Helliconia Summer

XI Journey to the Northern Continent

The old man wore an ankle-length keedrant which had seen better days. On his head was a scoop-shaped hat, which protected his scrawny neck as well as his bald pate from the sun. At intervals, he lifted a shaking hand to his lips to puff at the stem of a veronikane. He stood all alone, waiting to leave the palace for good.

At his back was a coach of light build, loaded with his few personal belongings. Two hoxneys were harnessed between the shafts. It needed only a driver, and then SartoriIrvrash could be gone.

The wait afforded him a chance to look across the parade to a corner where an old bent slave with a stick was encouraging a mountain of papers to burn. That bonfire contained all the papers ransacked from the ex-chancellor’s suite, including the manuscripts which formed ‘The Alphabet of History and Nature’.

The smoke rose into a pallid sky from which light ash occasionally fell. Temperatures were as high as ever, but a grey overcast covered everything. The ash was born on an easterly airstream from a newly erupting volcano some distance from Matrassyl. That was of no interest to SartoriIrvrash; it was the black ashes ascending which occupied his attention.

His hand trembled more violently and he made the tip of his veronikane blaze like a small volcano.

A voice behind him said, “Here are some more of your clothes, master.”

His slave woman stood there, a neatly wrapped bundle offered to him. She gave him a placatory smile. “It’s a shame you have to go, master.”

He turned his worn face fully to her, stepped a pace nearer to look into her face.

“Are you sorry to see me go, woman?”

She nodded and lowered her gaze. Well, he thought, she enjoyed it when we had a little rumbo—and to think I never bothered to ask. I never thought of her enjoyment. How isolated I have been in my own feelings. A good enough man, learned, but worth nothing because I had no feelings for others. Except for little Tatro.

He didn’t know what to say to the slave woman. He coughed.

“It’s a bad day, woman. Go inside. Thank you.”

She gave him a last eloquent glance before turning away. SartoriIrvrash thought to himself, Who knows what slave women feel? He hunched his shoulders, irritated with her, and with himself, for showing feeling.

He scarcely noticed when the driver appeared. He took in only a youthful figure, head shrouded against the heat in a kind of Madi hood, so that its face could scarcely be seen.

“Are you ready?” this figure called, as it swung itself up into the driver’s seat. The two hoxneys shuffled as the weight adjusted against their straps.

Still SartoriIrvrash lingered. He pointed with his kane towards the distant bonfire. There goes a whole lifetime’s learning.” He was mainly addressing himself. “That’s what I can’t forgive. That’s what I shall never forgive. All that work…”

With a heavy sigh, he climbed aboard the coach. It began at once to roll forward, towards the palace gates. There were those in the palace who loved him; fearing the king’s wrath, they had not dared to emerge and wave him farewell. He set his face firmly to the front, blinking his eyes rapidly.

The prospects before SartoriIrvrash were dim. He was thirty-seven years and eight tenners old—well past middle age. It was possible that he could get a post as advisor at the court of King Sayren Stund, but he detested both the king and Oldorando, which was far too hot. He had always kept himself apart from his own and his dead wife’s relations in Matrassyl. His brothers were dead. There was nothing for it but to go and live with his daughter; she and her husband dwelt in a dull southern town near the Thribriat border.

There he would sink from human ken and attempt to rewrite his life’s work. But who would print it, now that he had no power? Who would read it if it were not printed? In despair, he had written to his daughter, and now intended to catch a boat that would take him south. The coach proceeded briskly downhill. At the bottom of the hill, instead of turning towards the docks, it swerved to the right and rattled up a narrow alley. Its hubs on its left side screamed as they rubbed against the walls of the houses.

“Take care, you fool, you’ve gone wrong!” said SartoriIrvrash, but he said it to himself. Who cared what happened?

The equipage rattled down a back road under the brow of a cliff and entered a small neglected courtyard. The driver jumped energetically down and closed the courtyard gates, so that they could not be seen from the street. He looked in at the ex-chancellor.

“Would you care to climb down? There’s someone waiting to see you.” He swept off his elaborate headgear in a mock bow.

“Who are you? What have you brought me here for?”

The boy opened the carriage door invitingly.

“Don’t you recognize me, Rushven?”

“Who are you? Why—Roba, it’s you!” he said in some relief—for the thought had occurred to him that JandolAnganol might be planning to kidnap and murder him.

“It’s me or a hoxney, for I move at speed these days. That’s how it’s all secrecy. I’m a secret even from myself. I have vowed to be revenged on my cursed father again, since he banished my mother. And on my mother, who left without a farewell to me.”

As he allowed the boy to help him out, SartoriIrvrash surveyed him, anxious to see if he looked as wild as his words. RobaydayAnganol was now just twelve years old, a smaller and thinner edition of his father. He was toasted brown by the sun; red scars showed on his torso. Smiles came and went like twitches over his face, as though he could not decide whether he was joking or not.

“Where have you been, Roba? We’ve missed you. Your father missed you.”

“Do you mean the Eagle? Why, he nearly caught me. I’ve never cared for court life, I care even less now. My father’s crime has set me free. So I am a hoxney-brother. A Madi-assister. I will never become king, and he will never again become happy. New lives, new lives, and one for you, Rushven! You first introduced me to the desert, and I will not desert you. I’m going to take you to someone important, human, not father or hoxney.”

“Who? What’s this all about? Wait!”

But Roba was striding off. SartoriIrvrash looked doubtfully at the coach loaded with all his worldly goods and then decided he had better follow. Walking fast, he entered a dim hall only a step or two behind the king’s son.

The house was built according to a pattern suited to its overshadowed location: it stretched up to the light like a plant growing between boulders. The old man was panting by the time Roba led them off the shaking wooden stairs and into a room on the third floor, the only room on that level. SartoriIrvrash broke into prolonged coughing and collapsed on a stool someone offered him.

There were three people awaiting them in the room, and he observed that they seized on the opportunity also to cough. A certain rickety elegance in their structure, a certain sharpness of bone structure, marked them out as Sibornalese. One of them was a woman, elegantly dressed in a silk chagirack, the northern equivalent of a charfrul, its delicate fabric patterned with large black and white formal flowers. Two men stood behind her in the shadows. SartoriIrvrash recognized her immediately as Madame Dienu Pasharatid, wife of the ambassador who had disappeared the day that Taynth Indredd had introduced matchlocks into the palace.

He bowed to her and apologized for his coughing.

“We are all doing it, Chancellor. It is the volcano making our throats sore.”

“I believe my throat is sore through grief. You must not call me by my old title.” He would not ask her to what volcano she referred, but she saw uncertainty in his face.

“The volcanic eruption in the Rustyjonnik Mountains. Its ash carries this way.”

She regarded him with sympathy, letting him recover from the stairs. Her face was large and plain. Although he knew her for an intelligent woman, there was an unpleasant asperity about her mouth, and he had often been guilty of avoiding her company.

He looked about. The walls were covered with thin paper which had peeled in places. One picture hung there, a pen-and-tint drawing of what he recognized as Kharnabhar, the holy mountain of the Sibornalese. The only window, which was to one side, lighting Dienu Pasharatid’s face in profile, provided a view of rocky cliff from which creepers hung; the vegetation had a coating of grey ash. Roba sat cross-legged on the floor, sucking a straw and smiling from one to another of the party.

“Madame, what do you want with me? I must go to catch a boat before further disasters befall me,” SartoriIrvrash said.

She stood before him and clutched her hands behind her back, while gently moving her weight from one foot to another.

“We ask you to forgive us for getting you here in such an unusual way, but we wish to enlist your aid—for which aid, we will pay generously.”

She outlined her proposal, turning occasionally to the men for confirmation. All Sibornalese were profoundly religious, believing, as he knew, in God the Azoiaxic, who existed before life and round whom all life revolves. The members of the ambassadorial contingent held the religion of Akhanaba in low regard, considering it little better than a superstition. They were therefore shocked but not surprised when JandolAnganol made the decision to break his marriage and contract another.

Sibornalese—and the Azoiaxic through them—regarded the bond between woman and man as an equal decision to be held through life. Love was a matter of will, not whim.

SartoriIrvrash sat nodding automatically through this part of the speech, recognizing its sententious tone as characteristic of the northern continentals and longing to be on his way.

Roba, not even listening, winked at the ex-chancellor and said confidentially, “This is the house where Ambassador Pasharatid used to meet a lady of the town. It’s an historical whorish house—but for you this lady will only talk.”

SartoriIrvrash hushed him.

Ignoring the interruption, Madame Dienu said that her party felt that he alone, Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, had pretension to knowledge in the Borliense court. They felt that the king had treated him almost as badly as—possibly worse than—the queen. Such injustice distressed them, as it would all members of the Church of the Formidable Peace. She was now returning home. They invited SartoriIrvrash to join them, in the assurance that he would be given good accommodation in Askitosh and a good advisory position in the government, as well as freedom to complete his life’s work.

He felt the trembling which so often overcame him return. Temporizing, he asked, “What sort of advisory post?

Oh, advice on matters Borlienese, upon which he was such an expert. And they were preparing to leave Matrassyl on the hour.

So overwhelmed was he by this offer that SartoriIrvrash did not enquire why this sudden haste. Gratefully, he accepted.

“Excellent!” exclaimed Madame Dienu.

The two men behind her now showed an almost ancipital ability to change from stillness to intense activity without intervening stages. They were immediately gone from the room, to promote shouting on all floors and a galumphing on all stairs, as luggage and people hastened down into the courtyard below. Carriages emerged from shelters, hoxneys from stables, stable boys with harness from tackrooms. A procession was assembled in less time than a Borlienese could have drawn on a pair of boots. Prayers were briskly said, all standing round in a circle, and then they were away, leaving an empty house behind them.

They drove north through the warren of the old town, circled the great semisubterranean Dome of Striving, and were soon on the road north with the Takissa gleaming on their left-hand side. Roba yipped and sang as they went.

Weeks of travel followed.

A feature of the first part of their journey was the pervading greyness caused by the volcanic ash. Mount Rustyjonnik, always a source of grumbling and occasional runs of lava, was in full eruption. The country in the path of its ash became a land of the dead. Trees were killed by the substance, fields covered with it, streams clogged with it. After rain, it turned to paste. Birds and animals died or fled the area. Human families and phagors trudged away from their blighted homes.

Once the Sibornalese party had crossed the River Mar, the blight grew less. Then it faded. They entered Mordriat—a name of terror in Matrassyl. The reality was peaceful. Most of the tribes smiled beneath sheltering layers of braffista turbans, their chief item of apparel.

Guides were engaged to guarantee their safety, thin villainous-looking men who abased themselves at every sunrise and sunset. Round their campfire at night, the head Pointer of the Way, as he called himself, explained to the travellers how the ornamentation on his braffista indicated his rank in life. He boasted of the numerous ranks below his.

None listened more eagerly than SartoriIrvrash. “Strange, this human propensity to create ranks in society,” he observed to the rest of the party.

“A propensity the more noticeable the nearer the bottom of the pile one descends,” said Madame Dienu. “We avoid such demeaning gradations in my land. How you will enjoy seeing Askitosh. It is a model for all communities.”

SartoriIrvrash had some reservations about that. But he found a restful quality in the steady severity of Madame Dienu after years of dealing with a changeable king. As the wilderness grew more arid, his spirits rose; equally, Roba’s madness grew calmer. But when the others slept, SartoriIrvrash could not. His bones, which had become accustomed to a goosedown mattress, could not adapt to a blanket and hard ground. He lay looking up at the stars and the lightning flickering between them, full of an excitement he had not known since he and his brothers were children. Even his bitterness against JandolAnganol abated somewhat.

The weather continued dry. The coaches made fair progress over the low hills. They arrived at a small trading town called Oysha—“Quite probably a corruption of the Local Olonets word ‘osh’, meaning simply ‘town’,” SartoriIrvrash explained to the company. Explanations that could be attached to things made the journey more enjoyable. However the word was derived, at Oysha the Takissa, rushing down from the east, met up with its formidable tributary, the Madura. Both rivers had their sources high in the limitless Nktryhk. Beyond Oysha to the north stretched the Madura Desert.

In Oysha, the coaches were exchanged for kaidaw geldings. The Pointer volubly made the deal, during which much striking of foreheads took place. The kaidaw was a reliable animal when it came to crossing deserts. The rust-coloured brutes stood in the dusty market square of Oysha, indifferent to the deal being negotiated beside them.

The ex-chancellor sat on a chest while the trading was in progress. He mopped his brow and coughed. The outfall from Mount Rustyjonnik had given him a sore throat and fever he could not shake off. He stared at the long haughty faces of the kaidaws—those legendary steeds of the warrior phagors in the Great Winter. It was hard to see in these slow beasts the whirlwind which, with phagors astride it, had brought destruction upon Oldorando and other Campannlatian cities in the time of cold.

In the Great Summer, the animals stored water in their single hump. This made them suitable for desert conditions. They looked meek enough now, but excited SartoriIrvrash’s sense of history.

“I should purchase a sword,” he told RobaydayAnganol. “I was quite a swordsman in my younger day.”

Roba turned a cartwheel. “You turn the year upside down, now that you are free of the Eagle. You’re right to defend yourself, of course. In those hills lives the accursed Unndreid—our herdsmen here sleep with his multitudinous daughters every night. Murder’s as frequent hereabouts as scorpions.”

“The people seem friendly.”

Roba squatted before SartoriIrvrash and put on a cunning leer. “Why are they outwardly so friendly? Why is Unndreid now armed to the teeth with Sibornalese bang-bangs? Have you discovered why the big black Io Pasharatid left the court so suddenly?”

He took SartoriIrvrash’s arm and led him behind one of the coaches for privacy, where only the guileless eyes of the kaidaws were upon them.

“Even my father cannot buy friendship or love. These Sibornalese buy friendship. It’s their way. They’d trade their mothers for peace. They have been greasing their safe passage to Borlien by presenting the chiefs along the route with matchlocks, as they say. I say there is no match for them. Even Akhanaba’s favourite king, JandolAnganol, son of VarpalAnganol, father of a Madi-lover—but not so mad in that direction as he—even that monarch of Matrassyl was no match for matchlocks. They did for him in the Battle of the Cosgatt. Did you ever see the wounds in his thigh?”

“It kept your father abed. I saw only its effects, not the wound.”

“He goes without a limp. Lucky not to go without a hard-on! That wound was a kiss from Sibornal.”

Lowering his voice, SartoriIrvrash said, “You well know that I never trusted the Sibs. When the matchlocks were demonstrated in court, I advised that no Sibs should be present. My word went unheeded. It was shortly after the demonstration that Io Pasharatid disappeared.”

Roba lifted a cautionary finger and wagged it slowly. “Disappeared because his swindles were then revealed—revealed to his wife, our fair companion, and his own ambassadorial staff. There was a local young lady involved, who acted as go-between… and whom I also go between, on occasions… that’s how I know all about Io Pasharatid.”

He laughed. “The matchlocks which Taynth Indredd had in his possession—which he presented so arrogantly to my eagle-father—which my eagle-father took so pusillanimously, because he would take a plague scab from a beggar if it was offered—those matchlocks were sold to Taynth Indredd cheap by Pasharatid. Why cheap? Because they were not his to sell, in which case he could not avoid making a profit. The guns were the property of his government, intended to buy friendship with such as the rogues you see here, and with such as Dervlish the Skull, who has proved his friendship a thousand times over.”

“Unusual behaviour for a Sib. Especially one in high office.”

“High office, low character. It was because of the young lady. Did you never see the way he eyed my fair mother—I mean, she who was my mother before she went away without farewell?”

“Pasharatid would have been put to death if your father had discovered his crime. I assume he is now back in Sibornal.”

RobaydayAnganol shrugged eloquently. “We are following him. Madame Dienu is after his blood. To understand his lust for other ladies, simply contemplate union with her. Would you couple with a matchlock?… He’ll be busy concocting a lying tale, to cover his sins. She will arrive and seek to destroy it. Ah, Rushven, no drama like a family drama! They will have old Io locked up in the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar, mark my words. It was a place of religion, now they lock up criminals there. Well, monks are also prisoners… What a drama to come. You know the old saying, ‘More than an arm up a Sibornalese sleeve.’ I almost wish I were coming with you, to see what happens.”

“But you are coming! My dear boy!”

“Ah, unky, no affection! Not for Anganols! No protests. I’m leaving you here. You go north with Madame. I go back south with this coach. I have my parents to look after… my ex-parents…”

SartoriIrvrash’s face showed his distress. “Don’t leave me, lad, not with these villains. I shall be dead in no time.”

Making funny running-away gestures, the prince said, “Well, that’s escaping from being human, isn’t it? I’m going to be a Madi in no time. Another escape, another escapade. It’s the Ahd for me.”

He jumped forward and kissed SartoriIrvrash on his bald pate.

“Good luck in your new career, old uncle. Green things will grow from us both!”

He leaped into the coach, cracked his whip over the hoxneys, and was away at a great pace. The tribesmen fell back in alarm, cursing him in the name of the sacred rivers. A cloud of dust swallowed the speeding vehicle.

The Madura Desert: Matrassyl began to seem a long way off. But the stars came nearer overhead and, on clear nights, the sickle of YarapRombry’s Comet blazed like a signpost on their way.

SartoriIrvrash stood shivering in the small hours when the fire had died and the other travellers were sleeping. He could not entirely lose his fever. He thought of BillishOwpin. His story of having come from another world seemed more likely here than it had done at the palace.

He walked by the tethered kaidaws and encountered the Pointer of the Way, standing silently smoking. The two men talked in low voices. The kaidaws uttered sniggering grunts.

“The animals are quiet enough,” SartoriIrvrash said. “History pictures them as almost unmanageable brutes. To be ridden only by phagors. I’ve never seen a phagor riding one, any more than I have ever seen a cowbird with a phagor. Perhaps history was wrong on that point, too. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to disentangle history from legend.”

“Perhaps they aren’t so different,” the Pointer said. “I can’t read a single letter, so I have no strong opinion in the matter. But we smoke these kaidaws when they’re mere calves—puff a veronikane up their nostrils. It seems to make them calm.

“I’ll tell you a tale, since you can sleep no more than I.” He sighed heavily in preparation for the burden of narrative. “Many years ago now, I went eastwards with my master, through the provinces controlled by Unndreid, up into the wilderness of the Nktryhk. It’s a different world up there, very harsh world, with little air to breathe, yet people remain fit.”

“Less infection at high altitudes,” commented SartoriIrvrash.

“That’s not what the people of the Nktryhk say. They say that Death is a lazy fellow who doesn’t readily bother to climb mountains. I’ll tell you one thing. Fish is a popular food. Often the fish may be caught in a river a hundred or more miles away. Yet it doesn’t decay. You catch a fish here at dawn, it’s bad by Freyr-set. Up in the Nktryhk, it remains good to eat for a small year.”

He leaned over the back of one of the patient kaidaws and smiled. “It was fine up there when you got used to it. Cold by night, of course. No rain, never. And there, in the high valleys, is land ruled only by fuggies. They’re not as submissive as here. I tell you, it’s a different world. The fuggies ride kaidaws, ride them like the wind—aye, and have cowbirds to sail at their shoulders. My understanding is that they come down and invade the lowlands when snow falls here, whenever that may be. When Freyr fails.”

Nodding his head with interest and some disbelief, SartoriIrvrash said, “But there can be few phagors at those altitudes, surely? What can they eat, apart from your ever-fresh fish? There’s no food.”

“That isn’t so. They grow crops of barley in the valleys—right up to the snowbanks. All they need is irrigation. Every drop of water and urine is precious. There’s a virtue in that thin air—they have crops of barley that ripen in three weeks.”

“Half a tenner from sowing? Incredible.”

“Nevertheless it is so,” said the Pointer. “And the phagors share the grain and never quarrel or use money. And the white cowbirds drive out all other winged things bar the eagles. I saw it with my own eyes, when I stood no higher than this quadruped’s shoulders. I mean to go back one day—no king or laws there.”

“I’ll make a note of that, if you don’t mind,” said SartoriIrvrash.

As he wrote, he thought of JandolAnganol among his abandoned buildings.

After the Madura, the long desolation of Hazziz. Twice they had to pass through strips of vegetation, stretching from one bleak horizon to another like god’s hedges. Trees, shrubs, a riot of flowers, drew a line across the face of the grasslands.

“This is/will be the uct,” said Dienu Pasharatid, employing a translation of a Sibish continuous present tense. “It stretches across the continent from east to west, following the lines of Madi migration.”

In the uct, they saw Others. Madis were not the only beings to use the verdant road. The Pointer of the Way shot an Other from a tree. It fell to the ground almost at their feet, its eyebrows still twitching with shock. They roasted it later over the campfire.

One day rain fell, closing across the grasslands like a snake’s jaw. Freyr climbed higher into the sky than it managed in Matrassyl. SartoriIrvrash still wished to travel only by dimday, according to upper class Borlienese custom, but the other travellers would have none of that.

The nights spent sleeping in the open were over. The ex-chancellor surprised himself by regretting their passing. Sibornalese settlements were becoming more frequent, and in them the party stayed overnight. Each settlement was built to the same plan. Smallholdings lay inside a circle, with guard houses posted every so many paces along the perimeter. Between the smallholdings, roads like spokes of a wheel led in to one or more rings of dwellings which formed the hub. Generally, barns, stores, and offices encircled a church dedicated to the Formidable Peace, standing at the geometrical centre of the wheel formation.

Grey-clad priests-militant ruled these settlements, supervising the arrival and departure of the travelling party, which was always given free food and accommodation. These men, who sang the praises of God the Azoiaxic, wore the wheel symbol on their garb and carried wheel locks. They did not forget that they were in territory traditionally claimed by Pannoval.

When it was almost too late, SartoriIrvrash noticed that the Pointer of the Way and his men were not allowed inside the Sibornalese settlement. Touching his braffista, their guide was taking his pay from one of the ambassadorial staff and making off, heading southwards.

“I must bid him farewell,” said SartoriIrvrash. Dienu Pasharatid thrust a hand before him. “That is not necessary. He has been paid and he will leave. Our way ahead is clear.”

“But I liked the man.”

“But he is of no further use to us. The way is safe now, moving from settlement to settlement. They believe superstitious things, these barbarians. The Pointer told me he could lead us this far only because his tribe’s land-octave came this way.”

Pulling at his whiskers uncomfortably, SartoriIrvrash said, “Madame Dienu, sometimes old habits enshrine truth. The preference for one’s own land-octave is not entirely dead. Men and women prosper best when they live along whatever land-octaves they were born on. Practical sense lies behind such beliefs. Such octaves generally follow geological strata and mineral deposits, which influence health.”

She flicked a smile on and off her boney face. “Naturally, we expect primitive peoples to hold primitive beliefs. It is that which anchors them to primitivism. Things are continuously better where we are going.” This last sentence was evidently a direct translation into Olonets of one of many Sibish tenses.

Being of such high rank, Dienu Pasharatid addressed SartoriIrvrash in Pure Olonets. In Campannlat, Pure Olonets, as opposed to Local Olonets, was spoken only by high castes and religious leaders, mainly within the Holy Pannovalan Empire; it was becoming increasingly the prerogative of the Church. The main language of the northern continent was Sibish, a dense language with its own script. Olonets had made little headway against Sibish, except along some southern coasts where trade with the Campannlatian shore was common.

Sibish deployed multiple tenses and conditionals. It had no y sound. The substituted i was pronounced hard, while ch’s and sh’s were almost whistled. One result of this was to make a native of Askitosh sound sinister when speaking to a foreigner in the latter’s own language. Perhaps the entire history of the continuous northern wars rested on the mockery that Sib-speakers made of a word like ‘Matrassyl’. But behind the brief pursing of the lips involved lay the blind driving force of the climate of Helliconia, which discouraged unnecessary opening of the mouth for half the Great Year.

The travellers left their kaidaws at the southernmost settlement, where the Pointer went his way, and posted northwards from settlement to settlement on hoxneys.

After the twelfth settlement, they progressed up a slope which grew gradually steeper. It climbed for some miles. They were forced to dismount and walk beside their steeds. At the top of the rise stood a line of young rajabarals, high and thin, their bark of the translucence of celery. When the trees were gained, SartoriIrvrash laid a hand against the nearest tree. It was soft and warm, like the flank of his hoxney. He gazed up into the plumes high above him, stirring in the breeze.

“Don’t look upward—look ahead!” said one of his companions.

On the other side of the crest lay a valley, sombre in its blue shades. Beyond it was a darker blue: the sea.

His fever had gone and was forgotten. He smelt a new smell in the air.

When they reached the port, even the northerners showed excitement. The port had a defiantly Sibish name, Rungobandryaskosh. It conformed to the general layout of the settlements they had passed, except that it consisted only of a semi-circle, with a great church perched centrally on the cliff, a beacon light on its tower. The other half of the circle, symbolically, lay across the Pannoval Sea in Sibornal.

Ships lay in nearby docks. Everything was clean and shipshape. Unlike most of the races of Campannlat, the Sibornalese were natural seafarers.

After a night in a hostel, they rose at Freyr-rise and embarked with other travellers on a waiting ship. SartoriIrvrash, who had never been on anything larger than a dinghy before, went to his small cabin and fell asleep. When he woke, they were preparing to sail.

He squinted out of his square porthole.

Batalix was low over the water, spreading a pathway of silver across it. Nearby ships were visible as blue silhouettes, without detail, their masts a leafless forest. Near at hand, a sturdy lad rowed himself across the harbour in a rowing boat. The light so obscured detail that boy and boat became one, a little black shape where body went forward as oars went back. Slowly, stroke by stroke, the boat was dragged through the dazzle. The oars plunging, the back working, and finally the dazzle yielding (and soon composing itself again), as the rower won his way to the pillars of a jetty.

SartoriIrvrash recalled a time when he as a lad had rowed his two small brothers across a lake. He saw their smiles, their hands trailing in the water. So much had been lost since then. Nothing was without price. He had given so much for his precious ‘Alphabet’.

There were sounds of bare feet on deck, shouted orders, the creak of tackle as sails were raised. Even from the cabin, a tremor was felt as the wind started to catch. Cries from the dock, a rope snaking fast over the side. They were on their way to the northern continent.

It was a seven-day voyage. As they sailed north-northwest, the Freyr-days grew longer. Every night, the brilliant sun sank somewhere ahead of their bows, and spent progressively less time below the horizon before rising somewhere to the north of northeast.

While Dienu Pasharatid and her friends lectured SartoriIrvrash on the bright prospects ahead, visibility became dimmer. Soon they were enveloped in what one sailor, in the ex-chancellor’s hearing, called ‘a regular Uskuti up-and-downer.’ A thick brown murk descended like a combination of rain and sandstorm. It muffled the ship’s noises, covering everything above and below decks in greasy moisture.

SartoriIrvrash was the only person to be alarmed. The captain of the vessel showed him that there was no need to fear.

“I have sufficient instruments to sail through an underground cavern unharmed,” he said. Though of course our modern exploring ships are even better equipped.”

He showed SartoriIrvrash into his cabin. On his desk lay a printed table of daily solar altitudes, to determine latitude, together with a floating compass, a cross-staff, and an instrument the captain called a nocturnal, by which could be measured the elevation of certain first magnitude stars, and which indicated the number of hours before and after midnight of both suns. The ship also had the means to sail by dead reckoning, with distance and direction measured systematically on a chart.

While SartoriIrvrash made notes of these matters, there was a great cry from the lookout, and the captain hurried on deck, cursing in a way the Azoiaxic One would hardly have commended.

Through the drizzle loomed brown clouds and, somewhere in the clouds, men were bellowing. The clouds became shrouds and sails. At the last possible minute, a ship as big as their own slid by, with hardly a foot of leeway between hulls. Lanterns were seen, faces—mainly savage and accompanied by shaking fists—and then all were gone, back into the hanging soup. The Sibornal-bound ship was alone again in its sepia isolation.

Passengers explained to the foreigner that they had just passed one of the Uskut ‘herring-coaches’, fishing with curtain nets off the coast. The herring-coach was a little factory, since it carried salters and coopers among its crew, who gutted and packed the catch at sea, storing it in barrels.

Thoroughly upset by the near collision, SartoriIrvrash was in no mood to listen to a eulogy on the Sibornalese herring trade. He retired to his damp bunk, still wrapped in his coat, and shivered. When they landed in Askitosh, he reminded himself, they would be on a latitude of 30° N, and only five degrees south of the Tropic of Carcampan.

On the morning of the seventh day of the voyage, the banks of fog rolled back, though visibility remained poor. The sea was dotted with herring-coaches.

After a while, a sluggish stain on the horizon resolved itself into the coastline of the northern continent. It was no more than a ruled line of sandstone dividing almost waveless sea from undulating land.

Moved by something like enthusiasm for the sight of her homeland, Madame Dienu Pasharatid delivered SartoriIrvrash a brief geography lesson. He saw how the water was dotted with small ships. Uskutoshk had been forced to become a maritime nation because of the advance of ice southwards from the Circumpolar Regions—these regions being mentioned with hushed tones. There was little land for cultivation between sea and ice. The seas had to be harvested and sea lanes opened to the two great rich grain prairies of the continent—which she indicated as being distant with a sweep of her arm.

How distant, he asked.

Pointing westward and yet more westward, she named the nations of Sibornal, pronouncing their titles with varied inflections, as if she knew them personally, as if they were personages standing on a narrow strip of land glaring southwards, with cold draughts from the Circumpolar Regions freezing their backs—and all with a strong inclination to march down into Campannlat, SartoriIrvrash muttered to himself.

Uskutoshk, Loraj, Shivenink, where the Great Wheel was situated, Bribhar, Carcampan.

The grainlands were in Bribhar and Carcampan.

Her roll call ended with a finger pointing to the east.

“And so we have rounded the globe. Most of Sibornal, you see, is isolated in the extreme, caught between ocean and ice. Hence our independence. We have mountainous Kuj-Juvec coming after Carcampan—it is scarcely populated by humans—and then the troubled region of Upper Hazziz, leading into the Chalce Peninsula; then we are safe back in Uskutoshk, the most civilized nation. You arrive at a time of year when we have both Freyr and Batalix in the sky. But for over half the Great Year, Freyr is eternally below the horizon, and then the climate becomes severe. That’s the Weyr-Winter of legend… The ice moves south, and so do the Uskuts, as we call ourselves, if we can. But many die. Many die.” She used a future-continuous tense.

Warm though it was, she shivered at the thought. “Some other people’s lifetimes,” she murmured. “Fortunately, such cruel times are still far away, but they are hard to forget. It’s a race memory, I suppose… We all know that Weyr-Winter will come again.”

From the docks, they were escorted to a solid four-wheeled brake with a canopy. Into this vehicle they climbed after human slaves had piled in their baggage. Four yolked yelk then dragged them off at a good pace, along one of the radial roads leading away from the quayside.

As they passed under the shadow of an immense church, SartoriIrvrash tried to sort out the impressions that thronged in on him. He was struck by the fact that much of the wagonette in which they rode was not of wood but metal: its axles, its sides, even the seats on which they sat, all were metal.

Metal objects were to be seen on every side. The people crowding in the streets—not jostling and shouting like a Matrassyl crowd—carried metal pails or ladders or assorted instruments to the ships; some men were encased in gleaming armoured jackets. Some of the grander buildings on the way flaunted iron doors, often curiously decorated, with names in raised relief upon them, as if the occupants intended to live on there perpetually, whatever happened in the Circumpolar Regions.

A haze in the sky warded off the heat of Freyr, which, to the visitor’s eye, stood unnaturally high in the sky at noon. The atmosphere of the city was smokey. Although Sibornal’s forests were thin in comparison with the riotous jungles of the tropics, the continent had extensive lignite and peat beds, as well as metal ores. The ores were smelted in small factories in various parts of the city. Each metal was located in a definite area. Its refiners, its workers, and its ancilliary trades were grouped about it, and its slaves about them. Over the last generation, metals had become less expensive than wood.

“It’s a beautiful city.” One of the men leaned over to favour the visitor with this observation.

He felt small, sniffed a small sniff, and said nothing.

From the wagonette, he could see how Askitosh’s half-wheel plan worked. The great church by the harbour was the axle. After a semi-circle of buildings came a semicircle of farms, with fields, then another semicircle of buildings, and so on, though various living pressures had in some places broken down what to Borlienese eyes was an unnatural symmetry.

They were delivered to a large plain building like a box, in which slitlike windows had been cut. Its double entrance doors were of metal; on them, in raised relief, were the words 1st Convential, Sector Six. The convential proved to be a cross between a hotel, a monastery, a nunnery, a school, and a prison, or so it appeared to SartoriIrvrash, as he explored the cell-like room he was given, and read the rules.

The rules declared that two meals were served per day, at twenty minutes past four and at nineteen, that prayers were held every hour (voluntary) in the church on the top floor, that the garden was open during dimday for relaxed walking and meditation, that instructions (whatever they were) might be had at all times, and that permission was needed before visitors left the establishment.

Sighing, he washed himself and settled down on the bed, letting gloom overcome him. But Uskutoshkan hospitality, like most things Uskutoshkan, was brisk, and in no time came a brisk rap at his door and he was conducted along a corridor to a banquet.

The banqueting hall was long and low, lit by slit windows, from which the activities of the street could be glimpsed in small vertical sections. The floor was uncarpeted, yet a touch of luxury, even grandeur, was added to the chamber by an enormous tapestry on the rear wall which depicted, upon a scarlet background, a great wheel being rowed through the heavens by oarsmen in cerulean garments, each smiling blissfully, towards an astonishing maternal figure from whose mouth, nostrils, and breasts sprang the stars in the scarlet sky.

So struck was SartoriIrvrash by the details of this tapestry that he itched to make a note or even a sketch, but he was thrust forward and introduced to twelve personages who stood waiting to receive him. Each was named for him in turn by Madame Dienu Pasharatid. None shook his proffered hand: it was not the habit in that country to touch the hands of anyone outside one’s own family or clan.

He tried to grasp the complex names, but the only one to remain in his head was Odi Jeseratabhar, and that because it belonged to a Priest-Militant Admiral who wore a blue-and-grey striped uniform and was female. And moreover was beautiful in an austere way, with two fair tresses plaited and wound about her head to finish as two blond horns sticking forward with an impressive yet comical air.

All concerned smiled in an affable way upon their guest from Campannlat, and assembled themselves at the table with great noise of metal chairs scraping on the bare floor. As soon as they were seated, silence fell, and the greyest member of the dozen rose to say grace. The rest placed their forefingers on foreheads in the attitude of prayer.

SartoriIrvrash did the same. The grace began, intoned in dense Sibish, with dextrous use of continuous present, conditional-eternal, past-into-present, transferential, and other tenses, to carry the message of thanks all the way to the Azoiaxic One. The length of the prayer was perhaps intended to be proportional to the distance.

It was over at last, and a meal of many minute courses, mainly vegetarian except for fish, and relying heavily on assorted raw and steamed seaweeds, was served by slave wenches. Fruit juices and an alcoholic drink called yoodhl, with a seaweed base, were served.

The one exceptional course, the only one which SartoriIrvrash could say he really enjoyed, was a spitted creature brought on with ceremony, which he guessed to be a pig. It was presented still on its spit and covered with a creamy sauce. Of this, he was given a small portion of breast. He was told it was ‘treebries’. Only some days later did he discover that treebries was roast Nondad. It was a prized Uskutoshki delicacy, rarely served except to distinguished visitors.

While the banquet was still in progress, Dienu Pasharatid came round behind SartoriIrvrash’s chair and spoke to him.

“Soon, the Priest-Militant Admiral will address us. What she says may alarm you. Do not be alarmed. I know you are not given to fear. Equally, I know you are not given to malice, so do not think ill of me because of my part in this.”

The ex-chancellor was immediately alarmed and dropped his knife. “What is going to be said?”

“An important announcement which will affect your country’s destiny and mine. Odi Jeseratabhar will give you the details. Just remember, I was forced to bring you here in order to clear my name of any stain shed on it by my husband’s actions. Remember that you hate JandolAnganol and all will be well.”

She left him and returned to her seat. He found himself unable to take another mouthful of food.

Once the complex meal was finished and spirit served, the speeches began.

First came a welcoming speech from a local panjandrum, couched in almost comprehensible terminology. Then Madame Dienu rose.

After a brief preliminary, she came to her point. Making an oblique reference to her husband, she said she felt she had to atone for his departure from diplomatic procedures. Therefore, she had rescued Chancellor SartoriIrvrash from the melancholy position in which he found himself and had brought him here.

Their distinguished visitor was in a position to do them, and Uskutoshk, and indeed the entire northern continent, a service which would go down in history and secure for his name a place in their annals. What that service was, their loved and respected Priest-Militant Admiral, Madame Odi Jeseratabhar, would now announce.

Premonitions of bad things made SartoriIrvrash feel even worse than the yoodhl had done. He longed for a veronikane but, seeing that nobody else at the table smoked, was smoking, was about to smoke, or was even employing the conditional-eternal to smoke, desisted, and gripped the table instead, as the Admiral rose.

Since she was making a speech, she employed a kind of Mandarin Priest-Militant Sibish.

“Priests-Militant, War Commissions members, friends, and our new ally,” began the lady imposingly, tossing her blond horns, “time is always short, so I will/am cut my speech accordingly. In only eighty-three years Freyr will be/is at its strongest, and in consequence the Savage Continent and its barbarous nations are/should in dire array, prophesying doom for themselves. They are/were incapable of facing the future as we in Uskutoshk—rightly, to my mind—pride ourselves in doing/done/continuing.

“Of the chief nations of that unhappy continent, Borlien in particular is/will in trouble. Unfortunately, our old enemy, Pannoval, continues/grows strong. A random factor not calculated has recently/now become apparent, with our arms trading growing beyond control, owing to delinquent ambassadors. We shall not dwell on that incident.

“Soon, the warlike nations of the Savage Continent will be making imitations of our weapons. We must/can act before that is allowed to happen to any great extent, while we have supremacy.

“As those of my friends on the War Commission already know, our plan is nothing less than to take over Borlien.”

Her words struck the banqueters to silence. Then a great murmur of acclamation arose. Many eyes turned towards where SartoriIrvrash sat, white-faced.

“We have not/will not enough troops to hold down all of Borlien by force. Our plan is to annex and subdue by means provided unwittingly by the Borlienese king, JandolAnganol. Once we subdue Borlien, we can strike at Pannoval from the south as well as the north.”

The banqueters began clapping before the fair Admiral had finished. They smiled first at each other and then at SartoriIrvrash, who kept his gaze firmly on the finely turned lips of the Admiral.

“We have a fleet ready to sail,” said those lips. “We anticipate that Chancellor SartoriIrvrash will sail with it, to play his vital role. His reward will be great.”

Again applause, rationed to a few hand claps.

“The fleet will sail westward. I shall be in command aboard the Golden Friendship. We intend/shall sail around the coast of Campannlat, finally approaching the Bay of Gravabagalinien, where Queen MyrdemInggala is/will exiled, from the west. The chancellor and I will stop to conduct the queen from that place of exile, while the rest of the fleet intend/will sail on to bombard Ottassol, Borlien’s largest port, until it capitulates/has capitulated.

“The queen is/was will well-loved by her people. SartoriIrvrash will proclaim a new government for Ottassol under the queen, with himself as prime minister. No battle need be fought.

“You will/should appreciate the feasibility of this plan. Our distinguished ally and the barbarian queen, descended from the Thribriat Shannana, are both united in a hatred of King JandolAnganol. The queen will be happy to be reinstated. She will of course be under our supervision.

“Once Ottassol is/can secure, our boats and soldiery will move upriver to take over the capital, Matrassyl. My understanding, based on agents’ reports, is that we shall/ can find allies there, notably the queen’s old father and his faction. The king’s insecure rule will be easily ended. His life the same. The world can do without such phagor lovers.

“With Borlien fallen into our hands, we execute a sabre slash northwards, right across the Savage Continent, from Ottassol in the south to Rungobandryaskosh.

“We are hastening matters forward now that you are here. Rest, friends, for action lies ahead, action of a most glorious sort. We plan that a good part of the fleet will/can/should sail at Freyr-rise, two days from now, God willing.

“A great future dawns/will dawn.”

This time, the applause was unrationed.