Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [265]
The Journey temporarily laid waste the grazing along its entire length. Yet it also caused the earth to bloom.
Even in semi-desert, the Madis walked through an avenue of trees, bushes, herbs which they themselves had accidentally planted. Even on barren mountainsides, flowers blossomed which were otherwise seen only in the plains. The eastward and westward avenues – called ucts by the Madis – ran like ribbons, sometimes intertwined, right across the equatorial continent of Helliconia, marking an original trail of scumber.
Endlessly walking, Roba forgot his human connections and the hatred of his father. The Journey through the ucts was his life, his Ahd. At times, he could deceive himself and believe that he understood the murmured narrative that passed through the daily bloodstream.
Although he preferred migratory life to the scheming life of the court, it was a struggle to adapt himself to Madi eating habits. They retained a fear of fire, so their cooking was primitive, though they made a flat unleavened bread, called a la’hrap, by spreading a dough over hot stones. This la’hrap they stored to eat either fresh or stale. With it went blood and milk drawn from their animals. Occasionally, during feasts, they ate raw pulverised meat.
Blood was important to them. Roba wrestled with a whole nexus of words and phrases which had something to do with journeys, blood, food, and god-in-blood. He often meant to clarify his thoughts at night, to write down his knowledge when all was quiet; but directly they had eaten their frugal meal, everyone fell asleep. Roba also slept
No power could stop his eyelids closing. He slept without dreams, as he imagined his travelling companions did. Perhaps if they ever learnt to dream, he thought, they would turn that mysterious corner which separated their existence from a human one.
When the female, having clung to him for her brief ecstasy, fell away, he wondered in the moment before sleep if she was happy. There was no way he could ask or she answer. And he? He had been lovingly brought up by his mother, the queen of queens, and yet he knew that in all human happiness lies an unremitting sorrow. Perhaps the Madis escaped that sorrow by failing to become human.
Mist coiled over the Takissa and over Matrassyl, but above the city the suns burned. Because the air stifled in the palace, Queen MyrdemInggala lay in her hammock.
She had spent the morning dealing with supplicants. Many of her citizens were known to her by name. Now she dreamed in the shade of a small marble pavilion. Her reveries were of the king, who had recovered from his wound and then, without a word of explanation, had gone away on a journey – some said upriver to Oldorando. She had not been invited. Instead, he had taken with him the orphaned phagor runt, a survivor, like the king, of the Battle of the Cosgatt.
Beside the pavilion, MyrdemInggala’s chief lady-in-waiting, Mai TolramKetinet, played with Princess Tatro. She amused her with a painted wooden bird which flapped its wings. Other toys and storybooks lay scattered on the tesserae of the pavilion.
Scarcely aware of her daughter’s prattle, the queen allowed the bird to fly free in her mind. She had it flutter up into the branches of a gwing-gwing tree, where the ripe fruit hung in bunches. In the magic of her thought, Freyr became a harmless gwing-gwing. Its threatening advance towards the world became nothing more than fructiferous ripeness. Under the same magic which drowsed beneath the queen’s lids, she both was and was not the soft gwing-gwing flesh.
Their flesh came down and touched the ground. The globes of their summery weight were furred. They rolled under the hedges, sprawled in the velvets of the moss beneath, their cheeks gentle against the verdure. And the wild boar came.
It was a boar but it was her husband, her master, her king.
The boar