by Brian Aldiss
He leaped into the coach, cracked his whip over the hoxneys, and was away at a great pace. The tribesmen fell back in alarm, cursing him in the name of the sacred rivers. A cloud of dust swallowed the speeding vehicle.
The Madura Desert: Matrassyl began to seem a long way off. But the stars came nearer overhead and, on clear nights, the sickle of Yarap-Rombry’s Comet blazed like a signpost on their way.
SartoriIrvrash stood shivering in the small hours when the fire had died and the other travellers were sleeping. He could not entirely lose his fever. He thought of BillishOwpin. His story of having come from another world seemed more likely here than it had done at the palace.
He walked by the tethered kaidaws and encountered the Pointer of the Way, standing silently smoking. The two men talked in low voices. The kaidaws uttered sniggering grunts.
‘The animals are quiet enough,’ SartoriIrvrash said. ‘History pictures them as almost unmanageable brutes. To be ridden only by phagors. I’ve never seen a phagor riding one, any more than I have ever seen a cowbird with a phagor. Perhaps history was wrong on that point, too. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to disentangle history from legend.’
‘Perhaps they aren’t so different,’ the Pointer said. ‘I can’t read a single letter, so I have no strong opinion in the matter. But we smoke these kaidaws when they’re mere calves – puff a veronikane up their nostrils. It seems to make them calm.
‘I’ll tell you a tale, since you can sleep no more than I.’ He sighed heavily in preparation for the burden of narrative. ‘Many years ago now, I went eastwards with my master, through the provinces controlled by Unndreid, up into the wilderness of the Nktryhk. It’s a different world up there, very harsh world, with little air to breathe, yet people remain fit.’
‘Less infection at high altitudes,’ commented SartoriIrvrash.
‘That’s not what the people of the Nktryhk say. They say that Death is a lazy fellow who doesn’t readily bother to climb mountains. I’ll tell you one thing. Fish is a popular food. Often the fish may be caught in a river a hundred or more miles away. Yet it doesn’t decay. You catch a fish here at dawn, it’s bad by Freyr-set. Up in the Nktryhk, it remains good to eat for a small year.’
He leaned over the back of one of the patient kaidaws and smiled. ‘It was fine up there when you got used to it. Cold by night, of course. No rain, never. And there, in the high valleys, is land ruled only by fuggies. They’re not as submissive as here. I tell you, it’s a different world. The fuggies ride kaidaws, ride them like the wind – aye, and have cowbirds to sail at their shoulders. My understanding is, that they come down and invade the lowlands when snow falls here, whenever that may be. When Freyr fails.’
Nodding his head with interest and some disbelief, SartoriIrvrash said, ‘But there can be few phagors at those altitudes, surely? What can they eat, apart from your ever-fresh fish? There’s no food.’
‘That isn’t so. They grow crops of barley in the valleys – right up to the snowbanks. All they need is irrigation. Every drop of water and urine is precious. There’s a virtue in that thin air – they have crops of barley that ripen in three weeks.’
‘Half a tenner from sowing? Incredible.’
‘Nevertheless it is so,’ said the Pointer. ‘And the phagors share the grain and never quarrel or use money. And the white cowbirds drive out all other winged things bar the eagles. I saw it with my own eyes, when I stood no higher than this quadruped’s shoulders. I mean to go back one day – no king or laws there.’
‘I’ll make a note of all that, if you don’t mind,’ said SartoriIrvrash. As he wrote, he thought of JandolAnganol among his abandoned buildings.
After the Madura, the long desolation of Hazziz. Twice they had to pass through strips of vegetation, stretching from one bleak horizon to another like god’s hedges. Trees, shrubs, a riot of flowers, drew a line across the face of the grasslands.
‘This is / will be the uct,’ said Dienu Pasharatid, employing a translation of a Sibish continuous present tense. ‘It stretches across the continent from east to west, following the lines of Madi migration.’
In the uct, they saw Others. Madis were not the only beings to use the verdant road. The Pointer of the Way shot an Other from a tree. It fell to the ground almost at their feet, its eyebrows still twitching with shock. They roasted it later over the campfire.
One day rain fell, closing across the grasslands like a snake’s jaw. Freyr climbed higher into the sky than it managed in Matrassyl. SartoriIrvrash still wished to travel only by dimday, according to upper-class Borlienese custom, but the other travellers would have none of that.
The nights spent sleeping in the open were over. The ex-chancellor surprised himself by regretting their passing. Sibornalese settlements were becoming more frequent, and in them the party stayed overnight. Each settlement was built to the same plan. Smallholdings lay inside a circle, with guard houses posted every so many paces along the perimeter. Between the smallholdings, roads like spokes of a wheel led in to one or more rings of dwellings which formed the hub. Generally, barns, stores, and offices encircled a church dedicated to the Formidable Peace, standing at the geometrical centre of the wheel formation.
Grey-clad priests-militant ruled these settlements, supervising the arrival and departure of the travelling party, which was always given free food and accommodation. These men, who sang the praises of God the Azoiaxic, wore the wheel symbol on their garb and carried wheel locks. They did not forget that they were in territory traditionally claimed by Pannoval.
When it was almost too late, SartoriIrvrash noticed that the Pointer of the Way and his men were not allowed inside the Sibornalese settlement. Touching his braffista, their guide was taking his pay from one of the ambassadorial staff and making off, heading southwards.
‘I must bid him farewell,’ said SartoriIrvrash. Dienu Pasharatid thrust a hand before him. ‘That is not necessary. He has been paid and he will leave. Our way ahead is clear.’
‘But I liked the man.’
‘But he is of no further use to us. The way is safe now, moving from settlement to settlement. They believe superstitious things, these barbarians. The Pointer told me he could lead us this far only because his tribe’s land-octave came this way.’
Pulling at his whiskers uncomfortably, SartoriIrvrash said, ‘Madame Dienu, sometimes old habits enshrine truth. The preference for one’s own land-octave is not entirely dead. Men and women prosper best when they live along whatever land-octave they were born on. Practical sense lies behind such beliefs. Such octaves generally follow geological strata and mineral deposits, which influence health.’
She flicked a smile on and off her boney face. ‘Naturally, we expect primitive peoples to hold primitive beliefs. It is that which anchors them to primitivism. Things are continuously better where we are going.’ This last sentence was evidently a direct translation into Olonets of one of many Sibish tenses.
Being of such high rank, Dienu Pasharatid addressed SartoriIrvrash in Pure Olonets. In Campannlat, Pure Olonets, as opposed to Local Olonets, was spoken only by high castes and religious leaders, mainly within the Holy Pannovalan Empire; it was becoming increasingly the prerogative of the Church. The main language of the northern continent was Sibish, a dense language with its own script. Olonets had made little headway against Sibish, except along some southern coasts where trade with the Campannlatian shore was common.
Sibish deployed multiple tenses and conditionals. It had no y sound. The substituted i was pronounced hard, while ch’s and sh’s were almost whistled. One result of this was to make a native of Askitosh sound sinister when speaking to a foreigner in the latter’s own language. Perhaps the entire history of the continuous northern wars rested on the mockery that Sib-speakers made of a word like ‘Matrassyl’. But behind the brief pursing of the lips involved lay the blind driving force of the climate of Helliconia, which discouraged unnecessary opening of the mouth for half the Great Year.
The trave
llers left their kaidaws at the southernmost settlement, where the Pointer went his way, and posted northwards from settlement to settlement on hoxneys.
After the twelfth settlement, they progressed up a slope which grew gradually steeper. It climbed for some miles. They were forced to dismount and walk beside their steeds. At the top of the rise stood a line of young rajabarals, high and thin, their bark of the translucence of celery. When the trees were gained, SartoriIrvrash laid a hand against the nearest tree. It was soft and warm, like the flank of his hoxney. He gazed up into the plumes high above him, stirring in the breeze.
‘Don’t look upward – look ahead!’ said one of his companions.
On the other side of the crest lay a valley, sombre in its blue shades. Beyond it was a darker blue: the sea.
His fever had gone and was forgotten. He smelt a new smell in the air.
When they reached the port, even the northerners showed excitement. The port had a defiantly Sibish name, Rungobandryaskosh. It conformed to the general layout of the settlements they had passed, except that it consisted only of a semicircle, with a great church perched centrally on the cliff, a beacon light on its tower. The other half of the circle, symbolically, lay across the Pannoval Sea in Sibornal.
Ships lay in nearby docks. Everything was clean and shipshape. Unlike most of the races of Campannlat, the Sibornalese were natural seafarers.
After a night in a hostel, they rose at Freyr-rise and embarked with other travellers on a waiting ship. SartoriIrvrash, who had never been on anything larger than a dinghy before, went to his small cabin and fell asleep. When he woke, they were preparing to sail.
He squinted out of his square porthole.
Batalix was low over the water, spreading a pathway of silver across it. Nearby ships were visible as blue silhouettes, without detail, their masts a leafless forest. Near at hand, a sturdy lad rowed himself across the harbour in a rowing boat. The light so obscured detail that boy and boat became one, a little black shape where body went forward as oars went back. Slowly, stroke by stroke, the boat was dragged through the dazzle. The oars plunging, the back working, and finally the dazzle yielding (and soon composing itself again), as the rower won his way to the pillars of a jetty.
SartoriIrvrash recalled a time when he as a lad had rowed his two small brothers across a lake. He saw their smiles, their hands trailing in the water. So much had been lost since then. Nothing was without price. He had given so much for his precious ‘Alphabet’.
There were sounds of bare feet on deck, shouted orders, the creak of tackle as sails were raised. Even from the cabin, a tremor was felt as the wind started to catch. Cries from the dock, a rope snaking fast over the side. They were on their way to the northern continent.
It was a seven-day voyage. As they sailed north-northwest, the Freyr-days grew longer. Every night, the brilliant sun sank somewhere ahead of their bows, and spent progressively less time below the horizon before rising somewhere to the north of northeast.
While Dienu Pasharatid and her friends lectured SartoriIrvrash on the bright prospects ahead, visibility became dimmer. Soon they were enveloped in what one sailor, in the ex-chancellor’s hearing, called ‘a regular Uskuti up-and-downer’. A thick brown murk descended like a combination of rain and sandstorm. It muffled the ship’s noises, covering everything above and below decks in greasy moisture.
SartoriIrvrash was the only person to be alarmed. The captain of the vessel showed him that there was no need to fear.
‘I have sufficient instruments to sail through an underground cavern unharmed,’ he said. ‘Though of course our modem exploring ships are even better equipped.’
He showed SartoriIrvrash into his cabin. On his desk lay a printed table of daily solar altitudes, to determine latitude, together with a floating compass, a cross-staff, and an instrument the captain called a nocturnal, by which could be measured the elevation of certain first magnitude stars, and which indicated the number of hours before and after midnight of both suns. The ship also had the means to sail by dead reckoning, with distance and direction measured systematically on a chart.
While SartoriIrvrash made notes of these matters, there was a great cry from the lookout, and the captain hurried on deck, cursing in a way the Azoiaxic One would hardly have commended.
Through the drizzle loomed brown clouds and, somewhere in the clouds, men were bellowing. The clouds became shrouds and sails. At the last possible minute, a ship as big as their own slid by, with hardly a foot of leeway between hulls. Lanterns were seen, faces – mainly savage and accompanied by shaking fists – and then all were gone, back into the hanging soup. The Sibornal-bound ship was alone again in its sepia isolation.
Passengers explained to the foreigner that they had just passed one of the Uskut ‘herring-coaches’, fishing with curtain nets off the coast. The herring-coach was a little factory, since it carried salters and coopers among its crew, who gutted and packed the catch at sea, storing it in barrels.
Thoroughly upset by the near collision, SartoriIrvrash was in no mood to listen to a eulogy on the Sibornalese herring trade. He retired to his damp bunk, still wrapped in his coat, and shivered. When they landed in Askitosh, he reminded himself, they would be on a latitude of 30° N, and only five degrees south of the Tropic of Carcampan.
On the morning of the seventh day of the voyage, the banks of fog rolled back, though visibility remained poor. The sea was dotted with herring-coaches.
After a while, a sluggish stain on the horizon resolved itself into the coastline of the northern continent. It was no more than a ruled line of sandstone dividing almost waveless sea from undulating land.
Moved by something like enthusiasm for the sight of her homeland, Madame Dienu Pasharatid delivered SartoriIrvrash a brief geography lesson. He saw how the water was dotted with small ships. Uskutoshk had been forced to became a maritime nation because of the advance of ice southwards from the Circumpolar Regions – these regions being mentioned with hushed tones. There was little land for cultivation between sea and ice. The seas had to be harvested and sea lanes opened to the two great rich grain prairies of the continent – which she indicated as being distant with a sweep of her arm.
How distant, he asked.
Pointing westward and yet more westward, she named the nations of Sibornal, pronouncing their titles with varied inflections, as if she knew them personally, as if they were personages standing on a narrow strip of land glaring southwards, with cold draughts from the Circumpolar Regions freezing their backs – and all with a strong inclination to march down into Campannlat, SartoriIrvrash muttered to himself.
Uskutoshk, Loraj, Shivenink, where the Great Wheel was situated, Bribhar, Carcampan.
The grainlands were in Bribhar and Carcampan.
Her roll call ended with a finger pointing to the east.
‘And so we have rounded the globe. Most of Sibornal, you see, is isolated in the extreme, caught between ocean and ice. Hence our independence. We have mountainous Kuj-Juvec coming after Carcampan – it is scarcely populated by humans – and then the troubled region of Upper Hazziz, leading into the Chalce Peninsula; then we are safe back in Uskutoshk, the most civilised nation. You arrive at a time of year when we have both Freyr and Batalix in the sky. But for over half the Great Year, Freyr is eternally below the horizon, and then the climate becomes severe. That’s the Weyr-Winter of legend … The ice moves south, and so do the Uskuts, as we call ourselves, if we can. But many die. Many die.’ She used a future-continuous tense.
Warm though it was, she shivered at the thought. ‘Some other people’s lifetimes,’ she murmured. ‘Fortunately, such cruel times are still far away, but they are hard to forget. It’s a race memory, I suppose … We all know that Weyr-Winter will come again.’
From the docks, they were escorted to a solid four-wheeled brake with a canopy. Into this vehicle they climbed after human slaves had piled in their baggage. Four yoked yelk then dragged them off at a good pace, along one
of the radial roads leading away from the quayside.
As they passed under the shadow of an immense church, SartoriIrvrash tried to sort out the impressions that thronged in on him. He was struck by the fact that much of the wagonette in which they rode was not of wood but metal: its axles, its sides, even the seats on which they sat, all were metal.
Metal objects were to be seen on every side. The people crowding in the streets – not jostling and shouting like a Matrassyl crowd – carried metal pails or ladders or assorted instruments to the ships; some men were encased in gleaming armoured jackets. Some of the grander buildings on the way flaunted iron doors, often curiously decorated, with names in raised relief upon them, as if the occupants intended to live on there perpetually, whatever happened in the Circumpolar Regions.
A haze in the sky warded off the heat of Freyr, which, to the visitor’s eye, stood unnaturally high in the sky at noon. The atmosphere of the city was smokey. Although Sibornal’s forests were thin in comparison with the riotous jungles of the tropics, the continent had extensive lignite and peat beds, as well as metal ores. The ores were smelted in small factories in various parts of the city. Each metal was located in a definite area. Its refiners, its workers, and its ancillary trades were grouped about it, and its slaves about them. Over the last generation, metals had become less expensive than wood.
‘It’s a beautiful city.’ One of the men leaned over to favour the visitor with this observation.
He felt small, sniffed a small sniff, and said nothing.
From the wagonette, he could see how Askitosh’s half-wheel plan worked. The great church by the harbour was the axle. After a semicircle of buildings came a semicircle of farms, with fields, then another semicircle of buildings, and so on, though various living pressures had in some places broken down what to Borlienese eyes was an unnatural symmetry.
They were delivered to a large plain building like a box, in which slitlike windows had been cut. Its double entrance doors were of metal; on them, in raised relief, were the words 1st. Convential, Sector Six. The convential proved to be a cross between a hotel, a monastery, a nunnery, a school, and a prison, or so it appeared to SartoriIrvrash, as he explored the cell-like room he was given, and read the rules.