Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [320]
Those fires did not touch everyone. In some quarters, Helliconia was regarded as the relic of an age long past, a period of troubled history best forgotten, when human affairs had been little better managed on Earth than on Helliconia. The new men turned their faces to a new way of life in which the human and its engines were not to be the ultimate arbiter. Some who worked towards those goals found time still to cheer for crabbed SartoriIrvrash, or to become Myrdolators.
The terrestrial followers of the queen were many, even in the new lands. Day and night, they awaited their fossil news.
X
Billy Changes Custody
Whether Akhanaba or the ‘crazed geometries’ were in charge of events in Matrassyl – whether those events were pre-ordained or the result of blind happenstance – whether free will or determinism determined – the fact was that the next twenty-five hours were miserable ones for Billy Xiao Pin. All the bright colours he had experienced in his early hours on Helliconia had faded. Nightmare took over.
On that winter’s day in the Great Summer when Chancellor SartoriIrvrash interrogated Billy and did not listen properly, there was a period of night of almost five hours’ duration when neither Freyr nor Batalix was in the sky.
YarapRombry’s Comet could be seen low on the northern horizon. Then it was swallowed by a freak fog. The thordotter did not blow, as expected, but sent fog in its stead.
The fog arrived the way the queen left, by river. It made itself felt first as a cold shiver down the naked spines of wharfmen, ferrymen, and others whose livelihood lay along the confluences of the Valvoral and the Takissa.
Some of those watermen, going home, took the insidious element with them into the houses which lined the poor streets behind the docks – and made them the poorer for it. Wives, peering out as they dragged shutters across windows, saw godowns dissolve into a universal sepia puddle.
The puddle rose higher, brimming over the cliffs, as cunning as ill health, and penetrated the castle walls.
There, soldiers in their thin uniforms, shaggy-coated phagors, stirred the infection after them as they patrolled, coughed into it, became devoured by it. The palace itself did not long resist the invasion, but took on the aspects of a ghost of a palace. Through the empty rooms where Queen MyrdemInggala had lived, the fog went mournfully without a sound.
The marauder also found entry to the world under the hill. It snuffled amid that nest of gongs and exclamations and prayers and prostrations and processions and suppressions where holiness was manufactured; there, its uncanny breath mingled easily with the exhalations of vigils and congregations, and created purple haloes about devotional candles, as if here, and here alone, it found a kindred place where it was welcome. It coiled along floors among bare feet, and found out the secret places of the mountain.
To those secret places, Billy Xiao Pin was being escorted.
He rested his head wearily on his table once SartoriIrvrash had left him, letting tired thoughts run riot through his head. When he tried consciously to check on them, the thoughts were gone like criminals over a wall. Had he once described Helliconia as a ‘form of argument’? Well, there was no arguing with the reality. He recalled all his glib debates about reality with his Advisor, back on the Avernus. Now he had a dose of reality, and it would kill him.
The criminal thoughts crept into action again, to be checked when the doglike Lex placed a bowl of food before him.
‘Do eating,’ the ancipital commanded, as Billy looked mistily up at him.
The food was a porridge into which highly coloured fruit had been chopped. He took up a silver spoon and began to eat. The taste was insipid. After a few spoonfuls, drowsiness overcame him. He pushed the bowl away, groaning, and laid his head on the table again. Flies settled on the food, and on his undefended cheek.
Lex went to the wall opposite