Until this point, SartoriIrvrash’s delivery, free of his old pedantry, had kept his audience listlessly attentive. Many of the audience lounging on the lawn were drumble organisers, with a natural hatred of phagors; at the word ‘ancipitals’, they showed interest.
‘There is an ancipital in the story of the Silver Eye.
‘The ancipital is a gillot. Her role is advisor to a king in a mythical country, Ponpt. Well, not so mythicaclass="underline" Ponpt, now called Ponipot, still exists to the west of the Barrier Mountains. This gillot is superior to the king, and provides him with the wisdom whereby he rules. He depends on her as a son on a mother. At the end of the story, the king kills the gillot.
‘The Silver Eye itself is a body like a sun, but silver and shining only by night. Like a close star, without heat. When the gillot is slain, the Silver Eye sails away and is lost for ever.
‘What did all that signify? I asked myself. Where was the meaning of the tale?’
He leaned over the podium, hunching his shoulders and pointing at the audience in his eagerness to tell the tale.
‘The key to the puzzle came when I was on an Uskuti sailing vessel. The vessel was becalmed in the Cadmer Straits. Odi, this lady here, and I landed on Gleeat Island, where we managed to capture a wild gillot with a black pelage. The females of the ancipital species have a one-day flow of menses from the uterus as a prelude to the oestral cycle, when they go into rut. Because of my prejudice against the species, I have no knowledge of Native Ancipital or even Hurdhu, but I discovered then that the gillot’s word for her period was “tennhrr”. That was the key! Forgive me if such a subject seems too disgusting to contemplate.
‘In my studies — all destroyed by the great King JandolAnganol — I had noted that even phagors preserved one or two legends. They could hardly be expected to make sense. In particular, there is a legend which says Helliconia once had a sister body circling about it, just as Batalix circles about Freyr. This sister body flew away as Freyr arrived and as mankind was born. So the legend goes. And the name of the escaping body in Native is T’Sehn-Hrr.
‘Why should “tennhrr” and “T’Sehn-Hrr” be virtually the same word? That was the question I asked myself.
‘A gillot’s tennhrr occurs ten times in a small year — every six weeks. We may therefore assume that this heavenly eye or moon served as a timing mechanism for the periods. But did the moon “T’Sehn-Hrr”, supposing it existed, circle Helliconia once every six weeks? How to check on something which happened so long ago that human history has no record of it?
‘The answer lay in Tatro’s story.
‘Her story says that the silver eye in the sky opened and shut. Possibly that means it grew bigger or smaller, according to distance, as does Freyr. It became wide open or full ten times in a year. That was it. Ten times again. The pieces of the puzzle fitted.
‘You understand the unmistakable conclusion to which I was drawn?’
Gazing at his audience, SartoriIrvrash saw that indeed many of them did not understand. They waited politely for him to be done. He heard his voice rise to a shout.
‘This world of ours once had a moon, a silver moon, which was lost at a time of some kind of disturbance in the heavens. It sailed away, we don’t as yet know how. The moon was called T’Sehn-Hrr — and T’Sehn-Hrr is a phagor name.’
He looked at his notes, he conferred briefly with Odi, as the listeners stirred. He resumed his discourse with a note of asperity in his voice.
‘Why should the moon have only an ancipital name? Why is there no human record of this missing body? The answer leads us into the mazes and botherations of antiquity.
‘For when I looked about, I found that missing moon. Not in the sky, but shining forth from our everyday speech. For how is our calendar divided? Eight days in a week, six weeks in a tenner, ten tenners in a year of four hundred and eighty days… We never question it. We never question why a tenner is called a tenner, because there are ten of them in a year.
‘But that is not the whole truth. Our word “tenner” commemorates the time when the silver eye was open and the moon was full. It does so because humanity adopted the phagor word “tennhrr”. Tenner’ is “tennhrr” is “T’Sehn-Hrr”.’
The murmurings from the crowd were louder. Sayren Stund was plainly uncomfortable. But SartoriIrvrash held up Tatro’s storybook and called for silence. So engrossed was he that he failed to see the trap opening before him.
‘Hear the whole conclusion, my friends. There stands King JandolAnganol among you, and he must hear the truth as well — he who has so long encouraged the noxious ahumans to breed on his territories.’
But no one was interested in JandolAnganol at present. Their angry faces turned to SartoriIrvrash himself.
‘The conclusion is clear, inescapable. The ancipital race, to which we can ascribe many of our human difficulties over the ages, is not a race of new invaders, like the Driats. No. It is an ancient race. It once covered Helliconia as flambreg cover the Circumpolar Regions.
‘The phagors did not emerge out of the last Weyr-Winter, as the Sibornalese call it. No. That story is based on ignorance. The real story, the fairy story, tells the truth. Phagors long preceded mankind.
‘They were here on Helliconia before Freyr appeared — possibly long before. Mankind came later. Mankind depended on the phagors: Mankind learned language from the phagors and still uses phagor words. “Khmir” is the Native word for “rut”. “Helliconia” itself is an old ancipital term.’
JandolAnganol found his voice at last. The speech was such an onslaught on his religious sensibilities that he had stood as if in a trance, his mouth open, more resembling fish than eagle.
‘Lies, heresy, blasphemy!’ he shouted. The cry of blasphemy was taken up by other voices. But Sayren Stund had ordered his guard to see that JandolAnganol did not interrupt. Burly men closed in on him — to be met by JandolAnganol’s captains with drawn swords. A struggle broke out.
SartoriIrvrash raised his voice. ‘No, you see your glory diminished by the truth. Phagors preceded mankind. Phagors were the dominant race on our world, and probably treated our ancestors as animals until we rebelled against them.’
‘Let’s hear him. Who dares say the man is wrong?’ shrilled Queen Bathkaarnet-she. Her husband struck her in the mouth.
The hubbub from the audience rose. People were standing and shouting or kneeling to pray. Fresh guards ran to the scene, while some court ladies tried to escape. A fight had broken out round JandolAnganol. The first stone was thrown at SartoriIrvrash. Brandishing his fist, he continued to speak.
In that courtly crowd, now moved to fury, there was at least one cool observer, the envoy Alam Esomberr. He was detached from the human drama. Unable to be deeply moved by events, he could derive only amusement from their effects.
Those on Earth, distant in time and space, viewed the scene on King Sayren Stund’s lawn with less detachment. They knew that SartoriIrvrash spoke truth in general, even if his details were sometimes incorrect. They also knew that men did not love truth above all things, as he claimed. Truth had constantly to be fought for, for it was constantly being lost. Truth could sail away like a silver eye, never to be seen again.
When T’Sehn-Hrr sailed away, no human being had witnessed the event. Cosmologists on the Avernus and on Earth had reconstructed the event, and believed they understood it. In the great disruptions which had overtaken the system eight million Earth years previously, the gravitational forces of the star now called Freyr, with a mass 14.8 times that of the Sun, had wrenched T’Sehn-Hrr away from Helliconia’s pull.