Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (89 page)

The old man said nothing.

‘When I was a child, how you beat me! You punished me by locking me out. Once you locked me down here in this very cellar, remember? And yet I loved you, loved you without question. The fatal innocent love of a boy for his father. How is it I can love nobody else without that poison of hate leaking in?’

The old man wriggled in the chair as his son spoke, as if possessed of an incurable itch.

‘There’s no end to it,’ he said. ‘No end at all … We cannot tell where one emotion ends and the next begins. Your trouble’s not hate but guilt. That’s what you feel – guilt, Jan. I feel it, all men feel it. It’s an inherited misery bred in the bone, for which Akha punishes us with cold and heat. Women don’t seem to feel it the way men do. Men control women, but who’s to control men? Hate’s not bad at all. I like hate, I’ve always enjoyed hate. It keeps you warm at nights …

‘Listen, when I was young, lad, I hated almost everyone. I hated you because you wouldn’t do as you were told. But guilt – guilt’s a different matter, guilt makes you miserable. Hate cheers you up, makes you forget guilt.’

‘Love?’

The old man sighed, blowing his bad breath into the dank atmosphere. It was so dark that his son could not see his face, only the gap in it.

‘Dogs love their masters, that I do know. I had a dog once, a wonderful dog, white with a brown face, eyes like a Madi. He used to lie beside me on my bed. I loved that dog. What was his name?’

JandolAnganol stood up. ‘Is that the only love you’ve ever felt? Love for some scumbering hound?’

‘I don’t remember loving anyone else … Anyway, you are going to have a divorcement of MyrdemInggala, and you want an excuse so that you don’t feel so guilty about it eh?’

‘Is that what I said?’

‘When? I don’t remember. What time is it, do you reckon? You must announce that she and YeferalOborol, that brother of hers, plotted to murder the Sibornalese ambassador, and that’s how her brother was killed. A conspiracy. There’s a perfect excuse. And then when you put her away, you will please Sibornal as well as Pannoval and Oldorando.’

JandolAnganol clutched his forehead. ‘Father – how did you learn of YeferalOborol’s death? His body was brought back only an hour ago.’

‘You see, son, if you keep very still, as I have to with my stiff joints, everything comes to you. I have more time … There is another possibility …’

‘What’s that?’

‘You can just have her disappear in the darkness one night. Never seen again. Now that the brother’s gone, there’s no one interested enough to make a real fuss. Is her old father still alive?’

‘No. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t even dream of doing it.’

‘Of course you would …’ He panted a little by way of laughter. ‘But my conspiracy idea is a good one, eh?’

The king went to stand under the window. Waves of light floated on the domed brick ceiling of the prison. Outside was the queen’s reservoir. His sorrow accumulated like water. How treacherous this old man still was …

‘Good? Full of guile and taking advantage of circumstances, yes. I see clearly where I had my character from.’

He hammered on the door for release.

After the cellars, the evening world appeared bathed in light. He took a side door and emerged by the reservoir, where a flight of steps led down to the water. Once a boat had been moored there; he remembered playing in it as a boy; now it had disintegrated and sunk.

The sky was the hue of stale cheese, flecked with wisps of grey
cloud. On the far side of the pool, like a cliff, rose the queen’s quarters, its elegant outlines black against the sky. A light burned dimly in one window. Perhaps his beautiful wife was there, preparing for her bed. He could go and beg her forgiveness. He could lose himself in her beauty.

Instead, unpremeditatedly, he jumped forward into the reservoir.

He held his hands together above his head as if he were falling from a building. Air belched out from his clothes. The water grew dark rapidly as he sank.

‘Let me never rise,’ he said.

The water was deep and cold and black. He welcomed terror, trying to embrace the mud at the bottom. Bubbles streamed from his nose.

The processes of life commanded by the All-Powerful would not allow him to escape into the avenues of death. Despite his struggles, he found himself drifting upward again. As he surfaced, gasping, the queen’s light went out.

The next day dawned hot and heavy. The queen of queens allowed herself to be bathed by her women. She played with Tatro for a while, and then summoned SartoriIrvrash to meet her in the family vault.

There she paid her last respects to her brother. Soon he would be buried in his correct land-octave. His body lay swathed in yellow cloth on a block of Lordryardry ice. She noted with grief how even death had not transformed his plain features. She wept for all things prosaic and exotic, for all that had happened and failed to happen to her brother in his lifetime. So the chancellor found her.

He wore an ink-smeared smock. There was ink on his fingers. He bowed low, and there was ink on his pate.

‘Rushven, I have a farewell to say here, but I wish also to greet my brother now that his soul has passed to the world below. I wish you by me while I go into pauk, to see that nobody disturbs me.’

He looked troubled. ‘Madam. May I recall two items to your troubled mind. First, that pater-placation – pauk, if you prefer the old-fashioned term – is discouraged by your church. Second, it is not possible to commune with gossies before their mortal bodies are buried in their land-octaves.’

‘And third, you believe that pauk is a fairy tale anyway.’ She gave him a wan smile as she resurrected an old argument between them.

He shook his head. ‘I know well what once I said. However, times change. Now I confess that I myself have learned to go into pater-placation, to console myself by communing with the spirit of my departed wife.’

He bit his lips. Reading her expression, he said, ‘Yes, she has forgiven me.’

She touched him. ‘I’m glad.’

Then the academic rose up in him again, and he said, ‘But you see, Your Majesty, there is a philosophical difficulty in believing that the pater-placation ritual is other than subjective. There
cannot
be gossies and fessups under the ground with whom living people talk.’

‘We know there are. You and I and millions of peasants talk to our ancestors whenever we wish. Where’s the difficulty?’

‘Historical records, of which I have plenty, all report that the gossies were once creatures of hatred, bewailing their failed lives, pouring scorn on the living. Over the generations, that has changed; nowadays, all anyone gets is sweetness and consolation. That suggests that the whole experience is wish-fulfilment, a kind of self-hypnosis. Moreover, stellar geometry has outmoded the antique idea that our world rests on an original boulder, towards which fessups descend.’

She stamped her foot. ‘Must I call the vicar? Am I not under grief and strain enough, without having to listen to your preposterous historical lectures at this hour?’

She was immediately sorry for her outburst, and put an arm through his as they ascended to her room.

‘It’s a comfort, whatever it is,’ she said. ‘Praise be, there’s a realm of the spirit beyond knowledge.’

‘My dear queen, though I hate religion, I recognise sanctity when I am in its presence.’ When she squeezed his arm, he was emboldened to add, ‘But the Holy Church has never quite accepted pater-placation as part of its ritual, has it? It does not know what to make of gossies and fessups. In consequence, it would like to ban it, but if it did so, then a million peasants would quit the Church. So it ignores the entire question.’

She looked down at her smooth hands. Already she was preparing herself for the act. ‘How very sensible of the Church,’ she murmured.

SartoriIrvrash, in his turn, was sensible enough to make no reply.

MyrdemInggala led the way through into her inner chamber.
She sank down on her bed, composing herself, controlling her breathing, relaxing her muscles. SartoriIrvrash sat quietly by her bed, circling his forehead with the holy sign, to begin his vigil. He saw that already she was moving into the pauk state.

He kept his eyes tight closed, not daring to gaze upon her defenceless beauty, and listened to her infrequent exhalations.

The soul has no eyes, yet it sees in the world below.

The soul of the queen cast its regard downwards as it began its long descent. Beneath lay space more vast than night skies, more rich, more imposing. It was not space at all: it was the opposite of space, of consciousness even – a peculiar rupellary density without feature.

Just as the land regards an ocean-going ship as a token of freedom, while the sailors confined on that ship regard the land in similar terms, so the realm of oblivion was at once space and non-space.

To consciousness, the realm appeared infinite. In its downward direction, it ceased only where the races of manlike-kind began, in a green and unknown, unknowable womb, the womb of the original beholder. The original beholder – that passive motherly principle – received the souls of the dead who sank back into her. Although she might be no more than a fossil scent entombed in rock, she was not to be resisted.

Above the original beholder were the gossies and fessups, floating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands, as if all the stars of night had been stacked in order, and arranged in accordance with the ancient idea of land-octaves.

The queen’s exploratory soul sank down, floating like a feather towards the fessups. At close quarters, they resembled not stars so much as mummified chickens, with hollow eyes and stomachs, their legs dangling clumsily. Age had eroded them. They were transparent. Their insides circulated like luminescent fish in a bowl. Their mouths were open like fish, as if trying to blow a bubble towards a surface they would never see again. In their upper strata, where the gossies were less ancient, little dusts still escaped from phantom larynxes, the very last apostrophes remaining to the possessive case of life.

To some souls venturing there, the ranks of the departed were terrifying. For the queen they held consolation. She looked down upon them, those mouths pickled in obsidian, and was reassured to believe that at least some wreckage remained from existence, and would ever remain until the planet was consumed by fire. And who knew if even then …

For venturing souls, no compass bearings seemed possible. Yet there was direction. The beholder was a lodestone. All here had been collected according to plan, as stones on seashores are graded according to size. The ranks of fessups stretched below the whole earth, leading beyond Borlien and Oldorando to far Sibornal and even to the remote parts of Hespagorat, to semi-legendary Pegovin beyond the Climent Sea, even to the poles.

The soul barque moved to a breeze that did not blow, finally drifting to the gossie of what had once been her mother, the wild Shannana, wife to RatanOborol, ruler of Matrassyl. The maternal gossie resembled a battered birdcage, its ribs and hipbones forming tentative golden patterns against the darkness, like a leaf crushed long ago in a child’s book. It spoke.

Gossies and fessups were tormenting things. As negatives of being, they recalled only the incidents in their lives which were pleasant. The good had been interred with them; the evil, the dross, lost along with freedom of action.

‘Dear Moth, I come dutifully before you again, to see how you fare.’ Her ritual salutation.

‘My dear daughter, there are no troubles here. All is serene, nothing can go awry. And when you appear, everything is gained. My joyous and beautiful one, how did I squeeze such an offspring from my unworthy loins? Your grandmother is also here, delighted also to be back in your presence.’

‘It is a comfort to be in your presence, too, Moth.’ But the words were a formula against entropy.

‘Oh, no, but you must not say that, because the delight is all ours, and often I think how in the hurried days of my life I never cherished you enough, certainly not as much as your virtue warranted. There was always so much to be done, and another battle fought, and one may wonder now why energy was spent on
those unimportant things, whereas the real joy of life was being close with you and seeing you grow up into—’

‘Mother, you were a kind parent, and I not a dutiful enough child. I was always headstrong—’

‘Headstrong!’ exclaimed the old gossie. ‘No, no, you did nothing to offend. One sees these things differently in this stage of existence, one sees what the true things are, what’s important. A few little peccadillos are nothing, and I’m only sorry if I made a fuss at the time. That was just my stupidity – I knew all along that you were my greatest treasure. Not to pass on life, that’s the failure – as those down here without offspring will testify in endless dole.’

She continued joyfully in this vein, and the queen let her ramble on, placated by her words, for the fact was that in life she had found her mother self-absorbed and without more than perfunctory kindness. It delighted her to find that this battered cage should remember events of her childhood which she had forgotten. Flesh had died; memory was embalmed here.