Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (13 page)

Yuli went to Dravog’s office and collected the master key. He unlocked the cell door, took a fat lamp from a niche in the passage, and entered.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor in a pool of water. He was supporting his torso with his arms, so that the outline of his shoulder blades stuck painfully through his shirt. Head and cheek were bleeding.

He turned a sullen look at Yuli, then, without change of expression, let his head droop again.

Yuli looked down at the soaked and battered skull. Tormented, he squatted by the man, setting the lamp down on the filthy floor.

‘Scumb off, monk,’ the man growled.

‘I’ll help you if I can.’

‘You can’t help. Scumb it!’

They remained in the same positions, without moving or speaking, and water and blood mingled in the puddle.

‘Your name’s Usilk, I believe?’

No response. The thin countenance remained pointing down at the floor.

‘Is your father’s name Kyale? Living in Vakk?’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘I know – I knew him well. And your mother. She looked after me.’

‘You heard what I said …’ With a sudden burst of energy, the prisoner flung himself on Yuli, beating at him rather feebly. Yuli rolled over and disengaged himself, jumping up like an asokin. He was about to fling himself into the attack when he paused. With an effort of will, he controlled himself and pulled back. Without a word more, he collected the lamp and left the cell.

‘A dangerous one, that,’ Dravog said to him, permitting himself a sly grin at the priest’s expense, seeing his flustered appearance. Yuli retreated to the brothers’ chapel, and prayed in the dark to an unresponsive Akha.

There was a story Yuli had heard in Market, a story not unknown to the ecclesiastics in the Holies, about a certain worm.

The worm was sent by Wutra, wicked god of the skies. Wutra put the worm into the labyrinth of passages in Akha’s holy mountain. The worm is large and long, its girth being about equal to that of a passageway. It is slimy, and it slides along noiselessly in the dark. Only its breathing can be heard, issuing from its flabby lips. It eats people. They are safe one moment; the next, they hear the evil breathing, the rustle of long whiskers, and then they are swallowed.

A spiritual equivalent of Wutra’s worm was now at large in the labyrinths of Yuli’s thought. He could not prevent himself seeing, in the thin shoulders and blood of the prisoner, the gulf that lay between preachments and practice in Akha. It was not that the preachments were so pious, for mainly they were practical, stressing service; nor was it that life was so bad; what troubled him was that they were at odds.

There returned to his memory something that Father Sifans had said to him. ‘It is not goodness and holiness that lead a man to serve Akha. More often it is sin such as yours.’ Which implied that many among the priesthood were murderers and criminals – little
better than the prisoners. Yet they were set over the prisoners. They had power.

He went about his duties grimly. He smiled less than he had. He never felt happy working as a priest. The nights he spent in prayer, the days in thought – and in trying, when possible, to forge some sort of contact between himself and Usilk.

Usilk shunned him.

Finally, Yuli’s time in Punishment was completed. He entered a period of meditation before going to work with the Security Police. This branch of the militia had come under his notice while working in the cells, and he found within himself the ghost of a dangerous idea.

After only a few days in Security, Wutra’s worm became ever more active in his mind. His task was to see men beaten and interrogated and to administer a final blessing to them when they died. Grimmer and grimmer he became, until his superiors commended him and gave him cases of his own to handle.

The interrogations were simple, for there were few categories of crime. People cheated or stole or spoke heresy. Or they went to places that were forbidden or plotted revolution – the crime that had been Usilk’s. Some even tried to escape to Wutra’s realm, under the skies. It was now that Yuli realised that a land of illness gripped the dark world; everyone in authority suspected revolution. The illness bred in the darkness, and accounted for the numerous petty laws that governed life in Pannoval. Including the priesthood, the settlement numbered almost six and three quarter thousand people, every one of whom was forced into a guild or order. Every living, guild, order, dormitory, was infiltrated by spies, who themselves were not trusted, and also had an infiltrated guild of their own. The dark bred distrust, and some of its victims paraded, hangdog, before Brother Yuli.

Although he loathed himself for it, Yuli found he was good at the work. He felt enough sympathy to lower his victim’s guard, enough destructive rage to tear the truth out. Despite himself, he developed a professional’s taste for the job. Only when he felt secure did he have Usilk brought before him.

At the end of each day’s duty, a service was held in the cavern called Lathorn. Attendance was compulsory for the priesthood,
optional for any of the militia who wished to attend. The acoustics of Lathorn were excellent: choir and musicians filled the dark air with swelling veins of music. Yuli had recently taken up a musical instrument. He was becoming expert on the fluggel, a bronze instrument no bigger than his hand, which he at first despised, seeing other musicians play enormous peetes, vrachs, baranboims, and double-clows. But the tiny fluggel could turn his breath into a note that flew as high as a childrim, soaring up to the clouded roof of Lathorn above all conspiring melody. With it, Yuli’s spirit also flew, to the traditional strains of ‘Caparisoned’, ‘In His Penumbra’, and, his favourite, the richly counterpointed ‘Oldorando’.

One evening, after service, Yuli left Lathorn with an acquaintance, a shriven fellow priest by the name of Bervin, and they walked together through the tomblike avenues of the Holies, to run their fingers over new carvings even then being created by the three Brothers Kilandar. It chanced that they encountered Father Sifans, also strolling, reciting a litany to himself in a nervous undertone. They greeted each other cordially. Bervin politely excused himself, so that Yuli and Father Sifans could parade and talk together.

‘I don’t enjoy my feelings about my day’s work, Father. I was glad of the service.’

As was his fashion, Sifans responded to this only obliquely.

‘I hear marvellous reports of your work, Brother Yuli. You will have to seek further advancement. When you do, I will help you.’

‘You are kind, Father. I recall what you told me’ – he lowered his voice – ‘about the Keepers. An organisation for which one can volunteer, you said?’

‘No, I said one could only be elected to the Keepers.’

‘How could I put my name forward?’

‘Akha will aid you when it is necessary.’ He sniffed with laughter. ‘Now you are one of us, I wonder … have you heard a whisper of an order above even the Keepers?’

‘No, Father. You know I don’t listen to whispers.’

‘Hah, you should. Whispers are a blind man’s sight. But if you are so virtuous, then I will say nothing of the Takers.’

‘The Takers? Who are they?’

‘No, no, don’t worry, I will say not a word. Why should you
bother your head with secret organisations or tales of hidden lakes, free of ice? Such things may be lies, after all. Legends, like Wutra’s worm.’

Yuli laughed. ‘Very well, Father, you have worked me up to sufficient interest. You can tell me everything.’

Sifans made tsking noises with his thin lips. He slowed his step, and sidled into an alcove.

‘Since you force me. Very regrettable … You may remember how the rabble lives in Vakk, its rooms all a huddle, one on top the next, without order. Suppose this mountain range in which Pannoval lives is like Vakk – better, like a body with various interconnected parts, spleen, lungs, vitals, heart. Suppose there are caverns just as large as ours above us and below us. It’s not possible is it?’

‘No.’

‘I’m saying it is possible. It’s a hypothesis. Let us say that somewhere beyond Twink there exists a waterfall, falling from a cavern above ours. And that waterfall falls to a level below ours, some way below. Water plays where it will. Let us say that it falls into a lake, the waters of which are pure and too warm for ice to form on them … Let us imagine that in that desirable and secure place live the most favoured, the most powerful, the Takers. They take everything of the best, the knowledge and the power, and treasure it for us there, until the day of Akha’s victory.’

‘And keep those things from
us
…’

‘What’s that? Fillips, I missed what you said, Brother. Well, it’s just an amusing story I tell you.’

‘And does one have to be elected to the Takers?’

The father made little clicking noises with his tongue. ‘Who could penetrate such privilege, supposing it existed? No, my boy, one would have to be born to it – a number of powerful families, with beautiful women to keep them warm, and perhaps secret ways to come and go, even beyond Akha’s domains … No, it would need – why, it would need a revolution to get near such a hypothetical place.’

He stuck his nose in the air and giggled.

‘Father, you tease the poor simple priests below you.’

The old priest’s head went to one side, judicially. ‘Poor you are,
my young friend, and will most like remain so. Simple you are not – and that is why you will always make a flawed priest, as long as you continue. That is why I love you.’

They parted. The priest’s declaration troubled Yuli. Yes, he was a flawed priest, as Sifans said. A music lover, nothing more.

He washed his face in icy water as his thoughts burned. All these hierarchies of priesthoods – if they existed – led only to power. They did not lead to Akha. Faith never explained precisely, with a verbal precision to rival the precision of music, how devotion could move a stone effigy; the words of faith led only to a foggy obscurity called holiness. The realisation was as rough as the towel on which he dried his cheeks.

Lying in the dormitory far from sleep, he saw how old Sifans’ life had been stripped from the old man, real love had been starved from him, until he was left only with teasing ghosts of affection. He did not really care – had perhaps ceased to care a while ago – whether those beneath him had faith or not. His hints and riddles expressed a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with his own life.

In sudden fear, Yuli told himself that it would be better to die a man in the wilderness than a dry mouth here in the shadowy safeties of Pannoval. Even if it meant leaving behind his fluggel and the strains of ‘Oldorando’.

The fear made him sit up, casting off his blanket. Dark winds, the restless inhabitants of the dormitory, blew about his head. He shivered.

With a kind of exultation matching the exultation he had experienced on entering Reck long ago, he whispered aloud, ‘I don’t believe, I believe nothing.’

Power over others he believed. He saw it in action every day. But that was purely human. Perhaps he had actually ceased to believe in other than human oppression during that ritual in State, when men had allowed a hated phagor to bite the words from young Naab’s throat. Perhaps Naab’s words might still triumph, and the priests reform themselves until their lives held meaning. Words, priests – they were actual. It was Akha that was nothing.

Into the moving dark he whispered the words, ‘Akha, you are nothing!’

He did not die, and the winds still rustled in his hair.

He jumped up and ran. Fingers unwinding the wall-scroll, he ran and ran until he was exhausted, and his fingertips raw. He turned back, panting. Power he wanted, not subjection.

The war in his mind was stilled. He returned to his blanket. Tomorrow, he would act. No more priests.

Dozing, he started up once again. He was back on a frozen hillside. His father had left him, taken by the phagors, and he flung his father’s spear contemptuously into a bush. He recalled it, recalled the movement of his arm, the hiss of the spear as it embedded itself among the tattered branches, the knife-sharp air in his lungs.

Why did he suddenly recollect that insignificant detail?

Since he had no powers of self-analysis, the question remained unanswered as he drifted into sleep.

The morrow was the last day of his interrogation of Usilk; interrogations were permitted for only six days consecutively, then the victim was allowed to rest. Rules in this respect were strict, and the militia kept a suspicious eye on the priesthood in all these matters.

Usilk had said nothing useful, and was unresponsive alike to beating and cajolery.

He stood before Yuli, who was seated on an inquisitorial chair carved elaborately from a solid chunk of timber; it served to emphasise the difference between the state of the two men, Yuli outwardly at ease, Usilk half-starved, ragged, shoulders bowed, face wan and without expression.

‘We know that you were approached by men who threaten the security of Pannoval. All we wish is their names and then you can go free, back to Vakk.’

‘I did not know them. It was a word in the crowd.’

Both question and answer had become conventional.

Yuli rose from his chair and walked round the prisoner, giving no sign of his emotions.