She looked at him not unfavourably, but now held up her hand.
‘Rushven, no more! We were friends, but our lives have changed. Go in peace.’
Unexpectedly, he ran round the table and clasped her hand.
‘We’ll go, we’ll go! After all, I’m used to cruel treatment. But grant one request before we leave… With Odi’s assistance, I have discovered something of vital importance to us all. We shall go on to Oldorando, and present this discovery to the Holy C’Sarr, in the hopes that it may merit reward. It will also discountenance your ex-husband, you may be pleased to hear—’
‘What is your request?’ she broke in angrily. ‘Be finished, will you? We have more important business.’
‘The request has to do with the discovery, ma’am. When we were all safe at the palace at Matrassyl, I used to read to your infant daughter. Little you care for that now. I remember the charming storybook that Tatro possessed. Will you permit me to take that storybook with me to Oldorando?’
MyrdemInggala stifled something between a laugh and a scream. ‘Here we try to prepare for a land attack and you wish to have a child’s book of fairy tales! By all means take the book as far as I’m concerned — then be off the premises, and take that ceaseless tongue of yours with you!’
He kissed her hand. As he backed to the door, Odi beside him, he gave a sly smile and said, ‘The rain is stopping. Fear not, we shall soon be away from this inhospitable refuge.’
The queen hurled a candlestick after his retreating back.
To one side of the palace was an extensive garden, where herbs and fruit bushes grew. In the garden was an enclosure within which pigs, goats, chickens, and geese were kept. Beyond this enclosure stood a line of gnarled trees. Beyond the trees lay a low earthworks, grass-covered, which encircled marshy ground to the east — the direction from which Pasharatid’s force would come if it did come.
After a businesslike survey of the ground, TolramKetinet and Lanstatet decided they must use this old line of defence.
They had considered evacuating Gravabagalinien by ship. But the Prayer had been inexpertly moored. During the storm, it suffered damage and could hardly be considered seaworthy.
Everything of value was unloaded from the ship. Some of its higher timbers were utilised to make a watchtower in the stoutest tree.
As the ground dried off after the storm, some of the phagors were employed to build a defensive breastwork along the top of the earthworks. Others were deployed to dig trenches nearby.
This was the scene of activity which met SartoriIrvrash and Odi Jeseratabhar as they left the settlement. They travelled one behind the other on hoxneys, with a third animal trailing, carrying their baggage. They saw CaraBansity supervising the digging of fortifications, and SartoriIrvrash halted.
‘I must bid farewell to my old friend,’ he said as he dismounted.
‘Don’t be long,’ Odi warned. ‘You have no friends here because of me.’
He nodded and walked over to the deuteroscopist, squaring his shoulders.
CaraBansity was working in a patch of marshy ground with some labouring ancipitals. When he looked up and saw SartoriIrvrash, his heavy face went dark, then, as if forced to it by the pressure of excitement, burst into a smile. He beckoned SartoriIrvrash over.
‘Here’s the past… these earthworks form part of an ancient fortification system. The phagors are uncovering the geometries of legend made flesh…’
He walked over to a newly dug pit. SartoriIrvrash followed. CaraBansity knelt at the edge of the pit, heedless of squelching mud. An arm’s length below the turf, emerging from the peaty soil, lay what SartoriIrvrash took at first to be an old black bag, pressed flat. It was or it had been a man. His body lay sprawled on its left side. Short leather tunic and boots suggested that the man had been a soldier. Half-concealed beneath his flattened form lay the hilt of a sword. The man’s profile, mouth distorted by broken teeth, had been moulded by earth’s pressure into a macabre smile. The flesh was a rich shining brown.
Other bodies were being uncovered. The phagors worked without interest, scratching the mud away with their fingers. From the dirt, another mummified soldier appeared, a fearful wound in his chest. The creases of his face were clear, as if in a pencil sketch. His eyeballs had collapsed, giving his expression a melancholy vacancy.
The cellar smell of soil bit into their nostrils.
‘The peaty earth has preserved them,’ said SartoriIrvrash. ‘They could be soldiers who died in battle, or similar botheration. They may be a hundred years old.’
‘Far more than that,’ said CaraBansity, jumping down into the trench. He scratched up one of a number of what SartoriIrvrash had taken to be stones, and lifted it for examination. ‘This is probably what killed the fellow with the broken teeth. It’s a rajabaral tree seed, as hard as iron. It may have been baked, which is why it never germinated. It’s over six centuries since spring, when the rajabarals seeded. The attackers used the seeds as cannonballs. This is where the legendary battle of Gravabagalinien was fought. We find the site because we are about to use it again for battle.’
‘Poor devils!’
‘Them? Or us?’ He went to the rear corner of the excavation. Lying below the body of the man with the chest wound was a phagor, partly visible. Its face was black, its coat matted and reddened by the bog water, until it resembled a compressed vegetable growth. ‘You see how even then men and phagors fought and died together.’
SartoriIrvrash gave a snort of disgust. ‘They may equally well have been enemies. You’ve no evidence either way.’
‘Certainly it’s a bad omen. I wouldn’t want the queen to see these. Or TolramKetinet. He’s scumber himself. We’d better cover the bodies up.’
The ex-chancellor made to turn away. ‘Not all of us cover up the secrets we find, friend. I have knowledge in my possession which, when I lay it before the authorites of Pannoval, will start a Holy War against the ancipital kind throughout all Campannlat.’
CaraBansity looked calculatingly at him through his heavy bloodshot eyes. ‘And you’ll get paid for starting that war, eh? Live and let live, I say.’
‘Yes, you say it, Bardol, but these horned creatures don’t. Their creed is different. They will outbreed us and kill us unless we act. If you had seen for yourself the flambreg herds—’
‘Don’t fly into a passion. Passion always causes trouble… Now, we’ll get on with our job. There are probably hundreds of bodies lying under the earth about here.’
Folding his arms tightly about his chest, SartoriIrvrash said, ‘You give me a cold reception, just like the queen.’
CaraBansity climbed slowly out of the trench. ‘Her majesty gave you what you asked for, a book and three hoxneys.’ He stuck a knuckle between his teeth and stared at the ex-chancellor.
‘Why are you so against me, Bardol? Have you forgotten the time when, as young men, we looked through your telescope and observed the phases of Kaidaw as it sped above us? And from that deduced the cosmic geometries under which we exist?’
‘I don’t forget. You come here, though, with a Sibornalese officer, a dedicated enemy of Borlien. The queen is under threat of death and the kingdom of dissolution. I have no love of JandolAnganol or of phagors, yet I wish to see them continue, in order that people may still look through telescopes.