Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [299]
‘I’m grateful for the chance to help, Madam Queen.’
When they parted, and the queen had taken another glass of refreshing wine, she was more cheerful and battled almost gaily back to the palace with her lady-in-waiting, the sister of the general to whom her letter was now despatched. She could hope, whatever the king had decided.
Throughout the palace, doors banged and curtains fluttered in the wind. Pale of face, JandolAnganol talked to his religious advisors. One of them finally said to him, ‘Your Majesty, this state is holy, and we believe that you have already in your heart come to a decision. You will cement this new alliance for holy reasons, and we shall bless you for it.’
The king replied vehemently, ‘If I make this alliance, it will be because I am wicked, and welcome wickedness.’
‘Not so, my lord! Your queen and her brother conspired against Sibornal, and must be punished.’ They were already halfway to believing the lie he had set in circulation; it was his old father’s lie, but now it had become common property and possessed them one by one.
In their own chambers, the visiting statesmen, awaiting the king’s word, complained about the discomfort of this miserable little palace and of the poverty of the hospitality. The advisors quarrelled amongst themselves, jealous of each other’s privileges; but one thing they agreed on. They agreed that if and when the king divorced his queen and married Simoda Tal, the question of the large phagor population of Borlien should be reopened.
Old histories told how ancipital hordes had once descended on Oldorando and burned it to the ground. That hostility had never died. Year by year, the phagor population was being reduced. It was necessary that Borlien should follow the same policy. With Simoda Tal and her ministers at JandolAnganol’s side, the issue could be pressed harder.
And with MyrdemInggala gone, with her softhearted ways, it would be convenient to introduce drumbles.
But where was the king, and what was his decision?
The time was a few minutes after fourteen o’clock, and the king stood naked in an upper chamber. A great pendulum of pewter swung solemnly against one wall, clicking out seconds. Against the other wall hung an enormous mirror of silver. In the shadows stood serving wenches, waiting with vestments to dress JandolAnganol to appear before the diplomats.
Between the pendulum and the mirror JandolAnganol stood or paced. In his indecision, he ran his finger down the scar on his thigh, or pulled the pallid length of his prodo, or regarded the reflection of those bloody devotional stripes which stretched from his shoulderblades down to his thin buttocks. He snarled at the lean whipped thing he saw.
The king could easily send the diplomats packing; his rage, his khmir, were fully equal to such a deed. He could easily snatch up the thing dearest to him – the queen – and brand her mouth with hot kisses, vowing never to allow her from his sight. Or he could do the opposite – be a villain in private and become a saint in the eyes of many, a saint ready to throw everything away for his country.
Some of those who observed him from afar, such as the Pin family on the Avernus, who studied the cross-continuities of the king’s family, claimed that the decision was made for the king in a distant past. In their records lay the history of JandolAnganol’s family through sixteen generations, back to the time when most of Campannlat lay under snow, back to a distant ancestor of the king’s, AozroOn, who had ruled over a village called Oldorando. Along that line, untraced by those who were part of it, lay a story of division between father and son, submerged in some generations but never absent.
That pattern of division lay deep in JandolAnganol’s psyche, so deep he did not notice it in himself. Beneath his arrogance was an even older self-contempt. His self-contempt made him turn against his dearest friends and consort with phagors; it was an alienation which early years had