by Brian Aldiss
A great king had once ruled in Sibornal, before the last Weyr-Winter. His name had come down as King Denniss. King Denniss’s court had been held in Old Askitosh, and his retreat had been in the mighty edifices now known as the Autumn Palaces. So legend had it.
To his court, King Dennis had summoned learned men from all quarters of the globe. The great king had fought for Sibornal’s survival through the grim centuries of Weyr-Winter, and had launched an invasion force across the seas to attack Pannoval.
The king’s scholars had compiled catalogues and encyclopaedias. Everything that lived had been named, listed, categorised. Only the slow-pulsed world of the dead had been excluded, in deference to the Church of the Formidable Peace.
A long period of confusion followed the death of King Denniss. The winter came. Then the great families of the seven Sibornalese nations had joined together to form an Oligarchy, in an attempt to rule the continent on rational and scientific lines, as proposed by King Denniss. They had sent learned men abroad to enlighten the natives of Cam-pannlat, even as far afield as the old cultural centre of Keevasien, in the southwest of Borlien.
The autumn of the present Great Year had witnessed one of the most enlightened of the Oligarchy’s decrees. The Oligarchy had altered the Sibornalese calendar. Previously, Sibornalese nations, with the exception of backwaters like Upper Hazziz, had adhered to a “so many years after the coronation of Denniss” formula. The Oligarchy abolished such prescriptions.
Henceforth, the small years were numbered as the astronomers
directed, in precedence following the small year in which Helliconia and its feebler luminary, Batalix, were most distant from Freyr: in other words, the year of apastron.
There were 1825 small years, each of 480 days, in a Great Year. The present year, the year of Asperamanka’s incursion into Chalce, was 1308 After Apastron. Under this astronomical system, nobody could forget where they stood with regard to the seasons. It was a rational arrangement.
And Major Gardeterark rationally finished shaving, dried his face, and commenced in a rational way to brush his formidable teeth, allowing so many strokes for each tooth in front, so many for each behind.
The innovation of the calendar alarmed the peasantry. But the Oligarchy knew what it was doing. It became secretive; it amassed secrets. It deployed its agents everywhere. Throughout the autumn it developed a secret police force to watch over its interests. Its leader, the Oligarch, gradually became a secret person, a figment, a dark legend hovering over Askitosh, whereas—or so the stories said—King Denniss had been loved by his people and seen everywhere.
All the acts and edicts promulgated by the Oligarchy were backed by rational argument. Rationality was a cruel philosophy when practised by the likes of Gardeterark. Rationality gave him good reason for bullying people. He drank to rationality every evening in the mess, sinking his huge teeth deep over the rim of his glass as the liquor ran down his throat.
Now, having finished his toilet, he allowed his servant to help him into his boots and greatcoat. Rationally clad, he went out into the frosty predawn streets.
His under officer, Captain Harbin Fashnalgid, was not rational, but he drank.
Fashnalgid’s drinking had begun as an amiable social habit, indulged in with other young subalterns. As Fashnalgid’s hatred of the Oligarch grew, so did his need for drink. Sometimes, the habit got out of hand.
One night, back in the officers’ mess in Askitosh, Fashnalgid had been peaceably drinking and reading, ignoring his fellow men. A hearty captain by the name of Naipundeg halted by Fashnalgid’s chair and laid his hoxney-crop across the open page of the book.
“Always reading, Harbin, you unsociable dog! Filth, I suppose?”
Closing the volume, Fashnalgid said in his flat voice, “This is not a work you would have come across, Naipundeg. It’s a history of sacred architecture through the ages. I picked it up from a stall the other day. It was printed three hundred years ago, and it explains how there are secrets that we in these later days have forgotten. Secrets of contentment, for example. If you’re interested.”
“No, I’m not interested, to be frank. It sounds wretchedly dull.”
Fashnalgid stood up, tucking the little book into a pocket of his uniform. He raised his glass and drained it dry. “There are such blockheads in our regiment. I never meet anyone interesting here. You don’t mind me saying that? You’re proud of being a blockhead, aren’t you? You’d find any book not about filth dull, wouldn’t you?”
He staggered slightly. Naipundeg, himself far gone in drink, began to bellow with rage.
It was then that Fashnalgid blurted out his hatred of the Oligarchy, and of the Oligarch’s increasing power.
Naipundeg, throwing another tumbler of fiery liquor down his throat, challenged him to a duel. Seconds were summoned. Supporting their primaries, they jostled them into the grounds of the mess.
There a fresh quarrel broke out. The two officers drove off their seconds and blazed away at each other.
Most of the bullets flew wild.
All except one.
That bullet hit Naipundeg’s face, shattering the zygomatic bone, entering the head by way of the left eye, and leaving through the rear of the skull.
In that casual military society, Fashnalgid was able to pass off the duel as an affair of honour regarding a lady. The court-martial convened under Priest-Militant Asperamanka was easily satisfied; Naipundeg, an officer from Bribahr, had not been popular. Fashnalgid was exonerated of blame. Only Fashnalgid’s conscience remained unappeased; he had killed a fellow officer. The less his drinking companions blamed him, the more he judged himself guilty.
He applied for leave of absence and went to visit his father’s estates in the undulating countryside to the north of Askitosh. There he intended to reform, to become less prodigal with women and drink. Harbin’s parents were growing senile, although both still rode daily— as they had done for the past forty years or more—about their fields and stands of timber.
Harbin’s two younger brothers ran the estate between them, aided by their wives. The brothers were shrewd, sowing coarser crops when finer ones failed, selecting strains with more rapid growth periods, planting cold-resistant caspiarn saplings where gales blew down established trees, building stout fences to keep out the herds of flambreg which came marauding from the northern plains. Sullen phagors worked under the brothers’ direction.
The estate had seemed a paradise to Harbin in his childhood. Now it became a place of misery. He saw how much labour was required to maintain a status quo threatened by the ever worsening season, and wanted no part of it. Every morning, he endured his father’s repetitive conversation rather than join his brothers outdoors. Later, he retired to the library, to leaf moodily through old books which had once en- chanted him and to allow himself the occasional little drink.
Harbin Fashnalgid had often grieved that he was ineffectual. He could not exert his will. He was too modest to realise how many people, women especially, liked him for this trait. In a more lenient age, he would have been a great success.
But he was observant. Within two days, he had noticed that his youngest brother had a quarrel with his wife. Perhaps the difference between them was merely temporary. But Fashnalgid began offering the woman sympathy. The more he talked to her, the weaker became his resolve to reform. He worked on her. He spun her exaggerated tales about the glamour of military life, at the same time touching her, smiling at her, and feigning a great sorrow which was only part feigned. So he won her confidence and became her lover. It was absurdly easy.
It was an irrational way to behave.
Even in that rambling two-storey parental house, it was impossible that the affair should remain secret. Intoxicated by love, or something like it, Fashnalgid became incapable of behaving with discretion. He lavished absurd gifts on his new partner—a wicker hammock; a two-headed goat; a doll dressed as a soldier; an ivory chest crammed with manuscript versions of Ponipotan lege
nds; a pair of pecubeas in a gilt cage; a silver figurine of a hoxney with a woman’s face; a pack of playing cards in ivory inlaid with mother-of-pearl; polished stones; a clavichord; ribbons; poems; and a fossilized Madi skull with alabaster eyes.
He hired musicians from the village to serenade her.
The woman in her turn, driven to ecstasies by the first man in her life who knew nothing about the planting of potatoes and pellamoun-tain, danced for him on his verandah in the nude, wearing only the bracelets he gave her, and sang the wild zyganke.
It could not last. A lugubrious quality in the countryside could not tolerate such exuberance. One night, Fashnalgid’s two brothers rolled up their sleeves, rushed into the love nest, kicked over the clavichord, and bounced Fashnalgid out of the house.
“Abro Hakmo Astab!” roared Fashnalgid. Not even the labourers on the estate were allowed to employ that vile expression aloud.
He picked himself up and dusted himself down in the darkness. The two-headed goat chewed at his trousers.
Fashnalgid stationed himself under his old father’s window, to shout insults and supplications. “You and Mother have had a happy life, damn you. You’re of the generation which regarded love as a matter of will. ‘Will marks us from the animal, and love from lovelessness,’ as sayeth the poet. You married equally for life, do you hear, you old fool? Well, things are different now. Will’s given way to weather…
“You have to grab love when you can now… Didn’t you have a parental duty to make me happy? Eh? Reply, you biwacking old loon. If you’ve been so sherbing happy, why couldn’t you have given me a happy disposition? You’ve given me nothing else. Why should I always be so miserable?”
No answer came from the dark house. A doll dressed as a soldier sailed from one of the windows and struck him on the side of the head.
There was nothing for it but to return to his regiment in Askitosh. But news travelled fast among the landed families. Scandal followed Fashnalgid. As ill fortune would have it, Major Gardeterark was an uncle of the woman he had disgraced, of that very woman who had so recently danced naked on his verandah and sung the wild zyganke. From then on, Harbin Fashnalgid’s position in the regiment became one of increasing difficulty.
His money went on obscure books as well as women and drink. He was accumulating a case against the Oligarchy, discovering just how the authoritarian grip on the Northern Continent had increased over the sleepy centuries of autumn. Searching through the rubbish in an antiquarian’s attic, he came across a list of entitlements of Uskuti estates of over a certain annual income; the Fashnalgid estate was listed. These estates had “pledged assignments to the Oligarchy.” This phrase was not explained.
Fashnalgid fulfilled his military duties while brooding over that phrase. He became convinced that he was himself part of the property assigned.
Between bouts of drinking and wenching, he recalled some of his father’s boasts. Had not the old man once claimed to have seen the Oligarch himself? Nobody had seen the Oligarch. There was no portrait of the Oligarch. No vision of the Oligarch existed in Fashnalgid’s mind, except possibly a pair of great claws reaching over the lands of Sibornal.
After garrison duties one evening, Fashnalgid ordered his personal servant to saddle up his hoxney and rode furiously out to his father’s estate.
His brothers snarled at him like curs. Nor was he allowed as much as a glimpse of his light of love, except for a bare arm disappearing round a door as she was dragged away. He recognised the bracelets on the lovely wrist. How they had rattled when she danced!
His father lay on a day sofa, covered in blankets. The old man was scarcely able to answer his son’s questions. He rambled and procrastinated. Sadly, Fashnalgid recognised his own portrait in his father’s lies and pretences. The old man still claimed once to have seen Torkerkanzlag II, the Supreme Oligarch. But that had been over forty years ago, when his father was a youth.
“The titles are arbitrary,” the old man said. “They are intended to conceal real names. The Oligarchy is secret, and the names of the Members and the Oligarch are kept secret, so that no one knows them. Why, they don’t know each other… Just as well…”
“So you never met the Oligarch?”
“No one ever claimed to have met him. But it was a special occasion, and he was in the next room. The Oligarch himself. So it was said at the time. I know he was there, I’ve always said so. For all I know, he could be a gigantic lobster with pincers stretching to the sky, but he was certainly there that day—and had I opened the door, I would have seen him, pincers and all…”
“Father, what were you doing there, what was this special occasion?”
“Icen Hill, it’s called. Icen Hill, as you know. Everyone knows where it is, but even the Members of the Oligarchy don’t know each other. Secrecy is important. Remember that, Harbin. Honesty’s for boys, chastity’s for women, secrecy’s for men… You know the old saying my grandfather used to tell me, ‘There’s more than an arm up a Sibornalese sleeve.’ Some truth in that.”
“When were you at Icen Hill? Did you assign a tithe of this estate to the Oligarchy? I must know.”
“Duties, boy, there are duties. Not just buying women dolls and poems. The estate is entitled to protection if you assign it. Winter’s coming, you need to look ahead. I’m getting old. Security… There’s no need for you to be upset. It was agreed before you were born. I was someone then, more than you’ll ever—you should be a major by now, son, but from what I hear from the Gardeterarks… That’s why I signed the agreement that my firstborn son should serve in the Oligarch’s army, in the defence of that state act, when I—”
“You sold me into the army before I was born?” Fashnalgid said.
“Harbin, Harbin, sons go into the army. That’s gallantry. And piety. It’s piety, Harbin. As taught in church.”
“You sold me into the army? What precisely did you get in return?”
“Peace of mind. A sense of duty. Security, as I said, only you weren’t listening. Your mother approved. You ask her. It was her idea.”
“Beholder…” Fashnalgid went and poured himself a drink. As he was throwing the liquid down his throat, his father sat up and said in a distinct voice, “I received a promise.”
“What sort of a promise?”
“The future. The safety of our estate. Harbin, I was for many years myself a Member. That’s why I signed you over to the army. It’s an honour—a good career, fine career. You should cultivate young Gardeterark more…”
“You sold me. Father, you sold your son like a slave…” He began to weep and rushed from the house. Without looking back, he galloped away from the place where he had been born.
A few months later, he was posted with his battalion to Koriantura, under his enemy, Major Gardeterark, and ordered to prepare a warm reception for Asperamanka’s returning army.
Throughout recorded time, Sibornal had existed more unitedly than had the rabble of nations which comprised Campannlat. The nations of the northern continent had their differences, but remained capable of uniting in the face of an external threat.
In milder centuries, Sibornal was a favoured continent. From early in spring of the Great Year, Freyr rose and never set, permitting the northern lands to develop early. Now that the Year was declining, the Oligarchy was busy tightening the reins of its power—bringing in its own kind of darkness.
Both Oligarchy and common people understood that winter, setting in steadily, could burst society apart like a frozen water pipe. The disruptions of cold, the failure of food supplies, could spell the collapse of civilisation. After Myrkwyr, only a few years away, darkness and ice would be upon the land for three and a half local centuries: that was the Weyr-Winter, when Sibornal became the domain of polar winds.
Campannlat would collapse under the weight of winter. Its nations could not collaborate. Whole peoples would revert to barbarism. Sibornal, under more severe conditions, would survive through rational planning.
Still seeking consolation, Harbin Fashnalgid consorted with priests and holy men. The Church was a reservoir of knowledge. There he discovered the answer to Sibornal’s survival. Obsessed as he was with his virtual exile from his father’s estates, from those fields and woods where his brothers laboured, the answer had the force of revelation. It was not to the land that Sibornal would turn in extremity.
The huge continent was so largely covered by polar ice that it might best be regarded as a narrow circle of land facing sea. In the seas lay Sibornal’s winter salvation. Cold seas held more oxygen than warm ones. Come winter, the seas would swarm with marine life. The durable food chains of the ocean would yield their plenty—even when ice covered those estates of his family from which he had been banished.
The awful working of history gnawed at Fashnalgid. He was used to thinking in periods of days or tenners, not in decades and centuries. He fought his disposition to drink and took to spending as much time with priests as with whores. A Priest-Servitant attached to the military chapel in the Askitosh barracks became his confidant. To this priest, Fashnalgid one day confessed his hatred of the Oligarchy.
“The Church also hates the Oligarchy,” said the priest mildly. “Yet we work together. Church and State must never be divided. You resent the Oligarchy because, through its pressures, you had to enter the army. But the flaws in your character under which you labour are yours—not the army’s, not the Oligarchy’s.
“Praise the Oligarchy for its positive aspects. Praise it for its continuity and benevolent power. It is said that the Oligarchy never sleeps. Rejoice that it watches over our continent.”
Fashnalgid kept silent. He took a while to understand why the priest’s answer alarmed him. It came to him that “benevolent power” was a contradiction in terms. He was an Uskuti, yet he had been virtually sold into the slavery of the army. As for the Oligarchy not sleeping: anyone who went without sleep was by definition inhuman, and therefore as opposed to humanity as the phagors.
It was a while later that he realised the priest had spoken of the Oligarchy in the same terms he might have used for God the Azoiaxic. The Azoiaxic also was praised for his continuity and his benevolent power. The Azoiaxic also watched over the continent. And was it not claimed that the Church never slept?