Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (114 page)

The ship sailed on. They left Persecution Bay. The four who had been stranded in the midst of the stampede lay below decks in a fever induced by exposure and the bites of the flies.

Through SartoriIrvrash’s delirious brain travelled the herd, ever on, covering the world. The reality of that mass presence would not go away, struggle against it as he would. It remained even when he recovered.

As soon as he was strong enough, he went without ceremony to talk to Odi Jeseratabhar. The Priest-Militant Admiral was pleased to see him. She greeted him in a friendly fashion and even extended a hand, which he took.

She sat in her bunk covered only by a red sheet, her fair hair wild about her shoulders. Out of uniform, she looked gaunter than ever, but more approachable.

‘All ships sailing long distances call in at Persecution Bay,’ she said. ‘They pick up new victuals, meat chiefly. The Priest-Sailors Guild contains few vegetarians. Fish. Seal. Crabs. I have seen the flambreg stampedes before. I should have been more alert. They draw me. What do you think of them?’

He had noticed this habit in her before. While weaving a spell of Sibish tenses about herself, she would suddenly break out with a question to disconcert the listener.

‘I never knew there were so many animals in the world …’

‘There are more than you can imagine. More than anyone can / should imagine. They live all around the skirts of the great ice cap, in the bleak Circumpolar lands. Millions of them. Millions and millions.’

She smiled in her excitement. He liked that. He realised how lonely he was when she smiled.

‘I assume they were migrating.’

‘Not that, to the best of my knowledge. They come down to the water, but do not stay. They travel at all times of the year, not just in spring. They may simply be driven by desperation. They have only one enemy.’

‘Wolves?’

‘Not wolves.’ She gave a wolflike grin, glad to have caught him out. ‘Flies. One fly in particular. That fly is as big as the top joint of my thumb. It has yellow stripes – you can’t mistake it. It lays its eggs in the skin of the wretched bovidae. When the larvae hatch, they burrow through the hide, enter the bloodstream, and eventually lie in pockets under the skin on the back. There the grubs grow big, in a sore the size of a large fruit, until eventually they burst out of their crater and fall to the ground to begin the life cycle again. Almost every flambreg we kill has such a parasite – often several.

‘I have seen individual animals run in torment till they dropped, or cast themselves off tall cliffs, to escape that yellow-striped fly.’

She regarded him benevolently, as if this account gave her some inward satisfaction.

‘Madame, I was shocked when your men shot a few cows on the shore. Yet it was nothing, I see now. Nothing.’

She nodded.

‘The flambreg are a force of nature. Endless. Endless. They make humanity appear as nothing. The estimated population of Sibornal is twenty-five million at present. There are many times – perhaps a thousand times – that number of flambreg on the continent. As many flambreg as there are trees. It is my belief that once all Helliconia consisted only of those cattle and those flies, ceaselessly coming and going throughout the continents, the bovidae perpetually suffering a torment they perpetually tried to escape.’

Before this vision, both parties fell silent. SartoriIrvrash returned to his cabin. But a few hours later, Odi Jeseratabhar sought him out. He was embarrassed to receive her in his stinking cubbyhole.

‘Did my talk of unlimited flambreg make you gloomy?’ There was coquetry in her question, surely.

‘On the contrary. I am delighted to meet with someone like you, so interested in the processes of this world. I wish they were more clearly understood.’

‘They are better understood in Sibornal than elsewhere.’ Then she decided to soften the boast by adding, ‘Perhaps because we experience more seasonal change than you do in Campannlat. You Borlienese can forget the Great Winter in Summer. One sometimes fears / fearing when alone that, if next Weyr-Winter becomes just a few degrees colder, then there will be no humans left. Only phagors, and the myriad mindless flambreg. Perhaps mankind is – a temporary accident.’

SartoriIrvrash contemplated her. She had brushed her hair free to her shoulders. ‘I have thought the same myself. I hate phagors, but they are more stable than we. Well, at least the fate of mankind is better than that of the ceaselessly driven flambreg. Though we certainly have our equivalents of the yellow-striped fly …’ He hesitated, wanted to hear more from her, to test her intelligence and sensibilities. ‘When I first saw the flambreg, I thought how closely they resembled ancipitals.’

‘Closely, in many respects. Well, my friend, you pass for learned. What do you make of that resemblance?’ She was testing him, as her pleasantly teasing manner indicated. By common consent, they sat down side by side on his bunk.

‘The Madis resemble us. So do Nondads and Others, though more remotely. There seems to be no family connection between humans and Madis, though Madi-human matings are sometimes fertile of offspring. Princess Simoda Tal is one such sport. I never heard that phagors mate with flambreg.’ He gave a dry laugh at his uncertainty.

‘Supposing that the genethlic divinities who shape us have made a family connection, as you call it, between humankind and Madikind? Would you then accept that there was a connection between flambreg and phagors?’

‘That would have to be determined by experiment.’ He was on the brink of explaining his breeding experiments in Matrassyl, then decided to reserve that topic for another time. ‘A genetic
relationship implies outward similarities. Phagors and flambreg have golden blood as a protection against cold …’

‘There is proof without experiment. I do not believe as most people do that every species is created separately by God the Azoiaxic.’ She lowered her voice as she said this. ‘I believe the boundaries blur with time, as the boundary between human and Madi will blur again when your JandolAnganol weds Simoda Tal. You see where I lead?’

Was she secretly an atheist, as he was? To SartoriIrvrash’s amazement, the thought gave him an erection. ‘Tell me.’

‘I have not heard of phagors and flambreg mating, that’s true. However, I have good reason to believe that once this world held nothing but flambreg and flies – both in countless and mindless millions. Through genetic change, ancipitals developed from flambreg. They’re a refined version. What do you think? Is it possible?’

He tried to match her manner of argument.

‘The similarities may be several, but they are mainly surface ones, apart from blood colour. You might as well say men and phagors are alike because both species talk. Phagors stand erect like us. They have their own cast of intelligence. Flambreg have nothing of the kind – unless galloping madly back and forth across a continent is intelligent.’

‘The phagorian ability to walk upright and use language came after the two bloodlines divided. Imagine that phagors developed from a group of flambreg which … which found an alternative to ceaseless flight as a way of dealing with the fly problem.’

They were gazing at each other with excitement. He longed to tell Odi of his discovery regarding hoxneys.

‘What alternative?’

‘Hiding in caves, for instance. Going underground. Free of the fly torment, they developed intelligence. Stood upright to see further and then had forefeet free to use tools. In the dark, language developed as a substitute for sight. I’ll show you my essay on the subject one day. Nobody else has seen it.’

He laughed to think of flambreg performing such tricks.

‘Not over one generation, dear friend. Over many. Endless generations. The cleverer ones would win. Don’t laugh.’ She
tapped his hand. ‘If this did not happen in past time, then let me ask you this. How is it that the gestation period for gillots is one Batalix-year – while the gestation period for a flambreg cow is exactly the same length of time? Doesn’t that prove a genetic relationship?’

Sailing on, the two ships passed the lowly ports of the southernmost coast of Loraj, which lay inside the tropics. From the port of Ijivibir, a caravel of 600 tons named the
Good Hope
sailed out to join the
Golden Friendship
and the
Union
. It made a brave sight, with its sails painted in vertical stripes. Cannon were fired from the flagship in greeting, and the sailors gave a cheer. On an empty ocean, three vessels were many more than two.

Another occasion was marked when they had reached the most westerly point of their course at a longitude of 29° East. The time was ten to twenty-five. Freyr was below the horizon, trawling an apricot glow above. The glow dissolving the horizon seemed to radiate from the hazy water. It marked the grave from which the great sun would presently rise. Somewhere concealed in that glow lay the sacred country of Shivenink; somewhere in Shivenink, high in the mountains that ran all the way from sea to North Pole, was the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar.

A bugle sounded All Hands. The three ships clustered. Prayers were said, music played, all stood to pray with finger to forehead.

Out of the apricot haze came a sail. By a trick of the light, it appeared and disappeared like a vision. Birds screamed about its masts, newly away from land.

It was an all-white ship, sails white, hull fresh with whitewash. As it drew nearer, firing a gun in salute, those aboard the other ships saw that it was a caravel, no bigger than the
Good Hope
; but on its mainsail stood the great hierogram representing the Wheel itself, inner and outer circles connected by wavy lines. This was the
Vajabhar Prayer
, named after Shivenink’s chief port.

The four ships tacked close, like four pigeons nestling together on a branch. A bark of orders from the Priest-Militant Admiral herself. Bowsprits turned, cordage creaked, artemons filled. The little fleet began to sail southwards.

Colours in the water changed to a deeper blue. The ships were
leaving the Pannoval Sea astern and entering the northern margins of the vast Climent Ocean. Immediately, they struck rough weather. They had a hard time of it, combatting mountainous seas and hazardous storms, in which they were bombarded by gigantic hailstones. For days, they saw neither sun.

When at last they reached calmer waters, Freyr’s zenith was lower than before, and Batalix’s somewhat higher. To port lay the cliffs of Campannlat’s westernmost redoubt, Cape Findowel. Once they had rounded Findowel they sailed into the nearest anchorage along the coast of the tropical continent, there to rest for two days. The carpenters repaired the storm damage, the members of the Priest-Sailors Guild stitched sails or else swam in a warm lagoon. So welcome was the sight of men and women disporting themselves naked in the water – the puritanical Sibornalese were curiously unprudish on this occasion – that even SartoriIrvrash ventured into the water in a pair of silken underpants.

When he rested afterwards on the beach, sheltering from the power of both suns, he watched the swimmers climb out one by one. Many of the
Good Hope
’s crew were women, and sturdily built. He sighed for his youth. Io Pasharatid climbed out beside him and said to him quietly, ‘If only that beautiful queen of queens were here, eh?’

‘What then?’ He kept watching the water, hoping that Odi would emerge naked.

Pasharatid dug him in the ribs in an un-Sibornalese way.

‘What then, you say? Why, then this seeming paradise would be paradise indeed.’

‘Do you suppose that this expedition can possibly conquer Borlien?’

‘Given the fortune of war, I’m sure of it. We are organised and armed, in a way JandolAnganol’s forces will never be.’

‘Why, then the queen will come under your supervision.’

‘That reflection had not escaped me. Why else do you think I have this sudden enthusiasm for war? I don’t want Ottassol, you old goat. I want Queen MyrdemInggala. And I intend to have her.’

A man was walking with a pack slung over one shoulder. He wore the tattered remains of a uniform. Both suns beat down on him. Streams of sweat ran down into his tunic. He walked blindly, rarely looking up.

He was traversing a destroyed area of jungle in the Chwart Heights in eastern Randonan. All round were blackened and broken stumps of trees, many still smouldering. On the few occasions when the man looked about him, he could see nothing but the trail and blackened landscape all round. Palls of grey smoke rose in the distance. It was possible that tropical heat had started the blaze. Or perhaps a spark from a matchlock had been the cause of the death of a million trees. For many tenners battles had been fought over the area. Now soldiers and cannon were gone, and the vegetation likewise.

Everything about the man’s posture expressed weariness and defeat. But he kept on. Once he faltered, when one of his shadows faded and disappeared. Black cloud, rolling up, had blotted out Freyr. A few minutes later, Batalix too was swallowed. Then the rain came down. The man bowed his head and continued to walk. There was nowhere he could shelter, nothing he could do but submit to nature.

The downpour continued, increasing in ferocity by sudden fits. The ashes hissed. More and more of the resources of the heavens were called in, like reserves being brought into a battle.