by neetha Napew
'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 of 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 utilized 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 authorities 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.
XIX
Oldorando
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, Alam 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.
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 wild 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 around. 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, rejoicing 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 direction
s.
'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.'
