Dominating such local dates was a cosmic one with more meaning. Astronomical time in the Helliconian system was at full flood. The planet and its sister planets were approaching periastron, the nearest point in the orbit to the brilliant star known as Freyr.
It took Helliconia 2592 Earth years to complete one Great Year in its orbit about Freyr, during which time the planet endured extremes of heat and cold. Spring was over. Summer, the enervating summer of the Great Year, had arrived.
Summer’s duration would extend over two and a third Earth centuries. To those who lived on Helliconia at this time, winter and its desolations were but legends, although powerful ones. So they would remain yet a while, waiting in the human mind to become fact.
Above Helliconia shone its own local sun, Batalix. Dominating Batalix was its giant binary companion, Freyr, shining at present with an apparent brightness thirty percent greater than Batalix, although it was 236 times more distant.
Despite their involvements in their own history, the observers on Earth watched Helliconian events closely. They saw that strands of the web—the religious strand not the least—had been woven long ago which now entangled the King of Borlien.
III
A Premature Divorce
The Borlienese were not a nation of seamen, despite their long seacoast. It followed that they were not great shipbuilders like the Sibornalese, or even some nations of Hespagorat. The ship that took the king to Gravabagalinien and divorce was a small brig with round bows. It kept the coast in sight most of the time and navigated by traverse board, on which the mean course made good during each watch was calculated from the positions of pegs inserted on the board.
An even more tuglike brig followed the first, bearing the ancipitals of the First Phagorian Guard.
The king broke from his companions as soon as the ship sailed and went to stand by the rails, staring rigidly ahead, as if anxious to be the first to see the queen. Yuli became miserable at the motion of the sea and sprawled by the capstan. For once the king showed his pet no sympathy.
Its cordage creaking, the brig laboured through calm seas.
The king fell suddenly to the deck. His courtiers ran to him and lifted him. JandolAnganol was carried to his cabin and placed in his bunk. He was deathly pale and rolled about as if in pain, hiding his face.
A medical man examined him and ordered everyone to leave the cabin except CaraBansity. “Stay by his majesty. He has a touch of seasickness but nothing more. As soon as we get ashore he will be well again.”
“I understood that a characteristic of seasickness was vomiting.”
“Hrrm, well, in some cases. Commoners. Royal personages respond in a different fashion.” The doctor bowed himself out.
After a while, the king’s muttered complaints became articulate. “The dreadful thing I must do. Pray Akhanaba it will soon be over…”
“Majesty, let us discuss a sensible, important topic, to calm your mind. That rare bracelet of mine which you hold—”
The king raised his head and said, with his inflexible look, “Get out of here, you cretin. I’ll have you flung overboard to the fish. Nothing is important, nothing—nothing on this earth.”
“May your majesty soon recover himself,” said CaraBansity, backing his awkward bulk out of the cabin.
The ship made fair progress westwards, and sailed into the little bay at Gravabagalinien on the morning of the second day at sea. JandolAnganol, suddenly himself again, walked down the gangplank and into the surf—there was no jetty at Gravabagalinien—with Alam Esomberr close behind him, holding up his cloak tails.
With the latter travelled an escort of ten dignitaries of high ecclesiastical office, referred to by Esomberr as his rabble of vicars. The king’s retinue contained captains and armourers.
The queen’s palace waited inland, without a sign of life. Its narrow windows were shuttered. A black flag flew at half-mast from a turret. The king’s face, turned towards it, was itself as blank as a shuttered window. No man dared look long at it, lest he catch the Eagle’s eye.
The second brig was coming in, making awkward progress. Despite Esomberr’s impatience, JandolAnganol insisted on waiting until it was drawn in and a walkway extended from ship to shore, so that his ahuman troops could reach land without having to set foot in the water. He then made much of forming them up, drilling them, and addressing them in Native. At last he was ready to walk the half mile to the palace. Yuli ran ahead, frisking in the sand, kicking it up, delighted to be on firm ground again.
They were greeted by an ancient woman in a black keedrant and white apron. White hairs trailed from a mole on her cheek. She walked with a stick. Two unarmed guards stood some way behind her.
Close at hand, the white and gold building revealed its shabbiness. Gaps showed where slates on its roofs, planks from its verandahs, uprights in its railings, had fallen away and not been replaced. Nothing moved, except a herd of deer cropping grass on a distant hillside. The sea boomed endlessly against the shore.
The king’s costume took up the general sombre note. He wore an undecorated tunic and breeches of a deep blue close to black. Esomberr, by contrast, strolled along in his jauntiest powder blues, offset by a pink short cloak. He was perfumed this morning, to camouflage the stinks of the ship.
An infantry captain blew a bugle to announce their arrival.
The palace door remained closed. The old woman wrung her hands and muttered to the breeze.
Wrenching himself into action, JandolAnganol went up to the door and beat on its wooden panels with the hilt of his sword. The noise echoed within, setting hounds barking.
A key was applied to a lock. The door swung open, propelled by another aged hag, who gave a stiff curtsey to the king and stood there blinking.
All was gloom inside. The hounds that had set up such a din when the door was locked now slunk away into shadowy recesses.
“Perhaps Akhanaba in his somewhat temperamental mercy has sent the plague here,” suggested Esomberr.
“Thus releasing the occupants from earthly sorrow and rendering ours an unnecessary journey.”
The king gave a shout of greeting.
A light showed at the top of the stairs, where all was otherwise dark. They looked up, to see a woman carrying a taper. She bore it above her head, so that her features were in shadow. As she descended the stairs, every step creaked. As she neared those waiting below, the light from outside began to illuminate her features. Even before that, something in her carriage declared who she was. The glow strengthened, the face of Queen MyrdemInggala was revealed. She stopped a few paces in front of JandolAnganol and Esomberr and curtseyed first to the one, then the other.
Her beauty was ashen, her lips almost colourless, her eyes dark in her pallid face. Her hair floated in dark abundance about her head. She wore a pale grey gown to the floor which buttoned at the throat to conceal her breasts.
The queen spoke a word to the crone, who went to the doors and closed them, leaving Esomberr and JandolAnganol in the dark, with the intrusive phagor runt behind them. That dark revealed itself as seamed with threads of light. The palace was flimsily built of planking. When the sun shone on it, a skeletal aspect was revealed. As the queen led them to a side room, slivers of light disclosed her presence.
She stood awaiting them in the middle of a room defined by thin geometries of illumination where daylight slit round shuttered windows.