by Brian Aldiss
‘It’s simple. First you, as a savage, must attend a priest.’ That was the dictum of a sharp-faced militia captain before whom Yuli had to appear. He confronted Yuli in a little stone room, the balcony of which was a metre or so above one of Market’s terraces, and from which one might survey the whole animated scene.
The captain wore a floor-length cloak of black and white over the customary skins. On his head he wore a bronze helmet displaying the holy symbol of Akha, a kind of two-spoked wheel. His hide boots came halfway up his calf. Behind him stood a phagor, a black and white woven band tied round its hairy white brow.
‘Pay attention to me,’ growled the captain. But Yuli found his eyes ever drifting towards the silent phagor, wondering at its presence.
The ancipital stood with an air of taciturn repose, ungainly head thrust forward. Its horns were blunt; they had been sawn short, and their cutting edges dulled with a file. Yuli saw that it had a leather collar and thong about its throat, half-concealed under white hair, a sign of its submission to man’s rule. Yet it was a threat to the citizens of Pannoval. Many officers appeared everywhere with a submissive phagor beside them; the phagors were valued for their superior ability to see in the dark. Ordinary people went in fear of the shambling animals that spoke basic Olonets. How was it possible, Yuli wondered, for men to form liaisons with the same beasts who had imprisoned his father – beasts that everyone in the wilds hated from birth?
The interview with the captain was dispiriting, and worse was to come. He could not live unless he obeyed the rules, and they appeared interminable; there was nothing for it – as Kyale impressed upon him – but to conform. To be a citizen of Pannoval, you had to think and feel like a Pannovalian.
So he was consigned to attend the priest in the alley of livings where he had his room. This entailed numerous sessions at which he was taught a ritualised history of Pannoval (‘born from Great Akha’s shadow on the eternal snows …’) and forced to learn many of the scriptures by heart. He also had to do whatever Sataal, the priest, told him to do, including the running of many tedious errands, for Sataal was lazy. It was no great consolation to Yuli to find that the children of Pannoval went through similar courses of instruction at an early age.
Sataal was a solidly built man, pale of face, small of ear, heavy of hand. His head was shaven, his beard plaited, in the manner of many priests of his order. There were twists of white in the plaits. He wore a knee-length smock of black and white. His face was deeply pocked. It took Yuli some while to realise that, despite the white hairs, Sataal was not past middle age, being only in his late teens. Yet he walked in a round-shouldered way suggesting both age and piety.
When he addressed Yuli, Sataal spoke always kindly but remotely, keeping a gulf between them. Yuli was reassured by the man’s attitude, which seemed to say, This is your job and mine, but I shall not complicate it by probing into what your inner feelings are. So Yuli kept quiet, applying himself to the task of learning all the necessary fustian verses.
‘But what do they mean?’ he asked at one point, in bewilderment.
Sataal rose slowly in the small room, and turned about, so that his shoulders loomed black in a distant source of light, and all the rest of him flowed into encompassing shadow. A dull highlight gleamed on his pate as he inclined his head towards Yuli, saying, admonishingly, ‘Learning first, young fellow, then interpretation. After learning, then less difficulty in interpretation. Get everything by heart, you hardly need it by head. Akha never enforces understanding from his people, only obedience.’
‘You said that Akha cares nothing for anyone in Pannoval.’
‘The important point, Yuli, is that Pannoval cares for Akha. Now then, once again:
‘Whoso laps Freyr’s bane
Like a fish swallows ill bait:
When it groweth late
Our feeble frames he will burn.’
‘But what does it mean?’ Yuli asked again. ‘How can I learn it if I don’t understand it?’
‘Repeat it, son,’ said Sataal sternly. ‘“Whoso laps …”’
Yuli was submerged in the dark city. Its networks of shadows snatched at his spirit, as he had seen men in the outer world catch fish with nets under the ice. In dreams, his mother came to him, blood flying from her mouth. Then he would wake, to lie in his narrow cot staring up, far up, far beyond the confines of his flower-shaped room, to the roof of Vakk. Sometimes, when the atmosphere was fairly clear, he could see distant detail, with bats hanging up there, and stalactites, and the rock gleaming with liquid that had ceased to be liquid; and he wished he could fly away from the traps he found himself in. But there was nowhere else to go.
Once, in midnight desperation, he crawled through to Kyale’s home for comfort. Kyale was annoyed at being woken, and told him to go away, but Tusca spoke to him gently, as if he were her son. She patted his arm and clutched his hand.
After a while, she wept softly, and told him that indeed she had a son, a good kind lad of about Yuli’s age, Usilk by name. But Usilk had been taken from her by the police for a crime she knew he had never committed. Every night, she lay awake and thought of him, concealed in one of those terrifying places in the Holies, guarded by phagors, and wondered if she would ever see him again.
‘The militia and the priests are so unjust here,’ Yuli whispered to her. ‘My people have little to live on in the wilds, but all are equal, one with another, in the face of the cold.’
After a pause, Tusca said, ‘There are people in Pannoval, women as well as men, who do not learn the scriptures and think to overthrow those who rule. Yet without our rulers, we should be destroyed by Akha.’
Yuli peered at the outline of her face through the dark. ‘And do you think that Usilk was taken … because he wanted to overthrow the rulers?’
In a low voice she replied, holding tightly to his hand, ‘You must not ask such questions or you’ll meet trouble. Usilk was always rebellious – yes, perhaps he got among the wrong people …’
‘Stop your chatter,’ Kyale called. ‘Get back to your bed, woman – and you to yours, Yuli.’
These things Yuli nursed in himself all the while he went through his sessions with Sataal. Outwardly, he was obedient to the priest.
‘You are not a fool, even if you are a savage – and that we can change,’ said Sataal. ‘Soon you shall progress to the next step. For Akha is the god of earth and underground, and you shall understand something of how the earth lives, and we in its veins. These veins are called land-octaves, and no man can be happy or healthy unless he lives along his own land-octaves. Slowly, you can acquire revelation, Yuli. Maybe, if you are good enough, you could yourself become a priest, and serve Akha in a greater way.’
Yuli kept his mouth shut. It was beyond his ability to tell the priest that he needed no particular attentions from Akha: his whole new way of life in Pannoval was a revelation.
The days followed one another peacefully. Yuli became impressed with the never varying patience of Sataal, and began disliking his instruction periods less. Even away from the priest, he thought about his teaching. All was fresh and curiously exciting. Sataal had told him that certain priests, who undertook to fast, were able to communicate with the dead, or even with personages in history; Yuli had never heard of such things, but hesitated to call them nonsense.
He took to roving alone through the suburbs of the city, until its thick shadows took on for him colours of familiarity. He listened to people, who often talked of religion, or to the sayers who spoke at street corners, who often laced their stories with religion.
Religion was the romance of the darkness, as terror had been of the Barriers, where tribal drums warded off devils. Slowly, Yuli began to perceive in religious talk not a vacuum but a core of truth: the way in which people lived and died had to be explained. Only savages needed no explanation. The perception was like finding an animal’s trail in the snow.
Once he was in a malodorous part of Prayn, where human scumble was poured
into long trenches on which the noctiferous crops grew. Here, the people were pretty tough, as the saying had it. A man with short-cropped free-flowing hair, and therefore neither a priest nor a sayer, ran up and jumped onto a scumble barrow.
‘Friends,’ he said, standing before them. ‘Listen to me for a moment, will you? Just stop your labours and hear what I have to say. I speak not for myself but for the great Akha, whose spirit moves inside me. I have to speak for him although I put my life in danger, for the priests distort Akha’s words for their own purposes.’
People stopped to listen. Two tried to make a joke at the young man’s expense, but the others stood in submissive interest, Yuli included.
‘Friends, the priests say that we have to sacrifice to Akha and nothing more, and he will then keep us safe in the great heart of his mountain. I say that is a lie. The priests are content and do not care how we the ordinary people suffer. Akha tells you through my lips that we should do more. We should be better in ourselves. Our lives are too easy – once we have made sacrifices and paid taxes, we care nothing. We merely enjoy, or go to the games. You hear so often that Akha cares nothing for us and everything for his battle with Wutra. We must make him care – we must become worthy of his care. We must reform ourselves! Yes, reform! And the easy-living priests must reform themselves also …’
Someone called to say that the militia were coming.
The young man paused. ‘My name is Naab. Remember what I say. We too have a role in the great war between Sky and Earth. I will be back to speak if I can – speak my message to all Pannoval. Reform, reform! – Before it is too late …’ As he jumped down, there was a surge among the crowd that had gathered. A great tethered phagor rushed forward, with a soldier at the other end of his leash. It reached forward and grabbed Naab’s arm with its powerful horned hands. He gave a cry of pain, but a hairy white arm went round his throat and he was led away in the direction of Market and the Holies.
‘He shouldn’t have said such things,’ a grey man muttered, as the crowd dispersed.
Yuli followed the man on impulse, and grasped his sleeve.
‘The man Naab said nothing against Akha – why should the militia take him away?’
The man looked furtively about. ‘I recognise you. You’re a savage, or you wouldn’t ask such stupid things.’
For answer, Yuli raised his fist. ‘I’m not stupid or I would not ask my question.’
‘If you weren’t stupid, you’d keep quiet. Who do you think has power here? The priesthood, of course. If you speak out against them—’
‘But that’s Akha’s power—’
The grey man had slipped away into the dark. And there in that dark, that ever watchful dark, could be felt the presence of something monstrous. Akha?
One day, a great sporting event was to be held in Reck. It was then that Yuli, acclimatised to Pannoval, underwent a remarkable crystallisation of emotion. He hurried along to the sports with Kyale and Tusca. Fat lamps burned in niches, leading the way from Vakk to Reck, and crowds of people climbed through the narrowing rock passages, struggled up the worn steps, calling to one another, as they filed into the sports arena.
Carried along by the surge of humanity, Yuli caught a sudden view ahead of the chamber of Reck, its curved walls flickering with light. He saw but a slice of the chamber to begin with, trapped between the veined walls of the passage along which the rabble had to pass. As he moved, so into that framed distant view moved Akha himself, high above the heads of the crowd.
He ceased to listen to what Kyale was saying. Akha’s gaze was on him; the monstrous presence of the dark was surely made visible.
Music played in Reck, shrill and stimulating. It played for Akha. There Akha stood, broad and horrible of brow, its large stone eyes unseeing yet all-seeing, lit from below by flares. Its lips dripped disdain.
The wilderness held nothing like this. Yuli’s knees were weak. A powerful voice inside him, one he scarcely recognised as his own, exclaimed, ‘Oh, Akha, at last I believe in you. Yours is the power. Forgive me, let me be your servant.’
Yet alongside the voice of one longing to enslave himself was another, speaking simultaneously in a more calculating manner. It said, ‘The people of Pannoval must understand a great truth which it would be useful to get to comprehend by following Akha.’
He was astonished at the confusion within himself, a war that did not lessen as they entered the chamber and more of the stone god was revealed. Naab had said, ‘Humans have a role in the war between Sky and Earth.’ Now he could feel that war alive within him.
The games were intensely exciting. Running races and spear throwing were followed by wrestling between humans and phagors, the latter with their horns amputated. Then came the bat shoot, and Yuli emerged from his pietistic confusions to watch the excitement. He feared bats. High above the crowd, the roof of Reck was lined with the furry creatures, dangling with their leather wings about their heads. Archers came forward and shot in turn at the bats with arrows to which were attached silken threads. The bats, when hit, fell fluttering down, and were claimed for the pot.
The winner was a girl. She wore a bright red garment tight at the neck and long to the ground, and she pulled back her bow and shot more accurately than any man. And her hair was long and dark. Her name was Iskador, and the crowd applauded her wildly, none more so than Yuli.
Then there were the gladiatorial combats, men against men, men against phagors, and blood and death filled the arena. Yet all the time, even when Iskador was tensing her bow and her lovely torso – even then, Yuli thought in terms of great joy that he had found an amazing faith. The confusions within would be banished by greater knowledge, he assumed.
He recalled the legends he had listened to round his father’s fire. The elders had spoken of the two sentinels in the sky, and of how the men on earth had once offended the God of the Skies, whose name was Wutra. So that Wutra had banished the earth from his warmth. Now the sentinels watched for the hour when Wutra returned, to look again with affection on the earth, and see if the people behaved better. If he found they did, then would he remove the frosts.
Well, Yuli had to acknowledge that his people were savages, just as Sataal claimed; how else would his father have allowed himself to be dragged away by phagors? Yet there must be a germ of truth in the tales. For here in Pannoval was a more reasoned version of the story. Wutra was now merely a minor deity, but he was vengeful, and he was loose in the skies. It was from the skies that peril came. Akha was the great earth god, ruling underground, where it was safe. The Two Sentinels were not benign; being in the sky, they belonged to Wutra, and they could turn against mankind.
Now the memorised verses began to make sense. Illumination shone from them, so that Yuli muttered with pleasure what had previously given him pain, gazing upon Akha’s face as he did so:
‘Skies give false prospects,
Skies shower extremes:
Against all such schemes
Akha’s earth overhead protects.’
Next day, he went humbly to Sataal and told the man that he had been converted.
The pale heavy face of his priest regarded him, and Sataal drummed his fingers on his knees.
‘How were you converted? Lies fly about the livings these days.’
‘I looked at Akha’s face. For the first time I saw it clear. Now my heart is open.’
‘Another false prophet was arrested the other day.’
Yuli smote his chest. ‘What I feel inside me is not false, Father.’
‘It’s not so easy,’ said the priest.
‘Oh, it is easy, it is easy – now everything will be easy!’ He fell at the priest’s feet, crying his delight.
‘Nothing’s so easy.’
‘Master, I owe you everything. Help me. I want to be a priest, to become as you.’
During the next few days, he went about the lanes and livings noticing new things. No longer did he feel himself encased in gloom, buried underground. He was in
a favoured region, protected from all the cruel elements that had made him a savage. He saw how welcome the dim light was.
He saw too how beautiful Pannoval was, in all its chambers. In the course of their long habitation, the caves had been decorated by artists. Whole walls were covered with painting and carving, many of them illustrating the life of Akha and the great battles he had fought, as well as the battles he would fight when again enough humans had faith in his strength. Where the pictures had grown old and faint, new ones had been painted on top of them. Artists were still at work, often perched dangerously on top of scaffolding that reached towards the roof like the skeleton of some mythical long-necked animal.
‘What’s the matter with you, Yuli? You attend to nothing,’ Kyale said.
‘I’m going to be a priest. I’ve made up my mind.’
‘They’ll never let you – you from outside.’
‘My priest is speaking to the authorities.’
Kyale pulled at his melancholy nose, slowly lowering his hand until the tugging operations were taking place at one end of his moustache, as he contemplated Yuli. By now, Yuli’s eyesight had so adjusted to the dimness that every nuance of expression on his friend’s face was clear. When Kyale moved without a word to the back of his stall, Yuli followed.
Again grabbing his moustache for security, Kyale placed his other hand on Yuli’s shoulder. ‘You’re a good lad. You remind me of Usilk, but we won’t go into that … Listen to me: Pannoval isn’t like it was when I was a child, running barefoot through the bazaars. I don’t know what’s happened, but there’s no peace any more. All this talk of change – nonsense, to my mind. Even the priests are at it, with wild men ranting about reform. I say, let well enough alone. Know what I mean?’