Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (129 page)

‘Please make this brief, or the man will burst in upon us at this table,’ said CaraBansity. ‘We take it that you’re as great an orator as you are a general.’

Frowning, TolramKetinet said that Pasharatid would decide that two ships could never take Ottassol. His best plan would be to capture the queen and thus force Ottassol to submit to his demands. They should anticipate that Pasharatid would land somewhere to the east of Gravabagalinien, wherever a favourable beach presented itself. He would then march on Gravabagalinien with his men. He, TolramKetinet (who struck his chest as he spoke), declared that they must immediately muster their defences against this anticipated land attack. The queen’s person was safe in his keeping.

After a general discussion, the queen issued orders. As she spoke, rain started to drip down on the table. ‘Since water is my element, I cannot complain if the roof leaks,’ she said.

MyrdemInggala advised that defences should be built along the perimeters of the palace grounds and that the general should
draw up an inventory of all weapons and warlike impedimenta available, not forgetting the armoury of the
Vajabhar Prayer
.

Turning to SartoriIrvrash, she ordered him and Odi Jeseratabhar to depart from the palace at once. They might have three hoxneys from the stables.

‘You are kind, ma’am,’ said SartoriIrvrash, although the expression on his volelike face suggested he thought otherwise. ‘But can you spare us?’

‘I can if your companion is fit to ride.’

‘I don’t think she is fit.’

‘Rushven, I can spare you as Jan could spare you. You advised him on the plan of divorcement, didn’t you? As for your new consort, I understand that she is or was a close friend of the villainous Io Pasharatid.’

He was taken aback. ‘My lady, there was much botheration … Many questions of policy were involved. I was paid to support the king.’

‘You used to claim that you supported the truth.’

He searched his charfrul absentmindedly, as if looking for a veronikane, then settled for rubbing his whiskers instead.

‘Sometimes the two roles coincided. I know that your kind heart and the king’s spoke for the phagors in our kingdom. Yet they are the chief cause of all human troubles. In summer, we have the opportunity to rid ourselves of them when their numbers are low. Yet summer is the time we squabble among ourselves and are least capable of seeing them as our ultimate enemy. Believe me, ma’am, I have studied such histories as
Brakst’s Thribriatiad
, and have learned—’

She looked at him not unfavourably, but now held up her hand.

‘Rushven, no more! We were friends, but our lives have changed. Go in peace.’

Unexpectedly, he ran round the table and clasped her hand.

‘We’ll go, we’ll go! After all, I’m used to cruel treatment. But grant one request before we leave … With Odi’s assistance, I have discovered something of vital importance to us all. We shall go on to Oldorando, and present this discovery to the Holy
C’Sarr, in the hopes that it may merit reward. It will also discountenance your ex-husband, you may be pleased to hear—’

‘What is your request?’ she broke in angrily. ‘Be finished, will you? We have more important business.’

‘The request has to do with the discovery, ma’am. When we were all safe at the palace at Matrassyl, I used to read to your infant daughter. Little you care for that now. I remember the charming storybook that Tatro possessed. Will you permit me to take that storybook with me to Oldorando?’

MyrdemInggala stifled something between a laugh and a scream. ‘Here we try to prepare for a land attack and you wish to have a child’s book of fairy tales! By all means take the book as far as I’m concerned – then be off the premises, and take that ceaseless tongue of yours with you!’

He kissed her hand. As he backed to the door, Odi beside him, he gave a sly smile and said, ‘The rain is stopping. Fear not, we shall soon be away from this inhospitable refuge.’

The queen hurled a candlestick after his retreating back.

To one side of the palace was an extensive garden, where herbs and fruit bushes grew. In the garden was an enclosure within which pigs, goats, chickens, and geese were kept. Beyond this enclosure stood a line of gnarled trees. Beyond the trees lay a low earthworks, grass-covered, which encircled marshy ground to the east – the direction from which Pasharatid’s force would come if it did come.

After a businesslike survey of the ground, TolramKetinet and Lanstatet decided they must use this old line of defence.

They had considered evacuating Gravabagalinien by ship. But the
Prayer
had been inexpertly moored. During the storm, it suffered damage and could hardly be considered seaworthy.

Everything of value was unloaded from the ship. Some of its higher timbers were utilised to make a watchtower in the stoutest tree.

As the ground dried off after the storm, some of the phagors were employed to build a defensive breastwork along the top of the earthworks. Others were deployed to dig trenches nearby.

This was the scene of activity which met SartoriIrvrash and Odi Jeseratabhar as they left the settlement. They travelled one
behind the other on hoxneys, with a third animal trailing, carrying their baggage. They saw CaraBansity supervising the digging of fortifications, and SartoriIrvrash halted.

‘I must bid farewell to my old friend,’ he said as he dismounted.

‘Don’t be long,’ Odi warned. ‘You have no friends here because of me.’

He nodded and walked over to the deuteroscopist, squaring his shoulders.

CaraBansity was working in a patch of marshy ground with some labouring ancipitals. When he looked up and saw SartoriIrvrash, his heavy face went dark, then, as if forced to it by the pressure of excitement, burst into a smile. He beckoned SartoriIrvrash over.

‘Here’s the past … these earthworks form part of an ancient fortification system. The phagors are uncovering the geometries of legend made flesh …’

He walked over to a newly dug pit. SartoriIrvrash followed. CaraBansity knelt at the edge of the pit, heedless of squelching mud. An arm’s length below the turf, emerging from the peaty soil, lay what SartoriIrvrash took at first to be an old black bag, pressed flat. It was or it had been a man. His body lay sprawled on its left side. Short leather tunic and boots suggested that the man had been a soldier. Half-concealed beneath his flattened form lay the hilt of a sword. The man’s profile, mouth distorted by broken teeth, had been moulded by earth’s pressure into a macabre smile. The flesh was a rich shining brown.

Other bodies were being uncovered. The phagors worked without interest, scratching the mud away with their fingers. From the dirt, another mummified soldier appeared, a fearful wound in his chest. The creases of his face were clear, as if in a pencil sketch. His eyeballs had collapsed, giving his expression a melancholy vacancy.

The cellar smell of soil bit into their nostrils.

‘The peaty earth has preserved them,’ said SartoriIrvrash. ‘They could be soldiers who died in battle, or similar botheration. They may be a hundred years old.’

‘Far more than that,’ said CaraBansity, jumping down into the trench. He scratched up one of a number of what SartoriIrvrash
had taken to be stones, and lifted it for examination. ‘This is probably what killed the fellow with the broken teeth. It’s a rajabaral tree seed, as hard as iron. It may have been baked, which is why it never germinated. It’s over six centuries since spring, when the rajabarals seeded. The attackers used the seeds as cannonballs. This is where the legendary battle of Gravabagalinien was fought. We find the site because we are about to use it again for battle.’

‘Poor devils!’

‘Them? Or us?’ He went to the rear corner of the excavation. Lying below the body of the man with the chest wound was a phagor, partly visible. Its face was black, its coat matted and reddened by the bog water, until it resembled a compressed vegetable growth. ‘You see how even then men and phagors fought and died together.’

SartoriIrvrash gave a snort of disgust. ‘They may equally well have been enemies. You’ve no evidence either way.’

‘Certainly it’s a bad omen. I wouldn’t want the queen to see these. Or TolramKetinet. He’s scumber himself. We’d better cover the bodies up.’

The ex-chancellor made to turn away. ‘Not all of us cover up the secrets we find, friend. I have knowledge in my possession which, when I lay it before the authorites of Pannoval, will start a Holy War against the ancipital kind throughout all Campannlat.’

CaraBansity looked calculatingly at him through his heavy bloodshot eyes. ‘And you’ll get paid for starting that war, eh? Live and let live, I say.’

‘Yes, you say it, Bardol, but these horned creatures don’t. Their creed is different. They will outbreed us and kill us unless we act. If you had seen for yourself the flambreg herds—’

‘Don’t fly into a passion. Passion always causes trouble … Now, we’ll get on with our job. There are probably hundreds of bodies lying under the earth about here.’

Folding his arms tightly about his chest, SartoriIrvrash said, ‘You give me a cold reception, just like the queen.’

CaraBansity climbed slowly out of the trench. ‘Her majesty gave you what you asked for, a book and three hoxneys.’ He stuck a knuckle between his teeth and stared at the ex-chancellor.

‘Why are you so against me, Bardol? Have you forgotten the time when, as young men, we looked through your telescope and observed the phases of Kaidaw as it sped above us? And from that deduced the cosmic geometries under which we exist?’

‘I don’t forget. You come here, though, with a Sibornalese officer, a dedicated enemy of Borlien. The queen is under threat of death and the kingdom of dissolution. I have no love of JandolAnganol or of phagors, yet I wish to see them continue, in order that people may still look through telescopes.

‘Overturn the kingdom, as both you and she would do, and you overturn the telescopes.’

He gazed through the trees towards the sea with a bitter expression, shrugging his shoulders.

‘You have witnessed how Keevasien, once a place of some culture, home of the great YarapRombry, has been carelessly erased. Culture may flourish better under old injustice than under new. That’s all I say.’

‘It’s a plea for your own way of life.’

‘I shall always fight for my own way of life. I believe in it. Even when it means fighting myself. Go, take that woman with you – and remember there’s always more than an arm up a Sibornalese sleeve.’

‘Why speak to me like this? I’m a victim. A wanderer – an exile. My life’s work’s ruined. I could have been the YarapRombry of my epoch … I’m innocent.’

CaraBansity shook his large head. ‘You’re of an age when innocence is a crime. Leave with your lady. Go and spread your poison.’

They regarded each other challengingly. SartoriIrvrash sighed, CaraBansity climbed back into his trench.

SartoriIrvrash walked back to where Odi Jeseratabhar waited with the animals. He mounted his hoxney without a word, tears in his eyes.

They took the trail leading northwards to Oldorando. JandolAnganol and his party had travelled that way only a few days earlier, on their way to the home of the king’s murdered bride-to-be.

The suns blazed down out of a cloudless sky, flattening the veldt with their combined light.

King JandolAnganol, Eagle of Borlien, enjoyed being in the wilderness again. His way of enjoyment was not every man’s. It consisted mainly of hard marches interspersed with short rests. This was not to the taste of the C’Sarr’s pleasure-loving envoy, Alan Esomberr.

The king and his force, with attendant ecclesiastics, approached Oldorando from the south along one of the old Pilgrim’s Ways, which led on through Oldorando to Holy Pannoval.

Oldorando stood at the crossroads of Campannlat. The migratory route of the phagors and the various ucts of the Madis ran east and west close by the city. The old salt road meandered north into the Quzints and Lake Dorzin. To the west lay Kace – slatternly Kace, home of cutthroats, craftsmen, vagabonds, and villains; to the south lay Borlien – friendly Borlien, home of more villains.

JandolAnganol was approaching a country at war, like his own, with barbarians. That war between Oldorando and Kace had broken out because of the ineffectiveness of King Sayren Stund as much as the nastiness of the Kaci.

Faced with the collapse of the Second Army, JandolAnganol had made what was widely regarded as a cowardly peace with the hill clans of Kace, sending them valuable tributes of grain and veronikane in order to seal the armistice.

To the Kaci, peace was relative; they were long accustomed to internecine struggles. They simply hung their crossbows on the back of the hut door and resumed their traditional occupations.
These included hunting, blood feuds, potting – they made excellent pottery which they traded with the Madi for rugs – stealing, mining precious stones, and goading their scrawny womenfolk into working harder. But the war with Borlien, sporadic though it had been, instilled in the clans a new sense of unity.

Failing by some chance to quarrel during their extensive victory celebrations – when JandolAnganol’s grain tribute was converted into something more potable – the leading clans of Kace accepted as their universal suzerain a powerful brute called Skrumppabowr. As a kind of goodwill gesture on his election, Skrumppabowr had all the Oldorandans living on Kaci land slaughtered, or ‘staked’ as the local term was.