Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (11 page)

Even when he choked off the doubt, another doubt sprang up. How about the language of religion? Wasn’t that also the invention of men – perhaps pleasant, ineffectual men like Father Sifans?

‘Belief is not peace but torment; only the great War is peace.’ That part of the creed at least was true.

Meanwhile, Yuli kept his own counsel, and fraternised only superficially with his fellows.

They met for instruction in a low, damp, foggy hall named Cleft. Sometimes they went in utter darkness, sometimes in the glow of wicks carried by the fathers. Each session ended with the priest pressing his hand to the novice’s forehead, gesturing at his brain, an action at which the novices laughed later in their dormitory. Priests’ fingers were rough, from the wall-reading by which they navigated briskly about the labyrinths of the Holies even in the most pitchy blackness.

Each novice sat in a curiously shaped dock, built of clay bricks, facing his instructor. Each dock was decorated in individual low-reliefs, to make their identification in the dark easier. Their instructor sat opposite and above them, astride a clay saddle.

When only a few weeks of the novitiate had lapsed, Father Sifans announced the subject of heresy. He spoke in a low voice, coughing as he did so. Worse than nonbelief was to believe wrongly. Yuli leaned forward. He and Sifans had no light, but the charge-father in the next box did, a fluttering flame which served to throw a foggy orange nimbus about Sifans’ head and shade his face. The old man’s white-and-black gown further disintegrated his outlines, so that he merged with the dark of the chamber. Mist rolled about them, trailing anyone who walked slowly by, practising wall-reading. Coughs and muttering filled the low cavern; water dripped ceaselessly, like small bells.

‘A human sacrifice, Father, did you say a human sacrifice?’

‘The body is precious, the spirit expendable. One who has spoken against the priesthood, saying they should be more frugal to aid Akha … You are far enough on with your studies to attend his execution … Ritual from barbarous times …’

The nervous eyes, two tiny points of orange, flickered in the dark like a signal from a remote distance.

When the time came, Yuli walked through the lugubrious galleries, nervously trying to wall-read with his fingers. They entered the largest cavern in the Holies, called State. No light was allowed. Whispering filled the air as the priesthood assembled. Yuli surreptitiously took hold of the hem of Father Sifans’ gown in order not to lose him. Then a voice of a priest, declaiming the history of the long war between Akha and Wutra. Night was Akha’s, and the priests were set to protect their flock through the long night’s battle. Those who opposed the guardians must die.

‘Bring forth the prisoner.’

There was much talk of prisoners in the Holies, but this one was special. The tramp of the militia’s heavy sandals could be heard, a shuffling. Then brightness.

A shaft of light blazed down. The novices gasped. Yuli recognised that they stood in the vast chamber through which Sataal had led him, a long while ago. The light source was as before, high above the multitude of heads; it appeared blinding.

At its base stood a human figure, tied to a wooden framework, legs and arms spread. It was in the upright position, and naked.

Even as the prisoner gave a cry, Yuli recognised the dense impassioned face, square, and framed by short-cropped hair. It was the young man he had once heard speak in Prayn – Naab.

His voice and message were also recognisable. ‘Priests, I am not your enemy, though you treat me like one, but your friend. Generation by generation, you sink into inaction, your numbers grow less, Pannoval dies. We are not just passive votaries of Great Akha. No! We must fight with him. We must also suffer. In the great war between Sky and Earth, we must play our part. We must reform and purify ourselves.’

Behind the bound figure were militiamen in gleaming helmets, guarding him. Others arrived, bearing smoking brands. With them marched their phagors, checked by leather leads. They halted. They turned inward. They hoisted their brands high above their heads, and the smoke rose in leisurely braids upwards. Forward creaked a stiff cardinal, bowed under black-and-white garb and an elaborate mitre. He struck a golden staff against the ground three times, crying shrilly in the Priestly Olonets, ‘Have done, have done, have done … O Great Akha, our Warrior God, appear to us!’ A bell tinkled.

A second pillar of the brilliant white light, solidifying rather than banishing the surrounding night. Behind the prisoner, behind the phagors and the soldiers, Akha appeared, reaching upwards. A murmur of expectation came from the crowd. It was a skeletal scene, the militia and the massive white beasts all but transparent, Akha chalky in the column of light, the whole embedded in obsidian. In this representation, the semihuman head of the god thrust forward, and his mouth was open. The eyes were as sightless as ever.

‘Take this unsatisfactory life, O Great Akha, and use it for Thy satisfaction.’

Functionaries moved smartly forward. One began to crank at a handle set in the side of the frame holding the prisoner. The frame began to creak and shift. The prisoner cried softly once, as his body was forced to bend backwards. As the hinges on the framework opened, his body arched back, exposing his helplessness.

Two captains marched forward with a phagor between them.
The great beast’s blunted horns had been capped with silver and reached almost to the height of the soldiers’ eyebrows. It stood in the ungainly customary stance of a phagor, head and prow of chest thrust forward, its long white hair stirring slightly in the draught that blew through State.

Music sounded again, drum, gongs, vrachs, drowning out Naab’s voice, and the sustained warble of a fluggel rising high above them. Then everything stopped.

The body was bent double now, legs and feet twisted somewhere out of sight, head right back, exposing throat and thorax, gleaming pale in the column of light.

‘Take, O Great Akha! Take what is already Thine! Eradicate him.’

At the priest’s scream, the phagor stepped a pace forward and bent down. It opened its shovel mouth and applied rows of blunt teeth to either side of the proffered throat. It bit. It raised its head, and a great morsel of flesh came up with it. It moved back into place between the two soldiers, swallowing noncommittally. A trickle of red ran down its white front. The rear column of light was cut off. Akha disappeared back into his nourishing darkness. Many of the novices fainted.

As they jostled out of State, Yuli asked, ‘But why use those devilish phagors? They’re man’s enemy. They should all be killed.’

‘They are the creatures of Wutra, as their colour shows. We keep them to remind us of the enemy,’ said Sifans.

‘And what will happen to the – to Naab’s body?’

‘It will not be wasted. Every item is of some application. The whole carcass may go for fuel – perhaps to the potters, who always need to fire their kilns. I really don’t know. I prefer to keep myself aloof from administrative details.’

He dared say no more to Father Sifans, hearing the distaste in the old priest’s voice. To himself, he said over and over again, ‘Those evil brutes. Those evil brutes. Akha should have no part of them.’ But the phagors were all over the Holies, padding patiently along with the militia, their noctilucent eyes peering here and there under their craggy brows.

One day Yuli tried to explain to his charge-father how his father had been caught and killed by phagors in the wild.

‘You do not know for sure they killed him. Phagors are not always entirely evil. Sometimes Akha subdues their spirit.’

‘I’m sure he’s dead by now. There’s no way of being certain, though?’

He heard the father lick his lips as he hesitated, and then leaned towards Yuli in the blackness.

‘There is a way of being sure, my son.’

‘Oh, yes, if you mounted a great expedition from Pannoval north—’

‘No, no … other ways, more subtle. You will one day understand the complexities of Pannoval more fully. Or perhaps you won’t. For there are entirely other orders of the priesthood, warrior mystics, of which you do not know. Perhaps I had better say no more …’

Yuli urged him on. The priest’s voice sank still lower, until it was almost lost under the splash of a water drip near at hand.

‘Yes, warrior mystics, who forswear the pleasures of the flesh and in return gain mysterious powers …’

‘That’s what Naab advocated, and was murdered for it.’

‘Executed after trial. The superior orders prefer us, the administrative orders, to remain as we are … But they … they communicate with the dead. If you were one of them, you could speak with your father after death.’

Into the dark, Yuli stammered his amazement.

‘There are many human and divine capacities which can be trained, my son. I myself, when my father died, fell into a fast through sorrow, and after the passage of many days saw him clear, suspended in the earth which is Akha’s as if in another element, with his hands over his ears, as if he heard some sound he disliked. Death is not an end, but our extension in Akha – you recall the teaching, my son.’

‘I’m still angry with my father. Perhaps I have difficulty because of that. He was weak at the end. I wish to be strong. Where are these – these warrior mystics of whom you speak, Father?’

‘If you do not believe my words, as I sense, it is pointless my
telling you anything further.’ The voice held a nicely calculated shade of petulance.

‘I’m sorry, Father. I’m a savage, just as you say … You think the priesthood should reform itself, as Naab claimed, don’t you?’

‘I take a middle way.’ He sat leaning forward tensely for a while, blinking as if there was more to be said, and Yuli heard his dry eyelids flutter. ‘Many schisms divide the Holies, Yuli, as you will come to see if you take your orders. Things are less easy than they were when I was a boy. Sometimes it seems to me …’

The water drops went splash-splash-splash and someone coughed distantly.

‘What, Father?’

‘Oh … you have heretical thoughts enough, without my planting more. I can’t imagine why I talk to you. That’s the end of instruction for today, boy.’

Talking not to Sifans, who liked to proceed by equivocation, but to his fellows, Yuli gradually learnt something of the power structures that held the community of Pannoval together. The administration was in the hands of the priests, and they worked with the militia, one reinforcing the other. There was no final arbitrator, no great chief, like the chiefs in the tribes of the wilderness. Behind each order of the priesthood lay another. They faded off into the metaphysical darkness, in obscure hierarchies, none finally with the power to command all the others.

Some orders, went the rumour, lived in more distant caverns in the mountain chain. In the Holies, habits were lax. Priests might serve as soldiers and vice versa. Women came and went among them. Under all the prayer and learning was confusion. Akha was elsewhere. Somewhere – somewhere there was greater faith.

Somewhere along the receding chain of command, thought Yuli, must be Sifans’ order of warrior-mystics, who could commune with the dead and perform other amazing acts. The rumours, really no more to be listened to than the drip of water down a wall, whispered of an order elsewhere, set above the inhabitants of the Holies, who were referred to, when they were referred to at all, as the Keepers.

The Keepers, according to the whisper, were a sect to which admission was by election. They combined the dual role of
soldiering and priesthood. What they kept was knowledge. They knew things unknown even in the Holies, and that knowledge gave them power. By keeping the past, they laid claim to the future.

‘Who are these Keepers? Do we see them?’ Yuli asked. The mystery excited him, and as soon as he heard of them he longed to be part of the mysterious sect.

He was speaking again to Father Sifans, almost at the end of his term. The passage of time had matured him; he no longer mourned his parents, and the Holies kept him busy. He had discovered recently in his charge-father an intense relish of gossip. The eyes blinked faster, the lips trembled, and the morsels slipped out. Every day, as the two men worked together in the prayer hall of their order, Father Sifans allowed himself a small ration of revelation.

‘The Keepers can mix among us. We do not know who they are. Outwardly, they look no different from us. I might also be a Keeper, for all you know …’

Next day, after prayer, Father Sifans beckoned Yuli with a mittened hand and said, ‘Come, since your novice term is nearly up, I’ll show you something. You recollect what we were talking about yesterday?’

‘Of course.’

Father Sifans pursed his lips, squeezed his eyes together, raised his little sharp nose like a shrew’s towards the ceiling, and nodded his head sharply a dozen times. Then he set off at a stiff mincing pace, leaving Yuli to follow.

Lights were rare in this section of the Holies and, in some places, forbidden entirely. The two men moved now with assurance through total darkness. Yuli kept the fingers of his right hand extended, lightly touching a carved skein unwinding on the wall of the corridor. They were passing through Warrborw, and Yuli was now wall-reading.

Steps were indicated ahead. Two of the luminous-eyed preets fluttered in a wicker cage, punctuating the junction between the main passage, a side one, and the steps. Yuli and his old charge-father progressed steadily upwards,
clack-clack-clack
, up stairs,
along passages punctuated by more stairs, avoiding by habit others who walked in the limestoned dark.