by Brian Aldiss
The Madis themselves were infested with parasites. They feared water, and the yearly application of goat dripping to their lean carcasses increased rather than hampered infestations, but their insects played no accountable role in history.
Proud Hrr-Brahl Yprt, his long skull adorned with face crown, looked up at his mascot soaring high above, before glaring ahead again, alert for possible danger. He saw the three fists of the world in the harneys of his head, and the place at which they would eventually arrive, where lived the Sons of Freyr who had killed his grandfather, Great Kzahhn Hrr-Tryhk Hrast, who had dedicated his life to despatching the enemy in uncounted numbers. The Great Kzahhn had been killed by the Sons in Embruddock, and so had lost his chance of sinking into tether; thus was he destroyed for ever. The young kzahhn admitted to himself that his nations had been less active in killing Sons than they should have been, indulgently seeking instead the majestic ice storms of High Nktryhk, for which their yellow blood was brewed.
Now amends were being made. Before Freyr grew too strong, the Sons of Freyr in Embruddock would be eliminated. Then he would himself fade into the eternal peace of tether with no stain on his conscience.
As soon as she was strong enough, Shay Tal leaned on Vry’s shoulder and took herself down the lane to the old temple.
The doors of the temple had been removed and a fence substituted. In the dim interior, pigs squealed and rooted. Aoz Roon had been true to his word.
The women picked their way among the animals and stood in the middle of the muddied space, while Shay Tal stared up at the great ikon of Wutra, with his white hair, animal face, and long horns.
‘Then it’s true,’ she said in a low voice. ‘The fessups spoke true, Vry. Wutra is a phagor. Humanity has been worshipping a phagor. Our darkness is much greater than we guessed.’
But Vry was looking up hopefully at the painted stars.
IX
In and Out of a Hoxney Skin
The enchanted wildernesses began to chart their riverbanks with succulent-stemmed trees. Mists and fogs were syphoned from reviving bournes.
The great continent of Campannlat was some fourteen thousand miles long by five thousand miles wide. It occupied most of the tropical zone in one entire hemisphere of the planet of Helliconia. It contained staggering extremes of temperature, of height and depth, of calm and storm. And now it was reawakening to life.
A process of ages was bringing the continent, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down into the turbid seas that fringed its coastline. A similar trend, as remorseless, as far-reaching, was increasing its energy levels. Climatic change triggered an acceleration in metabolism, and the ferment of the two suns brought forth eructations from the veins of the world: tremors, volcanic eruptions, subsidences, fumaroles, immense suppurations of lava. The bed of the giant creaked.
These hypogean stresses had their parallels on the planetary surface, where carpets of colour sprang from the old icefields, green spears thrusting up before the last dregs of snow rotted into the soil, so urgently did Freyr call them forth. But the seeds had packaged themselves against precisely that advantageous moment. The flower responded to the star.
After the flower, again the seed. And those seeds provided the energy requirements for new animals that streamed across the new veldts. The animals too were packaged to the moment. Where few species had been, proliferation was. Crystalline states of cataplexy were exercised away under cantering hoofs. Moulting, they left haystacks of discarded winter hair behind them, which was seized upon immediately for nesting material by birds, while their dung provided foodstuffs for insects.
The long fogs were alive with darting birds.
Multitudinous winged life flashed like jewels across what had been sterile icefields only a moment before. In a torment of life, the mammals stretched their legs in full gallop towards summer.
All the manifold terrestrial changes following the one inexorable astronomical change were so complex that no man or woman could comprehend them. But the human spirit responded to them. Eyes opened and saw afresh. All across Campannlat, the human embrace had new passion in its sap.
People were healthier, yet disease spread. Things were better, yet things were worse. More people died, yet more people lived. There was more to eat, yet more people went hungry. For all these contradictions, the prompting was ever outward. Freyr called, and even the deaf responded.
The eclipse that Vry and Oyre had anticipated occurred. The fact that they alone in Embruddock had expected it was a source of satisfaction, although otherwise the effects of the eclipse were alarming. They perceived how terrifying the event was to the uninitiated. Even Shay Tal dropped on her bed and hid her eyes. Bold hunters stayed indoors. Old men had heart attacks.
Yet the eclipse was not total.
The slow erosion of Freyr’s disc began early in the afternoon. Perhaps it was the sloth of the whole thing which was so disturbing, and its duration. Hour by hour, the erosion of Freyr increased. When the suns set, they were still locked together. There was no guarantee that they would appear again, or appear again whole. Most of the population ran out into the open to watch this unprecedented sunset. In ashen silence, the maimed sentinels slid from view.
‘It’s the death of the world!’ cried a trader. ‘Tomorrow the ice will be back!’
As darkness descended, rioting broke out. People ran madly with torches. A new wooden building was set on fire.
Only the immediate intervention of Aoz Roon, Eline Tal, and some of their strong-armed friends saved a more general madness. A man died in the fire and the building was lost, but the rest of the night remained quiet. Next morning, Batalix rose as usual, then Freyr, entire. All was well – except that the geese of Embruddock stopped laying for a week.
‘What happens next year?’ Oyre and Vry asked each other. Independently of Shay Tal, they began serious work on the problem.
On the Earth Observation Station, the eclipses were merely a part of a pattern predicated by the two intersecting ecliptics of Star A and Star B, which were inclined to each other at an angle of ten degrees. The ecliptics intersected 644 and 1428 terrestrial years after apastron or, in Helliconian terms, 453 and 1005 years after apastron. On either side of the intersections were ranged annual eclipses; in the case of Year 453, an imposing array of twenty eclipses.
The partial eclipse of 632, heralding the series of twenty, was viewed by the scholars on the Observation Station with correct scientific detachment. The ragged fellows barging through the lanes of Embruddock were treated to compassionate smiles by the gods who rode high overhead.
After the mists, after the eclipse, floods. What was cause, what effect? Nobody wading through the residual mud could tell. The land to the east of Oldorando, as far as Fish Lake and beyond, lost its herds of deer, and food became scarce. The swollen Voral acted as a barrier to the west, where abundant animal life was frequently sighted.
Aoz Roon showed his gift for leadership. He made his peace with Laintal Ay and Dathka and, with their aid, drove the citizens to build a bridge across the river.
Such a project had never been attempted in living memory. Timber was scarce, and a rajabaral had to be cut into suitable lengths. The metal-makers corps produced two long saws with which an appropriate tree was sawn up. A temporary workshop was established between the women’s house and the river. The two boats stolen from Borlienian marauders were carefully broken up and reassembled to form parts of the superstructure. The rajabaral was turned into a thicket of chocks, wedges, planks, bars, struts, and posts. For weeks, the whole place was a timberyard; curls of shavings floated away downstream among the geese; Oldorando was full of sawdust and the fingers of its labourers of splinters. Thick piles were hauled and driven with difficulty into the bed of the river. Slaves stood up to their necks in the flood, tied to one another for safety; amazingly, no lives were lost.
Slowly, the bridge grew, and Aoz Roon stood there, calling them on. The first row of piers was washed away in a storm.
Work began again. Wood was driven against wood. The thuggish heads of sledgehammers took their arcs from the air to land with a thwack on great wooden wedges, the tops of which turned to fur under repeated blows. A narrow platform crept out across the waters and proved secure. Dominating the operation stood the bear-wrapped figure of Aoz Roon, swinging his arms, wielding a mallet or a whip, encouraging or cursing, ever active. They remembered him long afterwards over their rathel, saying, with admiration, ‘What a devil he was!’
The work prospered. The workers cheered. A bridge four planks wide with a handrail along one side spanned the dark Voral. Many of the women refused to cross it, disliking the glimpse of fast water through the gaps between the planks, and the everlasting splap-flub of current again the piles. But access to the western plains had been won. Game was plentiful there, and starvation was averted. Aoz Roon had reason to be pleased.
With the arrival of summer, Freyr and Batalix parted company, rising and setting at different times. Day was rarely so bright, night rarely entire. In the increased hours of daylight, everything grew.
For a while, the academy also grew. During the heroic period of the bridge building, everyone worked together. The shortage of meat meant for the first time an increased awareness of the importance of grain. The handful of seeds that Laintal Ay had pressed on Shay Tal became a clutch of fields, where barley, oats, and rye grew in profusion and were guarded from marauders as being among the precious possessions of the Den tribe.
Now that several women could reckon and write, the grain that was harvested was weighed and stored and fairly rationed; any carcasses brought in were tallied; fish yields were noted. Every pig and goose in the town was entered on a balance sheet. Agriculture and accountancy brought their own rewards. Everyone was busy.
Vry and Oyre had charge of the cereal fields, and of the slaves working there. From the nearer acres, they could see the big tower in the distance, over the waving ears of grain, with a sentry standing there on watch. They still studied the constellations; their star chart was as complete as they could make it. Stars were in their conversation often as they prowled among the grasses.
‘The stars are always on the move, like fish in a clear lake,’ Vry said. ‘All the fish turn together at the same moment. But the stars aren’t fish. I wonder what they are, and what they swim in.’
Oyre held a grass stalk up to the nose that Laintal Ay admired so much and closed first one eye and then the other.
‘The stalk seems to move back and forth across my vision, yet I know it’s still all the while. Perhaps the stars are still and it’s we who move …’
Vry received this and was silent. Then she said in a small voice, ‘Oyre, my beauty, perhaps it’s so. Perhaps it’s the earth that moves all the while. But then …’
‘What about the sentinels?’
‘Why, they don’t move either … That’s right we move, we go round and round like an eddy in the river. And they’re far away, like the stars …’
‘… But coming nearer, Vry, because it’s getting warmer …’
They gazed at each other, mouths open, eyebrows slightly raised, breathing lightly. Beauty and intelligence flowed in them.
The hunters, released by the bridge into the west, gave little thought to the revolving sky. The plains were open for their despoliation. Green rose up everywhere, crushed under their running feet, their sprawling bodies. Flowers burst. Insects that flew no more than a man’s height above the ground blundered among pale petals. Game in plenty was near at hand, to be brought down and dragged back to the town, spotting the new bridge with its dull blood.
With the growth of Aoz Roon’s reputation, Shay Tal’s went into eclipse. The diversion of women into labour connected either with the bridge or with agriculture weakened her hold on the intellectual life of the community. It hardly appeared to bother Shay Tal; since her return from the world below, she increasingly shunned companionship. She avoided Aoz Roon, and her gaunt figure was seen less often about the lanes. Only her friendship with old Master Datnil prospered.
Although Master Datnil had never again allowed her as much as a glimpse of the secret book of his corps, his mind wandered frequently to the past. She was content to listen to him unwinding the skein of his reminiscence, peopled with bygone names; it was not unlike, she thought, a visit to the fessups. What seemed dark to her held luminance for him.
‘To the best of my belief, Embruddock was once more complicated than it is now. Then it suffered a catastrophe, as you know … There was a mason-makers corps but it was destroyed some centuries ago. The master of the corps was particularly well thought of.’
Shay Tal had observed before his endearing habit of speaking as if he were present during the events he described. She guessed he was recalling something he had read in his secret book.
‘How was so much building achieved in stone?’ she asked him. ‘We know the labour of working in wood.’
They were sitting in the master’s dim room. Shay Tal squatted before him on the floor. Because of his age, Master Datnil sat on a stone set against the wall, so that he could rise easily. Both his old woman and Raynil Layan, his chief boy – a mature man with a forked beard and unctuous manners – came and went in the room; the master kept his talk guarded in consequence.
He answered Shay Tal’s question by saying, ‘Let us go down and walk in the sun for a few paces, Mother Shay. The warmth is good for my bones, I find.’
Outside, he put his arm through hers and they walked down the lane where curly-haired pigs foraged. Nobody was about, for the hunters were away in the west veldt and many of the women were in the fields, keeping company with the slaves. Mangy dogs slept in the light of Freyr.
‘The hunters are now away so much,’ Master Datnil said, ‘that the women misbehave in their absence. Our male Borlienian slaves harvest the women as well as the crops. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’
‘People copulate like animals. The cold for intellect, the warmth for sensuality.’ She looked above their heads, where little wanton birds swooped into holes in the stonework of the towers, bearing insects for their young.
He patted her arm and looked into her pinched face. ‘Don’t you fret. Your dream of going to Sibornal is your kind of satisfaction. We all must have something.’
‘Something? What?’ She frowned at him.
‘Something to hang on to. A vision, a hope, a dream. We don’t live only by bread, even the basest of us. There’s always some kind of inner life – that’s what survives when we become gossies.’
‘Oh, the inner life … It can be starved to death, can’t it?’
He stopped by the herb tower and she paused with him. They regarded the blocks of stone forming the tower. Despite the ages, the tower stood well. The blocks fitting neatly one into the other raised unanswered questions. How was stone quarried and cut? How was it built up so that it formed a tower which could stand for nine centuries?
Bees droned round their feet. A flight of large birds moved across the sky and disappeared behind one of the towers. She felt the day going by in her ears, and longed to be seized up in something great and all-embracing.
‘Perhaps we could make a small tower out of mud. Mud dries good and solid. A small mud tower first. Stone later. Aoz Roon should build mud walls round Oldorando. At present the village is virtually unguarded. Everyone’s away. Who will blow the warning horn? We are open to raiders, human and inhuman.’
‘I read once that a learned man of my corps made a model of this world in the form of a globe which could be rotated to show the lands on it – where was once Embruddock, where Sibornal, and so on. It was stored in the pyramid with much else.’
‘King Denniss feared more than the cold. He feared invaders. Master Datnil, I have kept silent for a while with respect to many of my secret thoughts. But they torment me and I must speak … I have learnt from my fessups that Embruddock …’ She paused, aware of the burden of what she was going to say, before completing her
sentence. ‘… Embruddock was once ruled by phagors.’
After a moment, the old man said, in a light conversational tone, ‘That’s enough sunlight. We can go in again.’
On the way up to his room, he stopped on the third floor of the tower. This was the assembly room of his corps, smelling strongly of leather. He stood listening. All was silent.
‘I wanted to make sure that my chief boy was out. Come in here.’
Off the landing was a small room. Master Datnil pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, looking round once more, anxiously. Catching Shay Tal’s eye, he said, ‘I don’t want anyone butting in. What I’m about to do in sharing the secrets of our corps carries the death penalty, as you understand. Ancient though I may be, I want the last few years of my life out.’
She looked round as she stepped into the small cubbyhole off the assembly room with him. For all their caution, neither of them saw Raynil Layan – as chief boy of the corps, due to inherit Master Datnil’s mantle when the old man retired. He stood in the shadows, behind a post supporting the wooden stair. Raynil Layan was a cautious, precise man, whose manner was always circumspect; he stood at this moment absolutely rigid, without breathing, showing no more movement than the post that partly protected him from view.
When the master and Shay Tal had entered the cubbyhole and closed the door behind them, Raynil Layan moved with some alacrity, his step light for so large a man. He applied his eye to a crack between two boards which he had engineered himself some while ago, the better to observe the movements of the man he would supplant.