Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (180 page)

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 understanding, 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!’

But she gave him a cold look, her eyes dark under her disordered hair. Collecting up her heavy skirt with one hand, she set
the other hand pale against her cheek and hastened from the chamber.

Next morning, after Toress Lahl had bathed and a slave woman had dressed her, Luterin took her before his mother and announced formally that he intended to marry her and not Insil Esikananzi. His mother wept and threatened – and in particular threatened the wrath of Luterin’s father – and finally retreated to her inner room.

‘We shall go for a ride,’ Luterin said coolly, strapping on his revolver and clipping a sling onto a short rifle. ‘I’ll show you the Great Wheel.’

‘Am I to ride behind you?’

He regarded her judiciously. ‘You heard what I said to my mother.’

‘I heard what you said to your mother. Nevertheless, at present I am not a free woman, and this is not Chalce.’

‘When we return, I will have the secretary issue you a declaration of your freedom. There are such things. Just now, I wish to be outside.’ He moved impatiently to the door, where two stablemen stood holding the reins of two yelk.

‘I’ll teach you the points of a yelk one day,’ he said, as they moved into the grounds. ‘These are a domestic breed – bred by my father, and his father before him.’

Once outside the grounds of the estate, they moved into the teeth of the wind. There was no more than a foot of snow underfoot. On either side of the track, striped markers stood, awaiting the time when the snow was deep.

To get to Kharnabhar, the peak, they had to pass the Esikananzi estates. The track then wound through a tall stand of caspiarns, the branches of which were fuzzy with frost. As they advanced, bells of differing voice told of Kharnabhar, as it emerged gradually from the cloud.

Everything here was bells, indoors and out. What had once had a function – to guard against the possibility of being lost in snow or fog – was now a fashion.

Toress Lahl reined her yelk and stared ahead, holding a cloaked arm up to her face to protect her mouth. Ahead lay the
village of Kharnabhar, the lodgings for pilgrims and the stalls on one side of the main track, the housing for those who worked with the Great Wheel on the other side. Most of the buildings had bells on their roofs, housed in cupolas, each with its distinctive tongue; they could be heard when the weather was too bad for them to be seen.

The track itself led uphill to the entrance to the Great Wheel. That entrance, almost legendary, had been adorned by the Architects with gigantic bird-faced oarsmen. It led into the depths of Mount Kharnabhar. The mount dominated the village.

Up the face of the mountain the buildings climbed, many of them chapels or mausoleums erected by pilgrims on this holiest of sites. Some of them stood boldly above the snow, perched on rock outcrops. Some were in ruins.

Shokerandit gestured largely ahead. ‘Of all this my father is in charge.’

He turned back to her. ‘Do you want to look more closely at the Wheel? They don’t take you in there by force. These days, you have to volunteer to get a place in the Wheel.’

As they moved forward, Toress Lahl said, ‘I somehow imagined that we should see a part of the Wheel from outside.’

‘It’s all inside the mountain. That’s the main idea. Darkness. Darkness bringing wisdom.’

‘I thought it was light brought wisdom.’

Jostling locals stared at their metamorphosed shapes. Some locals bore prominent goitres, a common malady in such mountainous inland regions. They superstitiously made the symbol of the circle as they moved towards the entrance of the Wheel with Shokerandit and Toress Lahl.

Nearer, they could see a little more: the great ramplike walls leading in from either side, as if to pour humanity down the gullet of the mountain. Above the entrance, protected from landslides by an apron, was a starkly carved scene embodying the symbolism of the Wheel. Oarsmen clad in ample garments rowed the Wheel across the sky, where could be recognised some of the zodiacal signs: the Boulder, the Old Pursuer, the Golden Ship. The stars sprang from the breast of an amazing maternal figure who stood to one side of the archway, beckoning the faithful to her.

Pilgrims, dwarfed by the statuary, knelt at the gateway, calling aloud the name of the Azoiaxic One.

She sighed. ‘It’s splendid, certainly.’

‘To you, it may be no more than splendid. To those of us who have grown up in the religion, it is our life, the mainspring that gives us confidence to face the vicissitudes of this life.’

Jumping lightly from his yelk’s back, he took hold of her saddle and said, looking up at her, ‘One day, if my father finds me fit enough, I may in my turn become Keeper of the Wheel. My brother was to have been heir to the role, but he died. I hope my chance will come.’