The learned, who are always attracted to the past, lodged also in the Autumn Palaces. For them, the Palaces were the greatest archaeological site in the world, their ruinous cellars taproots to an earlier age of man. And what cellarage! Mazes of almost infinite depth stretched down into
the rock, as if to syphon up warmth from the heart of Helliconia. Here were reckonings inscribed on stone and clay, pot shards, skeletons of leaves from vanished forests, skulls to be measured, teeth to be fitted to jawbones, middens, weapons dissolving in rust… the history of a planet patiently awaiting interpretation, yet as tantalisingly beyond complete comprehension as a vanished human life.
The Palaces lay pallid with distance, and the New Season passed them far to starboard.
The depleted crew occasionally saw other ships. As they sailed by the port of Ijivibir, they passed fleets of herring-coaches about their business. Farther out to sea, an occasional warship was sighted, reminding them that the quarrel between Uskutoshk and Bribahr was still active. Nobody molested them or even signalled to them. Ice dolphins sported alongside the vessel.
After Clusit, the captain decided to make a landing on the coast. He was familiar with these waters and determined to stock the ship with food before they made the last part of the run for the Shivenink port of Rivenjk. His passengers were doubtful about the wisdom of going ashore after their recent close encounter with the phagor band, but he reassured them.
This part of Loraj was within the northern tropics and still fertile. Behind the coast lay a glittering country of woods, lakes, rivers, and marshes, scarcely inhabited by mankind. Behind that country stood ancient eldawon and caspiarn forests, stretching all the way to the ice cap.
On the shore, helmeted seals basked, roaring as the passengers and crew of the New Season walked among them. They offered no resistance as they were clubbed to death. This clubbing was done with an oar. The oar had to hit the creature under the jaw in the vulnerable part of its throat. With its air passages blocked, the seal died of suffocation. This took some while. The passengers averted their gaze while the seals rolled in agony. Their mates often tried to help them, whimpering pitifully.
The heads of the seals were covered by something resembling a helmet. The helmet was an adaptation of horns, the seals having been land animals in the distant past, driven back into the oceans by the cold of Weyr-Winter. The adaptation protected the ears and eyes of the creatures, as well as the skull.
As the human party turned away from the seals they were killing, legged fish heaved themselves out of the waves and rushed up the steeply shelving shingle. They began attacking the dying seals, tearing chunks of their blubbery flesh.
“Hey!” shouted Shokerandit, and struck out at the fish.
Some scattered and ran under stones. One lay wounded by Shoke-randit’s blow. He picked it up and showed it to Odim and Fashnalgid.
The fish was the best part of a metre long. Its six “legs” were finlike. It had a lantern jaw, behind which trailed a number of fleshy whiskers. As its head flicked from side to side, jaw snapping, its filmy grey eyes stared at its captor.
“See this creature? It’s a scupperfish,” said Shokerandit. “Soon these creatures will be coming ashore in the thousands. Most of them get eaten by birds. The others survive and tunnel into the earth for safety. Later, they’ll become longer than snakes, once the Weyr-Winter’s here.”
“They’re Wutra’s worms, that’s what they’re called,” said the captain. “Best throw it away, sir. They’re not fit even for the sailors to eat.”
“The Lorajans eat them.”
The captain said, deferentially but firmly, “Sir, the Lorajans do eat the worms as a delicacy, that’s true. They are poison nonetheless. The Lorajans cook them with a poisonous lichen, and ’tis said that the two poisons cancel each other out. I’ve eaten the dish myself, sir, when wrecked on this coast some years past. But I still hate the sight and taste of the things, and certainly don’t want my men filling their bellies with them.”
“Very well.” Shokerandit flung the still wriggling scupperfish out to sea.
Cowbirds and other sorts of birds were wheeling above them, screaming. The sailors cut up six of the helmeted seals as quickly as possible and carried the chunks of meat over to the jolly boat. The offal was left to the other predators.
Toress Lahl was weeping in silence.
“Get back in the boat,” Fashnalgid said. “What are you weeping for?”
“What a horrible place this is,” the woman said, turning her face away. “Where things with legs crawl from the sea and everything eats some other living thing.”
“That’s how the world is, lady. Jump in.”
They rowed back towards the ship, and the birds followed, crying, crying.
The New Season hoisted sail and began to move over the still water, its bows swinging towards Shivenink. Toress Lahl tried to speak to Shokerandit, but he brushed her to one side; he and Fashnalgid had matters to attend to. She stood bv the rail, hand to brow, watching the coastline dwindle.
Odim came up and stood beside her.
“You need not be sorrowful. We’ll soon reach the safety of the harbour of Rivenjk. There my brother will take us in, and we can rest and recover from our various shocks.”
Her tears burst forth again. “Do you believe in a god?” she asked, turning a tear-stained face towards him. “You’ve undergone such sorrow this voyage.”
He was silent before answering. “Lady, all my life until now I have
lived in Uskutoshk. I behaved like an Uskuti. I believed like an Uskuti. I conformed—which means that I regularly worshipped God the Azoiaxic, the God of Sibornal. Now that I have come away from that place, or have been driven away, as one might say, I can see that I am no Uskuti. What is more, I find I have absolutely no belief in God. At his passing, I felt a weight lifting.” He patted his chest in illustration. “I can say this to you, since you are not an Uskuti.”
She gestured towards the shore they were leaving. “This hateful place… those dreadful creatures … all I’ve been through … my husband killed in battle… the gruesomeness of this ship… Everything just gets steadily worse, year by year… Why wasn’t I born in the spring? I’m sorry, Odim—this isn’t like me…”
After a pause, he said gently, “I understand. I’ve also undergone bereavement. My wife, my younger children, dear Besi… But I speak to my wife’s gossie in pauk, and she comforts me. Do you not seek out your husband in pauk, lady?”
She said to him in a low voice, “Yes, yes, I sink down to his gossie. He is not as I desire to see him. He comforts me and tells me I should find happiness with Luterin Shokerandit. Such forgiveness…”
“Well? Luterin is a pleasant young man, by all I see and hear.”
“I can never accept him. I hate him. He killed Bandal Eith. How can I accept him?” She startled herself by her own antagonism.
Odim shrugged his broad shoulders. “If your husband’s gossie so advises you…”
“I am a woman of principle. Maybe it is easier to forgive when you are dead. All gossies speak with the same voice, sweet like decay. I may cease the habit of pauk … I cannot accept the man who has enslaved me—however tempting the terms he uses to bribe me. Never. It would be hateful.”
He rested a hand on her arm. “All is hateful to you, eh? Yet perhaps you should try to think as I do that a new life is being presented to us—us exiles. I am twenty-five and five tenners—no chicken! You are much younger. The Oligarch is supposed to have observed that the world is a torture chamber. That is the case only for those who believe so.