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‘I shall have to go back.’

‘Then I return with you – I’m not leaving you again, my precious,’ Oyre said. ‘Raynil Layan can do as he pleases. Dol and the boy stay with father.’

As they stood talking, clutching each other, smoke drifted across the plains from the west. They were too involved, too happy, to notice.

‘The sight of my son revives me,’ Aoz Roon said, hugging the child and drying his eyes on his sleeve. ‘Dol, if you are able to let the past die, I’ll be a better man to you from now on.’

‘You speak words of regret, Father,’ Oyre said. ‘I should be the first to do that. I know now how wilfully I behaved to Laintal Ay, and almost lost him as a consequence.’

As he saw the tears come to her eyes, Laintal Ay thought involuntarily of his snoktruix in the earth below the rajabarals, and reflected that it was only through Oyre’s nearly having lost him that they were now able to find each other. He soothed her, but she burst out of his grasp, saying, ‘Forgive me, and I’ll be yours – and wilful no more, I swear.’

He clasped her, smiling. ‘Keep your will. It’s needed. We have much else to learn, and must change as times change. I’m grateful to you for understanding, for making me act.’

They clung lovingly together, clutching each other’s skeletal bodies, kissing each other’s fragile lips.

The Madi guide began to come to his senses. He got up and called for Raynil Layan, but the master of the mint had fled. The smoke was thicker now, adding its ashes to the ashen sky.

Aoz Roon started to relate his experiences on the island to Dol, but Laintal Ay interrupted.

‘We’re united again, and that is miraculous. But Oyre and I must return to Embruddock in all haste. We’ll surely be needed there.’

The two sentinels were lost in cloud. A breeze was rising, troubling the plain. It was the breeze, blowing from the direction of Embruddock, which carried the news of fire. Now the smoke became denser. It became a shroud, dimming the living beings – whether friend or foe – scattered across the expanses of plain. Everything was enveloped. With the smoke came the stench of burning. Flights of geese winged eastwards overhead.

The human figures clustering about two antlered animals represented between them three generations. They began to move across the landscape as it faded from view. They would survive, though everyone else perished, though the kzahhn triumphed, for that was what befell.

Even in the flames consuming Embruddock, new configurations were being born. Behind the ancipital mask of Wutra, Shiva – god of destruction and regeneration – was furiously at work on Helliconia.

The eclipse was total now.

END OF VOLUME ONE

… Alternatively, you may believe that all these things existed before, but that the human race was wiped out by a burst of fiery heat or its cities were laid low by some great upheaval of the world or engulfed by greedy rivers which persistent rains had driven to overflow their banks. All the more reason, then, to concede my point and admit that an end is coming to earth and sky. If the world was indeed shaken by such plagues and perils, then it needs only a more violent shock to make it collapse in universal ruin.

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura

55BC

Helliconia Summer

Man is all symmetry,

Full of proportions, one limb to another,

And all to all the world besides;

Each part may call the farthest, brother;

For head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides.

More servants wait on Man

Than he’ll take notice of: in every path

He treads down that which doth befriend him

When sickness makes him pale and wan.

Ah, mighty love! Man is one world and hath

Another to attend him.

George Herbert, Man

I

The Seacoast of Borlien

Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again. A short way out to sea, the procession of incoming surges was broken by a rocky mass crowned with vegetation. It marked a division between the deeps and the shallows.