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.