Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (82 page)

‘In the cell lived a gillot, an old female phagor. She was the only horned phagor in the kingdom. She was the source of all the king’s magic. By himself, the king was nothing. Every evening, the king would beseech the gillot to send the silver eye up into the sky. Every evening, she did as requested.

‘Then the king saw all that was happening in his kingdom. He also asked the old gillot many searching questions about nature, which she answered without fail.

‘One night when it was bitterly cold she said to him, “O King, why do you seek such knowledge?”

‘“Because there is power in knowledge,” replied the king. “Knowledge sets people free.”

‘To this the gillot said nothing. She was a wizard and yet she was his prisoner. At last she said in a terrible voice, “Then the time has come to set me free.”

‘At her words, the king fell into a swoon. The gillot walked from her dungeon, and commenced to climb the stairs. Now the queen had long wondered why her husband went to an underground room every night. On this night her curiosity had got the better of her. She was descending the stairs to spy on him when she encountered the gillot in the dark.

‘The queen screamed in terror. In order that she should not scream again, the phagor struck her a heavy blow and killed her. Roused by the sound of his queen’s much-loved voice, the king woke and ran upstairs. Finding what had occurred, he drew his sword and slew the phagor.

‘Even as she fell to the ground, the silver eye in the sky began to spiral away. Farther and farther it went, growing smaller and smaller, until it was lost to view. At last the people knew they were free, and the silver eye was never seen again.’

Tatro was silent for a moment.

‘Isn’t that an awful bit where the gillot gets killed?’ she said. ‘Would you read it again?’

Raising herself on one elbow, the queen said, teasingly, ‘Why do you read Tatro that silly story, Rushven? It’s a pure fairy story.’

‘I read it because Tatro likes it, ma’am,’ he said, smoothing his whiskers, as he often did in her presence, and smiling.

‘Knowing your opinion of the ancipital race, I cannot imagine you relish the notion that humankind once looked up to phagors for wisdom.’

‘Madam, what I relish about the story is that kings once looked up to others for wisdom.’

MyrdemInggala clapped her hands with pleasure at the answer. ‘Let us hope that that at least is no fairy story …’

In the course of their Ahd, the Madis came once more to Oldorando, and to the city bearing that name.

A sector of the city called the Port, beyond the South Gate, was set aside for the migrants. There they made one of their rare halts, for a few days. Celebrations of a modest sort took place. Spiced arang were eaten, elaborate zyganke were danced.

Water and wool. In Oldorando, the garments and rugs woven during the Journey were bartered with merchants for a few necessities. One or two human merchants had gained the trust of the Madis. The tribes always needed pans and goat bells; they were not workers of metal.

It also happened that some members of the tribe always arranged to remain in Oldorando, either until the tribe next returned or permanently. Lameness or illness was reason for leaving the Ahd.

Some years earlier, a lame Madi girl had left the Ahd and gained employment as a sweeper in the palace of King Sayren Stund. Her name was Bathkaarnet-she. Bathkaarnet-she had the traditional Madi face, part flower, part bird, and she would sweep where she was put to sweep without tiring, unlike the lazy Oldorandans. While she swept, small birds would cluster round her without fear, and listen to her song.

This the king saw from his balcony. In those days, Sayren
Stund had not surrounded himself with protocol and religious advisors. He had Bathkaarnet-she brought to him. Unlike most Madis, this girl had an active gaze which could focus like a human’s. She was very humble, which suited the nervous Sayren Stund.

He decided to have her taught Olonets, and a good master was employed. No progress was made until the king was inspired to sing to the girl. She sang in response. More language came to her, but she could never speak, only sing.

This shortcoming would have maddened many. It pleased the king. He found that her father had been human and had joined the journey when a youth, running away from slavery.

The king, despite contrary advice, married Bathkaarnet-she, converting her to his faith. Soon she bore him a two-headed son, who died. Then she bore two normal daughters who lived. First Simoda Tal, and then the mercurial Milua Tal.

Prince RobaydayAnganol had heard this story when a boy. Now, as Roba, and dressed as a Madi, he made his way from the Port to one of the gates at the rear of the palace. He wrote a note to Bathkaarnet-she, which a servant bore away.

He stood waiting patiently in the heat, where a nocturnal-flowering zaldal climbed and spread. To the prince, Oldorando was a strange city. Not a phagor was to be seen.

His intention was to learn as much about the Madis as he could from the Madi queen before returning to the Journey. He had determined that he would be the first man to sing the Madi tongue fluently. Before leaving his father’s court, he had often talked to Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, who had inspired in him a love of learning – another reason for his falling out with his father, the king.

Roba waited by the gate. He had kissed the rough cheek of his female, talced with the dust of the roadside, knowing that he could never find her again even when he rejoined the Journey. For then the Look of Acceptance might be flashed by someone else – or, if by her again, how was he to recognise her for sure? He felt strongly that the quality of individuality was a precious thing, granted only to humans and, to a lesser degree, to phagors.

After an hour, he saw the servant returning, watched his
self-important human strut, so unlike that Madi shamble which carried them safe across a lifetime. The man walked round two sides of the palace square, under shady cloisters, rather than brave the breath of Freyr in the open.

‘Very well, the queen will grant you five minutes’ audience. Be sure to bow to her, you rogue.’

He slipped through the side gate and began to walk across the square, using the Madi shamble, which kept the spine supple. A man was walking towards him with a hesitant kind of arrogance which needed no display. It was his father, King JandolAnganol.

Roba removed his old sack hood and bent down, sweeping the ground with it, using languid but steady strokes, Madi-fashion. JandolAnganol passed him, talking animatedly to another man, and never even gave him a glance. Roba straightened up and continued on his way to the queen.

The lame queen sat in a silver swing. Her toes were brown and ringed. She was rocked by a green-clad lackey. The room in which she greeted Roba was overgrown with vegetation, among which pecubeas flitted and preets sang.

When she discovered who he was, as she soon did, she refused to sing of her earlier life and instead warbled in fulsome terms about JandolAnganol.

This was not to Roba’s taste. A kind of madness came over him, and he said to the queen, ‘I want to sing the song of your birth-tongue. But your song is of my birth-curse. To know that man you praise, you must become his son. There’s no room for flesh and blood in that man’s heart, only for abstracts. Religion and country. Religion and country, not Tatro and Roba, in his harneys.’

‘Kings believe in such matters. I know it. I know they are set above us to dream of grand things we cannot,’ the queen sang. ‘It’s empty where kings live.’

‘Grandeur’s a stone,’ he said emphatically. ‘Under that stone he imprisons his own father. And I, his own son – he would imprison me for two years in a monastery. Two years to teach me grandeur! A vow of silence in a Matrassyl monastery, to introduce me to that stone Akhanaba …

‘How could I bear it? Am I a rickyback or slug, to crawl
beneath a stone? Oh, my father’s heart is stone, so I ran, ran like a footless wind, to join the Ahd of your kind, kind queen.’

Then Bathkaarnet-she began to sing. ‘But my kind are the scum of the earth. We have no intelligence, only ucts, and in consequence no guilt feelings. What do you call that? No conscience. We can only walk, walk, walk our lives away – except for me who luckily am lame.

‘My dear husband, Sayren, has taught me the value of religion, which is unknown to poor ignorant Madis. Fancy to live for centuries and not know that we exist only by the grace of the All-Powerful! So I respect your father for all his religious feelings. He scourges himself every day he is here.’

As the singing voice ceased, Roba asked bitterly, ‘And what is he doing here? Looking for me, a wandering part of his kingdom?’

‘Oh, no, no.’ There was fluting laughter. ‘He has been here conferring with Sayren, and with Church dignitaries from distant Pannoval. Yes, I saw them, they spoke to me.’

He stood before her, in such a way that the lackey had to swing her more gently. ‘Who confers and never speaks? Who has – and still seeks?’

‘Who can tell what kings confer about?’ she sang.

One of the bright birds fluttered into his face, and he beat it down.

‘You must know what they are planning, Your Majesty.’

‘Your father has a wound. I see it in his face,’ she sang. ‘He needs his nation to be powerful, to smite his enemies to the dust. For that, he will sacrifice even his queen, your mother.’

‘How will he sacrifice her?’

‘He will sacrifice her to history. Is not a woman’s life less than a man’s destiny? We are nothing but lame things in the hands of men …’

His ways became dark. He had presentiments of evil. His reason fled. He tried to return to the Madis and forget human treachery. But the Ahd required peace or at least absence of mind. After some days of walking, he left the uct and wandered away into the wilderness, living in forest trees or in dens lions had forsaken. He
talked to himself in a language all his own. He lived on fruits and fungi and things that crawled beneath stones.

Among the things that crawled beneath stones was a small crustacean, a rickyback. This little humpbacked creature had a tiny face peering from under its chitin shell, and twenty delicate white legs. Rickybacks congregated under logs and stones in their dozens, all packed snug together.

He lay watching them, playing with them, lying on his side with one arm crooked to support his head, flipping them gently over with a finger. He marvelled at their lack of fear, at their laziness. What was their purpose? How could they exist, doing so little?

But these little creatures had survived through the ages. Whether Helliconia was unbearably hot or unbearably cold – SartoriIrvrash had told him this – the rickybacks remained close to the ground, hiding away, and had probably done nothing more since time began.

They were wonderful to him, even as they lay kicking their dainty limbs in ridiculous attempts to right themselves.

His wonder was replaced by unease. What could they be doing if the All-Powerful had not put them here?

As he lay there, the thought was as powerfully presented to him as if someone spoke the words that he might be mistaken and his father might be right; perhaps there was an All-Powerful directing human affairs. In which case, much that had seemed to him wicked was good, and he was deeply mistaken.

He stood up, trembling, forgetting the insignificant creatures at his feet.

He looked up at the thick clouds in the sky. Had someone spoken?

If there was an Akhanaba, then he must surrender his will to the god. Whatever the All-Powerful decreed must be done. Even murder was justified, if the end was Akhanaba’s.

At least he believed in the original beholder, that mother figure who saw to the earth and all its works. That misty figure, identified with the world itself, took precedence over Akhanaba.

The days went by, and the suns travelled across them, scorching him. He was lost to the wilderness, hardly knowing he was lost, speaking to no one, seeing no one. There were nondads
about, evasive as thought, but he had no business with them. He was listening to the voice of Akhanaba, or the beholder.

As he wandered, a forest fire overtook him. He plunged in a brook full-length, watching the roaring machine of conflagration rush up one slope of a hill and down the other, exhaling energy. In the furnace of its flames he saw the face of a god; the smoke trailing out behind was the god’s beard and hair, grey with cosmic wisdom. Like his father, the vision in its passage left destruction behind it. He lay with half his face in the water and both eyes staring, one under water, one above, seeing two universes lit by the visitant. When the visitant had gone by, he rose, going up the hill as if drawn in the wake of the monster, to stagger among smouldering bushes.

The fire god had left a trail of black. He would see it ahead, still pursuing its course like a whirlwind of vengeance.

Prince RobaydayAnganol began to run, laughing as he went. He was convinced that his father was too powerful to kill. But there were those near him who could be killed, whose deaths would lessen him.

The thought roared into his mind like fire, and he recognised it for the voice of the All-Powerful. No longer did he feel pain; he had become anonymous, like a true Madi.

Caught up in the uct of his own life, RobaydayAnganol saw the stars wheel over his head every night. He saw as he fell asleep YarapRombry’s Comet blazing in the north. He saw the fleet star Kaidaw pass overhead
.