Helliconia Summer

VIII In the Presence of Mythology

Billy Xiao Pin’s face was round, as were, in general disposition, his eyes and nose. Even his mouth was a mere rosebud. His skin was smooth and sallow. He had left the Avernus only once previously, when close members of the Pin family had taken him on an Ipocrene fly-past.

Billy was a modest but determined young man, well-mannered like all members of his family, and it was believed that he could be relied upon to face his death with equanimity. He was twenty Earth years old, or just over fourteen by Helliconian reckoning.

Although the Helliconia Holiday Lottery was ruled by chance, it was generally agreed—at least among the thousand-strong Pin family—that Billy was an excellent choice as winner.

When his good fortune was announced, he was sent on a tour of the Avernus by his doting family. With him went his current girl friend, Rose Yi Pin. The moving corridors of the satellite were event-oriented, and those who travelled them often found themselves caught in technological typhoons, or surrounded by animated computer graphics, sometimes of a malignant kind. The Avernus had been in its orbit for 3269 years; every facility available was mustered to counteract the killing disease which threatened its occupants: lethargy.

Together with a group of friends, Billy took a holiday in a mountain resort. There they slept in a log hut high above the ski slopes. Such synthetic pleasure spots had once been based on real Earth resorts; now they were rejigged to imitate Helliconian locations. Billy and his friends appeared to ski in the High Nktryhk.

Later, they sailed the Ardent Sea to the east of Campannlat. Setting out from the one harbour on a thousand miles of coast, they had as background the eternal cliffs of Mordriat, rising out of the foam straight to heights of almost six thousand feet, their shoulders wreathed in cloud. The Scimitar waterfall fell and paused and fell again in its plunge of over a mile towards the racing sea.

Pleasing though such excitements were, the mind was always aware that every danger, each remote vista, was imprisoned in a mirrored room no more than eighteen feet long by twelve feet wide.

At the conclusion of the holiday, Billy Xiao Pin went alone to his Advisor, to squat before him in the Humility position.

“Silence recapitulates long conversations,” said the Advisor. “In seeking life you will find death. Both are illusory.”

Billy knew that the Advisor did not wish him to leave the Avernus, for the profound reason that the Advisor feared any dynamism. He was devoured by the deadly illusionism which had become prevalent philosophy. In his youth, he had written a poetic treatise one hundred syllables long entitled, “On the Prolongation of One Helliconian Season Beyond One Human Life-Span’.

This treatise was a product of, and a sustaining factor in, the illusionism which gripped the Avernus. Billy had no intellectual way of fighting the philosophy, but now that he was about to leave the ship, he felt a hatred of it which he dared to voice.

“I must stand in a real world and experience real joy, real hurt. If only for a brief while, I must endure real mountains and walk along stone streets. I must encounter people with real destinies.”

“You still overuse that treacherous word ‘real’. The evidence of our senses is evidence only to our senses. Wisdom looks elsewhere.”

“Yes. Well. I’m going elsewhere.”

But morbidity did not know where to stop. The aged man continued to lecture. Billy continued meekly to listen.

The old man knew that sex was at the bottom of it. He saw that Billy had a sensuous nature which needed to be curbed. Billy was giving up Rose to seek out Queen MyrdemInggala—yes, he knew Billy’s desires. He wished to see the queen of queens face to face.

That was a sterile idea. Rose was not a sterile idea. The real—to use that word—was to be found not extraneously but within the mystery of personality: in Billy’s case, Rose’s personality, perchance. And there were other considerations.

“We have a role to fulfil, our role towards Earth the Obligation. Our deepest satisfaction comes from fulfilling that role. On Helliconia, you will lose role and society.”

Billy Xiao Pin dared raise his eyes so as to regard his old Advisor. The huddled figure was planted, each of his out-breaths directing his weight down to anchor against the floor, each in-breath lifting his head towards the ceiling. He could not be perturbed, not even by the loss of a favourite pupil.

This scene was being recorded by ever-watching cameras and broadcasts to any of the six thousand who might care to flip to this chamber. There was no privacy. Privacy encouraged dissidence.

Watching the wise simian eyes, Billy saw that his Advisor no longer believed in Earth. Earth!—the subject Billy and his contemporaries discussed endlessly, the ever-interesting topic. Earth was not accessible like Helliconia. But Earth for the Advisor and hundreds like him had become a sort of ideal—a projection of the inner lives of those aboard.

As the voice shaped its crisp nothings, Billy thought he saw that the old man did not believe in the objective reality of Helliconia either. For him, ensconced in the sophistry of argument which formed so large a part of the station’s intellectual life, Helliconia was merely a projection, an hypothesis.

The great lottery prize was designed to counteract this withering of the senses. The youthful hope of the ship—which in magical ways centred about that great object of study disrobing its seasons below them—died, generation by generation, until the enforced imprisonment became voluntary imprisonment. Billy had to go and die that others might live.

He had to go to where that sloe-eyed queen thrust her body against the breath of the thordotter as she climbed to the castle.

The speech ceased at last. Billy took his chance.

“Thousand thanks for all your care, Master.” Bowing. Leaving. Breathing deeper.

His departure from the Avernus was stage-managed as a great event. Everyone felt strongly about his going. This was the actual proof that Helliconia existed. The six thousand were becoming less able to live imaginatively beyond the station, in spite of all the instruments which were devised to enable them to do so. The prize was a gesture of supreme worth, even to the losers.

Rose Yi Pin turned her neat small face up to Billy’s and wrapped her arms round him for the last time. “I believe you will live for ever down there, Billy. I shall watch you as I grow old and ugly. Just beware of their silly religions. Life here is sane. Down there they are mad in the head with religious notions—even that so beautiful queen of yours.”

He kissed her lips. “Live your orderly life. Don’t fret.”

Suddenly fury burst from her. “Why do you ruin my life? Where’s the order, with you gone?”

He shook his head. That you must discover for yourself.”

The automated craft was waiting to take him from purgatory. Billy climbed through the passage into the little shell, and the door hissed shut behind him. Terror gripped him; he strapped himself into the seat and enjoyed the emotion.

The choice as to whether to make the descent with the windows shuttered or not was his. He pressed a button. Up flew the shutters and he was rewarded with a view of a magical whale from whose flank he was now excommunicated. A belt of irregular stars spread into the distance like the curl of a comet’s tail. Gasping, he realized that these stars were unprocessed rubbish ejected from the Avernus, falling into orbit about the station.

At one moment, the Avernus was an immensity, its eighteen million tons obscuring the field of vision; at the next, it was dwindling, and Billy forgot to look. Helliconia was in view, as familiar as his own face in a mirror, but now seen more nakedly, with cloud drifting across its lit crescent and the peninsula of Pegovin striking like a club into the central sea. The great southern ice cap dazzled.

He looked for the two suns of the binary system as the windows darkened to fend off their light.

Batalix, the nearer sun, was lost behind the planet, only 1.26 astronomical units away.

Freyr, visible as a grey ball behind the opaqued glass, was immensely bright at 240 astronomical units. When at 236 astronomical units distance, Helliconia would reach perihelion, its nearest point to Freyr; that time was only 118 Earth years away. Then once more Batalix and its planets would be carried away on their orbits, not to come so close to the dominant member of the system for another 2592 Earth years.

To Billy Xiao Pin, this set of astronomical figures, which he had learned along with his alphabets at the age of three, made a neat diagram. He was about to land where the diagram became an untidy question of history, of crises and challenges.

His round face elongated at the thought. Although Helliconia had been under constant observation for such a long while, it remained in many ways a mystery.

Billy knew that the planet would survive perihelion, that temperatures at the equator would soar to 150 degrees but nothing worse; that Helliconia had an extraordinary system of homeostasis, at least as powerful as Earth’s, which would maintain as steady a state of equilibrium as possible. He did not share the superstitious fears of the peasantry that Freyr was about to devour them—though he understood how such fears might arise.

What he did not know was whether various nations would survive the testing heat. Tropical countries like Borlien and Oldorando were most threatened.

The Avernus had been in existence and observing since before the spring of the previous Great Year. It had once experienced the slow spread of the Great Winter on the planet below, had witnessed multitudes dying and nations going down. How precisely that pattern would be repeated in the Winter still far distant remained to be seen. The Earth Observation Station would have to function and the six families to exist for another fourteen Earth centuries before that mystery was resolved.

To this awe-inspiring world, Billy had committed his soul.

Trembling took Billy in every limb. He was to embrace this world, he was to be born.

The craft made two orbits of the planet, braking as it did so, and landed on a plateau to the east of Matrassyl.

Billy rose from his seat and stood listening. At last he remembered to breathe. An android had been sent down with him, an alter ego to defend him. The Avernians felt their vulnerability. The product of generations of soft-bred men, Billy was reckoned to need protection. The android was programmed to be aggressive. It carried defensive weapons. It looked human, and indeed its face was moulded to resemble Billy’s, which it did in all but mobility; its expressions changed sluggishly, giving it a permanent air of gloom. Billy disliked it. He looked at it as it stood expectantly in a recess shaped to its body.

“Stay where you are,” Billy said. “Go back to the Avernus with the craft.”

“You need my protection,” said the android.

“I will manage as best I can. It’s my life now.” He pressed a delay switch which would ensure automatic liftoff in an hour’s time. Then he activated the door and climbed from the craft.

He stood on the wished-for planet, breathing its scents, letting a thousand strange sounds come to his ears. The unfiltered air bruised his lungs. Dizziness assailed him.

He looked up. All above him stretched a sky of most beautiful resonant blue, without feature. Billy was accustomed to looking at space; paradoxically, the arch of sky appeared vaster. The eye was drawn forever into it. It covered the living world and was its most beautiful expression.

To the west, Batalix in aurioles of gold and tan was preparing to set. Freyr, its disc only thirty percent the size of Batalix’s, burned with splendid intensity almost at zenith. All around it swam the great blue envelope which was the first of Helliconia to be seen from space, and the unmistakable imprimatur of it as a life-bearing planet. The visiting life-form lowered his head and passed a hand over his eyes.

At a short distance stood a group of five trees, overhung with fleshy creepers. Towards them Billy made his way, walking as if gravity had only just been invented. He fell against the nearest trunk, embracing it, to have his hands torn by thorns. Nevertheless, he clung tight, closing his eyes, flinching from every inexplicable sound. He could not move. When the craft lifted for its return to the mother station, he wept.

Here was the real, with a vengeance. It penetrated all his senses.

By clinging to the tree, lying on the ground, hiding beside a fallen trunk, he accustomed himself to the experience of being on an immense planet. Distant objects, clouds, and a line of hills, in particular, terrified him with their implications of size and—yes—reality. Just as alarming were all the small live things with random inclinations of their own, whole phyla absent from existence aboard the Avernus. He looked down in anguish as a small winged creature alighted on his left hand and used it as a highway to his sleeve. What was most alarming was the knowledge that all these things were beyond his control; no touch of a switch could tame them.

There was in particular the problem of the suns, which he had not taken into account. On the Avernus, light and dark were largely matters of temperament; here, one had no choice. As dimday was followed by night, Billy felt for the first time the ancient precariousness of his kind. Long ago, mankind had built huddling places against the dark. Cities had developed, had grown to metropolises, and had taken off into space; now he felt himself back at the beginning of history.

He survived the night. Despite himself, he had fallen asleep, to wake unharmed. Doing his accustomed morning exercises brought him back to a sense of himself. He was enough in control to walk from the shelter of the cluster of trees and to rejoice in the morning. After drinking and eating from his rations, he set off in the direction of Matrassyl.

Walking along a jungle path, bemused by bird calls, he became aware of a footstep behind him. He turned. A phagor froze to instant immobility, only a few paces away.

Phagors were part of the mythology of the Avernus.

Their portraits and models of them were accessible everywhere. This one, however, had the presence and individuality of life. It chewed as it regarded Billy, saliva leaking from its broad lower lip. Over its bulky figure was a one-piece garment, dyed here and there with saffron. Tufts of its long white hair were similarly dyed, giving it an unhealthy appearance. A dead snake was knotted over one shoulder—evidently a recent catch. In its hand it carried a curved knife. This was neither an idealized museum replica nor a child’s cuddly toy. As it stepped nearer, it exuded a rancid odour which made Billy giddy.

He faced it squarely and spoke slowly in Hurdhu. “Can you give me directions to Matrassyl?”

The creature went on ruminating. It appeared to be chewing on some kind of scarlet nut; juice of that colour trickled from its mouth. A drop sprayed onto Billy Xiao Pin. He reached up and brushed it from his cheek.

“Matrassyl,” it said, pronouncing the word leadenly as “Madrazzyl.”

“Yes. Which way is Matrassyl?”

“Yes.”

The look in its cerise eyes—impossible to determine whether it was meek or murderous. He wrenched his gaze away, to find that more phagors stood near, bushlike among the befoliaged shadow.

“Can you understand what I say?” His sentences came from the phrasebook. He was bewildered by the unreality of the situation.

“A taking to a place is within ability.”

From a creature that had the natural force of a boulder, good sense was hardly to be expected, but Billy was left in little doubt as to its intentions. The creature rolled forward with an easy motion and pushed Billy along the path. Billy moved. The other figures tramped among the undergrowth, keeping pace.

They reached a broken slope. Here the jungle had been cleared—some trees had been hacked down, and scuttling pigs saw to it that further growth would never reach maturity. Among casual attempts at cultivation were huts, or rather, roofs supported by posts.

In the shade provided by these huts, lumpish figures lay like cattle. Some rose and came towards the foragers, one of whom sounded a small horn to announce their arrival. Billy was surrounded by male and female ancipitals, creaghs and gillots and runts, glaring up at him inquisitively. Some runts ran on all fours.

Billy dropped into the Humility position.

“I’m trying to get to Matrassyl,” he said. The absurdity of the sentence made him laugh; he had to check himself before he became hysterical, but the noise had the effect of making everyone stand back.

“The lower kzahhn has proximity for inspection,” a gillot said, touching his arm and making a motion of her head. He followed her across a stone-strewn dell, and everyone else followed him. Everything he passed—from tender green shoots to rounded boulders—was rougher than he could have visualized.

Under an awning set against the dell’s low cliff sprawled an elder phagor, arms bent at impossible angles. It sat up in smooth movements and revealed itself as an ancient gillot, with prominent withered dugs and black hairs sprouting from her coat. A necklace of polished gwing-gwing stones hung about her neck. She wore a face bracelet buckled across the prow of her nose as mark of rank. This was evidently the ‘lower kzahhn’.

Remaining seated, she looked up at Billy.

She spoke to him questioningly.

Billy had been a junior in the great sociological clan of Pin, and not a conscientious one at that. He worked in the division which studied the family of Anganols, generation by generation. There were those among his superiors who were conversant with the histories of the present king’s predecessors back to the previous spring, some sixteen generations past. Billy Xiao Pin spoke Olonets, the main language of Compannlat and Hespagorat, and several of its variants, including Old Olonets. But he had never attempted the ancipital tongue, Native; nor had he properly mastered the language the lower kzahhn was speaking, Hurdhu, the bridge language used in these times between man and phagor.

“I don’t understand,” he said, in Hurdhu, and felt a strange sensation when she understood, as if he had stepped from the real world into some strange fairy story. “Understanding is to me of you being from a far place,” she said, translating her own language, noun-choked, into Hurdhu. “What situation is that far place?” Perhaps they had seen the space-craft land. He gestured vaguely, and recited a prepared speech. “I come from a distant town in Morstrual, where I am the kzahhn.” Morstrual was even more remote than Mordriat, and safe to name. “Your people will be rewarded if they escort me to King JandolAnganol in Matrassyl.”

“King JandolAnganol.”

“Yes.”

She became immobile, gazing ahead. A stallun squatting nearby passed her a leather bottle from which she drank in slobbering fashion, letting the liquid spill. It smelt pungent and spiritous. Ah, he thought, raffel: a deleterious drink distilled by ancipitals. He had fallen in with a poor tribe of phagors. Here he was, dealing capably with these enigmatic beasts, and on the Avernus everyone would be watching him through the optical system. Even his old advisor. Even Rose.

The heat and the short walk over rough ground had taxed him. But a more self-conscious motive made him sit down on a flat stone and spread his legs, resting his elbows on his knees, to stare nonchalantly at the creature confronting him. The most incredible occurrences became everyday when there was no alternative.

“Ancipital race carry much spears for his crusade for King JandolAnganol.” She paused. Behind her was a cave. In its shade, dim cerise eyes gleamed. Billy guessed that tribal ancestors would be stored there, sinking through tether to pure keratin. At once ancestor and idol, every undead phagor helped direct its successors through the painful centuries when Freyr dominated.

“Sons of Freyr fight other Sons of Freyr each season, and we lend spears.”

He recognized the traditional phagorian term for humankind. The ancipitals, unable to invent new terms, merely adapted old ones.

“Order two of your tribe to escort me to King JandolAnganol.”

Again her stillness—and all the others, as Billy looked round, conspiring to that same immobility. Only the pigs and curs trundled about, forever searching for titbits in the dirt.

The old gillot then began a long speech which defied Billy’s understanding. He had to halt her in the middle of her ramblings, asking her to start again. Hurdhu tasted as pungent as goat’s cheese on his tongue. Other phagors came up, closing round him, choking him with their dense smell—but not as unpleasant as anticipated, he thought—all aiding their leader with her explanation. As a result, nothing was explained.

They showed him old wounds, backs bereft of skin and fur, broken legs, shattered arms, all exhibited with calm insistence. He was revolted and fascinated. They produced pennants and a sword from the cave.

Gradually he took their meaning. Most of them had served with King JandolAnganol in his Fifth Army. Some weeks ago, they had marched against Driat tribes. They had suffered a defeat here in the Cosgatt. The tribes had used a new weapon which barked like a giant hound.

These poor folk had survived. But they dared not go back to the king’s service in case that giant hound barked again. They lived as they could. They dreamed of returning to the cool regions of the Nktryhk.

It was a long tale. Billy became vexed by it, and by the flies. He took some of their raffel. It was deleterious, just as the textbooks said. Feeling sleepy, he ceased to listen when they tried to describe the Cosgatt battle to him. For them, it might have happened yesterday.

“Will two of you escort me to the king or will you not?”

They fell silent, then grunted to each other in Native Ancipital.

At length, the gillot spoke in Hurdhu to him.

“What gift is from your hand for such escort?”

On his wrist he wore a flat grey watch, its triple set of flicking figures telling the time on Earth, on Central Campannlat, and on the Avernus. It was standard equipment. The phagors would not be interested in time-telling, for their eotemporal harneys remained set in a temporality which registered only sporadic movement; but they would like the watch as decoration.

The old lower kzahhn’s mottled face hung over his arm as he extended it to her gaze. Of her horns, one had been broken halfway and its tip replaced with a wooden peg.

She pulled herself up in a squatting position and called to two of the younger stalluns.

“Do what the thing demands,” she said.

The escort stopped when a pair of houses was sighted in the distance. They would go no farther. Billy Xiao Pin removed the watch from his wrist and offered it to them. After contemplating it for a while, they refused to accept it. He could not understand their explanation. They seemed to have lapsed from Hurdhu into Native. He grasped that numbers were involved. Perhaps they feared the ever changing numbers. Perhaps they feared the unknown metal. Their refusal was made without emotion; they simply would not take it; they wanted nothing. “JandolAnganol,” they said. Evidently they still respected the king’s name.

As he went forward, Billy looked back at them, partly obscured by a spray of flowering creeper hanging from a tree. They did not move. He feared them; he also felt a kind of marvel, that he had been in their company and was still sane.

Soon he found himself moving from that dream to another just as wonderful, as he walked in the narrow streets of Matrassyl. The winding way took him under the great rock on which the palace stood. He began to recognize where he was. This and this he had seen through the optics of the Avernus. He could have embraced the first Helliconians he saw.

Churches had been built into the rock; the stricter religious orders imitated the preferences of their masters in Pannoval and locked themselves away from the light. Monasteries huddled against the rock, three storeys high, the more prosperous ones built in stone, the poorer in wood. Despite himself, Billy lingered, to feel the grain of the timber, running his nails in its cracks. He came from a world where everything was renewed—or destroyed and reconstituted—as soon as it aged. This ancient wood with the grain outstanding: how superb the accident of its design!

The world was choked with detail he could never have imagined.

The monasteries were cheerfully painted red and yellow, or red and purple, carrying the circle of Akhanaba in those colours. Their doors bore representations of the god, descending in fire. Black locks of hair escaped from his topknot. His eyebrows curled upwards. The smile on his half-human face revealed sharp white teeth. In each hand he carried torches. A cloth garment wound itself like a serpent about his blue body.

There were representations too, on banners, of saints and familiars and bogeys: Yuli the Priest, Denniss the King, Withram and Wutra, and streams of Others, large and black, small and green with claws lor toenails and rings on their toes. Among these supernatural beings—fat and bald or shaggy—went humans, generally in supplicatory postures.

Humans were shown small. Where I come from, Billy said to himself, humans would be shown large. But here they went in supplicatory postures, only to be mown down by the gods in one way or another. By flames, by ice, by the sword.

Memories of school lessons came to Billy, fertilized by reality. He had learnt how important religions were on backward Helliconia. Sometimes nations had been converted to a different religion in a day—it had happened to Oldorando, he recalled. Other nations, losing their religion as suddenly, had collapsed and disappeared without trace. Here was the very bastion of Borlien’s creed. As an atheist, Billy was both attracted and repelled by the lurid fates depicted on all sides.

The monks looked not too stricken by the dreadful state of the world; devastation was merely part of a greater cycle, the background of their placid existences.

“The colours!” Billy said aloud. The colours of devastation were like paradise. There is no evil here, he told himself, bedazzled. Evil is negative. Here everything is robust. Evil was where I came from, in negativity.

Robust. Yes, it’s robust. He laughed.

Mouth open, arms out, he stood in the middle of the street. Aromas drifting like colours of the air detained him. Every step of his way had been haunted by smells of various kinds—a dimension of life missing on the Avernus. Nearby, under the shadow of the cliff, was a well, with stalls clustering by it. Monks were flocking from their buildings to buy food there.

Billy was teased by the thought that they were performing just for him. Death might come. It would be worth it just to have stood here and caught these savoury smells, and to have seen the monks lift greasy buns to their faces. Above them, from a monastic balcony fluttered a red and yellow banner, on which he could read the legend, all the world’s wisdom has always existed. He laughed to himself at this antiscientific legend: wisdom was something that had to be hammered out—otherwise, he would not be here.

Here in the traffic of the street, Billy’s understanding grew of how priest-ridden Helliconian society was, and of how the Akhanaban faith influenced action. His antipathy to religion was deep-rooted; now he found himself in a civilization founded on it.

When he approached the stalls, a stall holder called to him. She was a tall woman, shabbily dressed, with a big red face. She maintained a bright-burning fire in a basin. Waffles were her trade. Billy had on him forged money, as well as other equipment for his visit. Pulling some coins from a pocket, he paid the woman and was rewarded with a savoury-smelling waffle. The waffle irons had imprinted on them the Akhanaban religious symbol, one circle within another, the two connected by oblique lines. He thought for the first time, as he bit into it, that the symbol possibly represented in a crude way the orbit of the lesser sun, Batalix, about the greater.

“It won’t bite you back,” said the waffle woman, laughing at him.

He moved away, triumphant at having negotiated the transaction. He ate more delicately than the monks, conscious of the eyes of the Avernus. Still munching, he continued along the street, a swagger in his step. Soon he was treading up the slopes that led to Matrassyl palace. It was wonderful. Real food was wonderful. Helliconia was wonderful.

The route became more familiar. Having studied the family now called royal through three generations, Billy knew the layout of the palace and its surroundings in some detail. More than once he had watched the archival tapes which showed this stronghold being taken by the forces of the grandfather of the present king.

At the main gate, he asked to speak to JandolAnganol, producing forged documents which showed him to be an emissary from the distant land of Morstrual. After an interrogation in the guard house, he was escorted to another building. A long wait ensued until he was taken to a section of the palace he recognized as the chancellor’s domain.

Here he kicked his heels, staring at everything—the rugs, the carved furniture, the stove, the curtains at the window, the stains on the ceiling—in a kind of fever. The waffle had given him hiccups. The world was a maze of fascinating detail, and every strand in the carpet on which he stood—he guessed it to be of Madi origin—had a meaning which led back into the history of the planet.

Queen MyrdemInggala, queen of queens, had stood in this very room, had placed her sandalled feet upon this woven carpet, and the beasts and birds figured there had gratefully received her weight as she passed by.

As Billy stood looking down at the carpet, a wave of dizziness overcame him. No, it couldn’t be death already. He clutched his stomach. Not death but that waffle? He sank into a chair.

Outside lay the world where everything had two shadows. He felt its heat and power. It was the real world of the queen, not the artificial world of Billy and Rose. But he might not be up to it…

He gave a loud hiccup. He understood now what his Advisor meant when he had said that Billy might find fulfilment with Rose. But that could never have been while the queen of his imagination stood in his way. The real queen was now somewhere close at hand.

The door opened—even that was a wonder, that wooden door. A lean old secretary appeared, who conducted him to the chancellor’s suite. There he sat on a chair in an antechamber and waited. To his relief, the hiccups died and he felt less ill.

Chancellor SartoriIrvrash appeared, walking wearily. His shoulders were bent and, despite a show of courtesy, his manner was preoccupied. He listened to Billy without interest and ushered him into a large room where books and documents took up a major part of the space. Billy looked at the chancellor with awe. This was a figure out of history. This was once the hawkish young advisor who had assisted JandolAnganol’s grandfather and father to establish the Borlienese state.

The two men seated themselves. The chancellor pulled agitatedly at his whiskers and muttered something under his breath. He seemed not to listen as Billy described himself as coming from a town in Morstrual on the Gulf of Chalce. He hugged his lean body as if comforting himself.

When Billy’s words ran out, he sat in puzzlement as silence descended. Did the chancellor not understand his Olonets?

SartoriIrvrash spoke at last. “We’ll do whatever we can to be of assistance, sir, although this is not the easiest of times, not by any means.”

“I want a conversation with you, if I can, as well as with his majesty and the queen. I have knowledge to offer, as well as questions to ask.”

He gave a belated hiccup.

“Apologies.”

“Yes, yes. Excuse me. I am what someone once termed a connoisseur of knowledge, but this happens to be a day of deepest—deepest botheration.”

He stood, clutching at his stained charfrul, shaking his head as he regarded Billy as if for the first time.

“What is so bad about today?” asked Billy in alarm.

The queen, sir, Queen MyrdemInggala…” The chancellor rapped his knuckles on the table for emphasis. “Our queen is being put away, expelled, sir. This is the day she sails for exile. For Ancient Gravabagalinien.”

He put his hands up to his face and began to weep.