Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

“Where have you been, Roba? We’ve missed you. Your father missed you.”

“Do you mean the Eagle? Why, he nearly caught me. I’ve never cared for court life, I care even less now. My father’s crime has set me free. So I am a hoxney-brother. A Madi-assister. I will never become king, and he will never again become happy. New lives, new lives, and one for you, Rushven! You first introduced me to the desert, and I will not desert you. I’m going to take you to someone important, human, not father or hoxney.”

“Who? What’s this all about? Wait!”

But Roba was striding off. SartoriIrvrash looked doubtfully at the coach loaded with all his worldly goods and then decided he had better follow. Walking fast, he entered a dim hall only a step or two behind the king’s son.

The house was built according to a pattern suited to its overshadowed location: it stretched up to the light like a plant growing between boulders. The old man was panting by the time Roba led them off the shaking wooden stairs and into a room on the third floor, the only room on that level. SartoriIrvrash broke into prolonged coughing and collapsed on a stool someone offered him.

There were three people awaiting them in the room, and he observed that they seized on the opportunity also to cough. A certain rickety elegance in their structure, a certain sharpness of bone structure, marked them out as Sibornalese. One of them was a woman, elegantly dressed in a silk chagirack, the northern equivalent of a charfrul, its delicate fabric patterned with large black and white formal flowers. Two men stood behind her in the shadows. SartoriIrvrash recognized her immediately as Madame Dienu Pasharatid, wife of the ambassador who had disappeared the day that Taynth Indredd had introduced matchlocks into the palace.

He bowed to her and apologized for his coughing.

“We are all doing it, Chancellor. It is the volcano making our throats sore.”

“I believe my throat is sore through grief. You must not call me by my old title.” He would not ask her to what volcano she referred, but she saw uncertainty in his face.

“The volcanic eruption in the Rustyjonnik Mountains. Its ash carries this way.”

She regarded him with sympathy, letting him recover from the stairs. Her face was large and plain. Although he knew her for an intelligent woman, there was an unpleasant asperity about her mouth, and he had often been guilty of avoiding her company.

He looked about. The walls were covered with thin paper which had peeled in places. One picture hung there, a pen-and-tint drawing of what he recognized as Kharnabhar, the holy mountain of the Sibornalese. The only window, which was to one side, lighting Dienu Pasharatid’s face in profile, provided a view of rocky cliff from which creepers hung; the vegetation had a coating of grey ash. Roba sat cross-legged on the floor, sucking a straw and smiling from one to another of the party.

“Madame, what do you want with me? I must go to catch a boat before further disasters befall me,” SartoriIrvrash said.

She stood before him and clutched her hands behind her back, while gently moving her weight from one foot to another.

“We ask you to forgive us for getting you here in such an unusual way, but we wish to enlist your aid—for which aid, we will pay generously.”

She outlined her proposal, turning occasionally to the men for confirmation. All Sibornalese were profoundly religious, believing, as he knew, in God the Azoiaxic, who existed before life and round whom all life revolves. The members of the ambassadorial contingent held the religion of Akhanaba in low regard, considering it little better than a superstition. They were therefore shocked but not surprised when JandolAnganol made the decision to break his marriage and contract another.

Sibornalese—and the Azoiaxic through them—regarded the bond between woman and man as an equal decision to be held through life. Love was a matter of will, not whim.

SartoriIrvrash sat nodding automatically through this part of the speech, recognizing its sententious tone as characteristic of the northern continentals and longing to be on his way.

Roba, not even listening, winked at the ex-chancellor and said confidentially, “This is the house where Ambassador Pasharatid used to meet a lady of the town. It’s an historical whorish house—but for you this lady will only talk.”

SartoriIrvrash hushed him.

Ignoring the interruption, Madame Dienu said that her party felt that he alone, Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, had pretension to knowledge in the Borliense court. They felt that the king had treated him almost as badly as—possibly worse than—the queen. Such injustice distressed them, as it would all members of the Church of the Formidable Peace. She was now returning home. They invited SartoriIrvrash to join them, in the assurance that he would be given good accommodation in Askitosh and a good advisory position in the government, as well as freedom to complete his life’s work.

He felt the trembling which so often overcame him return. Temporizing, he asked, “What sort of advisory post?

Oh, advice on matters Borlienese, upon which he was such an expert. And they were preparing to leave Matrassyl on the hour.

So overwhelmed was he by this offer that SartoriIrvrash did not enquire why this sudden haste. Gratefully, he accepted.

“Excellent!” exclaimed Madame Dienu.

The two men behind her now showed an almost ancipital ability to change from stillness to intense activity without intervening stages. They were immediately gone from the room, to promote shouting on all floors and a galumphing on all stairs, as luggage and people hastened down into the courtyard below. Carriages emerged from shelters, hoxneys from stables, stable boys with harness from tackrooms. A procession was assembled in less time than a Borlienese could have drawn on a pair of boots. Prayers were briskly said, all standing round in a circle, and then they were away, leaving an empty house behind them.

They drove north through the warren of the old town, circled the great semisubterranean Dome of Striving, and were soon on the road north with the Takissa gleaming on their left-hand side. Roba yipped and sang as they went.

Weeks of travel followed.

A feature of the first part of their journey was the pervading greyness caused by the volcanic ash. Mount Rustyjonnik, always a source of grumbling and occasional runs of lava, was in full eruption. The country in the path of its ash became a land of the dead. Trees were killed by the substance, fields covered with it, streams clogged with it. After rain, it turned to paste. Birds and animals died or fled the area. Human families and phagors trudged away from their blighted homes.

Once the Sibornalese party had crossed the River Mar, the blight grew less. Then it faded. They entered Mordriat—a name of terror in Matrassyl. The reality was peaceful. Most of the tribes smiled beneath sheltering layers of braffista turbans, their chief item of apparel.

Guides were engaged to guarantee their safety, thin villainous-looking men who abased themselves at every sunrise and sunset. Round their campfire at night, the head Pointer of the Way, as he called himself, explained to the travellers how the ornamentation on his braffista indicated his rank in life. He boasted of the numerous ranks below his.

None listened more eagerly than SartoriIrvrash. “Strange, this human propensity to create ranks in society,” he observed to the rest of the party.

“A propensity the more noticeable the nearer the bottom of the pile one descends,” said Madame Dienu. “We avoid such demeaning gradations in my land. How you will enjoy seeing Askitosh. It is a model for all communities.”

SartoriIrvrash had some reservations about that. But he found a restful quality in the steady severity of Madame Dienu after years of dealing with a changeable king. As the wilderness grew more arid, his spirits rose; equally, Roba’s madness grew calmer. But when the others slept, SartoriIrvrash could not. His bones, which had become accustomed to a goosedown mattress, could not adapt to a blanket and hard ground. He lay looking up at the stars and the lightning flickering between them, full of an excitement he had not known since he and his brothers were children. Even his bitterness against JandolAnganol abated somewhat.