Helliconia, page 112
When Major Gardeterark and his escort had left, Odim shut the door into the packinghouse and sat down by the fire. Very slowly he leaned forward, picked a chewed match from the carpet, and tossed it to the back of the grate. Besi knelt beside him and held his hand. Neither spoke for a long while.
At last Odim said, with an attempt at brightness, ‘Well, my dear little Besi, we are in difficulty. How can we meet it? Where can we all live? Here, possibly. Perhaps we could do away with that kiln we scarcely use and house some relations in there. The room could be made nice … But if I am not allowed to trade, then … well, ruin faces us all. They know that, the scoundrels. These Uskuti would have us all for slaves …’
‘Wasn’t he horrible, that man? His eyes, his teeth … like a crab.’
Odim sat up in his chair and clicked his fingers. ‘One stroke of luck, though. First, we start work with this Fashnalgid in the next warehouse. By good fortune, that very captain is at present billeted with me – you may have caught a glimpse of him. He reads books and perhaps he’s civilised. And my wife feeds him well. Perhaps we could persuade him to help us.’
He lifted up Besi’s chin so that she was forced to look him in the eye.
‘Always something can be done, my chick. Go round to this nice Captain Fashnalgid and invite him here. Say I have a present for him. He’ll bend the regulations for us, for sure. And, Besi … he’s as ugly as a mountain devil, but never mind. Very very sweet to him, eh, chick? As sweet as you can be, and that’s very sweet. Even a little tempting – you know? Even if you have to go to the limit. Our lives depend on such things …’
He tapped his long nose and smiled coaxingly.
‘Run along, my dove. And remember – stop at nothing to win him over.’
IV
An Army Career
The Restrictions of Persons in Abodes Act met with the mixed reception customary for proclamations from the Oligarchy. In the more privileged sectors of the city people nodded their heads and said, ‘How wise – what a good idea.’ Nearer the docks, they exclaimed, ‘So that’s what the biwackers are up to now!’
Eedap Mun Odim gave no overt expression to his dismay when he returned to his crowded five-storey home. He knew that the police would call soon enough to inform him that he was contravening the new law.
That night, he patted his children, settled his modest anatomy beside the slumbrous bulk of his wife, and prepared his mind for pauk. He had said nothing to his spouse, knowing that her display of anguish, her tears, her undoubted rushing from one end of the room to the other, kissing her three children with huge hydropic kisses en route, would do nothing to resolve the problem. As her breath became as regular as a balmy breeze over the autumn valleys of Kuj-Juvec, Odim gathered together his inner resources and underwent that small death which forms the entrance gate to pauk.
For the poor, the troubled, the persecuted, there was always that refuge: the trance state of pauk. In pauk lay communication with those of the family whose life on earth was ended. Neither State nor Church had jurisdiction over the region of the dead. That vast dimension of death placed no restriction on persons; nor did God the Azoiaxic prevail there. Only gossies and the more remote fessups existed in orderly oblivion, sinking towards the unrisen sun of the Original Beholder, she who took to her bosom all who lived.
Like a feather, the tremulous soul of Eedap Mun Odim sank down, to hold what intercourse it might with the gossie of its father, recently departed the world above.
The father now resembled a kind of ill-made gilt cage. It was difficult to see it through the obsidian of nonexistence, but Odim’s soul made its obeisances, and the gossie twinkled a little in response. Odim poured out his troubles.
The gossie listened, expressing consolation in little dreadful gasps of bright dust. It in its turn communed with the guttering ranks of ancestors below it. Finally it uttered advice to Odim.
‘Gentle and beloved son, your forebears honour you for your tender duty towards our family. Family must rely upon family, since governments do not comprehend families. Your good brother Odirin Nan lives distantly from you, but he, like you, shares an abiding fondness for our poor people. Go to him. Go to Odirin Nan.’
The voiceless voice sank away in an eddy. To which Odim faintly responded that he loved his brother Odirin Nan, but that brother lived in far Shivenink; might it not be better instead to cross the mountains and return to a remote branch of the family which still lived in the vales of Kuj-Juvec?
‘These here with me who still can make voice advise no return to Kuj-Juvec. The way over the mountains becomes more hazardous every month, as new arrivals here report.’ The tenuous framework guttered even as it spoke. ‘Also, the valleys are becoming stonier, and the cattle herds grow thin of flank. Sail westwards to your brother, beloved one, most dutiful of young men. Be advised.’
‘Father, to hear the melody of your voice is to obey its music.’
With tender expressions on either side, the soul of Odim drifted upwards through obsidian, like an ember through a starry void. The ranks of past generations were lost to view. Then came the pain of finding a feeble human body lying inert on a mattress, and seeking entry to it.
Odim returned to his mortal body, weakened by the excursion but strengthened by the wisdom of his father. Beside him, his ample wife breathed on, undistressed in her sleep. He put an arm about her and snuggled into her warmth, like a child against its mother.
There were those – lovers of secrecy – who rose almost at the time that Odim was settling to sleep. There were those – lovers of night – who liked to be about before dawn, in order to get ahead of their fellow men. There were those – lovers of chill – whose constitutions were such that they found satisfaction in the small hours when human resistance is at its lowest.
At the chime of three in the morning, Major Gardeterark stood in his leather trousers, keeping a watchful eye on his reflection in the mirror while he shaved.
Major Gardeterark would have no nonsense with pauk. He regarded himself as a rationalist. Rationalism was his creed, and his family’s. He had no belief in the Azoiaxic – Church Parade was a different matter – and less than a belief in pauk. It would never occur to the major that his thinking had confined him to an umwelt of living obsidian, through which no light shone.
At present, with each stroke of his cut-throat razor, he contemplated how to make miserable the lives of the inhabitants of Koriantura, as well as the existence of his under officer, Captain Harbin Fashnalgid. Gardeterark believed he had rational family reasons for hating Fashnalgid, over and above the motive of the letter’s inefficiency. And he was a rational man.
A great king had once ruled in Sibornal, before the last Weyr-Winter. His name had come down as King Denniss. King Denniss’s court had been held in Old Askitosh, and his retreat had been in the mighty edifices now known as the Autumn Palaces. So legend had it.
To his court, King Dennis had summoned learned men from all quarters of the globe. The great king had fought for Sibornal’s survival through the grim centuries of Weyr-Winter, and had launched an invasion force across the seas to attack Pannoval.
The king’s scholars had compiled catalogues and encyclopaedias. Everything that lived had been named, listed, categorised. Only the slow-pulsed world of the dead had been excluded, in deference to the Church of the Formidable Peace.
A long period of confusion followed the death of King Denniss. The winter came. Then the great families of the seven Sibornalese nations had joined together to form an Oligarchy, in an attempt to rule the continent on rational and scientific lines, as proposed by King Denniss. They had sent learned men abroad to enlighten the natives of Campannlat, even as far afield as the old cultural centre of Keevasien, in the southwest of Borlien.
The autumn of the present Great Year had witnessed one of the most enlightened of the Oligarchy’s decrees. The Oligarchy had altered the Sibornalese calendar. Previously, Sibornalese nations, with the exception of backwaters like Upper Hazziz, had adhered to a ‘so many years after the coronation of Denniss’ formula. The Oligarchy abolished such prescriptions.
Henceforth, the small years were numbered as the astronomers directed, in precedence following the small year in which Helliconia and its feebler luminary, Batalix, were most distant from Freyr: in other words, the year of apastron.
There were 1825 small years, each of 480 days, in a Great Year. The present year, the year of Asperamanka’s incursion into Chalce, was 1308 After Apastron. Under this astronomical system, nobody could forget where they stood with regard to the seasons. It was a rational arrangement.
And Major Gardeterark rationally finished shaving, dried his face, and commenced in a rational way to brush his formidable teeth, allowing so many strokes for each tooth in front, so many for each behind.
The innovation of the calendar alarmed the peasantry. But the Oligarchy knew what it was doing. It became secretive; it amassed secrets. It deployed its agents everywhere. Throughout the autumn it developed a secret police force to watch over its interests. Its leader, the Oligarch, gradually became a secret person, a figment, a dark legend hovering over Askitosh, whereas – or so the stories said – King Denniss had been loved by his people and seen everywhere.
All the acts and edicts promulgated by the Oligarchy were backed by rational argument. Rationality was a cruel philosophy when practised by the likes of Gardeterark. Rationality gave him good reason for bullying people. He drank to rationality every evening in the mess, sinking his huge teeth deep over the rim of his glass as the liquor ran down his throat.
Now, having finished his toilet, he allowed his servant to help him into his boots and greatcoat. Rationally clad, he went out into the frosty predawn streets.
His under officer, Captain Harbin Fashnalgid, was not rational, but he drank.
Fashnalgid’s drinking had begun as an amiable social habit, indulged in with other young subalterns. As Fashnalgid’s hatred of the Oligarch grew, so did his need for drink. Sometimes, the habit got out of hand.
One night, back in the officers’ mess in Askitosh, Fashnalgid had been peaceably drinking and reading, ignoring his fellow men. A hearty captain by the name of Naipundeg halted by Fashnalgid’s chair and laid his hoxney-crop across the open page of the book.
‘Always reading, Harbin, you unsociable dog! Filth, I suppose?’
Closing the volume, Fashnalgid said in his flat voice, ‘This is not a work you would have come across, Naipundeg. It’s a history of sacred architecture through the ages. I picked it up from a stall the other day. It was printed three hundred years ago, and it explains how there are secrets that we in these later days have forgotten. Secrets of contentment, for example. If you’re interested.’
‘No, I’m not interested, to be frank. It sounds wretchedly dull.’
Fashnalgid stood up, tucking the little book into a pocket of his uniform. He raised his glass and drained it dry. ‘There are such blockheads in our regiment. I never meet anyone interesting here. You don’t mind me saying that? You’re proud of being a blockhead, aren’t you? You’d find any book not about filth dull, wouldn’t you?’
He staggered slightly. Naipundeg, himself far gone in drink, began to bellow with rage.
It was then that Fashnalgid blurted out his hatred of the Oligarchy, and of the Oligarch’s increasing power.
Naipundeg, throwing another tumbler of fiery liquor down his throat, challenged him to a duel. Seconds were summoned. Supporting their primaries, they jostled them into the grounds of the mess.
There a fresh quarrel broke out. The two officers drove off their seconds and blazed away at each other.
Most of the bullets flew wild.
All except one.
That bullet hit Naipundeg’s face, shattering the zygomatic bone, entering the head by way of the left eye, and leaving through the rear of the skull.
In that casual military society, Fashnalgid was able to pass off the duel as an affair of honour regarding a lady. The court-martial convened under Priest-Militant Asperamanka was easily satisfied; Naipundeg, an officer from Bribahr, had not been popular. Fashnalgid was exonerated of blame. Only Fashnalgid’s conscience remained unappeased; he had killed a fellow officer. The less his drinking companions blamed him, the more he judged himself guilty.
He applied for leave of absence and went to visit his father’s estates in the undulating countryside to the north of Askitosh. There he intended to reform, to become less prodigal with women and drink. Harbin’s parents were growing senile, although both still rode daily – as they had done for the past forty years or more – about their fields and stands of timber.
Harbin’s two younger brothers ran the estate between them, aided by their wives. The brothers were shrewd, sowing coarser crops when finer ones failed, selecting strains with more rapid growth periods, planting cold-resistant caspiarn saplings where gales blew down established trees, building stout fences to keep out the herds of flambreg which came marauding from the northern plains. Sullen phagors worked under the brothers’ direction.
The estate had seemed a paradise to Harbin in his childhood. Now it became a place of misery. He saw how much labour was required to maintain a status quo threatened by the ever-worsening season, and wanted no part of it. Every morning, he endured his father’s repetitive conversation rather than join his brothers outdoors. Later, he retired to the library, to leaf moodily through old books which had once enchanted him and to allow himself the occasional little drink.
Harbin Fashnalgid had often grieved that he was ineffectual. He could not exert his will. He was too modest to realise how many people, women especially, liked him for this trait. In a more lenient age, he would have been a great success.
But he was observant. Within two days, he had noticed that his youngest brother had a quarrel with his wife. Perhaps the difference between them was merely temporary. But Fashnalgid began offering the woman sympathy. The more he talked to her, the weaker became his resolve to reform. He worked on her. He spun her exaggerated tales about the glamour of military life, at the same time touching her, smiling at her, and feigning a great sorrow which was only part feigned. So he won her confidence and became her lover. It was absurdly easy.
It was an irrational way to behave.
Even in that rambling two-storey parental house, it was impossible that the affair should remain secret. Intoxicated by love, or something like it, Fashnalgid became incapable of behaving with discretion. He lavished absurd gifts on his new partner – a wicker hammock; a two-headed goat; a doll dressed as a soldier; an ivory chest crammed with manuscript versions of Ponipotan legends; a pair of pecubeas in a gilt cage; a silver figurine of a hoxney with a woman’s face; a pack of playing cards in ivory inlaid with mother-of-pearl; polished stones; a clavichord; ribbons; poems; and a fossilised Madi skull with alabaster eyes.
He hired musicians from the village to serenade her.
The woman in her turn, driven to ecstasies by the first man in her life who knew nothing about the planting of potatoes and pellamountain, danced for him on his verandah in the nude, wearing only the bracelets he gave her, and sang the wild zyganke.
It could not last. A lugubrious quality in the countryside could not tolerate such exuberance. One night, Fashnalgid’s two brothers rolled up their sleeves, rushed into the love nest, kicked over the clavichord, and bounced Fashnalgid out of the house.
‘Abro Hakmo Astab!’ roared Fashnalgid. Not even the labourers on the estate were allowed to employ that vile expression aloud.
He picked himself up and dusted himself down in the darkness. The two-headed goat chewed at his trousers.
Fashnalgid stationed himself under his old father’s window, to shout insults and supplications. ‘You and Mother have had a happy life, damn you. You’re of the generation which regarded love as a matter of will. “Will marks us from the animal, and love from lovelessness,” as sayeth the poet. You married equally for life, do you hear, you old fool? Well, things are different now, Will’s given way to weather …
‘You have to grab love when you can now … Didn’t you have a parental duty to make me happy? Eh? Reply, you biwacking old loon. If you’ve been so sherbing happy, why couldn’t you have given me a happy disposition? You’ve given me nothing else. Why should I always be so miserable?’
No answer came from the dark house. A doll dressed as a soldier sailed from one of the windows and struck him on the side of the head.
There was nothing for it but to return to his regiment in Askitosh. But news travelled fast among the landed families. Scandal followed Fashnalgid. As ill fortune would have it, Major Gardeterark was an uncle of the woman he had disgraced, of that very woman who had so recently danced naked on his verandah and sung the wild zyganke. From then on, Harbin Fashnalgid’s position in the regiment became one of increasing difficulty.
His money went on obscure books as well as women and drink. He was accumulating a case against the Oligarchy, discovering just how the authoritarian grip on the Northern Continent had increased over the sleepy centuries of autumn. Searching through the rubbish in an antiquarian’s attic, he came across a list of entitlements of Uskuti estates of over a certain annual income; the Fashnalgid estate was listed. These estates had ‘pledged assignments to the Oligarchy’. This phrase was not explained.
Fashnalgid fulfilled his military duties while brooding over that phrase. He became convinced that he was himself part of the property assigned.
Between bouts of drinking and wenching, he recalled some of his father’s boasts. Had not the old man once claimed to have seen the Oligarch himself? Nobody had seen the Oligarch. There was no portrait of the Oligarch. No vision of the Oligarch existed in Fashnalgid’s mind, except possibly a pair of great claws reaching over the lands of Sibornal.
