“You’ll never miss your timepiece now, Billy,” Muntras said aloud.
He covered his face with a slab of hand and uttered something between a prayer and a curse.
For a moment more, the Ice Captain stood in the room, looking up at the ceiling with his mouth open. Then, recalling his duties, he walked over to the window and gave his clerk a sign to start paying out the men’s wages.
His wife entered the. room with Immya, her shoulder bandaged.
“Our Billish is dead,” he said flatly.
“Oh dear, and on assatassi day, too…” Eivi said. “You can hardly expect me to be sorry.”
“I’ll see his body is conveyed to the ice cellar, and we will bury him tomorrow, after the feast,” Immya said, moving over to observe the contorted body. “He told me something before he died which could be a contribution to medical science.”
“You’re a capable girl, you look after him,” Muntras said. “As you say, we can bury him tomorrow. A proper funeral. Meanwhile, I’ll go and look to the nets. As a matter of fact, I feel miserable, as if anyone cares.”
Taking no heed of the jabbering women who were stringing up lines of net on poles, the Ice Captain walked along the water’s edge. He wore high thick boots and kept his hands in his pockets. Occasionally, one of the black iguanas would jump up against him like an importuning dog. Muntras would knee it down again without interest. The iguanas wallowed among thick brown ropes of kelp which swirled in the shallow water, sometimes kicking to get free of the coils. In places, they were banked on top of each other, indifferent to how they lay.
To add to the melancholy abandonment of their postures, the iguanas were commensal with a hairy twelve-legged crab, which scurried in its millions among the forms which kept watch on the breakers. The crabs devoured any fragment of food—seal or seaweed—dropped by the reptiles; nor were they averse to devouring infant iguanas. The characteristic noise of the Dimariamian seashore was a crunch and scrabble of armoured legs against scales; the ritual of their lives was playing out against this clamour, which was as endless as the sound of the waves.
The ice captain took no notice of these saturnine occupants of the shore, but stared out to sea, beyond Lordry, the whaling island. He had checked at the harbour and been told that a light sailing dinghy had been stolen overnight.
So his son was gone, taking the magic watch, either as talisman or for trade. Had sailed away, without so much as a good-bye.
“Why did you do it?” Muntras asked half aloud, staring over the purple sea on which a dead calm prevailed. “For the usual reasons a man leaves home, I suppose. Either you couldn’t bear your family any longer, or you just wanted adventure—strange places, amazements, strange women. Well, good luck to you, lad. You’d never have made the world’s foremost ice trader, that’s certain. Let’s hope you aren’t reduced to selling stolen rings for a living…”
Some of the women, humble worker’s wives, were calling to him to come behind the nets before high tide. He gave them a salute and trudged away from the milling iguana bodies.
Immya and Lawyer would have to take over the company. Not his favourite people, but they’d probably run the whole concern better than he ever did. You had to face facts. It was no use growing bitter. Although he had never been comfortable with his daughter, he recognized that she was a good woman.
At least he’d stand by a friend and see that BillishOwpin got a proper burial. Not that either Billish or he believed in any of the gods. But just for their own two sakes.
He trudged towards the safety of the nets, where the workmen stood.
“You were all right, Billish,” he muttered aloud. “You were nobody’s fool.”
The Avernus had company in its orbit about Helliconia. It moved among squadrons of auxiliary satellites. The main task of these auxiliaries was to observe sectors of the globe the Avernus itself was not observing. But it so happened that the Avernus, on its circumpolar orbit, was itself above Lordryardry and travelling north at the time of Billy’s funeral.
The funeral was a popular event. The fact is, human egos being frail, other people’s deaths are not entirely unpleasurable. Melancholy itself is among the more enjoyable of emotions. Almost everyone aboard the Avernus looked in: even Rose Yi Pin, although she watched the event from the bed of her new boyfriend.
Billy’s Advisor, dry-eyed, gave a homily in one hundred measured words on the virtues of submission to one’s lot. The epitaph served also as an epitaph to the protest movements. With some relief, they forgot difficult thoughts of reform and returned to their administrative duties. One of them wrote a sad song about Billy, buried away from his family.
There were now a good many Avernians buried on Helliconia, all winners of Helliconia Holidays. A question often asked aboard the Earth Observation Station was, How did this affect the mass of the planet?
On Earth, where the funeral of Billy provoked less interest, the event was seen more detachedly. Every living being is created from dead star-matter. Every living being must make its solitary journey upward from the molecular level towards the autonomy of birth, a journey which in the case of humans takes three-quarters of a year. The complex degree of organization involved in being a higher life-form cannot be forever sustained. Eventually, there is a return to the inorganic. Chemical bonds dissolve.
That had happened in Billy’s case. All that was immortal about him was the atoms from which he was assembled. They endured. And there was nothing strange about a man of terrestrial stock being buried on a planet a thousand light-years away. Earth and Helliconia were near neighbours, composed of the same debris from the same long defunct stars.
In one detail that correct man, Billy’s Advisor, was incorrect. He spoke of Billy going to his long rest. But the entire organic drama of which mankind formed a part was pitched within the great continuing explosion of the universe. From a cosmic viewpoint, there was no rest anywhere, no stability, only the ceaseless activity of particles and energies.
XVII
Death-Flight
General Hanra TolramKetinet wore a wide-brimmed hat and an old pair of trousers, the bottoms of which were stuffed into the tops of a pair of knee-length army boots. Across his naked chest he had slung a fine new matchlock firearm on a strap. Above his head he waved a Borlienese flag. He waded out to sea towards the approaching ships.
Behind him, his small force cheered encouragement. There were twelve men, led by an able young lieutenant, GortorLanstatet. They stood on a spit of sand; behind them, jungle and the dark mouth of the River Kacol. Their voyage down from Ordelay—from defeat—was over; they had navigated in the Lordryardry Lubber, both rapids and sections of the river where the current was so slight that out from the depths came tuberous growths, fighting like knots of reproducing eels to gain the surface and release a scent of carrion and julip. That scent was the jungle’s malediction.
On either bank of the Kacol, the forest twisted itself into knots, snakes, and streamers no less forbidding than the tentacles which rose from the river depths. Here the forest indeed looked impenetrable; there were visible none of the wide aisles down which the general, half a tenner ago, had walked in perfect safety, for the river had tempted to the jungle’s edge a host of sun-greedy creepers. The jungle too, had become more dwarfish in formation, turning from rain forest proper to monsoon forest, with the heavy heads of its canopy pressing low above the heads of the Borlienese troops.
Where river at last delivered its brown waters into sea, foetid morning mists rose from the forest, rolling in ridge beyond ridge up the unruly slopes that culminated in the Randonanese massif.