Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (130 page)

Skrumppabowr’s next move was to repair the damage done by war to irrigation terraces and to villages in the southeast. To this end, he encouraged ancipitals to come in to Kace from Randonan, Quain, and Oldorando. In exchange for their labour, he guaranteed the phagors freedom from the drumbles racking Oldorando. Being heathen, the Kaci clans saw no reason to persecute the phagors as long as they behaved themselves and never looked at Kaci women.

JandolAnganol heard of these events with pleasure. They confirmed his sense of himself as a diplomat. The Takers were less pleased. The Takers were the militants of the Holy Pannovalan Empire, with highly placed connections within the See of Pannoval itself. Kilandar IX, so it was rumoured, had been a Taker himself in his young days.

A mounted arm of Takers, striking out from Oldorando City, made a daring raid on Akace, the squalid mountain settlement which served as a capital, and slaughtered over a thousand newly arrived phagors overnight, together with a few Kaci.

This success proved less than a victory. On their way home, the Takers, rendered careless by the outcome of their raid, were ambushed by Lord Skrumppabowr’s clans and slaughtered in their turn, many in sadistic ways. Only one Taker returned to Oldorando, more dead than alive, to tell the tale. A thin bamboo rod had been driven through his body from his anus; the sharp end protruded from behind the clavicle of his right shoulder. He had been staked.

Reports of this outrage reached King Sayren Stund. He declared a holy war on the barbarians and set a price on Skrumppabowr’s head. Blood had since been spilt on both sides, but mainly on the Oldorandan side. At the present time, half the Oldorandan army – in which no phagors were allowed to serve – was away making forced marches among the wilderness of shoatapraxi which abounded on Kace hillsides.

The king soon lost interest in the struggle. After the murder of his elder daughter, Simoda Tal, he retreated into the confines of his palace and was rarely seen. He bestirred himself when he heard of JandolAnganol’s approach, but then only at the concerted prompting of his advisors, his Madi queen, and his surviving daughter, Milua Tal.

‘How are we to amuse this great king, Sayren, sweetest?’ asked Queen Bathkaarnet-she, in her singing voice. ‘I am such a poor thing, a flower, and I am lame. A limp flower. Will you wish me to sing my songs of the Journey to him?’

‘I don’t care for the man, personally. He’s without culture,’ said her husband. ‘Jandol will bring his phagor guard, since he can’t afford to pay real soldiers. If we must endure the pestilential things in our capital, perhaps they’ll amuse us with their animal antics.’

Oldorando’s climate was hot and enervating. The eruption of Mount Rustyjonnik had opened up a chain of volcanic activity. A sulphurous pall often hung over the land. The flags which the king ordered to be put out to greet his Borlienese cousin hung limp in the airless atmosphere.

As for the King of Borlien, impatient energy possessed him. The march from Gravabagalinien had taken the best part of a tenner, first over the loess farmlands, then across wilder country. No pace was rapid enough for JandolAnganol. Only the First Phagorian made no complaint.

Bad news continued to reach the column. Crop failure and famine were everywhere in his kingdom; evidence of that lay all round. The Second Army was not merely defeated: it was never going to reemerge from the jungles of Randonan. Such few men as came back slunk to their own homes, swearing they would
never soldier again. The phagor battalions which had survived disappeared into the wilds.

From the capital, the news was no more encouraging. JandolAnganol’s ally, Archpriest BranzaBaginut, wrote that Matrassyl was in a state of ferment, with the barons threatening to take over and rule in the name of the scritina. It behoved the king to act positively, and as soon as possible.

He enjoyed being on the move, delighted in living off what game there was, rejoiced in the evening bivouac, and even tolerated days of brilliant sunshine, away from the coastal monsoons. It was as if he took pleasure from the ferment of emotions that filled him. His face became leaner, tenser, his waywardness more marked.

Alam Esomberr felt less enthusiastic. Brought up in his father’s house in the subterranean recesses of Pannoval, he was unhappy in the open and mutinous about the forced pace. The dandified envoy of the Holy C’Sarr called a halt at last, knowing he had the support of his weary retinue.

It was dimday, when fat, brilliant flowers opened among the lustreless grasses, inviting the attention of dusk-moths. A bird called, hammering at its two notes.

They had left the loess farmlands behind and were traversing a farmless moor which supported few villages. For shade, the envoy’s party retreated under an enormous denniss tree, whose leaves sighed in the breeze. The denniss sprouted many trunks, some young, some ancient, which propped themselves up languidly – like Esomberr himself – with gnarled elbows as they sprawled on the ground in all directions.

‘What can drive you like this, Jandol?’ Esomberr asked. ‘What are we hurrying for, except for hurrying’s abominable sake? To put it another way, what fate awaits you in Oldorando better than the one you revoked in Gravabagalinien?’

He eased his legs and looked up with his amused glance into the king’s countenance.

JandolAnganol squatted nearby, balancing on his toes. A faint smell of smoke came to his nostrils, and he searched the distance for its origin. He threw small pebbles at the earth.

A group of the king’s captains, the Royal Armourer, and others
leant on their staffs, a short distance away. Some smoked veronikanes, one teased Yuli, prodding the creature with his staff.

‘We must reach Oldorando as soon as possible.’ He spoke as one who wants no argument, but Esomberr persisted.

‘I’m eager to see that somewhat squalid city myself, if only to soak for a few millennia in one of their famous hot springs. That doesn’t mean I’m anxious to
run
all the way there. You’re a changed man since your Pannoval days, Jandol – not quite such fun, if I may say so …’

The king threw his pebbles more violently. ‘Borlien needs an alliance with Sayren Stund. That deuteroscopist who presented me with my three-faced timepiece, Bardol CaraBansity, said I had no business in Oldorando. A conviction seized me at that moment that I had to go there. My father supported me. His dying words to me were – as he lay dying in my arms—“Go to Oldorando.” Since that fool TolramKetinet allowed his army to be wiped out, I can only seek union with Oldorando. The fates of Borlien and Oldorando have always been linked.’ He flung down a final stone with violence, as if to destroy all argument.

Esomberr said nothing. He plucked a grass blade to suck, suddenly self-conscious under the king’s stare.

After a moment, JandolAnganol jumped up, to stand with his feet planted apart.

‘Here stand I. While I press upon the earth, the energies of the earth surge up through my body. I am of the Borlienese soil. I am a natural force.’

He raised his arms, fingers tensed.

The phagors, armed with their matchlocks, lay about at a short distance, like shapeless cattle, looking over the plain. Some rooted under stone and found grubs or rickybacks, which they ate. Others stood without movement beyond the occasional swing of the head or a flick of the ears to ward off flies. Winged things buzzed in the shade. Made uneasy, Esomberr sat up.

‘I don’t understand what you mean, but do enjoy yourself.’ His voice was dry.

The king scrutinised the horizon as he spoke. ‘An example for you, so that you understand well the kind of man I am. Although I may have rejected my Queen MyrdemInggala for whatever
reason, nevertheless she remains mine. If I discovered that you, for instance, had dared to enter her bedchamber to consort with her while we were in Gravabagalinien, then, notwithstanding our friendship, I would kill you without compunction, and hang your eddre from this tree.’

Neither of them moved. Then Esomberr rose and stood with his back to one of the trunks of the denniss. His narrow handsome face had grown as pale as a dead leaf.

‘I say, did it ever occur to you that those damned phagors of yours, well armed with Sibornalese weapons, strike fear into ordinary chaps like me? That they will most likely meet with an ill reception in Sayren Stund’s capital, where a holy drumble is in progress? Are you ever afraid that you might … well, grow to be a bit like a phagor yourself?’

The king turned slowly, with an expression denoting total lack of interest in the question.

‘Watch.’

He screwed his face into a mixture of grimace and smile, and snorted breath through his nose. He broke into a run, gathered himself, and leaped clear over one of the trunks of the tree, a full four feet above the ground. It was a perfect jump. He recovered himself, turned, and jumped the trunk in the opposite direction, with a force which carried him almost against Esomberr.

The king was half a head taller than the envoy. The latter, alarmed, reached for his sword, then stood without movement, tense against the king.

‘I am twenty-five years of age, in fine condition, and fear neither man nor phagor. My secret is that I am capable of going with circumstances. Oldorando shall be my circumstance. I gain energy from the geometry of circumstance … Do not vex me, Alam Esomberr, or forget my words about the sanctity of what was once mine. I am one of your circumstances, and not vice versa.’

The envoy moved to one side, coughed as a reason for moving his hand from his sword hilt to his mouth, and managed a pale smile.

‘You’re terribly fit, I see that. That’s tremendous. By the beholder, but I envy you. It’s a wretched nuisance that I and my
little rabble of vicars aren’t in such fine trim. I’ve often thought that praying vitiates the muscles. Therefore, I must request that you proceed ahead with your party and your favoured species – at your breakneck pace – while we follow on behind at our own feeble pace, eh?’

JandolAnganol regarded him without change of expression. Then he gave a fierce grimace. ‘Very well. The country hereabouts is peaceful, but guard yourselves. Robbers have scant respect for vicars. Remember you carry my bill of divorcement.’

‘Strive ever onwards, if you will. I shall deliver your bill to the C’Sarr in good time.’ He gave a wave of his hand and left it dangling in front of him. The king did not take it.

Instead, JandolAnganol turned away without further word and whistled Yuli to his side. He called the gillot leader of the guard, Ghht-Mlark Chzarn. The ahuman columns formed up and marched away; the humans followed more informally. In a short while, Alam Esomberr, together with his followers, was left standing silent under the denniss tree. Then the figures were lost to JandolAnganol amid the shade. Soon the great tree itself was lost in the shimmering heat of the plain.

Two days later, the king halted his force only a few miles short of Oldorando. Wisps of smoke trailed across the rolling landscape.

He stood by one of the aged stone pillars which dotted the landscape. Impatient for the rear of the phagor column to catch up, JandolAnganol traced with one finger the worn design on the stone, a familiar pattern of two concentric circles with curving lines running from inner to outer circle. Just for a moment, he wondered what the pillar and its pattern could signify; but such enigmas – presumably never capable of resolution, any more than he expected to be told what long-dead king had erected the stones – occupied his mind only for a moment. His thoughts were all on what lay immediately ahead.

They had reached a region which was in fact a hinterland of the fabled city they were approaching.

Of that city, there was as yet no sign. The view comprised low rolling hills, the foothills of the foothills of the Quzint Mountains, running like an armoured spine over the continent. Ahead,
sprawling across the ground, was one of the ucts, threading its way into the distance on either side.

The uct here formed a tawny rather than a green line, comprising few large trees but many bushes and cyclads, entwined by gaudy mantle flowers, the seeds of which migrant tribes chewed as they progressed.

No road was as wide as this uct. Unlike a road, however, it was not to be travelled by humans. Despite the depredations of arang and fhlebiht, it had become impenetrable. The Madi tribes with their animals travelled along its edge. There, scattering seeds and droppings, the protognostics unthinkingly widened the uct. Year by year it spread, becoming a strip of forest.

Not that the strip was regular. Alien growths like shoatapraxi, introduced as burrs on the coats of animals, had prospered in places where they could take advantage of favourable soil conditions, and spread in thickets. The Madi skirted the new thickets, or else plunged through them leaving a trail later obliterated by further waves of aliens.

What was incidental became established. The uct served as a barrier. Butterflies and small animals found on one side of the barrier were not to be seen on the other. There were birds and rodents and a deadly golden snake which kept to the shelter of the uct and never ventured beyond its confines as they spread across the continent. Several kinds of Others lived their pranksome lives out in the uct.

Humans, too, recognised the existence of the uct by using it as a frontier. This uct marked the frontier between Northern Borlien and the land of Oldorando.

And that frontier was on fire.

A lava flow from a newly erupting volcano had set the uct ablaze. It had begun to burn along its length like a fusee.