Helliconia Winter

by neetha Napew

  In Shokerandit's contingent, phagors stood side by side with humans. Both stalluns and gillots - the latter often with their offspring in attendance - fought, and male and female died together.

  Luterin was gathering honour to his family's name. Battle lust made him secure from caution and, seemingly, injury. Those who fought with him, including his friends, recognised this fearful enchantment and took heart from it. They cut into the Pannovalan enemy without fear or mercy, and the enemy gave way - at first with stubborn resistance, then in a rush. The Shiveninki pursued, on foot or in the saddle. They cut down the defeated as they ran, until their arms were weary of thrusting and stained to the shoulder with blood.

  This was the beginning of the rout of the Savage Continent.

  Before the forces from Pannoval itself began to retreat, Pannoval's doubtful allies cast about for a safe way home. The battalion from Borldoran had the misfortune to straggle across the path of Shokerandit, and came under attack. Bandal Eith Lahl, their commander, valiantly called on his men to fight. This the Borldoranians did, taking refuge behind their wagons. A gun battle ensued.

  The attackers set fire to the wagons. Many Borldoranians were slain. There came a lull in the firing, during which the noise of other encounters reached the ears of the protagonists. Smoke floated over the field, to be whipped away by the wind.

  Luterin Shokerandit saw his moment. Calling to the squadron, he dashed forward, Umat Esikananzi at his side, throwing himself at the Borldoranian position.

  In the wilds of his homeland, Luterin was accustomed to hunting alone, lost to the world. The intense empathy between hunter and hunted was familiar to him from early childhood. He knew the moment when his mind became the mind of the deer, or of the fierce-horned mountain goat, the most difficult of quarries.

  He knew the moment of triumph when the arrow flew home - and, when the beast died, that mixture of joy and remorse, harsh as orgasm, which wounded the heart.

  How much greater that perverted victory when the quarry was human! Leaping a barricade of corpses, Luterin came face to face with Bandal Eith Lahl. Their gazes met. Again that moment of identity! Luterin fired first. The Borldoranian leader threw up his arms, dropping his gun, doubling forward to clutch his intestines as they burst outwards. He fell dead.

  With the death of their commander, the Borldoranian opposition collapsed. Lahl's young wife was taken captive by Luterin, together with valuable booty and equipment. Umat and other companions embraced him and cheered before seizing what loot they could gather.

  Much of the booty the Shiveninki gathered was in the form of supplies, including hay for the animals, to ease the return of the contingent to their distant home in the Shivenink Chain.

  On all quarters of the field, the forces of the south suffered mounting defeat. Many fought on when wounded, and continued to fight when hope had gone. It was not courage they lacked, but the favour of their countless gods.

  Behind the Pannovalan defeat lay a history of unrest extending over long periods. During the slow deterioration of climate, as life became harder, the Country of a Thousand Cults was increasingly at odds with itself, with one cult opposed to another.

  Only the fanatical corps of Takers had the power to maintain order in Pannoval City. This sworn brotherhood of men lived inside the remotest recesses of the Quzint Mountains. It still clung to the ancient god Akhanaba.

  The Takers and their rigid discipline had become a byword over the centuries; their presence on the field might have turned the tide of defeat. But in these troublous times, the Iron Formations judged it best to remain close to home.

  At the end of that dire day, wind still blew, artillery still boomed, men still fought. Groups of deserters wended their way southwards, towards the sanctuary of the Quzints. Some were peasants who had never held a gun before. The forces of Sibornal were too exhausted to pursue defeated foes. They lit camp fires and sank down into the daze of battle slumber.

  The night was filled with isolated cries, and with the creak of carts making their way to safety. Yet even for those who retreated to distant Pannoval, there remained other dangers, fresh afflictions.

  Enmeshed in their own affairs, the human beings had no perception of the plain as other than an arena on which they made war. They did not see the place as a network of interrelated forces involved in the continual slow mechanisms of change, its present form being merely the representative of a forgotten series of plains stretching into the remote past. Approximately six hundred species of grass clothed the North Pannovalan flatlands; they were either spreading or in retreat under the dictates of climate; and with the success of any one kind of grass was bound up the fate of the animal and insect chains which fed on it.

  The high silica content of the grasses demanded teeth clad in strongly resistant enamel. Impoverished as the plain looked to a casual human glance, the seeds of the grass represented highly nutritious packages - nutritious enough to support numerous rodents and other small mammals. Those mammals formed the prey of larger predators. At the top of that food chain was a creature whose omnivorous capabilities had once made it lord of the planet. Phagors ate anything, flesh or grass.

  Now that the climate was more propitious to them, free phagors were moving into lower ground. To the east of the equatorial continent stood the mass of the High Nyktryhk. The Nyktryhk was far more than a barrier between the central plains and the horizons of the Ardent Sea: its series of plateaux, building upwards like steps of a giant staircase, its complex hierarchies of gorge and mountain, constituted a world in itself. Timber gave way to tundralike uplands, and those to barren canyons, excoriated by glaciers. The whole was crowned nine miles above sea level by a dominating plateau, a scalp on nodding terms with the stratosphere.

  Ancipital components who had lived the long centuries of summer in the high grasslands secure from man's depredations were descending to more abundant slopes as their refuges were assailed by the furies of oncoming winter. Their populations were building up in the labyrinthine Nyktryhk foothills.

  Some phagor communities were already venturing into territories traversed by mankind.

  Into the area of battle, under cover of darkness, rode a company of phagors, stalluns, gillots, and their offspring, in all sixteen strong. They were mounted on russet kaidaws, their runts clinging tight against their parents, half smothered in their rough pelages. The adults carried spears in their primitive hands. Some of the stalluns had entwined brambles between their horns. Above them, riding the chilly night air, flew attendant cowbirds.

  This group of marauders was the first to venture among the weary battle lines. Others were not far behind.

  One of the carts creaking towards Pannoval through the darkness had stuck. Its driver had attempted to drive it straight through an uct, a winding strip of vegetation which broke the plain in an east-west direction. Although much reduced from its summer splendour, the uct still represented a palisade of growth, and the cart was wedged with saplings between both axles.

  The driver stood cursing, attempting by blows to make his hoxneys budge.

  The occupants of the carts comprised eleven ordinary soldiers, six of them wounded, a hoxney-corporal, and two rough young women who served as cooks, or in any other capacity required. A phagor slave, dehorned, chained, marched behind the vehicle. So overcome by fatigue and illnesses was this company that they fell asleep one on top of the other, either beside the cart or in it. The luckless hoxneys were left to stand between the shafts.

  The kaidaw-phagor component came out of the night, moving in single file along the straggling line of the uct. On reaching the cart, they bunched closer together. The cowbirds landed in the grass, stepping delicately together, making noises deep in their throats, as if anxiously awaiting events.

  The events were sudden. The huddled band of humans knew nothing until the massive shapes were on them. Some phagors dismounted, others struck from their saddles with their spears.

  "Help!" screamed one of the doxies, t
o be immediately silenced with a thrust to the throat. Two men lying half under the cart woke and attempted to run. They were clubbed from behind. The dehorned phagor slave began to plead in Native Ancipital. It too was despatched without ceremony. One of the wounded men managed to discharge a pistol before he was killed.

  The raiders picked up a metal pot and a sack of rations from the cart. They secured the hoxneys on trailing leads. One of them bit out the throat of the groom-corporal, who was still living. They spurred their massive beasts on into the expanses of the plain.

  Although there were many who heard the shot and the cries, none on that vast battlefield would come to the aid of those on the cart. Rather, they thanked whatever deity was theirs that they themselves were not in danger, before sinking back into the phantasms of battle slumber.

  In the morning by dim first light, when cooking fires were started and the murders discovered, it was different. Then there was a hue and cry. The marauders were far away by that time, but the torn throat of the groom-corporal told its own tale. The word went round. Once more that ancient figure of dread-horned ancipital riding horned kaidaw - was loose in the land. No doubt of it: winter was coming, old terror-legends were stirring.

  And there was another dread figure, just as ancient, even more feared. It did not depart from the battlefield. Indeed, it thrived on the conditions, as if gunpowder and excreta were its nectar. Victims of the Fat Death were already showing their horrifying symptoms. The plague was back, kissing with its fevered lips the lips of battlewounds.

  Yet this was the dawn of a day of victory.

  II

  A SILENT PRESENCE

  In Luterin Shokerandit's mind, the sense of victory was mingled with many other emotions. Pride like a shrill of trumpets moved in him when he reflected that he was now a man, a hero, his courage proved beyond everyone's doubt but his own. And there was the excitement of knowing that he now had within his clutches a beautiful and powerless woman. Yet not entirely silenced was the continual unease of his thoughts, a flow so familiar that it was part of him. The flow brought before him continually the question of his duty to his parents, the obligations and restrictions at home, the loss of his brother - still painfully unexplained - the reminder that he had lost a year in prostrating illness. Doubt, in short, which even the sense of victory would not entirely still. That was Luterin's perceptual universe at thirteen years; he carried about with him an uncertainty which the scent, the voice, of Toress Lahl by turn soothed and aroused. Since he had no one in whom he could confide, his strategy was to suppress, to behave as if all were well.

  So at first light, he threw himself gladly back into action. He had discovered that danger was a sedative.

  "One last assault," said Archpriest-Militant Asperamanka. "Then the day will be ours." His face of anger moved among the thousand other grim faces, dry of lip, again preparing to fight.

  Orders were shouted, phagors mustered. Yelk were watered. Men spat as they swung themselves again into the saddle. The plain lightened with Batalix-dawn and human suffering again took on movement. The rise of the greater luminary was a more gradual event: weakening Freyr could not climb far above the horizon.

  "Forward!" In went the cavalry at walking pace, infantry behind. Bullets flew. Men staggered and fell.

  The Sibornalese attack lasted a little under the hour. Pannovalan morale was sinking fast. One by one, its units fell into retreat. The Shiveninki force under Luterin Shokerandit moved off in pursuit, but was recalled; Asperamanka had no wish to see this young lieutenant acquire yet more glory. The army of the north withdrew to the northern side of the river. Its wounded were taken to Isturiacha, to a field ambulance established in some barns. Tenderly, the broken men were laid to bleed on straw.

  As the opponents withdrew from the plain, the cost of battle could clearly be seen. As if in a gigantic shipwreck, pallid bodies lay strewn upon their last shore. Here and there, an overturned wagon burned, its smoke carrying thin across the soiled ground.

  Figures moved among the dead. A Pannovalan artillery officer was one of them, scarcely recognisable. Sniffing at a corpse like a dog, he wrenched at its jacket until the sleeve came off. He commenced to chew at the arm. He ate in snatches, face distorted, raising his head to look about as he chewed each mouthful.

  He continued to chew and stare even when a rifleman approached. The latter raised his weapon and fired at short range. The artillery officer was blown backwards, to lie motionless with arms outspread. The rifleman, with others similarly detailed, moved slowly about the death-field, shooting the devourers of corpses. These were the unfortunates who had contracted the Fat Death and, in the throes of bulimia, were driven to feast on the dead. Plague victims were reported on both sides.

  As the main body of the Pannovalan army made its untidy retreat, it left behind a detail of monumental masons.

  The masons had no victory to celebrate. Nevertheless, their trade had to be exercised. Back in Pannoval, the defeated commanders would be bound to claim a victory. Here, at the limits of their territory, the lie had to be reinforced in stone.

  Although the plain offered no quarries, the masons found a ruinous monument near at hand. They demolished it and carried its separate stones nearer to the bridge by the sullen river.

  These guildsmen took pride in their craft. With practised care, they reerected the monument almost stone for stone on its new site. The master-mason carved upon the base of the monument the name of the place and the date, and, in grander lettering, the name of the old Chief Marshal.

  All stood back and regarded the stonework with pride before returning to their wagon. None who executed this act of practical piety realised that he had demolished a monument commemorating a similar battle fought here eons ago.

  The gaunt Sibornalese watched with satisfaction as the defeated enemy withdrew southwards. They had sustained heavy losses, and it was clear there was nothing to be gained by pressing on farther as had once been planned; their other settlements had been wiped out, as refugees in Isturiacha reported.

  Those who survived the battle felt relief that the challenge was behind them. Yet there was also a sense in some quarters that the engagement had been a dishonourable thing - dishonourable and even paltry, after the months of training and preparation which had preceded it. For what had it been fought? For ground that would now have to be conceded? For honour?

  To quell such doubts, Asperamanka announced a feast to be held that evening in celebration of the Sibornalese victory. Some arang, newly arrived in Isturiacha, would be slaughtered; they and supplies captured from the enemy would provide the fare. The army rations, needed for the journey home, would not be touched.

  Preparations for this celebration went forward even while the dead were being buried in nearby consecrated ground. The graves lay in a great shallow vale, open to the wide skies, where aromas of cooking wafted over the corpses.

  While the settlers were busy, the army was content to rest. Their trained phagors sprawled with them. It was a day for grateful sleep. For binding of wounds. For repairs to uniforms, boots, harness. Soon they would have to be on the move again. They could not remain in Isturiacha. There was not enough food to support an idle army.

  Towards the end of the day, the smells of woodsmoke and roasting meats overcame the lingering stench of the battlefield. Hymns of thanksgiving were offered up to God the Azoiaxic. The men's voices, and the ring of sincerity in them, brought tears to the eyes of some women settlers, whose lives had been saved by these same hymn singers. Rape and captivity would have been their lot after a Pannovalan invasion.

  Children who had been locked in the church of the Formidable Peace while danger threatened were now released. Their cries of delight brightened the evening. They clambered among the soldiery, chuckling at the attempts of the men to get drunk on weak Isturiachan beer.

  The feast began according to the omens, as dimday snared the world. The roast arang were attacked until nothing but the stained cages of their ribs
remained. It was another memorable victory.

  Afterwards, three solemn elders of the settlement council approached the Archpriest-Militant and bowed to him. No hand touching took place since Sibornalese of high caste disapproved of physical contact with others.

  The elders thanked Asperamanka for preserving the safety of Isturiacha, and the senior among them said formally, "Revered sire, you understand our situation here is that of the last and southernmost settlement of Sibornal. Once there were/continued other settlements farther into Campannlat, even as far as Roonsmoor. All have been overwhelmed by the denizens of the Savage Continent. Before your army will/must retire to our home continent, we beseech you on behalf of all in Isturiacha to leave a strong garrison with us, that we may not/avoidance suffer the same fate as our neighbours."

  Their hairs were grey and sparse. Their noses shone in the light of the oil lamps. They spoke in a high dialect larded with slippery tenses, past continuous, future compulsive, avoidance-subjunctive, and the Priest-Militant responded in similar terms, while his gaze evaded theirs.

  "Honoured gentlemen, I doubt if you can/will/could support the extra mouths you request. Although this is the summer of the small year, and the weather is clement, yet your crops are poor, as I perceive, and your cattle appear starved." The thundercloud was dark about Asperamanka's brow as he spoke.

  The elders regarded each other. Then all three spoke simultaneously.

  "The might of Pannoval will return against us."