Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (5 page)

The last of the phagors marched past the ledge. They did not walk at the rear, either from respect for the low-bellied carnivores or because the going was difficult over such trampled ground, piled with scumble.

And now Alehaw rose, motioning his son to do likewise. They stood, clutching their weapons, and then slithered down to level ground.

‘Good!’ said Alehaw.

The snow was strewn with dead animals, in particular round the banks of the Vark. The break in the ice was plugged with drowned bodies. Many of those creatures who had been forced to lie down where they stood had frozen to death as they rested, and
were now turned to ice. The lumps of which they composed the red core were unrecognisable in shape after the blizzard.

Delighted to be able to move, young Yuli ran and jumped and cried aloud. Dashing to the frozen river, he skipped dangerously from one unidentifiable lump to another, waving his hands and laughing. His father called him sharply to heel.

Alehaw pointed down through the ice. Black shapes moved, obscurely seen, partly defined by trails of bubbles. They streaked the turbid medium in which they swam with crimson, boring up beneath the frozen layers to attack the banquet provided for their benefit.

Other predators were arriving by air, large white fowl coming in from the east and the sullen north, fluttering heavily down, brandishing ornate beaks with which they bored through the ice to the flesh underneath. As they devoured, they fixed on the hunter and his son eyes heavy with avian calculation.

But Alehaw wasted no time on them. Directing Yuli to follow, he moved to where the herd had stumbled across fallen trees, calling and waving his spear as he went, to frighten off predators. Here dead animals were readily accessible. Although badly trampled, they still preserved one part of their anatomies intact, their skulls. It was to these that Alehaw addressed his attention. He prised open the dead jaws with the blade of a knife, and adroitly cut out their thick tongues. Blood spilled over his wrists onto the snow.

Meanwhile, Yuli climbed among the tree trunks, collecting broken wood. He kicked the snow away from one fallen trunk, contriving a sheltered place in which he could make a small fire. Wrapping his bowstring round a pointed stick, he rubbed it to and fro. The crumbled wood smouldered. He blew gently. A tiny flame sprang up, as he had seen it do often under the magical breath of Onesa. When the fire was burning well, he set his bronze pot on it, and piled snow in to melt, adding salt from a leather pocket he carried in his furs. He was ready when his father brought seven slimy tongues in his arms, and slipped them into the pot.

Four of the tongues were for Alehaw, three for Yuli. They ate with grunts of satisfaction; Yuli trying to catch his father’s eye and
smile, to show satisfaction; but Alehaw kept his brows knit as he chewed, and his gaze down at the trampled ground.

There was work still to be done. Even before they had finished eating, Alehaw got to his feet and kicked the smouldering embers aside. The scavenger birds nearby rose momentarily, and then settled again to their feast. Yuli emptied the bronze pot and secured it to his belt.

They were almost at the place where the great herd of animals reached the western limit of its migration. Here, on higher ground, they would seek out lichen under the snow, and graze on the strands of shaggy green moss that wrapped the larch forests about. Here, too, on a low plateau, some of the animals would reach their due term and bring forth their young. It was to this plateau, no more than a mile off, that Alehaw and his son made their way through the grey daylight. In the distance, they saw groups of other hunters, heading in the same direction; each group deliberately ignored the others. No other group consisted of two people only, Yuli noted; that was the penalty his family paid for being not of the plain, but of the Barrier. For them, everything was more arduous.

They walked bent double, up the incline. The way was strewn with boulders, where an ancient sea had once withdrawn in the face of encroaching cold – but of that aspect of affairs they knew and cared nothing; only the present was of importance to Alehaw and his son.

On the lip of the plateau they stood, shielding their eyes against biting cold in order to peer forward. Most of the herd had disappeared. All that remained of its still active numbers were occasional swarms of flying insects and the pungent smell. It had left behind on the plateau those of its members who were propagating.

Among these fated individuals were not only yelk but the flimsier gunnadu and the bulky bodies of giant biyelk. They lay inert, covering a wide area, dead or almost dead, sometimes with sides heaving. Another party of hunters was moving closer among the dying animals. Grunting, Alehaw gestured to one side, and he and Yuli moved over in the direction of a broken cluster of pines, near which a few yelk lay. Yuli stood over one to watch his father
kill the helpless beast, already labouring its way into the grey world of eternity.

Like its monstrous cousin, the biyelk, and the gunnadu, the yelk was a necrogene, giving birth only through its death. The animals were hermaphrodite, sometimes male, sometimes female. They were too crudely designed to have within them the apparatus of mammals such as ovaries and wombs. After mating, the spurted sperm developed within the warm interior into small maggotlike forms, which grew as they devoured the stomach of their maternal host.

A time came when the maggot-yelk reached a main artery. It could then spread in its numbers like seed in the wind throughout the host animal, causing death within a short while. This event occurred unfailingly when the great herds reached the plateau at the western limit of their range. So it had done throughout ages that no one could count.

Even while Alehaw and Yuli stood over the beast, its stomach collapsed like an old bag. It threw up its head and died. Alehaw plunged in his spear, in ceremonial fashion. Both men dropped to their knees in the snow, and with their daggers ripped up the belly of the animal.

The maggot-yelk were within, no bigger than a fingernail – almost too small to see but collectively delicious to taste, and highly nourishing. They would help Onesa in her illness. They died on exposure to the freezing air.

Left to themselves, the maggot-yelk would live in safety inside the skins of their hosts. Within their little dark universe, they would not hesitate to devour each other, and many were the bloody battles fought in aorta and mesenteric arteries. The survivors grew through successive metamorphoses, increasing in size as they decreased in numbers. At length, two or possibly three small rapid-moving yelks would emerge from throat or anus, to face the starveling world outside. And this emergence would be achieved just in time to avoid death by trampling, as the herds moved slowly into position on the plateau for their return migration northeastwards towards far Chalce.

Dotted over the plateau, among the animals simultaneously procreating and dying, stood thick stone pillars. The pillars had
been set there by an earlier race of men. On each pillar was carved a simple device: a circle or a wheel with a smaller circle at its centre. From the centre circle, two opposed curved spokes radiated to the outer one. Nobody present on the sea-sculpted plateau, animal or hunter, attended to these decorated pillars in the least degree.

Yuli was engrossed with their catch. He tore off strips of hide, weaving them crudely into a bag, into which he scraped the dying maggot-yelk. Meanwhile his father was dissecting the carcass. Every bit of the dead body could be utilised. From the longest bones, a sledge would be built, lashed together with strips of hide. Horns would serve as runners, to ease their having to pull the sledge all the way home. For by then the little carriage would be loaded high with good solid joints of shoulder and rib and rump, covered over with the rest of the skin.

Both worked together, grunting with effort, their hands red, breath in a cloud above their heads where midges gathered unnoticed.

Suddenly, Alehaw gave a terrible cry, fell backwards, tried to run.

Yuli looked round in dismay. Three great white phagors had crept from a place of concealment among the pines, and stood over them. Two sprang on Alehaw as he got up, and clubbed him to the snow. The other struck out at Yuli. He rolled aside, yelling.

They had completely forgotten about the dangers of phagors, and had neglected to keep any watch. As he rolled and sprang and avoided the swinging club, Yuli saw the other hunters nearby, working calmly on the dying yelk just as he and his father had been doing. So determined were they to get on with the work, to build their sledges and be off – so near was starvation – that they continued about their business, glancing up at the fight only now and again. The story would have been different had they been kin of Alehaw and Yuli. But these were plainsmen, squat unfriendly men. Yuli yelled to them for help, without avail. One man nearby hurled a bloody bone at the phagors. That was all.

Dodging the swinging cudgel, Yuli started to run, slipped, and fell. Up thundered the phagor. Yuli fell into an instinctive defensive pose, resting on one knee. As the phagor dived at him, he
brought up his dagger in an underarm movement and sank it into the broad gut of his attacker. He watched with shocked amazement his arm disappear into stringy stiff pelage and that coat immediately belch into thick gold gore gushing everywhere. Then the body smote him, and he went rolling – rolling then by volition, rolling out of harm’s way, rolling into what shelter offered itself, rolling panting behind an upthrust shoulder of dead yelk, from where he looked out on a world suddenly turned enemy.

His assailant had fallen. Now he picked himself up, nursing that golden patch in his gut with enormous horned paws, and staggering mindlessly, crying ‘Aoh, aoh, aohhh, aohhhh …’ He fell head first and did not move again.

Behind the fallen body, Alehaw had been beaten to the ground. He lay crumpled, but the two phagors immediately seized him and one of them arranged him over his shoulders. The pair looked about, stared back at their fallen comrade, glanced at each other, grunted, turned their backs on Yuli, and began to march away.

Yuli stood up. He found his legs, bound inside his fur trousers, were shaking. He had no idea what to do. Distractedly, he skirted the body of the phagor he had killed – how he would boast of that to his mother and uncles – and ran back to the scene of the scuffle. He picked up his spear and then, after some hesitation, took his father’s spear as well. Then he set off to follow the phagors.

They were trudging ahead, making heavy weather of getting uphill with their burden. They soon sensed the boy following them, and turned now and again, halfheartedly trying to drive him off with threats and gestures. Evidently they did not think him worth expending a spear on.

When Alehaw recovered consciousness, the two phagors stopped, set him on his feet, and made him walk between them, encouraging him with blows. Uttering a series of whistles, Yuli let his father know that he was nearby; but whenever the older man ventured to look over his shoulder, he received a clout from one of the phagors that sent him reeling.

The phagors slowly caught up with another party of their own kind, consisting of a female and two males; one of the latter was
old and walked with a stick as tall as himself, on which he leaned heavily in his progress uphill. Every now and again, he stumbled in the piles of yelk droppings.

Eventually, the scatters of scumble appeared no more, and the smell died from their nostrils. They were moving along an upward path the migratory herd had not taken. The winds had dropped, and spruce trees grew on the slope. There were now several knots of phagors climbing up the hillside, many of them bowed beneath carcasses of yelk. And behind them trailed a nine-year-old human being, fear in his heart, trying to keep his father in sight.

The air grew thick and heavy, as if under enchantment. The pace was slower, the larches closer, and the phagors were forced to bunch more closely. Their rough song, scraped across their horny tongues, sounded loudly, a hum that on occasions rose to a scalding crescendo and then died again. Yuli was terrified, and fell further behind, darting from tree to tree.

He could not understand why Alehaw did not break from his captors and run back downhill; then he could grasp his spear again, and together the two of them would stand side by side and kill all the shaggy phagors. Instead, his father remained captive, and now his slighter figure was lost among the crowding figures in the twilight under the trees.

The humming song rose harshly and died. A smokey greenish light glowed ahead, promising a new crisis. Yuli sneaked forward, running doubled up to the next tree. Some kind of building stood ahead, fronted by a double gate, which opened slightly. Within, the faint fire showed. The phagors were shouting, and the gate opened more. They began to crowd in. The light was revealed as a brand, which one of their kind held aloft.

‘Father, Father!’ screamed Yuli. ‘Run, Father! I’m here.’

There was no answer. In the murk, which the torch further confused, it was impossible to see whether or not Alehaw had already been pushed inside the gate. One or two phagors turned indifferently at the shouts, and shooed Yuli away without animosity.

‘Go and zzhout at the wind!’ one cried in Olonets. They wanted only full-grown human slaves.

The last burly figure entered the building. Amid more shouting,
the gates closed. Yuli ran to them crying, banging against their rough wood as he heard a bolt being shot home on the other side. He stood there for a long while with his forehead against the grain, unable to accept what had happened.