The Ancient Ones

 

The skies broke open when Jaya came to the high places at the heart of the island.  She emerged from the shroud of the forest and stood upon a rocky hillside looking out over the expanse of the central plateau, the jagged mountains lying all around her in a vista that stole her breath.  The peaks of the mountains stood like phantoms, the mist fading their shoulders so that they seemed to float above the earth like giants, the hollows and folds of the foothills heavy with fog and dark with jungle.

And before her stood the place where her race had been born.  Sigara had been the fortress of her people from the eldest days, a refuge from their enemies, and the womb of their strength before they broke forth upon the outer world and subjugated it.  It was not like any other mountain, being instead a solid mass of stone, not diluted with soil, but like a great rock set down upon the earth by the hands of the gods themselves.  Looking on it from the south, she saw the narrow path etched up from below, cut back and forth across the rock face, and the idol of Hamau near the top, many times larger than any human shape.

The stone was fretted with green where vines grew up from below or dangled down from the top, and she saw streams where water cascaded down over the edge of the rock and fell to the jungle below like rain.  Above there would be pools and channels cut into the stone to make reserves and keep the rain for the inhabitants of the shrine and to fill the hanging gardens.  She wondered if those ancient feats of construction had been preserved, or if they had decayed along with the veneration of the gods.

She started down the slope toward the base of the rock.  For days she had seen no marks of human hand, no sign of pursuit or ambush, and yet she moved cautiously through this dreamlike landscape, certain that there were those hunting her blood through the dark.  Now there was no way for her to hide.  The sky split apart and the rain turned to blazes of color between the clouds.  Lightning flickered among the ghostly peaks of the mountains, and birds screamed as they passed overhead in their thousands.

The path led through stone pillars now broken and covered in moss, and up a long, weaving stair thick with fungi and lichens.  She expected to find guardians, or at least a sentinel, but all was quiet as she reached the base of the stone and looked up along the switching stairs, higher and higher.  It was a long climb to the top, and she set the haft of her spear upon the path and began to climb.

o0o

The way was narrow, the steps slick with the ever-present mist.  Birds nested in holes in the rock, and they burst forth as she approached, flew screaming into the sky.  The stone face was worked with images out of the history of her race, and yet she was hard-pressed to make out the figures beneath creeping vines thick with white and pink blossoms.  Heavy bees and butterflies was wide as her opened hands flew about her, and she walked upon a carpet of flower petals.

It was midmorning when she reached the widened place before the idol of Hamau, and she was glad to see the ambition of the apostates had not extended to defacing this statue as they had the others.  The face of the goddess was intact, her jaws wide, teeth gleaming.  The base of the statue was marred by heaped bones, and the smell of decay was heavy.  The path went up steps beside the idol, and there Jaya found herself awaited.

A half-dozen of the hooded cultists stood on the wide stair, blades gleaming in their hands, faces and arms painted black.  They did not move, spoke no words, and she was glad, for there was nothing they could say that she wished to hear.  The roots of twisted trees dug into the stone, gnarled and knotted like great fingers, and it was as though they had torn the rock face open to reveal the way.

One of the fanatics came down the steps with measured tread, long knives in each hand, and Jaya saw the greenish smear on the steel that spoke of venom.  She had no fear of that.  It surprised her that she had no fear at all.  Alone in this ancient place, beset by enemies poisoned with the worship of a false god, and yet all she felt was a grim purpose.  She would cleanse this place of all these wayward apostates.

She went to meet them, spear light and ready in her hand as a bolt of lightning, and she felt a strength go through her like molten fire through the veins of the earth herself.  “Come then,” she said softly.  “Come and let us embrace.”

The knife-wielder came to meet her and steel flickered in the half-light.  Thunder boomed far away as Jaya feinted, then again, evaded a rush and then struck like a cobra.  The bright steel spearpoint went through the man from side to side, and he fell with blood coming from his mouth, pouring from his pierced lungs.  He crumpled and fell bonelessly down the steps as the rest of them rushed upon her.

She caught one in mid-leap, ripped him open from groin to ribs and then stepped aside as his blood poured down the stairs.  Her spear was quick as a viper’s tongue and she struck again and again, opening wounds on arms and thighs.  Her attackers flanked and tried to spring on her from both sides, but she drove them back, pinned one to an ancient root and left the spear fixed in his flesh as she drew her sword flashing into the stormlight.

The last three fell on her, and they dueled there among the images of a vanished race, steel flicking and ringing as she fended them off with all the skill she possessed.  They were trained fighters, driven by their devotion to their murderous god, but Jaya had fought and killed again and again since she left her home, and she did not give way.

One went down, throat slashed open and pouring out his life on the knotted roots.  Another was not quick enough and Jaya took off his hand, kicked him down the stairs and faced the third one.  She saw fear in those eyes, and it tasted sweet.  She backed him up the steps, one pace at a time, her blade light and ready in her hand.  “Your false god abandons you,” she said.  “I am vengeance come to harvest in blood.”

The man hissed in fury and leaped down at her, but she was ready, and her stroke was clean and perfectly timed.  His body fell almost at her feet, gushing crimson, while his head tumbled down the steps, expression still shocked as it bounced down to the bottom.

Jaya took all the heads, cutting them free and carrying them up the stairs to the top, dangling from the single scalp-lock each one wore.  The stone was painted with their blood and she saw insects already gathering to feast on the dead.  She cleaned her sword and sheathed it, took the spear in her hand again.  The smell of slaughter was like iron in her mouth, and she was glad of it.  At the stop of the stair she dropped the heads and stood in the open atop the ancient stronghold of her people, before they had gone forth to mark the world.

The top of the great stone was carved into many levels and terraces, all of them now heavy with mist and draped with centuries of vines, some of them as thick as a man, many of them laden with flowers.  Ahead of her was an open space centered on a long pool, statues standing up from the still water, worn down by ages of rain until they seemed like human forms trapped within the rock, writhing to be free.  What had once been tended lawns were now heavy grass and twisted trees, and she saw ibis stalking among the water plants.

She heard drums now, low sounds shaking through the air, a throbbing that gathered strength and became like the pulse of a heart.  The sound came down to her from the central palace, spires rising through the fog as though they floated, and she followed the call, winding her way between the root-boles of the strange trees, heavy golden bees humming past her, frogs singing in the quiet.

Jaya went watchful but unafraid, wading through the wet grasses, finding her way up along the wide steps, looking at the faces carved on the stone walls.  Everywhere she heard the sounds of water, and there were streams cut into the rock, cascades and pools and fountains, all fed by the ever-present rain and the genius of those long-ago builders of the waterworks of this place – the cisterns and channels and underground streams all cut into the living rock.

At last the palace-temple stood before her, and she saw the spires that rose up on all sides, now festooned with trees that clung like sea-creatures and moss that colored the stone green and hung down in tatters.  Vines that grew and coiled and filled the air with drifting flower petals.  The towers were all pointed, made as symbolic mountains, grouped in fives – like the fingers of a hand.  Each one was covered with carved skulls, but now they were all hidden beneath the fecund growth of the jungle.

Something moved at the top of the stair, a shadow that flitted, and then she saw a fantastical shape emerge from the dark.  A towering form draped in tiger skins and a long cloak that it spread and swept like wings.  It wore a mask in the shape of a tiger skull, the eye sockets empty and black, the bone darkened and etched with signs and markings.

She saw it was a man dressed in some ritual finery, and it danced, blackened arms and legs flashing in the half-light.  It spun, stamping its feet in time to the beating of the drums.  It shouted, bellowing out words she could not decipher.  It held forth its arms, and then a mass of fanatics rushed down the steps and hurled themselves upon her.

Jaya had only moments to see them and realize they were all very young – twenty or so youths even younger than she, and they all bore envenomed knives and screamed in fury as they charged her.  Jaya remembered her brother Anut and flinched back.  She would not stain her steel with the blood of children, and yet she would not allow them to simply drag her down.

Furious, she struck the haft of her spear on the stone, and she seemed to feel a thrum beneath her feet as if the blow resonated through Sigara like the touch of a bell.  The mob hesitated, and then she rang the steel of her spearpoint on the steps and the note sang so loudly they shied away from the sound.  It rang out through the halls of the shrine and echoed from the pillars and towers, and then, from deep within, she heard the deep-voiced bellow of a tiger in fury.

The children cried out, staring wide-eyed up into the air, as if Hamau herself would come from the hanging mist and fall among them.  Jaya took the moment and advanced on them, giving vent to her own roar, and the smaller among them scattered back, crying out in terror.  The drums fell silent, and monkeys screamed among the towers.

Now she faced only six of the tallest, most well-grown youths, and she saw their courage hung by thin threads.  As she stepped closer they fell back, knives in shaking hands, eyes wide.  Jaya looked past them, up to where the dancer still capered and gesticulated, moaning as it held out arms in invocation.  She drew back her arm, took aim, and hurled the spear with all the force she possessed.

It struck the apparition dead in the center, and the man cried out as the steel pierced through him.  He sank down, groaning, and the other young cultists screamed and fled from her.  Jaya climbed the steps, hand on the hilt of her sword, and she watched for an ambush as she reached the top.  She felt eyes watching her, saw flitting shadows that crouched in the dark corners of the shrine and waited, their attention like moths on her skin.

The shaman was trying to draw forth the spear, and she took the haft and wrenched it free from his chest.  Blood ran down over his cloak, forming a pool beneath him, soaking into the ancient stone steps.  “You cannot kill me,” he rasped, his voice barely more than a whisper.  “I am eternal.  I am the power of Kshatra, the slayer in the dark.”

“I am vengeance for the ancient goddess,” Jaya said, and she gripped his skull mask and wrenched it off his face, revealed him as a thin, scarred man with bloodshot eyes and hollow cheeks.  “I am the wrath of Hamau, who you sought to overthrow.  But men are mortal, and gods endure.”

He smiled, blood running from his mouth and nose.  “You will never free her, you will never undo what we have done.  You will die.”

“Go before me as my herald,” Jaya said.  “May it be known on the day that I come down to the sea of flowers.”  She drew her sword and cut off his head with a flick of the blade.  Blood spattered her arm, and she kicked the body over so the black heart-blood flowed out over the stone and ran down the steps in a cascade.  She kicked the head aside, contemptuous.  She would keep no trophies from these.

Another roar echoed through the shrine, and Jaya stood for a long time, listening.  There was something here she did not yet see.  She cleaned and sheathed her sword, took up her spear again and wiped the blood from the steel.  She left the corpse behind and entered the ancient halls of her people, her footfalls soft on the carpet of moss and dead leaves.

The carvings on the walls were buried beneath lichens and hanging moss, the few bare places on the stone marred by crude signs marked with blood and soot.  Bones were scattered carelessly on the floor, and the smell of old death was plain.  For all that they dwelled here, the apostates had not made this a place for human things.  This was a temple made for death, adorned with skulls and left to the crawling insects and the skittering lizards.

She entered the heart of the shrine, where pillars rose on all sides and at the center was the high altar and before that a great carved pool.  Once it would have been filled with fresh water and cascaded with fountains, but now the channels had been blocked, so it was all but empty, open to the sky above beneath the long-fallen roof.  Jaya heard another growl and she went to the edge and looked down, and there she saw the tigress.

She was immense, as tall as one of the beasts the giants rode, and her shoulder would have stood higher than Jaya’s head.  She was gaunt as though starved, and her coat was wet and dull.  She waded in the water at the bottom of the pool, all of it green with slime and weeds.  On her face was a leather mask black with age, fastened in place by iron rings and affixed to a heavy chain that was riveted to a rock the size of a water bull.  The tigress moaned again, a call more than a roar.  A sound of despair, and Jaya felt pity and wrath well up inside her.

“It is a crime, what they have done to her,” said a voice, and Jaya turned, spear held ready.  At first she could not see who had spoken, but then she realized that the lump of stone close beside the pool was not stone, but a man so old and so filthy he seemed part of the temple.

“And what have you done?” she said, seeing his long, bedraggled hair, his beard that covered his chest, and the iron collar on his neck bound to another chain that fastened him to the stone.

“I?  I have watched, year after year, as those who I called my brothers have defiled and despoiled what was once a holy mission.”  He turned to her, and she saw his eyes were scarred over, gouged out many years gone.  “Though I cannot see, I can hear the cries of the children they steal and bring here to torture into their fanatic killers.  I hear their foul chants as they invoke a god of death and call it good.  I smell the decay and squalor they dwell in, and I hear the cries of this great beast, chained here so many years.”

“And who are you, old man?” she said, amazed someone could become so dirty and thin and aged and yet live.

“I was called Vadir,” he said.  “I was a high priest of the god Kshatra.  I was the one who led us from our home, far away, to this fabled temple here in the mountains.  We had been driven from our lands, and we sought a new beginning.”  He sighed.  “But my fellow faithful chose another path, and they turned against me.  When I would not sell death for gold they blinded me and imprisoned me here, so that I might know my failure.”

He gestured to the pool.  “They trapped the great tigress who roamed these ruins and imprisoned her here.  They could not blind her, so they put a mask over her face so she could not see.  They could not kill her, so they chained her.  They could not poison her, so they starved her, fed her only the flesh of those who transgressed against them.  They sought to drive her mad, and perhaps they have.”  He shook his head.  “And who are you, strange girl from the outer world?”

Jaya looked down at the trapped tigress.  Was this an emanation of the goddess herself?  A sacred animal?  Was it immortal?  She laid her spear down on the stone lip of the pool.  “I am Jaya, of the Tau’ta.  I am child of Undun, who was son of Amida, back through the many years to Kashyan the Three-Hearted himself, who led us from this land into exile.”  She drew her sword and chimed the steel on the stone.  “I am the heir to this place, now returned.”

The old man trembled, and she saw a tear run from one of his maimed eyes.  “I hoped I would live to this day.  I prayed for it.  I am all that remains of the legacy of my people.  All my brothers killed and killed one another until none remained but the young ones, and they did not know the secrets, the skills we once commanded.  Welcome, welcome daughter of kings.  A poor home you find here, yet it is yours.”

Jaya heard slight movements, and she looked to see the children of this place gathered around, hiding behind pillars, lurking in the shade of statues.  They watched her, eyes white in their darkened faces, uncertain and wondering.

“It is mine,” she said.  “All of it is mine, noble or foul, and I will cleanse it all.”

She unlaced her sandals, and then she slipped barefoot down into the knee-deep water, the green weeds floating on the surface swirling around her legs.  The tigress heard her and turned to face her, snarling blindly, showing teeth as long as knives.  The roar, even weakened, was so great it rang in her skull.

“I come at your call, Claw-Bearer, Sister of Night,” Jaya said.  “Across days and far lands you called me and I came.  I have followed the path and slain any who sought to stay me.  I have come for you, to remake this place, to cleanse it and make it holy again.  I walk in the footsteps of your kindred and they have touched me as well.  I carry the charge of all the gods, the weight of that which they have asked, and I will not shrink from it.”

She came closer, and closer, the tigress waiting with her head lowered, the growl from her throat like grinding stone.  Closer, and Jaya could reach out and touch her, could feel the wet, greasy fur, the looseness of the skin underneath.  Anger boiled in her heart, and yet she did not show it, not a flicker.  She slid her hand down to the iron collar, where the chain fastened it closed.  She sought out a gap in the closest link with the edge of her sword, dug it in, and twisted.

The iron chain was old, rimed over with corrosion, and her sword was bright and strong, made by master forgers in a lost age.  With a small sound the link snapped apart, and the chain dropped free.  Another link, and another twist, and the leather mask fell away from the tigress’s face, fell into the water and the muck at her feet.

Now, naked before the massive beast, Jaya felt the lift of fear in her belly, knowing she could do nothing to stop the tigress if she decided to strike.  She saw the bleary eyes, the sudden shying away from the light after untold years blinded.  She felt a surge of pity and reached out her hand, touched the muzzle, feeling the whiskers as stiff as steel quills.

Slowly, gently, the great tigress turned her head and rubbed against Jaya’s hand, and then she gave a guttural moan and turned away.  A single leap carried her to the lip of the pool, and she shook herself off and roared once, the sound echoing through the ancient halls, and then she vanished into the shadows of the temple, a flash of orange vanishing into darkness.

Jaya climbed back up out of the pit, and she went to the channel that had once fed water into the pool.  Stones had been placed to block the flow, and she wrenched them away, hurled them down into the green water until the water began to course again, falling into the pool, rippling the surface.  She looked around at the watching children, frightened and cringing from her, and she sheathed her sword and beckoned them.

“Come,” she said.  “We will begin a new age in this place.  Hamau will forgive, but you will have to earn it from her with your hands.”  She went to the old man, Vadir, and she pulled on the chain affixed to his collar until it broke.  “Come, old man.  There is work to do, and I believe you have as many stories to tell me, as I have for you.”  She looked around her, the pillars rising like ribs around the chamber of a heart.  From here she would begin.  From here she would flow outward to encompass the world.