Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (40 page)

While Shay Tal fasted and became more solitary, Vry became full of a repressed energy and developed her friendship with Oyre. With Oyre, she talked over all that Master Datnil had said, and found a sympathetic listener. They agreed that there were puzzling riddles in history, yet Oyre was lightly sceptical.

‘Datnil Skar is old and a bit gaga – Father always says so,’ she said, and limped found the room in parody of the Master’s gait, exclaiming in a piping voice, ‘“Our corps is so exclusive we didn’t even let King Denniss join …”’

When Vry laughed, Oyre said, more seriously, ‘Master Datnil could be executed for showing his corps Master Book about – that’s proof he’s gaga.’

‘And even then he wouldn’t let us look at it properly.’ Vry was silent, and then burst out, ‘If only we could put all the facts together. Shay Tal just collects them, writes them down. There must be a way of making a – a structure from them. So much has been lost – Master Datnil is right there. The cold was so bitter, once on a time, that almost everything inflammable was burnt – wood, paper, all records. You realise
we don’t even know what year it is?
– Though the stars might tell us. Loil Bry’s calendar is stupid, calendars should be based on years, not people. People are so fallible … and so am I. Oh, I’ll go mad, I swear!’

Oyre burst out laughing and hugged Vry.

‘You’re the sanest person I know, you idiot.’ They fell to discussing the stars again, sitting on the bare floor close together. Oyre had been with Laintal Ay to look at the fresco in the old
temple. ‘The sentinels are clearly depicted, with Batalix above Freyr as usual, but almost touching, above Wutra’s head.’

‘Every year, the two suns get closer,’ Vry said, decisively. ‘Last month, they virtually touched as Batalix overtook Freyr, and no one paid any notice. Next year, they will collide. What then? … Or maybe one passes behind the other.’

‘Perhaps that’s what Master Datnil meant by a Blindness? It would suddenly be dimday, wouldn’t it, if one sentinel disappeared? Perhaps there will be Seven Blindnesses, as once before.’ She looked frightened, and moved nearer her friend. ‘It will be the end of the world. Wutra will appear, looking furious, of course.’

Vry laughed and jumped to her feet. ‘The world didn’t end last time and won’t do so this time. No, perhaps it will mark a new beginning.’ Her face became radiant. ‘That’s why the seasons are growing warmer. Once Shay Tal has done her ghastly pauk, we will tackle the question anew. I shall work at my mathematics. Let the Blindnesses come – I embrace them!’

They danced round the room, laughing wildly.

‘How I long for some great experience!’ Vry cried.

Shay Tal, meanwhile, showed more clearly than before the little bird bones below her flesh, and her dark skins hung more loosely about her body. Food was brought her by the women, but she would not eat.

‘Fasting suits my ravenous soul,’ she said, pacing about her chilly room, when Vry and Oyre remonstrated with her, and Amin Lim stood meekly by. ‘Tomorrow I will go into pauk. You three and Rol Sakil can be with me. I will dredge up ancient knowledge from the well of the past. Through the fessups I will reach to that generation which built our towers and corridors. I will descend centuries if necessary, and confront King Denniss himself.’

‘How wonderful!’ Amin Lim exclaimed.

Birds came to perch on her crumbling window sill and be fed the bread Shay Tal would not touch.

‘Don’t sink into the past, ma’am,’ Vry counselled her. ‘That’s the way of old men. Look ahead, look outward. There’s no profit in interrogating the dead.’

So unused to argument had Shay Tal grown that she had
difficulty in refraining from scolding her chief disciple. She looked and saw, almost with startlement, that the diffident young thing was now a woman. Her face was pallid, with shadows under her eyes, and Oyre’s the same.

‘Why are you two so pale? Are you ill?’

Vry shook her head.

‘Tonight there’s an hour of darkness before dimday. I’ll show you then what Oyre and I are doing. While the rest of the world was sleeping, we have been working.’

The evening was clear at Freyr-set. Warmth departed from the world as the younger women escorted Shay Tal up to the roof of the ruinous tower. A lens of ghost light stretched upwards from the horizon where Freyr had set, reaching halfway to zenith. There was little cloud to conceal the heavens; as their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the stars overhead flashed out in brilliance. In some quarters of the sky, the stars were relatively sparse, in others they hung in clusters. Overhead, trailing from one horizon to the other, was a broad, irregular band of light, where the stars were as thick as mist, and there occasional brilliances burned.

‘It’s the most magnificent sight in the world,’ Oyre said. ‘Don’t you think so, ma’am?’

Shay Tal said, ‘In the world below hang fessups like stars. They are the souls of the dead. Here you see the souls of the unborn. As above, so below.’

‘I think we have to look to an entirely different principle to explain the sky,’ Vry said firmly. ‘All motions here are regular. The stars advance about that bright star there, which we call the polar star.’ She pointed to a star high above their heads. ‘In the twenty-five hours of the day, the stars rotate once, rising in the east and setting in the west like the two sentinels. Doesn’t that prove they are similar to the two sentinels, only much farther from us?’

The young women showed Shay Tal the star map they were making, with the relative positions of stars marked on a vellum sheet. She evinced little interest, and said, ‘The stars cannot affect us as the gossies do. How does this hobby of yours advance knowledge? You’d do better to sleep at night.’

Vry sighed. ‘The sky is alive. It’s not a tomb, like the world below. Oyre and I have stood here and seen comets flaring, landing on the earth. And there are four bright stars that move differently from all the others, the wanderers, of which the old songs sing. Those wanderers sometimes double back in their passage across the sky. And one comes over very fast. We’ll see it presently. We think it’s close to us, and we call it Kaidaw, because of its speed.’

Shay Tal rubbed her hands together, looking apprehensively about.

‘Well, it’s cold up here.’

‘It’s colder still down below, where the gossies lie,’ Oyre retorted.

‘You keep a watch on your tongue, young woman. You’re no friend of the academy if you distract Vry from her proper work.’

Her face became cold and hawklike; she turned away quickly, as if to shield Oyre and Vry from its sight, and climbed back downstairs without further words.

‘Oh, I shall pay for this,’ Vry said. ‘I shall have to be extra humble to make up for this.’

‘You’re too humble, Vry, and she’s too haughty. Scumb her academy. She’s scared of the sky, like most people. That’s her trouble, sorceress or no sorceress. She puts up with stupid people like Amin Lim because they pander to her haughtiness.’

She clutched Vry with a sort of angry passion and began to list the stupidities of everyone she knew.

‘What upsets me is that we did not get the chance to make her look through our telescope,’ Vry said.

It was the telescope that had made the greatest difference to Vry’s astronomical interest. When Aoz Roon had become lord, and had gone to live in the big tower, Oyre had been free to grub through all kinds of decaying possessions stored there in trunks. The telescope had come to light tucked among moth-riddled clothes which fell to pieces at the touch. It was simply made – perhaps by the long-defunct glass-makers corps – being no more than a leather tube which held two lenses in place; but when turned upon the wandering stars, the telescope had the power to change Vry’s perceptions. For the wanderers showed distinct
discs. In that, they resembled the sentinels, though they did not emit light.

From this discovery, Vry and Oyre had concluded that the wanderers were near to the earth, and the stars far away – some very far. From trappers who worked by starlight they had the names of the wanderers: Ipocrene, Aganip, and Copaise. And there was the fast one they had named themselves, Kaidaw. Now they sought to prove that these were worlds like their own, possibly even with people in them.

Gazing at her friend, Vry saw only the general outlines of that beautiful face and powerful head, and recognised how much Oyre resembled Aoz Roon. Both Oyre and her father seemed so full of spirit – and Oyre had been born outside agreements. Vry wondered if by chance – by any remote chance – Oyre had been with a man, in the dark of a brassimip or elsewhere. Then she shut the naughty thought away and turned her gaze to the sky.

They stayed rather soberly on the top of their tower until Hour-Whistler sounded again. A few minutes later Kaidaw rose and sailed up to the zenith.

Earth Observation Station Avernus – Vry’s Kaidaw – hung high over Helliconia, while the continent of Campannlat turned beneath it. The station’s crew devoted most of their attention to the world below; but the other three planets of the binary system were also under constant surveillance by automatic instrumentation
.

On all four planets, temperatures were rising. Improvement overall was steady; only on the ground did anomalies register on tender flesh
.

Helliconia’s drama of generations in travail was set upon a stage sparsely structured by a few overriding circumstances. The planet’s year about Batalix – Star B to the scholars of the Avernus – took 480 days (the ‘small’ year). But Helliconia also had a Great Year, of which the people of Embruddock knew nothing in their present state. The Great Year was the time Star B, and its planets with it, took to make an orbit round Freyr, the Star A of the scholars
.

That Great Year took 1825 Helliconian ‘small’ years. Since one Helliconian small year was the equivalent of 1.42 terrestrial years, this meant a Great Year of 2592 terrestrial years – a period during which many generations flourished and departed from the scene
.

The Great Year represented an enormous elliptical journey. Helliconia was
slightly larger than Earth, with a mass 1.28 times Earth’s; in many respects, it was Earth’s sister planet. Yet on that elliptical journey across thousands of years, it became almost two planets – a frozen one at apastron, when farthest from Freyr, an overheated one at periastron, when nearest Freyr
.

Every small year, Helliconia drew nearer to Freyr. Spring was about to signify its arrival in spectacular fashion
.

Midway between the high stars in their courses and the fessups sinking slowly towards the original boulder, two women squatted one on either side of a bracken bed. The light in the shuttered room was dim enough to render them anonymous, giving them the aspect of two mourning figures set on either side of the prostrate figure on the couch. It could be determined only that one was plump and no longer youthful, and the other gripped by the desiccating processes of age.

Rol Sakil Den shook her grizzled head and looked down with lugubrious compassion on the figure before her.

‘Poor dear thing, she used to be so nice as a girl, she’s no right to torture herself as she does.’

‘She should have kept to her loaves, I say,’ said the other woman, to make herself agreeable.

‘Feel how thin she is. Feel her loins. No wonder she’s gone weird.’

Rol Sakil was herself as thin as a mummy, her frame eroded by arthritis. She had been midwife to the community before growing too old for such exertions. She still tended those in pauk. Now that Dol was off her hands, she hung on the fringes of the academy, always ready to criticise, rarely prepared to think.

‘She’s got so narrow she couldn’t bring forth a stick from that womb of hers, never mind a baby. Wombs have to be tended – they are the central part of a woman.’

‘She has much to look to beside babies,’ said Amin Lim.

‘Oh, I’ve as much respect for knowledge as the next person, but when knowledge gets in the way of the natural facilities of copulation, then knowledge should move over.’

‘As for that,’ Amin Lim said with some asperity, from the other side of the bed, ‘her natural facilities were set aback when your Dol settled herself in Aoz Roon’s bed. She feels deeply for him, as
who doesn’t? A presentable man, Aoz Roon, besides being Lord of Embruddock.’

Rol Sakil sniffed. ‘That’s no reason why she should go off intercourse entirely. She could always fill in time elsewhere, to keep herself in training. Besides,
he
won’t come round knocking at
her
door again, you mark my words. He’s got his hands full with our Dol.’

The old woman beckoned Amin Lim nearer to bestow a confidence and they put their heads together over the supine body of Shay Tal. ‘Dol always keeps him at it – both by inclination and policy. A course I’d recommend to any woman, you included, Amin Lim. I hazard you enjoy a length now and again – it ain’t human not to, at your age. You ask your man.’

‘Oh, I daresay there isn’t a woman as hasn’t fancied Aoz Roon, for all his tempers.’

Shay Tal sighed in her pauk. Rol Sakil took her hand in her own withered one and said, still using a confidential mode, ‘My Dol tells me as he mutters terribly in his sleep. I tell her that’s the sign of a guilty conscience.’

‘What’s he got to be guilty about, then?’ Amin Lim asked.

‘Now, then – there I could tell you a tale … That morning, after all the drinking and carrying on, I was about early, as of old. And as I went out, well wrapped against the cold of morning, I come on a body in the dark and I says to myself, “Why here’s some fool drunk out of his wits, lying asleep on the ground.” There he was, at the base of the big tower.’