Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [32]
‘Take this unsatisfactory life, O Great Akha, and use it for Thy satisfaction.’
Functionaries moved smartly forward. One began to crank at a handle set in the side of the frame holding the prisoner. The frame began to creak and shift. The prisoner cried softly once, as his body was forced to bend backwards. As the hinges on the framework opened, his body arched back, exposing his helplessness.
Two captains marched forward with a phagor between them. The great beast’s blunted horns had been capped with silver and reached almost to the height of the soldiers’ eyebrows. It stood in the ungainly customary stance of a phagor, head and prow of chest thrust forward, its long white hair stirring slightly in the draught that blew through State.
Music sounded again, drum, gongs, vrachs, drowning out Naab’s voice, and the sustained warble of a fluggel rising high above them. Then everything stopped.
The body was bent double now, legs and feet twisted somewhere out of sight, head right back, exposing throat and thorax, gleaming pale in the column of light.
‘Take, O Great Akha! Take what is already Thine! Eradicate him.’
At the priest’s scream, the phagor stepped a pace forward and bent down. It opened its shovel mouth and applied rows of blunt teeth to either side of the proffered throat. It bit. It raised its head, and a great morsel of flesh came up with it. It moved back into place between the two soldiers, swallowing noncommittally. A trickle of red ran down its white front. The rear column of light was cut off. Akha disappeared back into his nourishing darkness. Many of the novices fainted.
As they jostled out of State, Yuli asked, ‘But why use those devilish phagors? They’re man’s enemy. They should all be killed.’
‘They are the creatures of Wutra, as their colour shows. We keep them to remind us of the enemy,’ said Sifans.
‘And what will happen to the – to Naab’s body?’
‘It will not be wasted. Every item is of some application. The whole carcass may go for fuel – perhaps to the potters, who always need to fire their kilns. I really don’t know. I prefer to keep myself aloof from administrative details.’
He dared say no more to Father Sifans, hearing the distaste in the old priest’s voice. To himself, he said over and over again, ‘Those evil brutes. Those evil brutes. Akha should have no part of them.’ But the phagors were all over the Holies, padding patiently along with the militia, their noctilucent eyes peering here and there under their craggy brows.
One day Yuli tried to explain to his charge-father how his father had been caught and killed by phagors in the wild.
‘You do not know for sure they killed him. Phagors are not always entirely evil. Sometimes Akha subdues their spirit.’
‘I’m sure he’s dead by now. There’s no way of being certain, though?’
He heard the father lick his lips as he hesitated, and then leaned towards Yuli in the blackness.
‘There is a way of being sure, my son.’
‘Oh, yes, if you mounted a great expedition from Pannoval north—’
‘No, no … other ways, more subtle. You will one day understand the complexities of Pannoval more fully. Or perhaps you won’t. For there are entirely other orders of the priesthood, warrior mystics, of which you do not know. Perhaps I had better say no more …’
Yuli urged him on. The priest’s voice sank still lower, until it was almost lost under the splash of a water drip near at hand.
‘Yes, warrior mystics, who forswear the pleasures of the flesh and in return gain mysterious powers …’
‘That’s what Naab advocated, and was murdered for it.’
‘Executed after trial. The superior orders prefer us, the administrative orders, to remain as we are … But they … they communicate with the dead. If you were one of them,