The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

  A noble but perfectly CWen-brained attitude! Failure—or less than wondrous success—loomed as a distinct possibility. Tsamra would not be pleased.

  General Kettukal sat down crosslegged upon the figured carpet. “The Baron’s turd-shooting weapon! We had hoped to find—” He stopped.

  Prince Eselne grunted and tossed his cup to the slavegirl to be refilled. “Oh, finish it,” he said irritably. “The Livyani have their Vru’uneb everywhere, just as we have the Omnipotent Azure Legion. If Lord Taluvaz does not know the tale, he is as useless to his masters as a clay sword to great Hrugga! He uses us, and we may be able to use him. ‘One Aqpu-beetle dies alone, but six build a nest... ’ ”

  “When I was at Paya Gupa, my Lord,” the General continued reluctantly in his deep, hard voice, “I had heard that there might be a counter to the Baron’s toy...”

  “Cha, everyone in the Five Empires has heard the story! At Avanthar or Bey Sii secrets are like water in a cracked jug! There was supposed to be some priest of Ketengku—or was it Thumis? —who knew of a device that would halt the Baron’s ‘Weapon Without Answer. ’ It was a great bone of contention between the priesthoods half a year back—do you recall?—before the war with Yan Kor. Then the fellow disappeared. Magically! a veritable Subadim the Sorcerer! Your people knew all this of course, Taluvaz.”

  Taken aback, Taluvaz started to shake his head in negation. He changed his mind and nodded instead.

  “—Out of the Temple of Eternal Knowing in Bey Sii, as neatly as a virgin spits out a Dlel-ivuit pit!” This from the General. The Tsolyani idiom was unknown to Taluvaz, but the sense of it was clear.

  There was no reason now to pretend ignorance. Taluvaz said, “My, ah, friends here told me ... Was there not something about the city of Purdimal?”

  “As if your people did not join the dance!” Eselne snorted. “Yes, we followed certain of my beloved brother Dhich’une’s ugly henchmen for a time, but the priest vanished into the stews of Purdimal! The Temple of Sarku dangled a pretty little captive priestess over the water, but the fish never rose to the bait. We finally rescued her with an Imperial writ from Avanthar—brother Dhich’une is not the only one with access to my godlike father!” Taluvaz had heard of this also. There had been pressure upon Prince Eselne from the Temple of Hrihayal to free the girl. He imagined he knew what form this pressure had taken. Eselne’s dalliance with Misenla, the High Priestess of Hrihayal in the Empire, was common table-gossip.

  “My agents fought Dhich’une’s men—or what he uses for men—and Mridobu’s, and those of at least three temples, and even my father’s people. Did you know that the Yan Koryani were there was well? Half of the Five Empires chasing each other like Hrihayal’s greasy priests plucking at little boys, and not a hair of the thrice-damned catamite ever seen again!” Taluvaz debated how much to say, but the Prince was still speaking:

  “And while this was happening, the Temple of Thumis found it opportune to pull poor Surundano out of their temple at Hauma and declare him a Prince! One day a clerk in a copying-hall, the next a Prince of the Empire!”

  General Kettukal guffawed, an unseemly and ignoble sound. “And then—of all the stupid times to act—the Temple of Vimuhla began to worry—as fearful as an old lady goosed by an Ahoggya! Two weeks ago they trotted forth a Princeling of their own! somebody named Mirusiya, raised in secret by the arrogant Vimuhla-loving Vriddi clan of Fasiltum! Did you hear of this, Lord Taluvaz? The fellow was trained as a warrior, an officer in a good Legion—that of the Lord of Red Devastation, as devoted to the Flame-God as a babe to its mother’s teat—and all too appealing to the army and the temples of our war-gods.”

  Taluvaz had NOT heard. It overturned the entire Den-den board!

  He struggled to look knowledgeable, thinking furiously all the while. What the Prince had left unspoken was that such an heir would be almost an exact copy—on the side of the Lords of Change—of Eselne himself! Dangerous! The war-gods’ temples, Lord Karakan of Stability and Lord Vimuhla of Change, had been close to a rapprochement of sorts; now there would be no reason for it, and the intrigue for alliances and power must begin all over again. The Temple of Vimuhla deserved to rot in Sarku’s wormy hells for causing this turn of events!

  This new Prince—and the shattering of what had until now been a secure power base—cut right under the foundations of Prince Eselne and his Military Party! Dismay ran through Taluvaz’ limbs like a fever: everything was changed. All the effort spent cultivating Eselne and his brash, loutish generals would be for nothing! There was no time to start afresh with this wretched flame-worshipping newcomer—though Tsamra would certainly send someone as soon as the Livyani Legate in Bey Sii heard of it. An immediate stroke was needed. Prince Eselne must have a victory: some resounding deed that would echo through the palaces and temple of Tsolyanu like a Tunkul-gong. The defeat of the Baron’s armies here in the west suddenly became urgent and imperative, whatever the cost.

  “—Frightened that Prince Eselne would make too much capital out of the war with Yan Kor,” General Kettukal was saying, “or perhaps that Ma’in Kriithai would betroth herself to Eselne and thus bring about an unbreakable alliance between her Goddesses and our Military Party! At any rate—”

  “Yes, at any rate there are times when I wish I could candle my ever-victorious father’s head! We not only have a major war upon our borders, we also have a well-fueled fire in the heart of our Empire! How many puling brats has my father spawned anyway—and hidden here and there about the country as a Shqa-beetle hides its eggs in a ball of dung? Now Karakan knows how many more little Princes and Princesses lurk behind the altars of this temple or that! How many noble clans have little boys and girls with the Omnipotent Azure Legion’s golden seal upon their plump arses? One more such revelation and I renounce the Gold and retire to Salarvya to breed virgins for Lady Dilinala!”

  The three girls in the comer giggled.

  Taluvaz strove to think the matter through. He felt like a swimmer in a rushing mountain river. An idea surfaced, and he snatched at it. He almost pushed it away: it was too perilous, a jag-edged Ssu sword that would cut many ways! Secrets would have to be disclosed—he ought to check with Tsamra and his colleagues in the Vru’uneb first. The Tsolyani might gain too much. Yet it was almost certainly the key to more Tsolyani cooperation than Tsamra could have hoped! There was no time. What should he do? Taluvaz again wished the Temple of Vimuhla and its flame-loving Prince into Lord Qame’el’s darkest and coldest hells.

  Still, the more Taluvaz thought about it, the better his key seemed. But to use it could mean his death. The secrets of the Shadow Gods and the Vru’uneb and the High Council were not for one man to babble freely. Yet...

  Prince Eselne and the stem-faced General were looking at him.

  Slowly, carefully now. Taluvaz fumbled for his cup of Chumetl, something to delay with, to hold back his words until he had had time to weigh each one. The stuff burned his throat like Vimuhla’s raging flames. He could not help making a face. He gasped and spoke:

  “Mighty Prince, I have made our needs plain to you, plainer than I would have spoken them to my own brother-priests.” The language was coming easier, the musical Tsolyani -syllables following one upon the other of their own accord. “I am honoured by your, ah, confidence.” He paused. Now he must plunge into the maelstrom. “Know that we—were indeed aware of the Man of Gold, the weapon to defeat the horrible device brought forth by the Baron Aid.”

  General Kettukal made an impatient sound in his throat, but the Prince gestured him to silence.

  “My Lord, we were indeed aware of the priest of Thumis, and of something of what he might have discovered. But it was not—useful—that he be found—by any of you—ah, at that time.” Taluvaz spread his hands palms downward in a gesture of apology. “Too much power—either to Tsolyanu or to Yan Kor— you must understand ...”

  Prince Eselne gave no sign. Politics were politics. Thus far Taluvaz had said nothing that Tsamra would fi
nd objectionable. If his guess were wrong, what he was about to add now would seal his death warrant at the hands of the ever-efficient Vru’uneb.

  “We did not seek very diligently, nor did we use all of our resources, mighty Prince. Had we done so, we would have found the priest as assuredly as the journeying of the sun through the sky. For—for we can command the aid of—” he filled his lungs with the dry air, “—the Heheganu, the Old Ones of Purdimal.” “What—?” The Prince looked puzzled; then his gaze hardened. “We are old, my Lord, older than Engsvanyalu, older then the First Imperium of the Bednalljans, or any of the empires that have come and gone upon Tekumel. We do not say it, but our Shadow-Gods are not distorted forms of the Gods of the Priest Pavar, as those outside of our sanctuaries are led to think. Within, we carry on the traditions of Llyan, of the First Kingdom after the Latter Times—of Llyan of Tsamra, my Lord. We have wisdom lost since the days of man’s first creation, from the ages before the Time of Darkness, before the lights in the sky were extinguished, and the lamps of the Old Gods went out, and the earth shook, and the waters walked, and the fires rose from the hells below ...”

  “What has all this mythology—?” General Kettukal began. “Hear me. There are peoples and things—from the First Times—allegiances and liaisons made then, before the world was as it is. One of these, ah, relationships is with the Heheganu, the Old Ones of Purdimal, who are now debased, a race so circumscribed and so poor and so disillusioned—and so disinherited—that they dwell in the places below and no longer walk abroad in the light of day. They know where your priest is, mighty Prince. They have given him refuge. They want no resurgence of the great conflict that he—the Man of Gold— would revive from the dust of the ancient past, no battle between that thing and the ‘Weapon Without Answer’ that the Baron drags down toward your frontiers.

  “Yet we—who are allied by certain bonds to them—can cause them to bring forth the priest and aid in finding his device. We can winkle him out for you. If the Man of Gold is as it is supposed to be, if it still operates after all these millennia, if—” “In return for which, we aid you with Tsolei and Mu’ugalavya— and the southern continent,” Prince Eselne drew a long breath.

  “Yes, those—and perhaps certain other mutual favours to be discussed—I must speak with my superiors in the High Temple of Qame’el at Tsamra. But I have opened the kernel of it for you. Yes, we will help you stop the Baron of Yan Kor. And you shall give us what I have asked today.”

  Prince Eselne stood up. He clapped his hands twice. A panel opened in the wall, revealing darkness within. “You are there, Chiyurga? Take these three girls and apply your magic to their minds; let them recall nothing of what was said here. Harm them not.”

  The slavegirls squealed, terrified in spite of the Prince’s soothing and the fat purse of gold he tossed to them.

  The three men remained talking until late in the night. Taluvaz eventually received not only an ewer of excellent, cool wine but a fine dinner as well.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  They often came here, up where the wind off Thenu Thendraya’s mighty flanks drove the dank mists away in grey rags and tatters. It was cool, less muggy, and—what they meeded most of all—less crowded and oderiferous than the labyrinths of the Splendid Paradise of the Crystal River, as the denizens of Purdimal ironically named the oldest and most dilapidated section of their city.

  If ever there had been a paradise here, it lay buried beneath millennia of rotting bricks and slums and offal, and the Crystal River was no more than a brownish slough that wound through slimed, turgid canals out to the Water Gate and thence into the swamps to the west of the town.

  Harsan lay back upon the narrow ledge to look up at the curve of the roof-comb that bellied out above his head, a huge cylinder of mortared masonry some four man-heights in diametre set horizontally along the highest summit of Lord Hrii’u’s Shrine of Evanescent Change as a thick log might be laid upon a stool. The stained and dingy stone was deeply pockmarked with hollow bubbles, some tiny and others the size of a man’s fist. Tlayesha said that it reminded her of a loaf of black bread, baked by some legendary baker for a feast of the Gods. The ornate sculptures of the comb were chipped and wind-worn, and one of the five tall spires that rose from its summit had fallen—five hundred, a thousand years before? No one remembered. The masonry itself was webbed with cracks, each lush with its own miniature garden of scabrous moss and russet fungi.

  One day it would collapse. Then perhaps a score or more of the priests and the wretched poor of Purdimal’s Splendid Paradise would perish beneath the cyclopean blocks. No matter! the Imperium would take the calamity in stride. Taxes would be raised in this province or that; carts laden with materials would arrive; engineers would scribble upon parchments and dangle their plumb-bobs; and legions of priests, scribes, and toiling slaves would come to build it all back up again. A new temple of Lord Hrii’ii, the mightiest of the Lords of Change, would rise upon this spot, and all would be as it had ever been.

  Across the way, beyond the plaza named the Court of Cries, the. cupolas of Lord Ksarul’s pyramidal temple rose like some leviathan of the sea from amongst the wrack of tenements and steep-pitched tile roofs. The wind brought them the distant thunder of drums and the shriek of trumpets from the esplanade behind it. Today the red-robes of the Temple of Vimuhla rejoiced and paraded there in New Town: their favoured Legion, that of the Lord of Red Devastation, had led General Kettukal’s armies to victory in the deserts north of Khirgar. News had also come from General Korikada hiKurushma of the Legion of the Givers of Sorrow, fanatics devoted to Lord Vimuhla’s Cohort, fierce Chiteng. His forces had sent the Yan Koryani back north in headlong flight from before the gates of Chene Ho in the far northwest. It was indeed a day of heady glory for the followers of the Flame. Prince Mirusiya, the latest of the Emperor’s heirs to be declared, would be pleased.

  Already the smoke of burning arose from the truncated cone of the Flame Lord’s shrine in the distance. Yan Koryani captives would go chanting—or screaming, or pleading, as their Skeins allowed-—into the fire-pits there, and the city would stink of roasted meat and entrails for a time. The Gods would rejoice, the priests said, although one might well wonder just how many times in history the victory pyres had been lit and how many men and women had died to please these, the grimmest of the Lords of Change.—And all for different and probably contradictory causes!

  The wind was in their direction. Harsan had no desire to await the smoke and the stench. He stretched, wrapped his kilt about his waist, and began rolling up the reed sleeping mat upon which he had been sitting. Tlayesha still slept, nude and ruddy-bronze in the shadow of the roof-comb, upon her mat beside him. His loins stirred, and he thought of making love one more time before going down. The clash of cymbals and a sustained, wordless, lusting roar from the crowds in New Town drifted up to him, and he decided against it. He ran a finger along the curve of her calf instead.

  “Come, it is time.”

  She woke, then, and reached up to him. Even now he found himself surprised and a little unsettled by her sky-hued eyes, paler still in the westering sunlight. He changed his mind again and sank down beside her. After all, what was the hurry? The breeze would not bring unpleasant smells for at least a few moments yet.

  She was not, Eyil—how long had it been-since that one had walked in his dreams? Tlayesha was not as deft and skillful in her love-making. She did not play upon each nerve and each touch in turn, as Eyil had drawn forth melodies from the Sra’ur of his body. Sometimes Tlayesha was inept; sometimes she hurried on before him; and at other times she could not keep up with his own eager impatience.

  Yet she was Tlayesha. It was enough.

  He helped her gather up her clothing, her mat, and her little urn of soothing oil. Together they descended the bronze-runged ladder that led down through the thick walls of Lord Hrii’ii’s ancient temple, along the galleries of carven friezes that hung high over the apse below, and on into the maze of
ventilation shafts that would take them home.

  The purple-robed priests of the Master of the Lords of Change never looked up. They would have been most upset if they had known what had just transpired upon the roof of their temple. But they were mostly old, fusty, and as devoted to their rituals as a Chlen-beast who plods round and round upon the threshing floor. This temple was not like the splendid new shrine to Lord Hrii’u over in New Town. None but the aged, the unambitious, the seekers of solitude, and those who had been passed over for lack of talent ever served here. Worshippers in this section of Purdimal were the ragged poor, the halfbreed mixtures of human and Heheganu, and the flotsam of the slums. Those who sought power and riches—the young, hard-eyed clergymen, the great scholars and sorcerers, the high pontiffs with their retinues of guards and scribes—rarely came to this place.

  Harsan was not sure just where the ventilation shafts of the pyramid left off and the warrens of the Undercity began. There were no streets in the Splendid Paradise, just intricately confused layers of little passages, rooms, and scruffy halls of pockmarked stone or rotting brick. It had taken him all of the many months since his recovery to learn his way about the maze. Families, some human, some Heheganu, some mixtures, and some—other— hung up mats and curtains and made their homes wherever they chose. No one cared. No Imperial bureaucrat came to ask questions or demand proof of ownership. This was the Splendid Paradise, after all.

  Down, left, right, down again, through the hall where the legs of colossal statues rose like columns to the ceiling, their bodies and heads gone or entombed forever in the masonry of later structures above. The occasional shafts of bloodied sunlight gave way to the orange-red twinkle of rush-candles. The ramshackle curtains of the human poor were replaced by the loose-woven reed mats of the Heheganu. No search party could ever find its way down here, the Old Ones said: the mats and curtains were made to be shifted and rehung in a matter of moments, altering the plan of these warrens beyond recognition. What were rooms could become passages; what were twisting subterranean alleyways turned into interlocking warrens of hovels and cubicles; and all was changed. In the whispering darkness the children of the Old Ones squatted on their haunches to stare solemnly at passersby as they had done for more centuries than were recorded in any book of histories.