Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [323]
Like a child finding that animals can talk, Billy listened as they spoke to him. ‘Possibility for revenge against Sons of Freyr at inharmonious season-of-Great-Year has no being. Surviving alone must have all our duty. Watchfulness fills our harneys. All time exists till Freyr-death. Kzahhn JandolAnganol has protective arm for ancipitals’ survival in lands of his component. Therefore, the order is for our legions to make formation in a reinforcement of Kzahhn JandolAnganol. Such is our present law of inharmonious season. Carefulness is what you Billy must take not to make a further torment for this kzahhn of weakness named JandolAnganol. Hast comprehension?’
With the noun-freighted sentences whirling in his head, he tried to declare his innocence. But questions of guilt, or freedom from it, were outside their umwelt. As he spoke, bafflement reinforced the hostility in the air.
Behind their hostility was fear of a kind, an impersonal fear. They saw JandolAnganol as weak, and they feared that when the alliance with Oldorando was sealed by dynastic marriage, their kind might become as subject to persecution in Borlien as in Oldorando. Their hatred of Oldorando was clear and, in particular, their hatred for its capital, which they called by the Eotemporal name of Hrrm-Bhhrd Ydohk.
While ancipital affairs were a mystery – a blank – to mankind, the ancipitals had a good grasp of mankind’s affairs. Such was mankind’s arrogant contempt of them that phagors were often present, though ignored, at the most delicate discussions of state. Thus the humblest runt could act effectively as a spy.
Confronting their stolid forms, Billy thought they intended to hold him to ransom, to influence the king against his new marriage; feebly he tried to convey that the king did not even know of his existence.
As soon as the words had left him, he saw that he had put himself in another danger. They might keep him here, in a worse prison than his previous one, if they realised that his presence in the palace was a secret. But the shaggy council was pursuing another line of thought, reverting once more to the question of Batalix’s capture by Freyr, an event which seemed of obsessive importance to them.
If not from Freyr, then was he from T’Sehn-Hrr? This question he could not understand. By T’Sehn-Hrr, did they mean the Avernus, Kaidaw? Evidently not. They tried to explain, he tried. T’Sehn-Hrr remained a mystery. He was one with the keratinous figures propped against the wall, doomed to say the same thing many times, in an ever-decreasing voice. Talking to phagors was like trying to wrestle with eternity.
The council passed him among them, pressing him here, turning him there. Again they were interested in looking at the three-faced watch on his wrist. Its writhing figures fascinated them. But they made no efforts to remove or even touch it, as if they sensed in it a destructive force.
Billy was still seeking for words when he realised that the kzahhn and his council were departing. Clouds gathered in his head again. He found himself staggering into a familiar chair, let his forehead rest on a familiar table. The gillots had returned him to his cell. A pale shrouded dawn was at hand.
Lex was there, without horns, emasculated and almost faithful.
‘Steps are necessity to bed for a sleep-period,’ he advised.
Billy started to weep. Weeping, he slept.
The fog reached far and wide and took a turn up the River Valvoral to view the jungles embracing either bank. Caring nothing for national frontiers, it penetrated far into Oldorando. There it met, among other river traffic, the Lordryardry Lady heading southeastward to Matrassyl and the distant sea.
With the last of its ice cargo sold profitably in Oldorando, the flat-bottomed boat now bore cargoes for the Borlienese capital of Ottassol: salt; silks; carpets