Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (67 page)

‘I’m a hunter, as you know. Laintal Ay and I tamed the Western Veldt. Faralin Ferd will die of the pest like his crony,
Tanth Ein. Will you be ruled by corpses? I won’t catch the plague. Intercourse passes on the plague, and I’m free of it.

‘My first deed will be to restore guards all round Embruddock, and to train a proper army. As we are at present, we are ripe to fall to any enemy – human or inhuman. Better die in battle than in bed.’

This last remark caused a groundswell of unease. Dathka paused, glaring down at them. Oyre and Dol stood among the people, Dol clutching Rastil Roon in her arms. Oyre cried out loudly as Dathka paused, ‘You are a usurper. How are you any better than Tanth Ein or Raynil Layan?’

Dathka went to the edge of the platform.

‘I steal nothing. I picked up what was dropped.’ He pointed at Oyre. ‘You of all people, Oyre, as the natural daughter of Aoz Roon himself, should know that I will return to your father what is his when he returns. He would wish me to do this.’

‘You cannot speak for him while he’s away.’

‘I can and do.’

‘Then you speak wrongly.’

Others to whom this wrangle meant little, and who cared little about Aoz Roon, also started to shout, calling out complaints. Someone threw an overripe fruit. The guard jostled the crowd, without effect.

Dathka’s face grew pale. He raised his fist above his head in passion.

‘Very well, you scumble, then I will tell you publicly what has always been kept silent. I’m not afraid. You think so greatly of Aoz Roon, you think he was so admirable, I’ll tell you the kind of man he was. He was a murderer. Worse, he was a double murderer.’

They fell quiet, their faces upturned to him in a cloud of flesh.

He was shaking now, conscious of what he had started. ‘How do you think Aoz Roon gained power? By murder, bloody murder, murder by night. There are those of you who will remember Nahkri and Klils, sons of ancient Dresyl, in the days bygone. Nahkri and Klils ruled when Embruddock was just a farmyard. One dark night, Aoz Roon – young then – threw the two brothers off the top of the big tower when they were in their
cups. A foul double deed. And who was there as witness, who saw it all? I was there – and so was she – his natural daughter.’ He pointed accusingly down at the thin figure of Oyre, now clinging in horror to Dol.

‘He’s mad,’ a boy shouted on the edge of the crowd. ‘Dathka’s mad!’ People were leaving at a run, or running up. General confusion was breaking out, and a struggle developing in one corner of the mob.

Raynil Layan tried to rally the crowd, bringing up his powerful pale presence to shout in a large voice, ‘Support us and we will support you. We will guard Oldorando.’

All this while, Faralin Ferd had been standing silent at the rear of the platform, arms bound, in the grip of a guard. He saw his moment.

‘Throw Dathka out!’ he shouted. ‘He never had Aoz Roon’s approval and he shall not have ours!’

Dathka turned about with a hunter’s rapid movement, drawing his curved dagger as he did so. He flung himself on the lieutenant. A high scream came from Farayl Musk, somewhere in the crowd, at the same time as several voices took up the cry, ‘Throw Dathka out!’

They fell silent almost immediately, stilled by Dathka’s sudden action. In the hush, smoke drifted across the scene. Nobody moved. Dathka stood rigid, back to his audience. For a moment, Faralin Ferd was also still. Then he threw up his head and gave a choking groan. Blood gushed from his mouth. He sagged, and the guard let him fall at Dathka’s feet.

Then there was uproar. Blood gave the whole crowd voice.

‘You fool, they’ll slaughter us,’ Raynil Layan shouted. He ran to the back of the platform and jumped down. Before anyone could stop him, he was disappearing down a side street.

The guard ran about, ignoring Dathka’s commands, as the mob closed on the platform. Farayl Musk was screaming for Dathka’s arrest. Seeing that it was all over, he also jumped from the platform and ran.

At the rear of the crowd, by the stalls, the small boys jumped up and down, clapping their hands in excitement. The crowd began to riot, finding rioting more lively than death.

For Dathka, there was nothing but to make an ignominious escape. He ran panting, gasping, muttering incoherently, through the deserted streets, his three shadows – penumbral, umbral, penumbral – changing their topology at his feet. His scuttling thoughts similarly dilated and shrank, as he tried to evade the knowledge of his failure, to retch up his disaster from inside him.

Strangers passed him, their belongings loaded on an archaic sledge. An old man, helping a child along, called to him, ‘The fuggies are coming.’

He heard the sound of people running behind him – the mob, avenging. There was one place he could go to for refuge, one person, one hope. Cursing her, he ran to Vry.

She was back in her old tower. She sat in a kind of dream, aware – and frightened of her awareness – that Embruddock was moving to a crisis. When he hammered on her door, she let him in almost with relief. She stood there with neither sympathy nor derision as Dathka collapsed weeping on her bed.

‘It’s a mess,’ she said. ‘Where’s Raynil Layan?’ He went on weeping, striking the bedding with his fist.

‘Stop it,’ she said mildly. She walked about the room, gazing up at the stained ceiling. ‘We live in such a mess. I wish I were free of emotion. Human beings are such messes. We were better when the snow contained us, frozen, when we had no … hope! I wish there were only knowledge, pure knowledge, no emotion.’

He sat up. ‘Vry—’

‘Don’t speak to me. You have nothing for me, and never had, you must accept that. I don’t want to hear what you have to say. I don’t want to know what you’ve done.’

Geese set up a great honking outside.

He sat on the bed, yawned. ‘You’re only half a woman. You’re cold. I’ve always known it, yet I couldn’t stop feeling as I did about you …’

‘
Cold?
… You fool, I steam like a rajabaral.’

The noise in the street was louder, loud enough for them to catch the note of individual voices. Dathka ran to the window.

Where were his men now? The people who poured out of nearby alleys were all strangers to him. He could not see one familiar face – none of his men, no Raynil Layan – not that that
surprised him – not even one citizen he could identify. Once on a time, every face had been known to him. Strangers were calling for his blood. Real fear entered his heart, as if his only ambition had been to die at the hand of a friend. To be hated by strangers … it was intolerable. He leaned from the window and shook his fist in defiance, cursing them.

The faces tipped upwards, opening in the middle almost in unison, like a shoal of fish. They roared and jibbered.

Before that noise, he dropped his fist and shrank back, not meaning to be quelled but quelled nevertheless. He leaned against the wall and examined his rough hands, with blood still moist in the nails.

Only when he heard Vry’s voice below did he realise she had left the room. She had flung open the door of the tower and was standing on the platform, addressing the people. The mob surged forward as those at the rear pressed in to hear what she said. Some called out mockingly, but were silenced by others. Her voice, clear and sharp, flew above their tousled heads.

‘Why don’t you stop and think what you’re doing? You’re not animals. Try to be human. If we are to die, let us die with human dignity, and not with our hands round one another’s throats.

‘You are aware of suffering. Both the suffering and the awareness are your badges of humanity. Be proud, rot you – die with that knowledge. Remember the waiting world of the gossies below, where there is only gnashing of teeth because the dead feel disgust for their own lives. Isn’t that a terrible thing? Doesn’t it seem to you a terrible thing, to feel disgust – disgust and contempt – for your own lives? Transform your own life from within. Never mind external weather, if it snows or rains or shines, never mind that, accept it, but work to transform your inner self. Create calm in your soul. Take thought. Would Dathka or his murder have the power to cure your personal predicament? Only you have that.

‘You think things are going badly. I must warn you that more challenges are to come. I tell you this with the full weight of the academy behind me. Tomorrow, tomorrow at noon, the third and worst of the Twenty Blindnesses is due. Nothing can stop it. Mankind has no power over the skies. What will you do then?
Will you run madly through the streets, cutting throats, smashing things, firing what your betters built – as if you were worse than phagors? Decide
now
how filthy, how low, you will be tomorrow!’

They looked at one another and murmured. No one shouted. She waited, instinctively seizing on the right moment at which to launch in again on a new tack.

‘Years ago, the sorceress Shay Tal addressed the inhabitants of Oldorando. I remember her words clearly, for I revered everything she said. She offered us the treasure of knowledge. That treasure can be yours if only you will be humble and dare to reach out your hands for it.

‘Understand what I tell you. Tomorrow’s blindness is no supernatural event. What is it? It is merely the two sentinels passing one another, those two suns you have known since birth. This world of ours is round as they are round. Imagine how large a ball our world must be for us not to fall off it – yet it is small compared with the sentinels. They look small merely because they are so far away.

‘Shay Tal, when she spoke, said that there was a disaster in the past. I believe that is not the case. We have added to her knowledge. Wutra has disposed of his world so that everything works through continuous action in all the parts. Your hair grows on your head and body as the suns rise and set. These are not separate actions but one in Wutra’s eyes. Our world travels in a circle round Batalix, and there are other worlds like ours which behave likewise. At the same time, Batalix travels in a greater circle round about Freyr. You have to accept that our farmyard is not at the centre of the universe.’

Their murmurs of protest grew louder. Vry overrode them by pitching her voice higher.

‘Do you understand that? Understanding is harder than slitting throats, isn’t it? To comprehend fully what I tell you, you must first understand and then grasp the understanding with your imagination, so that the facts live. Our year is four hundred and eighty days long, that we know. That is the time we take on Hrl-Ichor to make a complete circle about Batalix. But there is another circle to be made, the circle of Batalix and our world about Freyr. Are you prepared to hear the word? It takes eighteen
hundred and twenty-five small years … Imagine that great year!’ They were quiet now, staring at her, the new sorceress.

‘Until our day, few could imagine it! For each of us can expect only forty years of life. It would take forty-six of our lifetimes to add up to one whole circle of this world about Freyr. Many of our lives find no echo, yet are part of that greater thing. That is why such knowledge is difficult to grasp and easy to lose in time of trouble.’

She was seized up by her new power, seduced by her own eloquence.

‘What is the trouble, what is this disaster of which Shay Tal told us, large enough to make us mislay such important knowledge? Why, simply that the light of Freyr varies according to the time of the great year. We have come through many generations of poor light, of winter, when the earth lay dead under snow. Tomorrow you should rejoice when the eclipse comes – the blindness, when distant Freyr slips behind Batalix – for it is a sign that Freyr’s light grows nearer … We enter spring of the great year tomorrow. Rejoice! Have the sense, the knowledge, to rejoice! Throw away the mess of your lives that ignorance causes, and rejoice! Better times are coming for all of us.’

Shoatapraxi deflected them. The woody grass had been growing in clumps as they approached lower ground. The clumps became thickets. Now they tried to find their way through a region choked with it.

The vegetation rose above their heads. It was broken only by drumlins, up which it was possible to climb occasionally in order to get a bearing. With the shoatapraxi was entwined a thin-stemmed bramble, making progress both difficult and painful. The phagor army ahead had travelled another way. They were forced to follow the more meandering tracks of animals, yet the going remained bad for the yelk. They were nervous of the grass, as if disliking its pungent scent; their sweeping horns caught on the hollow stems, and the thorns underfoot penetrated to the softer parts of their hoofs. So the men dismounted, leading their necrogenes as they progressed on foot.

‘How much farther, barbarian?’ Skitosherill asked.

‘Not far,’ Laintal Ay responded. It was his stock answer to the stock question. They had slept uncomfortably in the forest, rising at dawn with frost in their clothes. He felt refreshed, still rejoicing in his lighter form, but he saw how weary the others were becoming. Aoz Roon was a shadow of what he had once been; in the night, he had called out in a strange language.

They came to marshy ground, where, to everybody’s relief, the shoatapraxi thinned. After pausing to see that all was quiet, they moved on, scattering flights of small birds before them. Ahead loomed a valley, with soft mounds rising on either side. They went that way, rather than moving on to higher ground, chiefly because of their fatigue; but as soon as they entered the neck of the valley, they were assailed by a chill wind, which rushed at them like an animal and bit to their bones. It was a time for struggling on grimly, with the head down.