Helliconia Summer h-2

by Brian Aldiss

  The Fifth Army marched eastwards, through jungles of stone. The invaders melted away before it. Most skirmishes were confined to dimday—neither side would fight either during darkness or when both suns were high. But the Fifth Army, under KolobEktofer, was forced to travel during full day.

  It travelled through earthquake country, where ravines ran obliquely across its path. Habitation was scanty. The ravines were a tangle of vegetation, but there, if anywhere, water was to be found—as well as snakes, lions, and other creatures. The rest of the land was pocked with umbrella cactus and scrub. Progress across it was slow.

  Living off the land was hard. Two kinds of creature dominated the plain, numberless ants and the ground-sloths which lived off the ants. The Fifth caught the sloths and roasted them, but the flesh was bitter in flavour.

  Still the cunning Darvlish withdrew his forces, luring the king away from his base. Sometimes he left behind smouldering campfires or dummy forts on elevated sites. Then a day would be wasted as the army investigated them.

  Colour-Major KolobEktofer had been a great explorer in his youth and knew the wilds of Thribriat, and the mountains above Thribriat, where the air finished.

  “They will stand, they will stand soon,” he told the king one evening when a frustrated Eagle was cursing their difficulties. “The Skull must soon fight, or the tribes will turn against him. He understands that well. Once he knows we’re far enough from Matrassyl to be without our supply trains, he’ll make his stand. And we must be ready for his tricks.”

  “What kind of tricks?”

  KolobEktofer shook his head. “The Skull is cunning, but not clever. He’ll try one of his father’s old tricks, and much good they did him. We’ll be ready.”

  The next day, Darvlish struck.

  As the Fifth Army approached a deep ravine, forward scouts sighted the Driat host drawn up in battle lines on the far bank. The ravine ran from northeast to southwest, and was choked with jungle. It was more than four times a javelin’s throw across from one bank to the other.

  Using hand signals, the king mustered his army to face the enemy across the ravine. The Phagorian guards were stationed in front because the ranks of motionless beasts would bring anxiety into the dim minds of the tribesmen.

  The tribesmen were of spectral aspect. It was just after dawn: twenty minutes past six. Freyr had risen behind cloud. When the sun broke free of the cloud, it became apparent that the enemy and part of the ravine would be in shadow for the next two or more hours; the Fifth Army would be exposed to Freyr’s heat.

  Crumbling cliff slopes backed the Driat array, with higher country above. On the royal left flank was a spur of high ground, its angles jutting towards the ravine. A rounded mesa stood between the spur and the cliffs, as if it had been set there by geological forces to guard the Skull’s flank. On top of the mesa, the walls of a crude fort could be seen; its walls were of mud, and behind the ramparts an occasional pennant was visible.

  The Eagle of Borlien and the colour-major studied the situation together. Behind the colour-major stood his faithful sergeant-at-arms, a taciturn man known as Bull.

  “We must find out how many men are in that fort,” JandolAnganol said.

  “It’s one of the tricks he learnt from his father. He hopes we’ll waste our time attacking that position. I’ll wager no Driats are up there. The pennants we see moving are tied to goats or asokins.” They stood in silence. From the enemy’s side of the ravine, under the cliffs, smoke rose in the shadowed air, and an aroma of cooking drifted across to remind them of their own hungry state.

  Bull took his officer to one side and muttered in his ear.

  “Let’s hear what you have to say, sergeant,” the king said.

  “It’s nothing, sire.”

  The king looked angry. “Let’s hear this nothing, then.”

  The sergeant regarded him with one eyelid drooping. “All I was saying, sire, is that our men will be disappointed. It’s the only way a common man—by which I mean myself—can advance himself, sire, to join the army and hope to grab what is going. But these Driats aren’t worth looting. What’s more they don’t appear to have females—by which I mean women, sire—so that the incentive to attack is… well, sire, on the low side.”

  The king stood confronting him face to face, until Bull backed away a step.

  “We’ll worry about women when we have routed Darvlish, Bull. He may have hidden his women in a neighbouring valley.”

  KolobEktofer cleared his throat. “Unless you have a plan, sire, I’d say we have a nigh-on impossible task here. They outnumber us two to one, and although our mounts are faster than theirs, in close combat our hoxneys will be flimsy compared with their yelk and biyelk.”

  There can be no question of retreat now that we have caught up with them at last.”

  “We could disengage, sire, and seek for a more advantageous position from which to attack. If we were on the cliffs above them, for instance—”

  “Or could capture them in an ambush, sire, by which I mean…”

  JandolAnganol flew into a rage. “Are you officers, or she-goats? Here we are, there stands our country’s enemy. What more do you want? Why falter now, when by Freyr-set we can all be heroes?”

  KolobEktofer drew himself up. “It is my duty to point out to you the weakness of our position, sire. The smell of some women as booty would have encouraged the men’s fighting spirits.”

  In a passion, JandolAnganol said, “They must not fear a subhuman rabble—with our cross-bowmen we shall rout them in an hour.”

  “Very good, sire. Perhaps if you would address Darvlish as filth it would increase our men’s fighting spirit.”

  “I shall address him.”

  A dark look was exchanged between KolobEktofer and Bull, but no more was said, and the former gave orders for the disposition of the army.

  The main body of men was dispersed along the ragged lip of the ravine. The left flank was strengthened by the Second Phagorian Guard. The hoxneys, numbering fifty in all, were in poor condition after their journey. They had been used mainly as pack animals. Now they were unloaded so as to serve as cavalry animals, to impress Darvlish’s men. Their loads were piled inside a shallow cave in the spur, and guards put on them, human and phagor. If the day was not carried, those supplies would provide booty for the Driats.

  While these dispositions went forward, the wing of shadow suspended from the shoulders of the opposite cliffs was retracting, like a giant sundial set to remind every man of his mortality. The Skull’s forces were revealed as no less imposing than they had seemed when shrouded in blue shade. The ur-human tribes wore a tatterdemalion collection of hides and blankets thrown on their bodies with the same negligence as they threw themselves on their yelks. Some wore bright-striped blankets rolled about their shoulders, to give themselves extra bulk. Some wore knee-high boots, many were barefoot. Their headgear inclined to massive biyelk-fur headpieces—often horned or antlered to denote rank. A feature common to many was the penis, painted or embroidered on their breeches in furious erection to denote their rapacious intent.

  The Skull was readily visible. His leather and fur headpiece was dyed orange. Antlers thrust forward from it about his moustachioed face. A sword wound sustained in his earlier battles with JandolAnganol had slashed away his left cheek and the flesh of his lower jaw, leaving him with a permanent death-grin, in which bone and teeth played a part. He managed to look fully as ferocious as his allies, whose fur-fringed eyes and prognathous jaws gave them a naturally savage aspect. A mighty biyelk was his steed.

  He raised his javelin above his head and shouted, “The vultures shall praise my name!” A ragged cheer came from the throats about him, echoing from the cliffs behind.

  JandolAnganol mounted his hoxney and stood in the stirrups. The shout he gave carried clear to the enemy host.

  He called in pidgin Olonets, “Darvlish, have you dared to stand before your face rots away?”

  A murmur of sounds rose
from both confronting armies. The Skull kneed his biyelk to the edge of the precipice and bellowed across to his enemy.

  “Do you hear me, Jandol, you woolly-eared dung-beetle? You were farted out of your father’s left instep, so why come you here, daring to face real men? Everyone knows your knackers are knocking together in fear. Crawl away, you dropping, crawl away and take those mangey arse-combings of warriors with you.”

  His voice echoed back and back again from the cliffs. When the silence was complete, JandolAnganol replied in similar vein.

  “Yes, I hear your womanish bleatings, Darvlish of the Dunghills. I hear your claim that those clap-ridden three-legged Others beside you are real men. We all know that real men would never associate with the likes of you. Who could bear the stench of your decay but those barbaric monkeys with phagor-scumber for grandmothers?”

  The orange head gear shook in the sunshine.

  “Phagor-scumber, is it, you dimday hrattock! You know whereof you talk, since a plateful of phagor-scumber is your daily diet, so much do you worship those horned Batalix-buggerers. Kick them into the ravine and dare to fight fair, you crap-crowned cockroach!”

  A roar of savage laughter came from the Driat host.

  “If you have so little respect for those who are the climax of creation by comparison with your yelk-yobs, then shake the spiders and scabs from your stinking codpiece and attack us, you cowardly little half-faced Driat dildo!”

  This address continued for some while. JandolAnganol was revealed as increasingly at a disadvantage, not having the resources of Darvlish’s foul mind on which to draw. While the verbal battle was in progress, KolobEktofer sent off Bull with a small column of men to create a diversion of their own.

  The heat intensified. Plagues of stinging things visited both armies. The phagors wilted under the gaze of Freyr and would soon break ranks. The insults wound up.

  “Epitaph for an ancipital earth-closet!”

  “Catamite of a Cosgatt ground-sloth!”

  The Borlienese army started to move along the lip of the ravine, shouting and brandishing their weapons, while the Driat horde did the same on the other side.

  KolobEktofer said to the king, “How shall we tackle the mesa fort, sire?”

  “I’m convinced you are right. The fort is a decoy. Forget all about it. You lead the cavalry, with infantry and the First Phagorian following. I will march the Second Phagorian behind the mesa, so that the Driats lose sight of us. When you engage them, we will charge from cover and attack their right flank, cutting in behind them. It should then be possible to drive Darvlish into the ravine with a pincer movement.”

  “I shall carry out your orders, sire.”

  “Akhanaba be with you, major.”

  The king spurred his hoxney and rode over to the phagorian guard.

  The ancipitals were full of complaint and had to be lectured before they would move. Not comprehending death, they claimed that the air-octaves in the valley did not favour their cause; in the event of defeat, they could not find tether here.

  The king addressed them in Hurdhu. This back-of-throat language was not the brand of pidgin Olonets in use between races, but a genuine bridge between human and non-human concepts, said to have originated—like so many innovations—from far Sibornal. Thick with nouns, clotted with gerunds, Hurdhu was palatable alike to human brains and the pale harneys of ancipitals.

  Native Ancipital was a language with only one tense, the continuous present. It was not a language adapted to abstract thought; even counting, limited to base three, was finite. Ancipital mathematics, however, dedicated itself to the enumeration of sets of years, and boasted a special eotemporal mode. Eotemporal was a sacred speech-form dealing with the concerns of eternity and purporting to be the language of tether.

  Natural death being unknown to phagors, theirs was an umwelt largely inaccessible to the understanding of human beings. Even phagors did not easily switch from Native to Eotemporal. Hurdhu, devised to solve such problems, used an intraspecific mode of communication. Yet every sentence in Hurdhu bore a weight of difficulty appropriate to its speakers. Humans required its rigid sentence order, corresponding to Olonets. Phagors required a fixed language in which neologisms were almost as impossible as abstracts. Thus, the Hurdhu equivalent for ‘humanity’ was ‘Sons of Freyr’. ‘Civilization’ was ‘many of roofs’; ‘military formation’ was ‘spears on move by orders’, and so on. It therefore took JandolAnganol time to make his orders clear to the Second Phagorian.

  When they comprehended fully that the foe confronting them was befouling their pastures and spitting their runts like sucking pigs, the stalluns and gillots began to march. They were almost fearless, although the heat had made them visibly less alert. With them went their runts, squealing to be carried.

  As the Second Phagorian moved, KolobEktofer shouted orders to the rest of the force. It also got under way. Dust rose. These movements awakened reciprocal movements in the Driat company. Those ragged ranks turned from line abreast into file and marched towards confrontation. The two forces would meet on the expanse at the foot of the cliffs, between the throat of the ravine and the mesa.

  The pace on both sides began brisk, slowing as an encounter became inevitable. There was no question of a charge; the chosen battlefield was strewn with broken boulders, memorials to the chthonic upheavals which still dominated the land. It was a question of picking a way towards the enemy.

  General shouting gave way to personal insult as the opposed forces drew nearer. Boots tramped without advancing. They faced each other, reluctant to close the gap of a few feet between them. Driat lords in the rear were bellowing and prodding, without effect. Darvlish galloped back and forth behind his men, screaming abuse at them for being scab-devouring cowards; but the tribesmen were unused to this kind of warfare, preferring quick forays and quick retreats. Javelins were thrown. At last, sword struck against sword and blade into body. Insults turned to screams. Birds began to gather in the sky above. Darvlish galloped the harder. JandolAnganol’s detachment appeared round the back of the mesa, and charged at moderate pace towards the right flank of the Driats, as planned.

  Whereupon, there were triumphant screams from the hillsides above the battle. There, protected by the shade afforded by the cliffs above them, some of the hags of the tribe—camp followers, harlots, savage dames—had crouched in ambush. They waited only for the enemy to make the anticipated move and skirt the mesa. Leaping to their feet, they rolled boulders down the slope before them, starting a landslide which roared down upon the Second Phagorian. The phagors froze in dismay and were skittled like ninepins. Many of their children died with them.

  The faithful Sergeant Bull had been the first to suspect that tribal women must be close at hand. Women were his particular interest. He had moved with a small column of men while the insult address was at its height. Under cover of umbrella cactus, his column climbed down into the ravine, through its thorn entanglements, and up its farther bank, where they managed to skirt the Driat horde and gain the cliffs without being seen.

  Scaling the cliffs was a feat. Bull never gave up. He led his men high above the host, where they found a path dotted with fresh human faeces. They smiled grimly at the discovery, which seemed to confirm their suspicions. They scrambled higher still. When they reached another path, life became easier. They crawled along this track on hands and knees, to avoid being seen by either of the armies below. Their reward was the sight of forty or more tribal women, swaddled in blankets and stinking skirts, squatting on the hillside a little way below them. The boulders piled in front of the witches told their own tale.

  The climbers had had to leave their spears behind.

  Their only weapons were short swords. The hill was too rugged to charge down. Their best hope was to fight the hags with their own weapons, and bombard them with stones and boulders.

  These had to be amassed in silence, allowing no telltale stones to roll down the slope to give their position away. Bull’s
column was still gathering ammunition when the Second Phagorian charged round the mesa, and the hags went into action.

  “Let them have it, my bullies,” the sergeant shouted. They sent a fusillade of stones flying. The women scattered, screaming, but not before their homemade avalanche was in action. Below them, the phagors were obliterated.

  With this encouragement, the Driat horde fought the main Borlienese force in fiercer spirit, long-swords flashing in the front ranks, javelins being thrown from the rear. The confused body of men broke into struggling groups. Dust rose above the scene. Thuds, shouts, screams sounded.

  Bull viewed the scrimmage from his vantage point. He wanted to be down in the thick of it. He could see, intermittently, the gigantic figure of his major, running from group to group, encouraging, wielding his bloody sword without cease. He could also see into the mud fort on top of the mesa. The king had been mistaken. Warriors were hiding there among asokins.

  The tide of fighting surrounded the base of the mesa, except where the cliff fall covered the bodies of the phagors of the Second. Bull yelled to warn KolobEktofer of his danger, but nothing could be heard above the din of battle. Bull ordered his men to climb down the cliffside to the northwest and rejoin the struggle. He lowered himself down the cliff, slithering and falling until he fetched up on hands and knees on the path where the tribal hags had waited. A young woman, hit on the knee by a stone, lay close by. She drew a dagger and flung herself on Bull. He twisted her arm until it cracked and dragged her face down on the ground, kicking her weapon over the edge.

  “I’ll deal with you later, you strumpet,” he said.

  The women had left javelins behind in their flight. He picked one up and balanced it, looking towards the mesa. From this lower elevation, he could scarcely glimpse the backs of the men who crouched behind its walls. But one of them, watching through a slit, had sighted him. This man rose. He raised a mysterious weapon to his chest, the other end of which another man steadied over his shoulder.

  Tensing himself, Bull flung the javelin with all his might. It flew true at first, but dropped harmlessly outside the walls of the fort.