by Brian Aldiss
The queen’s gown was pale yellow. It went with the solitude. Her favourite colour was red, but she wore it no more. It did not go with old Gravabagalinien and its haunted past. The hiss of the sea demanded yellow, to her mind.
When she was not swimming, she left Tatro on the beach to play and walked below the high-tide line. Her lady-in-waiting reluctantly followed. Tough grasses grew from the sand. Some formed clumps. A step or two farther inland and other plants ventured. A little white daisy with armoured stem was among the first. There was a small plant with succulent leaves, almost like a seaweed. MyrdemInggala did not know its name, but she liked to pick it. Another plant had dark leaves. It straggled among the sand and grasses in insignificant clusters but, on occasions where conditions were right, raised itself into striking bushes with a lustrous sheen.
Behind these first bold invaders of the shore lay the litter of the tide line. Then came a haggard area, punctuated with tough, large-flowered daisies. Then less adventurous plants took over, and the beach was banished, though inlets of sand seamed the land for some way.
“Mai, don’t be unhappy. I love this place.”
The dawdling lady put on a sullen expression. “You are the most beautiful and fateful lady in Borlien.” She had never spoken to her mistress in this tone before. “Why could you not keep your husband?”
The queen made no answer. The two women continued along the shore, some way apart. MyrdemInggala walked among the lustrous bushes, caressing their tips with her hand. Occasionally, something under a bush would hiss and recoil from her step.
She was aware of Mai TolramKetinet, trailing dolefully behind her, hating exile. “Keep up, Mai,” she called encouragingly. Mai did not respond.
XI
Journey to the Northern Continent
The old man wore an ankle-length keedrant which had seen better days. On his head was a scoop-shaped hat, which protected his scrawny neck as well as his bald pate from the sun. At intervals, he lifted a shaking hand to his lips to puff at the stem of a veronikane. He stood all alone, waiting to leave the palace for good.
At his back was a coach of light build, loaded with his few personal belongings. Two hoxneys were harnessed between the shafts. It needed only a driver, and then SartoriIrvrash could be gone.
The wait afforded him a chance to look across the parade to a corner where an old bent slave with a stick was encouraging a mountain of papers to burn. That bonfire contained all the papers ransacked from the ex-chancellor’s suite, including the manuscripts which formed ‘The Alphabet of History and Nature’.
The smoke rose into a pallid sky from which light ash occasionally fell. Temperatures were as high as ever, but a grey overcast covered everything. The ash was born on an easterly airstream from a newly erupting volcano some distance from Matrassyl. That was of no interest to SartoriIrvrash; it was the black ashes ascending which occupied his attention.
His hand trembled more violently and he made the tip of his veronikane blaze like a small volcano.
A voice behind him said, “Here are some more of your clothes, master.”
His slave woman stood there, a neatly wrapped bundle offered to him. She gave him a placatory smile. “It’s a shame you have to go, master.”
He turned his worn face fully to her, stepped a pace nearer to look into her face.
“Are you sorry to see me go, woman?”
She nodded and lowered her gaze. Well, he thought, she enjoyed it when we had a little rumbo—and to think I never bothered to ask. I never thought of her enjoyment. How isolated I have been in my own feelings. A good enough man, learned, but worth nothing because I had no feelings for others. Except for little Tatro.
He didn’t know what to say to the slave woman. He coughed.
“It’s a bad day, woman. Go inside. Thank you.”
She gave him a last eloquent glance before turning away. SartoriIrvrash thought to himself, Who knows what slave women feel? He hunched his shoulders, irritated with her, and with himself, for showing feeling.
He scarcely noticed when the driver appeared. He took in only a youthful figure, head shrouded against the heat in a kind of Madi hood, so that its face could scarcely be seen.
“Are you ready?” this figure called, as it swung itself up into the driver’s seat. The two hoxneys shuffled as the weight adjusted against their straps.
Still SartoriIrvrash lingered. He pointed with his kane towards the distant bonfire. There goes a whole lifetime’s learning.” He was mainly addressing himself. “That’s what I can’t forgive. That’s what I shall never forgive. All that work…”
With a heavy sigh, he climbed aboard the coach. It began at once to roll forward, towards the palace gates. There were those in the palace who loved him; fearing the king’s wrath, they had not dared to emerge and wave him farewell. He set his face firmly to the front, blinking his eyes rapidly.
The prospects before SartoriIrvrash were dim. He was thirty-seven years and eight tenners old—well past middle age. It was possible that he could get a post as advisor at the court of King Sayren Stund, but he detested both the king and Oldorando, which was far too hot. He had always kept himself apart from his own and his dead wife’s relations in Matrassyl. His brothers were dead. There was nothing for it but to go and live with his daughter; she and her husband dwelt in a dull southern town near the Thribriat border.
There he would sink from human ken and attempt to rewrite his life’s work. But who would print it, now that he had no power? Who would read it if it were not printed? In despair, he had written to his daughter, and now intended to catch a boat that would take him south. The coach proceeded briskly downhill. At the bottom of the hill, instead of turning towards the docks, it swerved to the right and rattled up a narrow alley. Its hubs on its left side screamed as they rubbed against the walls of the houses.
“Take care, you fool, you’ve gone wrong!” said SartoriIrvrash, but he said it to himself. Who cared what happened?
The equipage rattled down a back road under the brow of a cliff and entered a small neglected courtyard. The driver jumped energetically down and closed the courtyard gates, so that they could not be seen from the street. He looked in at the ex-chancellor.
“Would you care to climb down? There’s someone waiting to see you.” He swept off his elaborate headgear in a mock bow.
“Who are you? What have you brought me here for?”
The boy opened the carriage door invitingly.
“Don’t you recognize me, Rushven?”
“Who are you? Why—Roba, it’s you!” he said in some relief—for the thought had occurred to him that JandolAnganol might be planning to kidnap and murder him.
“It’s me or a hoxney, for I move at speed these days. That’s how it’s all secrecy. I’m a secret even from myself. I have vowed to be revenged on my cursed father again, since he banished my mother. And on my mother, who left without a farewell to me.”
As he allowed the boy to help him out, SartoriIrvrash surveyed him, anxious to see if he looked as wild as his words. RobaydayAnganol was now just twelve years old, a smaller and thinner edition of his father. He was toasted brown by the sun; red scars showed on his torso. Smiles came and went like twitches over his face, as though he could not decide whether he was joking or not.
“Where have you been, Roba? We’ve missed you. Your father missed you.”
“Do you mean the Eagle? Why, he nearly caught me. I’ve never cared for court life, I care even less now. My father’s crime has set me free. So I am a hoxney-brother. A Madi-assister. I will never become king, and he will never again become happy. New lives, new lives, and one for you, Rushven! You first introduced me to the desert, and I will not desert you. I’m going to take you to someone important, human, not father or hoxney.”
“Who? What’s this all about? Wait!”
But Roba was striding off. SartoriIrvrash looked doubtfully at the coach loaded with all his worldly goods and then decided he had better follow. Walking
fast, he entered a dim hall only a step or two behind the king’s son.
The house was built according to a pattern suited to its overshadowed location: it stretched up to the light like a plant growing between boulders. The old man was panting by the time Roba led them off the shaking wooden stairs and into a room on the third floor, the only room on that level. SartoriIrvrash broke into prolonged coughing and collapsed on a stool someone offered him.
There were three people awaiting them in the room, and he observed that they seized on the opportunity also to cough. A certain rickety elegance in their structure, a certain sharpness of bone structure, marked them out as Sibornalese. One of them was a woman, elegantly dressed in a silk chagirack, the northern equivalent of a charfrul, its delicate fabric patterned with large black and white formal flowers. Two men stood behind her in the shadows. SartoriIrvrash recognized her immediately as Madame Dienu Pasharatid, wife of the ambassador who had disappeared the day that Taynth Indredd had introduced matchlocks into the palace.
He bowed to her and apologized for his coughing.
“We are all doing it, Chancellor. It is the volcano making our throats sore.”
“I believe my throat is sore through grief. You must not call me by my old title.” He would not ask her to what volcano she referred, but she saw uncertainty in his face.
“The volcanic eruption in the Rustyjonnik Mountains. Its ash carries this way.”
She regarded him with sympathy, letting him recover from the stairs. Her face was large and plain. Although he knew her for an intelligent woman, there was an unpleasant asperity about her mouth, and he had often been guilty of avoiding her company.
He looked about. The walls were covered with thin paper which had peeled in places. One picture hung there, a pen-and-tint drawing of what he recognized as Kharnabhar, the holy mountain of the Sibornalese. The only window, which was to one side, lighting Dienu Pasharatid’s face in profile, provided a view of rocky cliff from which creepers hung; the vegetation had a coating of grey ash. Roba sat cross-legged on the floor, sucking a straw and smiling from one to another of the party.
“Madame, what do you want with me? I must go to catch a boat before further disasters befall me,” SartoriIrvrash said.
She stood before him and clutched her hands behind her back, while gently moving her weight from one foot to another.
“We ask you to forgive us for getting you here in such an unusual way, but we wish to enlist your aid—for which aid, we will pay generously.”
She outlined her proposal, turning occasionally to the men for confirmation. All Sibornalese were profoundly religious, believing, as he knew, in God the Azoiaxic, who existed before life and round whom all life revolves. The members of the ambassadorial contingent held the religion of Akhanaba in low regard, considering it little better than a superstition. They were therefore shocked but not surprised when JandolAnganol made the decision to break his marriage and contract another.
Sibornalese—and the Azoiaxic through them—regarded the bond between woman and man as an equal decision to be held through life. Love was a matter of will, not whim.
SartoriIrvrash sat nodding automatically through this part of the speech, recognizing its sententious tone as characteristic of the northern continentals and longing to be on his way.
Roba, not even listening, winked at the ex-chancellor and said confidentially, “This is the house where Ambassador Pasharatid used to meet a lady of the town. It’s an historical whorish house—but for you this lady will only talk.”
SartoriIrvrash hushed him.
Ignoring the interruption, Madame Dienu said that her party felt that he alone, Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, had pretension to knowledge in the Borliense court. They felt that the king had treated him almost as badly as—possibly worse than—the queen. Such injustice distressed them, as it would all members of the Church of the Formidable Peace. She was now returning home. They invited SartoriIrvrash to join them, in the assurance that he would be given good accommodation in Askitosh and a good advisory position in the government, as well as freedom to complete his life’s work.
He felt the trembling which so often overcame him return. Temporizing, he asked, “What sort of advisory post?
Oh, advice on matters Borlienese, upon which he was such an expert. And they were preparing to leave Matrassyl on the hour.
So overwhelmed was he by this offer that SartoriIrvrash did not enquire why this sudden haste. Gratefully, he accepted.
“Excellent!” exclaimed Madame Dienu.
The two men behind her now showed an almost ancipital ability to change from stillness to intense activity without intervening stages. They were immediately gone from the room, to promote shouting on all floors and a galumphing on all stairs, as luggage and people hastened down into the courtyard below. Carriages emerged from shelters, hoxneys from stables, stable boys with harness from tackrooms. A procession was assembled in less time than a Borlienese could have drawn on a pair of boots. Prayers were briskly said, all standing round in a circle, and then they were away, leaving an empty house behind them.
They drove north through the warren of the old town, circled the great semisubterranean Dome of Striving, and were soon on the road north with the Takissa gleaming on their left-hand side. Roba yipped and sang as they went.
Weeks of travel followed.
A feature of the first part of their journey was the pervading greyness caused by the volcanic ash. Mount Rustyjonnik, always a source of grumbling and occasional runs of lava, was in full eruption. The country in the path of its ash became a land of the dead. Trees were killed by the substance, fields covered with it, streams clogged with it. After rain, it turned to paste. Birds and animals died or fled the area. Human families and phagors trudged away from their blighted homes.
Once the Sibornalese party had crossed the River Mar, the blight grew less. Then it faded. They entered Mordriat—a name of terror in Matrassyl. The reality was peaceful. Most of the tribes smiled beneath sheltering layers of braffista turbans, their chief item of apparel.
Guides were engaged to guarantee their safety, thin villainous-looking men who abased themselves at every sunrise and sunset. Round their campfire at night, the head Pointer of the Way, as he called himself, explained to the travellers how the ornamentation on his braffista indicated his rank in life. He boasted of the numerous ranks below his.
None listened more eagerly than SartoriIrvrash. “Strange, this human propensity to create ranks in society,” he observed to the rest of the party.
“A propensity the more noticeable the nearer the bottom of the pile one descends,” said Madame Dienu. “We avoid such demeaning gradations in my land. How you will enjoy seeing Askitosh. It is a model for all communities.”
SartoriIrvrash had some reservations about that. But he found a restful quality in the steady severity of Madame Dienu after years of dealing with a changeable king. As the wilderness grew more arid, his spirits rose; equally, Roba’s madness grew calmer. But when the others slept, SartoriIrvrash could not. His bones, which had become accustomed to a goosedown mattress, could not adapt to a blanket and hard ground. He lay looking up at the stars and the lightning flickering between them, full of an excitement he had not known since he and his brothers were children. Even his bitterness against JandolAnganol abated somewhat.
The weather continued dry. The coaches made fair progress over the low hills. They arrived at a small trading town called Oysha—“Quite probably a corruption of the Local Olonets word ‘osh’, meaning simply ‘town’,” SartoriIrvrash explained to the company. Explanations that could be attached to things made the journey more enjoyable. However the word was derived, at Oysha the Takissa, rushing down from the east, met up with its formidable tributary, the Madura. Both rivers had their sources high in the limitless Nktryhk. Beyond Oysha to the north stretched the Madura Desert.
In Oysha, the coaches were exchanged for kaidaw geldings. The Pointer volubly made the deal, during which m
uch striking of foreheads took place. The kaidaw was a reliable animal when it came to crossing deserts. The rust-coloured brutes stood in the dusty market square of Oysha, indifferent to the deal being negotiated beside them.
The ex-chancellor sat on a chest while the trading was in progress. He mopped his brow and coughed. The outfall from Mount Rustyjonnik had given him a sore throat and fever he could not shake off. He stared at the long haughty faces of the kaidaws—those legendary steeds of the warrior phagors in the Great Winter. It was hard to see in these slow beasts the whirlwind which, with phagors astride it, had brought destruction upon Oldorando and other Campannlatian cities in the time of cold.
In the Great Summer, the animals stored water in their single hump. This made them suitable for desert conditions. They looked meek enough now, but excited SartoriIrvrash’s sense of history.
“I should purchase a sword,” he told RobaydayAnganol. “I was quite a swordsman in my younger day.”
Roba turned a cartwheel. “You turn the year upside down, now that you are free of the Eagle. You’re right to defend yourself, of course. In those hills lives the accursed Unndreid—our herdsmen here sleep with his multitudinous daughters every night. Murder’s as frequent hereabouts as scorpions.”
“The people seem friendly.”
Roba squatted before SartoriIrvrash and put on a cunning leer. “Why are they outwardly so friendly? Why is Unndreid now armed to the teeth with Sibornalese bang-bangs? Have you discovered why the big black Io Pasharatid left the court so suddenly?”
He took SartoriIrvrash’s arm and led him behind one of the coaches for privacy, where only the guileless eyes of the kaidaws were upon them.
“Even my father cannot buy friendship or love. These Sibornalese buy friendship. It’s their way. They’d trade their mothers for peace. They have been greasing their safe passage to Borlien by presenting the chiefs along the route with matchlocks, as they say. I say there is no match for them. Even Akhanaba’s favourite king, JandolAnganol, son of VarpalAnganol, father of a Madi-lover—but not so mad in that direction as he—even that monarch of Matrassyl was no match for matchlocks. They did for him in the Battle of the Cosgatt. Did you ever see the wounds in his thigh?”