Helliconia Summer

IV An Innovation in the Cosgatt

Alam Esomberr’s bitter laughter eventually reached the ears of those who lived on Earth. Despite the enormous gulf between Helliconia and Earth, that response to the labourings of fate met with immediate comprehension.

Between Earth and Helliconia a kind of relay was interposed, the Earth Observation Station called Avernus. The Avernus had its orbit about Helliconia as Helliconia had its orbit about Batalix, and as Batalix had its orbit about Freyr. Avernus was the lens through which terrestrial observers experienced events on Helliconia.

The human beings who worked on the Avernus dedicated their lives to a study of all aspects of Helliconia. That dedication was not of their choosing. They had no alternative.

Beneath that dominating injustice, a general justice prevailed. There was no poverty on the Avernus, no one starving physically. But it was a narrow domain. The spherical station had a diameter of only one thousand metres, most of its inhabitants living on the inside of the outer shell, and within that compass a kind of inanition prevailed, sapping life of its joy. Looking down does not exalt the spirit.

Billy Xiao Pin was a typical representative of Avernian society. Outwardly, he subscribed to all the norms; he worked without industry; he was engaged to an attractive girl; he took regular prescribed exercise; he had an Advisor who preached to him the higher virtues of acceptance. Yet inwardly Billy craved only one thing. He longed to be down on the Helliconian surface, 1500 kilometres below, to see Queen MyrdemInggala, to touch her, speak with her, and make love to her. In his dreams, the queen invited him into her arms.

The distant observers on Earth had other concerns. They followed continuities of which Billy and his kind were unaware. As they watched, suffering, the divorce at Gravabagalinien, they were able to trace the genesis of that division back to a battle which had taken place to the east of Matrassyl, in a region known as the Cosgatt. JandolAnganol’s experiences in the Cosgatt influenced his later actions and led—so it appeared by hindsight—inexorably to divorce.

What became known as the Battle of the Cosgatt took place five tenners—240 days, or half a small year—before the day that the king and MyrdemInggala severed their marriage bonds by the sea.

In the region of the Cosgatt, the king received a physical wound which was to lead to the spiritual severance.

Both the king’s life and his reputation suffered in the battle. And they were threatened, ironically, by nothing more than a rabble, the raggle-taggle tribes of Driats.

Or, as the more historically minded of terrestrial observers said, by an innovation. An innovation which changed not only the life of the king and queen but of all their people. A gun.

What was most humiliating for the king was that he held the Driats in contempt, as did every follower of Akhanaba in Borlien and Oldorando. For the Driats, it was conceded, were human—but only just. The threshold between non-human and human is shadowy. On one side of it lies a world full of illusory freedoms, on the other a world of illusory captivity. The Others remained animal, and stayed in the jungles. The Madis—tied to a migratory way of life—had reached the threshold of sapience, but remained protognostic. The Driats had just crossed the threshold, and there abided throughout recorded time, like a bird frozen on the wing.

The adverse conditions of the planet, the aridity of their share of it, contributed to the Driats’ permanent backwardness. For the Driat tribes occupied the dry grasslands of Thribriat, a country to the southeast of Borlien, across the wide Takissa. The Driats lived among herds of yelk and biyelk which pastured in those high regions during the summer of the great year.

Customs regarded as offensive by the outside world furthered the survival of the Driats. They practised a form of ritual murder, by which the useless members of a family were killed after failing certain tests. In times of near famine, the slaughter of the ancients was often the salvation of the innocents. This custom had given the Driats a bad name among those whose existence was cast in easier pastures. But they were in reality a peaceful people—or too stupid to be warlike in an effective way.

The eruption of various nations southwards along the ranges of the Nktryhk—particularly those warrior nations temporarily banded together behind Unndreid the Hammer—had changed that. Under pressure, the Driats bestirred their bivouacs and went marauding into the lower valleys of Thribriat, which lie in the rain shadow of the massive Lower Nktryhk.

A cunning warlord, known as Darvlish the Skull, had brought order to their ragged ranks. Finding that the simple Driat mind responded to discipline, he formed them into three regiments and led them into the region known as the Cosgatt. His intention was to attack JandolAnganol’s capital, Matrassyl.

Borlien already had the unpopular Western Wars on its hands. No ruler of Borlien, not even the Eagle, could hope really to win against either Randonan or Kace, since those mountainous countries could not be occupied or governed even if conquered.

Now the Fifth Army was recalled from Kace and sent into the Cosgatt. The campaign against Darvlish was not dignified with the title of war. Yet it ate up as much manpower as a war, cost as much, was fought as passionately. Thribriat and the wilderness of the Cosgatt were nearer to Matrassyl than the Western Wars.

Darvlish had a personal animus against JandolAnganol and his line. His father had been a baron in Borlien. He had fought by his father’s side when JandolAnganol’s father, VarpalAnganol, had appropriated his land. Darvlish had seen his father cut down by a youthful JandolAnganol.

When a leader died in battle, that was the end of fighting. No man would continue. Darvlish’s father’s army turned and ran. Darvlish retreated to the east with a handful of men. VarpalAnganol and his son pursued them, hunting them like lizards among the stoney mazes of the Cosgatt—until the Borlienese forces refused to go further because no more loot was forthcoming.

After almost eleven years in the wilderness, Darvlish had another chance, and took it: “The vultures shall praise my name!” became his war cry.

Half a small year before the king divorced his queen—before the idea even invaded his mind—JandolAnganol was forced to muster new troops and march at the head of them. Men were in short supply and required pay or the loot the Cosgatt would not yield. He used phagors. The phagor auxiliaries were promised freedom and land in return for service. They were formed into the First and Second Regiments of the Royal Phagorian Guard of the Fifth Army. Phagors were ideal in one respect: both the male and female fought, and their young went into battle with them. JandolAnganol’s father before him had also rewarded ancipital troops with land. It was as a result of this policy—forced on the kings by manpower shortage—that phagors lived more comfortably in Borlien than in Oldorando, and were less subject to persecution.

The Fifth Army marched eastwards, through jungles of stone. The invaders melted away before it. Most skirmishes were confined to dimday—neither side would fight either during darkness or when both suns were high. But the Fifth Army, under KolobEktofer, was forced to travel during full day.

It travelled through earthquake country, where ravines ran obliquely across its path. Habitation was scanty. The ravines were a tangle of vegetation, but there, if anywhere, water was to be found—as well as snakes, lions, and other creatures. The rest of the land was pocked with umbrella cactus and scrub. Progress across it was slow.

Living off the land was hard. Two kinds of creature dominated the plain, numberless ants and the ground-sloths which lived off the ants. The Fifth caught the sloths and roasted them, but the flesh was bitter in flavour.

Still the cunning Darvlish withdrew his forces, luring the king away from his base. Sometimes he left behind smouldering campfires or dummy forts on elevated sites. Then a day would be wasted as the army investigated them.

Colour-Major KolobEktofer had been a great explorer in his youth and knew the wilds of Thribriat, and the mountains above Thribriat, where the air finished.

“They will stand, they will stand soon,” he told the king one evening when a frustrated Eagle was cursing their difficulties. “The Skull must soon fight, or the tribes will turn against him. He understands that well. Once he knows we’re far enough from Matrassyl to be without our supply trains, he’ll make his stand. And we must be ready for his tricks.”

“What kind of tricks?”

KolobEktofer shook his head. “The Skull is cunning, but not clever. He’ll try one of his father’s old tricks, and much good they did him. We’ll be ready.”

The next day, Darvlish struck.

As the Fifth Army approached a deep ravine, forward scouts sighted the Driat host drawn up in battle lines on the far bank. The ravine ran from northeast to southwest, and was choked with jungle. It was more than four times a javelin’s throw across from one bank to the other.

Using hand signals, the king mustered his army to face the enemy across the ravine. The Phagorian guards were stationed in front because the ranks of motionless beasts would bring anxiety into the dim minds of the tribesmen.

The tribesmen were of spectral aspect. It was just after dawn: twenty minutes past six. Freyr had risen behind cloud. When the sun broke free of the cloud, it became apparent that the enemy and part of the ravine would be in shadow for the next two or more hours; the Fifth Army would be exposed to Freyr’s heat.

Crumbling cliff slopes backed the Driat array, with higher country above. On the royal left flank was a spur of high ground, its angles jutting towards the ravine. A rounded mesa stood between the spur and the cliffs, as if it had been set there by geological forces to guard the Skull’s flank. On top of the mesa, the walls of a crude fort could be seen; its walls were of mud, and behind the ramparts an occasional pennant was visible.

The Eagle of Borlien and the colour-major studied the situation together. Behind the colour-major stood his faithful sergeant-at-arms, a taciturn man known as Bull.

“We must find out how many men are in that fort,” JandolAnganol said.

“It’s one of the tricks he learnt from his father. He hopes we’ll waste our time attacking that position. I’ll wager no Driats are up there. The pennants we see moving are tied to goats or asokins.” They stood in silence. From the enemy’s side of the ravine, under the cliffs, smoke rose in the shadowed air, and an aroma of cooking drifted across to remind them of their own hungry state.

Bull took his officer to one side and muttered in his ear.

“Let’s hear what you have to say, sergeant,” the king said.

“It’s nothing, sire.”

The king looked angry. “Let’s hear this nothing, then.”

The sergeant regarded him with one eyelid drooping. “All I was saying, sire, is that our men will be disappointed. It’s the only way a common man—by which I mean myself—can advance himself, sire, to join the army and hope to grab what is going. But these Driats aren’t worth looting. What’s more they don’t appear to have females—by which I mean women, sire—so that the incentive to attack is… well, sire, on the low side.”

The king stood confronting him face to face, until Bull backed away a step.

“We’ll worry about women when we have routed Darvlish, Bull. He may have hidden his women in a neighbouring valley.”

KolobEktofer cleared his throat. “Unless you have a plan, sire, I’d say we have a nigh-on impossible task here. They outnumber us two to one, and although our mounts are faster than theirs, in close combat our hoxneys will be flimsy compared with their yelk and biyelk.”

There can be no question of retreat now that we have caught up with them at last.”

“We could disengage, sire, and seek for a more advantageous position from which to attack. If we were on the cliffs above them, for instance—”

“Or could capture them in an ambush, sire, by which I mean…”

JandolAnganol flew into a rage. “Are you officers, or she-goats? Here we are, there stands our country’s enemy. What more do you want? Why falter now, when by Freyr-set we can all be heroes?”

KolobEktofer drew himself up. “It is my duty to point out to you the weakness of our position, sire. The smell of some women as booty would have encouraged the men’s fighting spirits.”

In a passion, JandolAnganol said, “They must not fear a subhuman rabble—with our cross-bowmen we shall rout them in an hour.”

“Very good, sire. Perhaps if you would address Darvlish as filth it would increase our men’s fighting spirit.”

“I shall address him.”

A dark look was exchanged between KolobEktofer and Bull, but no more was said, and the former gave orders for the disposition of the army.

The main body of men was dispersed along the ragged lip of the ravine. The left flank was strengthened by the Second Phagorian Guard. The hoxneys, numbering fifty in all, were in poor condition after their journey. They had been used mainly as pack animals. Now they were unloaded so as to serve as cavalry animals, to impress Darvlish’s men. Their loads were piled inside a shallow cave in the spur, and guards put on them, human and phagor. If the day was not carried, those supplies would provide booty for the Driats.

While these dispositions went forward, the wing of shadow suspended from the shoulders of the opposite cliffs was retracting, like a giant sundial set to remind every man of his mortality. The Skull’s forces were revealed as no less imposing than they had seemed when shrouded in blue shade. The ur-human tribes wore a tatterdemalion collection of hides and blankets thrown on their bodies with the same negligence as they threw themselves on their yelks. Some wore bright-striped blankets rolled about their shoulders, to give themselves extra bulk. Some wore knee-high boots, many were barefoot. Their headgear inclined to massive biyelk-fur headpieces—often horned or antlered to denote rank. A feature common to many was the penis, painted or embroidered on their breeches in furious erection to denote their rapacious intent.

The Skull was readily visible. His leather and fur headpiece was dyed orange. Antlers thrust forward from it about his moustachioed face. A sword wound sustained in his earlier battles with JandolAnganol had slashed away his left cheek and the flesh of his lower jaw, leaving him with a permanent death-grin, in which bone and teeth played a part. He managed to look fully as ferocious as his allies, whose fur-fringed eyes and prognathous jaws gave them a naturally savage aspect. A mighty biyelk was his steed.

He raised his javelin above his head and shouted, “The vultures shall praise my name!” A ragged cheer came from the throats about him, echoing from the cliffs behind.

JandolAnganol mounted his hoxney and stood in the stirrups. The shout he gave carried clear to the enemy host.

He called in pidgin Olonets, “Darvlish, have you dared to stand before your face rots away?”

A murmur of sounds rose from both confronting armies. The Skull kneed his biyelk to the edge of the precipice and bellowed across to his enemy.

“Do you hear me, Jandol, you woolly-eared dung-beetle? You were farted out of your father’s left instep, so why come you here, daring to face real men? Everyone knows your knackers are knocking together in fear. Crawl away, you dropping, crawl away and take those mangey arse-combings of warriors with you.”

His voice echoed back and back again from the cliffs. When the silence was complete, JandolAnganol replied in similar vein.

“Yes, I hear your womanish bleatings, Darvlish of the Dunghills. I hear your claim that those clap-ridden three-legged Others beside you are real men. We all know that real men would never associate with the likes of you. Who could bear the stench of your decay but those barbaric monkeys with phagor-scumber for grandmothers?”

The orange head gear shook in the sunshine.

“Phagor-scumber, is it, you dimday hrattock! You know whereof you talk, since a plateful of phagor-scumber is your daily diet, so much do you worship those horned Batalix-buggerers. Kick them into the ravine and dare to fight fair, you crap-crowned cockroach!”

A roar of savage laughter came from the Driat host.

“If you have so little respect for those who are the climax of creation by comparison with your yelk-yobs, then shake the spiders and scabs from your stinking codpiece and attack us, you cowardly little half-faced Driat dildo!”

This address continued for some while. JandolAnganol was revealed as increasingly at a disadvantage, not having the resources of Darvlish’s foul mind on which to draw. While the verbal battle was in progress, KolobEktofer sent off Bull with a small column of men to create a diversion of their own.

The heat intensified. Plagues of stinging things visited both armies. The phagors wilted under the gaze of Freyr and would soon break ranks. The insults wound up.

“Epitaph for an ancipital earth-closet!”

“Catamite of a Cosgatt ground-sloth!”

The Borlienese army started to move along the lip of the ravine, shouting and brandishing their weapons, while the Driat horde did the same on the other side.

KolobEktofer said to the king, “How shall we tackle the mesa fort, sire?”

“I’m convinced you are right. The fort is a decoy. Forget all about it. You lead the cavalry, with infantry and the First Phagorian following. I will march the Second Phagorian behind the mesa, so that the Driats lose sight of us. When you engage them, we will charge from cover and attack their right flank, cutting in behind them. It should then be possible to drive Darvlish into the ravine with a pincer movement.”

“I shall carry out your orders, sire.”

“Akhanaba be with you, major.”

The king spurred his hoxney and rode over to the phagorian guard.

The ancipitals were full of complaint and had to be lectured before they would move. Not comprehending death, they claimed that the air-octaves in the valley did not favour their cause; in the event of defeat, they could not find tether here.

The king addressed them in Hurdhu. This back-of-throat language was not the brand of pidgin Olonets in use between races, but a genuine bridge between human and non-human concepts, said to have originated—like so many innovations—from far Sibornal. Thick with nouns, clotted with gerunds, Hurdhu was palatable alike to human brains and the pale harneys of ancipitals.

Native Ancipital was a language with only one tense, the continuous present. It was not a language adapted to abstract thought; even counting, limited to base three, was finite. Ancipital mathematics, however, dedicated itself to the enumeration of sets of years, and boasted a special eotemporal mode. Eotemporal was a sacred speech-form dealing with the concerns of eternity and purporting to be the language of tether.

Natural death being unknown to phagors, theirs was an umwelt largely inaccessible to the understanding of human beings. Even phagors did not easily switch from Native to Eotemporal. Hurdhu, devised to solve such problems, used an intraspecific mode of communication. Yet every sentence in Hurdhu bore a weight of difficulty appropriate to its speakers. Humans required its rigid sentence order, corresponding to Olonets. Phagors required a fixed language in which neologisms were almost as impossible as abstracts. Thus, the Hurdhu equivalent for ‘humanity’ was ‘Sons of Freyr’. ‘Civilization’ was ‘many of roofs’; ‘military formation’ was ‘spears on move by orders’, and so on. It therefore took JandolAnganol time to make his orders clear to the Second Phagorian.

When they comprehended fully that the foe confronting them was befouling their pastures and spitting their runts like sucking pigs, the stalluns and gillots began to march. They were almost fearless, although the heat had made them visibly less alert. With them went their runts, squealing to be carried.

As the Second Phagorian moved, KolobEktofer shouted orders to the rest of the force. It also got under way. Dust rose. These movements awakened reciprocal movements in the Driat company. Those ragged ranks turned from line abreast into file and marched towards confrontation. The two forces would meet on the expanse at the foot of the cliffs, between the throat of the ravine and the mesa.

The pace on both sides began brisk, slowing as an encounter became inevitable. There was no question of a charge; the chosen battlefield was strewn with broken boulders, memorials to the chthonic upheavals which still dominated the land. It was a question of picking a way towards the enemy.

General shouting gave way to personal insult as the opposed forces drew nearer. Boots tramped without advancing. They faced each other, reluctant to close the gap of a few feet between them. Driat lords in the rear were bellowing and prodding, without effect. Darvlish galloped back and forth behind his men, screaming abuse at them for being scab-devouring cowards; but the tribesmen were unused to this kind of warfare, preferring quick forays and quick retreats. Javelins were thrown. At last, sword struck against sword and blade into body. Insults turned to screams. Birds began to gather in the sky above. Darvlish galloped the harder. JandolAnganol’s detachment appeared round the back of the mesa, and charged at moderate pace towards the right flank of the Driats, as planned.

Whereupon, there were triumphant screams from the hillsides above the battle. There, protected by the shade afforded by the cliffs above them, some of the hags of the tribe—camp followers, harlots, savage dames—had crouched in ambush. They waited only for the enemy to make the anticipated move and skirt the mesa. Leaping to their feet, they rolled boulders down the slope before them, starting a landslide which roared down upon the Second Phagorian. The phagors froze in dismay and were skittled like ninepins. Many of their children died with them.

The faithful Sergeant Bull had been the first to suspect that tribal women must be close at hand. Women were his particular interest. He had moved with a small column of men while the insult address was at its height. Under cover of umbrella cactus, his column climbed down into the ravine, through its thorn entanglements, and up its farther bank, where they managed to skirt the Driat horde and gain the cliffs without being seen.

Scaling the cliffs was a feat. Bull never gave up. He led his men high above the host, where they found a path dotted with fresh human faeces. They smiled grimly at the discovery, which seemed to confirm their suspicions. They scrambled higher still. When they reached another path, life became easier. They crawled along this track on hands and knees, to avoid being seen by either of the armies below. Their reward was the sight of forty or more tribal women, swaddled in blankets and stinking skirts, squatting on the hillside a little way below them. The boulders piled in front of the witches told their own tale.

The climbers had had to leave their spears behind.

Their only weapons were short swords. The hill was too rugged to charge down. Their best hope was to fight the hags with their own weapons, and bombard them with stones and boulders.

These had to be amassed in silence, allowing no telltale stones to roll down the slope to give their position away. Bull’s column was still gathering ammunition when the Second Phagorian charged round the mesa, and the hags went into action.

“Let them have it, my bullies,” the sergeant shouted. They sent a fusillade of stones flying. The women scattered, screaming, but not before their homemade avalanche was in action. Below them, the phagors were obliterated.

With this encouragement, the Driat horde fought the main Borlienese force in fiercer spirit, long-swords flashing in the front ranks, javelins being thrown from the rear. The confused body of men broke into struggling groups. Dust rose above the scene. Thuds, shouts, screams sounded.

Bull viewed the scrimmage from his vantage point. He wanted to be down in the thick of it. He could see, intermittently, the gigantic figure of his major, running from group to group, encouraging, wielding his bloody sword without cease. He could also see into the mud fort on top of the mesa. The king had been mistaken. Warriors were hiding there among asokins.

The tide of fighting surrounded the base of the mesa, except where the cliff fall covered the bodies of the phagors of the Second. Bull yelled to warn KolobEktofer of his danger, but nothing could be heard above the din of battle. Bull ordered his men to climb down the cliffside to the northwest and rejoin the struggle. He lowered himself down the cliff, slithering and falling until he fetched up on hands and knees on the path where the tribal hags had waited. A young woman, hit on the knee by a stone, lay close by. She drew a dagger and flung herself on Bull. He twisted her arm until it cracked and dragged her face down on the ground, kicking her weapon over the edge.

“I’ll deal with you later, you strumpet,” he said.

The women had left javelins behind in their flight. He picked one up and balanced it, looking towards the mesa. From this lower elevation, he could scarcely glimpse the backs of the men who crouched behind its walls. But one of them, watching through a slit, had sighted him. This man rose. He raised a mysterious weapon to his chest, the other end of which another man steadied over his shoulder.

Tensing himself, Bull flung the javelin with all his might. It flew true at first, but dropped harmlessly outside the walls of the fort.

As he watched in disgust, Bull saw a puff of smoke issue from the weapon the two men were aiming at him. Something like a hornet whistled by his ear.

Groping among the pots and stained rags the women had left behind, Bull found the other javelins. He selected one and again stood poised.

The two men on the mesa had also been busy, ramming something in one end of their weapon. They took up their positions as formerly, and again Bull, as he launched his javelin, saw a puff of smoke and heard a bang. Next moment, something struck him a blow in the left shoulder, sending him spinning as if he had been brutally punched. He fell back, sprawling on the path.

The wounded woman hauled herself to her feet, grabbed one of the javelins, and braced herself to thrust it into his undefended stomach. He kicked her legs away, locked his right arm about her neck, and together they rolled down the hillside.

Meanwhile, the musketmen on the mesa rose to full view and commenced to discharge their novel weapons at KolobEktofer’s men. Darvlish screamed with delight and flung his biyelk into the fray. He saw that success could be his.

Dismayed by what had happened to the King’s force, KolobEktofer fought on, but the matchlock fire was having a devastating effect on his men. Some were hit. None liked the cowardly nature of this innovation which could kill at a distance. KolobEktofer knew immediately that the Driats had purchased these hand-artillery weapons from the Sibornalese, or from other tribes who traded with the Sibornalese. The Fifth were wavering. The only way to win the battle was to silence the fort immediately.

Summoning six hardened old campaigners to his side, he allowed them no time to pause; the struggle was going against the remnants of the king’s party. Sword drawn, the colour-major led a scramble up the one accessible path to the top of the mesa, where rubble formed a slope.

As KolobEktofer’s party reached the fort, an explosion greeted it. One of the Sibornalese matchlocks had blown up, killing a gunner. At the same time, other guns—there were eleven all told—jammed, or their powder ran out. The Driats were not expert at weapon maintenance. Demoralized, the company allowed themselves to be butchered. They expected no mercy and received none from KolobEktofer. This massacre was observed by the Driats, who surrounded the mesa.

The king’s force, or what was left of it, finding its best leaders gone, decided to retire while it was reasonably intact. Some of KolobEktofer’s younger lieutenants made attempts to slash their way to the king’s side but, their support failing them, they were themselves cut down. The rest of the force turned and ran for safety, pursued by Driats uttering blood-chilling threats. Although KolobEktofer and his companions put up a brave fight, they were overwhelmed. Their bodies were hacked to pieces and the pieces kicked into the ravine. Mad with victory despite a high casualty list, Darvlish and his cohorts split into groups to hunt down survivors. By nightfall, only vultures and skulking things were still moving on the field of battle. This was the first time that firearms were used against Borlien.

In a notorious house on the outskirts of Matrassyl, a certain ice trader was waking. The whore whose bed he had shared overnight was already padding about, yawning. The ice trader raised himself on one elbow, scratched his chest, and coughed. The time was just before Freyr-break.

“Any pellamountain, Metty?” he asked.

“It’s on the boil,” she said in a whisper. Since he had known her, Metty always drank pellamountain tea in the early morning.

He sat on the edge of her bed, peering through the thick twilight at her. He covered himself. Now that desire had gone, he was not proud of his thickening body.

He followed her into the little kitchen-cum-washroom which adjoined her cabin. A basin of charcoal had been blown into life with bellows; a kettle sang on it. The glowing charcoal gave the only light in the room, apart from the tatters of dawn filtering through a broken shutter. By this bad light, he observed Metty as she went about the business of making tea as if she were his wife. Yes, she was getting old, he thought, observing her thin, lined face—probably twenty-nine, maybe even thirty. Only five years his junior. No longer pretty, but good in bed. Not a whore any longer. A retired whore. He sighed. She only took old friends, nowadays, and then as a favour.

Metty was dressed, neat and conservative, intending to go to church.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t want to wake you, Krillio.”

“It’s all right.” Affection rising in him, he said reluctantly, “I wouldn’t want to leave without saying my thanks and farewells.”

“You’ll be making back to your wife and family now.”

She nodded without looking at him, concentrating on arranging a few leaves of the herb in two cups. Her mouth pursed. Her movements were businesslike—like all her movements, he thought.

The ice trader’s boat had docked late the previous day. He had come from Lordryardry with his usual cargo, all the way across the Sea of Eagles, to Ottassol, and then up the stubborn Takissa to Matrassyl. On this trip, besides ice, he had brought his son, Div, to acquaint him with the traders on the route. And to introduce Div to Metty’s house, to which he had been coming for as long as he had been trading with the royal palace. His lad was backward in all things.

Old Metty had a girl waiting for Div, an orphan of the Western Wars, slender and fair, with an attractive mouth and clean hair. Almost as inexperienced as Div, you’d say, at first glance. He had looked her over, trying with a coin in her kooni to see if she was free of disease. The copper coin had not turned green, and he had been satisfied. Or almost. He wanted the best for his son, fool though the boy was.

“Metty, I thought you had a daughter about Div’s age?”

She was not a communicative woman. “Doesn’t this girl suit?”

She flashed him a look as if to say, You mind your business and I’ll mind mine. Then perhaps relenting because he was always generous with his money and would never come again, she said, “My daughter Abathy, she wants to better herself, wants to move down to Ottassol. I tell her, there’s nothing in Ottassol you won’t find here, I said. But she wants to see the sea. All you’ll see is sailors, I told her.”

“So where is Abathy now?”

“Oh, she’s doing well for herself. Got a room, curtains, clothes… Earns a little money, she’ll be off south. She soon found herself a rich patron, her being so young and pretty.”

The ice trader saw the suppressed jealousy in Metty’s eyes and nodded to himself. Ever curious, he couldn’t resist asking who the patron was.

She shot one of her sharp glances at gawky young Div and the girl, both standing by the bunk impatient for their elders to go. Pulling a face—mistrusting what she was doing—she whispered a name into the trader’s mottled ear.

The trader sighed dramatically. “Well!”

But both he and Metty were too old and wicked to be shocked at anything.

“You going, Da?” Div asked his father.

So then he had left, to let Div get on with it as best he could. What fools men were when young, what clapped-out wrecks when old!

Now, as morning crept in, Div would be sleeping, his head against the girl’s, in some lower cabin. But all the pleasure the trader had experienced the night before, performing a fatherly duty, had gone. He felt hungry, but knew better than to ask Metty for food. His legs were stiff—whores’ beds were never meant for sleeping.

In a reflective mood, the ice trader realized that he had unwittingly performed a ceremony the previous evening. In handing his son over to the young whore, he was in effect relinquishing his old lusts. And what when lust died? Women had reduced him to beggary once; he had built up a prosperous trade—and never had he stopped lusting after women. But if that central interest withered… something had to enter the vacuum.

He thought of his own godless continent of Hespagorat. Yes, Hespagorat needed a god, though certainly not the god of this religion-infested Campannlat. He sighed, wondering why what lay between Metty’s narrow thighs should seem so much more powerful than god.

“Off to church, then? Waste of time.”

She nodded. Never argue with a client.

Taking the cup she offered, he cradled its warmth in his paw and went to the threshold of the doorless room. There he paused, looking back.

Metty had not lingered over her pellamountain, but diluted it with cold water and gulped it down. Now she pulled on black gloves which came up to her elbow, adjusting the lace round her wrinkling skin.

Catching his glance, she said, “You can go back to bed. No one stirs in this house yet awhile.”

“We’ve always got on well together, you and I, Metty.” Determined to win a word of affection from her, he added, “I get on better with you than with my own wife and daughter.”

She heard such confessions every day.

“Well, I hope to see Div next trip, then, Krillio. Goodbye.” She spoke briskly, moving forward so that he had to get out of her way. He stepped back into her cabin and she swept past, still fiddling with the top of one glove. She made it clear that the notion of there being any affection between them was just his fantasy. Her mind was on something excluding him.

Carrying his cup back to the bed, he sipped the hot tea. He pushed open the shutter for the pleasure or pain or whatever it was of seeing her walk down the silent street. The crowded houses were pale and closed; something in their aspect diquieted him. Darkness still hung in side alleys. Only one person was to be seen—a man who progressed like a sleepwalker, supporting himself with a hand against the walls. Behind him came a small phagor, a runt, whimpering. Metty emerged from a door beneath the ice trader’swindow, took a step into the street. She paused when she saw the man approaching. She knew all about drunks, he thought. Booze and loose women went together, on every continent. But this man was no drunk. Blood ran from his leg to the cobbles.

“I’m coming down, Metty,” he called. In another minute, still shirtless, he joined her in the ghostly street. She had not moved.

“Leave him, he’s injured. I don’t want him in my place. He’ll cause trouble.”

The injured man groaned, stumbling against the wall. He paused, lifted his head and stared at the ice trader.

The latter gasped in astonishment. “Metty, by the beholder! It’s the king, no less… King JandolAnganol!”

They ran to him and supported him to the shelter of the whorehouse.

Few of the king’s force returned to Matrassyl. The Battle of the Cosgatt, as it came to be called, inflicted a terrible defeat. The vultures praised Darvlish’s name that day.

On his recovery—when he had been nursed at the palace by his devoted queen, MyrdemInggala—the king claimed in the scritina that a great force of enemy had been routed. But the ballads the peddlers sold declared otherwise. The death of KolobEktofer was particularly mourned. Bull was remembered with admiration in the lower quarters of Matrassyl. Neither returned home.

In those days when JandolAnganol lay in his chamber, faint from his wounds, he came to the conclusion that if Borlien was to survive he must form a closer alliance with the neighbouring members of the Holy Pannovalan Empire, in particular Oldorando and Pannoval. And he must at all costs acquire that hand artillery which the bandits of the borderland had used so devastatingly.

All this he discussed with his advisors. In their concurrence was laid the seeds of that plan for a divorce and a dynastic marriage which was to bring JandolAnganol to Gravabagalinien half a year later. Which was to estrange him from his beautiful queen. Which was to estrange him from his son. And which, by an even odder fatality, was to confront him with another death, this one attributed to the protognostic race known as the Madis.