Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

He went out, banging the door behind him. He was not going to admit to his chancellor that he did feel guilt. He loved the queen; yet by some perverse streak in him he longed to be free, and the realization tortured him.

She was the queen of queens. All Borlien loved her, as they did not love him. And a further turn of that particular screw: he knew she deserved their love. Perhaps she took it too much for granted that he loved her… Perhaps she had too much power over him…

And that bastion of her body, ripe as corn sheaves, the soft seas of her hair, the ointments of her loins, the dazzlement of her gaze, the wholeness with which she smiled… But what would it be like to rip into the pubescent body of that pretentious semi-Madi princess? A different thing entirely…

His tortuous thoughts, winding this way and that, were penned in among the intricacies of the palace. The palace had accumulated almost by accident. Courts had been filled in by buildings and servants’ quarters improvized from ruins. The grand and the sordid lay side by side. The privileged who lived here above the city suffered almost as many inconveniences as those in the city.

One token of inconvenience lay in the grotesque arrangements on the skyline, now visible outlined against the darkening cloud overhead. The air in the valley lay stifling upon the city, like a cat indifferently sprawled upon a dying mouse. Canvas sails, wooden vanes, and little copper windmills had been perched high on air stacks, in order to drag a breath of freshness down to those who suffered in chambers below. This orchestra of semaphoric bids for relief creaked above the king’s head as he walked through his maze. He looked up once, as if attracted by a chorus of doom.

No one else was about, except sentries. They stood at every turn, and most of them were phagors. Weapon bearing, marching, or rigidly on guard, they might have been the sole possessors of the castle and its secrets.

JandolAnganol saluted them absently as he went through the gathering shadows. There was one person to whom he could go for advice. It might be advice of a villainous order, but it would be given. The person who gave it was himself one of the secrets of the castle. His father.

As he drew nearer to an innermost part of the palace where his father was confined, more sentries stiffened at his approach, as if by some potent regal quality he could freeze them with his presence. Bats fluttered from nooks in the stonework, hens scattered underfoot; but the place was strangely silent, dwelling on the king’s dilemma.

He made for a rear staircase protected by a thick door. A phagor stood there, his high military caste denoted by the fact that he had retained his horns.

“I will enter.”

Without a word, the phagor produced a key and unlocked the door, pushing it wide with his foot. The king descended, walking slowly with a hand on the iron rail. The gloom was thick, and thickened as the stair curved down. At the bottom was an anteroom where another guard stood before another locked door. This also was opened to the king.

He came into the damp set of chambers reserved for his father.

Even in his self-absorption, he felt the chill and the damp. A ghost of remorse moved in his harneys.

VarpalAnganol sat in the end room of three, wrapped in a blanket, gazing into a log fire smouldering in a grate. A grille high in one wall let in the last of daylight. The old man looked up, blinking, and made a slapping noise with his lips, as if moistening his mouth preparatory to speech, but he said nothing.

“Father. It’s I. Have you no lamp?”

“I was just trying to calculate what year it was.”

“It’s 381, winter.” It was some weeks since he had set eyes on his father. The old man had aged considerably, and would soon be one with the gossies.

He got himself to the standing position, supporting himself with an arm of the chair.

“Do you want to sit down, my boy? There’s only the one chair. This place is not very well furnished. It will do me good to stand for a while.”

“Sit down, Father. I want to talk to you.”

“Have they found your son—what’s his name? Roba? Have they found Roba?”

“He’s crazy, even the foreigners know it.”

“You see, he liked the desert as a child. I took him there, and his mother. The wide sky…”

“Father, I am thinking of divorcing Cune. There are state reasons.”

“Oh, well, you could lock her up with me. I like Cune, nice woman. Of course, we’d need another chair…”

“Father, I want some advice. I want to talk to you.” The old man sank down on the chair. JandolAnganol crossed in front of him and squatted facing him, back to the feeble fire. “I want to ask you about—love, whatever love is. Are you attending? Everyone is supposed to love. The highest and the lowest. I love the All-Powerful Akhanaba and perform my worship every day; I am one of his representatives here on earth. I also love MyrdemInggala, above all women who ever breathed. You know that I have killed men I thought looked lustfully upon her.”

A pause followed while his father gathered his thoughts.

“You’re a good swordsman, that I never denied.” The old man tittered.

“Didn’t a poet say Love is like Death? I love Akhanaba and I love Cune, yes. Yet under that love—I often ask myself—under that love, isn’t there a vein of hatred? Should there be? Does every man feel as I do?”

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 YeferalOboral, 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 YeferalOboral’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…”