Helliconia, page 104
Mating took place at full moon: a year later, parturition occurred at full moon. The runts slowly became adult. Everything was slow, as if heartbeats themselves took their time, and the leisurely pace at which a tree grew was a standard for all things. When the great white disc of moon sank into the mists of the horizon, all was much as it had been when it rose from those same mists. Being one with this sluggish peace, the phagors were governed by its tempo; time did not enter into their pale harneys.
Their pets died. When an Other died, its body was casually cast aside, or thrown outside the area of the camp for vultures to eat. The great black phagors did not know death: death was no more to them than time. As they grew older, their movements slowed. Though they remained within the shelter of their vaguely demarcated families, they became apart. Year by year, their abilities grew more circumscribed. Language was early lost. Eventually movement itself was lost.
Then the tribe showed a sense of caring. They cared not for individuals. They ministered to their infants, but otherwise only to those who succumbed to age. These superannuated phagors were stored safely away, revered, brought out on any ceremonial occasion, as for instance when an attack was intended on a nearby component.
Like embodiments of sluggish time, the elderly phagors passed without perceptible change beyond the shadowy division which distinguished life from other conditions. Time congealed in their eddre. They shrank, to become over many years nothing more than small keratinous images of their former selves. Even then, the flickerings of existence were not entirely spent. They were consulted. They still played a part in the life of the component. Only when they disintegrated could it be said that they were visited with finality: and many were so gently handled that they survived for centuries.
This crepuscular life-style continued long. Summer and winter spelt little change in the club-shaped peninsula, extending almost to the equator. Elsewhere, in the winters, the seas might freeze; in the peninsula, up in the mountains, down in the afforested valleys, a lethargic paradise was maintained unaltered over many, many moons, many moons and many eons.
The ancipital kind was not readily responsive to change. The unknown star – the unheralded and unprecedented star – was a brilliant point long before it entered the calculations of the components.
The first white-coated phagors which appeared were treated with indifference. More of them grew to maturity. They produced white offspring. Only then were they driven out. The outcasts lived along the doleful shores of the Kowass Sea, feeding on iguana. Their tame Others rode on their backs, occasionally throwing twigs of dried seaweed into the portable hearths.
In the gloaming, phagors and Others could be seen, strung out along the shore, flame and smoke at their shoulder, moving disconsolately towards the east. As year succeeded year, white phagors became more numerous, the exodus to the east more steady. They marked their way with stone pillars, perhaps in the hope that some day they could return home. That return was never to be.
Instead, the cancerous star in the skies grew brighter, eclipsing all other stars until, like T’Sehn-Hrr, it cast a shadow by night. Then the ancipital kind, after much consultation with the elders in tether, bestowed on the new star a name: Frehyr, meaning fear.
From one generation to another, there appeared no difference in the magnitude of the fear-star. But it grew. And from generation to generation the mutated white phagors spread along the coastlines of Hespagorat. To the west of the Pegovin Peninsula, they were halted by the dreary marshes of a land later to be known as Dimariam. To the east, they slowly covered the alpine lands of Throssa, to come, after two thousand miles, to the Cadmer land-bridge. All this was achieved with the spiritless determination characteristic of the ancipital kind.
Across the land-bridge, spreading over Radado, they entered lands where the climate more nearly resembled that of Pegovin. Some settled there; others, arriving later, foraged further. Always as they went they erected their stone pillars, to mark healthful air-octaves which led back to their ancestral home.
The time of catastrophe arrived. The ageing star, Batalix, with its freight of planets, was captured by the fear-star, young, furious, filling the space around it with radiation. The fear-star possessed a fainter companion. In the cosmic upheaval which followed, as new orbits were established, the fainter companion was lost. It sped away on a new course, taking with it one of Batalix’s planets and the moon of Helliconia, T’Sehn-Hrr. Batalix itself moved into a captive position about the fear-star. This was the Catastrophe, never to be forgotten in the harneys of the ancipital kind.
In the subsequent upheavals which afflicted the planet, the ancient land-bridge across the Cadmer Straits was demolished by savage winds and tides. The link between Hespagorat and Campannlat was severed.
During this time of change, the Others changed. The Others were more puny than their mentors, but more nimble and more flexible of mind. Their exodus from Pegovin had transformed their role vis-à-vis the phagors: they were no longer regarded merely as pets of an idle day, but were required to forage for food in order to keep the component fed.
The revolution happened by accident.
A party of Others was foraging in a bay along the Radado coast when the incoming tide cut them off. They were marooned temporarily on an island where a lagoon provided a glut of oil fish. The oil fish were one of the manifestations of a changing ecology; they spawned in the seas in their millions. The Others stayed and feasted.
Later, having lost their mentors, they struck out on their own, moving northwestwards into an almost deserted land they called Ponpt. Here were founded the Ten Tribes, or Olle Onets. Eventually, their greatly modified version of Ancipital, which became known as Olonets, spread throughout Campannlat. But that was not until many a century had passed its hand over the developing wildernesses.
The Others themselves developed. The Ten Tribes broke up and became many. They were quick to adapt to the new circumstances in which they found themselves. Some tribes never settled, and took to wandering the face of the new continent. Their great enemies were the phagors, whom they nevertheless regarded as godlike. Such delusions – such aspirations – were part and parcel of their lively response to the world in which they discovered themselves. They rejoiced, hunted, multiplied, and the new sun shone on them.
When the first Great Winter set in, when that first turbulent summer faded into cold, and the snows fell for months at a time, it must have seemed to the eotemporal minds of the phagors that normality was returning. This was the period during which the Ten Tribes were put to the test: genetically malleable, they were to have their future existences shaped by the degree of success with which they weathered the centuries of apastron, when Batalix crawled through the slowest sectors of its new orbit. Those tribes who adapted best emerged the next spring with new confidence. They had become humanity.
Male and female, they rejoiced in their new skills. They felt the world and the future to be theirs. Yet there were times – sitting about campfires at night with the star-shingle blazing overhead – when mysterious gaps opened in their lives and they seemed to look into a gulf there was no bridging. Back came folk memories of a period when larger creatures had looked after them and had administered a rough justice. They crept to sleep in silence, and words without sound formed on their lips.
The need to worship and be ruled – and to rebel against rule – never left them, even when Freyr again proclaimed its strength.
The new climate, with its higher energy levels, did not suit the white-coated phagors. Freyr, above them, was the symbol of all ills which befell. They took to carving an apotropaic symbol on their air-octave stones: one circle inside another, with rays like spokes connecting the inner with the outer. To the phagorian eye, this was first of all a picture of T’Sehn-Hrr moving away from Hrl-Ichor Yhar. It later came to be regarded as something different, as a picture of Freyr with its rays flattening Hrl-Ichor Yhar beneath it as it drew nearer.
While some of the Olonets-speakers were transformed, generation by generation, into the hated Sons of Freyr, the phagors slowly lost their culture. They remained stalwart and held horns high. For the new climate was not entirely on the side of the Sons.
Though Freyr never departed, there were long periods when it moved to such a distance that it hid its spiderous shape among the star-shingle. Then once again the ancipital kind were able to master the Sons of Freyr. At the next Time of Cold they would obliterate their ancient enemy entirely.
That time was not yet. But it would come.
END OF VOLUME TWO
Helliconia Winter
In the first place, since the elements of which we see the world composed – solid earth and moisture, the light breaths of air and torrid fire – all consist of bodies that are neither birthless nor deathless, we must believe the same of the Earth as a whole, and of its populations … And whatever earth contributes to feed the growth of others is restored to it. It is an observed fact that the Universal Mother is also the common grave. Earth, therefore, is whittled away with fresh increment.
Lucretius: De Rerum Natura
55 BC
Prelude
Luterin had recovered. He was free of the mysterious illness. He was allowed out again. The couch by the window, the immobility, the grey schoolmaster who came every day – they were done with. He was alive to fill his lungs with the brisk airs of outdoors.
The cold blew down from Mount Shivenink, sharp enough to peel the bark from the north side of trees.
The fresh wind brought out his defiance. It drew the blood to his cheeks, it made his limbs move with the beast which carried him across his father’s land. Letting out a yell, he spurred the hoxney into a gallop. He headed it away from the incarcerating mansion with its tolling bell, away along the avenue traversing the fields they still called the Vineyard. The movement, the air, the uproar of his own blood in his arteries, intoxicated him.
Around him lay his father’s territory, a dominion triumphing over latitude, a small world of moor, mountain, valley, plunging stream, cloud, snow, forest, waterfall – but he kept his thought from the waterfall. Endless game roved here, springing up plenteously even as his father hunted it down. Roving phagors. Birds whose migrations darkened the sky.
Soon he would be hunting again, following the example of his father. Life had been somehow stayed, was somehow renewed. He must rejoice and force away the blackness hovering on the edges of his mind.
He galloped past bare-chested slaves who exercised yelk about the Vineyard, clinging to their snaffles. The hoofs of the animals scattered mounds of earth sent up by moles.
Luterin Shokerandit spared a sympathetic thought for the moles. They could ignore the extravagances of the two suns. Moles could hunt and rut in any season. When they died, their bodies were devoured by other moles. For moles, life was an endless tunnel through which the males quested for food and mates. He had forgotten them, lying abed.
‘Moledom!’ he shouted, bouncing in the saddle, rising up in the stirrups. The spare flesh on his body made its own movements under his arang jacket.
He goaded the hoxney on. Exercise was what was needed to bring him back into fighting shape. The spare fat was falling away from him even on this, his first ride out for more than a small year. His twelfth birthday had been wasted flat on his back. For over four hundred days he had lain like that – for a considerable period unable to move or speak. He had been entombed in his bed, in his room, in his parents’ mansion, in the great grave House of the Keeper. Now that episode was finished.
Strength flowed back to his muscles, arriving from the animal beneath him, from the air, from the trunks of trees as they flashed by, from his own inner being. Some destructive force whose nature he did not comprehend had wiped him out of the world; now he was back and determined to make a mark upon that flashing stage.
One of the double entrance gates was opened for him by a slave before he reached it. He galloped through without pause or sideways glance.
The wind yelped in his unaccustomed ear like a hound. He lost the familiar note of the bell of the house behind him. The small bells on his harness jingled as the ground responded to his advance.
Both Batalix and Freyr were low in the southern sky. They flitted among the tree trunks like gongs, the big sun and the small. Luterin turned his back on them as he reached the village road. Year by year, Freyr was sinking lower in the skies of Sibornal. Its sinking called forth fury in the human spirit. The world was about to change.
The sweat that formed on his chest cooled instantly. He was whole again, determined to make up for lost time by rutting and hunting like the moles. The hoxney could carry him to the verge of the trackless caspiarn forests, those forests which fell away and away into the deepest recesses of the mountain ranges. One day soon, he planned to fade into the embrace of those forests, to fade and be lost, relishing his own dangerousness like an animal among animals. But first he would be lost in the embrace of Insil Esikananzi.
Luterin gave a laugh. ‘Yes, you have a wild side, boy,’ his father had once said, staring down at Luterin after some misdemeanour or other – staring down with that friendless look of his, while placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder as if estimating the amount of wildness per bone.
And Luterin had gazed downwards, unable to meet that stare. How could his father love him as he loved his father when he was so mute in the great man’s presence?
The distant grey roofs of the monasteries showed through the naked trees. Close lay the gates of the Esikananzi estate. He let the brown hoxney slow to a trot, sensing its lack of stamina. The species was preparing for hibernation. Soon all hoxneys would be useless for riding. This was the season for training up the recalcitrant but more powerful yelk. When a slave opened the Esikananzi gate, the hoxney turned in at walking pace. The distinctive Esikananzi bell sounded ahead, chiming randomly as the wind took its vane.
He prayed to God the Azoiaxic that his father knew nothing of his activities with Ondod females, that wickedness he had fallen into shortly before paralysis had overcome him. The Ondods gave what Insil so far refused him.
He must resist those inhuman females now. He was a man. There were sleazy shacks by the edge of the forest where he and his school friends – including Umat Esikananzi – went to meet those shameless eight-fingered bitches. Bitches, witches, who came out of the woods, out of the very roots of the woods … And it was said that they consorted with male phagors too. Well, that would not happen again. It was in the past, like his brother’s death. And like his brother’s death, best forgotten.
It was not beautiful, the mansion of the Esikananzis. Brutality was the predominant feature of its architecture; it was constructed to withstand the brutal onslaughts of a northern climate. A row of blind arches formed the base of it. Narrow windows, heavily shuttered, began only on the second floor. The whole structure resembled a decapitated pyramid. The bell in its belfry made a slatey sound, as if ringing from the adamantine heart of the building.
Luterin dismounted, climbed the steps, and pulled the doorbell.
He was a broad-shouldered youth, already lofty in the Sibornalese manner, with a round face seemingly built naturally for merriment: although, at this moment, awaiting sight of Insil, his brows were knit, his lips compressed. The tension of his expression caused him to resemble his father, but his eyes were of a clear grey, very different from his father’s dark, in-dwelling pupils.
His hair, curling riotously about his head and the nape of his neck, was light brown, and formed a contrast to the neat dark head of the girl into whose presence he was ushered.
Insil Esikananzi had the airs of one born into a powerful family. She could be sharp and dismissive. She teased. She lied. She cultivated a helpless manner; or, if it suited her better, a look of command. Her smiles were wintery, more a concession to politeness than an expression of her spirit. Her violet eyes looked out of a face she kept as blank as possible.
She was carrying a jug of water through the hall, clasped in both hands. As she came towards Luterin she lifted her chin slightly into the air, in a kind of mute exasperated enquiry. To Luterin, Insil was intensely desirable, and no less desirable for her capriciousness.
This was the girl he was to marry, according to the arrangement drawn up between his father and hers at Insil’s birth, to cement the accord between the two most powerful men of the district.
Directly he was in her presence, Luterin was caught up once more into their old conspiracy, into that intricate teasing web of complaint which she wove about herself.
‘I see, Luterin, you are on your two feet again. How excellent. And like a dutiful husband-to-be, you have perfumed yourself with sweat and hoxney before presuming to call and present your compliments. You have certainly grown while in bed – at least in the region of your waistline.’
She fended off an embrace with the jug of water. He put an arm about her slender waist as she led him up the immense staircase, made more gloomy by dark portraits from which dead Esikananzts stared as if in tether, shrunken by art and time.
‘Don’t be provoking, Sil. I’ll soon be slim again. It’s wonderful to have my health back.’
Her personal bell uttered its light clap on every stair.
‘My mother’s so sickly. Always sickly. My slimness is illness, not health. You are lucky to call when my tedious parents and my equally tedious brothers, including your friend Umat, are all attending a boring ceremony elsewhere. So you can expect to take advantage of me, can’t you? Of course, you suspect that I have been had by stable boys while you were in your year’s hibernation. Giving myself in the hay to sons of slaves.’
She guided him along a corridor where the boards creaked under their worn Madi carpets. She was close, phantasmal in the little light that filtered here through shuttered windows.
