The Man of Gold t-2
The Man of Gold
( Tekumel - 2 )
M. A. R. Barker
M. A. R. Barker
The Man of Gold
Chapter One
For upwards of half an hour now they had watched the runner on the road below the single watchtower of the monastery. Nothing at first but a tiny fleck of azure on the heat-shimmering horizon, he became a species of insect, all coppery brown legs beneath a carapace of brilliant blue, then a tiny mannikin moving with jerky puppet strides along the dusty, empty roadway. The younger of the two watchers on the parapet made the Pe Choi gesture-language symbol for “half” to his comrade.
The other man shook his shaven head and applied a box-like device to his eye. “Not so, Harsan, not this time. I make no more wagers. I still think he will take another Kiren to reach our gates, but I’ll not bet upon it. You have impoverished me already.”
The younger man hitched up his grey priestly kilt and carefully clambered back down from the dizzy height of the embrasured wall. “Let me look again through your invention, Zaren. I cannot imagine what an Imperial messenger desires here.”
The older priest handed over his device, a square box in which several small mirrors and lenses had been inserted and held in place with bits of wax, wood, and fibre. Harsan held it to his eye, squinted, and fiddled with the adjustment.
“By our Lord Thumis, Patron of Savants, this fellow springs up at me like a beast from its lair! Without your box all I can see is a pen-flick of blue and a splotch of skin. With it, I can even make out the golden cord that binds his headdress! You must submit this to the Adepts as one of your Labours of Reverence, Zaren. Surely you will make Fifth Circle-or even Sixth.”
Zaren smiled lopsidedly. “Not so. The principles underlying my box are all laid down in the ‘Book of the Visitations of Glory,’ written some four thousand years ago. All I did was to take them, cook them together, and putter until I got to a logical result. I am nothing but a tinkerer, Harsan. My skull is a pot in which other men’s ideas may be boiled. Our Lord Prior will pat me on the head, but that will be all.”
The younger priest pushed wavy shoulder-length black hair away from his face and raised the instrument to focus upon the horizon. Behind the toiling messenger the stone causeway wound down across sere, dusty fields, a brown-grey rivulet, to join with its parent, the Sakbe road on the eastern horizon. This mighty highway marked the visible presence of the Imperium of Tsolyanu; its three levels of roadway, crenellated and parapeted like some citadel wall, marched away south to the little city of Paya Gupa, and thence on to Tumissa and the southern provinces of the Empire.
Turning to the north, Harsan inspected the chalky peaks of the Chaka Range, upon the easternmost spur of which the Monastery of the Sapient Eye of Thumis stood. Eleven hundred Tsan to the north these fastnesses would descend through crumpled foothills and valleys into the alluvial plains bordering the northern sea, the lands of the hostile lords of Pijena and Yan Kor. To the south, beyond Paya Gupa, the green coverlet of jungle ran another thirteen hundred Tsan to the southern ocean, of which most of the priests of the monastery had heard no more than travellers’ tales.
Yet it was not there that the young priest’s eyes lingered but on the hazy blue-green ranges behind the monastery to the west where slender ropes of smoke upon the sky marked the places of villages beneath the jungle roof.
Zaren followed his gaze. “Not even my invention can pierce the forest, Harsan. The Pe Choi villages lie beyond its reach. Leave off looking, my friend. Why do you always turn to thinking of your Pe Choi foster parents-great insects and no kin of ours-when you are now amongst your own kind?”
The younger man did not turn. “It was they who found and raised me, Zaren. My heart wishes me once more amongst them, though they have six limbs to our four.”
Zaren would have said something, but Harsan went on. “Had it not been for those ‘insects,’ my life were ended before it had begun. How shall I think of the Pe Choi? My own human parents, my clan, my origins-I know none of them. Nor do I love those who left me there to die in the forest. La, man, shall I not yearn for T’kek who raised me, and for Ch’be who taught me, and for Lket who hunted with me? In my dreams shall I not return to Htiq-kku, the only clan-village I knew until T’kek brought me to this monastery when I was thirteen? I was used better by those ‘insects’ than by my own kind.” He lapsed into moody silence, stroking his lower lip with a gesture that struck Zaren as more characteristic of a Pe Choi than of one of humankind.
Zaren sighed and shuffled his plump bulk around to the narrow stair leading down from the eyrie. “Come, we have been over these matters as often as a peasant ploughs his field. -An accident, a babe lost from a merchant’s caravan, an unwed maid fleeing the vengeance of her clan-Thumis knows what brought you to the Pe Choi, and He alone may reveal it to you if it is so written in your Skein of Destiny. In the meantime you had best dash down and inform Prior Haringgashte of the arrival of our guest. Go now, speed! Otherwise our noble Prior will count his rosaries upon your backside with his knotted thong.”
Harsan pulled himself up for one last look over the parapet. The runner was now almost directly below, long legs pumping rhythmically, arms outflung, flanks gleaming with perspiration, blue cloth headdress bobbing with the final effort of the steep incline just below the monastery gates. In his right hand, clearly visible, was the tassled blue and white baton of an Imperii courier. This was indeed a visitor of significance.
The narrow stair circled down within the monastery’s prowlike eastern wall and emerged in the Hall of Instruction. Here, high up under the roof, lighted by tall recessed windows glazed with cloudy-grey glass, several dozen aspiring priests, a scattering of female acolytes, and a few scions of the local Chakan nobility sat struggling with the intricacies of Tsolyani calligraphy. Harsan’s old preceptor Chareshmu sat upon the dais, meticulously dissecting one of the Seventy-Seven Specimens of Dirresa the Copyist, traditional in priestly schools for the past thousand years. Harsan grinned. Chareshmu had all of the enthusiasm for his art of an addict for his drug, yet all of the lecturing talent of a stone idol. Heads lifted at the intrusion; pens stopped in mid squiggle. Harsan bowed perfunctorily in the old teacher’s direction, sketched the symbol of Thumis in the air, and ducked out, feeling Chareshmu’s baneful glare all the way across the room like a fire upon his back. Someone would suffer now-probably poor Kru’om, whose earnest pothooks resembled tangled tree branches more than they did the graceful Tsolyani script.
Harsan entered a pillared arcade, thence down a staircase painted with murals of Thumis bestowing the Orb of Eternal Light upon Hrugga, the hero of the Epics. Here the deity held out many-rayed hands towards the kneeling warrior king; there Thumis in his Aspect of the Jewelled Serpent strode at Hrugga’s back, protecting him from the Demon Qu’u. Farther on, the god’s many-faced, many-armed figure overspread marching columns of Classical Tsolyani script which related Hrugga’s victory over Missum, Lord of the Dead, on Dormoron Plain. Harsan gave these patched and peeling paintings only a bare glance. He had spent many hours here as a boy, copying each glyph under the shadow of Chareshmu’s quizzical eye and all too active rod.
The staircase debouched into the colonnade surrounding the outer precincts of the Hall of Divine Supplication. Here scribes swarmed, drawing up documents, copying devotional texts for sale to the pious, and tending to the myriad tasks of temple administration.
The monastery was charged with more than just religious obligations, of course: the district capital, Paya Gupa, lay some two hundred Tsan to the south. This place thus served as both shrine and local administrative centre. The Prior and his officers were empowered to settle land disputes, register claims, maintain records, license merch
ants, regulate trade, and even deal with criminal cases of a minor sort.
Harsan picked his way between low tables piled with scrolls, inkpots, and pencases, dodged perspiring copyists squatting crosslegged over their dry grass-smelling sheets of fibrous paper, and narrowly avoided collisions with young acolytes buried beneath armloads of record scrolls: The great bronze gates of the Hall of Divine Supplication stood ajar, and Harsan slipped into its shadowy gloom, fragrant with incense but deserted until the ceremony of Purifying the Lips of Thumis at sunset. From this chamber a half-hidden door of worn, black Tiu — wood opened onto a covered balcony overlooking the temple’s Hall of Enactments. Here Prior Haringgashte was wont to sit, watching all that transpired under his jurisdiction with a beady eye. He was not present today.
Harsan leaned over the age-blackened railing to peer down into the hubbub of scribes, peasants, landowners, merchants, and priests. Three pyramidal daises occupied the centre of the hall, the middle one standing three man-heights above the chipped grey marble pavement, the other two somewhat lower. From these, narrow gangways ran down to still lower platforms; short stairs, runways, ramps, and little wooden bridges travelled thence to still lower, broader daises, and finally to the floor. So great was the Tsolyani love for the visible display of all abstract relationships that one could almost trace the structure of the temple’s administration from the heights, arrangements, and interconnections of these daises.
All of the levels were occupied by shaven-headed, inkstained priests of the Second and Third Circles, men and women who had devoted their lives to the neat rows of entries of fields and produce, the ciphering of columns of tithes and taxes, and the recording of markets and trade. Here one entry announced the arrival of an infant into this world of Tekumel; there another line of script indicated his or her clan, profession, and status; a further squiggle noted the person’s marriage; other registers recorded the payment of taxes and tithes, the ownership of lands and goods, the growth of a family, children, servants, and concubines; and still another entry marked the citizen’s departure from this life and the final journey into the Halls of Belkhanu, the Lord of the Excellent Dead. All of the events of a thousand, thousand lifetimes were here in these scrolls, tossed carelessly back and forth from one careless sacerdotal hand to another.
Lamps for the melting of sealing wax burned blue with the pitchy redolence of Wes-wood. Young children did futile battle with cloth whisks against clouds of bottle-green Chri- flies. Older boys and girls carried brass trays of earthen cups brimming with Chumetl, the traditional daily drink of watered and salted buttermilk, to this outstretched hand or that. Clay wateijugs spread wet stains of welcome coolness over the soiled matting of the daises. Servitors in once-grey kilts bustled up from the lower platforms to pass some document to those higher up; others bore officiously sealed decrees down again to the petitioners waiting below.
Today the Hall of Enactments was crowded. The place thronged with villagers and the local gentry of the Chakas. Harsan noted the presence of Lord (-if one could dignify him with so lofty a title-) Se’eqel, the richest landowner of the district, surrounded by his little entourage of servants and bully-boys. There stood an awkward group of Kachor chiefs from the Inner Range, gaudy in their sleeveless tunics of Hma — wool and Kheshchal — feather headdresses. Townsmen in open vests and pleated kilts ostentatiously embroidered with their clan symbols milled around the scribes of the lower levels, jostling with traders in stained leather kilts, particoloured overcloaks, and laced travel leggings. Peasants of both sexes, nude save for brief clouts of Daichu — bark cloth, strove for the attention of the rows of bored petition-writers seated crosslegged along the back wall of the chamber.
Slightly apart from the rest, in a circle of their own, four graceful Pe Choi communed together like dancers before a performance. Harsan’s gaze lingered upon these; the six slender limbs, the upper pair of which ended in tiny skeletal hands, the middle pair used now for grasping and now for standing, and the two heavier rear limbs spread in a perpetual grasshopper-like crouch; the shiny black chitinous integument (these were males- females would be bone-white); the long, segmented tail switching restlessly to emphasise some point made by its owner; the delicate black-to-grey shading of the ear-ridges of the long, sleek heads; the lambent green eyes; the dainty jaws filled with peglike teeth. For a moment Harsan’s perspective did a sudden somersault: these Pe Choi were the Ntu-ntik, “the People,” and the soft-fleshed, hairy humans were again the Tkik-ntik, “the Outsiders.” One of these Pe Choi he recognised as old Tna-Chu, the Pqa E'etk, “the One to Be Consulted”-as much as human speech could match the connotations of the many-layered Pe Choi term, and as nearly as a human tongue and lips could reproduce the clicking, whispering, hooting language-of the nearest Pe Choi village some twenty Tsan into the forest to the west.
A stir in the chamber below brought Harsan back to his mission. A man dressed in the grey-lacquered Chlen — hide armour of the temple gate guards had thrust his way through the throng and was speaking earnestly with the scribes on the lower daises. Even as Harsan turned towards the staircase at the far end of the balcony he realised that he could never reach the highest dais before the guard did.
“Now,” said Harsan to himself, “I shall receive the ‘leather rosary.’ Damned Ferruga will announce this messenger to our beloved Prior before I can get there.” Nevertheless he adopted a fiercely dutiful look, drew five deep breaths to show that he had run all the way, and plunged down the steps three at a time. As he had predicted, he was too late.
Chapter Two
The summons from Prior Haringgashte did not come until after the lector priests had completed the nightly adoration of Lord Thumis, and the jewelled image, attired in robes of deepest purple-grey, had been conveyed upon its gilded litter by forty chanting bearers from the Hall of Divine Supplication to the upper shrine, the Gallery of Gazing Forth by Night. Here sat the priests of the Sixth and Seventh Circles, surrounded by their astrolabes and ephemerides, to ponder the skeins of past, present, future, might-be and might-have-been, in the movements of Tekumel’s two moons and four sister planets. As a newly anointed Scholar Priest of the Second Circle, Harsan had perforce to attend upon chubby old Vrishmuyel, chief of the astrologers, whose interests lay more in dozing than in the imparting of celestial mechanics to his brood of students.
With a sinking sensation, Harsan accepted the little plaque of dyed Chlen- hide, embossed with the symbol of Thumis upon one side and the Prior’s personal glyph upon the other, from the hand of the pretty girl acolyte who had brought it.
The Prior’s apartments were in the eastern wing, almost directly opposite the Gallery of Gazing Forth by Night across the east-west axis of the monastery. Harsan arrived slightly out of breath and paused to collect himself and to ascertain the Prior’s mood from the Meshqu, the little silver hook at eye-height beside the door, upon which coloured plaques of Chlen- hide were hung to indicate the current humour of the occupant within. To Harsan’s surprise, the symbol that hung there tonight was green striped with red: “The Badge of Solemn Contemplation,” rather than the red and black chequered “Fist of Stem Retribution.” With somewhat higher spirits he rattled the wooden clappers hanging from the door lintel.
Qumal, the Prior’s flat-faced, unsmiling body-servant, admitted Harsan to the empty anteroom, led him past the dining chamber, where three children were stacking up the many little golden bowls of the evening’s repast (and surreptitiously stuffing their cheeks with left-overs), and opened the bronze-studded door into Haringgashte’s audience hall.
This chamber was furnished in the simple style preferred by the austere temple of Thumis: grey-washed walls covered with painted devotional texts in black and red, coloured vignettes of the god, a tessellated marble floor overspread with a single carpet of cloud-grey Mnor- fur, several ascending daises, each with its low table set upon legs carven in the shapes of comical Kuruku- beasts, and a larger table in one corner heaped with scrolls, books, i
nkpots, jars of pigments, and vessels of unknown contents. A single branching candelabrum held twelve tiny oil — lamps. High up beneath the beamed ceiling four small clerestory windows admitted the cool evening breeze that blew nightly down off the Inner Range.
Prior Haringgashte sat alone upon the highest dais at the far end of the room. As with many from his native city of Tumissa, his physique had developed like that of the Choqun- plant: reed-slender in his youth, in his latter years he had become almost bottle-shaped. His small and delicate head joined his sloping chest with little pause for shoulders, and his rotund pot-belly overhung his rounded, almost feminine hips in testimony to his love of sedentary habits — and of good food. The grey vestments of Thumis did little to conceal his girth, nor did the black skullcap of the priesthood hide his bald and mottled scalp. He watched Harsan's approach with a steady and not overly baleful gaze, from which the latter derived some faint comfort. His first words took Harsan by surprise.
“It is related, priest Harsan, that you have been anointed a Scholar Priest of the Second Circle. What was the Labour of Reverence that brought you to this exalted status?”
“My-my Prior, it was a study of the language of the ancient Empire of Llyan of Tsamra…”
“Would you then become a grammarian?”
“Languages come as easily to me, Sire, as swimming to a fish. I know not why. Yet I would also study history, doctrines, and other-’ ’
The Prior put forth a soft hand, palm down, two fingers extended, to show that he wished to continue. “How go your studies of Llyani?”
The younger priest swallowed, started to speak, and tried again. “My Lord, as is known to you, the Empire of Llyan perished some twenty-five thousand years ago — nay, more, if the Livyani scholars are correct. We lack material-I have studied rubbings of the one hundred and fifty-eight stone inscriptions in LIyani, and I have had access to five of the seventeen most authentic books in the language. Yet this is so little. As my Lord knows, the centre of Llyan's empire lay not within our own land of Tsolyanu but rather in the plains between Mu’ugalavya and Livyanu to the southwest. All that we have are the later records of the Three States of the Triangle, some works of the Time of the Dragon Lords…” He trailed off, cursing himself for a babbler, well aware that the Prior knew all that he was telling him. But what did the man want?