Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [592]
Finally she returned. She stared and looked at him almost without recognition.
‘You never visit those below?’ she said in a small voice.
‘Never. We Shokerandits regard it as gross superstition.’
‘Do you not wish to speak with your dead brother?’
‘No.’
After a silence, he clutched her hand and asked, ‘You have been communing with your husband again?’
She nodded without speaking, knowing it was bitter to him. After a moment, she said, ‘Isn’t this world we live in like an evil dream?’
‘Not if we live by our beliefs.’
She clung to him then and said, ‘But isn’t it true that one day we shall grow old, and our bodies decay, and our wits fail? Isn’t that true? What could be worse than that?’
They made love again, this time more from fear than affection.
After he had done the rounds of the estate the next day, and found everything quiet, he went to visit his mother.
His mother’s rooms were at the rear of the mansion. A young servant girl opened the door to him, and showed him into his mother’s anteroom. There stood his mother, in characteristic pose, hands clasped tightly before her, head slightly on one side as she smiled quizzingly at him.
He kissed her. As he did so, the familiar atmosphere that she carried round with her enveloped him. Something in her attitude and her gestures suggested an inward sorrow, even – he had often thought it – an illness of some kind: and yet an illness, a sorrow, so familiar that Lourna Shokerandit drew on them almost as a substitute for other marked characteristics.
As she spoke gently to her son, not reproaching him for failing to come earlier, compassion rose in his heart. He saw how age had increased its tyranny upon her since their last meeting. Her cheeks and temples were more hollow, her skin more papery. He asked her what she had been doing with herself.
She put out a hand and touched him with a small pressure, as if uncertain whether to draw him nearer or push him away.
‘We won’t talk here. Your aunt would like to see you too.’
Lourna Shokerandit turned and led him into the small wood-panelled room within which much of her life was spent. Luterin remembered it from childhood. Lacking windows, its walls were covered with paintings of sunlit glades in sombre caspiarn forests. Here and there, lost among representations of foliage, women’s faces gazed into the room from oval frames. Aunt Yaringa, the plump and emotional Yaringa, was sitting in a corner, embroidering, in a chair upholstered somewhat along her own lines.
Yaringa jumped up and uttered loud soblike noises of welcome.
‘Home at last, you poor poor thing! What you must have been through …’
Lourna Shokerandit lowered herself stiffly into a velvet-covered chair. She took her son’s hand as he sat beside her. Yaringa perforce retreated to her padded corner.
‘It’s happiness to see you back, Luterin. We had such fears for you, particularly when we heard what happened to Asperamanka’s army.’
‘My life was spared through a piece of good fortune. All our fellow countrymen were slain as they returned to Sibornal. It was an act of deep treachery.’
She looked down at her thin lap, where silences had a habit of nestling. Finally she said, without glancing up, ‘It is a shock to see you as you are. You have become so … fat.’ She hesitated on the last word, in view of her sister’s presence.
‘I survived the Fat Death and am in my winter suit, Mother. I like it and feel perfectly well.’
‘It makes you look funny,’ said Yaringa, and was ignored.
He told the ladies something of his adventures, concluding by saying, ‘And I owe my survival in great part to a woman called Toress Lahl, widow of a Borldoranian I killed in battle. She nursed me devotedly through the Fat Death.’
‘From slaves, devotion is to be expected,’ said Lourna Shokerandit. ‘Have you been to see the Esikananzis yet? Insil will be eager to see you again, as you know.’
‘I have not yet spoken to her. No.’
‘I shall arrange a feast for tomorrow night, and Insil and her