Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [235]
‘What you want?’
‘I want the anatomist.’
Tying the hoxney to a hitching post, ScufBar entered and found himself in a small domed room. It contained a counter, behind which a second phagor stood.
The first phagor walked down a corridor, both walls of which it brushed with its broad shoulders. It pushed through a curtain into a living room in which a couch stood in one corner. The anatomist was enjoying congress with his wife on the couch. He rested as he listened to what the ahuman servant had to say, and then sighed.
‘Scerm you, I’ll be there.’ He climbed to his feet and leaned against the wall to pull his pants up under his charfrul, which he adjusted with slow deliberation.
His wife hurled a cushion at him. ‘You dolt, why do you never concentrate? Finish what you’re doing. Tell these fools to go away.’
He shook his head and his heavy cheeks trembled. ‘It’s the unremitting clockwork of the world, my beauty. Keep it warm till I return. I don’t order the comings and goings of men …’
He moved down the corridor and paused at the threshold of his shop so as to inspect the new arrival. Bardol CaraBansity was a solid man, less tall than weighty, with a ponderous way of speech and a heavy skull shaped not unlike a phagor’s. He wore a thick leather belt over his charfrul, and a knife in the belt. Although he looked like a common butcher, CaraBansity had a well-earned reputation as a crafty man.
With his hollow chest and protruding stomach, ScufBar was not an impressive sight, and CaraBansity made it plain he was not impressed.
‘I’ve got a body for sale, sir. A human body.’
Without speaking, CaraBansity motioned to the phagors. They went and brought the body in between them, dropping it down on the counter. Sawdust and ice fragments adhered to it.
The anatomist and deuteroscopist took a step nearer.
‘It’s a bit high. Where did you acquire it, man?’
‘From a river, sir. When I was fishing.’
The body was so distended by internal gases that it bulged out of its clothes. CaraBansity pulled it onto its back and tugged a dead fish from inside its shirt. He threw it at ScufBar’s feet.
‘That’s a so-called scupperfish. To those of us who have a care for truth, it’s not a fish at all but the marine young of a Wutra’s worm. Marine. Sea, not freshwater. Why are you lying? Did you murder this poor fellow? You look like a criminal. The phrenology suggests it.’
‘Very well, sir, if you prefer, I did find him in the sea. Since I am a servant of the unfortunate queen, I did not want the fact widely known.’
CaraBansity looked at him more closely. ‘You serve MyrdemInggala, queen of queens, do you, you rogue? She deserves good lackeys and good fortune, does that lady.’
He indicated a cheap print of the queen’s face, which hung in a corner of the shop.
‘I serve her well enough. Tell me what you will pay me for this body.’
‘You have come all this way for ten roon, not more. In these wicked times, I can get bodies to cut up every day of the week. Fresher than this one, too.’
‘I was informed that you would pay me fifty, sir. Fifty roon, sir.’ ScufBar looked shifty, and rubbed his hands together.
‘How does it happen that you turn up here with your malodorous friend when the king himself and an envoy from the Holy C’Sarr are due to arrive in Ottassol? Are you an instrument of the king’s?’
ScufBar spread his hands and shrank a little. ‘I have connections only with the hoxney outside. Pay me just twenty-five, sir, and I’ll go back to the queen immediately.’
‘You scerm are all greedy. No wonder the world’s going to pot.’
‘If that is the case, sir, then I’ll accept twenty. Twenty roon.’
Turning to one of the phagors standing by, flicking its pale milt up its slotlike nostrils, CaraBansity said, ‘Pay the man and get him out of here.’
‘How muzzh I pay?’
‘Ten roon.’
ScufBar let out a howl of anguish.
‘All right. Fifteen. And you, my man, present Bardol CaraBansity’s compliments to your queen.’
The phagor fumbled in its hempen gown and produced a thin purse. It proffered three gold coins, lying in the gnarled palm of its three-fingered