Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [416]
For this reason, the terrestrials were particularly interested in pauk. They had at this period discovered their own unity with their own planet, and related that unity to increasing empathy with Helliconia.
In the days that followed, lassitude took the queen of queens and laid her low.
She had lost the things of value which gave existence its previous fragrance. After the storm, the flowers would never lift their heads so high again. With her deep sense of guilt that she had somehow failed her king went bitter anger against him. If she had failed, it was not for want of trying, and the years of loving bestowed on him as freely as breath were more than wasted. Yet love remained beneath her anger. That was the cruellest thing. She understood JandolAnganol’s self-doubt as no one else did. She was unable to break from the bond they had once forged.
Every day, after prayer, she went into pauk, to communicate with her mother’s gossie. After her prostrations, recalling how SartoriIrvrash in particular had condemned all pater-placation as superstition, MyrdemInggala, in a fury of doubt, questioned whether she had visited her mother at all, whether the phantom was not in her head, whether there could be survival for anyone after death, except in the memories of those who had still to pass beyond that forbidding shore.
She questioned. Yet pauk was her consolation as much as the sea. For her dead brother YeferalOborol was now among the gossies, pouring out love for her as he sank towards the original beholder. The queen’s unspoken fear, that he had been murdered by JandolAnganol, was proved baseless. She knew now where the real blame lay. For all that she was grateful.
Yet she regretted not having that additional reason to hate the king. She swam in the sea among her familiars. Peace of mind forsook her each time she returned to shore. The phagors carried her back to the palace in her throne; her resentment grew as she approached its doors. The days dragged by and she grew no younger. She was scarcely on speaking terms with Mai. She ran up to her creaking chambers and hid her face.
‘If you feel so badly, follow the king to Oldorando and plead with the C’Sarr’s representatives there to annul your divorce,’ Mai said in impatient tones.
‘Would you like to follow the king?’ asked MyrdemInggala. ‘I would not.’
Burnt into her memory was a recollection of how, in spendthrift times, this woman, her lady-in-waiting, had been harvested into the king’s bed and the two of them, like low whores, had been pleasured by him at one and the same time. Neither woman spoke of those occasions – but they lay between them as tangibly as a sword.
Chiefly from a need to talk to someone, the queen persuaded CaraBansity to stay at the palace for a few days, and then for a day more. He pleaded that his wife awaited him back home in Matrassyl. She pleaded with him to wait a little longer. He begged to be excused, but, cunning man though he was, he found it impossible to say no to the queen. They walked every day along the shore, sometimes coming on herds of deer, and Mai trailed disconsolately behind them.
When JandolAnganol, Esomberr, and their party had been gone from Gravabagalinien for a week and two days, the queen was sitting moodily in her room, gazing to the landward side of her narrow domain. The door was thrown open and in ran TatromanAdala, shrieking a greeting.
The child came halfway across the gulf between the door and the place where her mother crouched. That mother had raised her head and looked from under her disordered hair with such venom that Tatto halted.
‘Moth! Can you play?’
The mother saw how the daughter’s infant face bore the features of her father’s line.