Against A Dark Background (29 page)

‘Welcome to nowhere,’ he said, smiling brightly. ‘We just left the comm net.’ He withdrew and closed the door.

Zefla looked vaguely surprised, then went back to her novel. Sharrow pulled out her little disposable phone. Its display flashed Transception Problem. She clicked a few buttons experimentally, then shrugged and put the phone away in her satchel.

Sharrow glanced at her watch. Another four hours on this train, another day on a second train, then two days after that they might just be in Pharpech if all went according to plan.

She looked out the window again.

‘And this is the view from the back of the Castle; that’s looking south. No; north. Well, more north-east, I suppose. I think.’ Travapeth handed the holo print to Zefla, who glanced at it and smiled again.

‘Enchanting,’ she said. Zefla passed the print across the conference table to Sharrow, who hardly bothered to glance at it.

‘Hmm,’ she said, stifling a yawn. She passed the print to Cenuij, sitting round the table from her. He looked at it. There was a sour, disgusted look on his face. He studied the holo as if trying to decide whether to tear it up, spit on it or set it on fire. Eventually he put it face down on a large pile of prints lying on the table.

They had hired a small office in a modern block in the city centre; Travapeth - clad in an ancient and grubby professorial robe that had probably once been maroon-had visited two days in a row, drinking large amounts of trax wine on each occasion and holding forth at some length - and with gradually increasing volume - on any and every aspect of the Kingdom of Pharpech that Zefla, Sharrow or Cenuij could think of.

Miz and Dloan, meanwhile, were tracking down any further information they could find on the Kingdom in data bases and publications; they were also completing the travel arrangements.

Zefla and Sharrow had been worried Cenuij would take exception to Travapeth’s bombastic demeanour; with Cenuij, things could always go either way when he met people who had as high an opinion of themselves as he did of himself. They had waited until Cenuij was in a particularly good mood before they introduced the two men to each other. It had worked; Cenuij seemed almost to have warmed to the old scholar, but today, after lunch in a private booth in a nearby restaurant, Travapeth had insisted on showing them the flat and holo photographs he had taken on his visits to the Kingdom, from the first time he’d gone there as a student fifty years earlier, up to his last visit, five years ago.

‘Ah,’ Travapeth said. He brought another carton of prints up from the floor at his side, depositing the carton on the table and delving inside. ‘Now, these are especially interesting,’ he said, plonking the thick wad of prints on the polished bark table. Dust puffed out from between the holos. Sharrow sighed. Cenuij, a look of horror on his face, glanced beneath the table to see how many more cartons Travapeth had down there.

‘These date from twenty years ago,’ Travapeth said, helping himself to a blister-fruit from the bowl.

Something small and red wriggled out from a hole in the bottom of the carton the prints had been in; it ran fast and eight-legged across the table towards the edge. Travapeth brought his hand holding the blister-fruit crunching down on the insect as he said, ‘These date from the time of His Majesty’s coronation.’

Zefla stared at the old scholar’s hand as he rolled it back and forth, making sure the insect was fully squashed.

‘As I say,’ Travapeth went on, absently wiping his red-stained hand on a different coloured stain already decorating the thigh of his robe, ‘I was personally invited to the coronation by His Majesty.’ He polished the blister-fruit on roughly the same part of the robe he’d wiped the insect on, and then bit into the fruit, talking through the resulting yellowish mush and waving the dripping fruit around. ‘I shink thish shirst one ish a short of zheneral zhiew . . .’

Sharrow put one hand under her armpit and her other hand to her brow.

‘Enchanting,’ Zefla said, passing the print to Sharrow. It was sticky. Sharrow gave it to Cenuij.

‘Ah,’ Travapeth said, swallowing. ‘Now; still the coronation day, but here we have the ceremony of the holy book being brought out of the vault.’

Sharrow looked up.

‘Holy book?’ Zefla said brightly. She accepted the print from the scholar’s thin, age-spotted hand.

‘Yes,’ Travapeth said, frowning at the holo. ‘The monarch has to be sitting on the book, on the throne in the cathedral when he is crowned.’ He handed the print to Zefla, a leery smile on his face. ‘Sitting on it with fundament bared, I may add,’ he added. ‘The monarch has to bare his nether regions to the skin cover of the book.’ The elderly scholar took another deep bite from the blister-fruit and sat smiling at Zefla as he masticated.

‘Fascinating,’ Zefla said, glancing at the print and passing it on. Sharrow looked at it. She sensed Cenuij waiting, tense, in the other seat.

The slightly blurred holo showed a crowd of serious looking but colourfully attired men holding the poles supporting an opened palanquin in which something light brown and about the size of a briefcase sat, resting on a white cushion. The by-now-familiar ramshackle bulk of Pharpech Castle rose in the background, at the end of the small city’s main square. She quickly turned the holo from side to side and up and down, but the image of the book in the palanquin didn’t reveal any more from other angles.

What sort of holy book is it?’ Sharrow asked.
Which one?’ She pretended to stifle another yawn, and smiled apologetically at Travapeth as she did so. She handed the holo to Cenuij, who looked at it then put it down. He jotted something in his notebook.

‘I have to confess, dear girl, that I don’t know,’ Travapeth admitted, frowning. He took another bite from the fruit. ‘Shome short of ancient tome shupposhed to have been a gisht shrom-’ He swallowed. `- the Ladyr Emperor to the first of the Useless Kings.’ Travapeth waved the dripping fruit around. Zefla flinched, then calmly wiped her eye. ‘I of course offered to inspect the book for His Majesty, to determine its identity, provenance and importance, but in this was refused, unusually.’ Travapeth shrugged. ‘All I know is that it’s an encased book, some sort of precious metal, probably silver. It’s about as thick as your hand, as long as your forearm and its breadth is roughly twenty-eight and half centimetres.’.

Cenuij sat back in his seat, fingers drumming on the table. Sharrow felt herself evaluating the scene, trying to gauge just how much interest they appeared to be showing. Too little might look as suspicious as too much.

Travapeth crunched into the core of the blister-fruit, frowned and spat a few seeds into the carton the holos had come from. ‘The book’s never been opened,’ he said. ‘Rumour is it’s booby-trapped, but anyway it’s locked and naturally there’s no key. I might have at least been able to establish the work’s identity had the old King not had it recovered - or rather additionally covered- in the skin of some revolutionary peasant leader some years before I first travelled to the Kingdom.’ Travapeth sighed.

‘It’s a very colourful ceremony, the coronation, isn’t it?’ Zefla said, turning to Sharrow and Cenuij and tapping her notebook stylo on the table’s polished surface. Sharrow nodded (thinking good girl), as Zefla turned back to Travapeth, who was taking aim at the office’s litter bin, stationed beneath a window near one corner of the room. He threw the core of the blister-fruit; it thumped soggily against the wall above and fell behind the bin. Travapeth shook his head.

‘It would make very good screen,’ Zefla said to him. She glanced round at Sharrow and Cenuij. ‘I’d just adore to record something like that ceremony,’ she said (Sharrow and Cenuij both nodded). ‘So ethnic,’ Zefla said to Travapeth, her hands out in front of her as though supporting two large invisible spheres. ‘So . . . so real.’

Travapeth looked wise.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Zefla said, `the current King is thinking of resigning or anything, is he?’

Travapeth wiped his hands on the front of his robe and shook his head. ‘I believe not, dear girl. The present King’s grandfather did abdicate; he took himself off to a monastery to pursue a life of holy despisal. But King Tard . . . well, he’s not really the religious type.’ Travapeth frowned. `He does believe in their god, of course, but I don’t believe it would be inaccurate to term his religious observances perfunctory rather than assiduous.’

‘They don’t ever re-enact-?’ Zefla began. But Travapeth boomed on.

‘Of course, sudden conversions to extreme holiness have been known to occur in the present royal family, usually following traumatic events in the life of the noble person concerned involvement in an unsuccessful coup, being discovered with somebody else’s spouse or one’s own mount, finding one has been made general of an army being sent to root out guerrillas and revolutionaries in deep country; that sort of thing. But for a monarch to take up holy orders is relatively rare; they tend to die in harness.’ Travapeth’s eyebrows rose. ‘Literally so in the case of the King’s great-grandfather, who accidentally strangled himself to death in a very unlikely position while suspended from the ceiling of a room in a house of less than spotless reputation.’ The old scholar gave a sort of grunting laugh and grimaced dubiously at Zefla as he took a drink from a goblet of trax wine, and gargled with it before swallowing.

‘Well,’ Zefla said. ‘Perhaps we might be able to catch some other ceremony. If we do get permission to work there.’

Certainly,’ Travapeth said, belching.
There’s the annual rededication of the cathedral, the maledictions before the annual glide-monkey hunt -that’s quite colourful, and the hunt itself is exciting. . . Well, they call it a hunt; it’s more of a spectator sport. Then there’s the New Year mass-executions day, the debtors’ flogging festival . . . and there are always events celebrating the birth of a new royal baby or the King’s acquisition of some new piece of technology.’ .

Yes,’ Zefla said, tapping the stylo on the conference table again.
These pieces of modern technology that the Kings purchase every now and again; I take it they have purely symbolic value?’

Travapeth shook his head.
Not even that, sweet lady; they are bought merely to remove any monetary surplus from the country’s economy. This, ah, apparently strange behaviour is designed to keep the Kingdom stable by soaking up profit that might otherwise lead to progress and therefore instability. This is the very reason that Pharpech is also known as the Court of the Useless Kings.’ Travapeth frowned and gestured with his hands.
This might strike us as a rather eccentric way to rule a state, but I think we have to respect the Pharpechians’ right to run their country the way they want, and certainly one cannot deny that it works; there has been no progress whatsoever in Pharpech for nearly eight hundred years. In its own way, that’s quite an achievement.’

Cenuij made an almost inaudible noise and jotted something in his notebook.

Of course,’ Travapeth sighed.
This practice can be taken too far; I was present in the Kingdom when His Majesty the present King took delivery of his radio telescope.’

`I thought the area was radio-opaque,’ Cenuij said.

Oh, absolutely,’ Travapeth said.
And of course there’s no break in the canopy for hundreds of kilometres. But you miss the point, my dear sir. The telescope was not bought to be used; there was nobody in the realm able to operate it and no electricity supply available anyway. As I have related, modern technology with the partial exception of the guards’ and the army’s weapons - is effectively banned in the Kingdom.’

The old scholar suddenly looked quite sad, and dropped his voice a little.
Even my own modest camera fell foul of this rule after the unfortunate business of the King being thrown from his mount while performing the annual capital boundary riding, during my last visit . . .’ Travapeth seemed to collect himself, sitting straight in his seat and raising his voice again.
No, sir; the King bought the telescope because it cost exactly the amount of money the treasury had to spend and because it was totally useless. Although I believe he did enjoy sliding around inside the bowl for a while, which goes against the letter but not the spirit of the Uselessness creed . . . But no,’ Travapeth said, and came close to scowling.
My complaint is with the site the King chose for his telescope, which was the old castle library; he had the library torn down and all the books burned.’ Travapeth shook his head.
Disgraceful behaviour,’ he muttered into his wine goblet.

Sharrow stared at him, then made a small note in her own notebook, just to be doing something. Oh shit, she thought.

Zefla was shaking her head, making noises of polite outrage.

Cenuij had stiffened.
All the books?’ he said, voice hoarse.
Burned?’

Travapeth looked up, eyebrows raised. `I’m afraid so,’ he said, nodding sadly.
They went into the castle furnace; coated the whole city in ash and black, half-burned pages.’ The old scholar shook his head.
Tragedy, really.’

`Terrible,’ Zefla agreed.

And for the townspeople, of course,’ Travapeth said.
As I’ve said; Pharpech experiences rain only rarely, and the roof-tax tends to discourage people from covering the top-most floor of their dwellings, so all that ash made a quite terrible mess.’

Were any very valuable books destroyed?’ Cenuij said. He gave a small smile.
I’m something of an antiquarian book collector in my spare time. I’d hate to think . . .’

`To be honest, I doubt it,’ Travapeth said, nodding to Zefla as she refilled his goblet with wine.
Thank you, dear girl.’ He looked at Cenuij.
Pharpech is something of a desert for bibliophiles, dear sir. There is no literary tradition as such; only a very few of the top officials in the Kingdom, a couple of family tutors and sometimes the monarch can read at all. Though, as one might expect, this has led to a rich oral culture. But no, sir; the library was a Useless purchase, bought a few hundred years ago from an auction house here in Malishu; it had belonged to a noble family fallen on hard times.