Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [195]
He was not content to die now. Not content to be killed by the lieutenants if they thought him involved with Dathka’s plotting. And not content either to die of the bone fever, contracted from these two wretches they were carrying away from the city. It was still three miles to the old tower he had in mind.
He paused. The phagors and Goija Hin trudged on automatically with their vile burdens. Here he was again, once more meekly doing what was asked of him. There was no reason for it. His stupid habit of obedience had to be broken.
He shouted to the phagors. They halted. They stood where they were, without moving. Only the burdens on their shoulders creaked slightly.
The group was standing on a narrow track with thickets of dog-thrush on either side. A child had been eaten near here a few days earlier; evidence suggested a sabre-tongue had been the killer – the predators came in close to settlements now that wild hoxneys were scarce. So there were few people about.
Laintal Ay struck in among the bushes. He got the phagors to carry their sick masters into the thicket and set them down. The monsters did so carelessly, so that the men rolled on the ground, still in locked positions.
Their lips were blue, peeled back to reveal yellow teeth and gums. Their limbs were distorted, their bones creaked. They were in some way aware of their position, yet unable to cease a constant motor movement, making their eyeballs roll horribly in their stretched facial skin.
‘You know what’s the matter with these men?’ Laintal Ay asked.
Goija Hin nodded his head and smiled evilly to demonstrate his mastery over human knowledge. ‘They’re ill,’ he said.
Nor did Laintal Ay forget the fever he had once caught off a phagor.
‘Kill the men. Make the phagors scrape out graves with their hands. As fast as you can.’
‘I understand.’ The slave master came heavily forward.
Laintal Ay stood with a branch pressing in his back, watching the fat old man do as he was bid, as Goija Hin had always done. At each step in the proceedings, Laintal Ay gave an order and it was executed. He felt himself fully implicated in everything and would not let himself look away. Goija Hin drew a short sword and stabbed it twice through the hearts of the sick men. The phagors scraped graves with their horny hands – two white phagors, and Myk, as obese as his master, prickled with the black hairs of age and working very slowly.
All the phagors had shackles on their legs. They rolled the corpses into their graves and kicked dirt over them, then stood without movement, as was their fashion, awaiting the next order. They were commanded to scrape three more graves under the bushes. This they did, working like mute animals. Goija Hin ran his sword between the ribs of the two strange phagors, afterwards smearing the yellow ichor on their coats as they lay face down, in order to clean his blade.
Myk was made to push them in their graves and cover them with dirt.
As he stood up, he faced Laintal Ay, sliding his pale milt up the slot of his right nostril.
‘Not kill now Myk, master. Strike off my chains and allow me to go away to die.’
‘What, let you loose, you old scumble, after all these years?’ Goija Hin said angrily, raising the sword.
Laintal Ay stopped him, staring at the ancient phagor. The creature had given him rides on his back when he was a boy. It touched him that Myk did not attempt to remind him of the fact. There was no feeble appeal to sentiment. Instead, he stood without movement, awaiting whatever would befall.
‘How old are you, Myk?’ Sentiment, he thought, my sentiment. You couldn’t face giving the necessary order to kill, could you?
‘I prisoner, don’t count years.’ The s’s were dragged like bees from his throat. ‘Once, we ancipitals ruled Embruddock, and you Sons of Freyr were our slaves. Ask Mother Shay Tal – she knew.’
‘She told me. And you killed