Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [369]
So that was it. He waited before replying.
‘The king saw that his duty lay in serving his country …’
‘You must feel bitter at his treatment of you. You must hate him.’
When SartoriIrvrash did not reply to that, Pasharatid said, or rather, shouted quietly in his ear, ‘How could he bear to give up a lady as lovely as the queen?’
No response.
‘Your countrymen call her “the queen of queens”, is that not correct?’
‘That is correct.’
‘I never saw anyone so beautiful in my life.’
‘Her brother, YeferalOboral, was a close friend of mine.’
This remark silenced Pasharatid. He appeared almost about to terminate the conversation when, with a burst of feeling, he said, ‘Just to be in Queen MyrdemInggala’s presence – just to see her – made a man – affected a man like …’
He did not finish his sentence.
Weather conditions were changeable. A complex system of high-and low-pressure areas brought fogs, hot brownish rains, such as they had encountered on the voyage across to Sibornal – ‘regular Uskuti up-and-downers’ – and periods of clarity where the featureless coastlines of Loraj could sometimes be glimpsed to starboard. Still they made good time, with pursuing winds either warm from the southwest or chilly from west of northwest.
Boredom drove SartoriIrvrash to become familiar with every part of the ship. He saw how the men were so cramped that they slept on deck on coils of rope, or on bins below deck, their heels propped high on the bulkheads. There was not an inch of spare space.
Day by day, the smell of the ship grew stronger. To perform their solid excretions, the men pulled off their trousers and worked their way along a spar set over the side of the ship, on which they had to balance, with a rope coming down from the yardarm to hold onto. Urination was performed to leeward, over the rail – and in dozens of other places, judging by olfactory evidence. The officers fared almost as badly. The women enjoyed better privacy.
After almost three weeks at sea the course was changed from due west to west by northwest, and the Golden Friendship and its companion sailed into Persecution Bay.
Persecution Bay was a great and melancholy indentation over one thousand miles long and five hundred miles deep on the coast of Loraj. Even at its mouth, the sea slackened, while day by day the wind dropped and the temperature fell. Soon they moved through a pearly haze, broken only by the shouts of the duty man calling the depth. They travelled now by dead reckoning.
Impatience seized SartoriIrvrash. He retired to his kennel of a cabin to smoke and read. Even those occupations were unsatisfactory, for his stomach howled like a lost dog. Already, ship’s rations were causing him, a thin man at the best of times, to tighten his belt. Men’s rations were salted fish, onions, olive or fish oil with bread every morning, soup at midday, and a repetition of breakfast for the evening meal, with hard cheese substituted for fish. A mug of fig wine or yoodhl was served to each man twice a week.
The men supplemented this diet with fresh-caught fish, hooked over the side. Officers fared little better, apart from an issue of pungent arang milk occasionally, to which was added brandy for those on watch. The Sibornalese complained at this diet in no more than a routine way, as if inured to it.
Moving forward at five knots, they crossed the line of 35°N, thus leaving the tropics for the narrow northern temperate zone. On that same day, they heard fearsome crashings through the mist, and a series of huge waves set the ship rocking. Then silence again. SartoriIrvrash poked his head out of his cabin and enquired of the first seaman who passed what it was.
‘Coast,’ said the man. And in a fit of communicativeness added a further word, ‘Glaciers.’
SartoriIrvrash nodded in satisfaction. He turned back to his notebook, which was, for want of better occupation, becoming a diary.
‘Even if the Uskuti are not civilised, they are enlarging my knowledge of the world. As is well known among scholars, our globe is set between great bands of ice. To the extreme north