The Sirian Experiments (39 page)

Meanwhile, on that area that lies immediately to the east of the Southern Continent I, which had previously been forested and green and very fertile, and since had become desert and semidesert, like so much of Rohanda, had arisen a religion, the third of those emanating from the region of the great inland seas, similar to one another, each succeeding one confirming its predecessor – though of course their exponents fought for dominance, claiming superiority. This third variation of the local religion had created marvellous and rich and complex civilizations that tolerated – at least to an extent and as far as is possible for Rohandans – the previous variations and also all kinds of other sects and cults and idea-groupings. There was prosperity, the development of knowledge of cosmic matters, and a precariously maintained peace. I could not have enough of gazing at these pictures of this amazingly intricate and affluent culture. And then, as I watched, the nomad horsemen arose from their grassy breeding places and overwhelmed everything I looked at, but everything, so that nothing was left but smoking cities, and charred fields and mounds of the slaughtered. The horsemen chased after every fleeing thing, even domestic animals, and killed them. From the northern half of Southern Continent I to the far east fringes of the main landmass remained only a waste of ruins. I cried out, I came to myself sitting on the Rohandan moon by Klorathy, and I looked at him with passionate appeal and reproach.

‘All!' I said to him, ‘Nothing left; is it possible that such an accomplishment can be wiped out, just like that?'

‘Yes, indeed it is possible – and it nearly happened.'

‘So what I saw was not the truth?'

‘It is what will happen – unless …'

‘Unless I help you?'

‘I need your help. I keep telling you so. It is a strange fact, but everywhere in the Galaxy when the weaker look at the stronger and the more powerful, what they see is self-sufficiency, easy capacity, an effortless ability – very seldom something that is indeed stronger, but only if it receives aid, support, a continuous and maintained regard of a certain kind, to enable this strength to function.'

I said nothing for a long time.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I have a long leave due to me at home, and I shall take it now. It is without precedent – the way I propose to spend my leave! And as a matter of fact, how? What do you want specifically?'

‘You shall be the ruler of a small realm, on the western slopes of the Great Mountains. And you shall confront the horsemen from the plains.'

‘And you?'

‘I shall be the general who commands the army of horsemen who will have overrun everything, leaving nothing behind but death – and who then stand at your gates ready to slay you and your people and lay your kingdom waste.'

‘And Nasar?'

‘He, and others, will be there.' 

‘Very well.'

I sent the appropriate messages home and put myself into the hands of Klorathy.

To voluntarily submerge myself in that story of murder and destruction that I had watched to its last detail was not the easiest thing I have done. One moment I was poised above, still a spectator, with Klorathy, and the next it was as if I had been swallowed by the brilliancies and multitudinous detail of that mountainous kingdom where Queen Sha'zvin
still ruled, waiting and watching while the cruel horsemen came closer, destroying everything they found.

It was not without interest, learning this Canopean technique of occupying a mind for a brief and exact purpose. The Queen, a vigorous and handsome woman, in middle age, the widow of a much-loved husband who had been killed in her youth, fighting during an earlier campaign against the horsemen, was standing high at the windows of her palace, which overlooked the walls of her city, gazing down a narrow ravine where the horsemen would have to come. Her mind was alert, though anxious; and occupied with the surveillance of a thousand administrative details. To enter that mind was not to overthrow it, or to supplant its own intelligence – rather to remain a spectator, and rather to one side, in readiness for the moments of decision. And so, too, Klorathy was doing a hundred miles away, with the general, Ghonkez.

Queen Sha'zvin was not aware of my entrance into her being, except as an increase in her anxiety. It was an experience more powerful than I had expected. I did not lose my Sirian perspectives, the Sirian scope of time and space. But I was inside, too, this civilization's view of itself as all there was of the known world – for on its edges were, to the north, the threatening horsemen, to the northwest, very far away, dark forests full of barbarians whom these people scarcely accounted as human at all, believing them not much more than beasts – and from their point of view, accurately – while beyond what was known and understood, in the Southern Continent, were, again, barbarians useful for trade and as slaves. Nothing was known at all of the Isolated Northern Continent and the Isolated Southern Continent. The world as understood by this great and powerful Queen was, though it stretched from one end of the main landmass to the other, circumscribed indeed, and the stars that roofed it were understood only – and to limited extent – by their influences on their movements … on
our
movements … an odd, a startling, a disturbing, clash of focuses and perspectives encompassed me; and as for the historical aspect, 
this Queen knew the story of her own civilization and some legends, mostly inaccurate, of a ‘distant' past, which to me, and my mind, was virtually contemporary with her.

She was feeling, as she stood there – part of a scene drenched with sunlight and with the vivid colours of Rohanda – that death lay just ahead not only for her but for her people. Death had already ended so much of what she knew. This kingdom of hers lay among the passes and roads that controlled the territories to the south, to the east, and to the west. The horsemen had already devastated everything to the west. For hundreds of miles there were nothing but ruins and corpses and the stink of death. She looked over her kingdom that as yet was all richness and peace, and the wind brought to her nostrils the news of corruption and of spoiling. The horsemen were encircling her to the south – there, too, the principalities and the kingdoms lay smoking. To her east, high in the mountains still remained some small safe valleys – for how long? Beyond them, on the other side of the Great Mountains, the horsemen ravaged and plundered and killed. She had survived so long because of this position on a small plateau encompassed by rocky and precipitous mountains. The horsemen of the plains did not love high places and rocks and fastnesses where, looking down, their heads swam and dizzied. They had left her and her people to the last.

Her land maintained five hundred thousand people. It was, had been, a place of contentment and order and harmony. She had seen herself as one blessed by God – such were the words she used – since her rulership had experienced none of the misfortunes that she knew well enough came sooner or later to all kingdoms. Now she ruled three times that number. Men, women, children, fleeing from the horsemen, had begged for refuge. She had taken them all in. Where a household had had ten people, now it had thirty. The smallest hut and shelter was crammed with refugees from hundreds of miles of devastated country. There was very little food. The wells were so low that water was limited to a few mouthfuls a day. Over this fair city of hers, all markets and pleasant buildings and lively streets, 
lay a silence. Often had she stood here, for the pleasure of watching her people – but now there was little movement, and no cries of buying and selling or greeting, no singing or laughter. Silence. They all, as she did, awaited death.

This scene I had noticed, as the sweep and scope of the terrible invasion had been shown to me by Klorathy, but now, there was a variation – a great hammering and clamour at the western gates of the city. The Queen turned to face, so she believed, the horsemen, looking to see them appear on the high walls. But they were not there. A messenger came running, breathless, pale. ‘There are more refugees from the west – about ten thousand – they have made their way here and beg your aid.'

The Queen stood silent. She was thinking that now, in this decision she was going to make, she would pay for all her long years of pleasure in the equilibrium of her rule, where she had never had to make a decision out of the pressures of a hard choice. She was about to say that she would not open her gates, because these ten thousand would drag her city into famine tomorrow instead of its possibly lasting another week and it was her duty as custodian to … but I caused her to say, instead, ‘Admit the leader of these people. For the time being bar the gates to the others.'

‘They are dying of thirst and hunger,' said the man who had brought the message.

‘Take them enough food and water to keep them alive, no more.'

He ran off, and shortly entered a young man, who ordinarily would be handsome, strong, and full of vitality, but now was gaunt and faint with famine. He put out his hand to hold himself on the painted arch of the entrance, and at the sight of his condition, Queen Sha'zvin filled a cup of water and took it across to him, and held it to his lips. He took one swallow of the precious liquid, and looked her in the eyes and said: ‘We beg your mercy, great Queen.'

I was saying to myself Nasar, Nasar, Nasar, knowing it was he, though nothing in his
appearance
said so. And now I
was in control of this Queen's mind and her decisions: Sirius and Canopus commanded, and Canopus was racing towards us at the head of a myriad brutes ready to destroy everything they could see.

‘Among us are savants, wise men and women, poets, geographers – those who have been saved from the devastation by Allah for purposes in the future. Take them in, and quickly, for it will not be long before the Mongols appear.'

The Queen said, smiling: ‘These precious ones will die almost as quickly inside our gates as they would outside them!' And
I
said, or made her say: ‘But bring them in. I will give the order.' She clapped her hands, and called the order to an attendant, who ran off.

We three stood together in the silent city, in the high rooms of this delightful palace, the death-smelling breeze stirring the embroidered hangings, and clinging in an unseen miasma on the surfaces of walls, pillars, the brilliant tile work of the ceilings.

‘You will buy time,' said Nasar, ‘in this way. You will go out to the northern wall and stand there, alone, facing them as they ride up the ravine.'

‘They have been slaughtering women all the way from China to the dark forests of the northwest and down to the southern seas.'

‘Ah, but we will be aided, just a little, for just long enough, in an illusion, great Queen.'

‘It will have to be a strong one,' said she, smiling – and I, now, had retreated to the back of her mind. For the course of events I had seen projected by Klorathy was altered: I had seen nothing of this: what was happening because of our intervention.

Nasar, revived a little by the swallow of water, but still staggering as he went, descended the stairways of this lovely building, so soon to be ruins, and arrived in the open square below the palace as the people he had brought across the deserts of the west came in. They, too, could hardly stand. 
They were an army of ghosts, and phantoms. And yet they were to live, a good many of them.

The Queen divested herself of her dagger, her ornaments, and, wrapping herself in a dark cloak, walked along the northern wall of her kingdom as the first horseman came chasing up the ravine.

Flights of arrows were already on their way to her when the leader shouted an order. These men who could shoot at full gallop as accurately as from the ground rested their bows on their horses' necks. There was not room in the narrow ravine, dark between its rock edges, for more then a few hundred of them. They were gazing up to the sunlit walls of this famed city, where there stood a single figure, a woman, confronting them steadily and without moving at all.

As they looked, it seemed as if the rays of light dazzled around her. Their ideas of deity did not include an illuminated female figure, and they were only temporarily stayed. They were riding steadily nearer, and higher, and soon, as the gates of the city swung back on a signal from the Queen, they saw the city itself, in its gardens and orchards and fantastic variety, a scene of plenty and deliciousness that had never failed to inflame these men – whose measures of worth were all related to the hardships and endurance of their symbiotic relationship with their herds – into a rage to destroy and afflict. Yet as they looked, every tree and plant and flower seemed to dazzle with light that was like a million minute rainbows. The woman on the high wall, the gardens, the buildings, all shone and dazzled, and from the watching horsemen there rose a deep and anguished groan. Their leader shouted to them that they were faced with demons; and the massed horsemen in their close leather tunics and trousers and caps, emanating a smell of sweaty skins – their own and their beasts – sent up, too, the smell of fear as they jostled back down the pass again, in the shades of the evening. Sending back fearful glances they saw high above them the red sandstone walls, and the woman there, motionless, surrounded by a dazzle of light.

They made a camp at the foot of the escarpment, and their cooking fires seemed to burn with otherworldly lights. But then their fear became anger, and after that, derision. These were not cowards, these men. They could not remember ever staying their hands before. Besides, not all had seen the enchanted city in its halo of iridescence. Even those who had, now doubted what they had seen. Their General Ghonkez maintained steadily – as his troops, who were not accustomed to subservience and blind obedience, but only to following orders whose sense they could understand, and who increasingly shouted criticisms at him – that they had done well to wait there through the night until the morning came and they could again ride up the pass and face the city in the plain light of day.