Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [457]
Sayren Stund’s plan had terribly misfired.
SartoriIrvrash had intended merely to be revenged on his ex-master and to have the First Phagorian slain. That was his conscious aim. His love of knowledge for its own sake, his hatred of his fellow men, had betrayed him. He had failed to understand his audience. As a result, religious belief was set at an intolerable crisis – and that on the day before the Emperor of Holy Pannoval, the great C’Sarr Kilandar IX, was to arrive in Oldorando to bestow the unction of Akhanaba upon the faithful.
The most living words spring from dead martyrs. The monks unwittingly propagated the heresies of SartoriIrvrash, which found ready soil on which to grow. Within a few days, it would be the monks themselves who were under attack.
What had goaded the crowd into such fury was the aspect of his disclosures to which SartoriIrvrash himself was blind. His listeners would make a connection through their faith of which, with his limited sympathies, SartoriIrvrash was incapable.
They perceived that the rumour long suppressed by the Church now confronted them nakedly. All the world’s wisdom had always existed. Akhanaba was – and they themselves, and their fathers before them, had spent their lives in the worship of – a phagor. They prayed to the very beast they persecuted. ‘Ask not therefore if I am man or animal or stone,’ said the scriptures. Now the comfortable enigma fell before the banal fact. The nature of their vaunted god, the god that held the political system together, was ancipital.
Which should the people now deny in order to make their lives tolerable? The intolerable truth? Or their intolerable religion?
Even the servants of the palace neglected their duties, asking each other, ‘Are we slaves of slaves?’ Over their masters, a spiritual crisis prevailed. Those masters had taken it for granted that they were masters of their world. Suddenly the planet had become another place – a place where they were comparative newcomers, and lowly newcomers at that.
Heated debates took place. Many of the faithful threw out SartoriIrvrash’s hypothesis entirely, affecting to dismiss it as a tissue of lies. But, as ever in such situations, there were others who subscribed to it and added to it, and even claimed they had known the truth all along. The torment mounted.
Sayren Stund took only a practical interest in his faith. It was not to him the living thing it was to JandolAnganol. He cared for it only as oil which smoothed his rule. Suddenly, everything was in question.
The hapless Oldorandan king spent the rest of the afternoon shut in his wife’s compartments, with preets twittering round his head. Every so often, he sent Bathkaarnet-she out to attempt to discover where Milua Tal might be, or received messengers who spoke of shops being broken into and a pitched fight being held in one of the oldest monasteries.
‘We’ve no soldiers,’ wept Sayren Stund.
‘And no faith,’ said his wife, with some complacency. ‘You need both to keep order in this terrible city.’
‘And I suppose JandolAnganol has fled to escape being killed. He should have stayed for the execution of his son.’
That thought cheered him until the arrival of Crispan Mornu in the evening. The advisor’s aspect showed that he had unsuspected reserves of gauntness in him. He bowed to his sovereign and said, ‘If I diagnose the confused situation correctly, Your Majesty, the central issue has shifted away from JandolAnganol. It now focuses on our faith itself. We must hope that this afternoon’s intemperate speech will soon be forgotten. Men cannot long endure to think of themselves as lower than phagor brutes.
‘This might be a convenient time to see that JandolAnganol is removed altogether from our attention. In canon law, he remains undivorced, and this morning we exposed his pretentions for what they are. He is a spent force.
‘Therefore, we should remove him from the city before he can speak to the Holy