Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (120 page)

They leaned back against the rounded stones, muttering.

‘I’ve been all over the world. I’ve seen it all. I’ve been to Uskutoshk, I’ve visited the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar, I’ve seen old ruined cities and sold junk in the bazaars of Pannoval and Oldorando. I’ve spoken with kings and queens as fair as flowers. It’s all out there, waiting for the man who dares. Friends everywhere. Men and women. It’s wonderful. I’ve loved every minute of it.

‘It’s bigger than you can ever imagine, stuck here at Lordryardry. This last voyage, I met a man who came from another world. There’s more than just this world, Helliconia. There’s another circling around us, Avernus. And others beyond that, worlds to be visited. Earth, for instance.’

All the while he was speaking, the little clerk was laying out his effects on a table under one of the barren apricot trees and
removing the key to the safe from an inner pocket. And the phagor was setting the safe down just where needed and flicking an ear as it did so. And the men were shuffling forward to the edge of the table and making their line more definite by moving closer to each other. And other men were coming up, directing suspicious looks at their boss, and joining the rear of the line. And the comfortable seriality of the world was being maintained under the purple clouds.

‘I tell you there are other worlds. Use your imagination.’ Muntras struck the table. ‘Don’t you feel the wanderlust occasionally? I did when I was a young ’un, I tell you. Inside my house even now I have a young man from one of these other worlds. He’s ill or he’d come out and speak to you. He can tell you miraculous things that happen lifetimes away.’

‘Does he drink Exaggerator?’

The voice came from within the ranks of the waiting men. It stopped Muntras in full burst. He paced up and down the line, red of face. Not an eye met his.

‘I’ll prove what I’m saying,’ Muntras shouted. ‘You’ll have to believe me then.’

He turned and stamped into the house. Only the clerk showed some impatience, drumming his little fingers on the plank table, staring about, pulling his sharp nose, and looking up at the heavy sky.

Muntras ran in to where Billy was, terribly distorted, without motion. He seized Billy’s petrified wrist, only to find that the watch had gone.

‘Billish,’ he said. He went over to the invalid, looked down at him, called his name more gently. He felt the cold skin, tested the twisted flesh.

‘Billish,’ he said again, but now it was merely a statement. He knew that Billish was dead – and he knew who had stolen the watch, that three-faced timepiece which King JandolAnganol had once held. There was only one person who would do such a thing.

‘You’ll never miss your timepiece now, Billy,’ Muntras said aloud.

He covered his face with a slab of hand and uttered something between a prayer and a curse.

For a moment more, the Ice Captain stood in the room, looking up at the ceiling with his mouth open. Then, recalling his duties, he walked over to the window and gave his clerk a sign to start paying out the men’s wages.

His wife entered the room with Immya, her shoulder bandaged.

‘Our Billish is dead,’ he said flatly.

‘Oh dear, and on assatassi day, too …’ Eivi said. ‘You can hardly expect me to be sorry.’

‘I’ll see his body is conveyed to the ice cellar, and we will bury him tomorrow, after the feast,’ Immya said, moving over to observe the contorted body. ‘He told me something before he died which could be a contribution to medical science.’

‘You’re a capable girl, you look after him,’ Muntras said. ‘As you say, we can bury him tomorrow. A proper funeral. Meanwhile, I’ll go and look to the nets. As a matter of fact, I feel miserable, as if anyone cares.’

Taking no heed of the jabbering women who were stringing up lines of net on poles, the Ice Captain walked along the water’s edge. He wore high thick boots and kept his hands in his pockets. Occasionally, one of the black iguanas would jump up against him like an importuning dog. Muntras would knee it down again without interest. The iguanas wallowed among thick brown ropes of kelp which swirled in the shallow water, sometimes kicking to get free of the coils. In places, they were banked on top of each other, indifferent to how they lay.

To add to the melancholy abandonment of their postures, the iguanas were commensal with a hairy twelve-legged crab, which scurried in its millions among the forms which kept watch on the breakers. The crabs devoured any fragment of food – seal or seaweed – dropped by the reptiles; nor were they averse to devouring infant iguanas. The characteristic noise of the Dimariamian seashore was a crunch and scrabble of armoured legs against scales; the ritual of their lives was playing out against this clamour, which was as endless as the sound of the waves.

The ice captain took no notice of these saturnine occupants of the shore, but stared out to sea, beyond Lordry, the whaling
island. He had checked at the harbour and been told that a light sailing dinghy had been stolen overnight.

So his son was gone, taking the magic watch, either as talisman or for trade. Had sailed away, without so much as a good-bye.

‘Why did you do it?’ Muntras asked half aloud, staring over the purple sea on which a dead calm prevailed. ‘For the usual reasons a man leaves home, I suppose. Either you couldn’t bear your family any longer, or you just wanted adventure – strange places, amazements, strange women. Well, good luck to you, lad. You’d never have made the world’s foremost ice trader, that’s certain. Let’s hope you aren’t reduced to selling stolen rings for a living …’

Some of the women, humble worker’s wives, were calling to him to come behind the nets before high tide. He gave them a salute and trudged away from the milling iguana bodies.

Immya and Lawyer would have to take over the company. Not his favourite people, but they’d probably run the whole concern better than he ever did. You had to face facts. It was no use growing bitter. Although he had never been comfortable with his daughter, he recognised that she was a good woman.

At least he’d stand by a friend and see that BillishOwpin got a proper burial. Not that either Billish or he believed in any of the gods. But just for their own two sakes.

He trudged towards the safety of the nets, where the workmen stood.

‘You were all right, Billish,’ he muttered aloud. ‘You were nobody’s fool.’

The Avernus had company in its orbit about Helliconia. It moved among squadrons of auxiliary satellites. The main task of these auxiliaries was to observe sectors of the globe the Avernus itself was not observing. But it so happened that the Avernus, on its circumpolar orbit, was itself above Lordryardry and travelling north at the time of Billy’s funeral
.

The funeral was a popular event. The fact is, human egos being frail, other people’s deaths are not entirely unpleasurable. Melancholy itself is among the more enjoyable of emotions. Almost everyone aboard the Avernus looked in: even Rose Yi Pin, although she watched the event from the bed of her new boyfriend
.

Billy’s Advisor, dry-eyed, gave a homily in one hundred measured words on
the virtues of submission to one’s lot. The epitaph served also as an epitaph to the protest movements. With some relief, they forgot difficult thoughts of reform and returned to their administrative duties. One of them wrote a sad song about Billy, buried away from his family
.

There were now a good many Avernians buried on Helliconia, all winners of Helliconia Holidays. A question often asked aboard the Earth Observation Station was. How did this affect the mass of the planet?

On Earth, where the funeral of Billy provoked less interest, the event was seen more detachedly. Every living being is created from dead star-matter. Every living being must make its solitary journey upward from the molecular level towards the autonomy of birth, a journey which in the case of humans takes three-quarters of a year. The complex degree of organisation involved in being a higher life-form cannot be forever sustained. Eventually, there is a return to the inorganic. Chemical bonds dissolve
.

That had happened in Billy’s case. All that was immortal about him was the atoms from which he was assembled. They endured. And there was nothing strange about a man of terrestrial stock being buried on a planet a thousand light-years away. Earth and Helliconia were near neighbours, composed of the same debris from the same long defunct stars
.

In one detail that correct man, Billy’s Advisor, was incorrect. He spoke of Billy going to his long rest. But the entire organic drama of which mankind formed a part was pitched within the great continuing explosion of the universe. From a cosmic viewpoint, there was no rest anywhere, no stability, only the ceaseless activity of particles and energies
.

General Hanra TolramKetinet wore a wide-brimmed hat and an old pair of trousers, the bottoms of which were stuffed into the tops of a pair of knee-length army boots. Across his naked chest he had slung a fine new matchlock firearm on a strap. Above his head he waved a Borlienese flag. He waded out to sea towards the approaching ships.

Behind him, his small force cheered encouragement. There were twelve men, led by an able young lieutenant, GortorLanstatet. They stood on a spit of sand; behind them, jungle and the dark mouth of the River Kacol. Their voyage down from Ordelay – from defeat – was over; they had navigated, in the
Lordryardry Lubber
, both rapids and sections of the river where the current was so slight that out from the depths came tuberous growths, fighting like knots of reproducing eels to gain the surface and release a scent of carrion and julip. That scent was the jungle’s malediction.

On either bank of the Kacol, the forest twisted itself into knots, snakes, and streamers no less forbidding than the tentacles which rose from the river depths. Here the forest indeed looked impenetrable; there were visible none of the wide aisles down which the general, half a tenner ago, had walked in perfect safety, for the river had tempted to the jungle’s edge a host of sun-greedy creepers. The jungle, too, had become more dwarfish in formation, turning from rain forest proper to monsoon forest, with the heavy heads of its canopy pressing low above the heads of the Borlienese troops.

Where river at last delivered its brown waters into sea, foetid morning mists rose from the forest, rolling in ridge beyond ridge up the unruly slopes that culminated in the Randonanese massif.

The mist had been something of a motif of their journey, preluded from the moment when – in undisputed possession of the
Lubber
at Ordelay – they had prised open the hatches, to be greeted by thick vapours pouring from the boat’s cargo of melting ice. Once the ice was cast overboard, the new owners, investigating, had discovered secret lockers full of Sibornalese matchlocks, wrapped in rags against the damp: the
Lubber
captain’s secret personal trade, to recompense himself for the dangerous voyages he undertook on behalf of the Lordryardry Ice Trading Company. Freshly armed, the Borlienese had set sail on the oily waters, to disappear into the curtains of humidity which were such a feature of the Kacol.

Now they stood, watching their general wade towards the ships, on a sandbar that stood out like a spur from a small rocky and afforested island, Keevasien Island, which lay between river and sea. The dark green tunnel, the stench, the insect-tormented silences, the mists, were behind them. The sea beckoned. They looked forward to rescue, shading their eyes to gaze seawards against a brilliance accentuated by the hazy morning overcast.

Rescue could hardly have been more timely. On the previous day, when Freyr had set and the jungle was a maze of uncertain outlines as Batalix descended, they had been seeking a mooring between gigantic roots red like intestines; without warning, a tangle of six snakes, none less than seven feet long, had dropped down from branches overhead. They were pack snakes which, with rudimentary intelligence, always hunted together. Nothing could have terrified the crew more. The man who stood at the wheel, seeing the horrible things land close to him and rapidly disentangle themselves, hissing in fury, jumped overboard without a moment’s thought, to be seized by a greeb which a moment before had resembled a decaying log.

The pack snakes were eventually killed. By that time, the boat had swung side on into the current, and was grinding against the Randonanese bank. As they attempted to regain control, their rudder hit an underwater obstruction and broke. Poles were brought forth, but the river was becoming both wider and deeper, so the poles did not serve. When Keevasien Island loomed through the dusk they had no power to choose either the port,
the Borlienese, stream, or the starboard, the Randonanese, stream. The
Lubber
was carried helplessly against the rocks on the northern point of the island; with its side stove in, it was beached in the shallows. The current tugged at it, threatening to wash it away. They grabbed some equipment and jumped ashore.

Darkness was coming in. They stood listening to the repetitive boom of the surf like distant cannon fire. Because of the great fear of the men, TolramKetinet decided to camp where they were for the brief night, rather than attempt to reach Keevasien, which he knew was close.

A watch was set. The night around them was given to subterfuge and sudden death. Small insects went shopping with large headlights, moths’ wings gleamed with terrifying sightless eyes, the pupils of predators glowed like hot stones; and all the while the two streams of the river surged close by, eddying phosphorescence, the heavy drag of water moaning its way into their dreams.