But, while the physical symptoms were in remission, Froissart remained anxious still, and his anxiety increased tenfold when Manthandros Trasilika called him to a private shipdeck conference.
‘Do you know who this is?’ said Trasilika, displaying a miniature portrait.
Trasilika’s fleshy palm engulfed the oval-shaped miniature, hiding it fom all scrutiny but their own. It was a picture of an old, old man with a cruel mouth parted in a smile which showed black gravestone teeth. Froissart surmised these fuliginous fangs to be dentures; he was wrong, but the mistake was pardonable, for few men as old as this retained their own teeth. The age of the sitter, more than the limitations of the portraitist, made the subject’s race hard to decipher; for it is one of the peculiarities of humanity that those differences which evidence themselves so stridently in youth (contrasts of race, health and gender) soften and blur with increasing age, all but vanishing in extreme senescence, that time of life when all flesh displays its common ancestry in the universal processes of wasting, shrivelling and depigmentation. However, Jean Froissart had spent many years in the Izdimir Empire, and hence was hypersensitive to matters of race; accordingly, he swiftly identified this gnarled ancient as a member of the Janjuladoola people. Only one thing made Froissart hesitate before pronouncing that diagnosis, and that was the eyes. Those ocular orbs, animating the wizened flesh as they did with such intelligent malice, were pale orange flecked with green, like undercooked eggs sprinkled with mint; they deviated so much from any human norm that Froissart momentarily wondered if the painting was of a real person at all, or whether the subject was a creature of legend or myth.
‘Well?’ said Trasilika. ‘Are you delaying the delivery of your wisdom till your ninetieth birthday adds the authority of age to its native credibility?’
‘No,’ said Froissart. ‘No, it was the eyes that gave me pause, that’s all. What I think is… here we have an old man. One of the Janjuladoola. Eighty, perhaps. Or older. That’s all. What else is there to say?’
‘Much,’ said Trasilika, closing his spongy fingers around the miniature. ‘The man is not eighty. He is in his youth still, for his years do not exceed seventy. He is a priest of Zoz the Ancestral. A High Priest. He is… the High Priest on Untunchilamon.’
Froissart was startled.
‘But,’ he said, ‘but, but you said…’
‘I know what I said.’
Before their departure from Bolfrigalaskaptiko, Trasilika had told Froissart (in the strictest confidence) that the latest intelligence (allegedly brought from Untunchilamon by the canoes of the Ngati Moana) confirmed earlier rumours which had declared Justina Thrug to be guilty of a massacre of all priests of Zoz the Ancestral who had the misfortune to dwell upon her island.
Obviously, Trasilika had lied.
‘So… so this is a priest,’ said Froissart, his ‘this’ referring to the miniature which Trasilika had already pocketed. ‘May I know his name?’
‘Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek,’ said Trasilika.
‘Ek?’ said Froissart in alarm.
‘The same.’
‘But — but you said he was dead.’
‘I lied,’ said Trasilika simply.
‘How could you?’ said Froissart.
He was horrified, and with good reason. Law and custom decreed that no wazir could be officially installed in his office without the ceremonial assistance of a High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral. In the absence of such a High Priest, Froissart himself would have conducted the necessary religious ceremony. But now that right, duty and privilege would automatically be claimed by Master Ek himself.
Jean Froissart knew much of Master Ek already, and none of what he knew was pleasant. Ek was as much a xenophobe as Aldarch the Third. He preached the supremacy of the Janjuladoola people, and despised all other races, particularly the children of Wen Endex; and, as both Trasilika and Froissart belonged to the despised group, Ek would doubtless be reluctant to give them his cooperation.
On the perilously unstable island to which the two men were venturing, lack of cooperation might mean their deaths; and surely there was a possibility that Ek’s displeasure might take a more active, more dangerous form.
As Froissart and Trasilika confronted each other in the shipdeck sunlight, a fight broke out between two sailors, matelots whose tempers had been strained beyond endurance by the stresses of this much-feared voyage to the waters of Untunchilamon. Without hesitation, both men plunged into the fray and sorted out the miscreants. No dignitary of the Janjuladoola people would even have contemplated joining such a brawl, but Froissart and Trasilika could not resist it.
Though Jean Froissart had lived for years in Obooloo, he still retained from his youth a love of physical conflict. He had been raised to be a Yudonic Knight of Wen Endex, and thus in his early years his every impulse toward reckless violence had been lauded and applauded. The results of such training in one’s formative years are not easily altered.
As for his companion:
Though he was travelling to Untunchilamon to be the new wazir of that island, Manthandros Trasilika was at heart a merchant; and a fat merchant; and a rapacious, rascally merchant. But he was not a cowardly merchant. The traders of Port Domax are noted for their ferocity in battle and the unmerchantlike joy which they take in the same; which helps explain the long and uninterrupted independence of their city.
When the sailors had been separated, pummelled and dismissed to the brig, a sweating Trasilika said to a panting Jean Froissart:
‘Cheer up,’ said Trasilika. ‘Soon I’ll be wazir and we’ll all be rich.’
‘Or dead,’ said Froissart. ‘Ek could be the death of us.’
‘Not Ek,’ said Trasilika. ‘Ek could be many things to us, but death is not one of them.’
‘How can you be so certain?’
‘Relax! I’ve a gift for Ek. Something he wants. Something he wants really, really badly. Something which will sweeten his heart till he sings to us as a lover.’
‘What?’ said Froissart.
‘A death warrant,’ said Trasilika. ‘A death warrant for the witch of Injiltaprajura. Justina Thrug, whom he so bitterly hates. My first act as wazir will be to have the bitch slaughtered. Then Ek, oh, Ek will love us indeed.’
Manthandros Trasilika was the very picture of confidence, but Froissart was not entirely convinced. He worried. And his worries were worsened when, that very day, he experienced a perturbing new symptom. Not the stabbing chest pains he had previously suffered with such anguished apprehension, but something equally ominous, if not more so. It felt like a heaviness in the region of his heart, as if that organ had been lumbered with a burden of lead. For the rest of that day he lived in fear of a massive, crushing heart attack.
‘Nonsense,’ muttered Froissart to himself. ‘Hypochondriacal hysteria. I’ve the constitution of an ox and a clearance from a heart specialist.’
The force of such self-reassurance was strengthened toward evening, when the weight at last eased from his chest, and he was almost able to persuade himself that the whole incident had been a figment of his imagination.
But, while fears of heart attack could be attributed to hypochondria, fears of Nadalastabstala Banraithan-chumun Ek were not so easily dismissed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Empress Justina woke in the depths of bardardor-nootha, that quarter which starts at midnight and ends at dawn. She woke alone, for she had gone to bed unpartnered; the current political crisis had almost ended her customary indulgences, for she needed all her wit and energy to ensure her own survival.