Atlan saga omnibus, p.120
Atlan Saga Omnibus, page 120
I would be bundled into our tent, by Cija or our lady, and soon I was in my cool fresh linen nightie, washed that morning in a hill-stream and bleached dry throughout the day, spread out on a jogging saddle to catch the heat. I’d hear the dew fall on the tent. Through the flap I could smell the airs, from mountain and cooking-fires. I’d pull the rugs up round my face. I’d dream of things I thought would be useful, like being able to paint pictures that moved, or being able to stop a cart by telling it to. We’d be woken at dawn by the camp-noises all around, and in would peer the sky, blue as a little bird’s first egg. My mother invariably crawled to the tent-flap to look out at the hills to be traversed that day with a strange gleeful sleepwalking expression. There might be a cheerful morning volcano belching jolly pink fire to greet us among the pastel mountains on the horizon. Scridol might turn up for breakfast, with a present for me, a stick of pointed charcoal for drawing, or a set of hinges for sticking collected things in collections, or some coloured pins. I was getting a little store now of Army stationery.
One day my mother let Scridol see the maps she had taken from Atlan. “I’ve always kept them,” she said, “because they’re so old. But I can’t understand them.” Scridol looked at them with silent attention. “They’re cold,” he said in a moment. “They make my hands and face feel quite cold.”
“Yes, I know,” said my mother. “I think there’s some kind of radiation in them. Is it in the parchment or in the inks? I don’t like putting them next to clothes in my trunk in case they’re dangerous in some way. But of course I couldn’t be so wicked as to throw them away.”
“It’s an extremely complicated vast dyke-system on several levels,” said Scridol, turning it this way and that. “It’s a remarkably sophisticated method of presenting water-engineering. But this is definitely cold energy. For Gods’ sakes don’t throw them away. I tell you what, these are going to be immensely valuable to you or somebody else one day. Keep them close and one day you’ll be able to bargain for anything you want with these.”
He didn’t suggest that he take charge of them, or hand them over to the present ruling interest of Atlan. “Well,” my mother said, “they ought to be for something. They’re not really beautiful antiques.”
Scridol by now of course had gathered that there was no contact between the General and my mother. And he never behaved as though there might be. He never said—“But, of course, you’d know better than!” when he spoke of the General. And he never insinuated almost-questions into the conversation.
At the time obviously I accepted this as normal. Mothers on a campaign stayed near their tent and carriage and daughter. Surely they didn’t expect more company than their daughter? And fathers ran the army from headquarters somewhere else.
Cija generally accepted as normal whatever happened, just the way I did. If it was happening, then it must be normal, was her non-philosophy. But she took to writing in the carriage in her fat diary, in her tiny spindly writing with its twiddly abbreviations and initials running riot.
Had she expected Zerd to invite her to the long tables in his own tents? (She’d have been eating with Sedili there.) Should he have acquainted her of the present policy of the campaign, since she was to be a figurehead on it? I am sure she was glad not to be at the long tables. She was not too happy with all that competition and the demanding mixture of balanced protocol and horseplay which went on at HQ, or at least she found that kind of atmosphere a strain unless she was winning hands down. She couldn’t be expected to win with Sedili around, Sedili who thought you a coward if you weren’t full of aggressive competition, and pressed home her advantage almost as a righteous duty to punish your ‘softness’. Sedili was one of the commanders of the army, and it seemed at times that every man she commanded worshipped her. Cija was only a local goddess with twenty men as bodyguard. Obviously she was happier being domestic in fresh air, just riding along sightseeing like a tourist with the march. But had Zerd thought any of this out, and if so, which bit? He was busy with the thousand rather time-consuming duties of a General on the move, but that meant nothing; he could always make time when he decided to, he could spin time out of the most appalling schedule. Sedili, her colonels, even her adoring footsoldiers must be kept comfortable, self-satisfied and partisan. Whatever my father’s motives, they would always be thought out practically. I read his palm once, years later, and it was days and nights before I could get his headline out of my mind. It calmly, matter-of-factly dominated the heart, the mounts, the life…
When we glimpsed shaggy creatures on twilight on the move, Scridol squinted at them and remarked: “Look, over there, what are those?”
“Kine,” my mother said. “Obviously wild—they are like fast-moving bramble-hedges, and look at those horns.”
Not long after, we heard “Hai! Hai!” and several of Ael’s bandits, who were meant to be several companies away, came swerving and bounding through our lines, almost standing in the stirrups as they urged their chunky little horses, scattering our more placid beasts. “I saw a fat mother cow,” shouted a lyrical country-loving bandit, “in the grasses with her little veal running beside her.”
And as we settled to our evening meal that night, if you glanced over to the rise on which the bandits encamped, you could see them lighting camp fires with all the glee of pyromania—and it was veal you could smell.
The daily kine-hunt became a noisy feature, the cattle roaring and bellowing as they swept the air with their awful horns, and not every bandit escaped unscathed. Some were very scathed indeed. No one but the bandits were reckless enough to go near those horns and hoofs, but the bandits’ hill-ponies with their traditional harness, bits in three pieces for better control as they swerved on the slopes, could dart in and retreat and dart in again like scorpions on the attack.
“When I saw those shaggy shapes among the grass at first in the dusk,” said Scridol, “I thought they were apes.”
“Apes?” my mother said, looking scornful, for she considered apes her own subject and no one else’s.
“Why not?” Scridol said. “There must be some around, there were by the tunnel. Didn’t you see them?”
“No, not at all.”
“There were signs of them in the tunnel,” Scridol said, “but they left it to make way for our passage, and could be seen in the dark sitting crouched in caves along the way outside and gazing on us.”
“Poor, dispossessed beings,” Cija said sadly. “No place for them, the leftover apes.”
Before the week was out, we were left in no doubt as to whether the kine were considered leftovers or not.
I was down at the river just after dawn, gathering reeds and lichens for Scridol. There was definite dawn wind these mornings, and it came scudding and racing hard before the sun, driven over the ridges before the relentless sun and flattening the grass on the broad hills like silvering sea or smoke. The reeds bent and sighed this way or that, pushing in each others’ way, and hissing like a whole marshful of snakes. I saw the deputation from the hill-farmers coming over the hill with the wind. Their best weapons, newly polished for their visit, shone in the new day’s sun. They looked very, very dignified indeed as they stalked to us in measured strides, and such dignity speaks of danger.
“You, small cunt-type-child, lead us to the Dragon’s tent,” one said through his moustaches. So I nodded obediently.
The long dark-blue weather-washed tent was pitched on the slope of a low hill on whose ridges perched Ael’s bandits on the lookout. As soon as they saw the farmers they started going “Hai! Hai!” and gathering together and running into and around the tent.
The farmers were ushered in, not just under the big outside awning but into the main tent, because that made them beholden for hospitality under the Dragon’s roof. I’d brought my lichens and my egg and toast along with me, and they wobbled with emotion as I sneaked in with the farmers, past the guards, slaves, ghirza-players, strutting staff-officers and such assorted HQ rabble. The farmers looked for the General and his commanders with blank expressions, before they lowered their gaze and saw that the floor was covered with outspread crackling detailed-scale maps, on which their hosts were kneeling. Clor, who had been perusing a rift valley as though it were dispatches, crawled over a mountain range on his knees, scrambled to his feet and invited the newcomers in. Zerd and his officers one by one rose politely to their feet.
There were ceremonious greetings and introductions and expressions of much mutual respect.
The General’s conference table stretched the length of his inner tent, but the chairs and stools had all been removed. The table was used for wine flagons, ale flagons, and Scridol’s inks. Scridol was squatted on his heels beside Zerd’s two secretaries. There was a camp-stool for him, but this he used as a shelf on which to sort and set out unsteady sheaves of paper that looked as though a crazy pigeon with inky feet had tottered over them.
Scridol started when he saw me, and made his eyebrows go up and down in a sort of frantic code. I went over and sat on a cushion beside him and he mouthed at me: “It seems that the breakfast-break may be protracted today.”
Cup-boys came running to pour drinks for the farmers.
“Are these your bandits?” one of the farmer-lords indicated Clor and Isad and Eng, Zerd’s chiefs of staff.
“Would you ask Ael if he might come in?” Zerd politely asked a nearby captain.
Ael instantly appeared, almost before the words were out of Zerd’s mouth. Ael sauntered very casually and insolently and placidly into the tent, closely surrounded by a group of his men, flicking the corners of their cloaks, pointing their toes and looking down their noses.
“Your bandits have been stealing our cattle,” the farmer-lord informed Zerd.
Ael now looked at the lord. “I have better things to do, my friend, than to scratch fleas with you,” he remarked to the lord. “Are you or are you not our allies? Do we starve as we traverse your land, pursuing an enemy as much yours as ours? Do we see you stirring from your agricultural activities to deal with the enemy, or do we have to do all, on your behalf as on our own? Do we waste time talking here over a few sides of beef, like market-girls, or do we use time to pursue Progdin? Did Progdin live off your land as he passed through, or did he not?”
“He stole and slaughtered many cattle,” the farmer-lord said. “But he is our enemy.”
“Do you give less to your friend than to your enemy?” Ael countered.
The farmer-lord looked at Zerd. “We ask indemnity,” he said, unmoved by Ael’s rhetoric.
Beautiful at this moment hurtled into the tent.
“Six of my men have just been killed down at the river,” he said, “by these scum.”
The farmer-lords put their hands on their weapons at once. “Your men attacked first,” they said. This was a matter of form, before they knew any more about the incident at all.
Since, it emerged, six of their men also had been killed (no one had done any proper counting yet, but six was a useful specific sounding unit meaning ‘several’) they demanded recompense.
Beautiful looked around, now resigning himself to involved parley, lifted his chin and said:
“My chair, my lords, is nowhere to be seen.”
Clor and Isad looked at Zerd, and Zerd looked bored and reminded the Riverine how at a previous conference the minutes had consisted mostly of a debate as to the precedence of seating at conference.
“We demand indemnity from your bandits for our cattle,” said the farmer-lord, addressing Zerd, Clor, Isad and Eng. “And for our men from your riverers.”
The riverine lord, his beautiful face twisted, vaulted the table, adding with his trailing dagger to its interesting surface texture.
“Are the Northern Rivers,” he bitterly inquired, “being asked to flow uphill?”
“The Northern Rivers,” Zerd drawled, “are entirely out of course. Would these Rivers pay us the signal courtesy of taking pan in our present war?”
Beautiful bowed very stiffly.
A big black-bearded lord now arrived at the tent-entrance and began explaining his business with the General in a louder than necessary voice. As it was obviously intended that he should, Zerd noted this arrival of the most pig-like (in my opinion) of the allies marching with him. The Black Pig had brought to the Dragon’s strength a force of more than four thousand men under arms. While committed totally to the war against the Northern King, and with nowhere else to turn if he failed Zerd too unless he wished for virtual exile, still he made it obvious that he might remove his presence if circumstances demanded. “Admit him,” Zerd signalled, since the Pig always felt it was a loss of face if he had to wait for an appointment.
The message was relayed to the entrance, where the Pig strode in bristling. He hung around uncertainly once in, not sure whether to approach Zerd or wait as current business was settled. His shoulders were hulking and his neck went straight up the back of his head. In order to take in the gist of any situation he had to turn his head and shoulders from side to side and back again, and this gave him an uneasy awkward and looming presence. Zerd saluted him and so the Pig came over and shuffled from foot to foot beside Zerd.
Zerd rather flatteringly introduced him to the farmer-tribes, who in their turn seemed somewhat impressed.
“A trifling matter,” the Pig said now that he’d got his way in. “But if it could be settled before we move off today. My coffers are at present still in the City. They are to follow shortly, when the Dictatress has converted them to the grain and goods I have personally purchased for the good of the Army.”
Zerd motioned to his secretary to sign a chit for the Pig, and didn’t wait to hear how much die Pig wanted, and what it was for, and why it was so desperately needed now.
The assembled lords bowed to each other, each neck stiffer than the others. A strange coagulation now resulted in the company as not one lord would continue his supplication in front of the others, nor stride out first, each hanging back to show the General a superior modesty.
Scridol beside me bent his head and regarded the stippling I’d been helping with. “Oh, well done,” he said softly. “Spot on.”
Zerd looked across at me. I wondered whether to tremble. He spoke to someone who spoke to a cup-boy who brought a slightly alcoholic honey drink across to me. I looked with delight across at my father to thank him, but he was now speaking patiently and obviously mendaciously to the farmer-lords.
I looked around at the assembled lords, only a sample of those with which Zerd had to march in the palm of his hand. Each invaluable in terms of men and arms, and altogether such a collection of high glances, darkling brows, bull necks and even club thumbs.
I was to learn later that Zerd was in fact the only member ever to benefit from these early conferences. Not much was ever decided except what was, after all, to be of paramount importance— Which voice spoke loudest or heaviest, which blustered and which carried weight. Under the guise of administrational and topographical policies, the points of precedence were hammered into shape by mailed gloves. Zerd calmly watched the demeanour infighting of each lord, saying to his commanders, “He guards his back,” or “He lets his men do the work.”
“Aren’t you the lord of Fourthcrag?” Beautiful asked one of the farmers, who acknowledged the fact.
“Well, now that I come to think of it,” said Beautiful, “when I was on my way down here to offer my poor assets to the lady Sedili, should she be good enough to accept such an offer, it was Fourthcrag which swooped upon me and slaughtered and pillaged to the tune of—” and he named the sum to the last farthing. “In view,” he added “of our present priorities, I could consider waiving my right to blood but if I did claim it,” he continued more darkly, “each of my men would be worth, at the accurate average, 1¾ tribesmen.”
The Pig cleared his throat.
“Since we are on the subject,” he said humbly, “I had been meaning to bring this up when it seemed most convenient, but I must insist that the riverine lord make me a present of three hundred men to compensate for injuries received on my part in street brawls in the City.”
The farmers were not to be blinded with science. They had come to talk cattle-mathematics, and these they had at the tips of their fingers and indeed their spears.
There was another disturbance at the tent-entrance, and a pale young woman came hurrying in. She saw Scridol before she saw Zerd, and hastened to me. “Oh, Scridol,” she said, in a hushed voice because she knew there was a conference going on, “thank the dear Gods. I was told you were here and the absolute brat with you.” She took my hand. Perhaps the back of her neck felt as though it were being stared at. She turned to see the General was looking at her. She bowed deeply to him and to the assembled company.
“My lords, my lords,” she gracefully winningly said. “Many and deep apologies. I have been searching for my small daughter, and She has made her way here when you are all at important business.”
The farmer-lords had by now recognised the uniform of our household captain who had accompanied her.
They looked from the captain to my mother to me, and back to Zerd, and then as one they fell upon their right knees. “Goddess,” they said, a low multiple hum, “Goddess,” as they touched their foreheads to the maps on the ground.
The scene in the tent had stilled. A small bird strayed in. Its thin squealing chatter and the bass, baritone hum “Goddess” were the only sounds. I saw Zerd look at my mother, who looks beautiful when she is worshipped: she is conditioned to respond to acts of worship, and when worshipped she stands taller and becomes vivid, becoming a current I suppose to pass the worship on and up to the proper world-channels, to her heavenly counterparts, as all earthly divinities are taught to do. It was an awe-inspiring and ludicrous moment. The farmer-lords, their wild dangerous clamour still echoing, as they bent each before her, very unpremeditated and savage and graceful. The shock and pique on the faces of Sedili’s faction, a rueful dead-end—knowing that this was one honour Sedili would never find accorded to her: not many young women ever receive such a demonstration as of ancient, awesome highly useful right.
