Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (188 page)

‘Insil!’ he cried into the twilight. ‘I shall be back!’

He did not work the next day, but watched the life-giving window being moved by others across the outer wall. On the following day, when again he refused to work, the window moved again and all but disappeared. Even the crack remaining was sufficient to spin an exquisite pearly luminosity into his confinement. When, on the fourth workday, even that vanished – presumably to charm the inmate of the following cell – he was disconsolate.

Now began a period of self-doubt. His longing to be free changed to a fear of what he would find. What would Insil have done with herself? Would she have left the place she hated?

And his mother. Perhaps she was dead by now. He resisted the impulse to sink into pauk and find out.

And Toress Lahl. Well, he had set her free. Perhaps she had made her way back to Borldoran.

And what of the political situation? Was the new Oligarch carrying out the old Oligarch’s edicts? Were phagors still being slain? What of the quarrel between Church and State?

He wondered how he would himself be treated when he emerged into the world. Perhaps a party of execution would await him. It was the old question, still unanswered over almost ten small years: was he saint or sinner? A hero or a criminal? Certainly he had forfeited any claim to the position of Keeper of the Wheel.

He began talking to an imagined woman, achieving an eloquence that was never his when he was face to face with anyone else.

‘What a maze life is to humans! It must be so much simpler to be a phagor. They aren’t tormented by doubt or hope. When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvellous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents’ limitations, meet a wonderful woman, and be capable of being wonderful to her.

‘At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility, in all the forests of conflicting opinion, there is a vital something that can be known – known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one’s true life – the point of everything – will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension.

‘But it isn’t like that at all. But if it isn’t, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us? All the years I’ve spent here – all the thought that’s gone by …’

He tugged mightily at each heavy chain that presented itself in that endless succession of chains. The days on the stone calendar dwindled. That impossible day would be upon him when he would be free again to move among other human beings. Whatever happened, he prayed to the Azoiaxic that he might make love to a woman again. In his imagination, Insil was no longer remote.

The wind blew from the north, carrying with it the taint of the permanent ice cap. Very few things could live within its breath. Even the tough leaves of the caspiarns furled themselves like sails against the trunks of the trees when the wind blew.

The valleys were filling with snow. The snow was packing down. Year by small year, the light grew less.

There was now a covered way to the small chapel of King JandolAnganol. It was roughly built of fallen branches, but it served to keep a path clear to the sunken door.

For the first time in many centuries, someone lived in the chapel. A woman and a small boy crouched over a stove in one corner. The woman kept the door locked, and screened the stove so that its light could not be seen from outside. She had no right to be here.

All round the chapel she had set traps which she found rusting in the vestry of the chapel. Small animals were caught in her traps, providing food enough. Only rarely did she dare show herself in the village of Kharnabhar, although she had a kind friend there who had established a store to sell fish brought up from the coast – for the old route she had once travelled was kept open, whatever the weather.

She taught her son to read. She drew the letters of the alphabet in the dust, or carried him to see the letters painted on the walls in various texts. She told him that the letters and words were pictures of ideal things, some of which existed or could exist, some of which should not exist. She tried to instil morality with his reading, but she also invented silly stories for him which made them both laugh.

When the child was asleep, she read to herself.

It was a perpetual source of wonder to her that the presiding presence in this building was a man from her own city of Oldorando. Their lives were united in a curious way, across miles and centuries. He had retreated to this place to be in seclusion and to do penance for his sins. Late in life, he had been joined by a strange woman from Dimariam, a distant country of Hespagorat. Both had left documents, through which she wandered by the hour. Sometimes she felt the king’s restless spirit by her side.

As the years passed, she told the story to her growing son.

‘This naughty King JandolAnganol did a great wrong in the country where your mother was born. He was a religious man, yet he killed his religion. It was a terrible paradox under which he found it hard to live. So he came to Kharnabhar and served in the
Wheel for the full ten small years, as now does the one who is your father.

‘JandolAnganol left two queens behind him to come here. He must have been very wicked, though the Sibornalese think him holy.

‘After he emerged from the Wheel, he was joined by the Dimariam woman I told you about. Like me, she was a doctor. Well, she seems to have been other things besides, including a trader of some sort. Her name was Immya Muntras, and she, feeling the call of religion, sought out the king. Perhaps she comforted his old age. She stood by him. That’s no ill thing.

‘Muntras possessed learning which she thought precious. See, here is where she wrote it all down, long ago, during the Great Summer, when people thought the world was going to end, just as they do now.

‘This lady Muntras had some information from a man who arrived in Oldorando from another world. It sounds strange, but I have seen so many amazing things in my life that I believe anything. Lady Muntras’s bones now lie in the antechapel, beside those of the king. Here are her papers.

‘What she learned from the man from another world concerned the nature of the plague. She was told by the strange man that the Fat Death was necessary, that it brought to those who survived a metamorphosis, a change in bodily metabolism which would enable them best to survive the winter. Without that metamorphosis, humans cannot hope to live through the heart of the Weyr-Winter.

‘The plague is carried by ticks which live on phagors and transfer to men and women. The bite of the tick gives you plague. The plague brings metamorphosis. So you see that man cannot survive the Weyr-Winter without phagors.

‘This knowledge the lady Muntras tried to teach in Kharnabhar, centuries past. Yet still they are killing phagors, and the State does everything in its power to keep the plague at bay. It would be better to improve medicine, so that more people who caught the plague could survive.’

So she used to talk, scanning her boy’s face in the semidarkness.

The boy listened. Then he went to play among the treasures left in the chests which had once belonged to the wicked king.

One evening, as he was playing and his mother reading by the firelight, there came a knocking at the door of the chapel.

Like the slow seasons, the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar always completed its revolutions.

For Luterin Shokerandit, the Wheel at last came full circle. The cell that had been his habitation returned to the opening. Only a wall 0.64 metres thick separated it from the cell ahead, into which a volunteer was even then stepping, to commence ten years in the darkness, rowing Helliconia towards the light.

There were guards waiting in the gloom. They helped him from his place of confinement. Instead of releasing him, they took him slowly up a winding side stair. The light grew steadily brighter; he closed his eyes and gasped.

They took him into a small room in the monastery of Bambekk. For a while he was left alone.

Two female slaves came, regarding him out of the corner of their eyes. They were followed by male slaves, bearing a bath and hot water, a silver looking glass, towels and shaving equipment, fresh clothes.

‘These are by courtesy of the Keeper of the Wheel,’ said one of the women. ‘ ’Tisn’t every wheeler gets this treatment, be sure of that.’

As the scent of hot water and herbs reached him, Luterin realised how he stank, how the methaney odours of the Wheel clung to him. He allowed the women to strip off his ragged furs. They led him to the bath. He lay glorying in the sensation as they washed his limbs. Every smallest event threatened to overwhelm him. He had been as if dead.

He was powdered and dried and dressed in the thick new clothes.

They led him to the window to peer out, although the light at first almost blinded him.

He was looking down on the village of Kharnabhar from a great height. He could see houses buried up to their roofs in snow. The only things that moved were a sledge pulled by three yelk and
two birds circling in the sky overhead, creating that eternal spectre of the wheel.

Visibility was good. A snowstorm was dying, and clouds blew away to the south, leaving pockets of undiluted blue sky. It was all too brilliant. He had to turn away, covering his eyes.

‘What’s the date?’ he asked one of the women.

‘Why, ’tis 1319, and tomorrow’s Myrkwyr. Now, how about having that beard cut off and looking a few thousand years younger?’

His beard had grown like a fungus in the dark. It was streaked with grey and hung to his navel.

‘Cut it off,’ he said. ‘I’m not yet twenty-four. I’m still young, aren’t I?’

‘I’ve certainly heard of people being older,’ said the woman, advancing with the scissors.

He was then to be taken before the Keeper of the Wheel.

‘This will be merely a formal audience,’ said the usher who escorted him through the labyrinth of the monastery. Luterin had little to say. The new impressions crowding in were almost more than he could receive; he could not help thinking how he had once regarded himself as destined to be Keeper.

He made no response when eventually he was left at one end of what seemed to him an immense chamber. The Keeper sat at the far end on a wooden throne, flanked by two boys in ecclesiastical garb. The dignitary beckoned Luterin to approach.

He stepped gingerly through the lighted space, awed by the number of paces it required to reach the dais.

The Keeper was an enormous man who had draped himself in a purple gown. His face seemed about to burst. Like his gown, it was purple, and mottled with veins climbing the cheeks and nose like vines. His eyes were watery, his mouth moist. Luterin had forgotten there were such faces, and studied it as an object of curiosity while it studied him.

‘Bow,’ hissed one of the attendant children, so he bowed.

The Keeper spoke in a throttled kind of voice. ‘You are back among us, Luterin Shokerandit. Throughout the last ten years, you have been under the Church’s care – otherwise you would
probably have been poisoned by your enemies, in revenge for your act of patricide.’

‘Who are my enemies?’

The watery eyes were squeezed between folds of lid. ‘Oh, the slayer of the Oligarch has enemies everywhere, official and unofficial. But they were mainly the Church’s enemies too. We shall continue to do what we can for you. There is a private feeling that … we owe you something.’ He laughed. ‘We could help you to leave Kharnabhar.’

‘I have no wish to leave Kharnabhar. It’s my home.’ The watery eyes watched his mouth rather than his eyes when he spoke.

‘You may change your mind. Now, you must report to the Master of Kharnabhar. Once, if you remember, the offices of Master and Keeper of the Wheel were combined. With the schism between Church and State, the two offices are separate.’

‘Sir, may I ask a question?’

‘Ask it.’

‘There’s much to understand … Does the Church hold me to be saint or sinner?’

The Keeper endeavoured to clear his throat. ‘The Church cannot condone patricide, so I suppose that officially you are a sinner. How could it be otherwise? You might have worked that out, I would have thought, during your ten years below … However, personally, speaking ex officio … I’d say you rid the world of a villain, and I regard you as a saint.’ He laughed.

So this must be an unofficial enemy, thought Luterin. He bowed, and turned to walk away when the Keeper called him back.

The Keeper heaved himself to his feet. ‘You don’t recognise me? I’m Wheel-Keeper Ebstok Esikananzi. Ebstok – an old friend. You once had hopes of marrying my daughter, Insil. As you see, I have risen to a post of distinction.’

‘If my father had lived, you would never have become Keeper.’

‘Who’s to blame for that? You be grateful that I’m grateful.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Luterin, and left the august presence, preoccupied by the remark regarding Insil.

He had no idea where he was supposed to go to report to the
Master of Kharnabhar. But Keeper Esikananzi had arranged everything. A liveried slave awaited Luterin with a sledge, with furs to protect him from the cold.

The speed of the sledge overwhelmed him, and the jingle of the animals’ harness bells. As soon as the vehicle started to move, he closed his eyes and held tight. There were voices like birds crying, and the song of the runners on the ice, reminding him of something – he knew not what.