Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (62 page)

Imagination functioned; the virus was merely a function
.

The two yelk trotted at a brisk rate, necks held horizontally. Their nostrils dilated, for they had been trotting for some while. Sweat shone on their flanks.

Their two riders wore high turn-down boots and long cloaks made of a grey cloth. Their faces were keen and grey, tufted with small beards on their chins. Nobody would have mistaken them for anything but Sibornalans.

The pebbly path they rode was shadowed by a shoulder of mountain. The regular
plud-plud-plud
of the yelk’s hoofs carried out over an expanse of wilderness threaded with trees and rivers.

The men were scouts belonging to the forces of the warrior-priest, Festibariyatid. They enjoyed their ride, breathing the fresh
air, rarely exchanging words, and always keeping a sharp eye for enemies.

Behind them down the trail other Sibornalans followed on foot, leading a group of captured protognostics.

The trail wound down to a river, beyond which the land rose in a rocky promontory. Its sloping cliffs were formed of broken rock strata, displaced almost vertically and studded with stubby trees. Here was the settlement ruled over by Festibariyatid.

The scouts forded the river at a shallow place. Assaying the cliffs, the yelk picked their way cautiously between the strata; they were northern plains animals, and not entirely happy in mountainous ground. They, and others like them, had been brought south with the annual incursion of colonists from the northern continent into Chalce and the regions bordering on Pannoval; hence the presence of yelk so far south.

The rear guard appeared along the trail. Its four members were armed with spears and escorted in their midst some luckless protognostics captured during their patrol. Among the captives, Cathkaarnit-he and Cathkaarnit-she plodded along, still scratching themselves despite weeks as prisoners on the move.

Encouraged by spear point, they waded across the shallow river and were forced to make their way up the cliff path, to the confines of which a scent of yelk still clung, past a sentry, and so to a settlement called New Ashkitosh.

To this ford, and to this perilous point, many weeks later, came Laintal Ay. He was a Laintal Ay that few even of his close friends would have recognised without hesitation. He had lost a third of his body weight, and was lean, skeletal even, with paler skin, with a different expression to his eyes. In particular – the finest of disguises because transparent – he moved his body in a new way. He had suffered and survived bone fever.

On leaving Oldorando, he had struck out to the northeast, across what was later known as Roon’s Moor, in the direction that Shay Tal and her cortege had taken. He wandered and lost the trail. The country he had known in his extreme youth, when it was covered in white and showed an open face to the skies, had disappeared under a tangle of green.

What had been a solitude was now populated with danger. He
was aware of restless movement, not only of harried animals, but of human, semihuman, and ancipital beings, all stirred up by the tide of the seasons. Hostile young faces peered through the bush at every turn. Every shrub had ears as well as leaves.

Gold was nervous in forest. Hoxneys were creatures of the wide open spaces. She grew more and more stubborn, until Laintal Ay dismounted, grumbling, and led the animal.

He found himself at last by a stone tower, to which he had climbed through a seemingly endless forest of birch and fern. He tied Gold to a tree before reconnoitring. All was quiet. He entered the hollow tower, where he rested, feeling ill. When he climbed to the top, he recognised his surroundings; the tower was one he had visited in his carefree wanderings, looking out to bare horizons.

Full of vexation and fatigue, he left the tower. He sank down wearily, stretched, and found himself unable to bring his arms down. Cramps racked him, a fever took him like a blow, and he arched over backwards in delirium, as if he planned to break his spine.

Small dark men and women emerged from hiding and regarded him, creeping stealthily nearer. They were protognostics of the Nondad tribe, hairy creatures who stood no higher than Laintal Ay’s waist. Their hands were eight-fingered, but concealed largely by the thick sandy hair that grew like cuffs from their wrists. Their faces resembled asokins, protruding muzzles giving them the same rather wistful appearance as the Madis.

Their language was a mingling of snorts, whistles, and clicks, in no way resembling Olonets, although a few transfusions from the old language had taken place. They consulted themselves, and finally decided to bear the Freyrian away, since his personal octave was good.

A line of proud rajabarals grew on the ridge behind the tower, their boles concealed by the stands of birch. At the base of one such tree, the Nondads entered their earth, dragging Laintal Ay with them, snorting and chuckling at their own difficulty. Gold snorted and plunged at the rein to no avail – her master disappeared.

Among the roots of the great tree, the Nondads had their safe
home. This was the Eighty Darknesses. They slept on beds of bracken, to ward off the rodents who shared the earth with them.

Their activities were dictated by custom. It was a custom to select kings and warriors at birth, to rule over and protect them. These rulers were trained to fierceness, and savage battles to the death took place among the Eighty Darknesses. But the kings served as surrogates for the rest of the tribe, acting out their innate violence, so the rank and file of the Eighty Darknesses were meek and loving, clinging close to each other without much sense of personal identity. Their impulse was always to husband life; Laintal Ay’s life was husbanded, although they would have devoured him down to the last phalange had he died. That was custom.

One of the females became snoktruix to Laintal Ay, lying against him, caressing and stroking him, sucking his fevers. His deliriums became choked with animals, small as mice, large as mountains. When he woke into the dark, it was to find he had an alien companion close as life, who would do anything to save him and make him whole. Feeling himself to be a gossie, he yielded ardently to this new mode of being, in which heaven and hell delivered themselves in the same embrace.

As far as he could ever understand the word, snoktruix meant a kind of healer: also stealer, dealer, and, above all, feeler.

He lay in the dark in convulsion, limbs contorted, sweating away his substance. The virus raged uncontrollably, forcing him through the terrible eye of Shiva’s needle. He became a landscape of sinew, over which the armies of pain battled. Yet the mysterious snoktruix was there, giving of her presence; he was not entirely in isolation. Her gift was healing.

In time, the armies of pain retreated. The voices in the Eighty Darknesses gradually made themselves intelligible, and he began dimly to comprehend what had happened to him. The extraordinary language of the Nondads had no words for food, drink, love, hunger, cold, warmth, hate, hope, despair, hurt, though it seemed that the kings and warriors, battling in the far dark, did. Instead, the rest of the tribe devoted their spare hours, which were many, in prolonged discussion concerning the Ultimates. The
necessities of life remained wordless, because contemptible. It was the Ultimates that mattered.

Laintal Ay, amid the suffocations of his succubus, never mastered the language enough to comprehend the Ultimates. But it appeared that the main thrust of the debate – which also was a custom, carried through many generations – was to decide whether all should merge their identity into a state of being within the great god of darkness, Withram, or whether they should cultivate a different state.

Long was the discourse about that different state, unbroken even when the Nondads ate. That they were eating Gold never occurred to Laintal Ay. His appetite had gone. Meditations concerning the different state flowed through him like water.

That different state was somehow equated with a great many things, some extremely uncomfortable, including light and battle; it was the state thrust upon the kings and warriors, and might be roughly translated as individuality. Individuality opposed Withram’s will. But in some way, or so the argument seemed to go, as entangled as the roots among which it was unravelled, opposing Withram’s will was also following it.

Everything was very confusing, especially when in one’s arms lay a small hairy snoktruix.

She was not the first to die. They all died quietly, crawling off among the Eighty Darknesses. At first, he was aware only that fewer voices joined in the harmonics of argument. Then the snoktruix also became rigid. He clutched her tight, in an anguish of which he had not known himself capable. But the Nondads had no resistance to the disease Laintal Ay had brought down into their earth; disease and recovery was not a custom.

Within a short while, she too was dead. Laintal Ay sat and wept. He had never seen her face, though its little meagre contours, behind which such richness seemed to dwell, were familiar to his fingertips.

The discussion of Ultimates came to an end. The last click, snort, whistle, faded into the Eighty Darknesses. Nothing had been decided. Even death, after all, had shown some indecision on the subject; it had been both individual and corporate.
Withram alone could say if he was pleased and, in the manner of gods, Withram maintained silence on the subject.

Overwhelmed by shock, Laintal Ay fought to bring together his scattered wits. On hands and knees, he crawled over the corpses of his rescuers, looking for escape. The full, terrible majesty of the Eighty Darknesses was upon him.

He said to himself, endeavouring to maintain the argument, ‘I have individuality, whatever problems my dear friends the Nondads had. I know I am myself, I cannot escape being myself. I must therefore be at peace with myself. I do not have to undergo that perennial debate they underwent. That’s all settled in my case. Whatever happens to me, I know that at least. I am my own man; whether I live or die, I can conduct myself accordingly. It’s vain to seek Aoz Roon. He is not my master; I am. Nor has Oyre so much power over me that I must become an exile. Obligations are not slaveries …’

And similarly, on and on, until the words bore little meaning even to himself. The maze among the roots yielded no exit. Many times, when a narrow tunnel took an upward curve, he would crawl forward hopefully – only to come against a blind end in which a corpse lay curled, with rodents conducting their own kind of debate over the entrails.

Passing through a widening chamber, he stumbled over a king. In the darkness, size had less meaning than in the light. The king felt enormous as he landed claws first, roaring. Laintal Ay rolled over, kicking, yelling, straggling to get out his dagger, and the terrible shapeless thing bit and slashed its way towards his throat. He heaved himself over, trying to flatten it, without effect. An elbow in its eye made the assailant momentarily less enthusiastic. Out came the dagger, to be kicked away as the scrimmage was renewed. His searching fingers found a root. Dragging himself closer to it, he pinned one of the king’s arms round the root and battered at the sharp-fanged head. Then the raging thing was loose again, flinging itself down on Laintal Ay with unabated fury. The two figures, made one figure in hatred, knocked down on themselves earth, filth, and scuttling things.

Limp after the ravages of bone fever and his long fast, Laintal Ay felt his will to fight weakening. Claws raked his side. Suddenly,
something slammed into their joined bodies. Savage roars and clicks filled the air. So total was his confusion that he took a moment to realise there was a third assailant in the dark – one of the Nondad warriors. The warrior was concentrating most of its venom on the king. It was like being caught between two porcupines.

Rolling and kicking, Laintal Ay fought himself loose from the fray, grasped his dagger, and managed to drag himself bleeding into an obscure corner. Drawing his legs up so that his shins protected his body and face from frontal attack, he found a narrow entryway above his head. Cautiously he pushed his way up into a tunnel scarcely wider than his body. Before the fever struck he would never have squeezed himself through; now, with pythonlike contortions, he managed it, eventually dropping into a small round chamber in the earth. He felt dead leaves under his hands. He lay there, gasping, listening with fear to the sounds of combat nearby.

‘Light, by the sentinels!’ he gasped. A faint greyness like mist pervaded the nook. He had struggled to the edge of the Eighty Darknesses.

Fear drove him to follow the light. He wormed his way out of the earth, and stood trembling beside the bare concave flank of a rajabaral. The light was a cascade, pouring from the tall lake of the sky.

For a long while he remained breathing deep, wiping blood and earth from his face. He looked down at his feet. A savage ferret face stared up at him, then disappeared. He had quit the realm of the Nondads, and his visitation had left most of them dead.

His mind dwelt poignantly on his snoktruix. Sorrow filled him, and amazement and gratitude.

One of the sentinels was overhead. Near the horizon was the other, Batalix, its rays striking almost horizontally through the great silent forest; creating a sinister beauty of its ocean of leaf.

His skins were in tatters. His flesh was incised by long weals, seeping blood, where the claws of the king had raked him.

Although he looked about and called once for Gold, it was without hope. He did not expect to see his hoxney again. His
hunterly instincts warned him against staying where he was; he would become prey to something unless he moved, and he felt too faint to fight another battle.