The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

  It was worth considering. It was Tsolyani custom for a Prince or a newly enthroned Emperor to proclaim the existence of only some of his progeny. Others were sent away to be raised in secret by the temples, the high clans, and various important patrons, under the aegis of the Omnipotent Azure Legion. Lord Durugen had seen the documents; the Temple of Thumis had been granted one such Imperial stepchild. Now might be the time to play him, as a black counter is brought onto the board in the game of Den-den. Then there would be another Imperial Prince—a Prince devoted to Lord Thumis. The crop seemed ripe for cutting—no, overripe, after this morning’s merry fiasco—and Lord Durugen vowed to himself that the matter would be brought up just as soon as he could convene the other Adepts of the temple and bring the Grand Adept, Lord Gamulu, from his estate in distant Paya Gupa to Bey Sii and get him to agree.

  That would cut certain knots!

  Another minor matter prodded at the edge of his consciousness: the boy they had summoned to inspect the relics. The Lady Misenla had known of him! He must be guarded now, reinforced with another, more senior scholar, and watched. There would be danger for the young man, whoever he was—the temple’s scribes would have the details—and he should be warned.

  Or should he? After all, the youth was but a pawn, useful if he could reach Bey Sii and decipher the wretched Llyani relics. But he was quite expendable. There were others who could perform that task, though perhaps not as well. Prior Haringgashte had submitted very enthusiastic reports. The original plan had been to summon a scholar who would attract no attention, squeeze all useful information from the relics, and spirit them off quickly to some remote temple treasury. This was no longer feasible; half the Empire seemed to know the fellow was coming!

  Another possibility made Lord Durugen pause, and his entourage dutifully halted behind him. the young man might lure any who wanted trouble into the open, a juicy haunch of Hmelu-meat to snare the Zrne. The priests of both Ksarul and Sarku had been suspiciously silent throughout this morning’s proceedings. Lord Vimuhla’s people had also sat all too snugly upon their flame-orange dais. Whoever was not satisfied with Lord Muresh’ decision might attempt to alter it by various extraordinary methods. Much could be made of a captured spy; a breach of the Concordat and the culprits’ ensuing disgrace alone were worth a dozen young priests!

  Lord Durugen grumbled a ritual catechism to himself. The long staircase was hard on his legs, and the lappets of his heavy golden pectoral banged against his thighs. All of these matters required more information and study. For now, however, he must be satisfied with the thought that each laboured step brought him ever nearer to his midday cup of thick Chumetl. He pulled off his towering headdress, heedless of the breach of traditional propriety, and plodded on.

  Chapter Six

  From the Monastery of the Sapient Eye the Sakbe road wound south through familiar country. The rumpled green foothills of Do Chaka lay like old friends along the way on the right hand, the west, and the dun-coloured patchwork fields of ripening grain swept off to the horizon and beyond to mighty Bey Sii and the centre of the Empire on the left. This was the landscape Harsan knew well.

  The first two days produced the expected crop of aches and blisters, but thereafter Harsan found his muscles hardening and his body becoming road-wise. Farmers and women might ride in the agonisingly slow Chlen-catts, and the aristocracy sat high in palanquins borne by trotting slaves; aside from one’s feet these two were the only methods of transportation on Tekumel. Harsan needed neither. Being able to march at the same rate as the booted traders and hard-faced soldiers somehow exhilarated him. This was the first time he had really used his limbs in all the years since the Pe Choi had brought him to the monastery, and he began to luxuriate in the rhythmic cadences of walking.

  The Sakbe road thrust out before him like a triple-tongued blade of grey stone. Harsan perforce used the lowest level, a paved thoroughfare wide enough for fifteen men to march abreast. The eastern parapet stood a good two man-heights above the sunbaked fields below, while the western side was a solid wall that rose up to the next higher level, five handspans beyond Harsan’s tallest reach. The second level was narrower but smoother, and its western wall in turn ascended another spear-length up to the third and highest tier. The lowest roadway was used by anyone: merchants, peasants, work-gangs, caravans of slaves bearing the goods of the Empire, the great trundling Chlen-caits which creaked their leisurely way from city to city laden with heavier items, and common travellers such as Harsan. The middle level was reserved by custom—and by harsh Tsolyani law— for members of the aristocracy, troops, officials, and priests of the higher Circles. The uppermost level belonged to the great nobles, the highest clergy, and couriers upon the Emperor’s business.

  Every few Tsan these triple roadways were blocked by a squat guard tower. Many of these were dark and empty in these days of relative peace, used by sojourners as convenient places to unroll sleeping mats and spend the night. Some were occupied by detachments of blue-armoured soldiery. These paid but perfunctory attention to a lone, grey-robed priest, and after a bored glance at Harsan’s writ, they let him be off upon his way. It had not always been so. There, where the mist-wreathed peaks of the Inner Range actually lay within the borders of Mu’ugalavya, the outer parapet of the third and highest level, buttressed and embattled like a fortress, always faced to the west, a line of defensible fortifications stretching from north to south along the frontier of the Empire. There was no war now—and had not been for over three hundred years—but there were rumblings along the border and whispers of an alliance between the “Red-Hats” of Mu’ugalavya and Baron Aid of Yan Kor.

  At first he met few travellers. Most of these were peasants or townsmen, carrying goods on their backs or in Chlen-carts to some nearby market or fair. They saluted Harsan respectfully and held out a hand for him to touch in blessing. In these parts it was thought good luck to meet a priest of Thumis, or one of Thumis’ Cohort, Ketengku, the Patron of Physicians.

  On the second day he passed a tax collector, a thin-lipped old man, borne in a litter by ten slaves. This august personage ignored Harsan’s greeting, though some of his retinue of scribes, record-keepers, and guards called out jocular salutations. On the second day, also, two parties of merchants overtook Harsan, their heavily laden burden-slaves jogging along at a fast trot that he could only envy.

  On the third morning he encountered two cohorts of soldiers in blue-lacquered Chlen-hide armour. Some of these leaned down from the middle roadway to shout obscene but friendly greetings, and a junior officer, resplendent in helmet and breastplate, tossed down a small skin of Tumissan wine for good luck. These were troops on their way north to reinforce the Tsolyani forces on the Yan Koryani border near Khirgar.

  He even met a party of Pachi Lei. This was another of the eight friendly nonhuman species which shared Tekumel with humankind. Harsan had not been this close to one of these creatures before. They were pear-shaped, soft-skinned beings, greyish-green in hue, a hand taller than a man, with four curiously articulated lower limbs for locomotion and four more, longer upper limbs for swinging in the trees of the forests of the Pan Chakan Protectorate that lay to the south of Harsan’s own Do Chakan hills. The Pachi Lei wore little more than cross-belts of untanned hide, and their leader carried a thick, short spear tipped with a barb of white bone. Harsan stared at them, and they stared back from round, platter-sized eyes, greeting him pleasantly enough in oddly accented Tsolyani and chattering amongst themselves in their own burbling tongue.

  On the sixth day, footsore but nevertheless pleased with his growing stamina, Harsan reached Paya Gupa—not PA-ya Gu-PA, as the Tsolyani called it, wrongly accenting the last vowel, but PA-ya GU-pa. The name meant “Red Mountain” in the older dialect of Do Chaka, and thus it appeared: walls and towers of rufous sandstone heaped along the summit of a low hill spurring out of the Chakan forests. The houses behind the walls were whitewashed, tiled with reds and tans, and scattered like children’s blocks
around the summit upon which the palace of the local governor stood.

  Harsan’s writ obtained lodging at the temple of Thumis. The sect of the Master of Wisdom was very powerful here, and Lord Gamulu hiBeshyene, the Grand Adept of the Temple, made his summer headquarters in the old, grey shrine that clambered down the hill to the west.

  The Proctor of the Dormitories arranged for Harsan to continue on to Tumissa and thence to Bey Sii in the company of a party of merchants. This was in itself somewhat daunting, for the capital still lay over a thousand long Tsan away. Even though Harsan felt himself capable of making thirty to forty Tsan a day, he wondered if he could keep up.

  He need not have worried. Much of the cargo carried by the thirty-odd slaves of the little caravan consisted of fine pottery and the crimson crystal goblets and ewers of Mu’ugalavya. Mnesun hiArkuna, the chief of the party and owner of most of its merchandise, fussed over the packing of each reed basket and the balancing of every slave’s burden in the morning and then again over its unloading at night while the other merchants dawdled over their food and the tasks of the camp. They made little more than twenty-five Tsan a day. Harsan guessed that it would take seven days to reach Tumissa, one day more than if he had travelled alone. Yet he found the bustling routine comforting and the company of the others a reassurance.

  Besides Mnesun, squat and thick-set as a river Ghar-beast, there were six in the party, not counting the slaves. Two of these were twin brothers, Mu’ugalavyani, whose goods included rare earths, perfumes, and scented oils from distant Kheiris. The third, a Salarvyani named Bejjeksa, was a trader of much experience and self-proclaimed cunning. He was now returning home with bales of finely-figured cloth and chests of soapstone carvings, products of Livyanu, the land to the south of Mu’ugalavya. The next, Hele’a of Ghaton, brought wares concealed within stoppered jars. Of these he said nothing, nor did he speak much otherwise: a small, tight, hard, little man as grey as the seas of his northern homeland. The fifth man was Sa’araz, a Livyani who affected all the airs and niceties of that nation’s aristocracy, though none could actually attest to his antecedents. He had neither chests nor bales but carried whatever it was he sold in a worn leather wallet affixed to his belt with a stout chain of rare iron.

  The sixth member of the group was a nonhuman, a hulking reptilian Shen, native to the hot lands south of Livyanu, half a continent away. He traded in the flame opals of Pan Chaka and in garnets, commodities which the Shen knew were valued by humans and other races, but which they themselves held in no particular esteem. Although the Shen was friendly enough, his guttural name was unpronounceable—something between a hiss and a snarl. Harsan made do with calling him “companion,” which seemed to please the creature greatly.

  It was the afternoon of the seventh day before they saw Tumissa. Once the guardian of the western marches of the Tsolyani frontier, its ponderous bastions and serried battlements had seen no fighting since the two Protectorates, Do Chaka and Pan Chaka, had been wrested from Mu’ugalavya in the great war some three hundred years before. Harsan looked upon the looming rings of concentric walls inlaid with marching rows of serpentine glyphs in the old Classical Tsolyani script, the tier upon tier of red-tiled roofs, and the dizzy turrets of the prow-like fortress which crowned the city’s westernmost hill, and would have greatly liked to spend a few days here. Others in the monastery had had much praise for Tumissa: its goods and shops, its rich palaces and mansions, its great library of hoary fame, the image called “Thumis Ascending to the Sun,” carved long ago by Marya of Tsamra, and many other wonders. They had also spoken of entertainments and displays more to the tastes of a young man—and of pretty clan-girls and courtesans and a dozen things more. But Mnesun gruffly stated that the caravan would journey forth in the morning. Lodgings were arranged outside the walls in the clanhouse of the People of the White Pebble, a mercantile clan allied by both blood and marriage to Mnesun’s own Clan of the Green Reed.

  When the party gathered at dawn in the cramped courtyard to curse and coax the caravan’s slaves into wakefulness, Harsan discovered that another small group had been added.. A score of bearers and servitors in an unfamiliar clan livery stood stamping and yawning around a blue-curtained covered litter.

  “We are joined by a lady,” Mnesun announced to all within hearing, “one Eyil hiVriyen, of the Green Kirtle Clan of Tumissa, who is on her way to marry her clan-cousin in Bey Sti.”

  There was no sign of the occupant of the litter, and thus it remained for a six-day. The party now took the Sakbe road which branched off directly to the east, an endless three-step staircase, the highest level of which faced north towards hostile, distant Yan Kor. The foothills were left behind, dust storms lay ever along the flat horizon, and heat lightning flickered there throughout the summer evenings. All of the visible world consisted of endless fields of standing grain, plots of yellow-brown earth, lone Wes-trees, olive-drab and drooping like lost wayfarers in the tawny yellow desolation, and occasional villages of baked brick, where naked dusty peasants lifted their heads from the perpetual round of toil to watch them pass by.

  The lady made but few appearances. Harsan had occasional glimpses of a tall, boyishly slender girl, attired in the embroidered open vest and slit-sided skirt preferred by the women of the western provinces. The Lady Eyil did not come to sit by their fire in the evenings but instead sent her attendant, a grim-faced peasant woman named Tsatla, to get her dinner from the common cookpots.

  It had gradually come to be understood that, as the only priest in the party, Harsan would offer the prescribed libation before each meal. This he did with care, choosing words that would give no offence to worshippers of other gods than his. One evening when supper was finished and his comrades had retired to drink wine and gamble or to seek sleep, the woman Tsatla came to Harsan and said that the Lady Eyil would speak with him.

  The litter lay in darkness, one curtain thrown back all along one side, forming a little three-sided room. The ochre-red glow of Kashi, Tekumel’s smaller, second moon, turned the gilded orbs of the four comer-posts into ruddy copper coins. Two of Lady Eyil’s attendants dozed upon their haunches nearby, while a little farther away her bearers lay sprawled in shadowed huddles, asleep.

  “Worthy priest?” The voice was low and musical, the accent the purring, slurred speech of Tumissa. “I have troubled you that I may ask a question.”

  “My lady?”

  “You are a servitor of Thumis and not of my Goddess Avanthe. Yet both are of the Lords of Stability. Advise me, therefore, upon a matter of propriety.” A silhouetted hand moved within the blackness of the litter. “I grow bored riding in this conveyence day after day. My limbs ache with its jouncing, and the heat within these curtains is enough to melt even the Shield of Vimuhla, Lord of Fire.” (Harsan thought: the woman is educated, as glib as any temple priestess.) She continued, “Now tell me this: is it fitting for me to join your circle for the morning and evening meals? I wish no dishonour to my clan nor inconvenience to your merchants, yet I do yearn for a chance to move about ...”

  Harsan hesitated. Some northern Chakan clans, he knew, guarded their womenfolk as zealously as any heap of gold in a treasure-vault, hemming them all about with veils and guards and eunuchs. Those of the south, on the other hand, paid -little heed when their ladies walked abroad bare-breasted and bold amongst strange men. Nor, it was said, did they care overmuch about the paternity of the inevitable results. Custom in Tumissa and the western cities lay somewhere betwixt these two extremes.

  He temporised. “My Lady, this must depend upon the practice of one’s clan. While some see nothing amiss in allowing a clan-daughter to exercise her limbs on a long journey and to alleviate the tedium with conversation, others find such behaviour brazen and ill-omened. Surely the tradition of your clan is better known to you than to an outsider such as myself.”

  “True, but in this matter I have little to guide me. At home we girls are granted considerable liberty. But this is the first time in my memor
y that one of us has been married outside Tumissa, and I recall no precedent.”

  “What commandments, then, were given to your attendants by your father or clan-patriarchs when you set forth?”

  “Why, to serve me, to protect me from harm, and to see me safe into the house of my clan-cousin, noble Retlan hiVriyen of Bey Sii.” There was a hint of what sounded like suppressed amusement in the girl’s voice.

  Priestly dialectics came to Harsan’s aid. “If these are the precise words, then the first and last clauses have no application. The second injunction, too, is of little relevance. You are certainly ‘protected from harm’ by your clan’s travel contract with the merchant Mnesun. He and his colleagues will do all possible to honour their agreement, for to act otherwise would bring shame upon their clans; they would be open to a lawsuit and demands for Shamtla—money paid to satisfy a grievance or to compensate for a crime—would follow. None would trust them thereafter. Barring the untoward, thus, there is no question of ill befalling you in this company.”

  “Then?”

  “Ah—surely the needs of a healthy person for exercise and the desire for decorous and instructive conversation cannot be classified as ‘ill.’ ” Harsan knew not quite where this path led, but logic seemed to point in this direction.