Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [292]
‘Is that what I said?’
‘When? I don’t remember. What time is it, do you reckon? You must announce that she and YeferalOborol, that brother of hers, plotted to murder the Sibornalese ambassador, and that’s how her brother was killed. A conspiracy. There’s a perfect excuse. And then when you put her away, you will please Sibornal as well as Pannoval and Oldorando.’
JandolAnganol clutched his forehead. ‘Father – how did you learn of YeferalOborol’s death? His body was brought back only an hour ago.’
‘You see, son, if you keep very still, as I have to with my stiff joints, everything comes to you. I have more time … There is another possibility …’
‘What’s that?’
‘You can just have her disappear in the darkness one night. Never seen again. Now that the brother’s gone, there’s no one interested enough to make a real fuss. Is her old father still alive?’
‘No. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t even dream of doing it.’
‘Of course you would …’ He panted a little by way of laughter. ‘But my conspiracy idea is a good one, eh?’
The king went to stand under the window. Waves of light floated on the domed brick ceiling of the prison. Outside was the queen’s reservoir. His sorrow accumulated like water. How treacherous this old man still was …
‘Good? Full of guile and taking advantage of circumstances, yes. I see clearly where I had my character from.’
He hammered on the door for release.
After the cellars, the evening world appeared bathed in light. He took a side door and emerged by the reservoir, where a flight of steps led down to the water. Once a boat had been moored there; he remembered playing in it as a boy; now it had disintegrated and sunk.
The sky was the hue of stale cheese, flecked with wisps of grey cloud. On the far side of the pool, like a cliff, rose the queen’s quarters, its elegant outlines black against the sky. A light burned dimly in one window. Perhaps his beautiful wife was there, preparing for her bed. He could go and beg her forgiveness. He could lose himself in her beauty.
Instead, unpremeditatedly, he jumped forward into the reservoir.
He held his hands together above his head as if he were falling from a building. Air belched out from his clothes. The water grew dark rapidly as he sank.
‘Let me never rise,’ he said.
The water was deep and cold and black. He welcomed terror, trying to embrace the mud at the bottom. Bubbles streamed from his nose.
The processes of life commanded by the All-Powerful would not allow him to escape into the avenues of death. Despite his struggles, he found himself drifting upward again. As he surfaced, gasping, the queen’s light went out.
VII
The Queen Visits the Living and the Dead
The next day dawned hot and heavy. The queen of queens allowed herself to be bathed by her women. She played with Tatro for a while, and then summoned SartoriIrvrash to meet her in the family vault.
There she paid her last respects to her brother. Soon he would be buried in his correct land-octave. His body lay swathed in yellow cloth on a block of Lordryardry ice. She noted with grief how even death had not transformed his plain features. She wept for all things prosaic and exotic, for all that had happened and failed to happen to her brother in his lifetime. So the chancellor found her.
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