Helliconia Spring

by Brian W Aldiss

  No, no…. It's just that my experiences have made me hard. You're hard, dodger, hard and cruel. You killed those two gentlemen. What are you going to be? Better to confess to the murders and see what happens. Try and love me, try and love me….

  I know so little. That's it. The whole world – you want to find out. Akha must know. Those eyes see everything. But me – you're so small, dodger – life's no more than one of those funny feelings when the childrim flies overhead.

  He marvelled at his own thoughts. Finally he cried for the guards to open his door, and found that he had been incarcerated for three days.

  For a year and a day, Yuli served in the Holies as a novice. He was not allowed to leave the halls, but dwelt in a monastic nocturne, not knowing whether Freyr and Batalix swam separately or together in the sky. A wish to run through the white wilderness gradually left him, erased by the penumbral majesty of the Holies.

  He had confessed to the murder of the two gentlemen. No punishment followed.

  The thin grey priest with the blinking eyes, Father Sifans, was the charge-father over Yuli and other novices. He clasped his hands and said to Yuli, "That unhappy incident of the murders is now sealed behind the wall of the past. Yet you must never allow yourself to forget it, lest, in forgetting, you come to believe that it never happened. Like the many suburbs of Pannoval, all things in life are interwoven. Your sin and your longing to serve Akha are of a piece. Did you imagine that it was holiness that led a man to serve Akha? Not so. Sin is a more powerful mover. Embrace the dark – through sin you come to terms with your own inadequacy."

  "Sin" was a word often on Father Sifans' lips at one period. Yuli watched it there with interest, with the absorption pupils devote to their masters. The way the lips moved was something he imitated to himself later, alone, using the movements to repeat all that he had to learn by heart.

  While the father had his own private apartment to which he withdrew after instruction, Yuli slept in a dormitory with others of his kind, in a nest of dark within the dark. Unlike the fathers, they were allowed no pleasures; song, drink, wenches, recreations were forbidden, and their food was of the most Spartan kind, selected from the offerings made by supplicants of Akha daily.

  "I can't concentrate. I'm hungry," he complained once to his charge-father.

  "Hunger is universal. We cannot expect Akha to fatten us. He defends us against hostile outside forces, generation by generation."

  "Which is more important, survival or the individual?"

  "An individual has importance in his own eyes, but generations have priority."

  He was learning to argue the priest's way, step by step. "But generations are made up of individuals."

  "Generations are not only the sum of individuals. They contain also aspirations, plans, histories, laws – above all, continuities. They contain the past as well as the future. Akha refuses to work with individuals alone, so individuals must be subdued – quenched, if necessary."

  Slyly, the father taught Yuli to argue. On the one hand, he must have blind faith; on the other, he needed reason. For its long journey through the years, the entombed community needed all defences, needed both prayer and rationality. The sacred verses claimed that at some time in the future, Akha, in his lonely battle, might suffer defeat and the world undergo a period of intense fire descending from the skies. The individual must be quenched, to avoid the burning.

  Through the entombing halls went Yuli, with all these ideas declaiming themselves in his head. They stood his understanding of the world upside down – but therein lay much of their attraction, since every revolutionary new insight only emphasised his previous ignorant state.

  Among all the deprivations, one sensory delight stole upon his bewilderment to soothe him. The priests found their way through the dark labyrinth by wall-reading, an arcane mystery in which Yuli was soon to be initiated. There was also another directional clue, intended to delight. Music. At first, Yuli in his innocence imagined that he heard the sound of spirits overhead. He could make nothing of the tickling line of melody played on a one-stringed vrach. He had never seen a vrach. If not a spirit, could it be the wail of wind through a crevice somewhere in the rock?

  His delight was so secret that he asked no one about the sounds, not even his fellow novices, until walking one day unexpectedly with Sifans into a religious service. Choirs were important, and monody even more so, with a single voice launched into the hollows of the dark; but what Yuli came to love most were the interventions by inhuman voices, those of the instruments of Pannoval.

  Nothing similar was ever beard in the Barriers. The only music the besieged tribes there knew was a prolonged drumming, on a drum made of hide; clacking, of animal bones struck together; and clapping, of human hands, accompanied by a monotonous chant. It was the luxurious complication of the new music that convinced Yuli of the reality of his still awakening spiritual life. One great tune in particular took him by storm, "Oldorando," which had a part for an instrument that soared about all others, then dived into their midst, finally to retreat into a secure melodic refuge of its own.

  Music became almost an alternative to light for Yuli. When he talked to his fellow novices, he found that they felt little of his exhilaration. But they – he came to realize – all carried a much greater central commitment to Akha himself than he. Most of the novices had loved or hated Akha from birth; Akha was nature to them as he was not to Yuli.

  When he wrestled with such matters during the sparse hours allotted to sleep, Yuli felt guilt that he was not as the other novices. He loved the music of Akha. It was a new language. But was not music the creation of men, rather than of…

  Even when he choked off the doubt, another doubt sprang up. How about the language of religion? Wasn't that also the invention of men – perhaps pleasant, ineffectual men like Father Sifans?

  "Belief is not peace but torment, only the Great War is peace." That part of the creed at least was true.

  Meanwhile, Yuli kept his own council, and fraternised only superficially with his fellows.

  They met for instruction in a low, damp, foggy hall named Cleft. Sometimes they went in utter darkness, sometimes in the glow of wicks carried by the fathers. Each session ended with the priest pressing his hand to the novice's forehead, gesturing at his brain, an action at which the novices laughed later in their dormitory. Priests' fingers were rough, from the wall-reading by which they navigated briskly about the labyrinths of the Holies even in the most pitchy blackness.

  Each novice sat in a curiously shaped dock, built of clay bricks, facing his instructor. Each dock was decorated in individual low-reliefs, to make their identification in the dark easier. Their instructor sat opposite and above them, astride a clay saddle.

  When only a few weeks of the novitiate had lapsed, Father Sifans announced the subject of heresy. He spoke in a low voice, coughing as he did so. Worse than non-belief was to believe wrongly. Yuli leaned forward. He and Sifans had no light, but the charge-father in the next box did, a fluttering flame which served to throw a foggy orange nimbus about Sifans' head and shade his face. The old man's white-and-black gown further disintegrated his outlines, so that he merged with the dark of the chamber. Mist rolled about them, trailing anyone who walked slowly by, practising wall-reading. Coughs and muttering filled the low cavern; water dripped ceaselessly, like small bells.

  "A human sacrifice, Father, did you say a human sacrifice?"

  "The body is precious, the spirit expendable. One who has spoken against the priesthood, saying they should be more frugal to aid Akha … You are far enough on with your studies to attend his execution. …Ritual from barbarous times…"

  The nervous eyes, two tiny points of orange, flickered in the dark like a signal from a remote distance.

  When the time came, Yuli walked through the lugubrious galleries, nervously trying to wall-read with his fingers. They entered the largest cavern in the Holies, called State. No light was allowed. Whispering filled the air as the
priesthood assembled. Yuli surreptitiously took hold of the hem of Father Sifans' gown in order not to lose him. Then a voice of a priest, declaiming the history of the long war between Akha and Wutra. Night was Akha's, and the priests were set to protect their flock through the long night's battle. Those who opposed the guardians must die.

  "Bring forth the prisoner."

  There was much talk of prisoners in the Holies, but this one was special. The tramp of the militia's heavy sandals could be heard, a shuffling. Then brightness.

  A shaft of light blazed down. The novices gasped. Yuli recognised that they stood in the vast chamber through which Sataal had led him, a long while ago. The light source was as before, high above the multitude of heads; it appeared blinding.

  At its base stood a human figure, tied to a wooden framework, legs and arms spread. It was in the upright position, and naked.

  Even as the prisoner gave a cry, Yuli recognised the dense impassioned face, square, and framed by short-cropped hair. It was the young man he had once heard speak in Prayn – Naab.

  His voice and message were also recognisable. "Priests, I am not your enemy, though you treat me like one, but your friend. Generation by generation, you sink into inaction, your numbers grow less, Pannoval dies. We are not just passive votaries of Great Akha. No! We must fight with him. We must also suffer. In the great war between Sky and Earth, we must play our part. We must reform and purify ourselves."

  Behind the bound figure were militiamen in gleaming helmets, guarding him. Others arrived, bearing smoking brands. With them marched their phagors, checked by leather leads. They halted. They turned inward. They hoisted their brands high above their heads, and the smoke rose in leisurely braids upwards. Forward creaked a stiff cardinal, bowed under black-and-white garb and an elaborate mitre. He struck a golden staff against the ground three times, crying shrilly in the Priestly Olonets, "Have done, have done, have done…. O Great Akha, our Warrior God, appear to us!" A bell tinkled.

  A second pillar of the brilliant white light, solidifying rather than banishing the surrounding night. Behind the prisoner, behind the phagors and the soldiers, Akha appeared, reaching upwards. A murmur of expectation came from the crowd. It was a skeletal scene, the militia and the massive white beasts all but transparent, Akha chalky in the column of fight, the whole embedded in obsidian. In this representation, the semi human head of the god thrust forward, and his mouth was open. The eyes were as sightless as ever.

  "Take this unsatisfactory life, O Great Akha, and use it for Thy satisfaction."

  Functionaries moved smartly forward. One began to crank at a handle set in the side of the frame holding the prisoner. The frame began to creak and shift. The prisoner cried softly once, as his body was forced to bend backwards. As the hinges on the framework opened, his body arched back, exposing his helplessness.

  Two captains marched forward with a phagor between them. The great beast's blunted horns had been capped with silver and reached almost to the height of the soldiers' eyebrows. It stood in the ungainly customary stance of a phagor, head and prow of chest thrust forward, its long white hair stirring slightly in the draught that blew through State.

  Music sounded again, drum, gongs, vrachs, drowning out Naab's voice, and the sustained warble of a fluggel rising high above them. Then everything stopped.

  The body was bent double now, legs and feet twisted somewhere out of sight, head right back, exposing throat and thorax, gleaming pale in the column of light.

  "Take, O Great Akha! Take what is already Thine! Eradicate him."

  At the priest's scream, the phagor stepped a pace forward and bent down. It opened its shovel mouth and applied rows of blunt teeth to either side of the proffered throat. It bit. It raised its head, and a great morsel of flesh came up with it. It moved back into place between the two soldiers, swallowing noncommittally. A trickle of red ran down its white front. The rear column of light was cut off. Akha disappeared back into his nourishing darkness. Many of the novices fainted.

  As they jostled out of State, Yuli asked, "But why use those devilish phagors? They're man's enemy. They should all be killed."

  "They are the creatures of Wutra, as their colour shows. We keep them to remind us of the enemy," said Sifans.

  "And what will happen to the – to Naab's body?"

  "It will not be wasted. Every item is of some application. The whole carcass may go for fuel – perhaps to the potters, who always need to fire their kilns. I really don't know. I prefer to keep myself aloof from administrative details."

  He dared say no more to Father Sifans, hearing the distaste in the old priest's voice. To himself, he said over and over again, "Those evil brutes. Those evil brutes. Akha should have no part of them." But the phagors were all over the Holies, padding patiently along with the militia, their noctilucent eyes peering here and there under their craggy brows.

  One day Yuli tried to explain to his charge-father how his father had been caught and killed by phagors in the wild.

  "You do not know for sure they killed him. Phagors are not always entirely evil. Sometimes Akha subdues their spirit."

  "I'm sure he's dead by now. There's no way of being certain, though?"

  He heard the father lick his lips as he hesitated, and then leaned towards Yuli in the blackness.

  "There is a way of being sure, my son."

  "Oh, yes, if you mounted a great expedition from Pannoval north –"

  "No, no … other ways, more subtle. You will one day understand the complexities of Pannoval more fully. Or perhaps you won't. For there are entirely other orders of the priesthood, warrior mystics, of which you do not know. Perhaps I had better say no more…."

  Yuli urged him on. The priest's voice sank still lower, until it was almost lost under the splash of a water drip near at hand.

  "Yes, warrior mystics, who forswear the pleasures of the flesh and in return, gain mysterious powers …"

  "That's what Naab advocated, and was murdered for it."

  "Executed after trial. The superior orders prefer us, the administrative orders, to remain as we are… But they… they communicate with the dead. If you were one of them, you could speak with your father after death."

  Into the dark, Yuli stammered his amazement.

  "There are many human and divine capacities which can be trained, my son. I myself, when my father died, fell into a fast through sorrow, and after the passage of many days saw him clear, suspended in the earth which is Akha's as if in another element, with his hands over his ears, as if he heard some sound he disliked. Death is not an end, but our extension in Akha – you recall the teaching, my son."

  "I'm still angry with my father. Perhaps I have difficulty because of that. He was weak at the end. I wish to be strong. Where are these – these warrior mystics of whom you speak, Father?"

  "If you do not believe my words, as I sense, it is pointless my telling you anything further." The voice held a nicely calculated shade of petulance.

  "I'm sorry, Father. I'm a savage, just as you say…. You think the priesthood should reform itself, as Naab claimed, don't you?"

  "I take a middle way." He sat leaning forward tensely for a while, blinking as if there was more to be said, and Yuli heard his dry eyelids flutter. "Many schisms divide the Holies, Yuli, as you will come to see if you take your orders. Things are less easy than they were when I was a boy. Sometimes it seems to me …"

  The water drops went splash-splash-splash and someone coughed distantly.

  "What, Father?"

  "Oh … you have heretical thoughts enough, without my planting more. I can't imagine why I talk to you. That's the end of instruction for today, boy."

  Talking not to Sifans, who liked to proceed by equivocation, but to his fellows, Yuli gradually learnt something of the power structures that held the community of Pannoval together. The administration was in the hands of the priests, and they worked with the militia, one reinforcing the other. There was no final arbitrator, no great chi
ef, like the chiefs in the tribes of the wilderness. Behind each order of the priesthood lay another. They faded off into the metaphysical darkness, in obscure hierarchies, none finally with the power to command all the others.

  Some orders, went the rumour, lived in more distant caverns in the mountain chain. In the Holies, habits were lax. Priests might serve as soldiers and vice versa. Women came and went among them. Under all the prayer and learning was confusion. Akha was elsewhere. Somewhere – somewhere there was greater faith.

  Somewhere along the receding chain of command, thought Yuli, must be Sifans' order of warrior-mystics, who could commune with the dead and perform other amazing acts. The rumours, really no more to be listened to than the drip of water down a wall, whispered of an order elsewhere, set above the inhabitants of the Holies, who were referred to, when they were referred to at all, as the Keepers.

  The Keepers, according to the whisper, were a sect to which admission was by election. They combined the dual role of soldiering and priesthood. What they kept was knowledge. They knew things unknown even in the Holies, and that knowledge gave them power. By keeping the past, they laid claim to the future.

  "Who are these Keepers? Do we see them?" Yuli asked. The mystery excited him, and as soon as he heard of them he longed to be part of the mysterious sect.

  He was speaking again to Father Sifans, almost at the end of his term. The passage of time had matured him; he no longer mourned his parents, and the Holies kept him busy. He had discovered recently in his charge-father an intense relish of gossip. The eyes blinked faster, the lips trembled, and the morsels slipped out. Every day, as the two men worked together in the prayer hall of their order, Father Sifans allowed himself a small ration of revelation.

  "The Keepers can mix among us. We do not know who they are. Outwardly, they look no different from us. I might also be a Keeper, for all you know…."

  Next day, after prayer, Father Sifans beckoned Yuli with a mittened hand and said, "Come, since your novice term is nearly up, I'll show you something. You recollect what we were talking about yesterday?"