Helliconia, page 70
SartoriIrvrash then rose, to demand that the scritina look upon new developments in the light of history.
‘With the battle of the Cosgatt still fresh in our minds, we know that there are new artilleries of attack available. Even the barbarous tribes of Driats have these new – guns, as they are called. With a gun, a man can kill an enemy as soon as he can see him. Such things are mentioned in old histories, although we cannot always trust what we read in old histories.
‘However. We are concerned with guns. You saw them demonstrated. They are made in the great northern continent by the nations of Sibornal, who have a pre-eminence in manufacturing arts. They possess deposits of lignite and metal ores which we do not. It is necessary for us to remain on good terms with such powerful nations, and so we have put down firmly this attempt to assassinate the ambassador.’
One of the barons at the back of the scritina shouted angrily, ‘Tell us the truth. Wasn’t Pasharatid corrupt? Didn’t he have a liaison with a Borlienese girl in the lower town, contravening our laws and his?’
‘Our agents are investigating,’ said SartoriIrvrash, and went on hastily. ‘We shall send a deputation to Askitosh, capital of the nation Uskutoshk, to open a trade route, hoping that the Sibornalese will be more friendly than hitherto.
‘Meanwhile, our meeting with the distinguished diplomats from Oldorando and Pannoval was successful. We have received a few guns from them, as you know. If we can send sufficient quantities of guns to our gallant General Hanra TolramKetinet, then the war with Randonan will be quickly over.’
Both the king’s speech and SartoriIrvrash’s were received coldly. Supporters of Baron RantanOboral, MyrdemInggala’s father, were present in the scritina. One of them rose and asked, ‘Are we to understand that it is these new weapons which are responsible for the deaths of sixty-one Myrdolators? If so, they are powerful weapons indeed.’
The chancellor’s reply was uncertain.
‘An unfortunate fire broke out at the castle, started by the ex-queen’s supporters, many of whom lost their lives in the blaze they had themselves caused.’
As SartoriIrvrash and the king left the chamber, a storm of noise broke out.
‘Give them the wedding,’ said SartoriIrvrash. ‘They’ll forget their anger as they coo over the prettiness of the child bride. Give them the wedding as soon as possible, Your Majesty. Make the fools forget one swindle with another.’
He looked away to hide his revulsion for his own role.
Tension hung over all who lived in the castle of Matrassyl, except for the phagors, whose nervous systems were immune to expectation. But even the phagors were uneasy, for the stench of burning still clung to everything.
Scowling, the king retired to his suite. A section of the First Phagorian stood duty outside his door, and Yuli remained with them while JandolAnganol prayed in his private chapel with his Royal Vicar. After prostrating himself in prayer, he had himself scourged.
While being bathed by his female servants, he summoned his chancellor back to him. SartoriIrvrash appeared after a third summons, clad in an ink-stained flowered charfrul and rush slippers. The old man looked aggrieved, and stood before the king without speaking, smoothing his beard.
‘You’re vexed?’ JandolAnganol addressed him from the pool. The runt sat a short distance away, its mouth open.
‘I’m an old man, Your Majesty, and have endured deep botheration this day. I was resting.’
‘Writing your damned history, more likely.’
‘Resting and grieving for the murdered sixty-one, if truth be told.’
The king struck the water with the flat of his hand. ‘You’re an atheist. You have no conscience to appease. You don’t have to be scourged. Leave that to me.’
SartoriIrvrash showed a tooth in a display of circumspection.
‘How can I serve your majesty now?’
JandolAnganol stood up, and the women swathed him in towels. He stepped from the bath.
‘You have done enough in the way of service.’ He gave SartoriIrvrash one of his darkly brilliant looks. ‘It’s time I put you out to pasture, like the old hoxneys of which you are so fond. I’ll find someone more to my way of thought to advise me.’
The women huddled by the earthenware pitchers which had brought the royal bathwater, and listened complacently to the drama.
‘There are many here who will pretend to think as you wish them to think, Your Majesty. If you care to put trust in such, that is your decision. Perhaps you will say how I have failed to please. Have I not supported all your schemes?’
The king flung away his towels, and paced naked and dangerous about the room. His gaze was as hasty as his walk. Yuli whined in sympathy.
‘Look at the trouble about my ears. Bankrupt. No queen. Unpopular. Mistrusted. Challenged in the scritina. Don’t tell me I’ll be a favourite of the mob when I wed that chit from Oldorando. You advised me to do this, and I have had sufficient of your advice.’
SartoriIrvrash had backed against one wall, where he was fairly safe from the king’s pacing. He wrung his hands in distress.
‘If I may speak … I have faithfully served you and your father before you. I have lied for you. I lied today. I have implicated myself in this gruesome Myrdolators’ crime for your sake. Unlike other chancellors you might elect, I have no political ambitions – You are good enough to splash me, your majesty!’
‘Crime! Your sovereign is a criminal, is he? How else was I to put down a revolt?’
‘I have advised you with your good in mind, rather than my advancement, sire. Never less than in this sorry matter of the divorcement. You will recall that I told you you would never find another woman like the queen and—’
The king seized a towel and wrapped it about his narrow waist. A puddle formed round his feet. ‘You told me that my first duty lay with my country. So I made the sacrifice, made it at your suggestion—’
‘No, Your Majesty, no, I distinctly—’ He waved his hands distractedly.
‘“I dizztingtly,”’ said Yuli, picking up a new word.
‘You merely want a scapegoat on which to vent your rage, sire. You shall not dismiss me like this. It’s criminal.’
The words echoed about the bath chamber. The women had made as if to escape from the scene, then had frozen in cautionary gestures, lest the king turn upon them.
He turned on his chancellor.
As his face flushed with rage, the colour chased itself down his jaw to his throat. ‘Criminal again! Am I criminal? You old rat, you dare give me your orders and insults! I’ll settle with you.’
He marched over to where his clothes lay spread.
Fearing that he had gone too far, SartoriIrvrash said in a shaking voice, ‘Your Majesty, forgive me, I see your plan. By dismissing me, you can then be free to blame me before the scritina for what has occurred, and thus show yourself innocent in their eyes. As if truth can be moulded that way … It is a well-tried tactic, well-tried – transparent, too – but surely we can agree on how precisely—’
He faltered and fell silent. A sickly evening light filled the room. Traces of an auroral storm flickered in the cloud mass outside. The king had drawn his sword from its scabbard where it lay on the table. He flourished it.
SartoriIrvrash backed away, knocking over a pitcher of scented water, which rushed to escape in a flood across the tiled floor.
JandolAnganol began a complex pattern of swordplay with an invisible enemy, feinting and lunging, at times appearing hard pressed, at times pressing hard himself. He moved rapidly about the room. The women huddled against the wall, tittering with nervousness.
‘Heigh! Yauh! Ho! Heigh!’
He switched direction, and the naked blade darted at the chancellor.
As it stopped an inch from his collarbone, the king said, ‘So, where’s my son, where’s Robayday, then, you old villain? You know he’d have my life?’
‘Well I know the history of your family, sire,’ said SartoriIrvrash, ineffectually covering his chest with his hands.
‘I must deal with my son. You have him hidden in the warren of your apartments.’
‘No, sire, that I do not.’
‘I am told you do, sire, the phagor guard told me. And he whispered, sire, that you still have some blood in your eddre.’
‘Sire, you are overtaxed by the ordeals you have undergone. Let me get—’
‘Get nothing, sire, but steel in the gullet. So reliable! You have a visitor in your rooms.’
‘From Morstrual, sire, a boy, no more.’
‘So, you keep boys now …’ But the subject seemed to lose its interest. With a shout, the king flung up his sword so that it embedded itself in the beams overhead. When he reached up and grasped its hilt, the towel fell from him.
SartoriIrvrash stooped to retrieve it for his majesty, saying, falteringly, ‘I understand from whence your madness comes, and allow—’
Instead of seizing the towel, the king seized the old man’s charfrul and swung him about by it. The towel went flying. The chancellor uttered a cry of alarm. His feet slipped from under him, and they fell together heavily, in the flood of water.
The king was back on his feet as nimbly as a cat, motioning to the women to help SartoriIrvrash up. The chancellor groaned and clutched his back as two of them assisted him.
‘Now go, sire,’ said the king. ‘Get packing – before I demonstrate to you just how mad I am. Remember, I know you for an atheist and a Myrdolator!’
In his own chambers, Chancellor SartoriIrvrash had a woman slave anoint his back with ointments, and indulged in some luxurious groans. His personal phagor guard, Lex, looked on impassively.
After a while, he called for some squaanej juice topped with Lordryardry ice, and then laboriously wrote a letter to the king, clutching his spine between sentences.
Honoured Sire,
I have served the House of Anganol faithfully, and deserve well from it. I am prepared still to serve, despite the attack upon my person, for I know how your majesty suffers in his mind at present.
As to my atheism and my learning, to which you so frequently object, may I point out that they are one, and that my eyes are opened to the true nature of our world. I do not seek to woo you from your faith, but to explain to you that it is your faith which puts you in your present difficult situation.
I see our world as a unity. You know of my discovery that a hoxney is a striped animal, appearances to the contrary. This discovery is of vital importance, for it links the seasons of our Great Year, and gives us new understanding of them. Many plants and animals may have similar devices by which to perpetuate their species through the Year’s conflicting climates.
Could it be that humanity has, in religion, a similar mode of perpetuation? Differing only as humanity differs from the brute beasts? Religion is a social binding force which can unify in times of extreme cold or, as now, of extreme heat. That social binding force, that cohesion, is valuable, for it leads to our survival in national or tribal entities.
What it must not do is rule our individual lives and thinking. If we sacrifice too much to religion, then we are prisoners of it, as Madis are prisoners of the uct. You must, sire, forgive my pointing this out to you, and I fear that you will not find it palatable, but you yourself have shown such a slavishness to Akhanaba—
He paused. No, as usual he was going too far. The king in his anger would destroy him if he read that sentence. Laboriously, he took a fresh sheet of parchment and wrote a modified version of his first letter. He charged Lex with delivering it.
Then he sat and wept.
He dozed. Later, he awoke to find Lex standing over him, his milt flicking up the slots of his nostrils. He had long grown used to the silence of phagors; though he hated the creatures, they were less bothersome than human slaves about the place.
His table clock told him it was near the twenty-fifth hour of the day. He yawned, stretched, and put on a warmer garment. Outside, the aurora flickered over an empty courtyard. The palace was asleep – except perhaps for the king …
‘Lex, we’ll go and speak with our prisoner. Have you fed him?’
The phagor, immobile, said, ‘The prisoner has his food, sir.’ He spoke in a low voice, buzzingly, so that the honorific came out as ‘zzorr’. His Olonets was limited, but SartoriIrvrash, in his abhorrence, refused to learn Hurdhu.
Among the shelves covering most of a long wall stood a cupboard. Lex swung it away from the wall to reveal an iron door. Clumsily, the ancipital inserted a key in the lock and turned it. He pulled the door open; man and phagor entered a secret cell.
This had once been an independent room. In the days of VarpalAnganol, the chancellor had had its external door plastered over. Now the only means of entry lay through his study. Stout bars had been fixed over the window. From outside, the window was lost in the muddle of the castle facade.
Flies buzzed in the room, or hung as if sleeping in the thick air. They crawled over the table, and over the hands of Billy Xiao Pin.
Billy sat on a chair. He was chained to a strong eye anchored in the floor. His clothes were stained with sweat. The stench in the room was overwhelming.
Producing a sachet of scantiom, pellamountain, and other herbs, SartoriIrvrash pressed it to his nose and gestured towards a cessbucket standing in a corner of the room.
‘Empty that.’ Lex moved to obey.
The chancellor took a chair and placed it beyond the reach of any lunge his prisoner might make. He sat down carefully, nursing his back and grunting. He lit a long veronikane before he spoke.
‘Now, BillishOwpin, you have been here for two days. We shall have another discussion. I am the Chancellor of Borlien, and, if you lie to me, it is well within my powers to torture you. You introduced yourself to me as the mayor of a town on the Gulf of Chalce. Then, when I locked you up, you claimed that you were a much grander person, who came from a world above this one. Who are you today? The truth now!’
Billy wiped his face on his sleeve and said, ‘Sir, believe me, I knew of this secret room before I arrived here. Yet I am ignorant of many aspects of your manners. My initial mistake was to pose as someone I am not – which I did because I doubted if you would believe the truth.’
‘I may say without vanity that I happen to be one of the foremost seekers after truth of my generation.’
‘Sir, I know it. Therefore set me free. Let me follow the queen. Why lock me up when I mean no harm?’
‘I lock you up because I may get some good out of you. Stand up.’
The chancellor surveyed his captive. Certainly, there was something odd about the fellow. His physiology was not the attenuated one of a Campannlatian, nor had he the barrel shape of those freak humans, sometimes displayed at fairs, whose ancestors (according to medical thought) had escaped the near-universal bone fever.
His friend CaraBansity in Ottassol would have said that underlying bone structure accounted for the peculiar rounded quality of the captive’s features. The man’s skin texture was smooth, with a notable pallor, though his button nose was sunburnt. His hair was fine.
And there were more subtle differences, such as the quality of the captive’s gaze and its duration. He seemed to look away to listen, and regarded SartoriIrvrash only when he spoke – although fear could account for that. His eyes were often cast upward, instead of down. In particular, he spoke Olonets in a foreign style.
All this the chancellor observed before saying, ‘Give me an account of this world above from which you claim to come. I am a rational man, and I shall listen without prejudice to what you have to say.’ He drew upon his kane and coughed.
Lex returned with an empty bucket and stood motionless against one wall, fixing his cerise glare on an undefined point in the middle distance.
When Billy sat down, his chains rattled. He placed his weighted wrists on the table before him and said, ‘Merciful sir, I come, as I told you, from a much smaller world than yours. A world perhaps of the size of the great hill upon which Matrassyl Castle stands. That world is called Avernus, though your astonomers have long known it as Kaidaw. It lies some fifteen hundred kilometres above Helliconia, with an orbital period of 7770 seconds, and its—’
‘Wait. On what does this hill of yours lie? On air?’
‘There is no air about Avernus. In effect, the Avernus is a metal moon. No, you don’t have that word in Olonets, sir, since Helliconia possesses no natural moon. Avernus orbits Helliconia continually, as Helliconia orbits Batalix. It travels through space, as Helliconia does, and moves continually, as Helliconia does. Otherwise, it would fall under the pull of gravitation. I think you understand this principle, sir? You know of the true relationships between Helliconia on the one hand and Batalix and Freyr on the other.’
‘I understand what you say very well.’ He slapped at a fly crawling over his bald pate. ‘You are addressing the author of “The Alphabet of History and Nature”, in which I seek to synthesise all knowledge. It is understood by few men – but I happen to be one of them – that Batalix and Freyr revolve about a common focus, while Copaise, Aganip, and Ipocrene revolve with Helliconia about Batalix. The haste of our sister worlds in their orbits is commensurate with their stature and their distance from the parent body, Batalix. Furthermore, cosmology informs us that these sister worlds sprang from Batalix, as men spring from their mothers, and Batalix sprang from Freyr, which is its mother. In the realm of the heavens, you will find me suitably informed, I flatter myself.’
He looked up at the ceiling and blew smoke among the flies.
Billy cleared his throat. ‘Well, it’s not quite like that. Batalix and its planets form a relatively aged solar system which was captured by a much larger sun, which you call Freyr, some eight million years ago, as we reckon time.’
The chancellor moved restlessly, crossing and uncrossing his legs, with a peevish expression on his face. ‘Among the impediments to knowledge are the persecutions of those who seek power, the difficulties of investigation, and – this in particular – a failure to recognise what should be investigated. I set all this out in my first chapter.
