Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [509]
She looked down at him and said, ‘Tell me what’s worrying you.’
‘I can’t. It’s too terrible. The world’s full of evil.’ He began dressing. She slipped into her soiled keedrant, wordless now, wondering if he would pay her. There was only an oil lamp to light the scene.
After lacing up his boots, he collected the book he had set by the bedside and put down some sibs for her. His look was one of misery. He saw her fright but could do nothing to comfort her.
‘Will you come back, Harbin?’ she asked, clasping her hands together.
He looked up at the cracked ceiling and shook his head. Then he went out.
A spiteful rain fell over Askitosh, setting its gutters foaming. Fashnalgid took no notice. He walked briskly through the deserted streets, trying to wear out his thoughts.
On the previous night, a messenger on an exhausted yelk had ridden through these same streets. He rode to the army headquarters at the top of the hill. Although the incident had been hushed up, the officers’ mess soon heard about it. The messenger was an agent of the Oligarch. He brought a report concerning Asperamanka, announcing the victory of the latter’s forces against the combined armies of Campannlat, and the relief of Isturiacha. Asperamanka, said the report, was expecting a triumphal reception on his return to Sibornal.
The messenger bearing this letter dismounted in the square and fell flat on his face. He was suffering all the symptoms of the Fat Death. A senior officer shot the man as he lay.
Only an hour or two later, Fashnalgid’s mother came to him distraught in a dream, saying, ‘Brother shall slay brother.’ He was himself dangling from a hook.
Two days passed and Fashnalgid was posted to Koriantura.
As he took his orders from Major Gardeterark, he saw clearly the plan the Oligarch had devised. There was one factor which would disrupt the scheme for carrying Sibornal through the Weyr-Winter. That factor was more divisive even than the cold: the Fat Death. In the madness the Fat Death carried with it, brother would devour brother.
The death of his midnight messenger warned the Oligarch that the return of Asperamanka’s army would bring the plague from the Savage Continent. So a rational decision had been arrived at: the army must not return. The First Guard, of which Fashnalgid was an officer, was in Koriantura for one reason only: to annihilate Asperamanka’s army as it approached the frontier. The antiplague regulations, the Restrictions of Persons in Abodes Act, imposed on the city and on Eedap Mun Odim, were moves to make the massacre when it came more acceptable to the population.
These terrible reflections ran through Harbin Fashnalgid’s head as he lay in his billet under Odim’s roof. Unlike Major Gardeterark, he was not an early riser. But he could not escape into sleep from the vision in his head. The Oligarchy he now saw as a spider, sitting somewhere in the darkness, sustaining itself through the ages at whatever cost to ordinary people.
That was the implication behind his father’s remark that he had bought the promise of the future. He had bought it with his son’s life. His father had ensured his own safety as an ex-Member of the Oligarchy, at no matter what expense to others.
‘I’ll do something about it,’ Fashnalgid said, as he finally dragged himself out of bed. Light was filtering through his small window. All round him, he could hear Odim’s vast family beginning to stir.
‘I’ll do something about it,’ he said as he dressed. And when, a few hours later, the girl Besi Besamrtikahl entered his office, he read in the unconscious gestures of her body a willingness to do his will. In that moment, he saw how he might make use of her and Odim to disrupt the Oligarch’s plan and save Asperamanka’s army.
The escarpment to the east of Koriantura, which tumbled down to the Isthmus of Chalce, marked the point where the continents of Sibornal and Campannlat joined. The broken land south of the escarpment – through which any army must make its way if approaching Uskutoshk – was bounded to