Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [399]
There was the beautiful breeze, the sky, the sea – why, as she strove to rejoice, did misery invade her? It could not be because she was jealous of the relationship which had grown – like a weed, she said to herself, like a weed – between her Priest-Militant Admiral and the Borlienese ex-chancellor. Nor could it be because she felt the slightest spark of affection for Io. ‘Think of winter,’ she told herself – using an Uskuti expression meaning, ‘Freeze your hopes.’
Even the communion with the Azoiaxic, which she was unable to break off, had proved disconcerting. It seemed that the Azoiaxic had no place for Dienu Pasharatid in his bosom. Despite her virtue, he was indifferent. He was indifferent despite her seemly behaviour, her circumspection.
In this respect at least, the Dweller, the Lord of the Church of the Formidable Peace, had proved dismayingly to resemble Io Pasharatid himself. And it was this reflection, rather than consolation, which pursued her over the empty leagues of sea. Anything was welcome by way of distraction. So, when the coast of Borlien appeared, she turned briskly from the wheel and summoned the bugler to sound ‘Good Tidings’.
Soon the rails of the four ships were crowded with soldiers, eager for a first glimpse of the land they were planning to invade and subjugate.
One of the last passengers to arrive on deck was SartoriIrvrash. He stood for a while in the open air, clapping his clothes and breathing deep to disperse a smell of phagor. The phagor was gone; only her bitter scent remained – that, and a fragment of knowledge.
After the Golden Friendship had left Findowel, it sailed southeastwards across the Gulf of Ponipot, past ancient lands, and through the Cadmer Straits, the narrowest stretch of water between Campannlat and Hespagorat. These were lands that legends told of; some said that humans had come into being here, some that language was first spoken here. Here was Ponipot, the Ponpt that little Tatro read about in her fairy tales, Ponipot almost uninhabited, gazing towards the setting of the suns, with its old mouldering cities whose names were still capable of stirring men’s hearts – Powachet, Prowash, Gal-Dundar on the frigid Aza River.
Past Ponipot, to be becalmed off the rocky spines of Radado, the land of high desert, the southern tail of the Barriers, where it was said that under one million humans lived – in contrast to the three and a quarter million in neighbouring Randonan – and certainly fewer humans than phagors: for Radado formed the western end of a great ancipital migratory route which stretched across the whole of Campannlat, the ultima Thule to which the creatures came in the summer of every Great Year, to go about their unfathomable rituals, or simply to squat motionless, staring across the Cadmer Straits towards Hespagorat, towards a destination unknown to other life forms.
Becalmed or otherwise, in those long hot days on the stationary ship, SartoriIrvrash had been content. He had escaped from his study into the wide world. During dimdays, there were long intellectual conversations to be enjoyed with the lady Priest-Militant Admiral, Odi Jeseratabhar. The two of them had become closer. Odi Jeseratabhar’s first intricacy of language had dissolved into something less formal. The involuntary proximities enforced by their narrow quarters had become wished for, treasured. They turned into circumspect lovers. And the circumnavigation of the Savage Continent had become a circumnavigation also of souls.
Sitting together on deck during that enchanted