Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (8 page)

But he adapted with the flexibility of youth. He came to look on Vakk as a prodigal town. Falling in with guild apprentices of his own age, he roamed its muddle of livings which were clustered on many floors, often leading one from another. Cubicle was stacked on cubicle in profusion, the furniture in each fixed because carved from the same rock as floors and walls, all in one flowing line. The story of rights of ways and privacies in these organic warrens was complex, but always related to the guild system of Vakk, and always, in case of dispute, to be settled by the judgement of a priest.

In one of these livings, Tusca, Kyale’s kindly wife, found Yuli a chamber of his own, only three doors from where she and Kyale lived. It was roofless and its walls curved; he felt as if he had been set down within a stone flower.

Vakk sloped steeply, and was dimly lit by natural light – more dimly than Market. The air was sooty with the exhalations of fat lamps, but clerics collected tax on every lamp, which had numbers stamped on their clay bases, so that they were used sparingly. The mysterious fogs which afflicted Market had less power in Vakk.

From Vakk, a gallery led direct to Reck. There were also, on lower ground, ragged arches leading to a high-roofed cavern called Groyne, which had good clean air, although the inhabitants of Vakk thought the inhabitants of Groyne rather barbarous, chiefly because they were members of more lowly guilds, slaughterers, tanners, diggers of chert and clay and fossil wood.

In the honeycombed rock adjoining both Groyne and Reck was another large cavern full of habitations and cattle. This was Prayn, which many avoided. It was being energetically extended by the sappers’ guild when Yuli arrived. Prayn collected all the night soil from the other suburbs and fed it to swine and
noctiferous crops, which thrived on heat. Some of the farmers in Prayn bred as a sideline a strain of bird called a preet, which had luminous eyes and luminescent patches on its wings. Preets were popular as cage birds; they added a little brightness to the livings of Vakk and Groyne – though they also were the subject of taxes collected by priests for Akha.

‘In Groyne they are gruff, in Prayn pretty tough,’ went a local saying. But Yuli found the people lifeless, except when roused by the games, rare exceptions being those few traders and trappers living in Market in terraces of their own guild, who regularly had occasion to be blessed by Akha and sent on business in the outside world, as had been the case with the two gentlemen of his acquaintance.

From all the major caverns, and from smaller ones, paths and tunnels led into the blind rock, some ascending, some descending. Pannoval was full of legends of magical beasts that came in from the primordial dark of the rock, or of people who were spirited away from their livings into the mountain. Best to stay put in Pannoval, where Akha looked after his own with his blind eyes. Better Pannoval, too, and taxes, than the cold glare of outside.

These legends were kept alive by the sayers’ guild, members of which stood on every stairway, or waited on terraces, and spun fantastic tales. In this world of nebulous gloom, words were like lights.

To one other section of Pannoval, which figured largely in people’s whispered discourse, Yuli was not allowed to make his way. That was the Holies. The Holies could be reached by gallery and stair from Market, but it was guarded by the militia, and set apart by repute. No one went voluntarily through its winding approaches. In the Holies lived the militia, forever guarding the law of Pannoval, and the priesthood, forever guarding its soul.

All these arrangements were so magnificent to Yuli that he could not see their meanness.

It took Yuli little time to find how closely the people were governed. They expressed no surprise in a system to which they had been born; but Yuli, accustomed to open spaces and the easily comprehended law of survival, was astonished at the way in
which their every movement was circumscribed. Yet they thought themselves uniquely privileged.

With his legitimately acquired stock of skins, Yuli planned to purchase a stall next to Kyale, and set up shop. He discovered that there were many regulations that forbade anything so simple. Nor could he trade without a stall – unless he had a special licence – and for that he would have to have been born a member of a hawkers’ guild. He needed a guild, an apprenticeship, and certain qualifications – a kind of exam – that only the priesthood could confer. He also needed a two-part certificate from the militia, together with insurance and references. Nor would he be able to trade until he owned a living. Yet he could not possess the room Tusca had rented for him until he was fully accredited with the militia. He was unable to meet even the most elementary qualification: a belief in Akha and a proof of regular sacrifices to the god.

‘It’s simple. First you, as a savage, must attend a priest.’ That was the dictum of a sharp-faced militia captain before whom Yuli had to appear. He confronted Yuli in a little stone room, the balcony of which was a metre or so above one of Market’s terraces, and from which one might survey the whole animated scene.

The captain wore a floor-length cloak of black and white over the customary skins. On his head he wore a bronze helmet displaying the holy symbol of Akha, a kind of two-spoked wheel. His hide boots came halfway up his calf. Behind him stood a phagor, a black and white woven band tied round its hairy white brow.

‘Pay attention to me,’ growled the captain. But Yuli found his eyes ever drifting towards the silent phagor, wondering at its presence.

The ancipital stood with an air of taciturn repose, ungainly head thrust forward. Its horns were blunt; they had been sawn short, and their cutting edges dulled with a file. Yuli saw that it had a leather collar and thong about its throat, half-concealed under white hair, a sign of its submission to man’s rule. Yet it was a threat to the citizens of Pannoval. Many officers appeared everywhere with a submissive phagor beside them; the phagors
were valued for their superior ability to see in the dark. Ordinary people went in fear of the shambling animals that spoke basic Olonets. How was it possible, Yuli wondered, for men to form liaisons with the same beasts who had imprisoned his father – beasts that everyone in the wilds hated from birth?

The interview with the captain was dispiriting, and worse was to come. He could not live unless he obeyed the rules, and they appeared interminable; there was nothing for it – as Kyale impressed upon him – but to conform. To be a citizen of Pannoval, you had to think and feel like a Pannovalian.

So he was consigned to attend the priest in the alley of livings where he had his room. This entailed numerous sessions at which he was taught a ritualised history of Pannoval (‘born from Great Akha’s shadow on the eternal snows …’) and forced to learn many of the scriptures by heart. He also had to do whatever Sataal, the priest, told him to do, including the running of many tedious errands, for Sataal was lazy. It was no great consolation to Yuli to find that the children of Pannoval went through similar courses of instruction at an early age.

Sataal was a solidly built man, pale of face, small of ear, heavy of hand. His head was shaven, his beard plaited, in the manner of many priests of his order. There were twists of white in the plaits. He wore a knee-length smock of black and white. His face was deeply pocked. It took Yuli some while to realise that, despite the white hairs, Sataal was not past middle age, being only in his late teens. Yet he walked in a round-shouldered way suggesting both age and piety.

When he addressed Yuli, Sataal spoke always kindly but remotely, keeping a gulf between them. Yuli was reassured by the man’s attitude, which seemed to say, This is your job and mine, but I shall not complicate it by probing into what your inner feelings are. So Yuli kept quiet, applying himself to the task of learning all the necessary fustian verses.

‘But what do they mean?’ he asked at one point, in bewilderment.

Sataal rose slowly in the small room, and turned about, so that his shoulders loomed black in a distant source of light, and all the rest of him flowed into encompassing shadow. A dull highlight
gleamed on his pate as he inclined his head towards Yuli, saying, admonishingly, ‘Learning first, young fellow, then interpretation. After learning, then less difficulty in interpretation. Get everything by heart, you hardly need it by head. Akha never enforces understanding from his people, only obedience.’

‘You said that Akha cares nothing for anyone in Pannoval.’

‘The important point, Yuli, is that Pannoval cares for Akha. Now then, once again:

‘But what does it mean?’ Yuli asked again. ‘How can I learn it if I don’t understand it?’

‘Repeat it, son,’ said Sataal sternly. ‘“Whoso laps …”’

Yuli was submerged in the dark city. Its networks of shadows snatched at his spirit, as he had seen men in the outer world catch fish with nets under the ice. In dreams, his mother came to him, blood flying from her mouth. Then he would wake, to lie in his narrow cot staring up, far up, far beyond the confines of his flower-shaped room, to the roof of Vakk. Sometimes, when the atmosphere was fairly clear, he could see distant detail, with bats hanging up there, and stalactites, and the rock gleaming with liquid that had ceased to be liquid; and he wished he could fly away from the traps he found himself in. But there was nowhere else to go.

Once, in midnight desperation, he crawled through to Kyale’s home for comfort. Kyale was annoyed at being woken, and told him to go away, but Tusca spoke to him gently, as if he were her son. She patted his arm and clutched his hand.

After a while, she wept softly, and told him that indeed she had a son, a good kind lad of about Yuli’s age, Usilk by name. But Usilk had been taken from her by the police for a crime she knew he had never committed. Every night, she lay awake and thought of him, concealed in one of those terrifying places in the Holies,
guarded by phagors, and wondered if she would ever see him again.

‘The militia and the priests are so unjust here,’ Yuli whispered to her. ‘My people have little to live on in the wilds, but all are equal, one with another, in the face of the cold.’

After a pause, Tusca said, ‘There are people in Pannoval, women as well as men, who do not learn the scriptures and think to overthrow those who rule. Yet without our rulers, we should be destroyed by Akha.’

Yuli peered at the outline of her face through the dark. ‘And do you think that Usilk was taken … because he wanted to overthrow the rulers?’

In a low voice she replied, holding tightly to his hand, ‘You must not ask such questions or you’ll meet trouble. Usilk was always rebellious – yes, perhaps he got among the wrong people …’

‘Stop your chatter,’ Kyale called. ‘Get back to your bed, woman – and you to yours, Yuli.’

These things Yuli nursed in himself all the while he went through his sessions with Sataal. Outwardly, he was obedient to the priest.

‘You are not a fool, even if you are a savage – and that we can change,’ said Sataal. ‘Soon you shall progress to the next step. For Akha is the god of earth and underground, and you shall understand something of how the earth lives, and we in its veins. These veins are called land-octaves, and no man can be happy or healthy unless he lives along his own land-octaves. Slowly, you can acquire revelation, Yuli. Maybe, if you are good enough, you could yourself become a priest, and serve Akha in a greater way.’

Yuli kept his mouth shut. It was beyond his ability to tell the priest that he needed no particular attentions from Akha: his whole new way of life in Pannoval was a revelation.

The days followed one another peacefully. Yuli became impressed with the never varying patience of Sataal, and began disliking his instruction periods less. Even away from the priest, he thought about his teaching. All was fresh and curiously exciting. Sataal had told him that certain priests, who undertook to fast, were able to communicate with the dead, or even with personages
in history; Yuli had never heard of such things, but hesitated to call them nonsense.

He took to roving alone through the suburbs of the city, until its thick shadows took on for him colours of familiarity. He listened to people, who often talked of religion, or to the sayers who spoke at street corners, who often laced their stories with religion.

Religion was the romance of the darkness, as terror had been of the Barriers, where tribal drums warded off devils. Slowly, Yuli began to perceive in religious talk not a vacuum but a core of truth: the way in which people lived and died had to be explained. Only savages needed no explanation. The perception was like finding an animal’s trail in the snow.

Once he was in a malodorous part of Prayn, where human scumble was poured into long trenches on which the noctiferous crops grew. Here, the people were pretty tough, as the saying had it. A man with short-cropped free-flowing hair, and therefore neither a priest nor a sayer, ran up and jumped onto a scumble barrow.

‘Friends,’ he said, standing before them. ‘Listen to me for a moment, will you? Just stop your labours and hear what I have to say. I speak not for myself but for the great Akha, whose spirit moves inside me. I have to speak for him although I put my life in danger, for the priests distort Akha’s words for their own purposes.’