Helliconia Winter

by neetha Napew

  She cast a benevolent gaze on Luterin and said, "You will never have a woman to make you entirely happy. But there will be much happiness in the pursuit."

  Much more she said, but this was all Luterin could remember when he woke up.

  Toress Lahl lay beside him. Not only were her eyes shut: her whole countenance presented a closed appearance. A lock of hair lay across her face; she bit it, as recently she had bitten the fox tail to preserve her from the cold of the trail. She scarcely breathed. He recognised that she was in pauk.

  Finally she returned. She stared and looked at him almost without recognition.

  "You never visit those below?" she said in a small voice.

  "Never. We Shokerandits regard it as gross superstition."

  "Do you not wish to speak with your dead brother?"

  "No."

  After a silence, he clutched her hand and asked, "You have been communing with your husband again?"

  She nodded without speaking, knowing it was bitter to him. After a moment, she said, "Isn't this world we live in like an evil dream?"

  "Not if we live by our beliefs."

  She clung to him then and said, "But isn't it true that one day we shall grow old, and our bodies decay, and our wits fail? Isn't that true? What could be worse than that?"

  They made love again, this time more from fear than affection.

  After he had done the rounds of the estate the next day, and found everything quiet, he went to visit his mother.

  His mother's rooms were at the rear of the mansion. A young servant girl opened the door to him, and showed him into his mother's anteroom. There stood his mother, in characteristic pose, hands clasped tightly before her, head slightly on one side as she smiled quizzingly at him.

  He kissed her. As he did so, the familiar atmosphere that she carried round with her enveloped him. Something in her attitude and her gestures suggested an inward sorrow, even - he had often thought it - an illness of some kind: and yet an illness, a sorrow, so familiar that Lourna Shokerandit drew on them almost as a substitute for other marked characteristics.

  As she spoke gently to her son, not reproaching him for failing to come earlier, compassion rose in his heart. He saw how age had increased its tyranny upon her since their last meeting. Her cheeks and temples were more hollow, her skin more papery. He asked her what she had been doing with herself.

  She put out a hand and touched him with a small pressure, as if uncertain whether to draw him nearer or push him away.

  "We won't talk here. Your aunt would like to see you too."

  Lourna Shokerandit turned and led him into the small wood-panelled room within which much of her life was spent. Luterin remembered it from childhood. Lacking windows, its walls were covered with paintings of sunlit glades in sombre caspiarn forests. Here and there, lost among representations of foliage, women's faces gazed into the room from oval frames. Aunt Yaringa, the plump and emotional Yaringa, was sitting in a corner, embroidering, in a chair upholstered somewhat along her own lines.

  Yaringa jumped up and uttered loud soblike noises of welcome.

  "Home at last, you poor poor thing! What you must have been through..."

  Lourna Shokerandit lowered herself stiffly into a velvet-covered chair. She took her son's hand as he sat beside her. Yaringa perforce retreated to her padded corner.

  "It's happiness to see you back, Luterin. We had such fears for you, particularly when we heard what happened to Asperamanka's army."

  "My life was spared through a piece of good fortune. All our fellow countrymen were slain as they returned to Sibornal. It was an act of deep treachery."

  She looked down at her thin lap, where silences had a habit of nestling. Finally she said, without glancing up, "It is a shock to see you as you are. You have become so ... fat." She hesitated on the last word, in view of her sister's presence.

  "I survived the Fat Death and am in my winter suit, Mother. I like it and feel perfectly well."

  "It makes you look funny," said Yaringa, and was ignored.

  He told the ladies something of his adventures, concluding by saying, "And I owe my survival in great part to a woman called Toress Lahl, widow of a Borldoranian I killed in battle. She nursed me devotedly through the Fat Death."

  "From slaves, devotion is to be expected," said Lourna Shokerandit. "Have you been to see the Esikananzis yet? Insil will be eager to see you again, as you know."

  "I have not yet spoken to her. No."

  "I shall arrange a feast for tomorrow night, and Insil and her family shall come. We will all celebrate your return." She clapped her hands once, without sound.

  "I shall sing for you, Luterin," said Yaringa. It was her speciality.

  Lourna's expression changed. She sat more upright in her chair.

  "And Evanporil tells me that you are countermanding the new Act to destroy all phagors."

  "We could cull them gradually, Mother. But to lose all six hundred at once would be to disrupt the working of the estate. We are hardly likely to get six hundred human slaves to replace them - apart from the greater expense of human slaves."

  "We must obey the State."

  "I thought we would wait for Father's return."

  "Very well. Otherwise, you will comply with the law? It is important for us Shokerandits to set an example."

  "Of course."

  "I should tell you that a foreign female slave was arrested in your rooms this morning. We have her in a cell, and she will go before the local Board when they meet next."

  Shokerandit stood up. "Why was this done? Who dared intrude into my rooms?"

  With composure, his mother answered, "The servant you had ordered to attend the slave woman reported that she went into a state of pauk. Pauk is proscribed by law. No less a personage than Priest-Supreme Chubsalid has gone to the stake for refusing to comply with the law. Exception can hardly be made for a foreign slave woman."

  "In this case, an exception will be made," Shokerandit said, pale of face. "Excuse me." He bowed to his mother and aunt and left their rooms.

  In a fury, he stamped through the passages to the Estates Office. He relieved his anger by bellowing at the staff.

  As he summoned the estate guard captain, Shokerandit said to himself, Very well, I shall marry Toress Lahl. I must protect her from injustice. She'll be safe, married to a future Keeper of the Wheel... and perhaps this scare will persuade her not to visit the gossie of her husband so often.

  Toress Lahl was released from the cell without trouble and restored to Shokerandit's rooms. They embraced.

  "I bitterly regret this indignity imposed on you."

  "I have become used to indignity."

  "Then you shall become used to something better. When the right opportunity arises, I will take you to meet my mother. She will see the kind of person you are."

  Toress Lahl laughed. "I am sure that I shall not greatly impress the Shokerandits of Khamabhar."

  The feast to mark Luterin's return was well attended. His mother had shaken off her lethargy to invite all local dignitaries as well as such Shokerandit relations as were in favour.

  The Esikananzi family arrived in force. With Member Ebstok Esikananzi came his sickly-looking wife, two sons, his daughter Insil Esikananzi, and a train of subsidiary relations.

  Since Luterin and Insil had last met, she had developed into an attractive woman, though a heaviness in her brow prevented true beauty - as well as suggesting that tendency to meet fate head-on which had long been a quality of the Esikananzis. She was elegantly dressed in a grey velvet gown reaching to the floor, adorned by the sort of wide lace collar she favoured. Luterin noted how the formal politeness with which she covered her disgust at his metamorphosis studiedly emphasised that disgust.

  All the Esikananzis tinkled to a great extent; their hip-bells were very similar in tone. Ebstok's was the loudest. In a loud whisper, he spoke of his bottomless sorrow at the death of his son Umat at Isturiacha. Luterin's protest that Umat was killed i
n the great massacre outside Koriantura was swept aside as lies and Campannlatian propaganda.

  Member Ebstok Esikananzi was a thickset man of dark and intricate countenance. The cold endured on his frequent hunts had brought a maze of red veins creeping like a species of plant life over his cheeks. He watched the mouths, not the eyes, of those who addressed him.

  Member Ebstok Esikananzi was a man who believed in being unafraid to speak his mind, despite the fact that this organ, when spoken, had only one theme to sound: the importance of his opinion.

  As they demolished the maggoty fists of venison on their plates, Esikananzi said, addressing both Luterin and the rest of the table, "You'll have heard the news about our friend Priest-Supreme Chubsalid. Some of his followers are kicking up a bit of trouble here. Wretched man preached treason against the State. Your father and I used to go hunting with Chubsalid in better days. Did you know that, Luterin? Well, we did on one occasion.

  "The traitor was born in Bribahr, so you don't wonder.... He paid a visit to the monasteries of the Wheel. Now he takes it into his head to speak against the State, the friend and protector of the Church."

  "They have burnt him for it, Father, if that's any consolation," said one of the Esikananzi sons, with a laugh.

  "Of course. And his estates in Bribahr will be confiscated. I wonder who will get them? The Oligarchy will decide on what is best. The great thing is, as winter descends, to guard against anarchy. For Sibornal, the four main tasks are clear. To unify the continent, to strike rapidly against all subversive activity, whether in economic, religious, or academic life... "

  As the voice droned on, Luterin Shokerandit stared down at his plate. He was without appetite. His eventful time away from Shivenink had so widened his outlook on life that he was oppressed by the sight and sound of the Esikananzis, of whom he had once been in awe. The pattern of the plate before him penetrated his consciousness; with a wave of nostalgia, he realised that it was an Odim export, despatched from the warehouse in Koriantura in better times. He thought with affection of Eedap Mun Odim and his pleasant brother - and then, with guilt, of Toress Lahl, at present locked in his suite for safety. Looking up he caught Insil's cool gaze.

  "The Oligarchy will have to pay for the death of the Priest-Supreme," he said, "no less than for the slaughter of Asperamanka's army. Why should winter be an excuse for overturning all our human values? Excuse me."

  He rose and left the room.

  After the meal, his mother employed many reproaches in order to induce him to return to the company. Sheepishly, he went and sat with Insil and her family. They made stiff conversation until slaves brought in a phagor who had been taught to juggle. Under guidance from her master's whip, the gillot jiggled a little from one foot to another while balancing a plate on her horns.

  An ensemble of slaves appeared next, dancing while Yaringa Shokerandit did her party piece and sang love songs from the Autumn Palaces.

  If my heart were free,

  if my heart were free,

  And wild as the dashing Venj is ...

  "Are you being uncivil or merely soldierly?" Insil asked, under cover of the music. "Do you anticipate our marrying in a kind of dumb show?"

  He gazed at her familiar face, smiled at her familiar teasing tone. He admired the froth of lace and linen at shoulders and breasts, and observed how those breasts had developed since their last meeting.

  "What are your expectations, Insil?"

  "I expect we shall do what is expected of us, like creatures in a play. Isn't that necessary in times like these - when, as you tactfully reminded Pa, ordinary values are cast off like garments, in order to meet winter naked."

  "It's more a question of what we expect from ourselves. Barbarism may come, certainly, but we can defy it."

  "Word has it that in Campannlat, following the defeat you administered to their various savage nations, civil wars have broken out and civilisation is already crumbling. Such disturbances must be avoided here at all costs... Notice that I have taken to talking politics since we parted! Isn't that barbarism?"

  "No doubt you have had to listen to your father preaching about the perils of anarchy many times. It's only your neckline I find barbaric."

  When Insil laughed, her hair fell over her brow. "Luterin, I am not sorry to see you again, even in your present odd shape, disguised as a barrel. Let's talk somewhere privately while your relation sings her heart out about that horrible river."

  They excused themselves and went together to a chill rear chamber, where biogas flames hissed a continual cautionary note.

  "Now we can trade words, and let them be warmer than this room," she said. "Ugh, how I hate Kharnabhar. Why were you fool enough to come back here? Not for my sake, was it?" She gave him a look askance.

  He walked up and down in front of her. "You still have your old ways, Sil. You were my first torturer. Now I've found others. I am tormented - tormented by the evil of the Oligarchy. Tormented by the thought that the Weyr-Winter might be survived by a compassionate society, if men thought that way, not by a cruel and oppressive one like ours. Real evil - the Oligarch ordered the destruction of his own army. Yet I can also see that Sibornal must become a fortress, submitting to harsh rules, if it is not to be destroyed as Campannlat will be by the oncoming cold. Believe me, I am not my old childish self."

  Insil appeared to receive the speech without enthusiasm. She perched herself on a chair.

  "Well, you certainly don't look yourself, Luterin. I was disgusted at the sight of you. Only when you condescend to smile, when you are not sulking over your plate, does your old self reappear. But the size of you ... I hope my deformities remain inside me. Any measures, however harsh, against the plague, are justified if they spare us that." Her personal bell tinkled in emphasis, its sound calling up a fragment of the past for him.

  "The metamorphosis is not a deformity, Insil; it's a biological fact. Natural."

  "You know how I hate nature."

  "You're so squeamish."

  "Why are you so squeamish about the Oligarch's actions? They're all part of the same thing. Your morality is as boring as Pa's politics. Who cares if a few people and phagors are shot. Isn't life one big hunt anyway?"

  He stared at her, at her figure, slender and tense, as she clutched her arms against the chill of the room. Some of the affection he had once felt broke through. "Beholder, you still argue and riddle as before. I admire it, but could I bear it over a lifetime?"

  She laughed back. "Who knows what we shall be called upon to endure? A woman needs fatalism more than a man. A woman's role in life is to listen, and when I listen I never hear anything but the howl of the wind. I prefer the sound of my own voice."

  He touched her for the first time as he asked, "Then what do you want from life, if you can't even bear the sight of me?"

  She stood up, looking away from him. "I wish I were beautiful. I know I haven't got a face - just two profiles tacked together. Then I might escape fate, or at least find an interesting one."

  "You're interesting enough."

  Insil shook her head. "Sometimes I think I am dead." Her tone was unemphatic; she might have been describing a landscape. "I want nothing that I know of and many things I know nothing of. I hate my family, my house, this place. I'm cold, I'm hard, and I have no soul.

  "My soul flew out of the window one day, maybe when you were spending your year pretending to be dead... I'm boring and I'm bored. I believe in nothing. No one gives me anything because I can give nothing, receive nothing."

  Luterin was pained by her pain, but only that. As of old, he found himself at a loss with her. "You have given me much, Sil, ever since childhood."

  "I am frigid, too, I suspect. I cannot bear even to be kissed. Your pity I find contemptible." She turned away to say, as if the admission cost her dear, "As for the thought of making love with you as you are now... well, it repels me ... at least, it does not attract me at all."

  Although he had no great depth of human unde
rstanding, Luterin saw how her coldness to others was part of her habit of maligning herself. The habit was more ingrained than formerly. Perhaps she spoke truth: Insil was always one for truth.

  "I'm not requiring you to make love with me, dear Insil. There is someone else whom I love, and whom I intend to marry."

  She remained half turned from him, her narrow left cheek against the lace of her collar. She seemed to shrink. The wan gaslight made the skin at the nape of her neck glisten. A low groan came from her. When she could not suppress it by putting hands to mouth, she began to beat her fists against her thighs.

  "Insil!" He clutched her, alarmed.

  When she turned back to him, the protective mask of laughter was back on her face. "So, a surprise! I find that there was after all something I wanted, which I never expected to want.... But I'm too much of a handful for you, isn't that true?"

  "No, not that, not a negative."

  "Oh, yes... I've heard. The slave woman in your quarters... You want to marry a slave rather than a free woman, because you've grown like all the men here, you want someone you can possess without contradiction."

  "No, Insil, you're wrong. You're no free woman. You are the slave. I feel tenderly for you and always will, but you are imprisoned in your self."

  She laughed almost without scorn. "You now know what I am, do you? Always before you were so puzzled by me, so you said. Well, you are callous. You have to tell me this news without warning? Why did you not tell my father, as convention demands? You're a great respecter of convention."

  "I had to speak to you first."

  "Yes? And have you broken this exciting news to your mother? What of the liaison between the Shokerandits and the Esikananzis now? Have you forgotten that we shall probably be forced to marry when your father returns? You have your duty as I have mine, from which neither of us has so far flinched. But perhaps you have less courage than I. If that day comes when we are forced into the same bed, I will repay you for the injury you do me today."

  "What have I done, for the Beholder's sake? Are you mad because I share with you your lack of enthusiasm for our marriage? Speak sense, Insil!"