Helliconia Spring

by Brian W Aldiss

  "You think things are going badly. I must warn you that more challenges are to come. I tell you this with the full weight of the academy behind me. Tomorrow, tomorrow at noon, the third and worst of the Twenty Blindnesses is due. Nothing can stop it. Mankind has no power over the skies. What will you do then? Will you run madly through the streets, cutting throats, smashing things, firing what your betters built – as if you were worse than phagors? Decide now how filthy, how low, you will be tomorrow!"

  They looked at one another and murmured. No one shouted. She waited, instinctively seizing on the right moment at which to launch in again on a new tack.

  "Years ago, the sorceress Shay Tal addressed the inhabitants of Oldorando. I remember her words clearly, for I revered everything she said. She offered us the treasure of knowledge. That treasure can be yours if only you will be humble and dare to reach out your hands for it.

  "Understand what I tell you. Tomorrow's blindness is no supernatural event. What is it? It is merely the two sentinels passing one another, those two suns you have known since birth. This world of ours is round as they are round. Imagine how large a ball our world must be for us not to fall off it – yet it is small compared with the sentinels. They look small merely because they are so far away.

  "Shay Tal, when she spoke, said that there was a disaster in the past. I believe that is not the case. We have added to her knowledge. Wutra has disposed of his world so that everything works through continuous action in all the parts. Your hair grows on your head and body as the suns rise and set. These are not separate actions but one in Wutra's eyes. Our world travels in a circle round Batalix, and there are other worlds like ours which behave likewise. At the same time, Batalix travels in a greater circle round about Freyr. You have to accept that our farmyard is not at the centre of the universe."

  Their murmurs of protest grew louder. Vry overrode them by pitching her voice higher.

  "Do you understand that? Understanding is harder than slitting throats, isn't it? To comprehend fully what I tell you, you must first understand and then grasp the understanding with your imagination, so that the facts live. Our year is four hundred and eighty days long, that we know. That is the time we take on Hrl-Ichor to make a complete circle about Batalix. But there is another circle to be made, the circle of Batalix and our world about Freyr. Are you prepared to hear the word? It takes eighteen hundred and twenty-five small years…. Imagine that great year!" They were quiet now, staring at her, the new sorceress.

  "Until our day, few could imagine it! For each of us can expect only forty years of life. It would take forty-six of our lifetimes to add up to one whole circle of this world about Freyr. Many of our lives find no echo, yet are part of that greater thing. That is why such knowledge is difficult to grasp and easy to lose in time of trouble."

  She was seized up by her new power, seduced by her own eloquence.

  "What is the trouble, what is this disaster of which Shay Tal told us, large enough to make us mislay such important knowledge? Why, simply that the light of Freyr varies according to the time of the great year. We have come through many generations of poor light, of winter, when the earth lay dead under snow. Tomorrow you should rejoice when the eclipse comes – the blindness, when distant Freyr slips behind Batalix – for it is a sign that Freyr's light grows nearer…. We enter spring of the great year tomorrow. Rejoice! Have the sense, the knowledge, to rejoice! Throw away the mess of your lives that ignorance causes, and rejoice! Better times are coming for all of us."

  •••

  Shoatapraxi deflected them. The woody grass had been growing in clumps as they approached lower ground. The clumps became thickets. Now they tried to find their way through a region choked with it.

  The vegetation rose above their heads. It was broken only by drumlins, up which it was possible to climb occasionally in order to get a bearing. With the shoatapraxi was entwined a thin-stemmed bramble, making progress both difficult and painful. The phagor army ahead had travelled another way. They were forced to follow the more meandering tracks of animals, yet the going remained bad for the yelk. They were nervous of the grass, as if disliking its pungent scent; their sweeping horns caught on the hollow stems, and the thorns underfoot penetrated to the softer parts of their hooves. So the men dismounted, leading their necrogenes as they progressed on foot.

  "How much farther, barbarian?" Skitosherill asked.

  "Not far," Laintal Ay responded. It was his stock answer to the stock question. They had slept uncomfortably in the forest, rising at dawn with frost in their clothes. He felt refreshed, still rejoicing in his lighter form, but he saw how weary the others were becoming. Aoz Roon was a shadow of what he had once been; in the night, he had called out in a strange language.

  They came to marshy ground, where, to everybody's relief, the shoatapraxi thinned. After pausing to see that all was quiet, they moved on, scattering flights of small birds before them. Ahead loomed a valley, with soft mounds rising on either side. They went that way, rather than moving on to higher ground, chiefly because of their fatigue; but as soon as they entered the neck of the valley, they were assailed by a chill wind, which rushed at them like an animal and bit to their bones. It was a time for struggling on grimly, with the head down.

  The wind brought fog with it. The fog curled about their bodies, though their heads were above it. Laintal Ay understood the wind, knowing that a layer of cold air poured down like water from the distant mountains on their left flank, down over the mounds into the valley, seeking lower ground. It was a local wind; the sooner they left its numbing grip, the better.

  Skitosherill's wife gave a faint cry and halted, leaning against her yelk and burying her face against her arm.

  Skitosherill returned to her concernedly and placed a grey-clad arm round her. The icy air wrapped his cloak about his leg.

  He looked worriedly up at Laintal Ay. "She can't go on," he said.

  "We'll die if we stay here."

  Dashing the moisture from his eyes, he looked forward. In a few hours, he realised, the valley would be warm and harmless. At present it was a death trap. They were in shadow. The light of the two suns slanted across the left slope of the valley above their heads; the light lay in thick vertical bars, where the shadows were cast of giant rajabarals which stood on the opposite crest. The rajabarals were steaming already in the morning sunshine, the vapour pouring up into the sky, casting a rolling shadow.

  He knew this place. Its configurations had been familiar to him when snow clothed it. It was normally a welcoming place – the last pass before a hunter gained the plains on the edge of which Oldorando stood. He was too cold even to shiver, body heat snatched by the wind. They could not continue. Skitosherill's wife still leaned sickly against the flank of the necrogene; now that she had given way, her maidservant also felt able to release her miseries and stood screaming with her back to the tide of air.

  "We'll get up among the rajabarals," he said, shouting the words into Skitosherill's ear. Skitosherill nodded, still involved with his wife, whom he was trying to help up into the saddle.

  "Mount, all of you," Laintal Ay called.

  As he shouted, a flutter of white caught his eye.

  Above the hillside on their left flank, cowbirds appeared, fighting the cold downdraught, their feathers flickering from white to grey as they rode in the shadows of the rajabarals opposite. Below the birds was a line of phagors. They were warriors; they carried spears at the ready. They moved to the edge of the mound, to poise themselves there as steady as boulders. They looked down at the humans embroiled in the tumbling mists below.

  "Fast, fast, up, before we're attacked!" As he shouted, he saw Aoz Roon was staring up at the brutes, without expression, making no move.

  He ran to him, clouting him across the back. "Up. We've got to get out of here."

  Aoz Roon said something harsh in his throat.

  "You're enchanted, man, you've learnt some of their accursed language and it's rendered you pow
erless."

  By force, he heaved his friend into his saddle. The scout did the same with the servant woman, who was sobbing in terror.

  "Up the slope to the rajabarals," Laintal Ay shouted. He slapped Aoz Roon's mare across its shaggy rump as he ran back to mount his own. Reluctantly, the animals started to climb. They made little response to heels in their ribs; a hoxney would have been lighter and faster.

  "They won't attack us," the Sibornalan said. "We'll give them the maidservant if there's trouble."

  "Our mounts. They will kill us for our mounts. To ride or for food. You stay behind and haggle if you wish."

  With a sick look, Skitosherill shook his head and swung himself into his saddle.

  He went first up the slope, leading his wife's beast. The scout and the maidservant followed close behind. Then there was a gap as Aoz Roon listlessly rode his yelk, allowing it to stray away from the others, despite Laintal Ay's shouts to keep together. He brought up the rear with the pack yelk, frequently casting glances back at the eminence behind them.

  The phagors did not move. It would not be the cold wind that worried them; they were creatures of the cold. Their immobility need not imply decision. It was impossible to know what the brutes thought.

  So they mounted the rise. They were soon out of the wind, to their great relief, and tugging with urgency on their reins.

  As they came over the brow of the hill, the sunlight shone into their eyes. Both suns, near enough to look amid their dazzle as if linked, glittered between the trunks of the great trees. Just for a moment, dancing figures could be seen in the heart of the gold, lightly tripping – Others at a mysterious festivity; then they vanished as if the acid glory of light had inexplicably dissolved them. The party drew into the protection of the smooth columns, still gasping with cold. With the canopy of steam overhead, it was almost as if they had entered a hall of the gods. There were about thirty of the massive trees. Beyond them lay open ground and the way to Oldorando.

  The phagor detachment moved. From complete immobility, it sprang into total action. The brutes came plodding concertedly down the slope on which they had remained poised. Only one of their kind was astride a kaidaw. He led. The cowbirds stayed shrieking above the valley.

  Desperately, Laintal Ay looked about for a refuge. There was none, except that offered by the rajabarals. The rajabarals themselves were emitting internal rumbling. He drew his sword and spurred over to where the Sibornalan was lowering his wife from her mount.

  "We'll have to stand and fight. Are you prepared for that? They'll be on us in a minute or two."

  Skitosherill looked up at him with agony etched in every line of his face. His mouth was open in a kind of snarl of anguish.

  "She has the bone fever, she will die," he said.

  His wife's eyes were glazed, her body stiffly contorted.

  With an impatient gesture of dismissal, Laintal Ay called to the scout, "You and I then. Look lively – here they come."

  For answer, the scout gave him a villainous grin, at the same time making a gesture with his finger of slitting windpipes. Laintal Ay was grimly encouraged.

  He cast about furiously by the base of the trees, looking for earths down which the Others had disappeared, thinking that here somewhere near at hand might be refuge – refuge and a snoktruix; – but never his snoktruix, never again.

  Despite their abrupt retreat, the Others had left no trace. Well, then there was no alternative to fighting. No doubt they must die. He would not expire until his breath could escape from every wound he received from the spears of the ancipitals.

  With the scout by his side, he went to the edge of the mound to challenge the enemy as they appeared.

  Behind him, the rumble in the rajabarals grew louder. The mighty trees had ceased to pour out steam and were making a noise like thunder. Below him, the first slanting rays of the linked suns had penetrated almost to the bottom of the valley, where they lit the spectacle of the phagors fording the katabatic wind, their sturdy bodies enmeshed in writhing fog, the stiff hairs of their coats stirred in their progress. They looked upwards and gave a churring cry at the sight of the two humans. They began to move up the hill.

  This incident was witnessed from the Earth Observation Station and, a thousand years later, by those who came on sandalled feet to the great auditoria on Earth. Those auditoria were fuller now than they had been at any time over the last century. People who went to view that enormous electronic recreation of a reality that had not been real for many centuries were wishing in their hearts that the humans whose lives they had followed would survive – always using the future tense, which comes naturally to homo sapiens, even for such events as this, so long past.

  From their privileged viewpoint, they saw beyond the incident among the grove of rajabarals, across the rolling plain where Fish Lake had once enshrined its terrifying statuary, to Oldorando itself.

  And all that landscape was dotted with figures. The young kzahhn was preparing at last to descend upon the city that had torn both life and tether from his illustrious grandstallun. He awaited only the sign. Although his force was arrayed in no great military order, but rather disposed itself like so many herds of cattle, not always looking to the front, numbers alone made it formidable. It would roll across ancient Embruddock, and then roll remorselessly on towards the southwest coasts of the continent of Campannlat, to the very cliffs of the eastern Climent Ocean, to cross if possible to Hespagorat, and the rocky ancestral homelands of Pagovin.

  Because of this nonhomogeneous disposition of the phagor crusade, it was still possible for travellers – refugees mainly – to move among the various herds and components without molestation, while hurrying in the direction from which the crusade had come. Generally, these fearful parties were led by Madis, sensitive to the air-octaves avoided by the hulking beasts under Hrr-Brahl Yprt's banner. One such party had the fork-bearded Raynil Layan pushing a timid Madi before him. It passed close by the young kzahhn himself, but the latter, immobile, gave no flicker of interest.

  The young kzahhn stood against the eroded flanks of Rukk-Ggrl and communed with those in tether, his father and his great-grandstallun, hearing once more their advice and instruction in his pale harneys. Behind him stood his generals and then his two surviving gillots. He had serviced the gillots rarely but, given favourable fortunes, the time would come again. First must the two future octaves of victory or death be unravelled; if he travelled down the octave of victory, there would be music for mating.

  He waited without motion, occasionally sliding his milt up the slots of his nostrils under the black fuzz of his muzzle. The sign would come in the heavens, the air-octaves would convulse themselves into a knot, and he and those whom he commanded would surge forward to burn down that ancient damned city, once Hrrm-Bhhrd Ydohk.

  Across this ancient battlefield, where man and phagor had encountered each other more frequently than either side knew, Laintal Ay and the Sibornalan scout stood with their swords ready to greet the first phagors to climb the mound. Behind them, the noise of the rajabarals was like thunder. Aoz Roon and the maidservant crouched by one of the boles, supinely awaiting whatever befell. Skitosherill laid down the rigid body of his wife tenderly, tenderly, shielding her face from the blinding double sun now climbing towards zenith. Then he ran to join his two fellows, drawing his sword as he did so.

  The uphill climb disrupted the line of phagors, the fitter arriving at the top first. As the leader charged into view, head and shoulders appearing over the slope, Laintal Ay ran forward. In despatching them one by one lay their only hope – he had counted thirty-five or more of the brutes, and refused to reckon the hopeless odds.

  Up came the phagor's throwing arm. It bent back to what to a human was a disconcerting angle, but Laintal Ay dived under the point of the spear, rendering it useless, and stabbed with a straight arm. His elbow took the shock as the blade grated against rib. As yellow blood spurted from the wound, to his mind came the old hunters' tale that a
ncipital intestines were situated above their lungs; he had proved its truth when he skinned the phagor to deceive its kaidaw.

  The phagor threw back its long boney head, lips peeling back from yellow teeth in a gesture of agony. It fell, and went rolling down the slope, to lie at the bottom in the dispersing mists.

  But the other brutes were at the breast of the rise now, closing in. The Sibornalan scout was fighting valiantly, every now and again gasping a curse in his native tongue. With a yell, Laintal Ay flung himself into the fray again.

  The world exploded.

  The noise was so sharp, so close, that fighting immediately stopped. A second explosion came. Black stones flew overhead, most of them landing somewhere on the far side of the valley. Pandemonium ensued.

  Each side was governed by its own instincts: the phagors became immobile, the two humans threw themselves flat on the ground.

  Their timing was perfect. Concurrent explosions sounded. The black stones flew everywhere. Several hit phagors, carrying them immediately over the brink, scattering their dying bodies. The rest of the phagors turned tail and ran back into the valley for safety, rolling, slipping, sliding, in their haste to escape. The cowbirds flew screeching across the sky.

  Laintal Ay sprawled where he was, hands over his ears, looking upwards in terror. The rajabarals were splitting from the top, cracking and peeling open like exploding casks, their staves falling. In the autumn of Helliconia's last great year, they had retracted their enormous fruit-bearing branches into the top of their trunks, sealing the crown over with a cap of resin until the vernal equinox. Over the winter centuries, internal heat pumps, drawing up warmth through the root system from rocks far below, had been preparing the way for this mighty explosion.