Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [291]
He came into the damp set of chambers reserved for his father.
Even in his self-absorption, he felt the chill and the damp. A ghost of remorse moved in his harneys.
VarpalAnganol sat in the end room of three, wrapped in a blanket, gazing into a log fire smouldering in a grate. A grille high in one wall let in the last of daylight. The old man looked up, blinking, and made a slapping noise with his lips, as if moistening his mouth preparatory to speech, but he said nothing.
‘Father. It’s I. Have you no lamp?’
‘I was just trying to calculate what year it was.’
‘It’s 381, winter.’ It was some weeks since he had set eyes on his father. The old man had aged considerably, and would soon be one with the gossies.
He got himself to the standing position, supporting himself with an arm of the chair.
‘Do you want to sit down, my boy? There’s only the one chair. This place is not very well furnished. It will do me good to stand for a while.’
‘Sit down, Father. I want to talk to you.’
‘Have they found your son – what’s his name? Roba? Have they found Roba?’
‘He’s crazy, even the foreigners know it.’
‘You see, he liked the desert as a child. I took him there, and his mother. The wide sky …’
‘Father, I am thinking of divorcing Cune. There are state reasons.’
‘Oh, well, you could lock her up with me. I like Cune, nice woman. Of course, we’d need another chair …’
‘Father, I want some advice. I want to talk to you.’ The old man sank down on the chair. JandolAnganol crossed in front of him and squatted facing him, back to the feeble fire. ‘I want to ask you about – love, whatever love is. Are you attending? Everyone is supposed to love. The highest and the lowest. I love the All-Powerful Akhanaba, and perform my worship every day; I am one of his representatives here on earth. I also love MyrdemInggala, above all women who ever breathed. You know that I have killed men I thought looked lustfully upon her.’
A pause followed while his father gathered his thoughts.
‘You’re a good swordsman, that I never denied.’ The old man tittered.
‘Didn’t a poet say that Love is like Death? I love Akhanaba and I love Cune, yes. Yet under that love – I often ask myself – under that love, isn’t there a vein of hatred? Should there be? Does every man feel as I do?’
The old man said nothing.
‘When I was a child, how you beat me! You punished me by locking me out. Once you locked me down here in this very cellar, remember? And yet I loved you, loved you without question. The fatal innocent love of a boy for his father. How is it I can love nobody else without that poison of hate leaking in?’
The old man wriggled in the chair as his son spoke, as if possessed of an incurable itch.
‘There’s no end to it,’ he said. ‘No end at all … We cannot tell where one emotion ends and the next begins. Your trouble’s not hate but guilt. That’s what you feel – guilt, Jan. I feel it, all men feel it. It’s an inherited misery bred in the bone, for which Akha punishes us with cold and heat. Women don’t seem to feel it the way men do. Men control women, but who’s to control men? Hate’s not bad at all. I like hate, I’ve always enjoyed hate. It keeps you warm at nights …
‘Listen, when I was young, lad, I hated almost everyone. I hated you because you wouldn’t do as you were told. But guilt – guilt’s a different matter, guilt makes you miserable. Hate cheers you up, makes you forget guilt.’
‘Love?’
The old man sighed, blowing his bad breath into the dank atmosphere. It was so dark that his son could not see his face, only the gap in it.
‘Dogs love their masters, that I do know. I had a dog once, a wonderful dog, white with a brown face, eyes like a Madi. He used to lie beside me on my bed. I loved that dog. What was his name?’
JandolAnganol stood up. ‘Is that the only love you’ve ever felt? Love for some scumbering hound?’
‘I don’t remember loving anyone else … Anyway, you are going to have a divorcement