Helliconia Summer h-2

by Brian Aldiss

  “I saw the lad go free. Wild as ever. Wilder. An arrow from a bow would be a fair comparison.”

  A groan escaped JandolAnganol’s lips. “Poor boy, why did he not come to me? I hoped that at last he had lost his hatred of me…”

  “By now he’s probably in the queue to kiss the wounds of the dead SartoriIrvrash—an unhygienic form of amusement if ever I saw one.”

  “Why did Rob not come to me… ?”

  There was no answer, but JandolAnganol could guess it: he had been hidden in the pavilion with Milua Tal. It would take many a tenner before the consequences of this day’s work were fully borne out, and he would have to live them through.

  As if echoing his thoughts, Alam Esomberr said, “And may I enquire what you intend to do with your famous Phagorian Guard, who have committed this atrocity?”

  The king threw him a hard glance and continued to walk away from the blaze.

  “Perhaps you will tell me how mankind is ever to solve its phagor problem,” he said.

  Envoi

  The soldiery from the Good Hope and the Union landed on the Borlienese coast and marched westwards on Gravabagalinien under the leadership of Io Pasharatid.

  As the force progressed, Pasharatid gleaned news of the turmoil about to overwhelm Matrassyl. The conscience of the people had been slowly roused as they digested the news of the massacre of the Myrdolators; the king would be unwelcome when he returned.

  In Pasharatid’s harneys a scheme burned with such conviction that it already seemed actual. He would take the queen of queens; Gravabagalinien would fall to him, and she also. Matrassyl would willingly accept her as queen. He would rule as consort; politically he was not ambitious, not greatly. His past, its evasions, disappointments, disgraces, would be over. One minor military engagement, and all he desired would be his.

  His advance scouts reported breastworks about the wooden palace. He attacked at Batalix-dawn, when haze stretched across the land. His gunners advanced two-by-two, wheel locks at the ready, protected by pikemen.

  A white flag waved from behind the defences. A stocky figure cautiously emerged into the open. Pasharatid signalled to his soldiery to halt, and walked forward alone. He was conscious of how brave he was, how upright. He felt every inch the conqueror.

  The stocky man approached. They halted when no more than a pike’s length apart.

  Bardol CaraBansity spoke. He asked why soldiers were advancing on an almost undefended palace.

  To which Io Pasharatid responded haughtily that he was an honourable man. He required only the surrender of Queen MyrdemInggala, after which he would leave the palace in peace.

  CaraBansity made the sacred circle on his forehead and sniffed a resounding sniff. Alas, he said, the queen of queens was dead, slain by an arrow fired by an agent of her ex-husband, King JandolAnganol.

  Pasharatid responded with angry disbelief.

  “Look for yourself,” said CaraBansity.

  He gestured towards the sea, lacklustre in the dawn light. Men were launching a funeral barque upon the waters.

  In truth, Pasharatid could see it for himself. He left his force and ran to the beach. Four men with heads bowed were carrying a bier on which a body lay beneath layers of white muslin. The hem of the muslin fluttered in a growing breeze. A wreath of flowers lay on top of the body. An old woman with hair growing from a mole in her cheek stood weeping at the water’s edge.

  The four men carried the bier reverently aboard the white caravel, the Vajabhar Prayer; the ship’s battered sides had been repaired well enough for a voyage which did not involve the living. They laid the bier under the mast and retired.

  ScufBar, the queen’s old majordomo dressed in black, stepped aboard the ship carrying a lighted torch. He bowed deeply to the shrouded body. Then he set light to the brushwood piled high on the deck.

  As fire took the ship, it began with the favouring wind to sail slowly out from the bay. The smoke billowed out across the water like lank hair.

  Pasharatid cast down his helmet into the sand, crying wildly to his men.

  “On your knees, you hrattocks! Down and pray to the Azoiaxic for this beautiful lady’s soul. The queen is dead, oh, the queen of queens is dead!”

  CaraBansity smiled occasionally as he rode a brown hoxney back to his wife in Ottassol. He was a clever fellow and his ruse had succeeded; Pasharatid’s pursuit had been deflected. On the little finger of his right hand, he wore the queen’s gift to him, a ring with a sea-blue stone.

  The queen had left Gravabagalinien only a few hours before Pasharatid’s arrival. With her went her general, his sister, the princess Tatro, and a handful of followers. They made their way northwards, across the fertile lands of Borlien, towards Matrassyl.

  Wherever they went, peasants came from their huts, men, women, and children, and called blessing upon MyrdemInggala. The poorest of people ran to feed her party and help her in any way possible.

  The queen’s heart was full. But it was not the heart it had been; the heat had gone from her affections. Perhaps she would accept TolramKetinet in time. That remained to be seen. She needed to find her son first and solace him. Then the future could be determined.

  Pasharatid remained on the shore for a long while. A herd of deer came down onto the beach and foraged at the high-tide line, ignoring his presence.

  The funeral ship drifted out to sea, bearing the corpse of the servant who had died following injuries from a falling gunpowder keg. Flames rose straight up, smoke sank across the waves. A crackle of timber came to Pasharatid’s ears.

  He wept and tore his tunic and thought of all that would never happen. He fell to his knees on the sand, weeping for a death that had yet to occur.

  The animals of the sea circled about the blazing hulk before leaving. They abandoned coastal waters and headed far out towards the deeps. Moving in well-organized legions, they swam where no man yet had sailed, to merge with the liquid wildernesses of Helliconia.

  The years passed. That tumultuous generation faded one by one… Long after the queen was lost to mortal sight, much that was immortal of her travelled across the immeasurable gulfs of space and was received on Earth. There, those lineaments and that face lived again. Her sufferings, joys, failings, virtues—all were called up once more for the peoples of Earth.

  On Helliconia itself, all memories of the queen were soon lost, as waves are lost on the beach.

  T’Sehn-Hrr shone overhead. The moonlight was blue. Even by day, when Batalix shone through the cool mists, the daylight was blue.

  Everything perfectly suited the ancipital kind. Temperatures were low. They held horns high and saw no need to hurry. They lived among the tropical mountains and forests of the Pegovin Peninsula of Hespagorat. They were at peace with one another.

  As the runts grew slowly to creighthood and then full adulthood, their coats became dense and black. Under that shapeless pelage, they were immensely strong. They threw roughly shaped spears which could kill at a hundred yards. With those weapons they slayed members of other components who infringed their territory.

  They had other arts. Fire was their chained and domesticated pet. They travelled with their hearths on their shoulders, and groups of them were to be seen, climbing down to the coast on occasions, where they would trap fish, with flames borne on stone slabs upon their broad shoulders.

  Bronze accoutrements were not beyond their understanding. With that metal they decorated themselves; the warm gleam of bronze might be caught about the smoking firesides of their mountain caves. They mastered pottery sufficiently to make coil pots, often of intricate design, shaped to resemble the pods of the fruits they ate. Coarse body coverings were woven from reeds and creepers. They had the gift of language. Stalluns and gillots went out to hunt together, or cultivated their scanty vegetables together in cleared patches. There was no quarrel between male and female.

  The ancipital components kept animals as pets. Asokins lived commensally with them, and served as hunting dogs when they
went out to hunt. Their Others were of less practical use; the naughty thieving tricks of Others were tolerated for the amusement their antics gave.

  When Batalix set and light drained from the cool world, the ancipitals sank indifferently to sleep. They slept humbly as cattle, lying where they had stood. They switched off. No dreams haunted their long skulls during the silent hours of night.

  Only when the moon T’Sehn-Hrr was full, they mated and hunted instead of sleeping. That was their great time. They killed any animal they came across, any bird, any other ancipital. There was no reason in the killing; they killed because it was their way.

  By daylight, some of the components, those who lived to the south, hunted flambreg. That vast continent, the southern polar continent of Hespagorat, was populated by millions of head of flambreg. With the flambreg went clouds of flies. With the clouds of flies went the yellow fly. So the phagors killed the flambreg, massacred them separately or by the scores, killed the heads of herds, killed does, gravid or otherwise, killed the young, tried to fill the world with their carcasses.

  The flambreg were never deterred from charging northwards across the lowlands of the Pegovin Peninsula. The ancipitals never wearied of killing them. The years came and went, and the centuries, and still the great herds plunged towards the untiring spears. There was no history among the components, except the history of this constant killing.

  Mating took place at full moon: a year later, parturition occurred at full moon. The runts slowly became adult. Everything was slow, as if heartbeats themselves took their time, and the leisurely pace at which a tree grew was a standard for all things. When the great white disc of moon sank into the mists of the horizon, all was much as it had been when it rose from those same mists. Being one with this sluggish peace, the phagors were governed by its tempo; time did not enter into their pale harneys.

  Their pets died. When an Other died, its body was casually cast aside, or thrown outside the area of the camp for vultures to eat. The great black phagors did not know death: death was no more to them than time. As they grew older, their movements slowed. Though they remained within the shelter of their vaguely demarcated families, they became apart. Year by year, their abilities grew more circumscribed. Language was early lost. Eventually movement itself was lost.

  Then the tribe showed a sense of caring. They cared not for individuals. They ministered to their infants, but otherwise only to those who succumbed to age. These superannuated phagors were stored safely away, revered, brought out on any ceremonial occasion, as for instance when an attack was intended on a nearby component.

  Like embodiments of sluggish time, the elderly phagors passed without perceptible change beyond the shadowy division which distinguished life from other conditions. Time congealed in their eddre. They shrank, to become over many years nothing more than small keratinous images of their former selves. Even then, the flickerings of existence were not entirely spent. They were consulted. They still played a part in the life of the component. Only when they disintegrated could it be said that they were visited with finality: and many were so gently handled that they survived for centuries.

  This crepuscular life-style continued long. Summer and winter spelt little change in the club-shaped peninsula, extending almost to the equator. Elsewhere, in the winters, the seas might freeze; in the peninsula, up in the mountains, down in the afforested valleys, a lethargic paradise was maintained unaltered over many, many moons, many moons and many eons.

  The ancipital kind was not readily responsive to change. The unknown star—the unheralded and unprecedented star—was a brilliant point long before it entered the calculations of the components.

  The first white-coated phagors which appeared were treated with indifference. More of them grew to maturity. They produced white off-spring. Only then were they driven out. The outcasts lived along the doleful shores of the Kowass Sea, feeding on iguana. Their tame Others rode on their backs, occasionally throwing twigs of dried seaweed into the portable hearths.

  In the gloaming, phagors and Others could be seen, strung out along the shore, flame and smoke at their shoulder, moving disconsolately towards the east. As year succeeded year, white phagors became more numerous, the exodus to the east more steady. They marked their way with stone pillars, perhaps in the hope that some day they could return home. That return was never to be.

  Instead, the cancerous star in the skies grew brighter, eclipsing all other stars until, like T’Sehn-Hrr, it cast a shadow by night. Then the ancipital kind, after much consultation with the elders in tether, bestowed on the new star a name: Frehyr, meaning fear.

  From one generation to another, there appeared no difference in the magnitude of the fear-star. But it grew. And from generation to generation the mutated white phagors spread along the coastlines of Hespagorat. To the west of the Pegovin Peninsula, they were halted by the dreary marshes of a land later to be known as Dimariam. To the east, they slowly covered the alpine lands of Throssa, to come, after two thousand miles, to the Cadmer land-bridge. All this was achieved with the spiritless determination characteristic of the ancipital kind.

  Across the land-bridge, spreading over Radado, they entered lands where the climate more nearly resembled that of Pegovin. Some settled there; others, arriving later, foraged further. Always as they went they erected their stone pillars, to mark healthful air-octaves which led back to their ancestral home.

  The time of catastrophe arrived. The ageing star, Batalix, with its freight of planets, was captured by the fear-star, young, furious, filling the space around it with radiation. The fear-star possessed a fainter companion. In the cosmic upheaval which followed, as new orbits were established, the fainter companion was lost. It sped away on a new course, taking with it one of Batalix’s planets and the moon of Helliconia, T’Sehn-Hrr. Batalix itself moved into a captive position about the fear-star. This was the Catastrophe, never to be forgotten in the harneys of the ancipital kind.

  In the subsequent upheavals which afflicted the planet, the ancient land-bridge across the Cadmer Straits was demolished by savage winds and tides. The link between Hespagorat and Campannlat was severed.

  During this time of change, the Others changed. The Others were more puny than their mentors, but more nimble and more flexible of mind. Their exodus from Pegovin had transformed their role vis-à-vis the phagors: they were no longer regarded merely as pets of an idle day, but were required to forage for food in order to keep the component fed.

  The revolution happened by accident.

  A party of Others were foraging in a bay along the Radado coast when the incoming tide cut them off. They were marooned temporarily on an island where a lagoon provided a glut of oil fish. The oil fish were one of the manifestations of a changing ecology; they spawned in the seas in their millions. The Others stayed and feasted.

  Later, having lost their mentors, they struck out on their own, moving northwestwards into an almost deserted land they called Ponpt. Here were founded the Ten Tribes, or Olle Onets. Eventually, their greatly modified version of Ancipital, which became known as Olonets, spread throughout Campannlat. But that was not until many a century had passed its hands over the developing wildernesses.

  The Others themselves developed. The Ten Tribes broke up and became many. They were quick to adapt to the new circumstances in which they found themselves. Some tribes never settled, and took to wandering the face of the new continent. Their great enemies were the phagors, whom they nevertheless regarded as godlike. Such delusions—such aspirations—were part and parcel of their lively response to the world in which they discovered themselves. They rejoiced, hunted, multiplied, and the new sun shone on them.

  When the first Great Winter set in, when that first turbulent summer faded into cold, and the snows fell for months at a time, it must have seemed to the eotemporal minds of the phagors that normality was returning. This was the period during which the Ten Tribes were put to the test: genetically malleable, they were to have their fu
ture existences shaped by the degree of success with which they weathered the centuries of apastron, when Batalix crawled through the slowest sectors of its new orbit. Those tribes who adapted best emerged the next spring with new confidence. They had become humanity.

  Male and female, they rejoiced in their new skills. They felt the world and the future to be theirs. Yet there were times—sitting about campfires at night with the star-shingle blazing overhead—when mysterious gaps opened in their lives and they seemed to look into the gulf there was no bridging. Back came folk memories of a period when larger creatures had looked after them and had administered a rough justice. They crept to sleep in silence, and words without sound formed on their lips.

  The need to worship and be ruled—and to rebel against rule—never left them, even when Freyr again proclaimed its strength.

  The new climate, with its higher energy levels, did not suit the white-coated phagors. Freyr, above them, was the symbol of all ills which befell. They took to carving an apotropaic symbol on their air-octave stones: one circle inside another, with rays like spokes connecting the inner with the outer. To the phagorian eye, this was first of all a picture of T’Sehn-Hrr moving away from Hrl-Ichor Yhar. It later came to be regarded as something different, as a picture of Freyr with its rays flattening Hrl-Ichor Yhar beneath it as it drew nearer.

  While some of the Olonets-speakers were transformed, generation by generation, into the hated Sons of Freyr, the phagors slowly lost their culture. They remained stalwart and held horns high. For the new climate was not entirely on the side of the Sons.

  Though Freyr never departed, there were long periods when it moved to such a distance that it hid its spiderous shape among the star-shingle. Then once again the ancipital kind were able to master the Sons of Freyr. At the next Time of Cold they would obliterate their ancient enemy entirely. That time was not yet. But it would come.