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.
XVI. The Man who Mined a Glacier
Summer of the small year had yielded to autumn in the southern hemisphere. The monsoons were gathering along the coasts of Hespagorat.
While on the pleasant northern coast of the Sea of Eagles Queen MyrdemInggala swam in the blue waters with her dolphins, on the dull southern coast of that same sea, where it merged with the waters of the Scimitar Sea, the Avernian prize-winner, Billy Xiao Pin, lay dying.
The port of Lordryardry was sheltered from open sea by the Lordry islands, two dozen in number, some of which were used as whaling stations. On these islands, and along the low-lying coasts of Hespagorat, marine iguanas lived in dense colonies. Wattled, warted, armoured, these inoffensive beasts grew to twenty feet in length and were sometimes to be seen swimming out to sea. Billy had observed them as the Ice Captain’s Lordryardry Lady brought him to Dimariam.
Ashore, the beasts swarmed over rocks and marshes and each other. Something in their slothful movements and sudden scurries marked them out as conspirators with the soggy weather which closed in on the Dimariamian shores at this time of small year; where cold air flowed northwards from the polar ice cap to meet the warm air above the oceans, banks of fog formed, enveloping everything in humid overcast.
Lordryardry was a small port of eleven thousand people. It owed its existence almost entirely to the enterprise of the Muntras family. One of its noteworthy features was that it lay at a latitude of 36.5° South, a degree and a half outside the wide tropical zone. Only eighteen and a half degrees farther south lay the polar circle. Beyond that circle, in the realms of eternal ice, Freyr was never to be seen during the long centuries of summer. In the Great Winter, Freyr would reappear, to remain for many lifetimes dominating the vacant world of the pole.
This Billy was told as he was driven by a traditional sledge from the ship to the ice captain’s house. Krillio Muntras recounted such facts with pride, though he fell silent as his home drew near.
The room of the house to which Billy was carried was white. Its windows were framed with white curtains. As he lay locked in illness, Billy could look through trees, over town roofs, to a prospect of white mist. In that mist, an occasional mast loomed.
Billy knew he was shortly to embark on another mysterious journey. Before his ship sailed, he was tended by Muntras’s self-weffacing wife, Eivi, and by his formidable married daughter, Immya. Immya, he was told, had a high standing in the community as a healer.
After a day’s rest, Eivi’s and Immya’s ministrations took effect, or else Billy enjoyed a remission. The encroaching stiffness partially left him. Immya wrapped him in blankets and helped him into the sledge. Four giant horned dogs, asokins, were harnessed up, and the family drove Billy inland to see the famous Lordryardry Glacier.
The Lordryardry Glacier had carved itself a bed between two hills. The leading face of the glacier fell into a lake which drained into the sea.
Billy observed that Krillio Muntras’s manner changed subtly in the presence of his daughter. They were affectionate together, but the respect he showed Immya was not entirely matched by the respect in which she held him — so Billy judged, going less by the way they spoke than by the way Muntras held his backbone and drew in his broad stomach in Immya’s presence, as if he felt he must contain himself when her sharp eyes were on him.
Muntras began to describe the workings at the glacier face. When Immya modestly prompted him on the number of men working there, he asked her without rancour to give the account herself. Which she did. Div stood behind his father and his sister, scowling; though he, as the son, was to inherit the ice company, he had nothing to contribute to the narrative, and soon slunk off.
Immya was not only the chief medical practitioner of Lordryardry; she was married to the chief lawyer of the town the Muntras clan had founded. Her husband, referred to always as Lawyer in Billy’s presence, as if that had been his baptismal name, stood as the spokesman and justice of the town against the capital, Oiishat. Oiishat lay to the west, on the frontier between Dimariam and Iskahandi. Oiishat cast envious eyes on the prosperous new Lordryardry, and devised ways of securing some of its wealth by taxation — schemes which Lawyer constantly foiled.
Lawyer also foiled Muntras’s local laws, which had been improvised to benefit the Muntras family rather than their workers. So Krillio was of two minds about his son-in-law.
Krillio’s wife evidently felt differently. She would hear no complaint about her daughter or the Lawyer. Though submissive, she was impatient with Div, whose behaviour — adversely affected by his mother’s dislike — became loutish in the home. ‘You should reconsider,’ she told Muntras one day, when they were both standing by Billy’s bedside, after another example of Div’s awfulness. ‘Hand over the company to Immya and Lawyer, and then everything will prosper. Under Div, it will be in ruin within three years. That girl has a proper grasp of things.’
Certainly, Immya had a grasp of things Hespagoratean. She had never ventured beyond the confines of the continent on which she was born, despite frequent opportunities to do so, as if she preferred to have her front doorstep guarded by the myriad scaley watchdogs which patrolled the shores of Dimariam. But locked in her broad bosom were metaphorical maps, histories, and compass bearings of the southern continent.
Immya Muntras had a good plain square face built like her father’s, a face capable of confronting glaciers. She stood foursquare to the ice face as she delivered her account of the family trade, in which she took great pride.
At this spot, they were far enough inland to be free of the coastal fog. The great wall of ice to which Muntras owed his wealth glittered in the sun. Where the glacier lay more distant, Batalix created in its hollows caverns of sapphire. Even its reflection in the lake at its foot gave off diamond glints.
The air was hard, fresh, and alive. Birds skimmed over the lake surface. Where the pure waters yielded to banks of blue flowers, insects were busy in their thousands.