by Brian Aldiss
‘Surely, if Akha banishes the snows, that is his invitation to return to the world of skies? It is not natural for men and women to be born and die in darkness.’
Father Sifans sighed. ‘So you say – but you were born under the skies.’
‘I hope to die there, too,’ Yuli said, with a fervour that surprised himself. He feared that his unpremeditated response would provoke his charge-father’s anger; instead, the old man placed a mittened hand on his shoulder.
‘We all desire conflicting desires …’ He struggled with himself – either to speak or to stay silent – then said calmly, ‘Come, we will return, and you shall lead the way. Your reading of the wall-scrolls is becoming excellent.’
He closed the shutter on Vakk. They regarded each other as the night rushed back. Then they returned through the dark sleeve of the gallery.
*
Yuli’s initiation as a priest was a great event. He fasted for four whole days, and came light-headed before his cardinal in Lathorn. With him went three other young men of Yuli’s own age, also due to take all the vows of a priest, also to sing for two hours, standing in stiff clothes and unaccompanied by music, the liturgies memorised for the occasion.
Their voices rose thinly in the great dark church, hollow as a cistern.
Darkness be our guise
Ever, and sting the sinner within
To sing. Bremely we begin
Priests, priests, of great rate,
Golden in ancient Akha’s gaze,
Armoured in ancient right.
A solitary candle stood between them and the figure of the seated cardinal. The old man remained motionless throughout the ceremony; perhaps he slept. A breeze blew the candle flame fluttering in his direction. In the background stood the three charge-fathers who had sponsored the young men to priesthood. Yuli could see Sifans dimly, his nose wrinkled upwards like a shrew’s in pleasure, nodding to the chant. No militia were present, or phagors.
At the end of the initiation, the stiff old figure decked out in its black and whites and chains of gold rose to its feet, raised its hands above its head, and intoned a prayer for the initiates:
‘… and grant finally, O Ancient Akha, that we may move ever more deeply into the caverns of thy thought until we discover within ourselves the secrets of that illimitable ocean, without bound or dimension, which the world calls life, but which we privileged few know to be Everything that is beyond Death and Life …’
Fluggels began to play, swelling music filled Lathorn and Yuli’s heart.
Next day, he was given his first task, to go among the prisoners of Pannoval and listen to their troubles.
*
For newly ordained priests there was an established procedure. They served first in the Punishment area, and then were transferred to Security before being allowed out to work among the ordinary people. In this process of hardening off, they were fortified in the distancing between them and the people implied in their ordination.
Punishment was full of noise and burning brands. It also had its quota of warders, drawn from the militia, and their phagors. It was situated in a particularly wet cavern. A light rain fell most of the time. Anyone who looked up could see the beads of moisture swinging downwards on a crooked path, teased by wind from stalactites far overhead.
Warders wore heavy soles to their boots, which sounded on the pavements. The white-coated phagors which accompanied them wore nothing, able to rely on their natural protection.
Brother Yuli’s job was to work duty spells with one of the three guard lieutenants, a coarse thick man called Dravog, who walked as if he were crushing beetles and spoke as if he were chewing them. He constantly beat his leggings with his stave, making an irritating drumming noise. Everything that concerned the prisoners – including the prisoners themselves – was meant to be banged. All movements were executed to gongs, any delay was punished by application of a stave. Noise was the order of the day. The prisoners were a sullen lot. Yuli had to legitimise any violence and frequently patch its victims.
He soon found himself opposed to Dravog’s mindless brutality, while the unremitting hostility of the prisoners eroded his nerves. The days spent under Father Sifans had been happy even if he had not always appreciated that at the time. In these harsh new surroundings, he missed the dense dark, the silences, the piety, and even Sifans himself, with his cautious friendliness. Friendship was not a quality Dravog recognised.
One of the sectors of Punishment was a cavern called Twink. In Twink, squads of prisoners worked at demolishing the rear wall to enlarge the work space. The toil was endless. ‘They’re slaves, and you’ve got to beat them to keep them going,’ Dravog said. The remark gave Yuli an uncomfortable glimpse into history – probably much of Pannoval had been opened up in this way.
The rubble from the excavation was carried away in clumsy wooden carts, which needed the efforts of two men to shift. The carts trundled to a place somewhere in the warrens of the Holies where the Vakk ran far below ground level and a deep pit waited to receive the rubble.
Twink contained a farm worked by the prisoners. Noctiferous barley was grown for bread, fish were farmed in a pool fed by a stream which poured from the rock. A quota of larger fish was culled every day. Diseased fish were dug into long banks where enormous edible fungi grew. Their pungent odour cut across the senses of anyone entering Twink.
Nearby, in other caverns, were more farms, and chert mines. But Yuli’s movements were almost as circumscribed as those of the prisoners; Twink formed the limit of his beat. He was surprised when Dravog, in conversation with another warder, mentioned that one of the side passages leading from Twink would take him into Market. Market! The name conjured up a jostling world he had left behind in a different life, and he thought nostalgically of Kyale and his wife. ‘You’ll never be a proper priest,’ he told himself.
The gongs were struck, the wardens shouted, the prisoners strained their grudging bodies. The phagors shambled back and forth, sticking their milts up their slotted nostrils, and occasionally exchanging a grunted word with each other. Yuli hated their presence. He was watching four prisoners under the eye of one of Dravog’s warders trawl in the fish pool. To do this, the men were forced to get into the freezing water up to their stomachs. When their net was full, they were allowed to climb out and drag the catch onto the bank.
The fish were gout. They were a pale strawy white, with blind blue eyes. They struggled hopelessly as they were dragged from their natural element
A rubble cart was passing, pushed by two prisoners. One of its wheels struck a stone. The prisoner shouldering the nearside shaft staggered and fell. As he went, he struck one of the fishers, a youth stooping to get a hold on the end of the net, who plunged head first into the water.
The warder began to shout and struck about him with his stave. His phagor hopped forward and grasped the prisoner who had slipped, lifting him off his feet. Dravog and another warder came running up in time to beat the young prisoner about his head as he dragged himself from the pool.
Yuli grasped Dravog’s arm.
‘Leave him alone. It was an accident. Help him out.’
‘He’s not allowed in the pool on his own,’ Dravog said savagely, elbowing Yuli out of the way and striking again.
The prisoner climbed out with blood and water pouring from his head. Another warder rushed up, his brand hissing in the rain, his phagor behind him, eyes pink in the shadows. He shouted, sorry to have missed the excitement. He joined with Dravog and the other warders in booting the half-drowned prisoner back to his cell in the next cavern.
When the commotion had died and the mob disappeared, Yuli cautiously approached the cell, in time to hear a prisoner in the adjoining cell call, ‘Are you all right, Usilk?’
Yuli went to Dravog’s office and collected the master key. He unlocked the cell door, took a fat lamp from a niche in the passage, and entered.
The prisoner sprawled on the floor in a pool of water. He was supporting
his torso with his arms, so that the outline of his shoulder blades stuck painfully through his shirt. Head and cheek were bleeding.
He turned a sullen look at Yuli, then, without change of expression, let his head droop again.
Yuli looked down at the soaked and battered skull. Tormented, he squatted by the man, setting the lamp down on the filthy floor.
‘Scumb off, monk,’ the man growled.
‘I’ll help you if I can.’
‘You can’t help. Scumb it!’
They remained in the same positions, without moving or speaking, and water and blood mingled in the puddle.
‘Your name’s Usilk, I believe?’
No response. The thin countenance remained pointing down at the floor.
‘Is your father’s name Kyale? Living in Vakk?’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘I know – I knew him well. And your mother. She looked after me.’
‘You heard what I said …’ With a sudden burst of energy, the prisoner flung himself on Yuli, beating at him rather feebly. Yuli rolled over and disengaged himself, jumping up like an asokin. He was about to fling himself into the attack when he paused. With an effort of will, he controlled himself and pulled back. Without a word more, he collected the lamp and left the cell.
‘A dangerous one, that,’ Dravog said to him, permitting himself a sly grin at the priest’s expense, seeing his flustered appearance. Yuli retreated to the brothers’ chapel, and prayed in the dark to an unresponsive Akha.
There was a story Yuli had heard in Market, a story not unknown to the ecclesiastics in the Holies, about a certain worm.
The worm was sent by Wutra, wicked god of the skies. Wutra put the worm into the labyrinth of passages in Akha’s holy mountain. The worm is large and long, its girth being about equal to that of a passageway. It is slimy, and it slides along noiselessly in the dark. Only its breathing can be heard, issuing from its flabby lips. It eats people. They are safe one moment; the next, they hear the evil breathing, the rustle of long whiskers, and then they are swallowed.
A spiritual equivalent of Wutra’s worm was now at large in the labyrinths of Yuli’s thought. He could not prevent himself seeing, in the thin shoulders and blood of the prisoner, the gulf that lay between preachments and practice in Akha. It was not that the preachments were so pious, for mainly they were practical, stressing service; nor was it that life was so bad; what troubled him was that they were at odds.
There returned to his memory something that Father Sifans had said to him. ‘It is not goodness and holiness that lead a man to serve Akha. More often it is sin such as yours.’ Which implied that many among the priesthood were murderers and criminals – little better than the prisoners. Yet they were set over the prisoners. They had power.
He went about his duties grimly. He smiled less than he had. He never felt happy working as a priest. The nights he spent in prayer, the days in thought – and in trying, when possible, to forge some sort of contact between himself and Usilk.
Usilk shunned him.
Finally, Yuli’s time in Punishment was completed. He entered a period of meditation before going to work with the Security Police. This branch of the militia had come under his notice while working in the cells, and he found within himself the ghost of a dangerous idea.
After only a few days in Security, Wutra’s worm became ever more active in his mind. His task was to see men beaten and interrogated and to administer a final blessing to them when they died. Grimmer and grimmer he became, until his superiors commended him and gave him cases of his own to handle.
The interrogations were simple, for there were few categories of crime. People cheated or stole or spoke heresy. Or they went to places that were forbidden or plotted revolution – the crime that had been Usilk’s. Some even tried to escape to Wutra’s realm, under the skies. It was now that Yuli realised that a land of illness gripped the dark world; everyone in authority suspected revolution. The illness bred in the darkness, and accounted for the numerous petty laws that governed life in Pannoval. Including the priesthood, the settlement numbered almost six and three quarter thousand people, every one of whom was forced into a guild or order. Every living, guild, order, dormitory, was infiltrated by spies, who themselves were not trusted, and also had an infiltrated guild of their own. The dark bred distrust, and some of its victims paraded, hangdog, before Brother Yuli.
Although he loathed himself for it, Yuli found he was good at the work. He felt enough sympathy to lower his victim’s guard, enough destructive rage to tear the truth out. Despite himself, he developed a professional’s taste for the job. Only when he felt secure did he have Usilk brought before him.
At the end of each day’s duty, a service was held in the cavern called Lathorn. Attendance was compulsory for the priesthood, optional for any of the militia who wished to attend. The acoustics of Lathorn were excellent: choir and musicians filled the dark air with swelling veins of music. Yuli had recently taken up a musical instrument. He was becoming expert on the fluggel, a bronze instrument no bigger than his hand, which he at first despised, seeing other musicians play enormous peetes, vrachs, baranboims, and double-clows. But the tiny fluggel could turn his breath into a note that flew as high as a childrim, soaring up to the clouded roof of Lathorn above all conspiring melody. With it, Yuli’s spirit also flew, to the traditional strains of ‘Caparisoned’, ‘In His Penumbra’, and, his favourite, the richly counterpointed ‘Oldorando’.
One evening, after service, Yuli left Lathorn with an acquaintance, a shriven fellow priest by the name of Bervin, and they walked together through the tomblike avenues of the Holies, to run their fingers over new carvings even then being created by the three Brothers Kilandar. It chanced that they encountered Father Sifans, also strolling, reciting a litany to himself in a nervous undertone. They greeted each other cordially. Bervin politely excused himself, so that Yuli and Father Sifans could parade and talk together.
‘I don’t enjoy my feelings about my day’s work, Father. I was glad of the service.’
As was his fashion, Sifans responded to this only obliquely.
‘I hear marvellous reports of your work, Brother Yuli. You will have to seek further advancement. When you do, I will help you.’
‘You are kind, Father. I recall what you told me’ – he lowered his voice – ‘about the Keepers. An organisation for which one can volunteer, you said?’
‘No, I said one could only be elected to the Keepers.’
‘How could I put my name forward?’
‘Akha will aid you when it is necessary.’ He sniffed with laughter. ‘Now you are one of us, I wonder … have you heard a whisper of an order above even the Keepers?’
‘No, Father. You know I don’t listen to whispers.’
‘Hah, you should. Whispers are a blind man’s sight. But if you are so virtuous, then I will say nothing of the Takers.’
‘The Takers? Who are they?’
‘No, no, don’t worry, I will say not a word. Why should you bother your head with secret organisations or tales of hidden lakes, free of ice? Such things may be lies, after all. Legends, like Wutra’s worm.’
Yuli laughed. ‘Very well, Father, you have worked me up to sufficient interest. You can tell me everything.’
Sifans made tsking noises with his thin lips. He slowed his step, and sidled into an alcove.
‘Since you force me. Very regrettable … You may remember how the rabble lives in Vakk, its rooms all a huddle, one on top the next, without order. Suppose this mountain range in which Pannoval lives is like Vakk – better, like a body with various interconnected parts, spleen, lungs, vitals, heart. Suppose there are caverns just as large as ours above us and below us. It’s not possible is it?’
‘No.’
‘I’m saying it is possible. It’s a hypothesis. Let us say that somewhere beyond Twink there exists a waterfall, falling from a cavern above ours. And that waterfall falls to a level below ours, some way below. Water
plays where it will. Let us say that it falls into a lake, the waters of which are pure and too warm for ice to form on them … Let us imagine that in that desirable and secure place live the most favoured, the most powerful, the Takers. They take everything of the best, the knowledge and the power, and treasure it for us there, until the day of Akha’s victory.’
‘And keep those things from us …’
‘What’s that? Fillips, I missed what you said, Brother. Well, it’s just an amusing story I tell you.’
‘And does one have to be elected to the Takers?’
The father made little clicking noises with his tongue. ‘Who could penetrate such privilege, supposing it existed? No, my boy, one would have to be born to it – a number of powerful families, with beautiful women to keep them warm, and perhaps secret ways to come and go, even beyond Akha’s domains … No, it would need – why, it would need a revolution to get near such a hypothetical place.’
He stuck his nose in the air and giggled.
‘Father, you tease the poor simple priests below you.’
The old priest’s head went to one side, judicially. ‘Poor you are, my young friend, and will most like remain so. Simple you are not – and that is why you will always make a flawed priest, as long as you continue. That is why I love you.’
They parted. The priest’s declaration troubled Yuli. Yes, he was a flawed priest, as Sifans said. A music lover, nothing more.
He washed his face in icy water as his thoughts burned. All these hierarchies of priesthoods – if they existed – led only to power. They did not lead to Akha. Faith never explained precisely, with a verbal precision to rival the precision of music, how devotion could move a stone effigy; the words of faith led only to a foggy obscurity called holiness. The realisation was as rough as the towel on which he dried his cheeks.
Lying in the dormitory far from sleep, he saw how old Sifans’ life had been stripped from the old man, real love had been starved from him, until he was left only with teasing ghosts of affection. He did not really care – had perhaps ceased to care a while ago – whether those beneath him had faith or not. His hints and riddles expressed a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with his own life.