Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

“Here’s the past… these earthworks form part of an ancient fortification system. The phagors are uncovering the geometries of legend made flesh…”

He walked over to a newly dug pit. SartoriIrvrash followed. CaraBansity knelt at the edge of the pit, heedless of squelching mud. An arm’s length below the turf, emerging from the peaty soil, lay what SartoriIrvrash took at first to be an old black bag, pressed flat. It was or it had been a man. His body lay sprawled on its left side. Short leather tunic and boots suggested that the man had been a soldier. Half-concealed beneath his flattened form lay the hilt of a sword. The man’s profile, mouth distorted by broken teeth, had been moulded by earth’s pressure into a macabre smile. The flesh was a rich shining brown.

Other bodies were being uncovered. The phagors worked without interest, scratching the mud away with their fingers. From the dirt, another mummified soldier appeared, a fearful wound in his chest. The creases of his face were clear, as if in a pencil sketch. His eyeballs had collapsed giving his expression a melancholy vacancy.

The cellar smell of soil bit into their nostrils.

“The peaty earth has preserved them,” said SartoriIrvrash. “They could be soldiers who died in battle, or similar botheration. They may be a hundred years old.”

“Far more than that,” said CaraBansity, jumping down into the trench. He scratched up one of a number of what SartoriIrvrash had taken to be stones, and lifted it for examination. “This is probably what killed the fellow with the broken teeth. It’s a rajabaral tree seed, as hard as iron. It may have been baked, which is why it never germinated. It’s over six centuries since spring, when the rajabarals seeded. The attackers used the seeds as cannonballs. This is where the legendary battle of Gravabagalinien was fought. We find the site because we are about to use it again for battle.”

“Poor devils!”

“Them? Or us?” He went to the rear corner of the excavation. Lying below the body of the man with the chest wound was a phagor, partly visible. Its face was black, its coat matted and reddened by the bog water, until it resembled a compressed vegetable growth. “You see how even then men and phagors fought and died together.”

SartoriIrvrash gave a snort of disgust. “They may equally well have been enemies. You’ve no evidence either way.”

“Certainly it’s a bad omen. I wouldn’t want the queen to see these. Or TolramKetinet. He’s scumber himself. We’d better cover the bodies up.”

The ex-chancellor made to turn away. “Not all of us cover up the secrets we find, friend. I have knowledge in my possession which, when I lay it before the authorities of Pannoval, will start a Holy War against the ancipital kind throughout all Campannlat.”

CaraBansity looked calculatingly at him through his heavy bloodshot eyes. “And you’ll get paid for starting that war, eh? Live and let live, I say.”

“Yes, you say it, Bardol, but these horned creatures don’t. Their creed is different. They will outbreed us and kill us unless we act. If you had seen for yourself the flambreg herds—”

“Don’t fly into a passion. Passion always causes trouble… Now, we’ll get on with our job. There are probably hundreds of bodies lying under the earth about here.”

Folding his arms tightly about his chest, SartoriIrvrash said, “You give me a cold reception, just like the queen.”

CaraBansity climbed slowly out of the trench. “Her majesty gave you what you asked for, a book and three hoxneys.” He stuck a knuckle between his teeth and stared at the ex-chancellor.

“Why are you so against me, Bardol? Have you forgotten the time when, as young men, we looked through your telescope and observed the phases of Kaidaw as it sped above us? And from that deduced the cosmic geometries under which we exist?”

“I don’t forget. You come here, though, with a Sibornalese officer, a dedicated enemy of Borlien. The queen is under threat of death and the kingdom of dissolution. I have no love of JandolAnganol or of phagors, yet I wish to see them continue, in order that people may still look through telescopes.

“Overturn the kingdom, as both you and she would do, and you overturn the telescopes.”

He gazed through the trees towards the sea with a bitter expression, shrugging his shoulders.

“You have witnessed how Keevasien, once a place of some culture, home of the great YarapRombry, has been carelessly erased. Culture may flourish better under old injustice than under new. That’s all I say.”

“It’s a plea for your own way of life.”

“I shall always fight for my own way of life. I believe in it. Even when it means fighting myself. Go, take that woman with you—and remember there’s always more than an arm up a Sibornalese sleeve.”

“Why speak to me like this? I’m a victim. A wanderer—an exile. My life’s work’s ruined. I could have been the YarapRombry of my epoch… I’m innocent.”

CaraBansity shook his large head. “You’re of an age when innocence is a crime. Leave with your lady. Go and spread your poison.”

They regarded each other challengingly. SartoriIrvrash sighed, CaraBansity climbed back into his trench.

SartoriIrvrash walked back to where Odi Jeseratabhar waited with the animals. He mounted his hoxney without a word, tears in his eyes.

They took the trail leading northwards to Oldorando. JandolAnganol and his party had travelled that way only a few days earlier, on their way to the home of the king’s murdered bride-to-be.

The suns blazed down out of a cloudless sky, flattening the veldt with their combined light.

King JandolAnganol, Eagle of Borlien, enjoyed being in the wilderness again. His way of enjoyment was not every man’s. It consisted mainly of hard marches interspersed with short rests. This was not to the taste of the C’Sarr’s pleasure-loving envoy, Alam Esomberr.

The king and his force, with attendant ecclesiastics, approached Oldorando from the south along one of the old Pilgrim’s Ways, which led on through Oldorando to Holy Pannoval.

Oldorando stood at the crossroads of Campannlat. The migratory route of the phagors and the various ucts of the Madis ran east and west close by the city. The old salt road meandered north into the Quzints and Lake Dorzin. To the west lay Kace—slatternly Kace, home of cutthroats, craftsmen, vagabonds, and villains; to the south lay Borlien—friendly Borlien, home of more villains.

JandolAnganol was approaching a country at war, like his own, with barbarians. That war between Oldorando and Kace had broken out because of the ineffectiveness of King Sayren Stund as much as the nastiness of the Kaci.

Faced with the collapse of the Second Army, JandolAnganol had made what was widely regarded as a cowardly peace with the hill clans of Kace, sending them valuable tributes of grain and veronikane in order to seal the armistice.

To the Kaci, peace was relative; they were long accustomed to internecine struggles. They simply hung their crossbows on the back of the hut door and resumed their traditional occupations. These included hunting, blood feuds, potting—they made excellent pottery which they traded with the Madi for rugs—stealing, mining precious stones, and goading their scrawny womenfolk into working harder. But the war with Borlien, sporadic though it had been, instilled in the clans a new sense of unity.

Failing by some chance to quarrel during their extensive victory celebrations—when JandolAnganol’s grain tribute was converted into something more potable—the leading clans of Kace accepted as their universal suzerain a powerful brute called Skrumppabowr. As a kind of goodwill gesture on his election, Skrumppabowr had all the Oldorandans living on Kaci land slaughtered, or ‘staked’ as the local term was.