Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [267]
Akhanaba punished her for her wanton thoughts. He punished her with the understanding that she would never know Jan, however close they were. By the same token – this was more painful – he would never know her as she desired to be known. As Hanra TolramKetinet mysteriously knew her, without a word being exchanged.
The spell of her reverie was broken by approaching footsteps. Opening one eye, MyrdemInggala saw the chancellor approaching. SartoriIrvrash was the only man in the court allowed into her private garden; it was a right she had granted him on the death of his wife. From her perspective of twenty-four and a half years, SartoriIrvrash was old at thirty-seven years and several tenners. He would not interfere with her women.
Yet she shut her eye again. This was the time of day when he returned from a certain nearby quarry. JandolAnganol had told her, laughing harshly, about the experiments SartoriIrvrash carried out on wretched captives in cages. His wife had been killed by those experiments.
His bald pate shone in the sun as he removed his hat to Tatro and Mai. The child liked him. The queen would not intervene.
SartoriIrvrash bowed to the recumbent form of the queen, and then to her daughter. He spoke to the child as if she were an adult, which possibly explained why Tatro liked him. There were few people in Matrassyl who could claim to be his friend.
This retiring man, of medium height and dishevelled dress, had been a power in Borlien for a long while. Thus when the king lay incapacitated by the wound received in the Cosgatt, SartoriIrvrash had ruled in his stead, directing the affairs of state from his untidy desk. If no one was his friend, all respected him. For SartoriIrvrash was disinterested. He played no favourites.
He was too solitary for favourites. Even the death of his wife appeared to have made no difference to his regime. He did not hunt or drink. He rarely laughed. He was too cautious to be caught in a mistake.
Nor had he even the customary swarm of relations on whom to bestow patronage. His brothers were dead, his sister lived far away. SartoriIrvrash passed muster as that impossible creature, a man without faults, serving a king who was full of them.
In a religious court, he had only one point of vulnerability. He was an intellectual and an atheist.
Even the insult of his atheism had to be overlooked. He tried to convert nobody to his way of thinking. When not occupied with affairs of state, he worked on his book, filtering truth from lies and legends. But that did not stop him occasionally showing a more human side of his nature and reading fairy tales to the princess.
SartoriIrvrash’s enemies in the scritina often wondered how he – so cold-blooded – and King JandolAnganol – so hot-blooded – kept from each other’s throat. The fact was, SartoriIrvrash was a self-effacing man; he knew how to swallow insults. And he was too remote from other people to be offended by them – until pressed too far. That time would come, but it was not yet.
‘I thought you weren’t coming, Rushven,’ said Tatro.
‘Then you must learn to have more faith in me. I always appear when I am needed.’
Soon Tatro and SartoriIrvrash were sitting together in the pavilion and the princess was thrusting one of her books at him, demanding a story. He read the one which always made the queen uneasy, the fairy tale of the silver eye.
‘Once upon a