Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [234]
On one side of the court was the Ripe Flagon, an inn carved out of the soil. Its interior, comfortingly cool, was lit only by reflections of the light striking down into the courtyard. Opposite the inn were small dwellings, also carved into the loess. Their ochre facades were brightened by flowers in pots.
Through a maze of subterranean passageways the village stretched, opening intermittently into courts, many of them with staircases which led up to the surface, where most of the inhabitants of Mordec were labouring. The roofs of the houses were fields.
As they ate a snack and drank wine at the inn, FloerCrow said, ‘He stinks a bit.’
‘He’s been dead a while. Queen found him on the shore, washed up. I’d say he was murdered in Ottassol, most like, and flung in the sea off a quay. The current would carry him down to Gravabagalinien.’
As they went back to the cart, FloerCrow said, ‘It’s a bad omen for the queen of queens, no mistake.’
The long casket lay in the back of the cart with the vegetables. Water trickled from the melting ice and dripped to the ground, where a pool marbled itself with a slow-moving spiral of dust. Flies buzzed round the cart.
They climbed in and started on the last few miles to Ottassol.
‘If King JandolAnganol wants to have someone done away with, he’ll do it …’
ScufBar was shocked. ‘The queen’s too well loved. Friends everywhere.’ He felt the letter in his inner pocket and nodded to himself. Influential friends.
‘And him going to many an eleven-year-old slip of a girl instead.’
‘Eleven and five tenners.’
‘Whatever. It’s disgusting.’
‘Oh, it’s disgusting, right enough,’ agreed ScufBar. ‘Eleven and a half, fancy!’ He smacked his lips and whistled.
They looked at each other and grinned.
The cart creaked towards Ottassol, and the bluebottles followed.
*
Ottassol was the great invisible city. In colder times, the plain had supported its buildings; now they supported the plain. Ottassol was an underground labyrinth, in which men and phagors lived. All that remained on the scorched surface were roads and fields, counterpointed by rectangular holes in the ground. Down in the rectangles were the courts, surrounded by facades of houses which otherwise had no external configuration.
Ottassol was earth and its converse, hollowed earth, the negative and positive of soil, as if it had been bitten out by geometrical worms.
The city housed 695,000 people. Its extent could not be seen and was rarely appreciated even by its inhabitants. Favourable soil, climate, and geographical situation had caused the port to grow larger than Borlien’s capital, Matrassyl. So the warrens expanded, often on different levels, until they were halted by the River Takissa.
Paved lanes ran underground, some wide enough for two carts to pass. ScufBar walked along one of these lanes, leading the hoxney with the casket. He had parted with FloerCrow at a market on the outskirts of town. As he went, pedestrians turned to stare, screwing up their noses at the smell which floated behind him. The ice block at the bottom of the casket had all but melted away.
‘The anatomist and deuteroscopist?’ he asked of a passerby. ‘Bardol CaraBansity?’
‘Ward Court.’
Beggars of all descriptions called for alms outside the frequent churches, wounded soldiers back from the wars, cripples, men and women with horrific skin cancers. ScufBar ignored them. Pecubeas sang from their cages at every corner and court. The songs of different strains of pecubea were sufficiently distinct for the blind to distinguish and be guided by them.
ScufBar made his way through the maze, negotiated a few broad steps down into Ward Court, and came to the door which bore a sign with the name Bardol CaraBansity on it. He rang the bell.
A bolt was shot back, the door opened. A phagor appeared, dressed in a rough hempen gown. It supplemented its blank cerise stare with a question.