by Brian Aldiss
He wore an ink-smeared smock. There was ink on his fingers. He bowed low, and there was ink on his pate.
‘Rushven, I have a farewell to say here, but I wish also to greet my brother now that his soul has passed to the world below. I wish you by me while I go into pauk, to see that nobody disturbs me.’
He looked troubled. ‘Madam. May I recall two items to your troubled mind. First, that pater-placation – pauk, if you prefer the old-fashioned term – is discouraged by your church. Second, it is not possible to commune with gossies before their mortal bodies are buried in their land-octaves.’
‘And third, you believe that pauk is a fairy tale anyway.’ She gave him a wan smile as she resurrected an old argument between them.
He shook his head. ‘I know well what once I said. However, times change. Now I confess that I myself have learned to go into pater-placation, to console myself by communing with the spirit of my departed wife.’
He bit his lips. Reading her expression, he said, ‘Yes, she has forgiven me.’
She touched him. ‘I’m glad.’
Then the academic rose up in him again, and he said, ‘But you see, Your Majesty, there is a philosophical difficulty in believing that the pater-placation ritual is other than subjective. There cannot be gossies and fessups under the ground with whom living people talk.’
‘We know there are. You and I and millions of peasants talk to our ancestors whenever we wish. Where’s the difficulty?’
‘Historical records, of which I have plenty, all report that the gossies were once creatures of hatred, bewailing their failed lives, pouring scorn on the living. Over the generations, that has changed; nowadays, all anyone gets is sweetness and consolation. That suggests that the whole experience is wish-fulfilment, a kind of self-hypnosis. Moreover, stellar geometry has outmoded the antique idea that our world rests on an original boulder, towards which fessups descend.’
She stamped her foot. ‘Must I call the vicar? Am I not under grief and strain enough, without having to listen to your preposterous historical lectures at this hour?’
She was immediately sorry for her outburst, and put an arm through his as they ascended to her room.
‘It’s a comfort, whatever it is,’ she said. ‘Praise be, there’s a realm of the spirit beyond knowledge.’
‘My dear queen, though I hate religion, I recognise sanctity when I am in its presence.’ When she squeezed his arm, he was emboldened to add, ‘But the Holy Church has never quite accepted pater-placation as part of its ritual, has it? It does not know what to make of gossies and fessups. In consequence, it would like to ban it, but if it did so, then a million peasants would quit the Church. So it ignores the entire question.’
She looked down at her smooth hands. Already she was preparing herself for the act. ‘How very sensible of the Church,’ she murmured.
SartoriIrvrash, in his turn, was sensible enough to make no reply.
MyrdemInggala led the way through into her inner chamber. She sank down on her bed, composing herself, controlling her breathing, relaxing her muscles. SartoriIrvrash sat quietly by her bed, circling his forehead with the holy sign, to begin his vigil. He saw that already she was moving into the pauk state.
He kept his eyes tight closed, not daring to gaze upon her defenceless beauty, and listened to her infrequent exhalations.
The soul has no eyes, yet it sees in the world below.
The soul of the queen cast its regard downwards as it began its long descent. Beneath lay space more vast than night skies, more rich, more imposing. It was not space at all: it was the opposite of space, of consciousness even – a peculiar rupellary density without feature.
Just as the land regards an ocean-going ship as a token of freedom, while the sailors confined on that ship regard the land in similar terms, so the realm of oblivion was at once space and non-space.
To consciousness, the realm appeared infinite. In its downward direction, it ceased only where the races of manlike-kind began, in a green and unknown, unknowable womb, the womb of the original beholder. The original beholder – that passive motherly principle – received the souls of the dead who sank back into her. Although she might be no more than a fossil scent entombed in rock, she was not to be resisted.
Above the original beholder were the gossies and fessups, floating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands, as if all the stars of night had been stacked in order, and arranged in accordance with the ancient idea of land-octaves.
The queen’s exploratory soul sank down, floating like a feather towards the fessups. At close quarters, they resembled not stars so much as mummified chickens, with hollow eyes and stomachs, their legs dangling clumsily. Age had eroded them. They were transparent. Their insides circulated like luminescent fish in a bowl. Their mouths were open like fish, as if trying to blow a bubble towards a surface they would never see again. In their upper strata, where the gossies were less ancient, little dusts still escaped from phantom larynxes, the very last apostrophes remaining to the possessive case of life.
To some souls venturing there, the ranks of the departed were terrifying. For the queen they held consolation. She looked down upon them, those mouths pickled in obsidian, and was reassured to believe that at least some wreckage remained from existence, and would ever remain until the planet was consumed by fire. And who knew if even then …
For venturing souls, no compass bearings seemed possible. Yet there was direction. The beholder was a lodestone. All here had been collected according to plan, as stones on seashores are graded according to size. The ranks of fessups stretched below the whole earth, leading beyond Borlien and Oldorando to far Sibornal and even to the remote parts of Hespagorat, to semi-legendary Pegovin beyond the Climent Sea, even to the poles.
The soul barque moved to a breeze that did not blow, finally drifting to the gossie of what had once been her mother, the wild Shannana, wife to RatanOborol, ruler of Matrassyl. The maternal gossie resembled a battered birdcage, its ribs and hipbones forming tentative golden patterns against the darkness, like a leaf crushed long ago in a child’s book. It spoke.
Gossies and fessups were tormenting things. As negatives of being, they recalled only the incidents in their lives which were pleasant. The good had been interred with them; the evil, the dross, lost along with freedom of action.
‘Dear Moth, I come dutifully before you again, to see how you fare.’ Her ritual salutation.
‘My dear daughter, there are no troubles here. All is serene, nothing can go awry. And when you appear, everything is gained. My joyous and beautiful one, how did I squeeze such an offspring from my unworthy loins? Your grandmother is also here, delighted also to be back in your presence.’
‘It is a comfort to be in your presence, too, Moth.’ But the words were a formula against entropy.
‘Oh, no, but you must not say that, because the delight is all ours, and often I think how in the hurried days of my life I never cherished you enough, certainly not as much as your virtue warranted. There was always so much to be done, and another battle fought, and one may wonder now why energy was spent on those unimportant things, whereas the real joy of life was being close with you and seeing you grow up into—’
‘Mother, you were a kind parent, and I not a dutiful enough child. I was always headstrong—’
‘Headstrong!’ exclaimed the old gossie. ‘No, no, you did nothing to offend. One sees these things differently in this stage of existence, one sees what the true things are, what’s important. A few little peccadillos are nothing, and I’m only sorry if I made a fuss at the time. That was just my stupidity – I knew all along that you were my greatest treasure. Not to pass on life, that’s the failure – as those down here without offspring will testify in endless dole.’
She continued joyfully in this vein, and the queen let her ramble on, placated by her words, for the fact was that in life she had found her mother self-absorbed and without more than perfunctory kindness. It delighted her to find tha
t this battered cage should remember events of her childhood which she had forgotten. Flesh had died; memory was embalmed here.
At last she interrupted her. ‘Moth, I came down here half-prepared to meet with YeferalOborol, expecting his soul to have joined you and grandmother.’
‘Ah … then my dear son has come to the end of earthly years? Oh, praise be, that’s good news indeed, how glad we shall be to be united with him, since he never mastered pater-placation as you have, you clever girl. How glad you make us.’
‘Dear Mother, he was shot by a Sibornalese gun.’
‘Splendid! Splendid! The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned. That is a treat … And when do we expect him?’
‘His mortal remains will be buried within a few hours.’
‘We shall watch for him, and what a welcome we shall give to him. You’ll be here with us one day, too, never fear …’
‘I look forward to it, Moth. And I have a request, which you must pass to your fellow fessups. It is a difficult question. There is one on the surface still who loves me, though he has never spoken his love; I have felt it radiating from him. I feel I can trust him as I can trust few men. He has been sent from Matrassyl to fight in a distant land.’
‘We have no wars down here, sweet child.’
‘This trusted friend of mine is often in pauk. His father is here in the world below. My friend’s name is Hanra TolramKetinet. I want you to pass a message on to his father, to ask Hanra’s whereabouts, for it is essential that I get a message to him.’
A hissing silence before the shade of Shannana spoke again.
‘My sweet child, in your world nobody communicates fully with another. So much is unknown. Here we have completion. There can be no secrets when the flesh is divested.’
‘I know, Moth,’ said the soul. It feared that kind of completion. It had heard the statement many times. It explained once more what it required from the revered gossie. After many a diversion, understanding was reached, and the soul’s enquiry was passed along the ranks, like a breeze rustling the dead leaves of a forest.
For the soul, there was difficulty in sustaining herself. Phantasms of the upper world seeped in, and a noise like frying. A curtain blew, something rattled with a deadly music. The soul began drifting, despite the cajolings of her mother’s gossie.
At last a message returned to her through the obsidian. Her friend was still among the living. The gossies of his family declared that he had spoken with them recently, when his corporeal part was near a village called Ut Pho in the jungles of the Chwart Heights on the eastern margins of the land called Randonan.
‘My thanks for what I needed to know,’ cried the soul. As it poured forth its gratitude, the maternal gossie puffed dust from its throat and spoke again.
‘Here we pity your poor disrupted lives, when physical sight blinds you. We can communicate with a greater voice beyond your knowledge, where many voices are one. Come soon and hear for yourself. Join us!’
But the frail soul knew these claims of old. The dead and the living were opposing armies; pauk was only a truce.
With many cries of affection, it left the spark which had once been Shannana, to sail upwards towards the spectrums of movement and breath.
When MyrdemInggala was strong enough, she dismissed SartoriIrvrash from her suite with suitable courtesies and no mention of what she had learned in pauk.
She summoned Mai TolramKetinet, sister to the friend of whom she had been enquiring in the world below. Mai aided her through the ritual of a post-pauk bath. The queen sluiced down her body with extra care, as if it had been sullied by its journey towards death.
‘I wish to go into the city, Mai – in disguise. You will accompany me. The princess will remain here. Prepare two sets of peasant clothes.’
When she was alone, MyrdemInggala wrote a letter to General TolramKetinet, apprising him of the threatening events at court. She signed the letter, sealed it with her seal, enclosed it in a leather pouch, and sealed that with a stronger seal.
Dismissing feelings of faintness, she dressed in the peasant clothes Mai brought, and concealed the message pouch in them.
‘We shall leave by the side gate.’
The side gate attracted less attention. There were always beggars and other importuners at the main gate. There were also heads of criminals on poles at present, which stank.
The guard let them through indifferently, and the women walked down the winding road to the city. At this hour, JandolAnganol was probably asleep. It was his habit, learnt from his father, to rise at dawn and show himself, crowned, on his balcony, for all to see. Not only did this gesture induce a feeling of security in the nation; it impressed everyone with the long hours the king worked – ‘like a one-legged peasant’, as the expression was. But the king generally went back to bed after his appearance.
Heavy cloud rolled overhead. The scorching wind, the thordotter, blew from the southeast, picking at their petticoats, blowing its hot breath in their faces till their eyes dried. It was a relief to gain the narrow alleys at the foot of the hill, despite the dust that whipped at their heels.
‘We’ll seek a blessing in the church,’ said MyrdemInggala. There was a church at the end of the street, with steps winding down round its curving wall in the traditional way of Old Borlienese church architecture. Little of the church was above ground except the dome. In this way, the fathers of the church imitated the desire to live underground which possessed the Takers, those holy men of Pannoval who had brought the faith to Borlien, centuries ago.
The two women were not alone in their descent. An old peasant shuffled before them, led by a boy. He held out a hand to them. His story was that he had given up his holding because the heat had killed his crops, and had come to beg in town. The queen gave him a silver coin.
Darkness prevailed inside the church. The congregation knelt in a pool of darkness intended to remind them of their mortal state. Light filtered down from above. The painted image of Akhanaba behind the circular altar was lit by candles. The long bovine face, blue-painted, the eyes kind but inhuman – these were lapped by uncertain shadows.
To these traditional elements was added a more modern embellishment. Near the door, lit by one candle, stood a stylised portrait of a mother, with sad downcast eyes, her hands spread. Many of the women shuffling in kissed the original beholder as they passed her.
No formal service was in progress but, since the church was nevertheless half full, a priest was praying aloud in a high nasal singsong.
‘Many come to knock at thy door, O Akhanaba, and many turn away without a knock.
‘And to those who turn away and those who stand in all piety knocking.
‘Thou sayest, “Cease to cry ‘When willst thou open to me, O All-Powerful One?’
‘“For I say that all the while the door stands open, and never has been shut.” These things are there to be seen but you see them not.’
MyrdemInggala thought of what her mother’s gossie had said. They communicated with a greater voice. Yet Shannana did not mention Akhanaba. Looking up at the face of the All-Powerful, she thought, it’s true, we are surrounded by mystery. Even Rushven can’t understand it.
‘All about you lies all that you need, if you will accept and not take by force. If you would but lay down your self, you would find what is greater than yourself.
‘All things are equal in this world, but also greater.
‘“Ask not therefore if I am man or animal or stone:
‘“All these I am and more that you must learn to perceive.”’
The chanting went on, the choir joining in. The queen reflected how excellently the alto voices chimed with the stone vaulting overhead; here indeed were spirit and stone united.
She put a hand under her clothes and placed it on her breast, trying to still the beating of her heart.
Despite the beauty of the singing, the apprehension in her would not be soothed. There was no time to contemplate eternity under the pr
essure of dire events.
When the priest had blessed them, she was ready to go on. The two women, shawls about their heads, went out again into the wind and daylight.
The queen led them to the quayside, where the River Takissa looked dark and choppy, like a narrow sea. A boat just in from Oldorando was mooring with some difficulty. Small boats were being loaded, but there was less activity than usual because of the thordotter. Empty carts, barrels, timbers, winches, and other equipment essential to river life stood about. A tarpaulin whipped back and forth in the wind. The queen walked on determinedly until they reached a warehouse over which was a sign reading: LORDRYARDRY ICE TRADING COMPANY.
This was the Matrassyl headquarters of the famous ice captain, Krillio Muntras of Lordryardry.
The warehouse had an assortment of doors on all floors, large and small. MyrdemInggala chose the smallest on the ground floor and walked in. Mai followed.
Inside was a cobbled court, with fat men rolling barrels of their own shape over to a dray.
‘I wish to speak with Krillio Muntras,’ she said to the nearest man.
‘He’s busy. He won’t speak to anyone,’ the man said, regarding her suspiciously. She had drawn a veil across her face, so as not to be recognised.
‘He’ll speak to me.’ She withdrew from a finger of her left hand a ring with the colours of the sea in it. ‘Take this to him.’
The man departed, muttering. By his stature and accent, she knew he was from Dimariam, one of the countries of the southern continent of Hespagorat. She waited impatiently, tapping her foot on the cobbles, but after a moment the man was back, his attitude much changed. ‘Pray allow me to show you to Captain Muntras.’
MyrdemInggala turned to Mai. ‘You will wait here.’
‘But, ma’am—’
‘And do not obstruct the men in their work.’
She was shown into a workshop smelling of glues and fresh-shaved wood, where old men and apprentices were sawing up timbers and making them into chests and iceboxes. The workbenches were bearded with long curly shavings. The men watched the hooded female figure curiously as it passed.