Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

“You must miss Matrassyl,” said Pasharatid speaking firmly into the wind.

“I miss the peace of my studies, yes.”

“And other things as well, I imagine. Unlike many of my fellow Uskuts, I enjoyed my time in Matrassyl. It was very exotic. Too hot, of course, but I did not mind that. There were fine people with whom I came in contact.”

SartoriIrvrash watched the arang fighting to turn round in their pen. They provided milk for the officers. He knew that Pasharatid was coming to his point at last.

“Queen MyrdemInggala is a fine lady. It is a shame that the king has exiled her, do you not think?”

So that was it. He waited before replying.

“The king saw that his duty lay in serving his country…”

“You must feel bitter at his treatment of you. You must hate him.”

When SartoriIrvrash did not reply to that, Pasharatid said, or rather, shouted quietly in his ear, “How could he bear to give up a lady as lovely as the queen?”

No response.

“Your countrymen call her ‘the queen of queens’, is that not correct?”

“That is correct.”

“I never saw anyone so beautiful in my life.”

“Her brother, YeferalOboral, was a close friend of mine.”

This remark silenced Pasharatid. He appeared almost about to terminate the conversation when, with a burst of feeling, he said, “Just to be in Queen MyrdemInggala’s presence—just to see her—made a man—affected a man like…”

He did not finish his sentence.

Weather conditions were changeable. A complex system of high and low pressure areas brought fogs, hot brownish rains, such as they had encountered on the voyage across to Sibornal—“regular Uskuti up-and-downers”—and periods of clarity where the featureless coastlines of Loraj could sometimes be glimpsed to starboard. Still they made good time, with pursuing winds either warm from the southwest or chilly from west of northwest.

Boredom drove SartoriIrvrash to become familiar with every part of the ship. He saw how the men were so cramped that they slept on deck on coils of rope, or on bins below deck, their heels propped high on the bulkheads. There was not an inch of spare space.

Day by day, the smell of the ship grew stronger. To perform their solid excretions, the men pulled off their trousers and worked their way along a spar set over the side of the ship, on which they had to balance, with a rope coming down from the yardarm to hold onto. Urination was performed to leeward, over the rail—and in dozens of other places, judging by olfactory evidence. The officers fared almost as badly. The women enjoyed better privacy.

After almost three weeks at sea the course was changed from due west to west by northwest, and the Golden Friendship and its companion sailed into Persecution Bay.

Persecution Bay was a great and melancholy indentation over one thousand miles long and five hundred miles deep on the coast of Loraj. Even at its mouth, the sea slackened, while day by day the wind dropped and the temperature fell. Soon they moved through a pearly haze, broken only by the shouts of the duty man calling the depth. They travelled now by dead reckoning.

Impatience seized SartoriIrvrash. He retired to his kennel of a cabin to smoke and read. Even those occupations were unsatisfactory, for his stomach howled like a lost dog. Already, ship’s rations were causing him, a thin man at the best of times, to tighten his belt. Men’s rations were salted fish, onions, olive or fish oil with bread every morning, soup at midday, and a repetition of breakfast for the evening meal, with hard cheese substituted for fish. A mug of fig wine or yoodhl was served to each man twice a week.

The men supplemented this diet with fresh-caught fish, hooked over the side. Officers fared little better, apart from an issue of pungent arang milk occasionally, to which was added brandy for those on watch. The Sibornalese complained at this diet in no more than a routine way, as if inured to it.

Moving forward at five knots, they crossed the line of 35°N, thus leaving the tropics for the narrow northern temperate zone. On that same day, they heard fearsome crashings through the mist and a series of huge waves set the ship rocking. Then silence again. SartoriIrvrash poked his head out of his cabin and enquired of the first seaman who passed what it was.

“Coast,” said the man. And in a fit of communicativeness added a further word, “Glaciers.”

SartoriIrvrash nodded in satisfaction. He turned back to his notebook, which was, for want of better occupation, becoming a diary.

“Even if the Uskuti are not civilized, they are enlarging my knowledge of the world. As is well known among scholars, our globe is set between great bands of ice. To the extreme north and the extreme south are lands consisting only of ice and snow. The miserable continent of Sibornal is especially loaded with this bothersome stuff, which may account for the dead hearts of its people. Now it seems they steer towards it, as if drawn by a magnet, instead of sailing on towards the warmer seas.

“What the purpose of this deviation might be, I shall not enquire—not wishing to risk further lectures from my personal demon, Pasharatid. But it may at least permit me to glimpse that horrid expanse which makes up the alpha and omega of the world.”

In the night came a ferocious storm which was on them without warning. The Golden Friendship could only heave to and weather it out. Immense waves burst against the hull, sending spray high into the spars. There were also ominous knockings which resounded through the ship, as if some giant of the deep was asking to be admitted aboard—so thought the ex-chancellor of Borlien, as he clung terrified to his bunk.

He doused the single whale-oil light in the cabin, as orders demanded. In the noisy dark he lay, by turns cursing JandolAnganol and praying to the All-Powerful. The giant of the deep by now had firm hold of the ship in both hands and was rocking it as some maniac might rock a cradle, in an attempt to pitch the baby out upon its nose. To his later astonishment, SartoriIrvrash fell asleep while this decanting process was at its height.

When he roused, the ship was silent again, its movement barely discernible. Beyond the porthole lay more mist, lit by meagre sunshine.

Moving to the companionway, past sleeping soldiers, he stared up at the sky. Tangled among the rigging was a pallid silver coin. He looked upon the face of Freyr. Back to memory came the fairy story he had enjoyed reading in the queen of queens’ company to TatromanAdala, about the silver eye in the sky that had sailed away at last.

The duty man called soundings. On the sea floated floes of ice, many carved into absurd forms. Some resembled stunted trees or monstrous fungi, as if the god of ice had taken it into his head to devise grotesque counterparts to living nature. These were the things that had come knocking at the heights of the storm, and it was a cause for gratitude that few bergs were half as big as the ship. These mysterious forms emerged from the mist, only to recede again into abstraction.

After a while, something made SartoriIrvrash shift his attention and look up. Across a narrow stretch of water were two phagor heads. The eyes in those heads stared not at the passing ship but at each other… There were the long face with its misanthropic jaw, the eyes protected by boney ridges, the two horns curving upwards.

And yet. No sooner had he recognized the beasts than SartoriIrvrash knew he was mistaken. There were no phagors. He was seeing two wild animals which confronted each other.

The movement of the ship caused the mist to swirl apart, revealing a small island, no more than a tussock in the sea, yet with a steep little cliff on the near side. Perched on the island’s barren crown stood two four-legged animals. Their coats were brown. Apart from their colour and their stance, they markedly resembled ancipitals.