by Brian Aldiss
He paused, cleared his throat, then said more briskly, ‘I’ll tell you a tale. It’s only brief. I remember one terrible winter when I was a lad when the phagors attacked, and disease and famine followed. Many people died. And the phagors were dying too, although we didn’t know it at the time. It was so dark, I swear days are brighter now … Anyhow, the phagors left behind a human boy during the slaughter. His name was – I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten it, but to the best of my belief it was something like Krindlesheddy. A long name. Once I knew it clearly. The years have made me forget.
‘Krindlesheddy had come from a country a long way to the north, Sibornal. He said that Sibornal was a land of perpetual glaciers. I was selected to be chief boy in my corps, and in Sibornal he was to be a priest, so we were both dedicated to our calling. He – Krindlesheddy or whatever his name was – thought our life was easy. The geysers kept Oldorando warm.
‘As a young member of the priesthood, my friend had belonged with some colonists who moved south to escape the cold. They came to a better land by a river. There they had to fight with the local inhabitants of a realm called – well, the name has gone after these many years. A great battle raged, in which Krindlesheddy – if that was his name – was injured. The survivors fled, only to be caught by raiding phagors. It was mere fortune that he escaped them here. Or perhaps they left him because he was wounded.
‘We did what we could to help the lad, but he died after a month. I cried for him. I was only young. Yet even then I envied him because he’d seen something of the world. He told me that in Sibornal the ice came in many colours and was beautiful.’
As Master Datnil finished his story, sitting meekly beside Shay Tal, Vry entered the room, on her way to the floor above.
He smiled kindly at her, saying to Shay Tal, ‘Don’t send Vry away. I know she’s your chief boy and you trust her, as I wish I could trust my chief boy. Let her hear what I have to say.’ He laid his wooden box on the floor in front of him. ‘I have brought the Master Book of our corps for you to see.’
Shay Tal looked as if she would faint. She knew that if this borrowing was discovered, the makers corps would kill the master without hesitation … She could guess at the inner struggle the old man had gone through before bringing it. She wrapped her thin arms about him and kissed him on his wrinkled forehead.
Vry came and knelt down by him, excitement on her face.
‘Let’s have a look!’ she exclaimed, reaching out a hand, forgetting her diffidence.
He put his hand over hers, detainingly.
‘Notice first the wood of which the box is made. It’s not from a rajabaral; the grain is too beautiful. Notice how it’s carved. Notice the delicate metal chasing that binds the corners. Could our metal-makers corps do such fine work today?’
When they had examined the details, he opened the box. He brought out a large tome bound in heavy leather, tooled with an elaborate design.
‘This I did myself, Mother. I rebound the book. It’s the inside that’s old.’
The pages inside were carefully, often elaborately, written by a number of different hands. Datnil Skar turned the pages rapidly, even now reluctant to reveal too much. But the women clearly saw dates, names, lists, and various entries and figures.
He looked up into their faces, smiling a grave smile. ‘In its way, this volume gives a history of Embruddock over the years. And each surviving corps has a similar volume, of that I am certain.’
‘The past is gone. We’re trying now to look outward to the future,’ said Vry. ‘We don’t want to be stuck in the past. We want to go out …’
Indecisively, she let the sentence die, regretting that in her excitement she had brought herself to their attention. Looking at the faces of the other two, she saw they were older and would never agree with her. Although their aims were in general agreement, a difference existed that could never be bridged.
‘The clue to the future lies in the past,’ Shay Tal said, comfortingly but dismissively, for she had made such remarks to Vry before. Turning to the old man, she said, ‘Master Datnil, we greatly appreciate your brave gesture in letting us look at the secret book. Perhaps some day we may examine it more thoroughly. Would you tell us how many masters there have been in your corps since records commenced?’
He closed the book and began packing it in its box. Saliva trickled from his old mouth, and his hands shook badly.
‘The rats know the secrets of Oldorando … I’m in danger, bringing this book here. Just an old fool … Listen, my dears, there was a great king who ruled over all Campannlat in the old days, called King Denniss. He foresaw that the world – this world which the ancipitals call Hrrm-Bhhrd Ydohk – would lose its warmth, as a bucket slops water when you carry it down a lane. So he set about founding our corps, with iron rules to be enforced. All the makers corps were to preserve wisdom through dark times, until warmth returned.’
He spoke chantingly, as from memory.
‘Our corps has survived since the good king’s time, though in some periods it had no wherewithal to tan leather. According to the record here, its numbers once sank to a master and an apprentice, who lived below ground a distance away … Dreadful times. But we survived.’
As he was wiping his mouth, Shay Tal asked what period of time they were discussing.
Datnil Skar gazed at the darkening rectangle of window as if contemplating flight from the question.
‘I don’t understand all the notations in our book. You know our confusions with the calendar. As we can understand from our own day, new calendars represent considerable dislocations … Embruddock – forgive me, I fear telling you too much – it didn’t always belong to … our sort of people.’
He shook his head, darting his gaze nervously round the room. The women waited, motionless as phagors in the old dull room. He spoke again.
‘Many people have died. There was a great plague, the Fat Death. Invasions … the Seven Blindnesses … tales of woe. We hope our present Lord—’ again a glance round the room – ‘will prove as wise as King Denniss. The good king founded our corps in a year called 249 Before Nadir. We do not know who Nadir was. What we do know is that I – allowing for a break in the record – am the sixty-eighth master of the tanners and tawyers corps. The sixty-eighth …’ He peered shortsightedly at Shay Tal.
‘Sixty-eight …’ Trying to hide her dismayed astonishment, she gathered her furs about her with a characteristic gesture. ‘That’s many generations, stretching back to antiquity.’
‘Yes, yes, stretching right back.’ Master Datnil nodded complacently, as if personally acquainted with vast stretches of time. ‘It’s nearly seven centuries since our corps was founded. Seven centuries, and still it freezes of nights.’
*
Embruddock in its surrounding wilderness was a beached ship. It still gave the crew shelter, though it would never sail again.
So greatly had time dismantled a once proud city that its inhabitants did not realise that what they regarded as a town was nothing more than the remains of a palace, which had stood in the middle of a civilisation obliterated by climate, madness, and the ages.
As the weather improved, the hunters were forced to go in increasingly long expeditions in search of game. The slaves planted fields and dreamed of impossible liberty. The women stayed at home and grew neurotic.
While Shay Tal fasted and became more solitary, Vry became full of a repressed energy and developed her friendship with Oyre. With Oyre, she talked over all that Master Datnil had said, and found a sympathetic listener. They agreed that there were puzzling riddles in history, yet Oyre was lightly sceptical.
‘Datnil Skar is old and a bit gaga – Father always says so,’ she said, and limped found the room in parody of the Master’s gait, exclaiming in a piping voice, ‘“Our corps is so exclusive we didn’t even let King Denniss join …”’
When Vry laughed, Oyre said, more seriously, ‘Master Datnil could be executed for showing his corps Master Book ab
out – that’s proof he’s gaga.’
‘And even then he wouldn’t let us look at it properly.’ Vry was silent, and then burst out, ‘If only we could put all the facts together. Shay Tal just collects them, writes them down. There must be a way of making a – a structure from them. So much has been lost – Master Datnil is right there. The cold was so bitter, once on a time, that almost everything inflammable was burnt – wood, paper, all records. You realise we don’t even know what year it is? – Though the stars might tell us. Loil Bry’s calendar is stupid, calendars should be based on years, not people. People are so fallible … and so am I. Oh, I’ll go mad, I swear!’
Oyre burst out laughing and hugged Vry.
‘You’re the sanest person I know, you idiot.’ They fell to discussing the stars again, sitting on the bare floor close together. Oyre had been with Laintal Ay to look at the fresco in the old temple. ‘The sentinels are clearly depicted, with Batalix above Freyr as usual, but almost touching, above Wutra’s head.’
‘Every year, the two suns get closer,’ Vry said, decisively. ‘Last month, they virtually touched as Batalix overtook Freyr, and no one paid any notice. Next year, they will collide. What then? … Or maybe one passes behind the other.’
‘Perhaps that’s what Master Datnil meant by a Blindness? It would suddenly be dimday, wouldn’t it, if one sentinel disappeared? Perhaps there will be Seven Blindnesses, as once before.’ She looked frightened, and moved nearer her friend. ‘It will be the end of the world. Wutra will appear, looking furious, of course.’
Vry laughed and jumped to her feet. ‘The world didn’t end last time and won’t do so this time. No, perhaps it will mark a new beginning.’ Her face became radiant. ‘That’s why the seasons are growing warmer. Once Shay Tal has done her ghastly pauk, we will tackle the question anew. I shall work at my mathematics. Let the Blindnesses come – I embrace them!’
They danced round the room, laughing wildly.
‘How I long for some great experience!’ Vry cried.
Shay Tal, meanwhile, showed more clearly than before the little bird bones below her flesh, and her dark skins hung more loosely about her body. Food was brought her by the women, but she would not eat.
‘Fasting suits my ravenous soul,’ she said, pacing about her chilly room, when Vry and Oyre remonstrated with her, and Amin Lim stood meekly by. ‘Tomorrow I will go into pauk. You three and Rol Sakil can be with me. I will dredge up ancient knowledge from the well of the past. Through the fessups I will reach to that generation which built our towers and corridors. I will descend centuries if necessary, and confront King Denniss himself.’
‘How wonderful!’ Amin Lim exclaimed.
Birds came to perch on her crumbling window sill and be fed the bread Shay Tal would not touch.
‘Don’t sink into the past, ma’am,’ Vry counselled her. ‘That’s the way of old men. Look ahead, look outward. There’s no profit in interrogating the dead.’
So unused to argument had Shay Tal grown that she had difficulty in refraining from scolding her chief disciple. She looked and saw, almost with startlement, that the diffident young thing was now a woman. Her face was pallid, with shadows under her eyes, and Oyre’s the same.
‘Why are you two so pale? Are you ill?’
Vry shook her head.
‘Tonight there’s an hour of darkness before dimday. I’ll show you then what Oyre and I are doing. While the rest of the world was sleeping, we have been working.’
The evening was clear at Freyr-set. Warmth departed from the world as the younger women escorted Shay Tal up to the roof of the ruinous tower. A lens of ghost light stretched upwards from the horizon where Freyr had set, reaching halfway to zenith. There was little cloud to conceal the heavens; as their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the stars overhead flashed out in brilliance. In some quarters of the sky, the stars were relatively sparse, in others they hung in clusters. Overhead, trailing from one horizon to the other, was a broad, irregular band of light, where the stars were as thick as mist, and there occasional brilliances burned.
‘It’s the most magnificent sight in the world,’ Oyre said. ‘Don’t you think so, ma’am?’
Shay Tal said, ‘In the world below hang fessups like stars. They are the souls of the dead. Here you see the souls of the unborn. As above, so below.’
‘I think we have to look to an entirely different principle to explain the sky,’ Vry said firmly. ‘All motions here are regular. The stars advance about that bright star there, which we call the polar star.’ She pointed to a star high above their heads. ‘In the twenty-five hours of the day, the stars rotate once, rising in the east and setting in the west like the two sentinels. Doesn’t that prove they are similar to the two sentinels, only much farther from us?’
The young women showed Shay Tal the star map they were making, with the relative positions of stars marked on a vellum sheet. She evinced little interest, and said, ‘The stars cannot affect us as the gossies do. How does this hobby of yours advance knowledge? You’d do better to sleep at night.’
Vry sighed. ‘The sky is alive. It’s not a tomb, like the world below. Oyre and I have stood here and seen comets flaring, landing on the earth. And there are four bright stars that move differently from all the others, the wanderers, of which the old songs sing. Those wanderers sometimes double back in their passage across the sky. And one comes over very fast. We’ll see it presently. We think it’s close to us, and we call it Kaidaw, because of its speed.’
Shay Tal rubbed her hands together, looking apprehensively about.
‘Well, it’s cold up here.’
‘It’s colder still down below, where the gossies lie,’ Oyre retorted.
‘You keep a watch on your tongue, young woman. You’re no friend of the academy if you distract Vry from her proper work.’
Her face became cold and hawklike; she turned away quickly, as if to shield Oyre and Vry from its sight, and climbed back downstairs without further words.
‘Oh, I shall pay for this,’ Vry said. ‘I shall have to be extra humble to make up for this.’
‘You’re too humble, Vry, and she’s too haughty. Scumb her academy. She’s scared of the sky, like most people. That’s her trouble, sorceress or no sorceress. She puts up with stupid people like Amin Lim because they pander to her haughtiness.’
She clutched Vry with a sort of angry passion and began to list the stupidities of everyone she knew.
‘What upsets me is that we did not get the chance to make her look through our telescope,’ Vry said.
It was the telescope that had made the greatest difference to Vry’s astronomical interest. When Aoz Roon had become lord, and had gone to live in the big tower, Oyre had been free to grub through all kinds of decaying possessions stored there in trunks. The telescope had come to light tucked among moth-riddled clothes which fell to pieces at the touch. It was simply made – perhaps by the long-defunct glass-makers corps – being no more than a leather tube which held two lenses in place; but when turned upon the wandering stars, the telescope had the power to change Vry’s perceptions. For the wanderers showed distinct discs. In that, they resembled the sentinels, though they did not emit light.
From this discovery, Vry and Oyre had concluded that the wanderers were near to the earth, and the stars far away – some very far. From trappers who worked by starlight they had the names of the wanderers: Ipocrene, Aganip, and Copaise. And there was the fast one they had named themselves, Kaidaw. Now they sought to prove that these were worlds like their own, possibly even with people in them.
Gazing at her friend, Vry saw only the general outlines of that beautiful face and powerful head, and recognised how much Oyre resembled Aoz Roon. Both Oyre and her father seemed so full of spirit – and Oyre had been born outside agreements. Vry wondered if by chance – by any remote chance – Oyre had been with a man, in the dark of a brassimip or elsewhere. Then she shut the naughty thought away and turned her gaze to the sky.
Earth Observation Station Avernus – Vry’s Kaidaw – hung high over Helliconia, while the continent of Campannlat turned beneath it. The station’s crew devoted most of their attention to the world below; but the other three planets of the binary system were also under constant surveillance by automatic instrumentation.
On all four planets, temperatures were rising. Improvement overall was steady; only on the ground did anomalies register on tender flesh.
Helliconia’s drama of generations in travail was set upon a stage sparsely structured by a few overriding circumstances. The planet’s year about Batalix – Star B to the scholars of the Avernus – took 480 days (the ‘small’ year). But Helliconia also had a Great Year, of which the people of Embruddock knew nothing in their present state. The Great Year was the time Star B, and its planets with it, took to make an orbit round Freyr, the Star A of the scholars.
That Great Year took 1825 Helliconian ‘small’ years. Since one Helliconian small year was the equivalent of 1.42 terrestrial years, this meant a Great Year of 2592 terrestrial years – a period during which many generations flourished and departed from the scene.
The Great Year represented an enormous elliptical journey. Helliconia was slightly larger than Earth, with a mass 1.28 times Earth’s; in many respects, it was Earth’s sister planet. Yet on that elliptical journey across thousands of years, it became almost two planets – a frozen one at apastron, when farthest from Freyr, an overheated one at periastron, when nearest Freyr.
Every small year, Helliconia drew nearer to Freyr. Spring was about to signify its arrival in spectacular fashion.
Midway between the high stars in their courses and the fessups sinking slowly towards the original boulder, two women squatted one on either side of a bracken bed. The light in the shuttered room was dim enough to render them anonymous, giving them the aspect of two mourning figures set on either side of the prostrate figure on the couch. It could be determined only that one was plump and no longer youthful, and the other gripped by the desiccating processes of age.