by Brian Aldiss
When he rested afterwards on the beach, sheltering from the power of both suns, he watched the swimmers climb out one by one. Many of the Good Hope’s crew were women, and sturdily built. He sighed for his youth. Io Pasharatid climbed out beside him and said to him quietly, “If only that beautiful queen of queens were here, eh?”
“What then?” He kept watching the water, hoping that Odi would emerge naked.
Pasharatid dug him in the ribs in an un-Sibornalese way.
“What then, you say? Why, then this seeming paradise would be paradise indeed.”
“Do you suppose that this expedition can possibly conquer Borlien?”
“Given the fortune of war, I’m sure of it. We are organized and armed, in a way JandolAnganol’s forces will never be.”
“Why, then the queen will come under your supervision.”
“That reflection had not escaped me. Why else do you think I have this sudden enthusiasm for war? I don’t want Ottassol you old goat. I want Queen MyrdemInggala. And I intend to have her.”
XV
The Captives of the Quarry
A man was walking with a pack slung over one shoulder. He wore the tattered remains of a uniform. Both suns beat down on him. Streams of sweat ran down into his tunic. He walked blindly, rarely looking up.
He was traversing a destroyed area of jungle in the Chwart Heights in eastern Randonan. All round were blackened and broken stumps of trees, many still smouldering. On the few occasions when the man looked about him, he could see nothing but the trail and blackened landscape all round. Palls of grey smoke rose in the distance. It was possible that tropical heat had started the blaze. Or perhaps a spark from a matchlock had been the cause of the death of a million trees. For many tenners battles had been fought over the area. Now soldiers and cannon were gone, and the vegetation likewise.
Everything about the man’s posture expressed weariness and defeat. But he kept on. Once he faltered, when one of his shadows faded and disappeared. Black cloud, rolling up, had blotted out Freyr. A few minutes later, Batalix too was swallowed. Then the rain came down. The man bowed his head and continued to walk. There was nowhere he could shelter, nothing he could do but submit to nature.
The downpour continued, increasing in ferocity by sudden fits. The ashes hissed. More and more of the resources of the heavens were called in, like reserves being brought into a battle.
Bombardment by hail was the next tactic. The hailstones stung the weary man into a run. He took what refuge he could in a hollow tree stump. Falling back against the crumbling wood, he exposed a stronghold of rickybacks. Deprived of their little fortress, the crustaceans climbed through veritable Takissas of liquid ash, seeking refuge with their puny antennae waving.
Unaware of this catastrophe, the man stared forth from under the brim of his hat, panting. Several bent figures staggered through the murk. They were the remnants of his army, the once celebrated Borlienese Second Army. One man passed obliviously within inches of the tree stump, dragging a terrible wound which bled afresh under the hailstones. The shelterer wept. He had no wound, except for a bruise on his temple. He had no right to be alive.
Like an uncomforted child, his weeping turned to exhaustion; he slept despite the hail.
The dreams that terminated sleep were full of hail. He felt their smart on his cheek, woke, saw that the sky was again clear. He started up, yet still the stones struck his face, his neck. As he gasped with vexation, a stone flew into his mouth. He spat it out, turning in bewilderment.
The gnarled, broomlike plants nearby had been burnt by fire. Fire had hardened their seedcases, ripening their seeds with its flame. In a new day’s warmth, the cases untwisted. They made a small noise, like the parting of moist lips. Their seeds were shot out in all directions. The ashy ground would provide fertile conditions for growth.
He laughed, suddenly pleased. Whatever folly mankind got up to, nature went on its uncheckable way. And he would go on his way. He patted his sword, adjusted his hat, hitched his pack, and started walking southeastwards.
He emerged from the devastated area towards noon. The way wound down between thickets of shoatapraxi. Over centuries, the road the soldier travelled had been by turns river, dried bed, ice track, cattle trail, and highway.
No man could trace its usages. Humble flowers grew beside its banks, some sprung from parent plants which had seeded far away. The banks became higher on either side. He staggered between them, hampered by shifting gravels underfoot. When they crumbled away at last, under the brow of a hill, he saw cottages standing in fields.
The prospect did little to reassure him.
The fields had long been untended. The cottages were derelict. Many roofs had fallen in, leaving end-walls pointing like old fists to the sky. Hedges topping the banks on either side of the track had collapsed from the weight of dust that had been thrown up. Dust had spread over adjoining fields, over cottages and outbuildings, over abandoned pieces of luggage which dotted the view. Everything was rendered in the same greyish tone, as if created all from one material.
Only a great army passing could have raised so much dust, the man with the pack thought. The army had been his. The Second Army had then been marching forward into battle. He was now returning silently in defeat.
His footsteps deadened, General Hanra TolramKetinet walked down the meandering street. One or two furtive phagors peered at him from the ruins, the long masks of their faces without expression. He did not remember this village; it was just one more village they had marched through on just one more hot day. As he reached the end of the street and the sacred pillar which defined the local land-octave, he saw a wedge-shaped copse which he thought he recalled, a copse which his scouts had reconnoitred for enemy. If he was right, there was a sizeable farmhouse beyond it, in which he had slept for a few hours.
The farmhouse remained intact. It was surrounded by outhouses which had been damaged by fire.
TolramKetinet stood by the gateway, peering in. Both yard and house were silent except for the buzz of flies. Sword in hand, he moved forward. Two slaughtered hoxneys lay in an open stall, bodies black with flies. Their stench met his nostrils.
Freyr was high, Batalix already westering. Conflicting shadows lent the house a drab air as he moved towards it. The windows were dimmed with dust. There had been a woman here, the farmer’s woman, with four small children, he recalled. No man. Now there was only the buzz of silence.
He set his pack down by the front doorstep and kicked the door open with his foot.
“Anyone there?” He hoped some of his men might be resting in the rooms.
No response. Yet his alerted senses warned him that there was a living thing in the building. He paused in the stone hall. A tall pendulum clock, with its twenty-five illuminated hours, stood silent against one wall. Otherwise, the impression was one of the poverty common to an area which had long been in a war zone. Beyond the hall everything lay in shadow.
Then he marched determinedly forward, down the passage, and into a low-ceilinged kitchen.
Six phagors stood in the kitchen. They stood motionless, as if awaiting his return. Their eyes glowed deep pink in the shade. Beyond them, through a window, grew a patch of bright yellow flowers; catching the sun, they made the beast shapes indeterminate. Yellow reflections rested on shoulders, on long cheekbones. One of the brutes retained its horns.
They came towards him, but TolramKetinet was ready. He had picked up their scent in the hall. They held spears, but he was a practised swordsman. They were swift, but they got in each other’s way. He drove the blade up under their rib cages, where he knew their eddre were. Only one of the ancipitals lunged with its spear. He half-severed its forearm with a single blow. Gold blood flew. The room filled with their heavy sick breathing. All died without making any other sound.
As they fell, he saw by their blazes that they had been trusted members of his guard. Catching the Sons of Freyr in disorder, they had taken a chance and reverted to type. A l
ess wary soldier would have fallen into their ambush. Indeed, one had done so recently. At the back of the kitchen, spread out on a table, was a Borlienese corporal, his throat neatly bitten out.
TolramKetinet went back into the courtyard and leaned against a warm outer wall. After a short while, his nausea passed. He stood breathing in the warm air, until the stench of nearby decay drove him from the courtyard.
He could not rest here. When his strength returned, he picked up his pack and resumed his silent march along the road leading towards the coast. Towards the sea and its voices.
The forest closed about him. The road south led through twisted columns of spirax trees, with their double entwined trunks. Through their avenues walked TolramKetinet. This was not dense tangled jungle. Little grew on its floor, for little sunlight penetrated down to the ground. He walked as in a lofty building, surrounded by pillars of amazing design.
Above spread other layers of the forests which separated Borlien from Randonan. The shrub layer, through which large creatures sometimes crashed. The under-story, where Others swung and called, occasionally dropping to the floor, to snatch at a fungus before swarming up to the safety of the branches. The canopy, the true roof of the jungle, decked with flowers TolramKetinet could not see, and birds he could only hear. The emergent layer, formed by the tallest trees, which reared above the canopy, home of predatory birds which watched and did not sing.
The solemnity of the rain forest was such that it appeared to those who ventured into it to be much more permanent than savannah land or even desert. It was not so. Of the 1825 small Helliconian years which made one Great Year, the elaborate jungle organism was able to sustain itself for less than half that period. Closely examined, every single tree revealed, in root, trunk, branch, and seed, the strategies it employed to survive when climate was less clement, when it would endure solitary in a howling waste, or wait in a case, petrified, beneath snow.
The fauna regarded the various layers of their home as unchanging. The truth was that the whole intricate edifice, more marvellous than any work of man, had come into being only a few generations ago in response to the elements, springing up like a jack-in-the-box from a scattering of nuts.
In this hierarchy of plants was a perfect order which appeared random only to an untutored eye. Everything, animal or insect or vegetable, had its place, generally a horizontal zone to call its own. The Others were rare exceptions to this rule. Phagors had taken refuge in the forest, often living in huts contrived in the angles between high-kneed roots, and Others had gravitated into their company, to play a role somewhere between pet and slave.
Often, settlements of a dozen or more phagors, with their runts, were established about the base of a large tree. TolramKetinet gave such places a wide berth. He deeply mistrusted the phagors, and feared the sorties made by their Others, who came rushing out like watchdogs when strangers were near, brandishing sticks.
Men sometimes lurked in these settlements. A small human hut was to be seen next to—and little to be distinguished from—an ancipital hut. These men, near-naked, were evidently accepted by the phagors as large versions of Others. It was as though the brown-pelted Others, in their alliance with the phagors, gave a licence to the men to live in lowly harmony with them.
Most of the men were deserters from units of the Second Army. TolramKetinet spoke to them, trying to persuade them to join him. Some did so. Others threw sticks. Many admitted that they hated the war and rejoined their old commander only because they were sick of the jungle with its secretive noises and slender diet.
After a day of marching along the aisles of the rain forest, they fell back into their old military roles again and accepted as if with relief the ancient disciplines of command. TolramKetinet also changed. His stance had been that of a defeated man. Now he pulled his shoulders back and took on something of his old swagger. The lines of his face tightened; he could again be recognized as a young man. The more men there were to take orders, the more easily he gave orders, and the more right they seemed. With the mutability of the human race, he became what those about him regarded him as being.
So the small force arrived at the Kacol River.
Powered by their new spirit, they launched a surprise raid and took the shantytown of Ordelay. With this victory, fighting spirit was entirely restored.
Among the craft on the Kacol was an ice ship, flying the flag of the Lordryardry Ice Trading Company. When the town was invaded, this vessel, the Lordryardry Lubber, tried to make its escape downstream, but TolramKetinet intercepted it with a group of men.
The terrified captain protested that he was a neutral and claimed diplomatic immunity. His business in Ordelay was not merely to trade in ice but to hand a letter to General Hanra TolramKetinet.
“Do you know where this general is?” demanded TolramKetinet.
“Somewhere in the jungle, losing the king’s war for him.”
With a sword at his throat, the captain said that he had sent a paid messenger to deliver the message; there his obligations ended. He had carried out Captain Krillio Muntras’s instructions.
“What said the contents of the letter?” TolramKetinet demanded.
The man swore he did not know. The leather wallet which contained it was sealed with the seal of the queen of queens, MyrdemInggala. How would he dare tamper with a royal message?
“You would never rest until you found out what was in it. Speak, you scoundrel!”
He needed encouragement. When crushed under an upturned table, the captain admitted that the seal of the wallet had come unstuck on its own. He had happened to notice, without meaning to, that the queen of queens was being sent into exile by King JandolAnganol, to a place on the north coast of the Sea of Eagles called Gravabagalinien; that she feared for her life; and that she hoped that she might one day see her good friend the general delivered from the dangers of war into her presence. She prayed that Akhanaba would guard him from all ills.
When he heard this, TolramKetinet became pale. He went away and looked over the side of the boat at the dark-flowing river, so that his soldiers should not see his face. Expectations, fears, desires, woke in him. He uttered a prayer that he might be more successful in love than in war.
TolramKetinet’s party put the battered captain of the Lubber ashore and commandeered his boat. They caroused for a day in town, stacked the ice ship with provisions and sailed for the distant ocean.
High above the jungle, the Avernus sailed in its orbit. There were those on the observation satellite, unfamiliar with the varieties of warfare practised on the planet below, who asked what kind of force could have defeated the Borlienese Second Army. They looked in vain for a set of swaggering Randonanese patriots who had repelled the invasion of their homeland.
There was no such force. The Randonanese were semi-savage tribes who lived in harmony with their environment. Some tribes cultivated patches of cereal. All lived surrounded by dogs and pigs which, when young, were allowed to suckle indiscriminately at the breasts of nursing mothers if they so desired. They killed for the pot and not for sport. Many tribes worshipped Others as gods, although that did not stop them killing such gods as they encountered swinging among the branches of the great forest home. Such was the mould of their mind that numbers of them worshipped fish, or trees, menses, spirits, or patches of double daylight.
In their humility, the tribes of Randonan tolerated the tribes of phagors, which were torpid, and consisted mainly of itinerant woodmen or fungusmongers. The phagors, in their turn, rarely attacked the human tribes, though the customary tales were told of stalluns carrying off human women.
The phagors brewed their own drink, raffel. On certain occasions, they brewed a different potion, which the Randonanese tribes called vulumunwun, believing it to be distilled from the sap of the vulu tree and from certain fungi. Unable to concoct vulumunwun themselves, they obtained it by barter from phagors. Then a feast would be held far into the night.
On these occasions, a great sp
irit often spoke to the tribes. It told them to go out and make sport in the Desert.
The tribes would bind their gods, the Others, to bamboo chairs and carry them away through the jungle on their shoulders. The whole tribe would go, babies, pigs, parrots, preets, cats, and all. They would cross the Kacol and enter what was officially Borlien. They would invade the richly cultivated lands of the central Borlienese plain.
This was the land the Randonanese called the Desert. It was open to the skies; the suns blazed down. It had no great trees, no dense shrub, no secret places, no wild boar, no Others. In this godless place—with a final libation of vulumunwun—they dared make sport, setting fire to or despoiling the crops.
The plainsmen of Borlien were sturdy dark men. They hated the pale lizards who materialized like ghosts out of nowhere. They rushed from their little villages and drove off the invaders with any weapon that came to hand. Often they lost their own lives in the process, for the tribesmen had blow tubes from which they blew feathered thorns tipped with poison. Maddened, the farmers would leave their homes and burn down the forests. So it had finally come to war between Borlien and Randonan.
Aggression, defence, attack, and counterattack. These moves became confused in the enantiodromia which, in human minds, constantly turns all things into their opposites. By the time the Second Army deployed its platoons in the jungle-clad mountains of Randonan, the little tribesmen had themselves become, in the eyes of their enemies, a formidable military force.
Yet what had defeated TolramKetinet’s expedition was no armed opposition. The defence of the tribes was to slide away into the jungle, shrieking through the night barbaric insults at the invaders, just as they heard the Others do. Like the Others, they took to the trees, to rain darts or urine down on the general’s men. They could not properly wage war. The jungle did that for them.
The jungle was full of diseases to which the Borlienese army was not immune. Its fruits brought torrential dysenteries, its pools malarias, its days fevers, and its insects a sordid crop of parasites which fed on the men from the outside in or from the inside out. Nothing could be properly fought; everything had to be survived. One by one, or in batches, Borlienese soldiers succumbed to the jungle. With them went King JandolAnganol’s ambitions for victory in the Western Wars.