JandolAnganol roused and jumped immediately to his feet, hand on sword.
The haggard man bowed. “I am sorry to awaken you, sire, and I regret coming late. Your soldiers killed two of my escort, and I barely escaped with my life.” He produced documents to prove his identity. He had begun to shake violently, knowing the fate of messengers who bring bad tidings.
The king barely glanced at the documents.
“Tell me your news, man.”
“It’s the Madis, Your Majesty.”
“What of them?”
The messenger shuffled his feet and put a hand to his face to stop his jaw rattling. “The Princess Simoda Tal is dead, sire. The Madis killed her.”
There was a silence. Then Alam Esomberr began to laugh.
IV
An Innovation in the Cosgatt
Alam Esomberr’s bitter laughter eventually reached the ears of those who lived on Earth. Despite the enormous gulf between Helliconia and Earth, that response to the labourings of fate met with immediate comprehension.
Between Earth and Helliconia a kind of relay was interposed, the Earth Observation Station called Avernus. The Avernus had its orbit about Helliconia as Helliconia had its orbit about Batalix, and as Batalix had its orbit about Freyr. Avernus was the lens through which terrestrial observers experienced events on Helliconia.
The human beings who worked on the Avernus dedicated their lives to a study of all aspects of Helliconia. That dedication was not of their choosing. They had no alternative.
Beneath that dominating injustice, a general justice prevailed. There was no poverty on the Avernus, no one starving physically. But it was a narrow domain. The spherical station had a diameter of only one thousand metres, most of its inhabitants living on the inside of the outer shell, and within that compass a kind of inanition prevailed, sapping life of its joy. Looking down does not exalt the spirit.
Billy Xiao Pin was a typical representative of Avernian society. Outwardly, he subscribed to all the norms; he worked without industry; he was engaged to an attractive girl; he took regular prescribed exercise; he had an Advisor who preached to him the higher virtues of acceptance. Yet inwardly Billy craved only one thing. He longed to be down on the Helliconian surface, 1500 kilometres below, to see Queen MyrdemInggala, to touch her, speak with her, and make love to her. In his dreams, the queen invited him into her arms.
The distant observers on Earth had other concerns. They followed continuities of which Billy and his kind were unaware. As they watched, suffering, the divorce at Gravabagalinien, they were able to trace the genesis of that division back to a battle which had taken place to the east of Matrassyl, in a region known as the Cosgatt. JandolAnganol’s experiences in the Cosgatt influenced his later actions and led—so it appeared by hindsight—inexorably to divorce.
What became known as the Battle of the Cosgatt took place five tenners—240 days, or half a small year—before the day that the king and MyrdemInggala severed their marriage bonds by the sea.
In the region of the Cosgatt, the king received a physical wound which was to lead to the spiritual severance.
Both the king’s life and his reputation suffered in the battle. And they were threatened, ironically, by nothing more than a rabble, the raggle-taggle tribes of Driats.
Or, as the more historically minded of terrestrial observers said, by an innovation. An innovation which changed not only the life of the king and queen but of all their people. A gun.
What was most humiliating for the king was that he held the Driats in contempt, as did every follower of Akhanaba in Borlien and Oldorando. For the Driats, it was conceded, were human—but only just. The threshold between non-human and human is shadowy. On one side of it lies a world full of illusory freedoms, on the other a world of illusory captivity. The Others remained animal, and stayed in the jungles. The Madis—tied to a migratory way of life—had reached the threshold of sapience, but remained protognostic. The Driats had just crossed the threshold, and there abided throughout recorded time, like a bird frozen on the wing.
The adverse conditions of the planet, the aridity of their share of it, contributed to the Driats’ permanent backwardness. For the Driat tribes occupied the dry grasslands of Thribriat, a country to the southeast of Borlien, across the wide Takissa. The Driats lived among herds of yelk and biyelk which pastured in those high regions during the summer of the great year.
Customs regarded as offensive by the outside world furthered the survival of the Driats. They practised a form of ritual murder, by which the useless members of a family were killed after failing certain tests. In times of near famine, the slaughter of the ancients was often the salvation of the innocents. This custom had given the Driats a bad name among those whose existence was cast in easier pastures. But they were in reality a peaceful people—or too stupid to be warlike in an effective way.
The eruption of various nations southwards along the ranges of the Nktryhk—particularly those warrior nations temporarily banded together behind Unndreid the Hammer—had changed that. Under pressure, the Driats bestirred their bivouacs and went marauding into the lower valleys of Thribriat, which lie in the rain shadow of the massive Lower Nktryhk.
A cunning warlord, known as Darvlish the Skull, had brought order to their ragged ranks. Finding that the simple Driat mind responded to discipline, he formed them into three regiments and led them into the region known as the Cosgatt. His intention was to attack JandolAnganol’s capital, Matrassyl.
Borlien already had the unpopular Western Wars on its hands. No ruler of Borlien, not even the Eagle, could hope really to win against either Randonan or Kace, since those mountainous countries could not be occupied or governed even if conquered.
Now the Fifth Army was recalled from Kace and sent into the Cosgatt. The campaign against Darvlish was not dignified with the title of war. Yet it ate up as much manpower as a war, cost as much, was fought as passionately. Thribriat and the wilderness of the Cosgatt were nearer to Matrassyl than the Western Wars.
Darvlish had a personal animus against JandolAnganol and his line. His father had been a baron in Borlien. He had fought by his father’s side when JandolAnganol’s father, VarpalAnganol, had appropriated his land. Darvlish had seen his father cut down by a youthful JandolAnganol.
When a leader died in battle, that was the end of fighting. No man would continue. Darvlish’s father’s army turned and ran. Darvlish retreated to the east with a handful of men. VarpalAnganol and his son pursued them, hunting them like lizards among the stoney mazes of the Cosgatt—until the Borlienese forces refused to go further because no more loot was forthcoming.
After almost eleven years in the wilderness, Darvlish had another chance, and took it: “The vultures shall praise my name!” became his war cry.
Half a small year before the king divorced his queen—before the idea even invaded his mind—JandolAnganol was forced to muster new troops and march at the head of them. Men were in short supply and required pay or the loot the Cosgatt would not yield. He used phagors. The phagor auxiliaries were promised freedom and land in return for service. They were formed into the First and Second Regiments of the Royal Phagorian Guard of the Fifth Army. Phagors were ideal in one respect: both the male and female fought, and their young went into battle with them. JandolAnganol’s father before him had also rewarded ancipital troops with land. It was as a result of this policy—forced on the kings by manpower shortage—that phagors lived more comfortably in Borlien than in Oldorando, and were less subject to persecution.