Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [388]
XVI
The Man who Mined a Glacier
Summer of the small year had yielded to autumn in the southern hemisphere. The monsoons were gathering along the coasts of Hespagorat.
While on the pleasant northern coast of the Sea of Eagles Queen MyrdemInggala swam in the blue waters with her dolphins, on the dull southern coast of that same sea, where it merged with the waters of the Scimitar Sea, the Avernian prize-winner, Billy Xiao Pin, lay dying.
The port of Lordryardry was sheltered from open sea by the Lordry islands, two dozen in number, some of which were used as whaling stations. On these islands, and along the low-lying coasts of Hespagorat, marine iguanas lived in dense colonies. Wattled, warted, armoured, these inoffensive beasts grew to twenty feet in length and were sometimes to be seen swimming out to sea. Billy had observed them as the Ice Captain’s Lordryardry Lady brought him to Dimariam.
Ashore, the beasts swarmed over rocks and marshes and each other. Something in their slothful movements and sudden scurries marked them out as conspirators with the soggy weather which closed in on the Dimariamian shores at this time of small year; where cold air flowed northwards from the polar ice cap to meet the warm air above the oceans, banks of fog formed, enveloping everything in humid overcast.
Lordryardry was a small port of eleven thousand people. It owed its existence almost entirely to the enterprise of the Muntras family. One of its noteworthy features was that it lay at a latitude of 36.5° South, a degree and a half outside the wide tropical zone. Only eighteen and a half degrees farther south lay the polar circle. Beyond that circle, in the realms of eternal ice, Freyr was never to be seen during the long centuries of summer. In the Great Winter, Freyr would reappear, to remain for many lifetimes dominating the vacant world of the pole.
This Billy was told as he was driven by a traditional sledge from the ship to the ice captain’s house. Krillio Muntras recounted such facts with pride, though he fell silent as his home drew near.
The room of the house to which Billy was carried was white. Its windows were framed with white curtains. As he lay locked in illness, Billy could look through trees, over town roofs, to a prospect of white mist. In that mist, an occasional mast loomed.
Billy knew he was shortly to embark on another mysterious journey. Before his ship sailed, he was tended by Muntras’s self-weffacing wife, Eivi, and by his formidable married daughter, Immya. Immya, he was told, had a high standing in the community as a healer.
After a day’s rest, Eivi’s and Immya’s ministrations took effect, or else Billy enjoyed a remission. The encroaching stiffness partially left him. Immya wrapped him in blankets and helped him into the sledge. Four giant horned dogs, asokins, were harnessed up, and the family drove Billy inland to see the famous Lordryardry Glacier.
The Lordryardry Glacier had carved itself a bed between two hills. The leading face of the glacier fell into a lake which drained into the sea.
Billy observed that Krillio Muntras’s manner changed subtly in the presence of his daughter. They were affectionate together, but the respect he showed Immya was not entirely matched by the respect in which she held him – so Billy judged, going less by the way they spoke than by the way Muntras held his backbone and drew in his broad stomach in Immya’s presence, as if he felt he must contain himself when her sharp eyes were on him.
Muntras began to describe the workings at the glacier face. When Immya modestly prompted him on the number of men working there, he asked her without rancour to give the account herself. Which she did. Div stood behind his father and his sister, scowling; though he, as the son, was to inherit the ice company, he had nothing to contribute to the narrative, and soon slunk off.
*
Immya was not only the chief medical practitioner of Lordryardry; she was married to the chief lawyer of the town the Muntras clan