Sour Grapes

Twenty

Candace stared into the shining crystal on the centre of the table, while Larentia explained to her dinner guests how she was able to see the future through the visions it produced. Vaguely, she was aware of Eunice's heartfelt hope that Candace couldn't see her future wrinkles; she had more than enough at the moment, thanks, and if that crystal even mentioned the word 'fat', she'd smash the thing with her shoe.

Candace continued to stare, knowing that it would be interpreted by the assembly as the first stage of her trance, since silence and stillness were as integral a part of her windwalking ritual as the persona she had developed of wearing rich, bold fabrics, a plethora of gold and honing her naturally deep voice to this melodious drawl. Yet it was not for professional reasons that Candace stared into its glistening facets, and it was not for its visions that she carried the prism around.

Her mind travelled back on a journey that took her down a long, dark, distant tunnel. And though she had never given up hoping to see lush lowlands at the end of the tunnel, where giant grey beasts with a fifth leg coming out of their forehead trumpeted loudly, where long-necked, long-legged creatures grazed the treetops and where striped horses ran wild in herds, no such visions had ever formed. It was always only more darkness she saw. A terrible blackness in which people were screaming, making terrible gurgling noises from deep in their throats, a blackness where fathers pleaded and mothers sobbed, and terrified children screamed…

Staring into the crystal, the memories solidified like the rock itself and shimmered every bit as brightly.

Kush was a land of plenty, she'd been told. Apart from the gold that oozed out of the rocks, there was brisk trade to be had in supplying Rome with exotic creatures and huge profits to be made from the enterprise. Candace had never been to Rome, so it was only through hearsay that she'd learned about huge spotted cats that spent all their lives up trees, and snakes thicker than a man's thigh that could swallow a billy goat whole. Indeed, it was through such tales that she'd heard about the grey five-legged monsters whose footsteps shook the ground and from whom giant logs of ivory came. Candace needed no telling that the Kings of Kush had grown rich from this ivory — very rich. Or that rich men grow powerful — very powerful. To the point that, when one of them dies, no one questions whether it is right or wrong that three hundred and twenty-eight men, women and children be buried along with the king. Or that he'd stipulated they should still be alive.

How old would Candace have been? Four? Maybe not even that, for she had no memories of life before that fateful day. All she recalled was being dragged in chains into that pit and seeing people strangled one after the other. Some were strangers, some were from her own village, many came from her own family. As her mother's turn came, she remembered the ribbon being wound round her neck as she sobbed and pleaded and begged for her baby's life. Candace recalled the startling warmth of the ribbon as it was wrapped round her own throat. Remembered the constriction, the pain, her vision blurring as the haze turned to red, but then, as she fell forward on to the corpse of her mother, a hand clamped round her mouth and a voice hissed in her ear,

Make a sound and I'll finish what I started.

Candace made no sound. Not a whimper. She lay there, face down and frozen with terror as her mother's corpse slowly cooled, and she listened to the gurgles and screams until finally, mercifully, only silence filled the air. As darkness cast its cloak over the burial pit, she felt a rough hand pulling her out, but this, she discovered, was no humanitarian rescue. She'd been snatched for pure profit, sold on as a plaything for a rich Roman family. A black toy for white children to tease and torment.

'As I was telling Terrence this afternoon, I got a letter from Cousin Julius to say old Auntie Antonia has lost her mind completely,' Thalia was twittering.

'Hardly a disaster,' Eunice retorted. 'It was a closed one, anyway; no one'll miss it.'

'Especially Antonia,' Terrence added dryly.

Candace didn't smile. Her features remained wooden, her eyes distant and, trapped in her memories, her mind travelled forwards. To the time when she was too old to continue as a source of childish amusement and was sold on again, this time as a slave. Do this, do that. I'll pinch you again if you don't do it quicker. Ah, yes, but slaves earn money… Some more than others, admittedly, it didn't matter. In addition to her upkeep, she was entitled to a small sum of pocket money to spend as she liked, and the crystal was her very first purchase. A lump of native rock on sale in the market at a price she'd had to pay for in six monthly instalments, but once she had it — once she clutched it to her breast — that shining glass would surely bring back her homeland. It would bring back her mother, her father, her brothers, her sisters. All the memories the old King had killed along with their persons.

But as the past stubbornly failed to materialize, so Candace could see the future…

Not through visions in the rock. She saw how she might use its reputation, for if others had tried to see the future and failed, surely it was because they weren't Kushite? The same instincts that had guided her as a child to keep her mouth shut during The Terror guided her then. She hadn't gone straight to her mistress. She began to convince other slaves that she could see their future, bland predictions that were nonetheless straws to clutch in a world where you owned nothing, not even your own soul. Word rippled up through the ranks until one day she was summoned. Basically, through rhetoric she had practised and gestures she'd rehearsed, it boiled down to nothing more than the Mistress encountering troubles and tribulation, but rising above them like migrating cranes. As the stupid bitch lapped it up, so Candace became a pampered pet with her own quarters, her own slaves, and slowly perfected her act. For a start, she made it clear that she couldn't 'see' every day. It was the crystal that imparted the sight; she was merely the instrument of prophecy. Picking and choosing these times gave her control, and by studying the ancient oracles, Candace mastered the art of juggling ambiguity, guesswork and gossip with the well-heeled's insatiable insecurity. As her reputation grew, so did her money chest… and her contempt for them and their class.

Once she'd saved enough to buy her own freedom, she adopted more sophisticated techniques to separate them from their money. The forces of the supernatural are all around us, my child. I am merely their instrument. So why hang on to this empty block of glistening glass? Why keep this crystal which shows neither future nor past?

Like the prism itself, Candace had no answer. Instead, she brought her mind back to the present, demanded silence, for lights to be extinguished, for incense to be lit to propitiate the dead.

'I remind you. The shades of our ancestors inhabit a world of darkness and quiet. If they are to walk again, even for one night, an atmosphere must be created in which they feel comfortable, even though for the rest of us, it will feel cold.'

She bade the assembly link hands, cautioning them to ignore the chill and concentrate on the rhythm of the harp. Let the music fill their minds, she intoned, for the harp was the gateway to the Afterlife.

'Through the circle you form,' she picked up a blade and shook back her sleeve, 'and the blood that I sacrifice,' she broke off while it splashed into the little bronze bowl, 'we create a dark demi-world in which the dead live and the living are dead, and now I cover the sacred Crystal of Kush that time may be as frozen as the air that sweeps over us from the distant Isles of the West.'

In the dark, the gold thread of her veil shimmered like sunlight on water as she threw it over the table.

'O Vanth, Demon of Death, who has eyes on her wings and sees everything, I summon you to walk among us tonight.'

Three loud raps reverberated round the dining hall, echoed by gasps from Eunice and Larentia.

'O Leinth, who waits at the Gates of the Underworld and drinks of human tears, I call upon you to turn your faceless face to the stone and approach.'

Three more knocks.

Candace drew a long breath and deepened the pitch of her voice.

'By the Falcon of the Sun, by the Vultures of the Moon, I bid ye spirits enter.'