THE POMEGRANATE GATE by Ariel Kaplan (EXCERPT)
Two worlds bound by a pomegranate gate
Toba Peres can speak but she can’t shout; she can walk but she can’t run; and she can write in five languages… with both hands at the same time.
Naftaly Cresques dreams every night of an orange-eyed stranger; when awake, he sees things that aren’t real; and he carries a book he can never lose and never read.
When the Queen of Sefarad orders all the nation’s Jews to leave or convert, Toba and Naftaly are forced to flee, but an unlucky encounter leaves them both separated from their caravan. Lost in the wilderness, Toba follows an orange-eyed stranger through a mysterious gate in a pomegranate grove, leaving Naftaly behind.
With a single step, Toba enters an ancient world that mirrors her own. There, she finds that her fate—and Naftaly’s—are bound to an ancient conflict threatening to destroy both realms.
From Chapter 5
Passing through the light left Toba with a strange, unwholesome sensation, as if she’d passed through a curtain of cold water, but somehow been left dry on the other side. It had been dark for a moment, and then she was through, and it seemed as if she’d simply walked from one part of the valley to another… the landscape was the same, the sky looked the same, even the pomegranate trees appeared to be the same, down to the arrangement of their branches. Only now she could see the men again, and she followed as fast as she was able, wishing she could call them back. If they could just escort her to the road, this misadventure would be over. The light was beginning to shift, as dawn broke before them. They were walking west, and the rising sun as it peeked over the horizon shone into her eyes.
That part was very wrong. She’d lived near these mountains all her life, and she was quite sure they loomed from the east, and that was not where the sun was beginning to ascend.
She glanced down at her feet as she picked her way across the landscape, and then stepped firmly into a person.
Toba looked up and realized she’d walked directly into the man with the silver hair. Only he’d been several hundred feet ahead of her only a moment ago, and she’d never seen him so much as turn around.
He was definitely, solidly there, however. So tall she only came up to his sternum, with sharply cut features wearing an expression that was alarmingly blank, like he’d schooled all of the emotion right out of his face.
She could not tell how old he was. His face was completely unlined, yet his hair was perfectly silver, and something about him seemed old indeed.
His eyes were the most alarming thing about him; his irises were too large, far too large, and his pupils were square—rather, they were rectangular, like a goat’s. They were blue, and the whites of
his eyes, too, were not truly white but a pale blue themselves, like the sky after a hard rain.
“Your eyes,” she said.
He startled then. “My eyes?” he said, as if there was nothing odd about them at all.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She knew, at that moment, that she’d made a terrible mistake.
She’d followed a pair of Maziks.
That was the only explanation. She tried to remember if her grandmother had ever told her what to do if she ever met a Mazik, but no one sensible actually believed in Maziks, and she’d never been particularly interested in fairy stories. She liked reading her grandfather’s books better, of philosophy and law and mathematics, and they never gave the rules for making conversation with inhuman spirits. Never trust a man you meet under a full moon; that was what her grandmother used to say
when Toba was small, but that was the extent of what she’d told her about such creatures.
But these Maziks had saved her life. Even if Toba wasn’t sure that had been precisely intentional.
“How did you come to be here?” the Mazik demanded.
“I… I followed you.”
“Through the gate?”
“The gate?” she breathed.
He exchanged a glance with the second Mazik, who had come to stand nearby. His hair was dark—glossy black, darker even than Toba’s—but his eyes were even odder, not only square, but the gold of a sunset. Unlike his companion, however, his face was not blank. It was bemused. “Well,” he told the first Mazik. “This is a problem.”
The first Mazik turned away.
“What do you suggest we do with her?” the dark-haired Mazik called after him.
Toba shivered. That wasn’t promising at all. But he didn’t sound particularly homicidal. He seemed more annoyed than anything.
“Judge for yourself,” the first Mazik said, slipping the satchel off his shoulder and handing it to his companion. “I have things to do.” And he walked away from them, head held high, hair shining in the too-bright light.
“Judge for myself,” the second muttered, adjusting the satchel to hang behind his back. “How very helpful.” Toba could not say why she felt that he was the younger of the pair, but it was a strong impression. Turning to Toba, he said, “I don’t suppose you’d be decent enough not to bleed on me if I cut off your head?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I’ll make it a point to bleed out all over your lovely boots. It will be horrible. Gore, everywhere.”
He sighed. Under the rising sun, the charcoal of his clothes was fading away to a green the color of a peacock’s tail, and he patted his sleeves as if hoping to expedite the change. “Of course,” he muttered. “And then I’d be left to deal with your oozing corpse.” He started walking. When Toba failed to follow, he called back, “Are you coming?”
The silver-haired Mazik was out of view, leaving only the darker man behind, before Toba could reply. “Why should I follow you? You’ve just considered killing me.”
“I didn’t kill you,” he said. “Are you hoping for a better offer? Because you won’t get one. You can’t go back through the gate, not until the next moon. And if you go wandering around by yourself, someone will cut your head off, whether you threaten to bleed on his boots or not.”
Toba pondered this. “I see,” she said.
“I’m so glad you understand,” he said, “let’s get started.”
“No,” she told his retreating back. “I mean, I understand that you want me to go with you because you’re worried I’ll be caught by someone else, and that person might find out I followed you, and
there must be some penalty for that.”
He stopped walking and cast an eye over his shoulder. “If I were so worried about that, why wouldn’t I have killed you in the first place?”
“What is in your satchel?”
“Amusing girl,” the Mazik said, turning to face her. “That isn’t any of your business.”
She planted her feet and said, “Is it heads?”
The Mazik stared at her. Finally, he said, “Did you just ask me if I’m carrying a parcel of severed heads?”
“Yes,” she said. “Or fingers. Or toes. Or ears, I don’t know.”
“You have the most ghastly imagination. Where did you come from?”
“I want to know what sort of man you are before I follow you home,” she said. “What were you doing before, on the other side of the gate?”
“You think we were collecting trophies?” He held up the satchel with one hand. “You’ll note there’s no blood.”
“I think you’re perfectly capable of creating a satchel—”
“That would not leak viscera. I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. Fine. Feast your eyes, then.” He reached into the bag and pulled out the contents. “Are you satisfied?”
It was a book, very old; from this distance, she could not read the full title, but she caught the word history. She held out her hands for it.
“Oh,” he said, “I think not.” He slid the book back into the bag. “Not that you could likely read it. Now, can we go before someone else comes upon this ridiculous discussion and ends us both?”
Toba considered a moment: it seemed to her that a Mazik with a sack of books was probably less dangerous than one without. “Fine,” she said, before adding, “I can read it. I can read five languages.”
Here the outer edge of the Mazik’s eyebrow lifted slightly, before he turned and continued on, leaving Toba scrambling to keep up. They crested the hill, and below them was a city.
It did not sit in the valley, as Rimon did, but in the hills above—a white terraced city that caught the light of the sun and mirrored it back, forcing Toba to shade her eyes. “Are we going there?” she asked.
“No. Adon Asmel doesn’t live in the city.” He grasped her by the shoulders and turned her forty-five degrees in in the other direction. His hands, through her dress, were like flames, and she flinched. “We’re going there.”
In the distance, there was a white-stone alcalá and two towers spanning either edge of the front wall, but unmarked by any sort of banner. It was difficult to make out from the distance, but the sides
seemed to come out at odd angles, and Toba suspected that from a bird’s perspective it would show itself to have six sides. There seemed to be nothing else in the area; no estates, no other buildings
at all.
Toba turned back to the city. It was small, she thought, smaller than Rimon, and sat on the hillside, like a terraced garden, while the valley below was strangely empty. Her eye drew a boundary around
the town, following the crenulated wall that demarked the edge of the city. She counted four gates, which seemed to correspond to the cardinal directions. The road they were on would lead, eventually, to the gate at the southern entrance.
“When we arrive,” she said, once his hands were no longer on her shoulders, “what will happen?”
“Well,” he said airily, “I suppose I shall have to find something useful for you to do.”
The Pomegranate Gate is due for release 20th July from Solaris. You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org