Helliconia Winter h-3 Read online

  In a court overlooked by the upper windows of the mansion, a liegeman and two freemen were brandishing swords. They had cornered six dehorned phagors. One of the phagors, a gillot with thin withered dugs which spoke of years in captivity, was calling out in a hoarse voice, in Sibish, “You not to kill, you vile Sons of Freyr! This Hrl-Ichor Yhar come back belong to us, the ancipitals! Stop! Stop!” “Stop!” Shokerandit said.

  The men had already killed one of the ahumans. A swordsman had disembowelled a stallun with a downward slash of his sword. Ancipital eddre lodged in their carcasses above their lungs. As Shokerandit bent over the corpse, which was still in spasm, the intestines slithered forth on a tide of yellow blood.

  The mass loosened itself and began slowly to evacuate the cavern of the ribs like a concoction of soft- boiled eggs in jelly. Beige shadows ran between little glistening mounds which came creeping out of the wound like a living mass, flowing thickly over the flags and into the cracks between the flags, flowing until all poured forth, separate organs no longer distinguishable in the general exodus, leaving a hollow behind them.

  Shokerandit tugged back the dead creature’s ear to expose its blaze mark.

  He glared at the men.

  “These are our slave ancipitals. What are you doing?”

  The liegeman was scowling. “Best mind out the way, master. Orders are to kill off all phagors, whether ours or otherwise.”

  The five phagors began shouting hoarsely and scrambling to get past the men, who immediately brought their swords to the ready.

  “Stop. Drikstalgil, who gave you these orders?” He remembered the liegeman’s name.

  Keeping one eye on the ancipitals and his sword ready, the liegeman dipped into his left pocket and brought out a folded paper.

  “Secretary Evanporil issued me this this morning. Now, stand back, if you would not mind, master, or you’ll get crushed.”

  He handed Shokerandit a poster, which Shokerandit flapped open with an angry gesture. It was printed in heavy black letters.

  The poster announced that a New Act had been passed, in a further attempt to keep down the Plague known as the Fat Death. The Ancipital Race had been identified as the main Carrier of the Plague. All Phagors must therefore be killed. Phagor slaves must be put down. Wild Phagors should be shot on sight. A bounty would be paid of One Sib per ancipital head by the appropriate authority in each District. Henceforth, the possession of Phagors was illegal, under Penalty of Death. By Order of the Oligarch.

  “Put up your swords until I give you further orders,” Shokerandit said. “No more killing till I say so. And get this corpse away from here.”

  When the men reluctantly did as he instructed, Shokerandit went back into the house, marching angrily upstairs to see the secretary.

  The mansion was full of ancient prints, many of them engraved by a steel process in Rivenjk, when that city had boasted an artistic colony. Most of the prints depicted scenes suitable to wild mountainous areas: hunters coming unexpectedly upon bears in clearings, bears coming unexpectedly upon hunters, stags at bay, men mounted on yelk leaping into chasms, women being stabbed in gloomy forests, lost children dying in pairs upon exposed crags.

  Beside the secretary’s door was a print of a soldier-priest on guard before the very portals of the Great Wheel. He stood stiffly upright while spearing to death an immense phagor which had leaped from a hole to attack him. The engraving was entitled—the Sibish lettering executed with many a curlicue—“An Old Antagonism.”

  “Very appropriate,” Shokerandit said aloud, thumped on Evanporil’s door, and entered.

  The secretary was standing by his window, looking out, and enjoying a cup of pellamountain tea. He inclined his head and looked slyly at Shokerandit without speaking.

  Shokerandit spread the poster out on his desk.

  “You did not tell me about this when I was here earlier. How’s that?”

  “You did not ask me, Master Luterin.”

  “How many ancipitals do we employ on the estate?”

  The secretary answered without hesitation. “Six hundred and fifteen.”

  “It would be a tremendous loss to slaughter them. The new Act is not to be complied with. First, I am going into town to see what the other landlords make of it.”

  Secretary Evanporil coughed behind his fingers. “I wouldn’t advise a visit to town just now. We have reports of some disturbance there.”

  “What kind of disturbance?”

  “The clergy, Master Luterin. The live cremation of Priest-Supreme Chubsalid has caused a great deal of disaffection. A tenner has passed since his death, and I’m given to understand that the occasion was marked this morning by the burning of an effigy of the Oligarch. Member Ebstok Esikananzi led some men to quell the display, but there has been trouble since.”

  Shokerandit sat himself on the edge of the desk.

  “Evanporil, tell me, do you consider that we can afford to kill over six hundred phagors out of hand?”

  “That’s not for me to say, Master Luterin. I am only an administrator.”

  “But the Act—it’s so arbitrary. Don’t you think so?”

  “I would say, since you ask me, Master Luterin, that, if scrupulously carried out, the Act will rid Sibornal of the ancipital kind for ever. An advantage, wouldn’t you say?”

  “But the immediate loss of cheap labour to us … I don’t imagine my father will be best pleased.”

  “That may be, sir, but for the general good…” The secretary let the sentence hang.

  “Then we will not implement the Act until my father returns. I shall write to Esikananzi and the other landlords to that effect. See that the managers are clear on that score immediately.”

  Shokerandit spent the afternoon happily riding about the estate, ensuring that no more phagors were harmed. He rode out some miles to call on his father’s cousins, who had another estate in a mountainous region. With his mind full of plans, he forgot entirely about his mother.

  That night he made love to Toress Lahl as usual. Something in the words he uttered, or in the way he touched her, woke a response in her. She became a different person, yielding, imaginative, fully alive. An exhilaration beyond mere happiness filled Luterin. He thought he had won a great gift. All the pains of life were worth such delight.

  They spent the whole night in the closest embraces, moving slowly, moving wildly, moving scarcely at all. Their spirits and bodies were one.

  Towards morning, Luterin fell asleep. He was immediately in the dreamworld.

  He was walking through a sparse landscape almost bereft of trees. It was marshy underfoot. Ahead lay a frozen lake whose immensity could not be judged. It was the future: all-powerful night prevailed in a small winter during the Weyr-Winter. Neither sun was in the sky. A lumbering animal with rasping breath followed him.

  It was also the past. On the shores of the lake were camped all the men who had died violently in the Battle of Isturiacha. Their wounds still remained, disfiguring them. Luterin saw Bandal Eith Lahl there, standing apart with his hands in his pockets, gazing down at the ground.

  Under the ice of the lake, something gigantic was penned. He recognised that this was where the breathing came from.

  The being surged forth from the ice. The ice did not break. The being was a huge woman with a lustrous black skin. She rose and rose into the sky. No one saw her but Luterin.

  She cast a benevolent gaze on Luterin and said, “You will never have a woman to make you entirely happy. But there will be much happiness in the pursuit.”

  Much more she said, but this was all Luterin could remember when he woke up.

  Toress Lahl lay beside him. Not only were her eyes shut: her whole countenance presented a closed appearance. A lock of hair lay across her face; she bit it, as recently she had bitten the fox tail to preserve her from the cold of the trail. She scarcely breathed. He recognised that she was in pauk.

  Finally she returned. She stared and looked at him almost without reco
gnition.

  “You never visit those below?” she said in a small voice.

  “Never. We Shokerandits regard it as gross superstition.”

  “Do you not wish to speak with your dead brother?”

  “No.”

  After a silence, he clutched her hand and asked, “You have been communing with your husband again?”

  She nodded without speaking, knowing it was bitter to him. After a moment, she said, “Isn’t this world we live in like an evil dream?”

  “Not if we live by our beliefs.”

  She clung to him then and said, “But isn’t it true that one day we shall grow old, and our bodies decay, and our wits fail? Isn’t that true? What could be worse than that?”

  They made love again, this time more from fear than affection.

  After he had done the rounds of the estate the next day, and found everything quiet, he went to visit his mother.

  His mother’s rooms were at the rear of the mansion. A young servant girl opened the door to him, and showed him into his mother’s anteroom. There stood his mother, in characteristic pose, hands clasped tightly before her, head slightly on one side as she smiled quizzingly at him.

  He kissed her. As he did so, the familiar atmosphere that she carried round with her enveloped him. Something in her attitude and her gestures suggested an inward sorrow, even—he had often thought it— an illness of some kind: and yet an illness, a sorrow, so familiar that Lourna Shokerandit drew on them almost as a substitute for other marked characteristics.

  As she spoke gently to her son, not reproaching him for failing to come earlier, compassion rose in his heart. He saw how age had increased its tyranny upon her since their last meeting. Her cheeks and temples were more hollow, her skin more papery. He asked her what she had been doing with herself.

  She put out a hand and touched him with a small pressure, as if uncertain whether to draw him nearer or push him away.

  “We won’t talk here. Your aunt would like to see you too.”

  Lourna Shokerandit turned and led him into the small wood-panelled room within which much of her life was spent. Luterin remembered it from childhood. Lacking windows, its walls were covered with paintings of sunlit glades in sombre caspiarn forests. Here and there, lost among representations of foliage, women’s faces gazed into the room from oval frames. Aunt Yaringa, the plump and emotional Yaringa, was sitting in a corner, embroidering, in a chair upholstered somewhat along her own lines.

  Yaringa jumped up and uttered loud soblike noises of welcome.

  “Home at last, you poor poor thing! What you must have been through…”

  Lourna Shokerandit lowered herself stiffly into a velvet-covered chair. She took her son’s hand as he sat beside her. Yaringa perforce retreated to her padded corner.

  “It’s happiness to see you back, Luterin. We had such fears for you, particularly when we heard what happened to Asperamanka’s army.”

  “My life was spared through a piece of good fortune. All our fellow-countrymen were slain as they returned to Sibornal. It was an act of deep treachery.”

  She looked down at her thin lap, where silences had a habit of nestling. Finally she said, without glancing up, “It is a shock to see you as you are. You have become so … fat.” She hesitated on the last word, in view of her sister’s presence.

  “I survived the Fat Death and am in my winter suit, Mother. I like it and feel perfectly well.”

  “It makes you look funny,” said Yaringa, and was ignored.

  He told the ladies something of his adventures, concluding by saying, “And I owe my survival in great part to a woman called Toress Lahl, widow of a Borldoranian I killed in battle. She nursed me devotedly through the Fat Death.”

  “From slaves, devotion is to be expected,” said Lourna Shokerandit. “Have you been to see the Esikananzis yet? Insil will be eager to see you again, as you know.”

  “I have not yet spoken to her. No.”

  “I shall arrange a feast for tomorrow night, and Insil and her family shall come. We will all celebrate your return.” She clapped her hands once, without sound.

  “I shall sing for you, Luterin,” said Yaringa. It was her speciality.

  Lourna’s expression changed. She sat more upright in her chair.

  “And Evanporil tells me that you are countermanding the new Act to destroy all phagors.”

  “We could cull them gradually, Mother. But to lose all six hundred at once would be to disrupt the working of the estate. We are hardly likely to get six hundred human slaves to replace them—apart from the greater expense of human slaves.”

  “We must obey the State.”

  “I thought we would wait for Father’s return.”

  “Very well. Otherwise, you will comply with the law? It is important for us Shokerandits to set an example.”

  “Of course.”

  “I should tell you that a foreign female slave was arrested in your rooms this morning. We have her in a cell, and she will go before the local Board when they meet next.”

  Shokerandit stood up. “Why was this done? Who dared intrude into my rooms?”

  With composure, his mother answered, “The servant you had ordered to attend the slave woman reported that she went into a state of pauk. Pauk is proscribed by law. No less a personage than Priest- Supreme Chubsalid has gone to the stake for refusing to comply with the law. Exception can hardly be made for a foreign slave woman.”

  “In this case, an exception will be made,” Shokerandit said, pale of face. “Excuse me.” He bowed to his mother and aunt and left their rooms.

  In a fury, he stamped through the passages to the Estates Office. He relieved his anger by bellowing at the staff.

  As he summoned the estate guard captain, Shokerandit said to himself, Very well, I shall marry Toress Lahl. I must protect her from injustice. She’ll be safe, married to a future Keeper of the Wheel… and perhaps this scare will persuade her not to visit the gossie of her husband so often.

  Toress Lahl was released from the cell without trouble and restored to Shokerandit’s rooms. They embraced.

  “I bitterly regret this indignity imposed on you.”

  “I have become used to indignity.”

  “Then you shall become used to something better. When the right opportunity arises, I will take you to meet my mother. She will see the kind of person you are.”

  Toress Lahl laughed. “I am sure that I shall not greatly impress the Shokerandits of Khamabhar.”

  The feast to mark Luterin’s return was well attended. His mother had shaken off her lethargy to invite all local dignitaries as well as such Shokerandit relations as were in favour.

  The Esikananzi family arrived in force. With Member Ebstok Esika-nanzi came his sickly-looking wife, two sons, his daughter Insil Esikananzi, and a train of subsidiary relations.

  Since Luterin and Insil had last met, she had developed into an attractive woman, though a heaviness in her brow prevented true beauty—as well as suggesting that tendency to meet fate head-on which had long been a quality of the Esikananzis. She was elegantly dressed in a grey velvet gown reaching to the floor, adorned by the sort of wide lace collar she favoured. Luterin noted how the formal politeness with which she covered her disgust at his metamorphosis studiedly emphasised that disgust.

  All the Esikananzis tinkled to a great extent; their hip-bells were very similar in tone. Ebstok’s was the loudest. In a loud whisper, he spoke of his bottomless sorrow at the death of his son Umat at Isturia-cha. Luterin’s protest that Umat was killed in the great massacre outside Koriantura was swept aside as lies and Campannlatian propaganda. Member Ebstok Esikananzi was a thickset man of dark and intricate countenance. The cold endured on his frequent hunts had brought a maze of red veins creeping like a species of plant life over his cheeks. He watched the mouths, not the eyes, of those who addressed him.

  Member Ebstok Esikananzi was a man who believed in being unafraid to speak his mind, despite the fact that this o
rgan, when spoken, had only one theme to sound: the importance of his opinion.

  As they demolished the maggoty fists of venison on their plates, Esikananzi said, addressing both Luterin and the rest of the table, “You’ll have heard the news about our friend Priest-Supreme Chub-salid. Some of his followers are kicking up a bit of trouble here. Wretched man preached treason against the State. Your father and I used to go hunting with Chubsalid in better days. Did you know that, Luterin? Well, we did on one occasion.

  “The traitor was born in Bribahr, so you don’t wonder… He paid a visit to the monasteries of the Wheel. Now he takes it into his head to speak against the State, the friend and protector of the Church.”

  “They have burnt him for it, Father, if that’s any consolation,” said one of the Esikananzi sons, with a laugh.

  “Of course. And his estates in Bribahr will be confiscated. I wonder who will get them? The Oligarchy will decide on what is best. The great thing is, as winter descends, to guard against anarchy. For Sib- ornal, the four main tasks are clear. To unify the continent, to strike rapidly against all subversive activity, whether in economic, religious, or academic life…”

  As the voice droned on, Luterin Shokerandit stared down at his plate. He was without appetite. His eventful time away from Shivenink had so widened his outlook on life that he was oppressed by the sight and sound of the Esikananzis, of whom he had once been in awe. The pattern of the plate before him penetrated his consciousness; with a wave of nostalgia, he realised that it was an Odim export, despatched from the warehouse in Koriantura in better times. He thought with affection of Eedap Mun Odim and his pleasant brother—and then, with guilt, of Toress Lahl, at present locked in his suite for safety. Looking up he caught Insil’s cool gaze.

  “The Oligarchy will have to pay for the death of the Priest-Supreme,” he said, “no less than for the slaughter of Asperamanka’s army. Why should winter be an excuse for overturning all our human values? Excuse me.”

  He rose and left the room.

  After the meal, his mother employed many reproaches in order to induce him to return to the company. Sheepishly, he went and sat with Insil and her family. They made stiff conversation until slaves brought in a phagor who had been taught to juggle. Under guidance from her master’s whip, the gillot jiggled a little from one foot to another while balancing a plate on her horns.