Helliconia Summer

V The Way of the Madis

The Madis of the continent of Campannlat were a race apart. Their customs were separate from those of either mankind or the ancipital kind. And their tribes were separate from each other.

One tribe was progressing slowly westwards, through a region of Hazziz which had become desert, several days’ journey north of Matrassyl.

The tribe had been on its travels for longer than anyone could tell. Neither the protognostics themselves nor any of the nations which saw them pass could say when or where the Madis began their journeyings. They were nomads. They gave birth while on the move, they grew up and married on the move, they were finally lost to life on the move.

Their word for Life was Ahd, meaning the Journey.

Some humans who took an interest in the Madis—and they were few—believed that it was Ahd which kept the Madis apart. Others believed that it was their language. That language was a song, a song where melody seemed to dominate words. There was about the Madi tongue a complexity and yet an incompleteness which seemed to bind the tribe to its way, and which certainly entangled any human who tried to learn it.

A young human was trying to learn it now.

He had made attempts to speak hr’Madi’h when a child. Now in adolescence, his situation was more serious, and his lessons correspondingly more earnest.

He waited beside a stone pillar on which was inscribed a god symbol. It marked one boundary of a land-octave or health-line, although for that ancient superstition he cared little.

The Madis approached in irregular groups or in file. Their low melody preceded them. They passed him by without looking at him, though many of the adults stroked in passing the stone by which he stood. They wore, men and women, alike, sacklike garments loosely tied at the waist. The garments had high stiff hoods which could be raised against bad weather, giving their wearers a grotesque appearance. Their wooden shoes were primitively cut, as if the feet which had to bear them through Ahd were of no consideration.

The youth could see the trail winding back like a thread through the semidesert. There was no end to it. Dust hung over it, veiling it slightly. The Madis moved with a murmur of protognostic language. At any time, someone was singing to some others, the notes passing along the line like blood through an artery. The youth had once assumed this discourse to be a commentary on the way. Now he inclined to the idea that it was some kind of narrative; but what the narrative might concern he had no idea, since for the Madis there was neither past nor future.

He awaited his moment.

He searched the faces coming towards him as if looking for someone loved and lost, anticipating a sign. Although the Madis were human in physical appearance, their countenances held a tantalizing quality, their protognostic innocence, which reminded those who looked on them of animal faces or the faces of flowers. There was one common Madi face. Its eyeballs protruded, with soft brown irises nestled in thick eyelashes. Its nose was pronouncedly aquiline, reminiscent of a parrot’s beak. The forehead receded, the lower jaw was somewhat undershot. The whole effect was startlingly beautiful in the youth’s eyes. He was reminded of a lovely mongrel dog he had worshipped as a child, and also of the white-and-brown flowers of the dogthrush bush.

By one distinguishing mark could the male face be told from the female. The male had two bosses high on their temples and two on their jaws. Sometimes these bosses were dappled with hair. Once, the youth had seen a male with short stubs of horn emerging from the bosses.

The youth looked with fondness on the array of faces as it passed. He responded to the Madi simplicity. Yet hatred burned in his harneys. He wished to kill his father, King JandolAnganol of Borlien.

Motion and murmur flowed past him. Suddenly, there was his sign!

“Oh, I thank you!” he exclaimed, and moved forward.

One of the Madis, a female driving arang, had turned her gaze away from the trail, to look directly at him, giving him the Look of Acceptance. It was an anonymous look, gone as soon as it came, a gleam of intelligence not to be sustained. He fell in beside the female, but she paid him no further attention; the Look had been passed.

He had become a part of the Ahd.

With the migrants went their animals, pack animals such as yelk, trapped in the animals’ great summer grazing grounds, as well as the semi-domesticated animals: several kinds of arang, sheep, and fhlebiht—all hoofed animals—together with dogs and asokins, which seemed as dedicated to the migratory life as their masters.

The youth, who called himself only Roba and detested the title of prince, remembered with scorn how the bored ladies of his father’s court would yawn and wish they were ‘as free as the wandering Madi.’ The Madi, with no more consciousness than a clever dog, were enslaved by the pattern of their lives.

Every day, camp was struck before dawn. At sunrise, the tribe would be off, moving to an untidy pattern. Throughout the day, rest periods occurred along the column, but the rests were brief and took no account of whether two suns or one ruled in the sky. Roba became convinced that such matters did not enter their minds; they were eternally bound to the trail.

Some days, there were obstacles on the route, a river to be crossed, a mountainside. Whatever it was, the tribe would accomplish it in their undemonstrative way. Often a child was drowned, an old person killed, a sheep lost. But the Ahd went on, and the harmony of their discourse did not cease.

At Batalix-set, the tribe came to a slow halt.

Then were chanted over and over the two words that meant ‘water’ and ‘wool’. If there was a Madi god, he was composed of water and wool.

The men saw to it that all the animals of their herd had water before they prepared the main meal of the day. The women and girls took down crude looms from their pack animals and on them wove rugs and garments of dyed wool.

Water was their necessity, wool their commodity.

“Water is Ahd, wool is Ahd.” The song had no precision, but it recognized truth.

The men sheared the wool from their animals and dyed it, the women from the age of four walked along the trail teasing the wool onto their distaffs. All the articles they made were made from wool. The wool of the long-legged fhlebiht was finest and went to make satara gowns fit for queens.

The woven articles were either stowed on pack animals or else worn by male and female alike under their drab outer garments. Later, they were traded at a town along the route, Distack, Yicch, Oldorando, Akace…

After the evening meal, eaten as dusk thickened, all the tribe slept huddled together, male, female, animal. The females came on heat rarely. When it was the time of the female Roba travelled with, she turned to him for her satisfaction, and he found delight in that fluttering embrace. Her orgasms were marked by peals of song.

The path the Madis took was as pre-ordained as the pattern of their days. They journeyed to the east or to the west by different trails; those trails sometimes crossed, sometimes wandered a hundred miles apart. A journey in one direction took an entire small year, so that such knowledge of passing time as they had was spoken of in terms of distance—that understanding was Roba’s entry point into hr’Madi’h.

That the Journey had been in progress for centuries, and perhaps for centuries before that, was evidenced by the flora growing along its way. These flower-faced creatures, who owned nothing but their animals, nevertheless dropped things all along their route. Faeces and seeds were scattered. As they walked, the women were in the habit of plucking herbs and plants such as afram, henna, purple hellebore, and mantle. These yielded dyes for their rugs. The seeds of the plants were shed, along with the seeds of food plants like barley. Burrs and spores adhered to the coats of the animals.

The Journey temporarily laid waste the grazing along its entire length. Yet it also caused the earth to bloom.

Even in semi-desert, the Madis walked through an avenue of trees, bushes, herbs which they themselves had accidentally planted. Even on barren mountainsides, flowers blossomed which were otherwise seen only in the plains. The eastward and westward avenues—called ucts by the Madis—ran like ribbons, sometimes intertwined, right across the equatorial continent of Helliconia, marking an original trail of scumber.

Endlessly walking, Roba forgot his human connections and the hatred of his father. The Journey through the ucts was his life, his Ahd. At times, he could deceive himself and believe that he understood the murmured narrative that passed through the daily bloodstream.

Although he preferred migratory life to the scheming life of the court, it was a struggle to adapt himself to Madi eating habits. They retained a fear of fire, so their cooking was primitive, though they made a flat unleavened bread, called a la’hrap, by spreading a dough over hot stones. This la’hrap they stored to eat either fresh or stale. With it went blood and milk drawn from their animals. Occasionally, during feasts, they ate raw pulverized meat.

Blood was important to them. Roba wrestled with a whole nexus of words and phrases which had something to do with journeys, blood, food, and god-in-blood. He often meant to clarify his thoughts at night, to write down his knowledge when all was quiet; but directly they had eaten their frugal meal, everyone fell asleep. Roba also slept.

No power could stop his eyelids closing. He slept without dreams, as he imagined his travelling companions did. Perhaps if they ever learnt to dream, he thought, they would turn that mysterious corner which separated their existence from a human one.

When the female, having clung to him for her brief ecstasy, fell away, he wondered in the moment before sleep if she was happy. There was no way he could ask or she answer. And he? He had been lovingly brought up by his mother, the queen of queens, and yet he knew that in all human happiness lies an unremitting sorrow. Perhaps the Madis escaped that sorrow by failing to become human.

Mist coiled over the Takissa and over Matrassyl, but above the city the suns burned. Because the air stifled in the palace, Queen MyrdemInggala lay in her hammock. She had spent the morning dealing with supplicants. Many of her citizens were known to her by name. Now she dreamed in the shade of a small marble pavilion. Her reveries were of the king, who had recovered from his wound and then, without a word of explanation, had gone away on a journey—some said upriver to Oldorando. She had not been invited. Instead, he had taken with him the orphaned phagor runt, a survivor, like the king, of the Battle of the Cosgatt.

Beside the pavilion, MyrdemInggala’s chief lady-in-waiting, Mai TolramKetinet played with Princess Tatro. She amused her with a painted wooden bird which flapped its wings. Other toys and storybooks lay scattered on the tesserae of the pavilion.

Scarcely aware of her daughter’s prattle, the queen allowed the bird to fly free in her mind. She had it flutter up into the branches of a gwing-gwing tree, where the ripe fruit hung in bunches. In the magic of her thought, Freyr became a harmless gwing-gwing. Its threatening advance towards the world became nothing more than fructiferous ripeness. Under the same magic which drowsed beneath the queen’s lids, she both was and was not the soft gwing-gwing flesh.

Their flesh came down and touched the ground. The globes of their summery weight were furred. They rolled under the hedges, sprawled in the velvets of the moss beneath, their cheeks gentle against the verdure. And the wild boar came.

It was a boar but it was her husband, her master, her king.

The boar pranced upon the fruit, crushed it, devoured it, until juices suppurated at its chin. Even as she filled the garden with her syruped thought, she prayed to Akhanaba to deliver her from the rape—or, rather, to let her enjoy and not to punish her for her excess. Comets flew through the sky, mists boiled above the city, the burn of Freyr fell on them because she allowed herself to dream of the great boar.

The king was upon her now in her reverie. His immense bristled back arched over her. There were nights, there were nights in the summer, when he would call her to his bedchamber. She would go barefoot, annointed. Mai trailed beside her with the whale-oil lamp, its flame carried in a bubble of glass like some incandescent wine. She would appear before him knowing that she was the queen of queens. Her eyes would be wide and dark, her nipples already aglow, her thighs alive with an orchard of gwing-gwings ripe for the tusk.

The pair of them would throw themselves into their embraces with a passion which was ever new. He would call her by her pet name, like a child calling in its sleep. Their flesh, their souls, seemed to rise up like steam from two hot streams mingling.

Mai TolramKetinet’s duty was to stand beside their couch and throw a light upon their transports. They were not to be denied the sight of each other’s naked body.

Sometimes the girl, staid though she was in her daylight nature, would be overcome, and thrust her hand into her own kooni. Then JandolAnganol, ruthless in his khmir, would harvest the girl down beside the queen and take her as if there were nothing to choose between the two women.

Of this, no word was ever spoken by the queen in daylight. But her intuition informed her that Mai told her brother, now the general of the Second Army, what occurred; she knew by the way that young general looked at her. Sometimes in her hammock, daydreaming, she wondered how it would be if Hanra TolramKetinet also joined in those encounters in the king’s bedchamber. The khmir sometimes failed. On occasions, when dusk moths flew and her lamp again waxed incandescent, JandolAnganol came by secret passage to where she lay. No one else had his footfall. It was, she thought, at once rapid and indecisive, the very footprint of his character. He flung himself upon her. The gwing-gwings were there, but not the tusk. Fury would seize him at this betrayal of his own body. In a court where he trusted few, that was the ultimate treason.

Then intellectual khmir would seize him. He would flagellate himself with a hatred as intense as his previous passion. The queen screamed and wept. In the morning, slave women would go down on their knees, bitter-mouthed and sly-eyed, to mop his blood from the tiles beside her bed.

To this characteristic of her master’s, the queen of queens never made reference. Not to Mai TolramKetinet, not to the other ladies of the court. Like his footfall, it was part of him. He was as impatient with his own desires as he was with those of his courtiers. He could not be still enough to face himself, and while his wounds healed he had been alone with his thoughts.

Summoning more branches of gwing-gwings to soften what she was saying to herself, she told herself that the vein of weakness was part of his strength. He would be weaker without it. But she could never tell him she understood. She screamed instead. And the next night, the humpbacked animal would be rooting among the hedgerows again.

Sometimes in the day, when it seemed the gwing-gwings blushed for their devouring, she would plunge naked into her pool, sinking down into the embrace of the water—and looking upwards would see the bright scattered blast of Freyr across the surface. One day—oh, she knew it in her eddre—Freyr would come blasting down into the depths of the pool to burn her for the intensity of her desires. Good Akhanaba, spare me. I am the queen of queens, I too have khmir.

And of course she watched him in the day.

Talking with his courtiers, with wise men or fools—or perhaps even with that ambassador from Sibornal who fixed her with a look she feared—the king would stretch forth a hand and pluck an apple from a bowl. He would snatch without looking. It might be one of the cinnabrian apples, brought upriver from Ottassol. He would bite into it. He would eat it—not as his courtiers ate apples, who nibbled round the flesh and left a fat central spindle to be thrown on the floor. The King of Borlien ate wholeheartedly, yet without apparent enjoyment, and devoured the entire fruit, skin, flesh, core, plump brown pips. All would go, ground down, while he talked. He would then wipe his beard, apparently never giving a thought to the fruit. And secretly MyrdemInggala would think of the boar in the hedges.

Akhanaba punished her for her wanton thoughts. He punished her with the understanding that she would never know Jan, however close they were. By the same token—this was more painful—he would never know her as she desired to be known. As Hanra TolramKetinet mysteriously knew her, without a word being exchanged.

The spell of her reverie was broken by approaching footsteps. Opening one eye, MyrdemInggala saw the chancellor approaching. SartoriIrvrash was the only man in the court allowed into her private garden; it was a right she had granted him on the death of his wife. From her perspective of twenty-four and a half years, SartoriIrvrash was old at thirty-seven years and several tenners. He would not interfere with her women.

Yet she shut her eye again. This was the time of day when he returned from a certain nearby quarry. JandolAnganol had told her, laughing harshly, about the experiments SartoriIrvrash carried out on wretched captives in cages. His wife had been killed by those experiments.

His bald pate shone in the sun as he removed his hat to Tatro and Mai. The child liked him. The queen would not intervene. SartoriIrvrash bowed to the recumbent form of the queen, and then to her daughter. He spoke to the child as if she were an adult, which possibly explained why Tatro liked him. There were few people in Matrassyl who could claim to be his friend.

This retiring man, of medium height and dishevelled dress, had been a power in Borlien for a long while. Thus when the king lay incapacitated by the wound received in the Cosgatt, SartoriIrvrash had ruled in his stead, directing the affairs of state from his untidy desk. If no one was his friend, all respected him. For SartoriIrvrash was disinterested. He played no favourites.

He was too solitary for favourites. Even the death of his wife appeared to have made no difference to his regime. He did not hunt or drink. He rarely laughed. He was too cautious to be caught in a mistake.

Nor had he even the customary swarm of relations on whom to bestow patronage. His brothers were dead, his sister lived far away. SartoriIrvrash passed muster as that impossible creature, a man without faults, serving a king who was full of them.

In a religious court, he had only one point of vulnerability. He was an intellectual and an atheist.

Even the insult of his atheism had to be overlooked. He tried to convert nobody to his way of thinking. When not occupied with affairs of state, he worked on his book, filtering truth from lies and legends. But that did not stop him occasionally showing a more human side of his nature and reading fairy tales to the princess.

SartoriIrvrash’s enemies in the scritina often wondered how he—so cold-blooded—and King JandolAnganol—so hot-blooded—kept from each other’s throat. The fact was, SartoriIrvrash was a self-effacing man; he knew how to swallow insults. And he was too remote from other people to be offended by them—until pressed too far. That time would come, but it was not yet.

“I thought you weren’t coming, Rushven,” said Tatro.

“Then you must learn to have more faith in me. I always appear when I am needed.”

Soon Tatro and SartoriIrvrash were sitting together in the pavilion and the princess was thrusting one of her books at him, demanding a story. He read the one which always made the queen uneasy, the fairy tale of the silver eye.

“Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled over the kingdom of Ponptpandum in the West, where all the suns set. The people and phagors of Ponptpandum feared their king for they thought he had magic powers.

“They longed to be rid of him, and to have a king who would not oppress them, but nobody knew what to do.

“Whenever the citizens thought of a scheme, the king found out. He was such a great magician that he conjured up a huge silver eye. This eye floated in the sky all night, spying on everything that happened in the unhappy kingdom. The eye opened and shut. It came fully open ten times every year, as everyone knew. Then it saw most.

“When the eye saw a conspiracy, the king knew about it. He would then execute all the conspirators, whether men or phagors, outside the palace gate.

“The queen was sad to see such cruelty, but she could do nothing. The king swore that, whatever else he did, he would never harm his lovely queen. When she begged him to be merciful, he did not strike her, as he would have done anyone else, even his advisors.

“In the lowest dungeon of the castle was a room guarded by seven blind phagor guards. They had no horns, because all phagors when they grew up sawed off their horns at the annual fair in Ponptpandum, so as to try and look more human. The guards let the king enter the cell.

“In the cell lived a gillot, an old female phagor. She was the only horned phagor in the kingdom. She was. the source of all the king’s magic. By himself, the king was nothing. Every evening, the king would beseech the gillot to send the silver eye up into the sky. Every evening, she did as requested.

Then the king saw all that was happening in his kingdom. He also asked the old gillot many searching questions about nature, which she answered without fail.

“One night when it was bitterly cold she said to him, ‘Oh King, why do you seek such knowledge?’

“ ‘Because there is power in knowledge,’ replied the king. ‘Knowledge sets people free.’

“To this the gillot said nothing. She was a wizard and yet she was his prisoner. At last she said in a terrible voice, ‘Then the time has come to set me free.’

“At her words, the king fell into a swoon. The gillot walked from her dungeon, and commenced to climb the stairs. Now the queen had long wondered why her husband went to an underground room every night. On this night, her curiosity had got the better of her. She was descending the stairs to spy on him when she encountered the gillot in the dark.

The queen screamed in terror. In order that she should not scream again, the phagor struck her a heavy blow and killed her. Roused by the sound of his queen’s much-loved voice, the king woke and ran upstairs. Finding what had occurred, he drew his sword and slew the phagor.

“Even as she fell to the ground, the silver eye in the sky began to spiral away. Farther and farther it went, growing smaller and smaller, until it was lost to view. At last the people knew they were free, and the silver eye was never seen again.”

Tatro was silent for a moment.

“Isn’t that an awful bit where the gillot gets killed?” she said. “Would you read it again?”

Raising herself on one elbow, the queen said, teasingly, “Why do you read Tatro that silly story, Rushven? It’s a pure fairy story.”

“I read it because Tatro likes it, ma’am,” he said, smoothing his whiskers, as he often did in her presence, and smiling.

“Knowing your opinion of the ancipital race, I cannot imagine you relish the notion that humankind once looked up to phagors for wisdom.”

“Madam, what I relish about the story is that kings once looked up to others for wisdom.”

MyrdemInggala clapped her hands with pleasure at the answer. “Let us hope that that at least is no fairy story…”

In the course of their Ahd, the Madis came once more to Oldorando, and to the city bearing that name.

A sector of the city called the Port, beyond the South Gate, was set aside for the migrants. There they made one of their rare halts, for a few days. Celebrations of a modest sort took place. Spiced arang were eaten, elaborate zyganke were danced.

Water and wool. In Oldorando, the garments and rugs woven during the Journey were bartered with merchants for a few necessities. One or two human merchants had gained the trust of the Madis. The tribes always needed pans and goat bells; they were not workers of metal.

It also happened that some members of the tribe always arranged to remain in Oldorando, either until the tribe next returned or permanently. Lameness or illness was reason for leaving the Ahd.

Some years earlier, a lame Madi girl had left the Ahd and gained employment as a sweeper in the palace of King Sayren Stund. Her name was Bathkaarnet-she. Bathkaarnet-she had the traditional Madi face, part flower, part bird, and she would sweep where she was put to sweep without tiring, unlike the lazy Oldorandans. While she swept, small birds would cluster round her without fear, and listen to her song. This the king saw from his balcony. In those days, Sayren Stund had not surrounded himself with protocol and religious advisors. He had Bathkaarnet-she brought to him. Unlike most Madis, this girl had an active gaze which could focus like a human’s. She was very humble, which suited the nervous Sayren Stund.

He decided to have her taught Olonets, and a good master was employed. No progress was made until the king was inspired to sing to the girl. She sang in response. More language came to her, but she could never speak, only sing.

This shortcoming would have maddened many. It pleased the king. He found that her father had been human and had joined the journey when a youth, running away from slavery.

The king, despite contrary advice, married Bathkaarnet-she, converting her to his faith. Soon she bore him a two-headed son, who died. Then she bore two normal daughters who lived. First Simoda Tal, and then the mercurial Milua Tal.

Prince RobaydayAnganol had heard this story when a boy. Now, as Roba, and dressed as a Madi, he made his way from the Port to one of the gates at the rear of the palace. He wrote a note to Bathkaarnet-she, which a servant bore away.

He stood waiting patiently in the heat, where a nocturnal-flowering zaldal climbed and spread. To the prince, Oldorando was a strange city. Not a phagor was to be seen.

His intention was to learn as much about the Madis as he could from the Madi queen before returning to the Journey. He had determined that he would be the first man to sing the Madi tongue fluently. Before leaving his father’s court, he had often talked to Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, who had inspired in him a love of learning—another reason for his falling out with his father, the king.

Roba waited by the gate. He had kissed the rough cheek of his female, talced with the dust of the roadside, knowing that he could never find her again even when he rejoined the Journey. For then the Look of Acceptance might be flashed by someone else—or, if by her again, how was he to recognize her for sure? He felt strongly that the quality of individuality was a precious thing, granted only to humans and, to a lesser degree, to phagors.

After an hour, he saw the servant returning, watched his self-important human strut, so unlike that Madi shamble which carried them safe across a lifetime. The man walked round two sides of the palace square, under shady cloisters, rather than brave the breath of Freyr in the open.

“Very well, the queen will grant you five minutes’ audience. Be sure to bow to her, you rogue.”

He slipped through the side gate and began to walk across the square, using the Madi shamble, which kept the spine supple. A man was walking towards him with a hesitant kind of arrogance which needed no display. It was his father, King JandolAnganol.

Roba removed his old sack hood and bent down, sweeping the ground with it, using languid but steady strokes. Madi-fashion. JandolAnganol passed him, talking animatedly to another man, and never even gave him a glance. Roba straightened up and continued on his way to the queen.

The lame queen sat in a silver swing. Her toes were brown and ringed. She was rocked by a green-clad lackey. The room in which she greeted Roba was overgrown with vegetation, among which pecubeas flitted and preets sang.

When she discovered who he was, as she soon did, she refused to sing of her earlier life and instead warbled in fulsome terms about JandolAnganol.

This was not to Roba’s taste. A kind of madness came over him, and he said to the queen, “I want to sing the song of your birth-tongue. But your song is of my birth-curse. To know that man you praise, you must become his son. There’s no room for flesh and blood in that man’s heart, only for abstracts. Religion and country. Religion and country, not Tatro and Roba, in his harneys.”

“Kings believe in such matters. I know it. I know they are set above us to dream of grand things we cannot,” the queen sang. “It’s empty where kings live.”

“Grandeur’s a stone,” he said emphatically. “Under that stone he imprisons his own father. And I, his own son—he would imprison me for two years in a monastery. Two years to teach me grandeur! A vow of silence in a Matrassyl monastery, to introduce me to that stone Akhanaba…

“How could I bear it? Am I a rickyback or slug, to crawl beneath a stone? Oh, my father’s heart is stone, so I ran, ran like a footless wind, to join the Ahd of your kind, kind queen.”

Then Bathkaarnet-she began to sing. “But my kind are the scum of the earth. We have no intelligence, only ucts, and in consequence no guilt feelings. What do you call that? No conscience. We can only walk, walk, walk our lives away—except for me who luckily am lame.

“My dear husband, Sayren, has taught me the value of religion, which is unknown to poor ignorant Madis. Fancy to live for centuries and not know that we exist only by the grace of the All-Powerful! So I respect your father for all his religious feelings. He scourges himself every day he is here.”

As the singing voice ceased, Roba asked bitterly, “And what is he doing here? Looking for me, a wandering part of his kingdom?”

“Oh, no, no.” There was fluting laughter. “He has been here conferring with Sayren, and with Church dignitaries from distant Pannoval. Yes, I saw them, they spoke to me.”

He stood before her, in such a way that the lackey had to swing her more gently. “Who confers and never speaks? Who has—and still seeks?”

“Who can tell what kings confer about?” she sang. One of the bright birds fluttered into his face, and he beat it down.

“You must know what they are planning, Your Majesty.”

“Your father has a wound. I see it in his face,” she sang. “He needs his nation to be powerful, to smite his enemies to the dust. For that, he will sacrifice even his queen, your mother.”

“How will he sacrifice her?”

“He will sacrifice her to history. Is not a woman’s life less than a man’s destiny? We are nothing but lame things in the hands of men…”

His ways became dark. He had presentiments of evil. His reason fled. He tried to return to the Madis and forget human treachery. But the Ahd required peace or at least absence of mind. After some days of walking, he left the uct and wandered away into the wilderness, living in forest trees or in dens lions had forsaken. He talked to himself in a language all his own. He lived on fruits and fungi and things that crawled beneath stones.

Among the things that crawled beneath stones was a small crustacean, a rickyback. This little humpbacked creature had a tiny face peering from under its chitin shell, and twenty delicate white legs. Rickybacks congregated under logs and stones in their dozens, all packed snug together.

He lay watching them, playing with them, lying on his side with one arm crooked to support his head, flipping them gently over with a finger. He marvelled at their lack of fear, at their laziness. What was their purpose? How could they exist, doing so little?

But these little creatures had survived through the ages. Whether Helliconia was unbearably hot or unbearably cold—SartoriIrvrash had told him this—the rickybacks remained close to the ground, hiding away, and had probably done nothing more since time began.

They were wonderful to him, even as they lay kicking their dainty limbs in ridiculous attempts to right themselves.

His wonder was replaced by unease. What could they be doing if the All-Powerful had not put them here?

As he lay there, the thought was as powerfully presented to him as if someone spoke the words that he might be mistaken and his father might be right; perhaps there was an All-Powerful directing human affairs. In which case, much that had seemed to him wicked was good, and he was deeply mistaken.

He stood up, trembling, forgetting the insignificant creatures at his feet.

He looked up at the thick clouds in the sky. Had someone spoken?

If there was an Akhanaba, then he must surrender his will to the god. Whatever the All-Powerful decreed must be done. Even murder was justified, if the end was Akhanaba’s.

At least he believed in the original beholder, that mother figure who saw to the earth and all its works. That misty figure, identified with the world itself, took precedence over Akhanaba.

The days went by, and the suns travelled across them, scorching him. He was lost to the wilderness, hardly knowing he was lost, speaking to no one, seeing no one. There were nondads about, evasive as thought, but he had no business with them. He was listening to the voice of Akhanaba, or the beholder.

As he wandered, a forest fire overtook him. He plunged in a brook full-length, watching the roaring machine of conflagration rush up one slope of a hill and down the other, exhaling energy. In the furnace of its flames he saw the face of a god; the smoke trailing out behind was the god’s beard and hair, grey with cosmic wisdom. Like his father, the vision in its passage left destruction behind it. He lay with half his face in the water and both eyes staring, one under water, one above, seeing two universes lit by the visitant. When the visitant had gone by, he rose, going up the hill as if drawn in the wake of the monster, to stagger among smouldering bushes.

The fire god had left a trail of black. He would see it ahead, still pursuing its course like a whirlwind of vengeance.

Prince RobaydayAnganol began to run, laughing as he went. He was convinced that his father was too powerful to kill. But there were those near him who could be killed, whose deaths would lessen him.

The thought roared into his mind like fire, and he recognized it for the voice of the All-Powerful. No longer did he feel pain; he had become anonymous, like a true Madi.

Caught up in the uct of his own life, RobaydayAnganol saw the stars wheel over his head every night. He saw as he fell asleep YarapRombry’s Comet blazing in the north. He saw the fleet star Kaidaw pass overhead.

Robayday’s keen eyes picked out the phases of Kaidaw when it was at zenith. But it moved rapidly, traversing the sky from south to north. As he watched it hurl itself towards the horizon, it was no longer possible to distinguish the Kaidaw’s disc; it sank to a pinpoint of bright light and then disappeared.

To its inhabitants the Kaidaw was known as the Avernus, Earth Observation Station Avernus. During this period, it was home for some six thousand inhabitants, men, women, children, androids. The human beings were divided into six scholarly families or clans. Each clan studied some aspect of the planet below, or of its sister planets. The information they gathered was signalled back to Earth.

The four planets which circled about the G-class star known as Batalix comprised the great discovery of Earth’s interstellar age. Interstellar exploration—“conquest’, as the peoples of that arrogant age called it—was conducted at enormous expense. The expense became so ruinous that interstellar flight was eventually abandoned.

Yet it yielded a transformation in the human spirit. A more integrated approach to life meant that people no longer sought to exact more than their fair share from a global production system now much better understood and controlled. Indeed, interpersonal relationships took on a kind of sanctity, once it was realized that, of a million planets within reasonable distance from Earth, not one could sustain human life or match the miraculous diversity of Earth itself.

With emptiness the universe was prodigal beyond belief. With organic life, it was niggardly. As much as anything, it was the scale of desolation of the universe which caused mankind to turn with abhorrence from interstellar flight. By then, however, the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system had been discovered.

“God built Earth in seven days. He spent the rest of his life doing nothing. Only in his old age did he stir himself and create Helliconia.” So said one terrestrial wag.

So the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system were of prime importance to the spiritual existence of Earth. And of those planets, Helliconia was paramount.

Helliconia was not unlike Earth. Other human beings lived there, breathed air, suffered, enjoyed and died. The ontological systems of both planets were parallel.

Helliconia was a thousand light-years from Earth. To travel from one world to the other in the most technologically advanced starship took over fifteen hundred years. Human mortality was too frail to sustain such a journey.

Yet a deep need in the human spirit, a wish to identify with something beyond itself, sought to sustain a bond between Earth and Helliconia. Despite all the difficulties imposed by the enormous gulfs of space and time, a permanent watch post was built in orbit about Helliconia, the Earth Observation Station. Its duty was to study Helliconia and send back its findings to Earth.

So began a long one-sided involvement. That involvement exercised one of mankind’s most attractive gifts, the power of empathy. Ordinary terrestrials turned every day—or would turn long hence—to learn how their friends and heroes fared on the surface of the remote planet. They feared phagors. They watched developments at the court of JandolAnganol. They wrote in the Olonets script; many people spoke one or other of the languages. To some extent, Helliconia had unwittingly colonised Earth.

This bond continued long after the end of Earth’s great interstellar age.

Indeed, Helliconia, prize of that age, was another cause of its decline. There it was, this world of splendour and terror, as beautiful as any dream—and to step on it was death for any human. Not immediate, but certain death.

Pervading the atmosphere of Helliconia were viruses which, through long processes of adaptation, were harmless to the natives. At least they were harmless throughout most of the Great Year. But to anyone from Earth, those unfilterable viruses formed a barrier like the sword of the angel who—in an ancient Earth myth—guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

And to many people aboard the Avernus, a garden of Eden was what the planet below them resembled, at least when the slow cruel centuries of the winter of the Great Year had passed.

The Avernus had its parks, with streams and lakes, and a thousand ingenious electronic simulations with which to challenge its young men and women. But it remained an artificial world. Many aboard it felt that their lives remained artificial lives, without the zest of reality.

This sense of artificiality was particularly oppressive in the case of the Pin clan. For the Pin clan was in charge of cross-continuities. Their responsibility was mainly sociological.

The chief task of the Pin clan was to record the unfolding of the lives of one or two families through the generations throughout the 2592 Earth years of the Great Year and beyond. Such data, impossible to collect on Earth, was of great scientific value. It meant also that the Pin family built up an especially close identification with their subjects below.

That proximity was reenforced by the knowledge which shadowed all their days—the knowledge that Earth was irrecoverably far away. To be born on station was to be born into unremitting exile. The first law governing life on the Avernus was that there was no going home.

Computerborgoid ships occasionally arrived from Earth. These linkships, as they were called, always provided emergency accommodation in which humans could travel. Possibly some faint hope existed on Earth that one of the Avernians would be able, as a result of new methods, to return to Earth; more likely, the ships, old-fashioned in design, had never been modernized. The gulf of space and time made the thought of such passage a mockery; even bodies sunk deep in cryogenic sleep fell into decay over one and a half-thousand years.

Helliconia lay incomparably nearer than Earth. Yet the viruses kept Helliconia sacrosanct.

Existence on the Avernus was Utopian—that is to say, pleasant, equable, and dull. There were no terrors to face, no injustices, no shortages, and few sudden shocks. There was no revelatory religion; religious faith hardly commended itself to a society whose duty it was to watch the upheavals on the world below. The metaphysical agonies and ecstasies of individual egos were ruled incorrect.

Yet to some Avernians of every generation, their world remained a prison, its orbit an uct going nowhere. Certain members of the Pin clan, looking down on the poor crazed Roba wandering in the wilderness, were consumed by envy of his freedom.

The intermittent arrival of link-ships merely emphasized their oppression. In earlier days, a link-ship had caused a riot. It had come full of cassettes of news—ancient news of cartels, sports, nations, artefacts, names, all unknown. The leader of the riot had been caught and, in an unprecedented move, sent down to his death on the surface of Helliconia.

Everyone on the Observation Station had watched avidly his extraordinary adventures before he succumbed to the virus. They had lived vicariously on the planet on their doorstep.

From that time on, there had to be a safety valve, a tradition of ritualized sacrifice and escape. So the ironically named Helliconia Holiday Lottery came into being. The lottery was held once every ten years during the centuries of the Helliconian summer. The winner of the lottery was allowed to descend to his certain death, and to choose any place at which to land. Some preferred solitude, some cities, some mountains, some the plains. No winner ever refused to go or turned aside from fame and freedom.

Lottery time came round again 1177 Earth years after apastron—the nadir of the Great Year.

The three previous winners had been women. On this occasion, the prizewinner was Billy Xiao Pin. He made his choice without difficulty. He would go down to Matrassyl, capital city of Borlien. There he would gaze upon the face of the queen of queens before the helico virus overcame him.

Death was to be Billy’s prize: a death in which he would mingle richly with the centuries-long orchestration of Helliconia’s Great Summer.