Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [454]
He bowed in the direction of the Oldorandan king, who smiled back, unaware of what was to come. There were scattered handclaps.
‘While life was peaceful at the Matrassyl court, I was privileged in enjoying the company of MyrdemInggala, called by her subjects the queen of queens – merely because they knew not of Queen Bathkaarnet-she, of course – and her daughter, TatromanAdala. Tatro had a collection of fairy tales which I used to read to her. Although all my papers were destroyed, as I have said, Tatro’s fairy tales were not destroyed, not even when her cruel father banished her to the coast. We have a copy of Tatro’s book here.’
At this point, Odi solemnly raised the little book aloft and held it for all to see.
‘In Tatro’s storybook is a tale called “The Silver Eye”. I read it many times without perceiving its inner meaning. Only when I travelled could I grasp its elusive truth. Perhaps because the herds of flambreg reminded me strongly of primitive ancipitals.’
Until this point, SartoriIrvrash’s delivery, free of his old pedantry, had kept his audience listlessly attentive. Many of the audience lounging on the lawn were drumble organisers, with a natural hatred of phagors; at the word ‘ancipitals’, they showed interest.
‘There is an ancipital in the story of the Silver Eye.
‘The ancipital is a gillot. Her role is advisor to a king in a mythical country, Ponpt. Well, not so mythical: Ponpt, now called Ponipot, still exists to the west of the Barrier Mountains. This gillot is superior to the king, and provides him with the wisdom whereby he rules. He depends on her as a son on a mother. At the end of the story, the king kills the gillot.
‘The Silver Eye itself is a body like a sun, but silver and shining only by night. Like a close star, without heat. When the gillot is slain, the Silver Eye sails away and is lost for ever.
‘What did all that signify? I asked myself. Where was the meaning of the tale?’
He leaned over the podium, hunching his shoulders and pointing at the audience in his eagerness to tell the tale.
‘The key to the puzzle came when I was on an Uskuti sailing vessel. The vessel was becalmed in the Cadmer Straits. Odi, this lady here, and I landed on Gleeat Island, where we managed to capture a wild gillot with a black pelage. The females of the ancipital species have a one-day flow of menses from the uterus as a prelude to the oestral cycle, when they go into rut. Because of my prejudice against the species, I have no knowledge of Native Ancipital or even Hurdhu, but I discovered then that the gillot’s word for her period was “tennhrr”. That was the key! Forgive me if such a subject seems too disgusting to contemplate.
‘In my studies – all destroyed by the great King JandolAnganol – I had noted that even phagors preserved one or two legends. They could hardly be expected to make sense. In particular, there is a legend which says Helliconia once had a sister body circling about it, just as Batalix circles about Freyr. This sister body flew away as Freyr arrived and as mankind was born. So the legend goes. And the name of the escaping body in Native is T’Sehn-Hrr.
‘Why should “tennhrr” and “T’Sehn-Hrr” be virtually the same word? That was the question I asked myself.
‘A gillot’s tennhrr occurs ten times in a small year – every six weeks. We may therefore assume that this heavenly eye or moon served as a timing mechanism for the periods. But did the moon “T’Sehn-Hrr”, supposing it existed, circle Helliconia once every six weeks? How to check on something which happened so long ago that human history has no record of it?
‘The answer lay in Tatro’s story.
‘Her story says that the silver eye in the sky opened and shut. Possibly that means it grew bigger or smaller, according to distance, as does Freyr. It became wide open or full ten times in a year. That was it. Ten times again. The pieces of the puzzle fitted.
‘You understand the unmistakable conclusion to which I was drawn?’
Gazing at his audience, SartoriIrvrash saw that indeed many of them did not understand. They waited