Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (7 page)

“I agree. I also feel instinctively that I’d trust Shalune before Uluye, which is a pity, because it’s obvious that Uluye’s word is law here.”

“Yess.” Grimya shook herself from head to tail. “And we still don’t know what they
w-want
of you. That is what trrroubles me most of all.”

“Well, their attitude so far is at least reassuring, and that seems to confirm what the lodestone told us.” Indigo fingered the leather bag around her neck. “We must just wait and see.”

The wolf dipped her head. “I th-ink,” she said, “that this is some religious place, as we were led to believe. That smoke at the top of the cliff—a shrine, perhaps?”

“Possibly. Though if it is, then as you said earlier, it’s probably not dedicated to the Earth Mother as we know Her.”

Grimya laid her ears back. “That, too, trroubles me. If—”

“No.” Indigo held up a hand, forestalling what the wolf had been about to say. She knew Grimya was thinking about the next trial that faced them, the next demon that must be found and challenged, and she said gently, “I don’t think it would be wise to speculate about it yet. We’ve been led astray too often in the past to risk assuming that things are necessarily what they seem now. We must be patient, bide our time.” Abruptly that struck her as wryly funny and she gave a small, hollow laugh. “Time is the one thing we can be sure of, after all.”

Uluye returned as the sun was setting. Indigo had slept for some hours after eating the meal the women had left for her; surprising, as she’d done little else but sleep during the past five days, but the heat and the quiet were soporific and she had drifted off without intending to. Grimya—who had shared the food, although she found it far too spicy for her simpler tastes—was curled up in the coolest corner, and both raised their head with a guilty start as the curtain was lifted aside and the tall woman appeared on the threshold.

Uluye was still wearing the feathered headdress but had changed her robe for a long, sleeveless shift; and a necklace strung with a myriad bones, each carved into the shape of some animal or bird, hung around her neck and clinked with every movement she made.

“We are ready,” she said. At least, Indigo believed that was her meaning. “Come.”

Indigo frowned. “Come?” She repeated the word queryingly. “Where?”

Uluye pointed upward, then held out something she was carrying. A robe somewhat like her own, but dyed with swirling shades of blue and purple and black. Indigo took it tentatively and pointed to herself. “You want me to wear this?” she asked in her own language.

Uluye didn’t reply but watched expectantly, and after a moment’s hesitation, Indigo shrugged and began to change. The robe was cool and loose, far more comfortable than her travel-stained shirt and trousers. When she was ready, Uluye nodded approval and led the way toward the cave’s exit. Not knowing her intention but willing to cooperate, at least for the time being, Indigo followed, Grimya padding in her wake.

They emerged onto the ledge and Indigo stopped, awed by the view. The sun’s edge was just visible as a thin, fiery crescent above the trees, and in its refracted light the world seemed to have caught fire. The lake was a great, still circle of blood red, the sky overhead like polished brass, and between lake and sky and shadow-drowned forest, the sandstone walls of the ziggurat glowed crimson with the last of the evening light. To the east, clouds were gathering, knife-thin streaks presaging the heavier masses moving in behind them. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

Uluye led them to the far end of the ledge, where a staircase much smaller and narrower than the great flights crisscrossing the rock face beneath them led up the final flank to the cliff’s summit. Looking about, Indigo was surprised to find that there was no one else to be seen either on this level or on any of the ledges below. The smiling, welcoming faces they had seen earlier were gone, and the bluff seemed utterly deserted.

They began to climb, and as they neared the top of the flight, the thin plume of smoke became visible again, rising against the rapidly darkening sky. A scent hung heavy on the air, growing stronger as they approached the summit: spicy, a little acrid, shot through with an echo of something decaying and unwholesome. Then they mounted the last dozen steps, emerged onto the cliff top—and Indigo stared in astonishment at the sight that confronted her.

Four truncated sandstone pillars rose twenty feet from the ziggurat’s table, marking out a near-perfect square. Stone slabs formed a terraced floor between the pillars, and around the square upward of fifty women, of every age from youngest to oldest, stood in silent, intent ranks. A dozen or more were armed with spears, which they held at a stiff, ritualistic angle; all were robed, all were hung about with wood and bone ornaments; all were utterly still.

But it wasn’t the watching, waiting crowd that took Indigo’s attention, nor the pillars, nor even the great bowl of beaten metal raised on a plinth and from which the smoke of incense rose in a steady, oppressively perfumed stream. It was the chair—throne perhaps would be a better word—that had been placed before the plinth, near the square’s center. Cut from sandstone blocks, its arms and back were carved into intricate and terrible shapes that blended human, animal and other, disturbing and unnameable forms. And enthroned on the chair in an awful semblance of majesty, dressed in a flowing cloak of feathers and crowned by a vast and heavy headdress that dwarfed even Uluye’s, was a corpse.

She—it—must have been dead for at least fifteen days, and the decay wrought by the tropical heat in that time was horrible. Indigo quickly turned her head away after one look at the maggot-eaten flesh, the empty eye sockets, the insane, fixed grin where the lips had rotted away to reveal crumbling teeth. The sweet-sick smell that she’d thought a part of the heady clouds of incense was, she realized now, the stench from the corpse, and her stomach threatened to heave. What was this creature? What was its significance? And what had it to do with her?

Uluye stepped forward until she stood facing the thing in the chair. Then she turned on her heel, her tall figure dramatically lit by the incense fire in the bowl behind her, raised her arms high and began to speak. Indigo understood only a few words and could glean nothing from them, but Grimya, at her side, flattened her ears suddenly and her hackles rose.

Indigo
— But the wolf got no further, for at that moment Uluye’s speech came to an end and a great wailing cry went up from the assembled women, followed seconds later by the discordant blare of the great horns.

Smiling with grim pleasure, Uluye turned about once more and strode toward the sandstone chair. She made a perfunctory ritual obeisance to the enthroned corpse, then reached up and lifted the elaborate crown from its head. Pieces of flesh and clumps of shriveling hair fell away from the skull as the headdress came free. Then Uluye stepped back, turned, and approached Indigo, the crown held aloft. Indigo watched her, still not comprehending, until Grimya’s frantic mental voice broke through her bemusement.

Indigo! I heard what she said to them! This—this thing, the body—it was someone sacred to them, some kind of great oracle. Now the oracle is dead ... and they mean you to take its place!

Indigo felt as though her feet had fused with the stone beneath her. She stared into Uluye’s triumphantly smiling face and saw in the tall woman’s eyes the truth of Grimya’s warning. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak or react, Uluye had stepped one final pace forward, and to the renewed wailing and bellowing of horns, placed the huge and weighty crown on Indigo’s head.

“No ...” Indigo started to back away. “No, oh no. You don’t understand, you don’t realize, I’m not—” Grimya yipped a warning and Indigo stopped as she found her retreat blocked by four armed women. They didn’t threaten her, but their implacable expressions and the mere presence of the spears in their hands negated the need for any word or gesture.

Wildly, Indigo looked for other escape routes. There were none. The stairway behind her was the only way down from the cliff top; and the other spear-carriers had closed in until she was effectively surrounded. They and the other women, the spectators, were gazing at her with an air of expectation.

Indigo took a deep breath to calm herself and laid a restraining hand on Grimya’s head as the wolf began to snarl threateningly.
Wait
, she said silently, then aloud: “Uluye, there has been a great mistake,“ She knew the priestess wouldn’t comprehend her, but she had to make some attempt to communicate before matters got completely out of hand. ”I don’t know what this means, but I am not a goddess or an oracle or whatever it is that you seem to believe I am. Uluye, you must try to understand—“ Seeing that Uluye’s expression hadn’t changed, she switched frantically to telepathy.
Grimya, she hasn’t any idea of what I’m saying! Help me, please
!

Racking her mind, Grimya found a word in the Dark Isle tongue that she believed meant
wrong
. Indigo said it repeating it three times in an urgent, pleading tone. Uluye’s smile became supercilious and she shook her head.

“Not wrong,” she stated emphatically, and held out one hand. “Come.”

Grimya—

She won’t listen! Even if I knew the right words, she wouldn’t heed them. Indigo, this is dangerous! If you don’t do as they want, I fear they might turn on us, and there are too many spears for us to fight!

Indigo had reached the same conclusion. It seemed that for now at least, she had no choice but to comply with Uluye’s will. She made a gesture of acquiescence, hoping that her nervousness wasn’t too palpably obvious, and allowed the tall woman to take hold of her hand and lead her to the stone chair. In the space of just a few minutes, dusk had turned to darkness as the sun vanished altogether, and two priestesses were feeding the great brazier so that its flames suddenly leaped higher, illuminating the cliff top with hot yellow.

The thing in the chair seemed to loom toward Indigo as though it had suddenly and horribly returned to life, and she shrank back with a gasp before realizing that it was only an illusion created by the flickering light. The mingled smells of incense and putrefaction were making her giddy, the weight of the monstrous crown was unbalancing her; she felt unreal, out of control, as though she were in a nightmare, with no one to wake her.

There was a faint glimmering in the sky, and somewhere in the distance, thunder grumbled angrily. Uluye led Indigo to the throne and they stood together beside it. The stench of the dead oracle’s body flowed over Indigo and she thought she might vomit, or even faint. With a great effort she managed to stay upright, and then Uluye made an imperious movement with her free hand and two shadowy figures stepped forward. They moved to the chair and lifted the corpse from its resting place. Uluye drew Indigo aside as it was carried down the steps. Then, with great solemnity, they followed the small procession across the terraced floor to the edge of the ziggurat. Indigo looked down but could see nothing beyond a faint, slate-dark glimmer where the lake must be. All else was lost in the intense darkness of the tropical night.

Suddenly lightning flashed again, momentarily turning the night electric blue and throwing the two figures and their gruesome burden into sharp silhouette. The assembled women began to wail again, and the wailing became a steady, rhythmic and ululating chant that was counter-pointed by the horns and by a sound Indigo hadn’t heard before: the thud and rumble of heavy drums beating out from far below, hidden in the darkness.

The two women on the cliff’s edge—one of them, Indigo realized now, was Shalune—uttered a shrill scream that rose above the cacophony. They swung their arms back, feet braced, and with a second howling cry, they hurled the body of the old oracle up and out and away over the bluff. Indigo glimpsed it turning and spinning like a rag doll against the sky. Then a fork of brilliant lightning flashed out almost directly overhead, and the roar of thunder drowned all other noise as a phosphorescent glitter far below showed that the lake had taken the offering cast down to it.

The chanting ceased and the horns and drums fell silent as the thunder’s echoes faded away, and for perhaps ten seconds, the atmosphere was oppressively quiet and still. Then, softly at first but quickly rising both in pitch and in strength, the assembled women began a rhythmic, whispering chant. One word, repeated over and over again:
speak; speak; speak
. Indigo didn’t understand the significance of it, but the women’s voices carried an unpleasantly insistent undertone that sent a chill through her. Then suddenly Uluye, who alone had not joined in the chant, raised her arms high again and cried out in a powerful voice that rang across the lake and the forest.

“
Speak
!” Uluye swung around to face her, and the eager, almost fanatical gleam in her eyes as she and the assembled women fiercely chanted shocked Indigo to the marrow as she suddenly comprehended what they meant.

“Speak! Speak! Speak!” It was a litany now, a litany and a demand that Indigo knew she couldn’t fulfill. She tried to protest, tried again to make Uluye see that she was not and could never be their oracle, but the women were crowding around her, propelling her willy-nilly toward the stone chair, and her denials were lost in the chant and in a new bawl of thunder that shook the cliff. The chair loomed before her, hands were pushing her to the high seat and turning her around; she shuddered as she felt the touch of unyielding stone at her back and beneath her thighs. Then the women fell back like a wave ebbing, and Indigo sat alone on the oracle’s throne.

She felt giddy with the smell of incense, which mingled now with the sharp scent of approaching rain. She couldn’t see Grimya among the crowd below the plinth, and she’d lost mental contact, her mind too shocked and confused to allow her to think clearly.

Uluye stood beside her, and from somewhere she had produced a wooden bowl filled with water, which she held to Indigo’s lips. Indigo drank gratefully and deeply before realizing that there was more than water in the vessel: herbs, half-dissolved powders, tastes she didn’t recognize. She shuddered as the drink went down, but at least it was cooling, easing her parched throat and dry lips. The crown weighed down on her; her head was beginning to ache and she felt fierily hot, as though the fever had returned and was running in her veins once more.