Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [334]
‘Take care, you fool, you’ve gone wrong!’ said SartoriIrvrash, but he said it to himself. Who cared what happened?
The equipage rattled down a back road under the brow of a cliff and entered a small neglected courtyard. The driver jumped energetically down and closed the courtyard gates, so that they could not be seen from the street. He looked in at the ex-chancellor.
‘Would you care to climb down? There’s someone waiting to see you.’ He swept off his elaborate headgear in a mock bow.
‘Who are you? What have you brought me here for?’
The boy opened the carriage door invitingly.
‘Don’t you recognise me, Rushven?’
‘Who are you? Why – Roba, it’s you!’ he said in some relief – for the thought had occurred to him that JandolAnganol might be planning to kidnap and murder him.
‘It’s me or a hoxney, for I move at speed these days. That’s how it’s all secrecy. I’m a secret even from myself. I have vowed to be revenged on my cursed father again, since he banished my mother. And on my mother, who left without a farewell to me.’
As he allowed the boy to help him out, SartoriIrvrash surveyed him, anxious to see if he looked as wild as his words. RobaydayAnganol was now just twelve years old, a smaller and thinner edition of his father. He was toasted brown by the sun; red scars showed on his torso. Smiles came and went like twitches over his face, as though he could not decide whether he was joking or not.
‘Where have you been, Roba? We’ve missed you. Your father missed you.’
‘Do you mean the Eagle? Why, he nearly caught me. I’ve never cared for court life. I care even less now. My father’s crime has set me free. So I am a hoxney-brother. A Madi-assister. I will never become king, and he will never again become happy. New lives, new lives, and one for you, Rushven! You first introduced me to the desert, and I will not desert you. I’m going to take you to someone important, human, not father or hoxney.’
‘Who? What’s all this about? Wait!’
But Roba was striding off. SartoriIrvrash looked doubtfully at the coach loaded with all his worldly goods and then decided he had better follow. Walking fast, he entered a dim hall only a step or two behind the king’s son.
The house was built according to a pattern suited to its overshadowed location: it stretched up to the light like a plant growing between boulders. The old man was panting by the time Roba led them off the shaking wooden stairs and into a room on the third floor, the only room on that level. SartoriIrvrash broke into prolonged coughing and collapsed on a stool someone offered him.
There were three people awaiting them in the room, and he observed that they seized on the opportunity also to cough. A certain rickety elegance in their structure, a certain sharpness of bone structure, marked them out as Sibornalese. One of them was a woman, elegantly dressed in a silk chagirack, the northern equivalent of a charfrul, its delicate fabric patterned with large black and white formal flowers. Two men stood behind her in the shadows. SartoriIrvrash recognised her immediately as Madame Dienu Pasharatid, wife of the ambassador who had disappeared the day that Taynth Indredd had introduced matchlocks into the palace.
He bowed to her and apologised for his coughing.
‘We are all doing it, Chancellor. It is the volcano making our throats sore.’
‘I believe my throat is sore through grief. You must not call me by my old title.’ He would not ask her to what volcano she referred, but she saw uncertainty in his face.
‘The volcanic eruption in the Rustyjonnik Mountains. Its ash carries this way.’
She regarded him with sympathy, letting him recover from the stairs. Her face was large