Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [387]
The king smiled, or at least showed his teeth, as he attempted to approach his son. Roba backed away. ‘You’ll never understand what your grandfather did to me. You’ll never understand his power over me – then – now – perhaps for ever – because I have no power over you. I could succeed only by putting him away.’
‘Prisons flow like glaciers in your blood. I’m going to be a Madi, or a frog. I refuse to be human as long as you claim that title.’
‘Rob, don’t be so cruel. See sense. I – am about to – have to – marry a Madi girl soon. That’s why I came to inspect the Madi here. Please stay with me.’
‘Trittom your Madi-slave woman! Count progeny! Measure, make notes! Write it down, suffer, lock up the fertile ones, and never forget that there is one running loose about Helliconia fit to send you to an eternal prison …’
As he spoke, the youth was backing away, fingers trailing on the ground. Then he turned and darted away into the bushes. A moment later, the king spied his figure climbing over the quarry cliff. Then he was gone.
The king went and leaned against the trunk of a tree, closing his eyes.
It was the whimpering of the guard which roused him. He went over to where the old man sprawled, and assisted him to his feet.
‘Sorry for that, sir, but perhaps a small slave, now I’m getting past it …’
Rubbing his forehead with a weary gesture, JandolAnganol said, ‘You can answer some questions, slanje. Tell me, please, which way is it that Madi women prefer copulation? From the rear, like animals, or face to face, like humans? Rushven would have told me.’
The guard rubbed his hands on his tunic and laughed. ‘Oh, both ways, sir, to my observation, and I’ve seen it many times, working here with no help. But mainly from the rear, as do the Others. Some say as they mate for life, others as they are promiscuous, but cage life is different.’
‘Do the Madi sexes kiss each other on the lips like humans?’
‘I’ve not seen that sir? no. Only humans.’
‘Do they lick genitals before congress?’
‘That is prevalent in all cages, sir. A lot of licking. Licking and sucking mostly, I’d say, very dirty.’
‘Thank you. Now you may release the prisoners. They have served their purpose. Set them free.’
He left the quarry with a slow step, one hand on his sword, one on his brow.
Soft bars of shadow cast by the rajabarals moved across him as he headed back for the palace. Freyr was near to setting. The sky was yellow. Concentric haze aurioles of brown and orange, created by volcanic dust particles, encompassed the sun. It lay near the horizon like a pearl in a corrupt oyster. And the king said to Lapwing, ‘I can’t trust him. He’s wild, just as I was. I love him but I’d be better advised to kill him. If he had the sense to work with his mother forming an alliance in the scritina against me, I’d be finished … I love her, but I’d be better advised to kill her, too …’
The hoxney made no response. It moved towards the sunset with no ambition but to get home.
The king became aware of the vileness of his own thoughts.
Looking up at the flaring sky, he saw there the evil his religion taught him to see. ‘I must chasten myself,’ he said. ‘Aid me, O All-Powerful One!’
He stuck a spur in Lapwing’s flank. He would go and see the First Phagorian Guard. They raised no difficult moral issues. With them he felt at peace.
The brown aureoles triumphed over the yellow. As Freyr disappeared, the oyster became ashen from its extremities inwards, changing minute by minute as the Batalix sunlight caught it. Its beauty lost, it became just a cloud formation among jumbled cloud as Batalix itself sloped westward. Akhanaba could be saying – and in no enigmatic fashion – that the whole complex scheme of things was about to end.
JandolAnganol returned to his silent palace, to find there an envoy from the Holy Pannovalan Empire. Alam Esomberr, all smiles, awaited his pleasure.
His bill of divorcement had arrived at last. He had but to present it to the