Helliconia Spring

by Brian W Aldiss

  Only when they were buried on their correct land-octaves could they, as gossies, hope to communicate with their living children. And their children, when their time came to make the journey to the world below, should also lie along the correct land-octave.

  With his hand held like a chopper, old Asurr Tal chopped at the hills and valleys about them.

  "Remember that simple regulation, and father-communing can be established. The word grows fainter, like an echo along mountain valleys, from one vanished generation to the next, throughout the kingdoms of the dead, who outnumber the living as lice outnumber men."

  As Little Yuli regarded the barren mountainside, a strong revulsion rose in him against this teaching. Not long since, his interest had been only with the living, and he had felt himself free.

  "This business of talking to the dead," he said heavily. "The living should have no traffic with the dead. Our place is here, travelling on this earth.

  The old man snickered, caught Yuli's furred sleeve in a familiar way, and pointed downwards.

  "You may think so, you may think so. Unfortunately, it is the rule of existence that our place is both here and down below, down in the grit. We must learn to use the gossies as we use animals for our benefit."

  "The dead should keep in their place."

  "Oh, well … as for that, you'll be dead one day, yourself. Besides, Mistress Loil Bry wishes you to learn these things, does she not?"

  Yuli desired to shout, "I hate the dead and want nothing of them." But he bit off the words and stood silent. And so he was lost.

  •••

  Although he learned how to perform the rituals of father-communicating, Little Yuli was never able to communicate with his father, much less with the first Yuli. The dead yielded no response. Loil Bry explained this by saying that his parents had been buried in an incorrect land-octave. Nobody fully understood the mysteries of the world below. In trying to understand more, he sank further under his woman's power.

  All this time, Dresyl worked for the community, consulting with the old lord. He never lost his love for Yuli, even making his two sons study some of the lore that their strange aunt readily poured forth. But be never permitted them to stay long, lest they become bewitched.

  •••

  Two years after Nahkri was born to Dresyl, Loil Bry presented Little Yuli with a daughter. They named her Loilanun. With the midwife's help, Loilanun was born in the tower under the porcelain window.

  Loil Bry, assisted by Yuli, gave their daughter a special present. They gave her, and through her all Oldorando, a calendar.

  Owing to the disruptions of the centuries, Embruddock had had more than one calendar. Of the three old calendars, the most generally known was the so-called Lordly. The Lordly simply counted years from the accession of the last lord. The other two were antiquated, and one, the Ancipital, regarded as sinister; it had been abandoned for that reason, and for that reason had never entirely died. The Denniss went in for large numbers, and was not perfectly understood since the priests had been expelled from the town.

  Under these old calendars, the birth of Loilanun fell, respectively, in the years 21, 343, and 423. Now her birth date was declared to be the Year Three After Union. Henceforth, dates would be kept with reference to the number of years since Oldorando and Embruddock came together.

  The population received this gift with the same stoicism they received the news that there was a band of ancipital marauders in the vicinity.

  One Batalix-dawn, when the clouds were thick as phlegm and hoar-frost speckled the ancient breastworks of the hamlet, the horns of the lookout sounded from an eastern tower. Immediately, there was stir and shouting. Dresyl ordered all women to be locked in the women's tower, where many of them were already at work. He assembled his men, armed, at the barricades. His little sons came forth trembling to join him and stare towards the rising sun.

  In the grey dawn distance, horns showed.

  The phagors attacked in strength. Among their number were two who rode on kaidaws, their own particular animals – animals horned and mailed in fibrous red fur thick enough to withstand any cold.

  As they were assailing the barricades, Dresyl had one of his men break down a small earth dam previously built to pen in the hot waters of a geyser. Phagors notoriously hate water. A scalding flood now burst upon them, swirling about their knees, causing awful confusion in their ranks. Some hunters leaped forward to press home their advantage.

  One of the kaidaws went down in yellow mud, hoofs thrashing, and was killed by a well-flung spear to the heart. In panic, another of the great beasts made a standing jump, clearing the barricade. It was the legendary spring jump of the horned horse, which few humans ever witnessed. The animal came down among the warriors of Oldorando.

  They clubbed the kaidaw to death and captured its rider. Many other brutes were maimed by stones. The attackers retreated at last, while only one defender had been killed. All were exhausted. Some flung themselves into hot springs to restore their energies.

  This was a great victory for united action, declared Dresyl. He strode about in a kind of fury, brow dark with triumph, shouting to all that they were now one tribe, and had been blooded. Henceforth, all must work for all, and all would prosper. The women gathered round to listen, whispering while the men lay flat, recovering. It was the Year Six.

  Kaidaw meat was good. Dresyl ordered a feast of celebration, to start when both sentinels had set. The kaidaw carcass was boiled in the earthwaters, and then roasted over fires lit in the square. Barley wine and rathel were provided to celebrate the victory.

  Dresyl made a speech, as did the old lord, Wall Ein. Songs were sung. The man who had charge of slaves brought forward the captured phagor.

  Nobody present that evening in the Year Six had any reason for misgivings. Humans had again fought off their legendary foes and everyone intended to celebrate the occasion. The celebrations would include the putting to death of their captive.

  The inhabitants of Oldorando had no way of knowing how special a personage their captive was among the ancipital race, or that his death would drift down the backwaters of the years until terrible retribution would be visited on them and their offspring.

  Everyone fell silent as the monster stood among them, glaring at them with his large scarlet eyes. His arms were lashed behind his back with leather rope. His horned feet pawed restlessly at the ground. In the gathering dark, he seemed immense; the bogeyman of all their nocturnal dreams, a creature from uneasy dimday sleeps. He was clad in shaggy white fur, stained by mud and battle. He stood challengingly before his human captors, giving off a resonant smell, his boney head with its two long horns thrust forward between his shoulders. His thick white milt appeared foraging up the slits of his nostrils, first one, then the other.

  This brute wore strange accoutrements. A broad stomacher fashioned from hide was strapped round his girth; spurs at ankle and wrist supported protruding spikes. The elegant razored horns were capped with metal. It fitted his gigantic skull like a harness, coming to a two-pronged point in the centre of the forehead between the eyes, curving behind the ears, and fastening elaborately under the jaw so as to encompass the long boney chops.

  Baruin stepped forward and said, "See what our concerted action has achieved. We have captured a chief. By his headgear, this beast leads a component. Look at him well, you young men who have never before seen a fuggie close, for they are our traditional enemy, in darkness and light."

  Many young hunters stepped forward and tugged the creature's matted hair. He stood unmoving and let forth a fart like a small thunderclap. They fell back, alarmed.

  "Fuggies organise their herds into components," Dresyl explained. "Most can speak Olonets. They take humans as slaves, and are beastly enough to eat their captives. As a chief, this brute understands all we say. Don't you?" He clouted its rough shoulder. The monster stared coldly at him.

  The old lord, standing beside Dresyl, spoke.

  "The male p
hagors are called stalluns and the females gillots or fillocks, that I know. Males and females alike go on raids and fight together. They are creatures of ice and darkness. Your great ancestor Yuli warned against them. They are bringers of illness and death."

  Then the phagor spoke, using the Olonets in a hoarse churring voice.

  "You worthless Sons of Freyr will all blow away before the final storm! This world, this town, belong to us, the ancipitals."

  The women in the crowd were frightened. They threw stones at the evil thing that spoke in their midst, and shouted, "Kill him, kill him!"

  Dresyl raised an arm, pointing.

  "Drag him up to the top of the herb tower, friends! Drag him to the top and throw him off."

  "Yes, yes," they roared, and at once the bolder hunters ran forward, seized the great stubborn bulk and, by sheer force, thrust it towards the nearby building. Great cheering and commotion reigned; children ran screaming round their elders.

  Among those urchins were the two sons of Dresyl, Nahkri and Klils, both scarcely out of toddling stage. Because they were so small, they were able to stagger through the legs of the milling adults, and so came up against the right leg of the phagor, rising like a shaggy column before their eyes.

  "You touch it."

  "No, you.

  "You daren't, coward!"

  "You're a coward too!"

  Putting forth chubby fingers, they touched the leg together.

  Heavy musculature moved below a rug of hair. The limb lifted, the three-toed foot stamped down in the mud.

  Though these monstrous creatures could master the Olonets tongue, they were far from human. The thoughts in the harneys of their heads ran aslant. Old hunters knew that inside their barrel bodies they carried their intestines above their lungs. From their machinelike walk, it could be seen how their limbs were jointed in a different way from a man's; at what should have been elbow and knee, phagors could bend lower arms and legs in impossible attitudes. That distinction alone was enough to strike terror into small boys' hearts.

  For a moment they were in contact with the unknown. Pulling back their hands as if they had been burnt – in truth, the ancipital body temperature was cooler than man's – the two urchins looked at each other with wild eyes.

  Then they burst into howls of fear. Dly Hoin swept the boys into her arms. By then, Dresyl and others had shifted the monster on.

  Although the great animal struggled in its bonds, it was hammered through the entrance and into the tower. The crowd, restless in the square, listened to the noise within, which worked its way up the building. A cheer rose in the thick air as the first hunter emerged on the roof. Behind everybody, the kaidaw carcass roasted, untended; its flavours mingled with wood smoke to fill the bowl of the square, full of upturned faces. A second cheer, louder than the first, arose when the phagor chief was dragged into view, black against the sky.

  "Throw it down!" screamed the crowd, united in hate.

  The monstrous chief fought with his jostling captors. He roared as they prodded him with daggers. Then, as if realising that the game was up, he jumped up onto the parapet and stood there, glaring down at the jostling mob below.

  With a last burst of rage, he snapped his bonds. He jumped forward, arms outstretched, with a massive spring that carried him away from the tower. The crowd tried too late to scatter. The great body hurtled dawn, crushing three people beneath it, a man, a woman, a child. The child was killed outright. A groan of terror and dismay rose from the rest there assembled.

  Even then, the great animal was not killed. He raised himself up on his shattered legs to confront the avenging blades of the hunters. Everyone pierced him through, through the thick coat, through the dense flesh. He struggled on until his curdled yellow blood streamed across the trampled ground.

  •••

  While these terrible events took place, Little Yuli remained in his chamber with Loil Bry and their infant daughter. When he made to dress and join the fight, Loil Bry cried that she felt unwell and needed his company. She clung to him, kissing his lips with her pale mouth, and would not let him go.

  After this, Dresyl felt contempt for his cousin-brother. But he did not go and kill him, as he had a mind to, although these were savage times. For he remembered a lesson and recognised that killing divided tribes. When his sons ruled, this was forgotten.

  This forbearance of Dresyl's – based on a friendship begun in his boyhood, before Dresyl had a beard or grey in it – stood the community in good stead, and earned him new respect. And the things Little Yuli learned at the expense of his fighting spirit were fruitful in the days to come.

  Immediately after the shock caused by the appearance of the phagor chief in its midst, the community underwent another ordeal. A mysterious illness, accompanied by fever, cramps, and body rash, seized half the population of Oldorando. The first to go down were the hunters who had pushed the phagor to the top of the herb tower. For some days, little hunting was done. The domesticated pigs and geese had to be eaten instead. A woman with child died of fever, and the whole hamlet sorrowed to lose two precious lives to the world below. Yuli and Loil Bry, together with their daughter, escaped the illness.

  Soon the communal bloodstream was purged of its malady, and life went on as usual. But the news of the slaying of the phagor spread forth from the community.

  •••

  And for a while the climate continued harsh towards mankind. The cold winds picked out the seams of any badly stitched garment.

  The two sentinels of light, Freyr and Batalix, went about their duties as appointed, and the Hour-Whistler continued to blow.

  For half of the year, the sentinels shone together in the skies. Then the hours of their setting slipped further apart, until gradually Freyr ruled the sky by day and Batalix the sky by night; then night scarcely seemed night, day scarcely light enough to be called day. Then the sentinels again became reconciled: days became bright with both lights, nights became pitch.

  One quarter, when there were only shrill stars looking down on Oldorando, when cold and dark were intense, the old lord, Wall Ein Den, died; he descended to the world below, to become himself a gossie and sink down to the original boulder.

  Another year was finished, and another. A generation grew up, another grew old. Slowly numbers increased under Dresyl's peaceful rule, while the suns performed their sentry duties overhead.

  Although Batalix showed the larger disc, Freyr always gave out more light and more warmth. Batalix was an old sentinel, Freyr young and lusty. From one generation to the next, no man could positively swear that Freyr grew towards manhood, but so said the legends. Humanity endured – suffering or rejoicing – from generation to generation, and lived in the hope that Wutra would be victorious in the world above, and ever sustain Freyr.

  These legends carried reality within them, as a flower bulb carries the flower within its flesh. So humans knew without knowing they knew.

  As for the animals and birds, still many in numbers though few in species, their senses were more closely bound by the magnetic fluctuations of the globe than were mankind's. They also knew without knowing they knew. Their comprehensions told them that ineluctable change was already at hand – was indeed rising under the earth, in the bloodstream, in the air, in the stratosphere, and in all that was in the biosphere.

  •••

  Above the stratosphere rode a small self-contained world built from the elements of metals gathered in the rich fields among the stars. From the surface of Helliconia, this world appeared in the night sky as a star itself, travelling swiftly overhead.

  It was the Earth Observation Station Avernus.

  The binary system of Freyr and its companion, Batalix, was closely watched by the Avernus. In particular, the families on the station studied Helliconia, and had done so for more than one of its slow Great Years about Freyr – or Star A, as it was known on the station.

  Helliconia was of unique interest of the people of Earth, and never more
so than at this period. Helliconia revolved about Batalix – Star B, as it was known on the station. Both sun and planet were beginning to accelerate in their orbit. They were still almost six hundred times as distant from Freyr as Earth is from its primary. But the distance was diminishing, week by week.

  The planet was now several centuries past apastron, the coldest part of its orbit. There was new purpose in the corridors of the Observation Station; everyone could read the message in the increasingly favourable temperature gradients.

  IV - Favourable Temperature Gradients

  * * *

  Children follow their parents or they do not. Laintal Ay grew up knowing his mother as a quiet woman, given to the same kind of studious seclusion as her mother and father. But Loilanun had not always behaved like that, before life defeated her.

  In adolescence, she rejected the gentle tutelage of Loil Bry and Little Yuli. She screamed at them that she hated the cloistered atmosphere of their room – which, as they grew older, they were increasingly reluctant to leave. After a violent quarrel, she left them, went to live in another tower with relations.

  There was plenty of work. Loilanun became useful at grinding and tanning. While making a pair of hunting boots, she met their future wearer and fell in love with him. She was scarcely at the age of puberty. She ran out with the hunter on bright nights, when no one could sleep. There was the world in all its appalling beauty about her for the first time. She became his woman. She would have died for him.

  Manners were changing in Oldorando. He took Loilanun out with him on a deer hunt. Once Dresyl would never have permitted women running with them; but his command had become less certain as he grew older. The deer hunters met with a stungebag in a narrow defile. Before Loilanun's eyes, her man was run down and pierced through by one of the creature's horns. He died before he could be carried home.