Helliconia Summer h-2 Read online

  “Whoa,” said FloerCrow, as the cart rumbled into a village by the roadside.

  Thick loess walls guarded the aggregation of dwellings against robbers. The gateway had broken and crumbled during last year’s monsoon and had not yet been repaired. Although the gloom was still intense, no lights showed from any window. Hens and geese scavenged beneath the patched mud walls, on which apotropaic religious symbols were painted.

  One item of cheer was provided by a stove burning by the gate. The old vendor who tended the stove had no need to cry his wares: the wares gave out a smell which was their own advertisement. He was a waffle seller. A steady stream of peasants bought waffles from him to eat on their way to work.

  FloerCrow dug ScufBar in the ribs and pointed with his whip to the vendor. ScufBar took the hint. Climbing stiffly down, he went to buy their breakfast. The waffles came straight from the glowing jaws of the waffle iron into the hands of the customers. FloerCrow ate his greedily and climbed into the back of the cart to sleep. ScufBar changed hoxneys, took the reins, and got the cart moving again.

  The day wore on. Other vehicles jostled on the road. The landscape changed. For a while, the highway ran so far below the level of the ground that nothing could be seen but the brown walls of fields. At other times, the way ran along the top of an embankment, and then a wide prospect of cultivation was visible.

  The plain stretched in all directions, as flat as a board, dotted with bent figures. Straight lines prevailed. Fields and terraces were square. Trees grew in avenues. Rivers had been deflected into canals; even the sails of boats on the canals were rectangular.

  Whatever the view, whatever the heat—today’s temperature was in the hundreds—the peasants worked while there was light in the sky. Vegetables, fruits, and veronika, the chief cash crop, had to be tended. Their backs remained bent, whether one sun or two prevailed.

  Freyr was pitilessly bright in contrast to the dull red face of Batalix. No one doubted which of the two was master of the heavens. Travellers faring from Oldorando, nearer the equator, told of forests bursting into flame at Freyr’s command. Many believed Freyr would shortly devour the world, yet still rows had to be hoed and water trickled on delicate growths.

  The farm cart neared Ottassol. The villages were no longer visible to the eye. Only fields could be seen, stretching to a horizon which dissolved in unstable mirages.

  The road sloped down into a groove, bounded on either side by earth walls thirty feet high. The village was called Mordec. The men climbed down and tethered the hoxney, which drooped between the shafts until water was brought for it. Both of their little dun-coloured animals showed signs of tiredness.

  Narrow tunnels led into the soil on either side of the road. Sunlight showed through them, chopped neatly into rectangular shape. The men emerged from a tunnel into an open court, well below ground level.

  On one side of the court was the Ripe Flagon, an inn carved out of the soil. Its interior, comfortingly cool, was lit only by reflections of the light striking down into the courtyard. Opposite the inn were small dwellings, also carved into the loess. Their ochre facades were brightened by flowers in pots.

  Through a maze of subterranean passageways the village stretched, opening intermittently into courts, many of them with staircases which led up to the surface, where most of the inhabitants of Mordec were labouring. The roofs of the houses were fields.

  As they ate a snack and drank wine at the inn, FloerCrow said, “He stinks a bit.”

  “He’s been dead a while. Queen found him on the shore, washed up. I’d say he was murdered in Ottassol, most like, and flung in the sea off a quay. The current would carry him down to Gravabagalinien.”

  As they went back to the cart, FloerCrow said, “It’s a bad omen for the queen of queens, no mistake.”

  The long casket lay in the back of the cart with the vegetables. Water trickled from the melting ice and dripped to the ground, where a pool marbled itself with a slow-moving spiral of dust. Flies buzzed round the cart.

  They climbed in and started on the last few miles to Ottassol.

  “If King JandolAnganol wants to have someone done away with, he’ll do it…”

  ScufBar was shocked. “The queen’s too well loved. Friends everywhere.” He felt the letter in his inner pocket and nodded to himself. Influential friends.

  “And him going to marry an eleven-year-old slip of a girl instead.”

  “Eleven and five tenners.”

  “Whatever. It’s disgusting.”

  “Oh, it’s disgusting, right enough,” agreed ScufBar. “Eleven and a half, fancy!” He smacked his lips and whistled.

  They looked at each other and grinned.

  The cart creaked towards Ottassol, and the bluebottles followed. Ottassol was the great invisible city. In colder times, the plain had supported its buildings; now they supported the plain. Ottassol was an underground labyrinth, in which men and phagors lived. All that remained on the scorched surface were roads and fields, counterpointed by rectangular holes in the ground. Down in the rectangles were the courts, surrounded by facades of houses which otherwise had no external configuration.

  Ottassol was earth and its converse, hollowed earth, the negative and positive of soil, as if it had been bitten out by geometrical worms.

  The city housed 695,000 people. Its extent could not be seen and was rarely appreciated even by its inhabitants. Favourable soil, climate, and geographical situation had caused the port to grow larger than Borlien’s capital, Matrassyl. So the warrens expanded, often on different levels, until they were halted by the River Takissa.

  Paved lanes ran underground, some wide enough for two carts to pass. ScufBar walked along one of these lanes, leading the hoxney with the casket. He had parted with FloerCrow at a market on the outskirts of town. As he went, pedestrians turned to stare, screwing up their noses at the smell which floated behind him. The ice block at the bottom of the casket had all but melted away.

  “The anatomist and deuteroscopist?” he asked of a passerby. “Bardol CaraBansity?”

  “Ward Court.”

  Beggars of all descriptions called for alms outside the frequent churches, wounded soldiers back from the wars, cripples, men and women with horrific skin cancers. ScufBar ignored them. Pecubeas sang from their cages at every corner and court. The songs of different strains of pecubea were sufficiently distinct for the blind to distinguish and be guided by them.

  ScufBar made his way through the maze, negotiated a few broad steps down into Ward Court, and came to the door which bore a sign with the name Bardol CaraBansity on it. He rang the bell.

  A bolt was shot back, the door opened. A phagor appeared, dressed in a rough hempen gown. It supplemented its blank cerise stare with a question.

  “What you want?”

  “I want the anatomist.”

  Tying the hoxney to a hitching post, ScufBar entered and found himself in a small domed room. It contained a counter, behind which a second phagor stood.

  The first phagor walked down a corridor, both walls of which it brushed with its broad shoulders. It pushed through a curtain into a living room in which a couch stood in one corner. The anatomist was enjoying congress with his wife on the couch. He rested as he listened to what the ahuman servant had to say, and then sighed.

  “Scerm you, I’ll be there.” He climbed to his feet and leaned against the wall to pull his pants up under his charfrul, which he adjusted with slow deliberation.

  His wife hurled a cushion at him. “You dolt, why do you never concentrate? Finish what you’re doing. Tell these fools to go away.”

  He shook his head and his heavy cheeks trembled. “It’s the unremitting clockwork of the world, my beauty. Keep it warm till I return. I don’t order the comings and goings of men…”

  He moved down the corridor and paused at the threshhold of his shop so as to inspect the new arrival. Bardol CaraBansity was a solid man, less tall than weighty, with a ponderous way of speech and a heavy skull s
haped not unlike a phagor’s. He wore a thick leather belt over his charfrul, and a knife in the belt. Although he looked like a common butcher, CaraBansity had a well-earned reputation as a crafty man.

  With his hollow chest and protruding stomach, ScufBar was not an impressive sight, and CaraBansity made it plain he was not impressed.

  “I’ve got a body for sale, sir. A human body.”

  Without speaking, CaraBansity motioned to the phagors. They went and brought the body in between them, dropping it down on the counter. Sawdust and ice fragments adhered to it.

  The anatomist and deuteroscopist took a step nearer.

  “It’s a bit high. Where did you acquire it, man?”

  “From a river, sir. When I was fishing.”

  The body was so distended by internal gasses that it bulged out of its clothes. CaraBansity pulled it onto its back and tugged a dead fish from inside its shirt. He threw it at ScufBar’s feet.

  “That’s a so-called scupperfish. To those of us who have a care for truth, it’s not a fish at all but the marine young of a Wutra’s worm. Marine. Sea, not freshwater. Why are you lying? Did you murder this poor fellow? You look like a criminal. The phrenology suggests it.”

  “Very well, sir, if you prefer, I did find him in the sea. Since I am a servant of the unfortunate queen, I did not want the fact widely known.”

  CaraBansity looked at him closely. “You serve MyrdemInggala, queen of queens, do you, you rogue? She deserves good lackeys and good fortune, does that lady.”

  He indicated a cheap print of the queen’s face, which hung in a corner of the shop.

  “I serve her well enough. Tell me what you will pay me for this body.”

  “You have come all this way for ten roon, not more. In these wicked times, I can get bodies to cut up every day of the week. Fresher than this one, too.”

  “I was informed that you would pay me fifty, sir. Fifty roon, sir.” ScufBar looked shifty, and rubbed his hands together.

  “How does it happen that you turn up here with your malodorous friend when the king himself and an envoy from the Holy C’Sarr are due to arrive in Ottassol? Are you an instrument of the king’s?”

  ScufBar spread his hands and shrank a little. “I have connections only with the hoxney outside. Pay me just twenty-five, sir, and I’ll go back to the queen immediately.”

  “You scerm are all greedy. No wonder the world’s going to pot.”

  “If that is the case, sir, then I’ll accept twenty. Twenty roon.”

  Turning to one of the phagors standing by, flicking its pale milt up its slotlike nostrils, CaraBansity said, “Pay the man and get him out of here.”

  “How muzzh I pay?”

  “Ten roon.”

  ScufBar let out a howl of anguish.

  “All right. Fifteen. And you, my man, present Bardol CaraBansity’s compliments to your queen.”

  The phagor fumbled in its hempen gown and produced a thin purse. It proffered three gold coins, lying in the gnarled palm of its three-fingered hand. ScufBar grabbed them and made for the door, looking sullen.

  Briskly CaraBansity ordered one of his ahuman assistants to shoulder the corpse—an order obeyed without observable reluctance—and followed him along the dim corridor, where strange odours drifted. CaraBansity knew as much about the stars as about the intestines, and his house—itself shaped rather like an intestine—extended far into the loess, with entrances to chambers devoted to all his interests on several lanes.

  They entered a workshop. Light slanted down through two small square windows set in fortress-thick earth walls. Where the phagor trod, points of light glinted under his splayed feet. They looked like diamonds. They were beads of glass, scattered when the deuteroscopist was making lenses. The room was crammed with learned litter. The ten houses of the zodiac were painted on the wall. Against another wall hung three carcasses in Various stages of dissection—a giant fish, a hoxney, and a phagor. The hoxney had been opened up like a book, its soft parts removed to display ribs and backbone. On a desk nearby lay sheets of paper on which CaraBansity had drawn detailed representations of the dead animal, with various parts depicted in coloured ink.

  The phagor swung the Gravabagalinien corpse from his shoulder and hung it upside down from a rail. Two hooks pierced the flesh between the Achilles tendon and the calcaneum. The broken arms dangled, the puffy hands rested like shelled crabs on the floor. At a blow from CaraBansity, his assistant departed. CaraBansity hated having the ancipitals about, but they were cheaper than servants or even human slaves.

  After a judicial contemplation of the corpse, CaraBansity pulled out his knife, and cut the dead man’s clothes away. He ignored the stench of decay.

  The body was that of a young man, twelve years old, twelve and a half, possibly twelve and nine tenners, not more. His clothes were of coarse and foreign quality, his hair was cut in a manner generally used by sailors.

  “You, my fine fellow, are probably not of Borlien,” said CaraBansity to the corpse. “Your clothes are Hespagorat style—probably from Dimariam.”

  The belly was so distended that it had folded over and concealed a leather body belt. CaraBansity worked it free. As the flesh sank back, a wound was revealed. CaraBansity slipped on a glove and thrust his fist into the wound. His fingers met with an obstruction. After some tugging, he extracted a curved grey ancipital horn, which had punctured the spleen and sunk deep into the body. He regarded the object with interest. Its two sharp edges made it a useful weapon. It had once possessed a handle, which was missing, possibly lost in the sea.

  He regarded the body with fresh curiosity. A mystery always pleased him.

  Setting the horn down, he examined the belt. It was of superior workmanship, but the sort of standard thing sold anywhere—at Osoilima, for example, where pilgrims provided a ready market for such goods. On the inner side was a button-down pocket, which he flipped open. From the pocket, he withdrew an incomprehensible object.

  Frowning, he laid the object in his grubby palm and walked across to the light with it. It was like nothing he had ever seen before. He could not even identify the metal of which it was chiefly made. A shiver of superstitious fear crossed his pragmatic mind.

  As he was washing it under the pump, removing traces of sand and blood, his wife Bindla, entered the workshop.

  “Bardol? What are you doing now? I thought you were coming back to bed. You know what I was keeping warm for you?”

  “I love it, but I have something else to do.” He flashed her one of his solemn smiles. She was of middle age—at twenty-eight and one tenner almost two years younger than he—and her rich russet hair was losing some of its colour; but he admired the way she was still aware of her ripe charms. At present, she was overacting her resentment at the smells in the room.

  “You’re not even writing your treatise on religion, your usual excuse.”

  He grunted. “I prefer my stinks.”

  “You perverse man. Religion is eternal, stinks aren’t.”

  “On the contrary, my leggiandrous beauty, religions change all the time. It’s stinks which go on unchanged for ever.”

  “You rejoice in that?”

  He was drying the wonderful object on a cloth and did not answer.

  “Look at this.”

  She came and rested a hand on his shoulder.

  “By the boulder!” he exclaimed in awe. He passed it to Bindla, and she gasped. A strap of cunningly interwoven metal, much like a bracelet, supported a transparent panel in which three sets of numbers glowed.

  They read the numbers aloud as he pointed to them with a blunt finger.

  06:16:55 — 12:37:76 — 19:20:14

  The numbers writhed and changed as they watched. The CaraBansity’s looked at each other in mute astonishment. They watched again.

  “I never saw such a talisman before,” Bindla said in awe.

  They had to look again, fascinated. The figures were black on a yellow background. He read them aloud.


  06:20:25 — 13:00:00 — 19:23:44

  As CaraBansity put the mechanism to his ear to see if it made any noise, the pendulum clock on the wall behind began to chime thirteen. This clock was an elaborate one, built by CaraBansity himself in his younger days. It showed in pictorial form the rising and setting times of the two suns, Batalix and Freyr, as well as the divisions of the year, the 100 seconds in a minute, the forty minutes in an hour, the twenty-five hours in a day, the eight days in a week, the six weeks in a tenner, and the ten tenners in a year of four hundred and eighty days. There was also an indicator to show the 1825 small years in a Great Year; that pointer now stood at 381, the present date by the Borlien-Oldorando calendar.

  Bindla listened to the mechanism, and heard nothing. “Is it a clock of some kind?”

  “Must be. Middle numbers make it thirteen o’clock, Borlien time…”

  She always knew when he was at a loss. He chewed his knuckle like a child.

  There was a row of studs along the top of the bracelet. She pressed one.

  A different series of numbers appeared in the three apertures.

  6877 — 828 — 3269

  (1177)

  The middle one’s the year, by some ancient calendar or other. How can that work?”

  He pressed the stud and the previous series appeared. He set the bracelet down on the bench and stared at it, but Bindla picked it up and slipped it over her hand. The bracelet immediately adjusted itself, fitting snugly to her plump wrist. She shrieked.