Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (143 page)

‘Never. I imagine my mother’s sickness comes from pauk.’

‘Well, sherb you,
I
do it every day. I kiss my grandmother’s corpse-lips and taste the maggots …’ Then she burst into laughter. ‘Don’t look so silly. I’m joking. I hate the thought of those things underground and I’m glad you don’t go near them.’

She lowered her gaze to the flowers.

‘These snowflowers are tokens of the world’s death, don’t you think? There are only white flowers now, to go with the snow. Once, so the histories say, brightly coloured flowers bloomed in Kharnabhar.’

She pushed the vase resignedly from her. Down in the throats
of the pale blossoms, a touch of gold remained, turning to a speck of intense red at the ovary, like an emblem of the vanishing sun.

He sauntered across to her, over the patterned tiles. ‘Come and sit on the couch with me and talk of happier things.’

‘You must be referring to the climate – declining so rapidly that our grandchildren, if we live to have any, will spend their lives in near-darkness, wrapped in animal skins. Probably making animal noises … That sounds a promising topic.’

‘What nonsense you talk!’ Laughing, he jumped forward and grasped her. She let him drag her down on the couch as he uttered fevered endearments.

‘Of course you can’t make love to me, Luterin. You may feel me as you have before, but no lovemaking. I don’t think I shall ever take kindly to lovemaking – but in any case, were I to permit it, you would lose your interest in me, your lust being satisfied.’

‘It’s a lie, a lie.’

‘It had best stand as the truth, if we are to have any marital happiness at all. I am not marrying a sated man.’

‘I could never have enough of you.’ As he spoke, his hand was foraging up her clothes.

‘The invading armies …’ Insil sighed, but she kissed him and put the point of her tongue in his mouth.

At which moment, the door of the wardrobe burst open. Out jumped a young man of Insil’s dark colouration, but as frenzied as his sister was passive. It was Umat, brandishing a sword, shouting.

‘Sister, sister! Help is at hand! Here’s your brave rescuer, to save you and the family from dishonour! Who’s this beast? Isn’t a year in bed enough for him, that he must rise immediately to seek the nearest couch? Varlet! Rapist!’

‘You rat in the skirting!’ Luterin shouted. He rushed at Umat in a rage, the wooden sword fell to the floor, and they wrestled furiously. After his long confinement, Luterin had lost some of his strength. His friend threw him to the floor. As he picked himself up, he saw that Insil had flitted away.

He ran to the door. She had vanished into the dark recesses of the house. In the scuffle, her flowers had been spilt and the jug broken on the tiled floor.

Only as he made his way disconsolately back to the village
road, letting the hoxney carry him at walking pace, did it occur to Luterin that possibly Insil had staged Umat’s interruption. Instead of going home, he turned right at the Esikananzi gate, and rode into the village to drink at the Icen Inn.

Batalix was close to setting when he followed the mournful Shokerandit bell home. Snow was falling. No one was about in the grey world. At the inn, the talk consisted mainly of jokes and complaints concerning the new regulations being introduced by the Oligarch, such as curfew. The regulations were intended to strengthen communities throughout Sibornal for ordeals to come.

Most of the talk was cheap, and Luterin despised it. His father would never speak of such things – or not in his one remaining son’s hearing.

The gaslights were burning in the long hall of his home. As Luterin was unbuckling his personal bell, a slave came up, bowed, and announced that his father’s secretary wished to see him.

‘Where is my father?’ Luterin demanded.

‘Keeper Shokerandit has left, sir.’

Angrily Luterin ran up the stairs and threw open the door into the secretary’s room. The secretary was a permanent member of the Shokerandit household. With his beaklike nose, his straight line of eyebrow, his shallow forehead, and the quiff of hair which protruded over that forehead, the secretary resembled a crow. This narrow wooden room, its pigeonholes stuffed with secret documents, was the crow’s nest. From here, it surveyed many secret prospects beyond Luterin’s ken.

‘Your father is off on a hunt, Master Luterin,’ announced this wily bird now, in a tone mingling deference with reproach. ‘Since you were nowhere to be found, he had to leave without bidding you farewell.’

‘Why didn’t he let me accompany him? He knows I love the hunt. Perhaps I can catch him up. Which way did his entourage go?’

‘He entrusted me with this epistle for you. You would perhaps be advised to read it before dashing off.’

The secretary handed over a large envelope. Luterin snatched
it from his talons. He ripped open the cover and read what was set down on the enclosed sheet in his father’s large and careful hand:

A blush spread over Luterin’s face as he read his father’s rare word of praise. That his father should be satisfied with him despite all his failings! – satisfied enough to declare a masque in his honour!

His glow of happiness faded when he realised that his father would himself not be present at the masque. No matter. He would become a soldier and do anything asked of him. He would make his father proud of him.

Perhaps even Insil would warm to the name of glory …

The masque was performed in the banqueting hall of the Shokerandit mansion on the eve of Luterin’s departure south.

Stately personages in grand costume enacted preordained roles. A solemn music played. A familiar story was performed telling of innocence and villainy, of the lust to possess, and of the convoluted role of faith in the lives of men. To some characters harm was allotted, to some good. All came under a law greater than their own jurisdiction. The musicians, bent over their strings, emphasised the mathematics which prevailed over relationships.

The harmonies evoked by the musicians suggested a cadence of stern compassion, inviting a view of human affairs far beyond the normal acceptances of optimism or pessimism. In the leitmotifs for the woman forced to give herself to a ruler she hated and for the man unable to control his baser passions, musical members of the audience could detect a fatality, a sense that even the most individual characters were indissolubly functions of their environment, just as individual notes formed part of the greater harmony. The stylised acting of the performers reinforced this interpretation.

Some entrances were politely applauded by the audience, others observed without especial pleasure. The actors were well rehearsed in their roles, but not all by any means commanded the same presence as the principals.

Figures of state, figures of noble families, figures of the church, allegorical figures representing phagors and monsters, together with the various humours of Love, Hatred, Evil, Passion, Fear, and Purity, played their parts on the boards and were gone.

The stage emptied. Darkness fell. The music died.

But Luterin Shokerandit’s drama was just beginning.

Such was the nature of grass that it continued to grow despite the wind. It bowed to the wind. Its roots spread under the soil, anchoring it, leaving no room for other plants to find lodgement. The grass had always been there. It was the wind which was more recent – and the bite in it.

The great exhalations from the north carried with them a fast-moving sky, comprising a patchwork of black and grey cloud. Over distant high ground the clouds spilled rain and snow. Here, across the steppelands of Chalce, they purveyed nothing worse than a neutral obscurity. That neutrality found an echo in the monotony of the terrain.

A series of shallow valleys opened one into the next without definite feature. The only movement to be seen was among the grasses. Some tufts bore insignificant yellow flowers which rippled in the wind like the fur of a supine animal. The sole landmarks were occasional stone pillars marking land-octaves. The south-facing sides of these stones sometimes bore lichens, yellow and grey.

Only keen eyes could have discerned minute trails in the grass, used by creatures which appeared at night or during dimday, when only one of the two suns was above the horizon. Solitary hawks, patrolling the sky on motionless wings, explained the lack of daytime activity. The widest trail through the grasslands was carved by a river which flowed southwards towards the distant sea. Deep and sluggish in movement, its waters appeared partly congealed. The river took its colour from the tatterdemalion sky.

From the north of this inhospitable country came a flock of arang. These long-legged members of the goat family loosely
followed the tedious bends of the river. Curly-horned dogs kept the arang closely grouped. These hardworking asokins were in turn controlled by six men on hoxney-back. The six sat or stood in their saddles to vary their journey. All were dressed in skins lashed about their bodies with thongs.

The men frequently looked back over their shoulders, as if afraid of pursuit. Keeping up a steady pace, they communicated with their asokins by whoops and whistles. These encouraging signals rang through the hollow spaces round about, clear above the bleat of the arang. However often the men glanced back, the drab northern horizon remained empty.

The ruins of a place of habitation appeared ahead, nestling in an elbow of the river. Scattered stone huts stood roofless. A larger building was no more than a shell. Ragged plants, taking advantage of the windbreak, grew about the stones, peering from the blank window sockets.

The arangherds gave the place a wide berth, fearing plague. A few miles farther on, the river, taking a leisurely curve, served as a boundary which had been in dispute for centuries, perhaps for as long as there had been men in the land. Here began the region once known as Hazziz, northernmost land of the North Campannlatian Plain. The dogs channelled the arang along beside the river, where a path had been worn. The arang spread into a fast-moving line, face to tail.

They came in time to a broad and durable bridge. It threw its two arches across the wind-troubled face of the water. The men whistled shrilly, the asokins marshalled the arang into a bunch, preventing them crossing the bridge. A mile or two away, lying against the northern bank of the river, was a settlement built in the shape of a wheel. The name of the settlement was Isturiacha.

A bugle sounded from the settlement, telling the arangherds that they had been sighted. Armed men and black Sibornalese cannon guarded the perimeter.

‘Welcome!’ shouted the guards. ‘What did you see to the north? Did you see the army?’

The arangherds drove their animals into pens already awaiting them.

The stone farmhouses and barns of the settlement had been
built as a fortification along its perimeter. The farms, where cereals and livestock were raised, lay in the middle. At the hub of the circle, a ring of barracklike offices surrounded a tall church. There was continual coming and going in Isturiacha, which increased as the herdsmen were taken into one of the central buildings to refresh themselves after their journey across the steppes.

On the south side of the bridge, the plain was more varied in contour. Isolated trees betokened increased rainfall. The ground was stippled with fragments of a white substance, which from a distance resembled crumbling stone. On closer inspection the fragments proved to be bone. Few pieces measured more than six inches in length. Occasionally a tooth or wedge of jawbone revealed the remains to be those of men and phagors. These testimonies to past battles stretched across miles of plain.

Over the immobility of this doleful place rode a man on yelk-back, approaching the bridge from the south. Some way behind him followed two more men. All three wore uniform and were equipped for war.