Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (126 page)

The inanimate anatomy on the floor in the belfry began slowly to move. Its limbs twitched. It sat up. Its eyes opened in a blank face.

The only living thing to meet its gaze was Yuli, who crawled nearer and said, ‘My poor king in tether.’

Without answering, JandolAnganol ruffled the runt’s fur and let it snuggle against him.

‘Oh, Yuli, what a thing is life.’

After a minute, he patted the ancipital across the shoulders. ‘You’re a good boy. No harm in you.’

As the creature snuggled against him, the king felt an object against his side, and drew from his pocket the watch with three faces which he had taken from CaraBansity. Whenever he looked at it, his thoughts became troubled, yet he could not find it in himself to throw it away.

Once, the timepiece had belonged to Billy, the creature who claimed to come from a world not ruled by Akhanaba. It was necessary to banish Billy from consciousness (as one banished the thought of those damned Myrdolators), for Billy was a challenge to the whole elaborate structure of belief by which the Holy Pannovalan Empire stood. Sometimes, the fear came to the king that he might become bereft of his religious faith, as he had
become bereft of so much else. Only his faith and this humble inhuman pet were left to him.

He groaned. With a great effort, he got to his feet again.

Within the hour, King JandolAnganol was at the head of his force, riding Lapwing with Envoy Alam Esomberr beside him. Behind came the king’s captains, then Esomberr’s party, and after them the body of the First Royal Phagorian Guard, ears atwitch, scarlet eyes fixed ahead, marching as their kind had done many centuries before towards the city of Oldorando.

The king’s departure from the wooden palace, with all its underlying sense of anxiety, made a due impression on the watchers on the Avernus. They were glad to divert their attention from the sight of the king in pauk. Even the devoted female admirers of his majesty felt uncomfortable at the sight of him lying prone with his spirit away from his body
.

Throughout the human population of Helliconia, pauk, or pater-placation, came as naturally as spitting. It had no particular religious significance, although it often existed alongside religion. Just as women became pregnant with future lives, so people were pregnant with the lives of those who had gone before them
.

On the Avernus, the mysterious Helliconian practice of pauk was regarded as a religious function roughly equivalent to prayer. As such, it embarrassed the six families. The families suffered no inhibitions concerning sex: constant monitoring had ensured that long since; for them love and the higher emotions were no more than side effects of daily functions, to be ignored where possible; but religion was particularly difficult to deal with
.

The families regarded religion as a primitive obsession, an illness, an opiate for those who could not think straight. They hoped perpetually that SartoriIrvrash and his kind would become more militant in their atheism and bring about the death of Akhanaba, thus contributing to a happier state of affairs. They neither liked nor understood pauk. They wished it did not happen
.

On Earth, other opinions prevailed. Life and death could be perceived as an inseparable whole; death was never feared where life was properly lived. The terrestrials regarded with the liveliest interest the Helliconian activity of pauk. During the first years of contact with Helliconia, they had regarded the trance state as a kind of astral projection of the Helliconian soul, rather similar to a state of meditation. Later, a more sophisticated viewpoint had developed; understanding grew that the people of Helliconia possessed an ability peculiar
to them, to shift beyond and return from the boundary set between life and death. This continuity had been given them in compensation for the remarkable discontinuities of their Great Year. Pauk had evolutionary value, and was a point of union between the humans and their changeable planet
.

For this reason, the terrestrials were particularly interested in pauk. They had at this period discovered their own unity with their own planet, and related that unity to increasing empathy with Helliconia
.

In the days that followed, lassitude took the queen of queens and laid her low.

She had lost the things of value which gave existence its previous fragrance. After the storm, the flowers would never lift their heads so high again. With her deep sense of guilt that she had somehow failed her king went bitter anger against him. If she had failed, it was not for want of trying, and the years of loving bestowed on him as freely as breath were more than wasted. Yet love remained beneath her anger. That was the cruellest thing. She understood JandolAnganol’s self-doubt as no one else did. She was unable to break from the bond they had once forged.

Every day, after prayer, she went into pauk, to communicate with her mother’s gossie. After her prostrations, recalling how SartoriIrvrash in particular had condemned all pater-placation as superstition, MyrdemInggala, in a fury of doubt, questioned whether she had visited her mother at all, whether the phantom was not in her head, whether there could be survival for anyone after death, except in the memories of those who had still to pass beyond that forbidding shore.

She questioned. Yet pauk was her consolation as much as the sea. For her dead brother YeferalOborol was now among the gossies, pouring out love for her as he sank towards the original beholder. The queen’s unspoken fear, that he had been murdered by JandolAnganol, was proved baseless. She knew now where the real blame lay. For all that she was grateful.

Yet she regretted not having that additional reason to hate the king. She swam in the sea among her familiars. Peace of mind forsook her each time she returned to shore. The phagors carried her back to the palace in her throne; her resentment grew as she approached its doors. The days dragged by and she grew no
younger. She was scarcely on speaking terms with Mai. She ran up to her creaking chambers and hid her face.

‘If you feel so badly, follow the king to Oldorando and plead with the C’Sarr’s representatives there to annul your divorce,’ Mai said in impatient tones.

‘Would you like to follow the king?’ asked MyrdemInggala. ‘I would not.’

Burnt into her memory was a recollection of how, in spendthrift times, this woman, her lady-in-waiting, had been harvested into the king’s bed and the two of them, like low whores, had been pleasured by him at one and the same time. Neither woman spoke of those occasions – but they lay between them as tangibly as a sword.

Chiefly from a need to talk to someone, the queen persuaded CaraBansity to stay at the palace for a few days, and then for a day more. He pleaded that his wife awaited him back home in Matrassyl. She pleaded with him to wait a little longer. He begged to be excused, but, cunning man though he was, he found it impossible to say no to the queen. They walked every day along the shore, sometimes coming on herds of deer, and Mai trailed disconsolately behind them.

When JandolAnganol, Esomberr, and their party had been gone from Gravabagalinien for a week and two days, the queen was sitting moodily in her room, gazing to the landward side of her narrow domain. The door was thrown open and in ran TatromanAdala, shrieking a greeting.

The child came halfway across the gulf between the door and the place where her mother crouched. That mother had raised her head and looked from under her disordered hair with such venom that Tatto halted.

‘Moth! Can you play?’

The mother saw how the daughter’s infant face bore the features of her father’s line. The genethlic divinities might have further tragedies yet in store. The queen screamed at Tatro.

‘Get out of my sight, you little witch!’

Amazement, scandal, anger, dismay passed across the child’s face. It glowed red, it seemed to dissolve, it flowed with tears and sobs.

The queen of queens leaped to her sandalless feet, and rushed at the small being. Twirling it about, she thrust it forward and out of the room, slamming the door on it. Then she herself, flinging her body against a wall, hands above her head, also wept.

Later in the day, her mood lightened. She sought out the child and made a fuss of her. Lassitude gave way to a mood of elation. She put on a satara gown and went downstairs. Her portable golden throne was summoned, though the heat of midday was heavy on Gravabagalinien. Submissive hornless phagors brought it forth. Majordomo ScufBar came, and Princess Tatro with her nursemaid, and the nursemaid’s maid, carrying storybooks and toys.

The small procession being assembled, MyrdemInggala mounted her throne, and they started on the way to the beach. At this hour, no courtiers accompanied them. Freyr regarded them, low over a shoulder of cliff, Batalix shone almost at zenith.

Leisurely waves, aglitter as if the world had just begun that day, came in, curling to reveal for a moment their cucumber hearts. About the stand of the Linien Rock, water gargled invitingly. Of the assatassi of the recent past there was no sign, nor would there be until next year.

MyrdemInggala stood for a while on the beach. The phagors stood silently by her throne. The princess rushed excitedly about, issuing her commands to the maids for the building of the strongest sand castle ever, a pianissimo generalissimo rehearsing her role in life. The lure of the sea was not to be resisted. With a bold swing of her arm, the queen released herself from her dress and slid the zona from under her breasts. Her perfumed body was available to the sunlight.

‘Don’t leave me, Moth!’ Tatro shrilled.

‘I shall not be long,’ replied her mother, and ran down the beach to plunge into the beckoning sea.

Once below the surface, the forked creature became a fish herself, as lithe as a fish and almost as speedy. Swimming strongly she passed the dark form of the Linien Rock, to surface only when she was well out into the bay. Here the headland to the east curved round, creating a comparatively narrow passage between it and the solitary stand of rock. She called. The queen of queens
was immediately surrounded by dolphins – her familiars, as she spoke of them.

They came, as she knew, in ranking order. She had only to release a spur of urine into the water, and the shapes silvered in, circling about her, closer and closer, till she could rest her arms upon two of them as securely as on the arms of her throne.

Only the privileged could touch her. They were twenty-one in number. Beyond them was an outer court, not less than sixty-four in number. Sometimes, a member of this outer court was permitted to join the inner. Beyond the outer court was a retinue whose numbers MyrdemInggala could only estimate. Possibly one thousand three hundred and forty-four. The retinue contained most of the mothers, children, and oldsters belonging to this school – or nation, as the queen thought of it.

Beyond the retinue, constantly on guard for danger, was the regiment. She rarely saw individual members of the regiment and was discouraged from approaching them, but understood that it numbered certainly as many individuals as the retinue. She also understood that in the deeps were monsters which the dolphins feared. It was the duty of the regiment to guard the retinue and the courts, and to warn them of danger.

MyrdemInggala trusted her familiars more than she trusted her human companions; yet, as in every living relationship, something was withheld. Just as she could not share with them her life on land, they had something in the deeps, some dark knowledge, they could not share with her. Because this thing was unknown, lying beyond her mind, it had its sinister music.

The inner court spoke to her with their great orchestral range of voices. Their pipings near at hand were humble and sweet – truly she was accepted as a queen below water as on land. Further out to sea, long sustained baritone chirps sounded, with basso profundo groans intermingling in a perplexing pattern.

‘What is it, my sweetings, my familiars?’

They raised their smiling faces and kissed her shoulders. She knew each member of the inner court by sight and had names for them.

Something worried them. She relaxed, letting her understanding spread out like her urine through the water. She swam
deep with them, out to colder water. They spiralled about her, occasionally touching her skin with their skin.

Secretly she hoped to catch a glimpse of the monsters of the true sea. She had not been exiled long enough in Gravabagalinien ever to catch a glimpse of them. However, they appeared to be telling her that this time trouble came from the west.

They had warned her of the death-flight of the assatassi. Although they lacked her time sense, she began to appreciate that whatever was coming was coming slowly but remorselessly, and would arrive soon. Strange thrills worked in her. The creatures responded to her thrills. Every shudder of her body was part of their music.

Understanding her curiosity, the dolphins guided her forward again.

She stared through the zafferine panes of the sea. They had brought her to the brink of a shallow shelf, on which seaweeds grew, bent before the overmastering current. They pushed through. Beyond was a sandy basin. Here were the multitudes of the retinue, line on line, facing westwards.

Beyond them, moving with the wary action of a patrol, was the whole force of the regiment, close together, body almost touching body, making the sea black and extending farther out than vision could penetrate. Never before had the queen been allowed such a close sight of the whole school, or realised how vast it was, how many individuals comprised it. Matching the complex ranks assembled came a tremendous harmony of noise, extending far beyond her human hearing.