Helliconia Summer

XV The Captives of the Quarry

A man was walking with a pack slung over one shoulder. He wore the tattered remains of a uniform. Both suns beat down on him. Streams of sweat ran down into his tunic. He walked blindly, rarely looking up.

He was traversing a destroyed area of jungle in the Chwart Heights in eastern Randonan. All round were blackened and broken stumps of trees, many still smouldering. On the few occasions when the man looked about him, he could see nothing but the trail and blackened landscape all round. Palls of grey smoke rose in the distance. It was possible that tropical heat had started the blaze. Or perhaps a spark from a matchlock had been the cause of the death of a million trees. For many tenners battles had been fought over the area. Now soldiers and cannon were gone, and the vegetation likewise.

Everything about the man’s posture expressed weariness and defeat. But he kept on. Once he faltered, when one of his shadows faded and disappeared. Black cloud, rolling up, had blotted out Freyr. A few minutes later, Batalix too was swallowed. Then the rain came down. The man bowed his head and continued to walk. There was nowhere he could shelter, nothing he could do but submit to nature.

The downpour continued, increasing in ferocity by sudden fits. The ashes hissed. More and more of the resources of the heavens were called in, like reserves being brought into a battle.

Bombardment by hail was the next tactic. The hailstones stung the weary man into a run. He took what refuge he could in a hollow tree stump. Falling back against the crumbling wood, he exposed a stronghold of rickybacks. Deprived of their little fortress, the crustaceans climbed through veritable Takissas of liquid ash, seeking refuge with their puny antennae waving.

Unaware of this catastrophe, the man stared forth from under the brim of his hat, panting. Several bent figures staggered through the murk. They were the remnants of his army, the once celebrated Borlienese Second Army. One man passed obliviously within inches of the tree stump, dragging a terrible wound which bled afresh under the hailstones. The shelterer wept. He had no wound, except for a bruise on his temple. He had no right to be alive.

Like an uncomforted child, his weeping turned to exhaustion; he slept despite the hail.

The dreams that terminated sleep were full of hail. He felt their smart on his cheek, woke, saw that the sky was again clear. He started up, yet still the stones struck his face, his neck. As he gasped with vexation, a stone flew into his mouth. He spat it out, turning in bewilderment.

The gnarled, broomlike plants nearby had been burnt by fire. Fire had hardened their seedcases, ripening their seeds with its flame. In a new day’s warmth, the cases untwisted. They made a small noise, like the parting of moist lips. Their seeds were shot out in all directions. The ashy ground would provide fertile conditions for growth.

He laughed, suddenly pleased. Whatever folly mankind got up to, nature went on its uncheckable way. And he would go on his way. He patted his sword, adjusted his hat, hitched his pack, and started walking southeastwards.

He emerged from the devastated area towards noon. The way wound down between thickets of shoatapraxi. Over centuries, the road the soldier travelled had been by turns river, dried bed, ice track, cattle trail, and highway.

No man could trace its usages. Humble flowers grew beside its banks, some sprung from parent plants which had seeded far away. The banks became higher on either side. He staggered between them, hampered by shifting gravels underfoot. When they crumbled away at last, under the brow of a hill, he saw cottages standing in fields.

The prospect did little to reassure him.

The fields had long been untended. The cottages were derelict. Many roofs had fallen in, leaving end-walls pointing like old fists to the sky. Hedges topping the banks on either side of the track had collapsed from the weight of dust that had been thrown up. Dust had spread over adjoining fields, over cottages and outbuildings, over abandoned pieces of luggage which dotted the view. Everything was rendered in the same greyish tone, as if created all from one material.

Only a great army passing could have raised so much dust, the man with the pack thought. The army had been his. The Second Army had then been marching forward into battle. He was now returning silently in defeat.

His footsteps deadened, General Hanra TolramKetinet walked down the meandering street. One or two furtive phagors peered at him from the ruins, the long masks of their faces without expression. He did not remember this village; it was just one more village they had marched through on just one more hot day. As he reached the end of the street and the sacred pillar which defined the local land-octave, he saw a wedge-shaped copse which he thought he recalled, a copse which his scouts had reconnoitred for enemy. If he was right, there was a sizeable farmhouse beyond it, in which he had slept for a few hours.

The farmhouse remained intact. It was surrounded by outhouses which had been damaged by fire.

TolramKetinet stood by the gateway, peering in. Both yard and house were silent except for the buzz of flies. Sword in hand, he moved forward. Two slaughtered hoxneys lay in an open stall, bodies black with flies. Their stench met his nostrils.

Freyr was high, Batalix already westering. Conflicting shadows lent the house a drab air as he moved towards it. The windows were dimmed with dust. There had been a woman here, the farmer’s woman, with four small children, he recalled. No man. Now there was only the buzz of silence.

He set his pack down by the front doorstep and kicked the door open with his foot.

“Anyone there?” He hoped some of his men might be resting in the rooms.

No response. Yet his alerted senses warned him that there was a living thing in the building. He paused in the stone hall. A tall pendulum clock, with its twenty-five illuminated hours, stood silent against one wall. Otherwise, the impression was one of the poverty common to an area which had long been in a war zone. Beyond the hall everything lay in shadow.

Then he marched determinedly forward, down the passage, and into a low-ceilinged kitchen.

Six phagors stood in the kitchen. They stood motionless, as if awaiting his return. Their eyes glowed deep pink in the shade. Beyond them, through a window, grew a patch of bright yellow flowers; catching the sun, they made the beast shapes indeterminate. Yellow reflections rested on shoulders, on long cheekbones. One of the brutes retained its horns.

They came towards him, but TolramKetinet was ready. He had picked up their scent in the hall. They held spears, but he was a practised swordsman. They were swift, but they got in each other’s way. He drove the blade up under their rib cages, where he knew their eddre were. Only one of the ancipitals lunged with its spear. He half-severed its forearm with a single blow. Gold blood flew. The room filled with their heavy sick breathing. All died without making any other sound.

As they fell, he saw by their blazes that they had been trusted members of his guard. Catching the Sons of Freyr in disorder, they had taken a chance and reverted to type. A less wary soldier would have fallen into their ambush. Indeed, one had done so recently. At the back of the kitchen, spread out on a table, was a Borlienese corporal, his throat neatly bitten out.

TolramKetinet went back into the courtyard and leaned against a warm outer wall. After a short while, his nausea passed. He stood breathing in the warm air, until the stench of nearby decay drove him from the courtyard.

He could not rest here. When his strength returned, he picked up his pack and resumed his silent march along the road leading towards the coast. Towards the sea and its voices.

The forest closed about him. The road south led through twisted columns of spirax trees, with their double entwined trunks. Through their avenues walked TolramKetinet. This was not dense tangled jungle. Little grew on its floor, for little sunlight penetrated down to the ground. He walked as in a lofty building, surrounded by pillars of amazing design.

Above spread other layers of the forests which separated Borlien from Randonan. The shrub layer, through which large creatures sometimes crashed. The under-story, where Others swung and called, occasionally dropping to the floor, to snatch at a fungus before swarming up to the safety of the branches. The canopy, the true roof of the jungle, decked with flowers TolramKetinet could not see, and birds he could only hear. The emergent layer, formed by the tallest trees, which reared above the canopy, home of predatory birds which watched and did not sing.

The solemnity of the rain forest was such that it appeared to those who ventured into it to be much more permanent than savannah land or even desert. It was not so. Of the 1825 small Helliconian years which made one Great Year, the elaborate jungle organism was able to sustain itself for less than half that period. Closely examined, every single tree revealed, in root, trunk, branch, and seed, the strategies it employed to survive when climate was less clement, when it would endure solitary in a howling waste, or wait in a case, petrified, beneath snow.

The fauna regarded the various layers of their home as unchanging. The truth was that the whole intricate edifice, more marvellous than any work of man, had come into being only a few generations ago in response to the elements, springing up like a jack-in-the-box from a scattering of nuts.

In this hierarchy of plants was a perfect order which appeared random only to an untutored eye. Everything, animal or insect or vegetable, had its place, generally a horizontal zone to call its own. The Others were rare exceptions to this rule. Phagors had taken refuge in the forest, often living in huts contrived in the angles between high-kneed roots, and Others had gravitated into their company, to play a role somewhere between pet and slave.

Often, settlements of a dozen or more phagors, with their runts, were established about the base of a large tree. TolramKetinet gave such places a wide berth. He deeply mistrusted the phagors, and feared the sorties made by their Others, who came rushing out like watchdogs when strangers were near, brandishing sticks.

Men sometimes lurked in these settlements. A small human hut was to be seen next to—and little to be distinguished from—an ancipital hut. These men, near-naked, were evidently accepted by the phagors as large versions of Others. It was as though the brown-pelted Others, in their alliance with the phagors, gave a licence to the men to live in lowly harmony with them.

Most of the men were deserters from units of the Second Army. TolramKetinet spoke to them, trying to persuade them to join him. Some did so. Others threw sticks. Many admitted that they hated the war and rejoined their old commander only because they were sick of the jungle with its secretive noises and slender diet.

After a day of marching along the aisles of the rain forest, they fell back into their old military roles again and accepted as if with relief the ancient disciplines of command. TolramKetinet also changed. His stance had been that of a defeated man. Now he pulled his shoulders back and took on something of his old swagger. The lines of his face tightened; he could again be recognized as a young man. The more men there were to take orders, the more easily he gave orders, and the more right they seemed. With the mutability of the human race, he became what those about him regarded him as being.

So the small force arrived at the Kacol River.

Powered by their new spirit, they launched a surprise raid and took the shantytown of Ordelay. With this victory, fighting spirit was entirely restored.

Among the craft on the Kacol was an ice ship, flying the flag of the Lordryardry Ice Trading Company. When the town was invaded, this vessel, the Lordryardry Lubber, tried to make its escape downstream, but TolramKetinet intercepted it with a group of men.

The terrified captain protested that he was a neutral and claimed diplomatic immunity. His business in Ordelay was not merely to trade in ice but to hand a letter to General Hanra TolramKetinet.

“Do you know where this general is?” demanded TolramKetinet.

“Somewhere in the jungle, losing the king’s war for him.”

With a sword at his throat, the captain said that he had sent a paid messenger to deliver the message; there his obligations ended. He had carried out Captain Krillio Muntras’s instructions.

“What said the contents of the letter?” TolramKetinet demanded.

The man swore he did not know. The leather wallet which contained it was sealed with the seal of the queen of queens, MyrdemInggala. How would he dare tamper with a royal message?

“You would never rest until you found out what was in it. Speak, you scoundrel!”

He needed encouragement. When crushed under an upturned table, the captain admitted that the seal of the wallet had come unstuck on its own. He had happened to notice, without meaning to, that the queen of queens was being sent into exile by King JandolAnganol, to a place on the north coast of the Sea of Eagles called Gravabagalinien; that she feared for her life; and that she hoped that she might one day see her good friend the general delivered from the dangers of war into her presence. She prayed that Akhanaba would guard him from all ills.

When he heard this, TolramKetinet became pale. He went away and looked over the side of the boat at the dark-flowing river, so that his soldiers should not see his face. Expectations, fears, desires, woke in him. He uttered a prayer that he might be more successful in love than in war.

TolramKetinet’s party put the battered captain of the Lubber ashore and commandeered his boat. They caroused for a day in town, stacked the ice ship with provisions and sailed for the distant ocean.

High above the jungle, the Avernus sailed in its orbit. There were those on the observation satellite, unfamiliar with the varieties of warfare practised on the planet below, who asked what kind of force could have defeated the Borlienese Second Army. They looked in vain for a set of swaggering Randonanese patriots who had repelled the invasion of their homeland.

There was no such force. The Randonanese were semi-savage tribes who lived in harmony with their environment. Some tribes cultivated patches of cereal. All lived surrounded by dogs and pigs which, when young, were allowed to suckle indiscriminately at the breasts of nursing mothers if they so desired. They killed for the pot and not for sport. Many tribes worshipped Others as gods, although that did not stop them killing such gods as they encountered swinging among the branches of the great forest home. Such was the mould of their mind that numbers of them worshipped fish, or trees, menses, spirits, or patches of double daylight.

In their humility, the tribes of Randonan tolerated the tribes of phagors, which were torpid, and consisted mainly of itinerant woodmen or fungusmongers. The phagors, in their turn, rarely attacked the human tribes, though the customary tales were told of stalluns carrying off human women.

The phagors brewed their own drink, raffel. On certain occasions, they brewed a different potion, which the Randonanese tribes called vulumunwun, believing it to be distilled from the sap of the vulu tree and from certain fungi. Unable to concoct vulumunwun themselves, they obtained it by barter from phagors. Then a feast would be held far into the night.

On these occasions, a great spirit often spoke to the tribes. It told them to go out and make sport in the Desert.

The tribes would bind their gods, the Others, to bamboo chairs and carry them away through the jungle on their shoulders. The whole tribe would go, babies, pigs, parrots, preets, cats, and all. They would cross the Kacol and enter what was officially Borlien. They would invade the richly cultivated lands of the central Borlienese plain.

This was the land the Randonanese called the Desert. It was open to the skies; the suns blazed down. It had no great trees, no dense shrub, no secret places, no wild boar, no Others. In this godless place—with a final libation of vulumunwun—they dared make sport, setting fire to or despoiling the crops.

The plainsmen of Borlien were sturdy dark men. They hated the pale lizards who materialized like ghosts out of nowhere. They rushed from their little villages and drove off the invaders with any weapon that came to hand. Often they lost their own lives in the process, for the tribesmen had blow tubes from which they blew feathered thorns tipped with poison. Maddened, the farmers would leave their homes and burn down the forests. So it had finally come to war between Borlien and Randonan.

Aggression, defence, attack, and counterattack. These moves became confused in the enantiodromia which, in human minds, constantly turns all things into their opposites. By the time the Second Army deployed its platoons in the jungle-clad mountains of Randonan, the little tribesmen had themselves become, in the eyes of their enemies, a formidable military force.

Yet what had defeated TolramKetinet’s expedition was no armed opposition. The defence of the tribes was to slide away into the jungle, shrieking through the night barbaric insults at the invaders, just as they heard the Others do. Like the Others, they took to the trees, to rain darts or urine down on the general’s men. They could not properly wage war. The jungle did that for them.

The jungle was full of diseases to which the Borlienese army was not immune. Its fruits brought torrential dysenteries, its pools malarias, its days fevers, and its insects a sordid crop of parasites which fed on the men from the outside in or from the inside out. Nothing could be properly fought; everything had to be survived. One by one, or in batches, Borlienese soldiers succumbed to the jungle. With them went King JandolAnganol’s ambitions for victory in the Western Wars.

As for that king, so distant from his army disintegrating in Randonan, he was suffering from difficulties almost as elaborate as the mechanisms of the jungle. The bureaucracies of Pannoval were more enduring than the jungle and so had longer to develop their entanglements. The queen of queens had been gone from JandolAnganol’s capital for many weeks, and still his bill of divorcement had not arrived from the capital of the Holy Empire.

As the heat intensified, Pannoval stepped up the drumble against the ancipital species living on its lands. Fleeing phagor tribes sought refuge in Borlien, against the general wishes of the mass of people, who both hated and feared the shaggies.

The king felt differently. In a speech given in the scritina, he welcomed the refugees, promising them land in the Cosgatt on which they would be allowed to settle if they would join the army and fight for Borlien. By this means, the Cosgatt, now safe from the shadow of Darvlish, could be cultivated at low cost, and the newcomers effectively removed from the presence of the Borlienese.

This human hand extended to the phagors pleased no one in Pannoval or Oldorando, and the bill of divorcement was again delayed.

But JandolAnganol was pleased with himself. He was suffering enough to appease his conscience.

He put on a bright jacket and went to see his father. Again he walked through the winding ways of his palace and down through the guarded doors to the cellarage where he kept the old man. The chambers of the prison seemed more dank than ever. JandolAnganol paused in the first chamber which had once served as mortuary and torture chamber. Darkness enclosed him. The sounds of the outer world were stilled.

“Father!” he said. His own voice sounded unnatural to his ears.

He went through the second chamber and into the third, where pallid light filtered in. The log fire smouldered as usual. The old man, wrapped as usual in his blanket, sat before the fire as usual, chin resting on chest. Nothing down here had altered for many years. The only thing that had altered now was that VarpalAnganol was dead.

The king stood for a while with one hand on his father’s shoulder. Thin though it was, the flesh was unyielding.

JandolAnganol went and stood under the high barred window. He called to his father. The skull with its wispy hair never moved. He called again, louder. No movement.

“You’re dead, aren’t you?” said JandolAnganol, in tones of contempt. “Just one more betrayal… By the beholder, wasn’t I miserable enough with her gone?”

No answer came. “You’ve died, haven’t you? Gone away to spite me, you old hrattock…”

He strode over to the fireplace and kicked the logs all over the cell, filling it with smoke. In his fury, he knocked the chair over and the frail body of his father fell to the stones, remaining in its huddled position.

The king stooped over this tiny effigy, as if contemplating a snake, and then, with a sudden movement, fell to his knees—not to engage in prayer, but to seize the body by its dry throat and pour a flood of words upon it, in which the accusation that this dead thing had long ago turned his mother against him, quenching her love, was repeated in many forms, hissed forth with spiteful examples, until the words died and the king remained there bent over the body, wrapped in heavy coils of smoke. He beat the flagstones with his fist, then crouched motionless.

The logs strewn across the floor were extinguished by damp, each one by itself. At last, red-eyed, the king took himself away from the darkened place, going upwards with a hurried pace as if pursued, up to warmer regions.

Among the many denizens of the palace was an ancient nurse who lived in the servants’ quarters and was bedridden most of the day. JandolAnganol had not entered the servants’ quarters since he was a child. He found his way without hesitation through the mean corridors and confronted the old woman, who jumped out of bed and clung to one of its posts in terror. She glared at him aghast, pulling hair before her eyes.

“He’s dead, your master and lover,” JandolAnganol said, without expression. “See that he is prepared for burial.”

Next day, a week of mourning was declared, and the Royal First Phagorian Guard paraded through the city in black.

The common people, starved of excitement by their poverty, were quick to spy upon the king’s mood, at second or third hand if need be. Their connections with the palace were close, if subterranean. All knew someone who knew someone who was in the royal employ; and they smelt out JandolAnganol’s alternating moods of excitement and despair. Bareheaded under the suns, they flocked to the holy ground where VarpalAnganol, with the pomp due to a king, was to be buried on his correct land-octave.

The service was presided over by the Archpriest of the Dome of Striving, BranzaBaginut. The members of the scritina were there, housed in a stand erected for the occasion, and draped with the banners of the house of Anganol. These worthies showed on their faces more the heaviness of disapproval of the living king than grief for the dead one; but they attended nevertheless, fearing the consequences if they did not, and their wives attended them, for the same reason.

JandolAnganol made an isolated figure as he stood by the open grave. He gave an occasional darting glance round, as if hoping for sight of Robayday. This nervous glance became more frequent as the body of his father, wrapped in a gold cloth, was placed on its side in the place dug for it. Nothing went down with him. All present knew what waited below, in the world of the gossies, where material things were needed no more. The only concession to the rank of the departed was when twelve women of the court came forward to cast flowers down upon the still form.

Archpriest BranzaBaginut closed his eyes and chanted.

“The seasons in their processes bear us away to our final octaves. As there are two suns, the lesser and the greater, so we have two phases of being, life and death, the lesser and the greater. Now a great king has gone from us into the greater phase. He who knew the light has gone down into the dark…”

And as his high voice silenced the whispering of the crowd, who strained forward eagerly as the dogs which also attended the ceremony were straining their noses toward the grave, the first handfuls of earth were thrown. At that moment, the king’s voice rang out. This villain ruined my mother and myself. Why do you pray for such a villain?”

He took a great leap across the lips of the pit, pushed the Archpriest aside, and ran, still shouting, towards the palace, the shoulders of which loomed above the hill. Beyond sight of the crowd, he ran still, and would not stop until he was at his stables and on his hoxney and riding madly out into the woods, leaving Yuli to mewl far behind.

This disgraceful episode, this insult to the established religion by a religious man, delighted the common population of Matrassyl. It was talked about, laughed over, praised, condemned, in the rudest hut.

“He’s a joker, is Jandol,” was often the carefully considered verdict, arrived at in taverns after a long evening’s drinking, where death was not regarded with much affection. And the reputation of the joker rose accordingly, to the vexation of his enemies on the scritina.

To the wrath not only of the joker’s enemies but to that of a slender young man, bronzed of skin and dressed in rags, who attended the burial and witnessed the king’s departure. Robayday had been not far away, living on a fisherman’s island among the reedy waters of a lake, when news of his grandfather’s death reached him. He had returned to the capital with the alertness of a deer which attempts a closer inspection of a lion.

Seeing the joker’s retreat, he was emboldened to follow and leaped on a hoxney, taking a track that had been familiar to him since his youth. He had no intention of confronting his father and did not even know what was in his own mind. The joker, who had anything but humour on his mind, took a path he had not taken since SartoriIrvrash had been expelled. It led to a quarry, hidden by the soft waxy stems of young rajabaral trees; these saplings, with hundreds of years of growth in them, were scarcely recognizable as the redoubtable wooden fortresses they would become when the summer of the Great Year yielded once more to winter. His fever over, the king tied Lapwing to a young tree. He rested a hand on the smooth wood, and his head on his hand. To his mind came a memory of the queen’s body and of the cadency which had once lit their love. Such good things had died, and he had not known.

After a while in silence, he led Lapwing past the stump of the parent rajabaral, as black as an extinct volcano. Ahead stood the wooden palisade which barred entry to the quarry. No one challenged him. He pushed his way in.

All was untended in the forecourt. Weeds thrived. The lodge was in disrepair; a short neglect was leading it to a long decay. An old man with a straggling white beard came forward and bowed low to his majesty.

“Where’s the guard? Why isn’t the gate locked?” But there was carelessness in his challenge, which he uttered over one shoulder, in the act of approaching the cages ahead.

The old man, accustomed to the king’s moods, was too wise to adopt a matching carelessness, and followed with a lengthy explanation of how all but he were withdrawn from the quarry once the chancellor was disgraced. He was alone and still tended the captives, hoping thereby to incur the king’s pleasure.

Far from showing pleasure, the king clasped his hands behind his back and assumed a melancholy face. Four large cages had been built against the cliffs of the quarry, each divided into various compartments for the greater comfort of its prisoners. Into these cages JandolAnganol sent his dark regard.

The first cage contained Others. They had been swinging there by hands, feet or tails as a way of passing time; when the king moved towards their prison, they dropped down and came running to the bars, thrusting out their handlike paws, oblivious to the exalted status of their visitor.

The occupants of the second cage shrank away at the stranger’s approach. Most of them flitted into their compartments, out of sight. Their prison was built on rock, so that they could not tunnel into the earth. Two of their number came forward and stood against the bars, looking up into JandolAnganol’s face. These protognostics were Nondads, small elusive creatures often confused with Others, to whom they bore a resemblance. They stood waist-high to a human and their faces, with protruding muzzles, resembled Others. Scanty loincloths covered their genitals; their bodies were covered with light sandy hair.

The two Nondads who came forward addressed the king, flitting nervously about as they did so. A strange amalgam of whistles, clicks, and snorts served them for language. The king regarded them with an expression between contempt and sympathy before passing on to the third cage.

Here were imprisoned the more advanced form of protognostic, the Madis. Unlike the occupants of the first two cages, the Madis did not move when the king approached. Robbed of their migratory existence, they had nowhere to go; neither the settings of the suns nor the comings and goings of kings held meaning for them. They tried to hide their faces in their armpits as JandolAnganol regarded them.

The fourth cage was built of stone, rough-hewn from the quarry, as a tribute to the greater firmness of will of its occupants, which were human—mainly men and women of Mordriat or Thribriatan tribes. The women slunk back into the shadows. Most of the men pressed forward and began eloquently to implore the king to release them, or at worst to allow no more experiments on them.

“There’s nothing for it now,” said the king to himself, moving about as restlessly as those imprisoned.

“Sir, the indignities we have suffered…”

Ash from Rustyjonnik still lay in odd corners, where weeds thrust from it, but the eruptions had ceased as suddenly as they began. The king kicked at the ash, raising a small dust storm with his boots.

Although he was most interested in the Madis and studied them from all angles, sometimes squatting to do so, he was too restless to remain in one place. Madi males struggled forward with one of their females, naked, and offered her to him as a condition of their release.

JandolAnganol broke away in disgust, his face working.

Bursting from behind the stone cage into the sunlight, he came face to face with RobaydayAnganol. Both became rigid like two cats, until Roba began to gesticulate, arms and fingers spread. Behind him came the white-haired old guard, shuffling his feet and complaining.

“Imprisoning them for the good of their sanity, mighty king,” said Roba.

But JandolAnganol moved swiftly forward, flung an arm about his son’s neck, and kissed him on the lips, as though he had decided on this approach a while ago.

“Where have you been, my son? Why so wild?”

“Can a boy not grieve among leaves, but must come to court to do so?” His Words were indistinct as he backed away from his father, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. As he bumped into the third cage, his other hand went behind him to support himself.

Immediately, one Madi reached out and grasped his forearm. The naked female who had been offered to the king bit him savagely in the ball of his thumb. Roba screamed with pain. The king was at once at the cage with his sword drawn. The Madis fell back and Roba was released.

“They’re as hungry for royal blood as Simoda Tal,” said Roba, hopping about with his hands clutched between his legs. “You saw how she bit me in the balls! What a stepmotherly act was there!”

The king laughed as he sheathed his sword.

“You see what happens when you put your hand in other people’s affairs.”

“They’re very vicious, sir, and certain they’ve been wronged,” said the old guard from a safe distance.

“Your nature inclines towards captivity as frogs incline towards pools,” Roba told his father, still skipping. “But free these wretched beings! They were Rushven’s folly, not yours—you had greater follies afoot.”

“My son, I have a phagor runt I care for, and perhaps he cares for me. He follows me for affection. Why do you follow me for abuse? Cease it, and live a sane life with me. I will not harm you. If I have wounded you, then I regret it, as you have long given me cause to regret it. Accept what I say.”

“Boys are particularly difficult to bring up, sir,” commented the guard.

Father and son stood apart, regarding each other. JandolAnganol had hooded his eagle gaze, and appeared calm. On Roba’s smooth face was a smouldering rage.

“You need another runt following you? Haven’t you captives enough in this infamous quarry? Why did you come up here to gloat over them?”

“Not to gloat. To learn. I should have learned from Rushven. I need to know—what Madis do… I understand, boy, that you fear my love. You fear responsibility. You always have. Being a king is all responsibility…”

“Being a butterfly is a butterfly’s responsibility.”

Irritated by this remark, the king again took to pacing before the cages. “Here was all SartoriIrvrash’s responsibility. Maybe he was cruel. He made the occupants of these four cages mate with each other in prescribed combinations in order to see what resulted. He wrote all down, as was his fashion. I burnt it all—as is my fashion, you will add. So, then.

“By his experiments, Rushven found a rule which he called a cline. He proved that the Others in Cage One could sometimes produce progeny when mated with Nondads. Those progeny were infertile. No, the progeny of the Nondads breeding with Madis were infertile. I forget details. Madis could produce progeny when mated with the humans in Cage Four. Some of those progeny are fertile.

“He carried on his experiments for many years. If Others and Madis were forced to copulate, no issue resulted. Humans mating with Nondads produce no issue. There is a grading, a cline. These facts he discovered. Rushven was a gentle person. He did what he did for the sake of knowledge.

“You probably blame him, as you blame everyone but yourself. But Rushven paid for his knowledge. One day, two years ago—you were absent then, in the wilds as usual—his wife came to the quarry to feed the captives, and the Others broke out of their cage. They tore her to pieces. This old guard will tell you…”

“It was her arm I found first, sir,” said the guard, pleased to be mentioned. “The left arm, to be partic’lar, sir.”

“Rushven certainly paid for his knowledge. Roba, I have paid for mine. The time will come when you too have to pay a price. It won’t always be summer.”

Roba tore leaves from a bush as if he would destroy the bush, and wrapped the leaves about his wounded hand. The guard went to help him, but Roba kicked him away with a bare foot.

“This stinking place… these stinking cages… the stinking palace… Taking notes of dirty little ruttings… Once, look, before kings were born, the world was a big white ball in a black cup. Along came the great kzahhn of all ancipitals and mated with the queen of all the humans, split her open with his enormous prodo and filled her right up with golden spume. That rumbo so shook the world that it jarred it out of its winter frigidity and caused the seasons—”

He could not finish the sentence, so overcome was he by laughter. The old guard looked disgusted and turned to the king.

“I can assure you, sir, the chancellor never carried out no such experiment here, to my certain knowledge.”

The king remained rigid, eyes bright with contempt, not moving until his son’s outburst was over. He turned his back to him then, before speaking.

“We have no need of that, and no need of quarrelling, not in a time of grief. Let us return together to the palace. You can ride behind me on Lapwing, if you wish.”

Roba fell to his knees and covered his face with his hands. He made noises that were not weeping.

“Perhaps he’s hungry,” suggested the guard.

“Get out, man, or I’ll slice your head off.”

The guard fell back. “I still feed them faithfully every day, Your Majesty. Bring all the food up from the palace, and I’m not as young as I was.”

JandolAnganol turned back towards his kneeling son. “You know your grandfather is now one with the gossies?”

“He was tired. I saw his grave yawn.”

“I do my best, sir, but really I need a slave to assist me…”

“He died in his sleep—an easy death, for all his sins.”

“I said he was tired. Self-demented, mother-tormented, granddad-fermented… that’s three blows you’ve struck. Where next?”

The king folded his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits. “Three blows! You child—they’re my one wound. Why do you plague me with nonsense? Stay and comfort me. Since you’re unfit to marry even a Madi, stay.”

Roba put his hands on the dirt before him and began slowly to get to his feet. The guard seized his chance to say, “They don’t copulate any more, sir. Only among themselves, each cageful, as a way of passing time.”

“Stay with you, Father? Stay with you as Grandfather stayed, in the bowels of the palace? No, I’m going back to the—”

As he was speaking, the guard shuffled forward in supplicatory fashion and interposed himself between JandolAnganol and his son. The king struck him a blow which sent him staggering into a bush. The captives began a great to-do, hammering on their bars.

The king smiled, or at least showed his teeth, as he attempted to approach his son. Roba backed away. “You’ll never understand what your grandfather did to me. You’ll never understand his power over me—then—now—perhaps for ever—because I have no power over you. I could succeed only by putting him away.”

“Prisons flow like glaciers in your blood. I’m going to be a Madi, or a frog. I refuse to be human as long as you claim that title.”

“Rob, don’t be so cruel. See sense. I—am about to—have to—marry a Madi girl soon. That’s why I came to inspect the Madi here. Please stay with me.”

“Trittom your Madi-slave woman! Count progeny! Measure, make notes! Write it down, suffer, lock up the fertile ones, and never forget that there is one running loose about Helliconia fit to send you to an eternal prison…”

As he spoke, the youth was backing away, fingers trailing on the ground. Then he turned and darted away into the bushes. A moment later, the king spied his figure climbing over the quarry cliff. Then he was gone.

The king went and leaned against the trunk of a tree, closing his eyes.

It was the whimpering of the guard which roused him. He went over to where the old man sprawled, and assisted him to his feet.

“Sorry for that, sir, but perhaps a small slave, now I’m getting past it…”

Rubbing his forehead with a weary gesture, JandolAnganol said, “You can answer some questions, slanje. Tell me, please, which way is it that Madi women prefer copulation? From the rear, like animals, or face to face like humans? Rushven would have told me.”

The guard rubbed his hands on his tunic and laughed. “Oh, both ways, sir, to my observation, and I’ve seen it many times, working here with no help. But mainly from the rear, as do the Others. Some say as they mate for life, others as they are promiscuous, but cage life is different.”

“Do the Madi sexes kiss each other on the lips like humans?”

“I’ve not seen that, sir, no. Only humans.”

“Do they lick genitals before congress?”

“That is prevalent in all cages, sir. A lot of licking. Licking and sucking mostly, I’d say, very dirty.”

“Thank you. Now you may release the prisoners. They have served their purpose. Set them free.”

He left the quarry with a slow step, one hand on his sword, one on his brow.

Soft bars of shadow cast by the rajabarals moved across him as he headed back for the palace. Freyr was near to setting. The sky was yellow. Concentric haze aurioles of brown and orange, created by volcanic dust particles, encompassed the sun. It lay near the horizon like a pearl in a corrupt oyster. And the king said to Lapwing, “I can’t trust him. He’s wild, just as I was. I love him but I’d be better advised to kill him. If he had the sense to work with his mother forming an alliance in the scritina against me, I’d be finished… I love her, but I’d be better advised to kill her, too…”

The hoxney made no response. It moved towards the sunset with no ambition but to get home.

The king became aware of the vileness of his own thoughts.

Looking up at the flaring sky, he saw there the evil his religion taught him to see. “I must chasten myself,” he said. “Aid me, O All-Powerful One!”

He stuck a spur in Lapwing’s flank. He would go and see the First Phagorian Guard, They raised no difficult moral issues. With them he felt at peace.

The brown aureoles triumphed over the yellow. As Freyr disappeared, the oyster became ashen from its extremities inwards, changing minute by minute as the Batalix sunlight caught it. Its beauty lost, it became just a cloud formation among jumbled cloud as Batalix itself sloped westward. Akhanaba could be saying—and in no enigmatic fashion—that the whole complex scheme of things was about to end.

JandolAnganol returned to his silent palace, to find there an envoy from the Holy Pannovalan Empire. Alam Esomberr, all smiles, awaited his pleasure.

His bill of divorcement had arrived at last. He had but to present it to the queen of queens and he would be free to marry his Madi princess.