Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [546]
‘That’s how the world is, lady. Jump in.’
They rowed back towards the ship, and the birds followed, crying, crying.
The New Season hoisted sail and began to move over the still water, its bows swinging towards Shivenink. Toress Lahl tried to speak to Shokerandit, but he brushed her to one side; he and Fashnalgid had matters to attend to. She stood by the rail, hand to brow, watching the coastline dwindle.
Odim came up and stood beside her.
‘You need not be sorrowful. We’ll soon reach the safety of the harbour of Rivenjk. There my brother will take us in, and we can rest and recover from our various shocks.’
Her tears burst forth again. ‘Do you believe in a god?’ she asked, turning a tear-stained face towards him. ‘You’ve undergone such sorrow this voyage.’
He was silent before answering. ‘Lady, all my life until now I have lived in Uskutoshk. I behaved like an Uskuti. I believed like an Uskuti. I conformed – which means that I regularly worshipped God the Azoiaxic, the God of Sibornal. Now that I have come away from that place, or have been driven away, as one might say, I can see that I am no Uskuti. What is more, I find I have absolutely no belief in God. At his passing, I felt a weight lifting.’ He patted his chest in illustration, ‘I can say this to you, since you are not an Uskuti.’
She gestured towards the shore they were leaving. ‘This hateful place … those dreadful creatures … all I’ve been through … my husband killed in battle … the gruesomeness of this ship … Everything just gets steadily worse, year by year … Why wasn’t I born in the spring? I’m sorry, Odim – this isn’t like me …’
After a pause, he said gently, ‘I understand. I’ve also undergone bereavement. My wife, my younger children, dear Besi … But I speak to my wife’s gossie in pauk, and she comforts me. Do you not seek out your husband in pauk, lady?’
She said to him in a low voice, ‘Yes, yes, I sink down to his gossie. He is not as I desire to see him. He comforts me and tells me I should find happiness with Luterin Shokerandit. Such forgiveness …’
‘Well? Luterin is a pleasant young man, by all I see and hear.’
‘I can never accept him. I hate him. He killed Bandal Eith. How can I accept him?’ She startled herself by her own antagonism.
Odim shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘If your husband’s gossie so advises you …’
‘I am a woman of principle. Maybe it is easier to forgive when you are dead. All gossies speak with the same voice, sweet like decay. I may cease the habit of pauk … I cannot accept the man who has enslaved me – however tempting the terms he uses to bribe me. Never. It would be hateful.’
He rested a hand on her arm. ‘All is hateful to you, eh? Yet perhaps you should try to think as I do that a new life is being presented to us – us exiles. I am twenty-five and five tenners – no chicken! You are much younger. The Oligarch is supposed to have observed that the world is a torture chamber. That is the case only for those who believe so.
‘When we walked on the shore, killing off those seals – only six out of thousands, after all! – a feeling overcame me that I was being shaped for the winter season in some wonderful way. I had put on flesh but I had shed the Azoiaxic …’ He sighed. ‘I find difficulty talking profoundly. I’m better at figures. I’m only a merchant, as you know, lady. But this metamorphosis through which we have come – it is so wonderful that we must, must, try to live in accord with nature and her generous accountancy.’
‘And so I’m supposed to yield to Luterin, is that it?’ she said, giving him a straight look.
A smile turned the corner of his mouth. ‘Harbin Fashnalgid has a soft spot for you also, lady.’
As they laughed, Kenigg, Odim’s one surviving son, ran up to him and hugged him. He stooped and kissed the boy on his cheek.
‘You’re a marvellous man, Odim, I really think it,’ Toress Lahl said, patting his hand.
‘You are marvellous too – but try not to be too marvellous for happiness. That’s an old Kuj-Juvec saying.’
As she