Helliconia Summer h-2

by Brian Aldiss

  “Alam, you are requested to cheer me, not depress me, on the eve of my divorcement from MyrdemInggala.”

  The envoy drained his glass. “One woman’s much like another. I’m sure you’ll be blissfully happy with Simoda Tal.”

  He saw the pain in the king’s face. JandolAnganol said, looking away towards the dancers, “My son should be marrying Simoda Tal, but I get no sense from him. MyrdemInggala understands that I take this step in the interests of Borlien.”

  “By the boulder, does she indeed?” Esomberr felt inside his silk jacket and produced a letter. “You had better read this, which has just come to my hand.”

  Seeing MyrdemInggala’s bold handwriting, JandolAnganol took the sheet trembling, and read.

  To the Holy Emperor, C’Sarr Kilandar IX, Head of the Holy Pannovalan Empire, in the City of Pannoval, in the country of that name.

  Revered Sire—Whose faith is followed devoutly by the undersigned—

  Look favourably upon this supplication from one of thy most unlucky daughters.

  I, Queen MyrdemInggala, have been punished where no crime was committed. I was unjustly accused of conspiring against Sibornal by my husband the king, and by his father, and stand in grave danger.

  Revered sire, my lord King JandolAnganol has treated me with cruel injustice, banishing me from his side to this forlorn seaside place. Here I must stay until the king disposes of me as he will, a victim of his khmir.

  I have been a faithful wife to him for thirteen years, and have borne him a son and a daughter. The daughter is yet little, and remains with me. My son has become wild since this division, and I know not where he is.

  Since my lord the king usurped his father’s throne, ill things have befallen our kingdom. He has made enemies on all sides. To break from a circle of retribution, he plans a dynastic marriage with Simoda Tal, daughter of King Sayren Stund of Oldorando. As I understand, this arrangement has obtained your approval. To your judgment I must bow. But it will not be enough for JandolAnganol to reject me by a manipulation of the law, he will also require me finally removed from the earthly scene.

  Therefore I beseech my revered Emperor to despatch as soon as possible a letter forbidding the king to harm me or my children in any fashion, on pain of excommunication. At least the king professes religious faith; such a threat would have effect upon him.

  Your distraught daughter-in-religion

  ConegUndunory MyrdemInggala

  This letter will reach you via your envoy in Ottassol, and I pray he will mercifully deliver it to thy cherished hand by the fastest means.

  “Well, then we shall have to deal with this,” said the king, with a look of pain, clutching the letter.

  “I will have to deal with this,” corrected Esomberr, retrieving the letter.

  The following day, the party set sail westwards along the coast of Borlien. With the king went his new chancellor, Bardol CaraBansity.

  The king had developed a nervous habit at this time of looking over his shoulder, as if he felt himself watched by Akhanaba, the great god of the Holy Pannoval Empire.

  There were those who watched him—or who would watch him—but they were more remote in space and time than JandolAnganol could imagine. They were to be numbered in their millions. At this time, the planet Helliconia held ninety-six million human beings, and possibly a third of that number of phagors. The distant watchers were still more numerous.

  The inhabitants of the planet Earth had once watched the affairs of Helliconia with considerable detachment. The transmissions from Helliconia, beamed to Earth by the Earth Observation Station, had begun as little more than a source of entertainment. Over the centuries, as Great Spring on Helliconia turned to Summer, matters were changing. Observation was developing into commitment. The watchers were being changed by what they watched; despite the fact that Present and Past on the two planets could never coincide, an empathetic link was now being forged. Schemes were in hand to make that link more positive. The increasing maturity, the increasing understanding of what it was to be an organic entity, was a debt which the peoples of Earth owed to Helliconia. They now saw the embarkation of the king from Ottassol, not as Tatro saw the wave on the beach, as a separate event, but rather as a strand in an inescapable web of cosmology, culture and history. That the king possessed free will was never in dispute among the observers; but whichever way JandolAnganol turned to exert his will—a ferocious one—the infinite linkages of the continuum closed behind him again, to leave little more trace than the keel of his ship upon the Sea of Eagles. Although the terrestrials viewed the divorce with compassion, they saw it less as an individual act than as a cruel example of a division in human nature between mistakenly romantic readings of love and duty. This they were able to do because something of Earth’s long crucifixion was over. The upheaval of JandolAnganol’s divorce from MyrdemInggala took place in the year 381, by the local Borlien-Oldorando calendar. As the mysterious timepiece had indicated, on Earth the year was 6877 years after the birth of Christ; but this suggested a false synchronicity, and the events of the divorce would become real to the peoples of Earth only when a further thousand years elapsed.

  Dominating such local dates was a cosmic one with more meaning. Astronomical time in the Helliconian system was at full flood. The planet and its sister planets were approaching periastron, the nearest point in the orbit to the brilliant star known as Freyr.

  It took Helliconia 2592 Earth years to complete one Great Year in its orbit about Freyr, during which time the planet endured extremes of heat and cold. Spring was over. Summer, the enervating summer of the Great Year, had arrived.

  Summer’s duration would extend over two and a third Earth centuries. To those who lived on Helliconia at this time, winter and its desolations were but legends, although powerful ones. So they would remain yet a while, waiting in the human mind to become fact.

  Above Helliconia shone its own local sun, Batalix. Dominating Batalix was its giant binary companion, Freyr, shining at present with an apparent brightness thirty percent greater than Batalix, although it was 236 times more distant.

  Despite their involvements in their own history, the observers on Earth watched Helliconian events closely. They saw that strands of the web—the religious strand not the least—had been woven long ago which now entangled the King of Borlien.

  III

  A Premature Divorce

  The Borlienese were not a nation of seamen, despite their long seacoast. It followed that they were not great shipbuilders like the Sibornalese, or even some nations of Hespagorat. The ship that took the king to Gravabagalinien and divorce was a small brig with round bows. It kept the coast in sight most of the time and navigated by traverse board, on which the mean course made good during each watch was calculated from the positions of pegs inserted on the board.

  An even more tuglike brig followed the first, bearing the ancipitals of the First Phagorian Guard.

  The king broke from his companions as soon as the ship sailed and went to stand by the rails, staring rigidly ahead, as if anxious to be the first to see the queen. Yuli became miserable at the motion of the sea and sprawled by the capstan. For once the king showed his pet no sympathy.

  Its cordage creaking, the brig laboured through calm seas.

  The king fell suddenly to the deck. His courtiers ran to him and lifted him. JandolAnganol was carried to his cabin and placed in his bunk. He was deathly pale and rolled about as if in pain, hiding his face.

  A medical man examined him and ordered everyone to leave the cabin except CaraBansity. “Stay by his majesty. He has a touch of seasickness but nothing more. As soon as we get ashore he will be well again.”

  “I understood that a characteristic of seasickness was vomiting.”

  “Hrrm, well, in some cases. Commoners. Royal personages respond in a different fashion.” The doctor bowed himself out.

  After a while, the king’s muttered complaints became articulate. “The dreadful thing I must do. Pray Ak
hanaba it will soon be over…”

  “Majesty, let us discuss a sensible, important topic, to calm your mind. That rare bracelet of mine which you hold—”

  The king raised his head and said, with his inflexible look, “Get out of here, you cretin. I’ll have you flung overboard to the fish. Nothing is important, nothing—nothing on this earth.”

  “May your majesty soon recover himself,” said CaraBansity, backing his awkward bulk out of the cabin.

  The ship made fair progress westwards, and sailed into the little bay at Gravabagalinien on the morning of the second day at sea. JandolAnganol, suddenly himself again, walked down the gangplank and into the surf—there was no jetty at Gravabagalinien—with Alam Esomberr close behind him, holding up his cloak tails.

  With the latter travelled an escort of ten dignitaries of high ecclesiastical office, referred to by Esomberr as his rabble of vicars. The king’s retinue contained captains and armourers.

  The queen’s palace waited inland, without a sign of life. Its narrow windows were shuttered. A black flag flew at half-mast from a turret. The king’s face, turned towards it, was itself as blank as a shuttered window. No man dared look long at it, lest he catch the Eagle’s eye.

  The second brig was coming in, making awkward progress. Despite Esomberr’s impatience, JandolAnganol insisted on waiting until it was drawn in and a walkway extended from ship to shore, so that his ahuman troops could reach land without having to set foot in the water. He then made much of forming them up, drilling them, and addressing them in Native. At last he was ready to walk the half mile to the palace. Yuli ran ahead, frisking in the sand, kicking it up, delighted to be on firm ground again.

  They were greeted by an ancient woman in a black keedrant and white apron. White hairs trailed from a mole on her cheek. She walked with a stick. Two unarmed guards stood some way behind her.

  Close at hand, the white and gold building revealed its shabbiness. Gaps showed where slates on its roofs, planks from its verandahs, uprights in its railings, had fallen away and not been replaced. Nothing moved, except a herd of deer cropping grass on a distant hillside. The sea boomed endlessly against the shore.

  The king’s costume took up the general sombre note. He wore an undecorated tunic and breeches of a deep blue close to black. Esomberr, by contrast, strolled along in his jauntiest powder blues, offset by a pink short cloak. He was perfumed this morning, to camouflage the stinks of the ship.

  An infantry captain blew a bugle to announce their arrival.

  The palace door remained closed. The old woman wrung her hands and muttered to the breeze.

  Wrenching himself into action, JandolAnganol went up to the door and beat on its wooden panels with the hilt of his sword. The noise echoed within, setting hounds barking.

  A key was applied to a lock. The door swung open, propelled by another aged hag, who gave a stiff curtsey to the king and stood there blinking.

  All was gloom inside. The hounds that had set up such a din when the door was locked now slunk away into shadowy recesses.

  “Perhaps Akhanaba in his somewhat temperamental mercy has sent the plague here,” suggested Esomberr.

  “Thus releasing the occupants from earthly sorrow and rendering ours an unnecessary journey.”

  The king gave a shout of greeting.

  A light showed at the top of the stairs, where all was otherwise dark. They looked up, to see a woman carrying a taper. She bore it above her head, so that her features were in shadow. As she descended the stairs, every step creaked. As she neared those waiting below, the light from outside began to illuminate her features. Even before that, something in her carriage declared who she was. The glow strengthened, the face of Queen MyrdemInggala was revealed. She stopped a few paces in front of JandolAnganol and Esomberr and curtseyed first to the one, then the other.

  Her beauty was ashen, her lips almost colourless, her eyes dark in her pallid face. Her hair floated in dark abundance about her head. She wore a pale grey gown to the floor which buttoned at the throat to conceal her breasts.

  The queen spoke a word to the crone, who went to the doors and closed them, leaving Esomberr and JandolAnganol in the dark, with the intrusive phagor runt behind them. That dark revealed itself as seamed with threads of light. The palace was flimsily built of planking. When the sun shone on it, a skeletal aspect was revealed. As the queen led them to a side room, slivers of light disclosed her presence.

  She stood awaiting them in the middle of a room defined by thin geometries of illumination where daylight slit round shuttered windows.

  “Nobody is in the palace at present,” MyrdemInggala said, “except for me and the Princess TatromanAdala. You may kill us now, and there will be no witnesses except the All-Powerful.”

  “We do not intend to hurt you, madam,” said Esomberr. He walked over to one of the windows and opened the shutters. Turning in the dusty light, he saw the husband and wife standing close in the almost empty room.

  MyrdemInggala pursed her lips and blew out her taper.

  JandolAnganol said, “Cune, as I’ve said, this divorce is a question of state policy.” His manner was abnormally subdued.

  “You may force me to accept it. You can never make me understand it.”

  Esomberr opened the window and called for his retinue and for AbstrogAthenat.

  The ceremony will not detain you long, madam,” he said. He paraded into the centre of the room and bowed to her. “My name is Esomberr of the Esomberrs. I am the Envoy and Representative in Borlien of the Great C’Sarr Kilandar IX, the Father Supreme of the Church of Akhanaba and Emperor of Holy Pannoval. My function is to act as witness on behalf of the Father Supreme, in a brief ceremony. That is my public duty. My private duty is to declare that you are more beautiful than any representation of you could ever be.”

  To JandolAnganol she said faintly, “After all we have been to each other…”

  Continuing without altering the tone of his voice, Esomberr said, “The ceremony will absolve King JandolAnganol from any further marital ties. Under this special bill of divorcement granted by the Father Supreme himself, you two will cease to be husband and wife, your vows will be rescinded, and you will renounce the title of Queen.”

  “Upon what grounds am I to be divorced, sir? What is the pretext? How has the revered C’Sarr been told I have offended, to be treated like this?”

  The king stood as in a trance, staring rigidly at the air, while Alam Esomberr pulled a document from his pocket, flapped it open, and read.

  “Madam, we have witnesses to prove that while you have been taking your holidays here in Gravabagalinien”—he sketched a sensuous gesture—“you have entered the sea in a state of nudity. That you have there consorted carnally with dolphins. That this unnatural act, forbidden by the Church, has been frequently repeated, often within sight of your child.”

  She said, “You know this is a complete fabrication.” She spoke without fire in her voice. Turning to JandolAnganol, she said, “Can the state survive only by dragging down my name, by disgracing me—and by making you lower than a slave?”

  “Here comes the Royal Vicar, madam, who will perform our ceremony,” said Esomberr. “You need only stand silent. No further embarrassment will be caused you.”

  AbstrogAthenat entered, radiating the chill of his personality in the space of the chamber. He raised a hand and pronounced a blessing. Two small boys playing the pipes stood behind him.

  The queen said coldly, “If this holy farce must take place, I insist that Yuli be removed from the room.”

  JandolAnganol broke from his reverie to order his runt outside. After a small fuss, it left.

  AbstrogAthenat came forward with a paper on which the words of the wedding ceremony were inscribed. He took the hands of the king and queen, making each hold a side of the paper, which they did as if hypnotized. He then read the bill out in a high, clear voice. Esomberr looked from one to other of the royal pair. They looked at the floor. The vicar lift
ed a ceremonial sword high. With a muttered prayer, he brought it down.

  The paper bond they held was sliced in two. The queen let her half float to the wooden tiles. The vicar produced a document which JandolAnganol signed, Esomberr signing as witness. The vicar signed it himself, then handed it to Esomberr for its onward transmission. The vicar bowed to the king. He left the room, followed by his two piping boys.

  “The deed is done,” said Esomberr. Nobody moved.

  Heavy rain began to fall. Sailors and soldiers from the ships had crowded to the open window to catch a glimpse of a ceremony of which they could boast for the rest of their lives. Now they ran for shelter, and officers bellowed at them. The downpour increased. Lightning flashed and presently thunder broke overhead. The monsoons were approaching.

  “Ah, well, we must make ourselves comfortable,” said Esomberr, striving for his usual lightness of tone. “Perhaps the queen—the ex-queen, excuse me—will have some ladies bring us refreshment.” He called to one of his men. “Look down in the cellars. The serving maids will be hiding down there or, failing them, the wine will be.”

  Rain poured in the open window and the unsecured shutter banged.

  “These storms blow in from nowhere and are soon over,” JangolAnganol said.

  “That’s the way to take it, Jan—with a metaphor,” said Esomberr genially. He clapped the king on the shoulder.

  Without a word, the queen set down her extinguished taper on a shelf, then turned and left the room.

  Esomberr collected two chairs with tapestry seats and set them together, opening up a shutter nearby so that they could watch the fury of the elements. They both sat down, and the king put his head between his hands.

  “After your marriage to Simoda Tal, I promise you things will take a turn for the better, Jan. In Pannoval, we are somewhat committed on our northern front against the Sibornalese. The fighting is particularly bitter because of traditional religious differences, you know.