Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (110 page)

‘Rhhh! You lurk underground like miserable fessups! Out of my way, slanje!’

He pressed forward. The invading party went in under grey rock, thrusting into the entrails of the establishment.

They came to the furnaces, six of them, pot-bellied, made of brick and stone, patched and repatched, towering up to a murky roof, where ventholes in the rock showed as blackened cavities. One of the furnaces was working. Boys were shovelling and kicking fuel into a gleaming eye of heat, as fire roared and raged. Men in leather aprons drew a tray of red-hot rods from the furnace door, set them on a mutilated table, and stepped back, tight-lipped, to see what the excitement was.

Further into the chamber, men were kneeling by anvils. They had been hammering away at iron rods. Their din stopped as they stood to see what was happening. At the sight of JandolAnganol, blank amazement covered their faces.

For a moment, the king too was stopped. The terrible cavern astonished him. A captive stream gushed along a trough to work the enormous bellows placed by the furnace. Elsewhere were piled timbers and instruments as fearful as any used in torture. From a separate side cavern came wooden tubs bearing iron ore. Everywhere, blacksmiths, iron smelters, craftsmen – half naked – peered at him with pink-rimmed eyes.

SlanjivalIptrekira ran before the king, his arms raised, waving, fists clenched.

‘Your Majesty, the ores are being reduced by charcoal. It is a sacred process. Outsiders – even royal personages – are not allowed to view these rites.’

‘Nothing in my kingdom is secret from me.’

‘Attack him, kill him!’ cried the Royal Armourer.

The men carrying glowing iron bars lifted them with thick
leather gloves. They looked at each other, then set them down again. The king’s person was sacred. Nobody else moved.

With perfect calm, JandolAnganol said, ‘Slanji, you have uttered a treasonable command against your sovereign, as all those here bear witness. I will have every member of the corps executed without exception if anybody dares make a move against my royal person.’

Brushing past the armourer, he faced two men at a table.

‘You men, how old are these furnaces? For how many generations has metalcraft continued in this manner?’

They could not answer for fear. They wiped their blackened faces with their blackened gloves, which effected no improvement in their appearance.

It was SlanjivalIptrekira who answered, in a subdued voice. ‘The corps was founded to perpetuate these sacred processes, Your Majesty. We but do as we are bid by our ancestors.’

‘You are answerable to me, not to your ancestors. I bid you make good guns and you failed.’ He turned to the corpsmen who had gathered silently in the fumous chamber.

‘You men, all, and apprentices. You carry out old methods. Those old methods are obsolete. Haven’t you the wits to understand? There are new weapons available, better than we can make in Borlien. We need new methods, better metals, better systems.’

They looked at him with dark faces and red-rimmed eyes, unable to understand that their world was ending.

‘These rotten furnaces will be demolished. More efficient ones will be built. They must have such furnaces in Sibornal, in the land of the Uskuti. We need furnaces like the Sibornalese. Then we shall make weapons like the Sibornalese.’

He summoned up a dozen of his brute soldiery and commanded them to destroy the furnaces. The phagors seized crowbars and commenced without question to carry out their orders. From the live furnace, when its wall was broached, molten metal burst forth. It flashed across the floor. A young apprentice fell screaming under its flood. The metal set fire to wood shavings and timber. The corpsmen shrank away aghast.

All the furnaces were broken. The phagors stood by for further orders.

‘Have them built anew, according to directions I shall send you. I will have no more useless guns!’ With these words, he marched from the building. The corpsmen came to themselves and threw buckets of water over their blazing premises. SlanjivalIptrekira was arrested and jostled off into captivity.

The following day, the Royal Armourer and Ironmaster was tried before the scritina and convicted of treason. Even the other corps-masters could not save SlanjivalIptrekira. He had ordered his men to attack the person of his king. He was executed in the public view, and his head exhibited to the crowd.

Enemies of the king in the scritina, and not his enemies only, nor only in the scritina, were nevertheless angered that he had ventured into premises by long tradition sacrosanct. This was another mad act which would never have been committed had Queen MyrdemInggala been near to keep his madness under control.

JandolAnganol, however, sent a messenger to Sayren Stund, King of Oldorando, his future father-in-law. He knew that the destruction of the city of Oldorando, when it had been overcome by phagor invasion, had resulted in the craft corps’ being reformed, and their equipment renewed. Their foundries should therefore be more advanced than Borlien’s. He remembered at the last moment to send his neighbour a gift for Simoda Tal.

King Sayren Stund sent JandolAnganol a dark hunchbacked man called Fard Fantil. Fard Fantil came with credentials showing him to be an expert in iron furnaces who understood new methods. JandolAnganol sent him to work immediately.

Immediately, a delegation from the Ironmakers Corps, ashen of face, came before the king to complain of Fard Fantil’s ruthlessness and sullen ways.

‘I like sullen men,’ roared JandolAnganol.

Fard Fantil had the premises of the guild moved to a hillside outside Matrassyl. Here the timber was available for charcoal and the supply of running water was constant. The water was necessary to power stamping mills.

No one in Borlien had ever heard of stamping mills. Fard Fantil explained in supercilious fashion that this was the only way to crush ore effectively. The corpsmen scratched their heads and grumbled. Fard Fantil cursed them. Furious at being turned out of their town quarters, the men did all they could to sabotage the new establishment and bring the foreigner into disgrace. The king still received no guns.

When Dienu Pasharatid disappeared from the court so unexpectedly, following her husband to Uskutoshk, she had left behind some Sibornalese staff. These JandolAnganol had imprisoned. He ordered an Uskut brought before him and offered him his freedom if he would design an effective iron smelter.

The cool young man had perfect manners, so perfect that he made a flourish whenever he addressed the king.

‘As your majesty knows, the best smelters come from Sibornal, where the art is advanced. There we use lignite instead of charcoal for fuel, and forge the best steel.’

‘Then I wish you to design a smelter for use here, and I shall reward you.’

‘Your majesty knows that the wheel, that great basic invention, came from Sibornal, and was not known in Campannlat until a few centuries ago. Also many of your new crops are from the north. Those furnaces which you destroyed – even that design came from Sibornal during a previous Great Year.’

‘Now we wish for something more up-to-date.’ JandolAnganol restrained his temper.

‘Even when the wheel was brought to Borlien, Your Majesty, full use was never made of it, not only for transport, but in milling, pottery, and irrigation. You have no windmills in Borlien as we have in Sibornal. It has seemed to us, Your Majesty, that the nations of Campannlat have been slow to adopt the arts of civilisation.’

It was noticeable that about the king’s jaw a roseate flush mounted as the sun of his anger was dawning.

‘I’m not demanding windmills. I want a furnace capable of producing steel for my guns.’

‘Your majesty possibly intends to say guns imitated from the Sibornalese model.’

‘No matter what I intend to say, what I do say is that I require you to build me a good furnace. Is that understood, or do you only speak Sibish?’

‘Forgive me, Your Majesty, I had thought you understood the position. Permit me to explain that I am not an artisan but an ambassadorial clerk, nimble with figures but not with bricks and suchlike. I am if anything less able to build a furnace than your majesty.’

Still the king received no guns.

The king spent an increasing amount of time with his phagor soldiery. Knowing the necessity for repeating everything to them, he impressed upon them every day that they would accompany him in strength to Oldorando, in order to make a grand display in the foreign capital on the occasion of his marriage.

Places were delegated in the palace grounds where king and phagor guard met on equal terms. No human entered the phagorian barracks. To this rule the king subscribed, as VarpalAnganol had before him. There was no question of his venturing beyond a certain point in the way he had invaded the traditional quarters of the Ironmakers Corps.

His chief phagor major was a gillot by name Ghht-Mlark Chzarn, addressed by JandolAnganol as Chzarn. They conversed in Hurdhu.

Knowing the ancipital aversion to Oldorando, the king explained once more why he required the presence of the First Phagorian at his forthcoming marriage.

Chzarn responded.

‘Speech has been made with our ancestors in tether. Much speech has formed in our harneys. It is delivered that we make a goance with your sovereign body to Hrl-Drra Nhdo in the land Hrrm-Bhhrd Ydohk. That goance we make at command.’

‘Good. It is good we make goance together. I rejoice that those in tether are in agreement. Have you further to say?’

Ghht-Mlark Chzarn stood impassive before him, her deep pink eyes almost level with his. He was aware of her smell and of the barely audible sound of her breathing. His long acquaintance with phagors told him that more speech was to come. The members of
the guard behind her were equally impassive, pressing together, coat against coat. An occasional fart broke from their ranks.

Impatient man though JandolAnganol was, something in the deliberation of phagors – in that intense impression that what they said came not from them only but rather from a great distance, relayed from some ancestral store of understanding to which he could never have access – soothed him. He stood before his major almost as still as she before him.

‘Further sayance.’ Ghht-Mlark Chzarn went through a formula with which the king was familiar. Before a new subject could be broached, linkages with those in tether must be sustained. Thus was aneotic thought endured.

They confronted each other, as tradition demanded, in a military room called the Clarigate; humans entered at one end, phagors at the other. The walls were painted by phagors in swirling greens and greys. The ceiling was so low that its beams were scarred by tracks of ancipital horn points – possibly a deliberate device to emphasise the fact that the Phagorian Guard were never dehorned.

One god only protected the king, Akhanaba, the All-Powerful; many demons tormented him. Phagors were not among those demons; he was accustomed to the steady calculation of their speech, never regarding them – as did his fellow men – as either slow-witted or convoluted in thought.

And in these days of his inner torment, he found a new factor to admire about his guard. They were not sexually preoccupied. He considered that the streams of lubricious thought which occupied the minds of men and women at court – and his own mind, despite applications of god and rod – were absent from ancipital harneys.

There was a periodicity to phagor sexuality. Gillots came into oestrus every forty-eight days, while the stalluns performed the sexual act every three weeks. Coitus was joined without ceremony and not always privately. Because of this lack of shame in what to humans was an act more secret than prayer, the ancipital race was a symbol of lust. The goat foot, the erect horns, were emblems of rut to humanity. Tales of stalluns raping women –
and on occasion men – were common and could lead to drumbles and purges in which many phagors were killed.

When the phagor major arrived at her thought, it was brief. ‘In our goance to Hrl-Drra Nhdo in the land Hrrm-Bhhrd Ydohk, it is delivered your ancipital host must make great presence. So your power burn bright before Hrl-Drra Nhdo people. Commendation comes that that host on parade must have carriance of …’ A long pause while the concept struggled through into speech. ‘… Of new weapons.’

With considerable pain, JandolAnganol said, ‘We need the new hand artillery from Sibornal. As yet, we cannot produce them in Borlien.’

Beads of condensation stood on the walls of the Clarigate. The heat was overpowering. Chzarn made a gesture the king knew well, signifying ‘Stand.’

He repeated his statement. She repeated the ‘Stand’ gesture.

After consultation both with those living and with those in tether, the phagor major declared that the needed weapons would be obtained. Although the king understood the struggle phagors underwent to verbalise the aneotic, he was compelled to ask them how the weapons would be obtained.

‘Much speech has form in our harneys,’ said Chzarn, after another pause.

There was an answer. She switched to Eotemporal to be clear in her tenses. An answer would be delivered, was even now about to be delivered, but must nevertheless wait upon another time, another tenner. His power would be made great in Hrl-Drra Nhdo. Hold horns high.

He had to be content with that.