giant’s heartbeat and discovered a turning waterwheel at the pyramid’s side, still doubtless powering the streams that washed the steps. He climbed them, his heart beating harder and faster than the unvarying thump of the waterwheel, and reached the pyramid’s summit to find another altar whence the water streamed, but this hollow and pierced for the stems of a thousand flowers whose blood-red or wine-purple blooms were now beginning to close with the approach of twilight.
This was all: search as he might, he found nothing more. Had some other apostate priest fled downriver with the gems and succumbed as Qaden-Thamwë had done, his canoe beached on some forgotten shore or carried down to the sea? As the question occurred to him he felt a tickle in his throat and suppressed a cough. It might have been no more than the golden pollen of the blooms, which he had disturbed in wafting clouds as he searched around the altar, but somehow he knew the rains had not done the work he had trusted they would and that the murrain clung yet to the city it had destroyed.
A great weariness came over him and he found a dry corner of the steps and sat there, watching as night occupied the city more swiftly but no less surely than the jungle would. Then he slept. At dawn he was woken by a strange musical humming interwoven among the thump of the waterwheel and turned, rubbing sleep from his eyes, to see the gems of Qaden-Thamwë, breasts aglitter with green or crimson in the horizontal light, darting from bloom to bloom on blurring wings.
© 2004 Simon Whitechapel