Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [634]
The soldiers dragged the creature nearer to the fire. The crowd ceased its dancing and shouted with excitement, the women egging the soldiers on along with the men.
‘Burn it!’ shouted Asperamanka, but he merely echoed the voice of the mob.
‘It’s just a domestic,’ Luterin said. ‘Harmless as a dog.’
‘It’s still capable of spreading the Fat Death.’
Fight though it would, the ancipital was pulled and pushed to the largest of the fires. Its coat began to burn. Another inch – a yell from the crowd – a heave – and then a mournful call sounded from beyond the gathering. Distant human screams. Into the marketplace poured armed ancipitals on kaidaws.
Each ancipital wore body armour. Some wore primitive skull shields. They rode their red kaidaws from a position behind the animals’ low humps, at the crouch. In this position they could strike out with spears as they went.
‘Freyr die! Sons of Freyr die!’ they cried from their harsh throats.
The crowd began to move, less as separate individuals than as a wave. Only the soldiers made a stand. The captive phagor was left with its pale harneys boiling in its skull, but it rose up and made off, coat still smouldering.
Asperamanka ran forward, shouting to the soldiers to fire. Luterin, as an observer, could see that there were no more than eight of the invaders. Some of them sprouted black hairs, a mark of ancipital old age. All but one had been dehorned – a sure sign that these were no kind of threat from the mountains, such as tremulous imaginations in Kharnabhar fed on, but a few refugee phagors who had banded together on this special day, when conditions in Sibornal reverted to virtually what they had been before Freyr entered Helliconia’s sky, many epochs ago.
He saw how members of the crowd who were impeded in some way fell first to the stabbing spears: pedlars with trays, women with babies or small children, the lame, the sick. Some were trampled underfoot. A baby was scooped up and flung into the heart of a fire.
As Asperamanka and his two bullies drew guns and started firing, the horned ancipital wheeled its russet-haired mount and charged at the Master. It came straight, its skull low over the massive skull of the kaidaw. In its eye was no light of battle, simply a dull cerise stare: it was doing what it did according to some ancient template set in its eotemporal brain.
Asperamanka fired. The ballets lost themselves in the thick pelage of animal. It faltered in mid-stride. The two bullies turned and ran. Asperamanka stood his ground, firing, shouting. The kaidaw fell suddenly on one knee. Up came the spear. It caught Asperamanka as he turned. The tip entered his skull through the eye socket and he fell back into the monastery entrance.
Luterin ran for his life. He had wrenched his arms free of the belt. He jumped down into the street, into the trampled snow, and ran. There were other running figures nearby, too concerned with saving their own lives to bother with his. He hid behind a house, panting, and surveyed the scene.
Blue shadows and bodies lay on the marketplace. The sky overhead was a deep blue, in which a bright star gleamed – Aganip. Hues of sunset lay to the south. It was bitterly cold.
The mob had surrounded one kaidaw and was pulling its rider to the ground. The others were galloping off to safety – another sign that this was not an arm of a regular ancipital component, which would not have abandoned a fight so easily.
He made his way without trouble towards Sanctity Street and his appointment with Toress Lahl.
Sanctity Street was narrow. Its buildings were tall. Most had been constructed in a better age to house the pilgrims who came to visit the Wheel. Now the shutters were up; many doors were barricaded. Slogans had been painted on the walls: God Keep the Keeper, We Follow the Oligarch – presumably as a form