Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

“I’m an old man, Your Majesty, and have endured deep botheration this day. I was resting.”

“Writing your damned history, more likely.”

“Resting and grieving for the murdered sixty-one, if truth be told.”

The king struck the water with the flat of his hand. “You’re an atheist. You have no conscience to appease. You don’t have to be scourged. Leave that to me.”

SartoriIrvrash showed a tooth in a display of circumspection.

“How can I serve your majesty now?”

JandolAnganol stood up, and the women swathed him in towels. He stepped from the bath.

“You have done enough in the way of service.” He gave SartoriIrvrash one of his darkly brilliant looks. “It’s time I put you out to pasture, like the old hoxneys of which you are so fond. I’ll find someone more to my way of thought to advise me.”

The women huddled by the earthenware pitchers which had brought the royal bathwater, and listened complacently to the drama.

“There are many here who will pretend to think as you wish them to think, Your Majesty. If you care to put trust in such, that is your decision. Perhaps you will say how I have failed to please. Have I not supported all your schemes?”

The king flung away his towels, and paced naked and dangerous about the room. His gaze was as hasty as his walk. Yuli whined in sympathy.

“Look at the trouble about my ears. Bankrupt. No queen. Unpopular. Mistrusted. Challenged in the scritina. Don’t tell me I’ll be a favourite of the mob when I wed that chit from Oldorando. You advised me to do this, and I have had sufficient of your advice.”

SartoriIrvrash had backed against the wall, where he was fairly safe from the king’s pacing. He wrung his hands in distress.

“If I may speak… I have faithfully served you and your father before you. I have lied for you. I lied today. I have implicated myself in this gruesome Myrdolator’s crime for your sake. Unlike other chancellors you might elect, I have no political ambitions—You are good enough to splash me, your majesty!”

“Crime! Your sovereign is a criminal, is he? How else was I to put down a revolt?”

“I have advised you with your good in mind, rather than my advancement, sire. Never less than in this sorry matter of the divorcement. You will recall that I told you you would never find another woman like the queen and—”

The king seized a towel and wrapped it about his narrow waist. A puddle formed round his feet. “You told me that my first duty lay with my country. So I made the sacrifice, made it at your suggestion—”

“No, Your Majesty, no, I distinctly—” He waved his hands distractedly.

“ ‘I dizztingtly’,” said Yuli, picking up a new word.

“You merely want a scapegoat on which to vent your rage, sire. You shall not dismiss me like this. It’s criminal.”

The words echoed about the bath chamber. The women had made as if to escape from the scene, then had frozen in cautionary gestures, lest the king turn upon them.

He turned on his chancellor.

As his face flushed with rage, the colour chased itself down his jaw to his throat. “Criminal again! Am I criminal? You old rat, you dare give me your orders and insults! I’ll settle with you.”

He marched over to where his clothes lay spread.

Fearing that he had gone too far, SartoriIrvrash said in a shaking voice, “Your Majesty, forgive me, I see your plan. By dismissing me, you can then be free to blame me before the scritina for what has occurred, and thus show yourself innocent in their eyes. As if truth can be moulded that way… It is a well-tried tactic, well-tried—transparent, too—but surely we can agree on how precisely—”

He faltered and fell silent. A sickly evening light filled the room. Traces of an auroral storm flickered in the cloud mass outside. The king had drawn his sword from its scabbard where it lay on the table. He flourished it.

SartoriIrvrash backed away, knocking over a pitcher of scented water, which rushed to escape in a flood across the tiled floor.

JandolAnganol began a complex pattern of swordplay with an invisible enemy, feinting and lunging, at times appearing hard pressed, at times pressing hard himself. He moved rapidly about the room. The women huddled against the wall, tittering with nervousness.

“Heigh! Yauh! Ho! Heigh!”

He switched direction, and the naked blade darted at the chancellor.

As it stopped an inch from his collarbone, the king said, “So, where’s my son, where’s Robayday, then, you old villain? You know he’d have my life?”

“Well I know the history of your family, sire,” said SartoriIrvrash, ineffectually covering his chest with his hands.

“I must deal with my son. You have him hidden in the warren of your apartments.”

“No, sire, that I do not.”

“I am told you do, sire, the phagor guard told me. And he whispered, sire, that you still have some blood in your eddre.”

“Sire, you are overtaxed by the ordeals you have undergone. Let me get—”

“Get nothing, sire, but steel in the gullet. So reliable! You have a visitor in your rooms.”

“From Morstrual, sire, a boy, no more.”

“So, you keep boys now…” But the subject seemed to lose its interest. With a shout, the king flung up his sword so that it embedded itself in the beams overhead. When he reached up and grasped its hilt, the towel fell from him.

SartoriIrvrash stooped to retrieve it for his majesty, saying, falteringly, “I understand from whence your madness comes, and allow—”

Instead of seizing the towel, the king seized the old man’s charfrul and swung him about by it. The towel went flying. The chancellor uttered a cry of alarm. His feet slipped from under him, and they fell together heavily in the flood of water.

The king was back on his feet as nimbly as a cat, motioning to the women to help SartoriIrvrash up. The chancellor groaned and clutched his back as two of them assisted him.

“Now go, sire,” said the king. “Get packing—before I demonstrate to you just how mad I am. Remember, I know you for an atheist and a Myrdolator!”

In his own chambers, Chancellor SartoriIrvrash had a woman slave annoint his back with ointments, and indulged in some luxurious groans. His personal phagor guard, Lex, looked on impassively.

After a while, he called for some squaanej juice topped with Lordryardry ice, and then laboriously wrote a letter to the king, clutching his spine between sentences.

Honoured Sire,

I have served the House of Anganol faithfully, and deserve well from it. I am prepared still to serve, despite the attack upon my person, for I know how your majesty suffers in his mind at present.

As to my atheism and my learning, to which you so frequently object, may I point out that they are one, and that my eyes are opened to the true nature of our world. I do not seek to woo you from your faith, but to explain to you that it is your faith which puts you in your present difficult situation.

I see our world as a unity. You know of my discovery that a hoxney is a striped animal, appearances to the contrary. This discovery is of vital importance, for it links the seasons of our Great Year, and gives us new understanding of them. Many plants and animals may have similar devices by which to perpetuate their species through the Year’s conflicting climates.

Could it be that humanity has, in religion, a similar mode of perpetuation? Differing only as humanity differs from the brute beasts? Religion is a social binding force which can unify in time of extreme cold, or, as now, of extreme heat. That social binding force, that cohesion, is valuable, for it leads to our survival in national or tribal entities.