Harry Cavendish (17 page)

Mrs. Bellingham was in the Cramptonian half, bewildered. She needed to get to the Emperor to blow him up. She had wanted to do it at the presentation ceremony, or when he was about to cut her head off, but if the match were abandoned and he lay on the pitch playing with the spandrill any longer, she would not have her opportunity. The situation called for decisive action.

She mounted her pony and set off to where the Emperor lay.

‘Emperor,’ she said when she reached him. ‘Sad, mad Emperor. I’m talking to you.’

The Emperor looked up, towards the red, where the voice came from.

‘Emperor,’ she said again. ‘I have come here to kill you.’

He saw her as mauve, flat and matt amongst the vibrancies, a dullness, without sheen. Standing still too long - an oppression.

She threw herself on him, as though she were belly flopping to a mattress, and smothered him and the spandrill too. Then when she had him covered, she began a frantic scrambling with her fingers on the handle of the mallet, trying to get the hidden compartment open so she could smash the phial. As she had dived, the crowd had risen, and the referee, panicked into action and blowing his whistle furiously, was racing down the pitch, the teams in pursuit. It would have to be done quickly. She could feel the spandrill beneath her, feebly making efforts to burrow its way out, and the Emperor roaring and trying to throw her off, and she couldn’t get the compartment open.

At last, her thumb connected with the right place, and she pressed against the phial, pushing it hard. It crushed beneath her finger, shards of glass stuck her, and she felt a heat as the balm mixed with the air.

She braced for the explosion. But nothing came.

She washed it about some more, and took it to her lips to blow on it, and there was a pop and spark from the casing, and then, milliseconds later, an explosion that cracked through the stadium with a shower of flame and a great shaft of smoke, and bits of Mrs. Bellingham and bits of the Emperor and bits of the tiny spandrill sprayed up into the air in a bloody arc, as though they were fired from a wood-chipper, raining down gore on the crowd closest to the goal.

The Shamanic Throat was still at camp, preparations for his removal not yet having been completed, and nothing could be packed up and put away, but there was an end of term feeling in Shambalah all the same.

The cow was frolicking carelessly in the long grass to the west of the glade, near to the tent that contained the Throat himself.

He had issued his pronouncement that morning in a small ceremony that was attended only by Bernard and Proton. The cow had seen them emerge together, hand in hand, but Proton had been looking puzzled, and they were muttering to each other.

Now she saw them again, and the Sibyl stopped to search within his caftan, and found a scroll he had hidden there.

‘I think the Throat wanted me to give you this,’ he said within earshot of the cow, handing it to Proton.

‘Was that really the Shamanic Throat we saw this morning?’ said Proton.

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

‘He’s a frog, Bernard.’

‘Not a frog at all.’

‘He is a frog, Bernard.’

‘The thing you see as a frog is merely a manifestation of his shamanic familiar. He is invisible.’

‘And he didn’t talk. He didn’t even croak.’

‘No, but we have a well worked out system of blinks and winks and silent gesturing. It’s all thoroughly documented in the Ancient Texts.’

‘I don’t remember anything like that in the Ancient Texts, Bernard.’

‘Not all the Texts are accessible to the layman, Captain. The Candidate has been endorsed. The Throat is pleased. Let us move on.’

‘The credibility of my boy is dependant on the credibility of the Shamanic Throat, Bernard. I can’t accept that the Shamanic Throat is just a common or garden frog.’

‘He’s certainly not common or garden. I can vouch for that.’

‘Just what kind of a monkey nuts operation are you running here, Bernard?’ continued Proton louder, and they moved back to the main encampment beyond the earshot of the cow.

Cormack was getting ready for the march to Kabbal and sought out her counsel.

‘Oooo, I saw Stanton Bosch last night, Cormack,’ she said. ‘I did mean to tell you.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes, he’s alive.’

‘Well, that is good news. I wonder how on Earth he survived.’

‘He wanted me to give you this.’

The cow bent herself over and pulled a long, thin tube out of her that looked like the kind of stick that athletes use in a relay.

‘What is that?’ said Cormack.

‘A communication device. Keep it about you. He’ll be calling you when we get to Kabbal.’

The death of the Emperor was all over the uniSwarm, all over all the channels, all over everywhere.

Nothing quite so sensational had happened in the Universe for a good long time – not since his father had poisoned the Senate and laid the blame on his aunt and had her disembowelled over the course of a week by Proctors using razor wire threaded on a mangle.

Mrs. Bellingham’s final belly flop, his blowing up, the chaotic scenes that followed, were all endlessly replayed on the media outlets. Conspiracy theories were expounded; political scientists were inveighed; the resulting power vacuum was analysed beyond anybody’s capacity to take it all in.

In short, the Empire, just as Mrs. Bellingham had planned, was in chaos.

The hive-mind was picked up piece by piece and there was an attempt to reassemble it, which was compromised when the nano-bots, finally released from the confines of their box, all ran away at once.

Nothing could be salvaged. Mrs. Bellingham’s duct was found, inert, in the front row of the main stand.

Then it was discovered the Emperor had not been properly backed up, too much reliance having been placed by the technicians responsible on a hive-mind that had proved itself dangerously unreliable. So it really was sayonara for the lot of them.

The Senate wished to announce a new Emperor immediately, but the obvious candidate, the Emperor’s eldest son, was dithering. Frightened of assassination, he had gone into hiding by closing his eyes tightly in a loft on a Pleasure World, and they played along, politically, by pretending their search drones couldn’t see him.

There were numerous other pretenders, but none could gain sufficient support from the Senate, and there was nothing to be done except to wait it out until a consensus could be formed around a new candidate that might be acceptable to a majority.

The Opikarp, himself, had initially expressed a wish to be nominated. But support for an Emperor confined to a fish tank was not likely to be overwhelming, and he had eventually decided to withdraw his candidacy and perhaps try another time, when the new Emperor was killed, he supposed, which would surely happen quickly. The long, stable periods of Imperial Rule represented by the Emperor and his father were now over for good, he was sure - unsustainable periods of quietude in a Universe of flux.

In any case, he was under arrest, which in his case meant little change in his living conditions, his tank still being surrounded by armed guards much as it was before, only now their guns were pointed at him. He was accused of complicity in the assassination of the Emperor – a charge, given the circumstances, it was proving hard to deny. He had already fingered Traction, and Traction was likely being tortured, but the fact that Mrs. Bellingham had managed to get to the Emperor with a loaded mallet, and the fact that she was on Zargon 8 with the connivance of the Opikarp, and the fact that the Emperor and the hive-mind were not around to support his alibis, made the Opikarp’s position very dangerous.

Still, he thrived on danger, he thought. It surrounded his fish tank, corrupted his fish weed, and made his fish food piquant. He would survive this latest calumny.

His only thought was to turn it to his advantage.

Cormack, the cow, the Sibyl and Proton reached Kabbal a little before nightfall. It had not been a difficult journey - the Sibyl’s estimate of a day was, after his manner, conservative - because they had fashioned a little sled for the cow from two bamboo branches that they pulled with thick vines they had found in the forest so they could walk apace.

All the same, they were exhausted when they came upon the little settlement of a few hundred huts.

The huts were circular, with straw roofing, and constructed from wattle and daub. Smoke rose from their high chimneys, and, as they passed, they could see great fires roaring within, and women cooking, boiling stews in black iron cauldrons. Outside, ragged children, caked in mud, played with skinny dogs, and skipped in front of them as they walked down the narrow streets.

They came across a storehouse, a granary, and several workshops, with smiths inside wearing leather aprons and hammering at red hot irons. Pleasing smells of freshly cooked breads and pastries announced a bakery, and there was a butcher’s, and a smokehouse, close to the slurries that ran to cesspits.

There, they found a leatherworker, lifting a pelt to carry to his liming pit. He was clothed from head to foot in dirty bandages so that he looked leprous and ruined. And there was an inn, empty save mine host.

Everywhere they were greeted with scowls and sneers and nobody was happy to see them.

Proton had them walk right across the town, and then, when he realized he had gone too far, and the village was gone and the jungle was around him, he started to lead them back in again.

‘Are we going anywhere in particular?’ asked Cormack.

‘Searching for signs of civilization, Cormack,’ he said resignedly.

They marched around the huts again, kicking at the piles of offal raked in untidy heaps.

‘Well, I’m going to have to leave you here,’ said Bernard, sounding like he had had enough. ‘My work is done.’

‘Really?’ said Proton. ‘You’re off now?’

‘Yes, I need to be heading back.’

‘Regards to the Shamanic Throat.’

‘Of course.’

The Sibyl, glorious in his multi-coloured caftan, sloped off back down the path and with a last languorous wave was lost into the dark of the forest.

‘Right,’ said Proton, looking bereaved. ‘These people must have a leader or something, mustn’t they?

Mustn’t they? They’re so…disappointing…’

‘I expect there’s a Village Chieftain,’ said Cormack brightly.

‘Yes, a Village Chieftain. That might do,’ said Proton.

He accosted a bearded individual who was staring in disbelief at the cow.

‘Excuse me, young sir,’ he said. ‘Could you take me to your Village Chieftain?’

‘Over there,’ said the man, pointing to a large hut they had passed by earlier.

It was centrally located, another wattle and daub construction built around an enormous stone chimney, square like a turret, from which beams were hung like umbrella spindles to form a frame for its thatch of straw.

The floor was of baked mud and the man who stood on it, according with the prevailing sentiment within the village, was not pleased to see them.

‘Full up!’ he cried. ‘You’ll have to clear your own spot in the forest. Here!’

He tossed them an axe that Proton caught deftly by the handle.

‘We’re not staying actually,’ said Proton.

‘Good.’

‘No. We’re mobilizing.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I bring you the Negus! Cormack, stand up straight!’

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’

‘You know, that’s what I was thinking…’ said Cormack.

‘The Negus!’ said Proton, with some distaste. ‘Not yet come to terms with his new position. Do stand up straight, Cormack! This is important!’

The Village Elder looked Proton up and down.

‘I suggest you take the axe and clear yourself a spot in the forest. You can sleep there tonight. We’ll see that you are unharmed. You can leave in the morning.’

‘No, no, no!’

‘See, we don’t take too kindly to people that come here and make jokes at our expense.’

‘No, no! You have us wrong. This is no joke. This is the Negus. He’s certified by the Shamanic Throat.

See.’ Proton took Bernard’s scroll from his coat and showed it to the Elder. ‘We’re here to mobilize you.’

The Elder was reluctant to accept the scroll, but he eventually took it, opened it, and read it punctiliously, from top to bottom twice.

‘It looks authentic,’ he said at last.

‘It is authentic.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘From the Shamanic Throat. Look, Bernard…’ said Proton, forgetting that Bernard had already left.

‘Damn!’

‘Well, the procedure is very straightforward with any claimants like this,’ said the Elder.

‘I’ve gone from being a candidate to being a claimant,’ said Cormack.

‘We have to send it for verification to Shambalah.’

‘The Throat is packing up. He’ll be gone by the time you get there.’

‘Can’t be too careful,’ said the Elder. ‘So many phonies pass this way.’

Proton stayed, arguing with the Elder, whose name was Dennis, for a quarter-hour or so, but even he had to admit defeat in the face of such stolid opposition, and they repaired across town to cut a bed in the trees.

‘It would help if you could perform a miracle or something,’ he said to Cormack.

‘I’ve already told you, I’m not capable of any miracles.’

‘It’s so disappointing, your general unwillingness to help out in situations like this. It’s dangerous to get these people’s backs up, you know. We’ve been through so much together, Cormack. Why won’t you help me?’

‘I’m not the Negus, Proton.’

‘C’mon on, mate!’ said Proton. ‘So, who the hell was it who performed the Three Ordeals then?’

Cormack felt a tingle in his leg. It was the relay stick given him by the cow, vibrating to let him know that Stanton Bosch was on the line.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Proton, ‘Need to pee.’

He walked a little further into the forest until he was hidden from view.

‘Yo there, skinny man!’ said Stanton Bosch on the phone. ‘How are you doing?’