Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (84 page)

She sometimes had a slow way of smiling as if she was reluctant to be amused, which started at her eyes, included her nose, and then worked about the curves of her lips.

‘We’d agree on that. Borlien lacks great friends at the present.’

‘Admit it, Rushven, your history will never be finished,’ said YeferalOboral, the queen’s brother, using an old nickname. ‘It simply gives you an excuse to sleep all afternoon.’

The chancellor sighed; the queen’s brother had not his sister’s brains. He said severely, ‘If you stopped kicking your heels about
the court, you could set up an expedition and sail round the world. How that would add to our knowledge!’

‘I wish that Robayday had done some such thing,’ said MyrdemInggala. ‘Who knows where the lad is now?’

SartoriIrvrash was not going to waste sympathy on the queen’s son. ‘I made one new discovery yesterday,’ he said. ‘Do you wish to hear of it or not? Will I bore you? Will the mere sound of such botherations of knowledge cause you to jump from the ramparts?’

The queen laughed her silvery laugh and held his hand. ‘Come, Yef and I are no dolts. What’s the discovery? Is the world getting colder?’

Ignoring this facetiousness, SartoriIrvrash asked, frowning, ‘What colour is a hoxney?’

‘I know that,’ cried the young princess. ‘They’re brown. Everyone knows hoxneys are brown.’

Grunting, SartoriIrvrash lifted her up into his arms. ‘And what colour were hoxneys yesterday?’

‘Brown, of course.’

‘And the day before that?’

‘Brown, you silly Rushven.’

‘Correct, you wise little princess. But if that is the case, then why are hoxneys depicted as being striped in two brilliant colours in the illuminations in ancient chronicles?’

He had to answer his own question. ‘That is what I asked my friend Bardol CaraBansity down in Ottassol. He flayed a hoxney and examined its skin. And what has he discovered? Why, that a hoxney is not a brown animal as we all believe. It is a brown-striped animal, with brown stripes on a brown background.’

Tatro laughed. ‘You’re teasing us. If it’s brown and brown, then it’s brown, isn’t it?’

‘Yes and no. The lie of the coat shows that a hoxney is not a plain brown animal. It consists of brown stripes. What possible point could there be to that?

‘Well, I have hit upon the answer, and you will see how clever I am. Hoxneys were once striped in brilliant stripes, just as the chronicles show. When was that? Why, in the spring of the Great Year, when suitable grazing was available again. Then the hoxneys needed to multiply as rapidly as possible. So they
put on their most brilliant sexual display. Nowadays, centuries later, hoxneys are well established everywhere. They don’t need to breed exponentially, so mating display is out. The stripes are dulled down to neutral brown – until the spring of the next Great Year calls them out again.’

The queen made a moue. ‘If there
is
another Great Year spring, and we don’t all tumble into Freyr.’

SartoriIrvrash clapped his hands pettishly together. ‘But don’t you see, this – this adaptive geometry of the hoxneian species is a guarantee that we
don’t
tumble into Freyr – that it comes near every great summer, and then again recedes?’

‘We’re not hoxneys,’ said YeferalOboral, gesturing dismissively.

‘Your Majesty,’ said the chancellor, addressing himself earnestly to the queen, ‘my discovery also shows that old manuscripts can often be trusted more than we think. You know the king your husband and I are at odds. Intercede for me, I pray. Let a ship be commissioned. Let me be allowed two years away from my duties to sail about the world, collecting manuscripts. Let us make Borlien a centre of learning, as it once was in the days of YarapRombry of Keevasien. Now my wife is dead, there’s little to keep me here, except your fair presence.’

A shadow passed over her face.

‘There is a crisis in the king, I feel it. His wound has healed in his flesh but not in his mind. Leave your thought with me, Rushven, and let it wait until this anxious meeting with the Pannovalans is over. I fear what is in store.’

The queen smiled at the old man with considerable warmth. She easily endured his irritability, for she understood its source. He was not entirely good – indeed, she considered some of his experiments pure wickedness, especially the experiment in which his wife was killed. But who was entirely good? SartoriIrvrash’s relationship with the king was a difficult one, and she often tried, as now, to protect him from JandolAnganol’s anger.

Endeavouring to deliver him from his own blindness, she added gently, ‘Since the incident in the Cosgatt, I have to be careful with his majesty.’

Tatro tugged SartoriIrvrash’s whiskers. ‘You mustn’t go sailing at your age, Rushven.’

He set her down on the ground and saluted her. ‘We may all have to make unexpected journeys before we are finished, my dear little Tatro.’

As on most mornings, MyrdemInggala and her brother walked along the western ramparts of the palace and gazed out over the city. This morning, the mists that little winter usually brought were absent. The city lay clear below them.

The ancient stronghold stood on a cliff looming over the town, in a deep curve of the Takissa. Slightly towards the north, the Valvoral gleamed where it joined the greater river. Tatro never tired of looking down at the people in the streets or on the river craft.

The infant princess extended a finger towards the wharfs and cried, ‘Look, ice coming, Moth!’

A fore- and aft-rigged sloop was moored by the quayside. Its hatches had recently been opened, for steam poured forth into the air. Carts were drawn up alongside the ship, and blocks of finest Lordryardry ice gleamed for a moment in the sun as they were swung from the hold into the waiting vehicles. As ever, the delivery was on time, and the palace with its guests would be awaiting it.

The ice carts would come rumbling up the castle road, winding as the road wound, with four oxen straining at the shafts, to gain the fortress which stood out like a ship of stone from its cliffs.

Tatro wanted to stand and watch the ice carts come all the way up the hill, but the queen was short of patience this morning. She stood slightly apart from her child, looking about her with an abstracted air.

JandolAnganol had come at dawn and embraced her. She sensed that he was uneasy. Pannoval loomed. To make matters worse, bad news was coming from the Second Army in Randonan. It was always bad news from Randonan.

‘You can listen to the day’s discussion from the private gallery,’ he said, ‘if it won’t bore you. Pray for me, Cune.’

‘I always pray for you. The All-Powerful will be with you.’

He shook his head patiently. ‘Why isn’t life simple? Why
doesn’t the faith make it simple?’ His hand went to the long scar on his leg.

‘We’re safe while we’re here together, Jan.’

He kissed her. ‘I should be with my army. Then we’d see some victories. TolramKetinet is useless as a general.’

There’s nothing between the general and me, she thought – yet he knows there is …

He had left her. As soon as he was gone, she felt gloomy. A chill had fallen over him of late. Her own position was threatened. Without thinking, she linked her arm through her brother’s as they stood on the ramparts.

Princess Tatro was calling, pointing to servants she recognised wending their way up the hill to the palace.

Less than twenty years earlier, a covered way had been built up the hillside to the walls. Under its protection, an army had advanced on the besieged fortress. Using gunpowder charges, it blew an entrance into the palace grounds. A bloody battle was fought.

The inhabitants were defeated. All were put to the sword, men and women, phagors and peasants. All except the baron who had held the palace.

The baron disguised himself and – binding his wife, children, and immediate servants – led them to safety through the breached wall. Bellowing to the enemy to get out of his way, he had successfully bluffed a path to freedom with his mock prisoners. Thus his daughter escaped death.

This Baron RantanOborol was the queen’s father. His deed became renowned. But the fact was that he could never regain his former power.

The man who won the fortress – which was described, like all fortresses before they fall, as impregnable – was the warlike grandfather of JandolAnganol. This redoubtable old warrior was then busy unifying eastern Borlien, and making its frontiers safe. RantanOborol was the last warlord of the area to fall to his armies.

Those armies were largely a thing of the past, and MyrdemInggala, by marrying JandolAnganol and securing some future for her family, had come to live in her father’s old citadel.

Parts of it were still ruinous. Some sections had been rebuilt in JandolAnganol’s father’s reign. Other grand rebuilding schemes, hastily started, slowly crumbled in the heat. Piles of stone formed a prominent part of the fortress landscape. MyrdemInggala loved this extravagant semi-ruin, but the past hung heavy over its battlements.

She made her way, clutching Tatro’s hand, to a rear building with a small colonnade. These were her quarters. A featureless red sandstone wall was surmounted by whimsical pavilions built in white marble. Behind the wall were her gardens and a private reservoir, where she liked to swim. In the middle of the reservoir was an artificial islet, on which stood a slender temple dedicated to Akhanaba. There the king and queen had often made love in the early days of their marriage.

After saying good-bye to her brother, the queen walked up her stairs and along a passage. This passage, open to the breeze, overlooked the garden where JandolAnganol’s father, VarpalAnganol, had once raced dogs and flown multi-coloured birds. Some of the birds remained in their cotes – Roba had fed them every morning before he ran away. Now Mai TolramKetinet fed them.

MyrdemInggala was conscious of an oppressive fear. The sight of the birds merely vexed her. She left a maid to play with Tatro in the passage, and went to a door at the far end which she unlocked with a key hidden among the folds of her skirt. A guard saluted her as she passed through. Her footsteps, light as they were, rang on the tiled floor. She came to an alcove by a window, across which drapes had been drawn, and seated herself on a divan. Before her was an ornate trellis. Through this she could watch without being observed from the other side.

From this vantage point, she could see over a large council chamber. Sun streamed in through latticed windows. None of the dignitaries had yet arrived. Only the king was there, with his phagor runt, the runt that had been a constant companion ever since the Battle of the Cosgatt.

Yuli stood no higher than the king’s chest. Its coat was white and still tipped with the red tassels of its early years. It skipped and pirouetted and opened its ugly mouth as the king held out a hand for it. The king was laughing and snapping his fingers.

‘Good boy, good boy,’ he said.

‘Yezz, I good boy,’ said Yuli.

Laughing, the king embraced it, lifting it off the ground.

The queen shrank back. Fear seized her. As she lay back, the wicker chair beneath her creaked. She hid her eyes. If he knew she was there, he made no attempt to call.

My wild boar, my dear wild boar, she called silently. What has become of you? Her mother had been gifted with strange powers: the queen thought, Something awful is going to overwhelm this court and our lives …

When she dared look again, the visiting dignitaries were entering, chatting among themselves and making themselves comfortable. Cushions and rugs were scattered everywhere. Slaves, female and scantily clad, were busily providing coloured drinks.

JandolAnganol walked among them in his princely way and then flung himself down on a canopied divan. SartoriIrvrash entered, nodding sober greetings, and stationed himself behind the king’s divan, lighting a veronikane as he did so. The runt Yuli settled on a cushion, panting and yawning.

‘You are strangers in our court,’ said the queen aloud, peeping through her trellis. ‘You are strangers in our lives.’

Near JandolAnganol sat a group of local dignitaries, including the mayor of Matrassyl, who was also head of the scritina, JandolAnganol’s vicar, his Royal Armourer, and one or two army men. One of the military was, by his insignia, a captain of phagors but, out of deference to the visitors, no phagor was present, except for the king’s pet.

Among the foreign group, most conspicuous were the Sibornalese. The ambassador to Borlien, Io Pasharatid, was from Uskut. He and his wife sat tall and grey and distant from each other. Some said that they had quarrelled, some that Sibornalese were simply like that. The fact remained that the two, who had lived at the court for more than nine tenners – they were due to complete their first year in another three weeks – rarely smiled or exchanged a glance.

‘You I fear, Pasharatid, you ghost,’ said the queen.

Pannoval had sent a prince. The choice had been carefully made. Pannoval was the most powerful nation among the seventeen countries of Campannlat, its ambitions restrained only by the war it had constantly to wage against Sibornal on its northern front. Its religion dominated the continent. At present, Pannoval courted Borlien, which already paid levies in grain and church taxes; but the courtship was that between an elderly dowager and an upstart lad, and what the lad was sent was a minor prince.