The Throne of Bones (40 page)

“As the testicles are the repository of all virtue, Lord, as they are the source of courage and honor and potency, we treasure those of the tiger and grant them to a favored few.”

“So that you meant to compliment me in your heathenish way?”

“Indeed, Sir, that was my pathetic intention. Forgive me if the highest accolade that my people can grant offends you.”

He might have pursued this inquiry further, but he had just smeared some of the gray slime on her skin, and he tumbled into an abyss. No longer gray, it glowed and vibrated with a green brilliance he had never beheld. To say that it resembled any known shade of green would be like saying that a sunset resembled a skillet. It was not just the color, it was a new way of seeing it. The streak on Tuphaduba’s buttocks was the gateway to another world.

He labored all that day and through the night on his subjects, painting over, erasing, blending, revising. The slightest variation on one slave threw the four-fold composition into a dizzying new perspective. Each design seemed more wonderful than the last. He rejected dozens of them, any one of which would have stunned and dazzled the world.

Licking his fingers to thin the paints, he learned that they had flavors that exactly matched their colors. He was astounded to discover that he could identify not just the taste of blue but the sound of yellow and the feel of red. Indeed, he must have been creating his compositions by the distinctive sounds and touches and flavors of his new palette, because he only now realized that he had forgotten to strike a light when darkness fell.

Sunrise painted the city with the unheard-of colors that his sister’s potions had revealed to him, and with their sounds as well. The whining and grumbling of his slaves, begging him to let them sleep, added new flavors to the banquet of light, new themes to the symphony of color he had made of them. Ignoring the vivid orange of their protests, he hustled them out into the street, even though the only people he could stupefy with his genius would be early-rising workers and late-retiring carousers.

He acquired a considerable crowd of both, who followed him in silent awe. He grinned and nodded at them in a singularly red way, inviting their indigo praise. He tried to explain what he had done, since they were so obviously puzzled, but ordinary words wouldn’t serve. He spoke new words that suited his colors and made strange gestures that evoked their music.

To his astonishment, the fools mocked and gibed. He might have borne this with the dignity of misunderstood genius if their jeers and laughter hadn’t altered his composition by adding to it a hideous, foul-tasting shade that hurt his ears.

“I’ll teach you not to fuchsia my Art, you browns!” he shrieked, attacking them with teeth, fists and feet. “I’ll mauve you!”

It’s not easy to cause a stir in Sythiphore, and it’s even harder in that most tolerant of cities to be deemed a lunatic. By the time he was haled before a magistrate, Tiphytsorn had learned to keep his secret wisdom to himself. How could anyone understand his Art when they couldn’t even see it? The fools insisted that he had herded a stumbling flock of badly-abused slaves through the streets, not painted at all, but so leeched of all color that they looked like drowned corpses. The only nervous symptom he exhibited, and it could have been a harmless tic, was to wince whenever the magistrate made his teeth ache with one of his high-pitched, magenta gestures.

A horrifying pattern, a purple conspiracy began to emerge as witnesses to other acts came forward to testify: commercial painters he had abused, lords and ladies he had offended by refusing to paint them. Every sensible thing he’d ever said or done was put forward as a symptom of madness.

He was about to heave a sigh of relief when Phitithia appeared, fortunately not trailing seaweed but painted decorously in cloying shades of pink and yellow. Even if she had chosen to have herself decorated by some tasteless nitwit, she would set everyone straight. But he nearly strangled on his sigh when he recognized the copper-painted figure beside her as the ineffable Dildosh, who should have been drowned by Captain Calamard.

“Who is Captain Calamard?” the magistrate asked, repeating the name that Tiphytsorn had foolishly blurted out in his shock.

Phitithia said, “My Lord, I spared my poor, deranged brother the pain of the news that his dear friend, the captain, perished heroically while rescuing my fiancé from drowning. But perhaps he heard of it elsewhere, and this was what drove him completely mad.”

“My Lord!” the artist cried, rising and planning to demonstrate his sanity with a speech of the purest and most translucent violet. “As they say in Parasundar when paying homage to their greatest men, I’ll cut your balls off and eat them, you stinking beast.”

He got no further before the magistrate ordered him gagged.

Yodeo Globb came from Sythiphore, which typed him so handily that the people of Fandragord neglected to look too closely at the man himself. To anyone’s eye, he matched the type: plump, jolly and energetic, never failing to amuse when agitation thickened his accent and thinned his syntax.

If he kept odd hours, that was only to be expected, for any Sythiphoran behavior that cannot be classed as funny or disgusting is agreed to be inscrutable. If he sometimes smelled worse than hard work and a limited wardrobe could explain, it was ascribed to a lifetime of eating fish, and perhaps putting them to even less wholesome uses.

He said that he was an antiquary, an unworldly career for the hard-bargaining “melonhead” of folklore, but everyone agreed he had come to the right place. Fandragord was first built on the level of Hogman’s Plain, according to the story children are told, but the giants stepped on it. A new city rose on the site, but they stepped on that, too, and so on, until the present city was built on a heap of ruins too tall for them to stamp down.

Grownups who tell this story know that the “giants” who destroyed the city more than once were the feuding Houses of Fand and Vendren, not mentioned by name because so many of them are still around, and still as touchy as ever, but any sharp-eyed child who spends an afternoon scuffing through the rubbish can find enough broken weapons, regimental badges, charred bones and cracked skulls to decorate a packing-crate castle.

Since Yodeo Globb was no intellectual, even by whatever absurd standard prevailed in his native city, his pursuits were seen as similarly childish. Mention of “the scholar from Sythiphore” never failed to raise a laugh at the cheap inn where he lodged, and no one laughed more merrily than the stranger himself. Taproom idlers would be encouraged to go on to such questions as, “How’s your sister, melonhead?,” alluding to the infamously close bonds of Sythiphoran families, and he would laugh all the harder. The jokes obscured his true interest: unearthing more recent artifacts, such as gold teeth, silver spectacle-frames, and the coins traditionally placed on the eyes of corpses.

Although Yodeo’s window overlooked a brothel whose inmates were lax in drawing their blinds, he found his eyes more often raised to the distance and the mound that overshadowed the intervening expanse of Hogman’s Plain. This was only the closest of several such symmetrical hills in the wasteland, popularly known as the Giants’ Graves; and like so many other ruins and natural sites in or near the witch-cursed city, it was generally avoided.

Yodeo was not a fanciful man, but little imagination was needed to see the rough shape of a supine figure in the mound, a fancy lewdly enhanced by the lone oak-tree rising from its groin. For the first time in his career, he was tempted to step over the line that separates the grave-robber from the true antiquary. He had no faith in giants, but he did believe in ancient warlords with giant purses.

He had struck up acquaintances among the sluts across the courtyard, who had time and inclination to gossip of such news as the fatal accident to Tubok, the rich grocer, or the funeral arrangements for poor Lady Roxilla. He would often bring them extravagant bunches of flowers or odds and ends of junk jewelry, charming them with his gallantry and his queerly old-fashioned taste.

“They never was giants,” he told a pair of them one day. “They’s foot-bones would break when they do walk.”

“That’s why he’s lying down, probably,” said Poppy, the pert one. “Maybe he wasn’t a giant all his life.”

Orchid, the somber one, said, “Like all men, only more so, the giants were swine. So my mother told me. When the gods at last get sick of all this garbage—” her gesture included the courtyard, the whorehouse, the ancient city of Fandragord, and everything else under the sun—“they’ll be roused from their graves to root it out.”

“Orchid can’t wait,” Poppy said, pointing to the absurdly placed oak.

Yodeo distracted the women from the scuffle that ensued by telling them about whales, a species they believed in no more than he did in giants; but they agreed to go upstairs and examine the proof of his claim that he, like all Sythiphorans, was descended from these prodigious mammals.

One morning he set out through the thorny desert of witchgrit and monk’s-rut that separated the mound from the city, soon regretting the economy and skepticism that had kept him from renting a mule to carry his tools and fetch back his loot. The path had been made by goats no more eager than humans to visit the mound. Fighting his way directly through the brambles soon frayed his clothes, his skin and his temper, and often led him into unexpected pockets where he could see neither the city nor his goal. He was forced again and again to wriggle his way out of dead ends and start over.

The vertical sun found him less than halfway to the Giant’s Grave. He had brought only enough crusty bread, goat-cheese and the ghastly local wine for one meal, but he saved half for later. He did not neglect a libation to Thululriel, although the offering to his sea-god had never seemed more futile than in this dusty waste.

“New deaders more better, I says,” he grumbled. “Leave old bones for dogs, that kisses my ears less whelk-sarding stupidly.”

An unplanned nap over the acid vintage did nothing to improve his temper or his timetable, and the sun had set behind the barrow before he reached it. The top was still washed with golden light, and the ascent was easy, for the witchgrit seemed reluctant to take root in the slope.

That it was a human earthwork was now evident, but he doubted that the figure depicted was human. Apart from being three city blocks long, it was taller than a four-story building at its enormous chest, and the sculpted arms and legs showed certain anatomical anomalies. It was impossible at close range to determine whatever features might have remained on the eroded head, but it was definitely broader than human proportion would dictate, and quite neckless.

At the head, which seemed as likely a place as any for the warlord’s crypt, he began prodding the earth with a stiff wire. His spirits revived; he could be seen by anyone who might be watching from the city, and it amused him to practice his craft in plain view for once, a feat worthy of the legendary Zuleriel Vogg. Perhaps it was his destiny to be a great tomb-robber like Zuleriel, and not a pilferer of trinkets that mourners thought not worth retrieving from their loved ones; or to become the antiquary he claimed to be, donating his less negotiable finds to the City of Fandragord. The local elders might reward his philanthropy with a title and the right to wear a sword.

“Which would make them snippets think once before laughing on the way I speaks,” he muttered. “Fluting bunch of eel-riggers!”

The sun had set, and a wiser course might have been to repair to the shelter of the oak, resuming work in daylight, but just then his probe hit a smooth substructure at a depth of four feet. It could have been marble. It could have been the burial chamber.

His probing grew frenzied as he scurried to find an entrance, and he was soon rewarded by the unmistakable clink of metal. He took up his shovel by the light of a pregnant moon and began slicing the tough earth.

Laboring like the melonhead of popular myth, who smiles while digging ditches or laying bricks all day without growing tired or thin, Yodeo at last uncovered an object that wiped the smile off his face. A smile is inadequate for a man who finds riches beyond imperial greed. He hooted maniacally and, though he had never known he was capable of dancing, danced on the panel of solid gold.

Having collapsed on it, having kissed it and stroked it and whispered endearments to it, he began scraping earth from its limits. It was round, some three feet across, suggesting a trapdoor that would give access to the crypt. And if the mere door was gold, what riches lay beneath?

Oblique moonlight and his scurrying fingertips enabled him to a make out a face embossed on the lid. It flaunted a portcullis of grotesque teeth that might have been the visor of a barbaric helmet. The perimeter bore a raised inscription whose characters defied his linguistic knowledge, admittedly limited. Nevertheless he was struck by a disquieting familiarity, not with the specific image or the letters, but with their arrangement on the disk.

Yodeo Globb had always been cautious, but a painful hike in the sun, more than an hour of digging, a growling stomach and a galloping heart, all combined to break the lifelong habit. He took a crowbar and, while standing on one edge of the trapdoor, tried to raise the other. His screamed curses cited his own stupidity when the lid pivoted to drop him into black emptiness.

He woke to pain and the most vile smell he had ever encountered in a career not characterized by sweet odors. He ejected the meager contents of his stomach, but this made him feel no better. In trying to raise his torso from a smooth, cold surface, he discovered that the impossibly heavy gold lid had fallen into the pit with him, crushing and pinning his legs.

“Oh, mother!” he groaned. “Why for came your Yodi to this wicked, witchy city?”

The answer was obvious, and it only increased his chagrin. Centuries of feuds and persecutions had taught Fandragorans to be the least inquisitive folk on earth. For that reason, it had seemed a likely place to ply his trade in peace; but for the same reason, no one would come looking for him. His only friends were drawn from a profession where memories are proverbially short.