Both Oligarchy and common people understood that winter, setting in steadily, could burst society apart like a frozen water pipe. The disruptions of cold, the failure of food supplies, could spell the collapse of civilisation. After Myrkwyr, only a few years away, darkness and ice would be upon the land for three and a half local centuries: that was the Weyr-Winter, when Sibornal became the domain of polar winds.
Campannlat would collapse under the weight of winter. Its nations could not collaborate. Whole peoples would revert to barbarism. Sibornal, under more severe conditions, would survive through rational planning.
Still seeking consolation, Harbin Fashnalgid consorted with priests and holy men. The Church was a reservoir of knowledge. There he discovered the answer to Sibornal’s survival. Obsessed as he was with his virtual exile from his father’s estates, from those fields and woods where his brothers laboured, the answer had the force of revelation. It was not to the land that Sibornal would turn in extremity.
The huge continent was so largely covered by polar ice that it might best be regarded as a narrow circle of land facing sea. In the seas lay Sibornal’s winter salvation. Cold seas held more oxygen than warm ones. Come winter, the seas would swarm with marine life. The durable food chains of the ocean would yield their plenty — even when ice covered those estates of his family from which he had been banished.
The awful working of history gnawed at Fashnalgid. He was used to thinking in periods of days or tenners, not in decades and centuries. He fought his disposition to drink and took to spending as much time with priests as with whores. A Priest-Servitant attached to the military chapel in the Askitosh barracks became his confidant. To this priest, Fashnalgid one day confessed his hatred of the Oligarchy.
‘The Church also hates the Oligarchy,’ said the priest mildly. ‘Yet we work together. Church and State must never be divided. You resent the Oligarchy because, through its pressures, you had to enter the army. But the flaws in your character under which you labour are yours — not the army’s, not the Oligarchy’s.
‘Praise the Oligarchy for its positive aspects. Praise it for its continuity and benevolent power. It is said that the Oligarchy never sleeps. Rejoice that it watches over our continent.’
Fashnalgid kept silent. He took a while to understand why the priest’s answer alarmed him. It came to him that ‘benevolent power’ was a contradiction in terms. He was an Uskuti, yet he had been virtually sold into the slavery of the army. As for the Oligarchy not sleeping: anyone who went without sleep was by definition inhuman, and therefore as opposed to humanity as the phagors.
It was a while later that he realised the priest had spoken of the Oligarchy in the same terms he might have used for God the Azoiaxic. The Azoiaxic also was praised for his continuity and his benevolent power. The Azoiaxic also watched over the continent. And was it not claimed that the Church never slept?
From that moment on, Fashnalgid ceased to attend church, and was more confirmed than ever in his opinion that the Oligarchy was monstrous.
The Oligarch’s First Guard had escaped being sent with Asperamanka’s punitive expedition to Northern Campannlat. Only a few weeks later, however, it received orders to move to Koriantura to man the frontier.
Fashnalgid had dared to question Major Gardeterark on the reasons for the move.
‘The Fat Death is spreading,’ said the major brusquely. ‘We don’t want any rioting in the frontier towns, do we?’ His dislike of his junior officer was such that he would look him not in the eyes but in the moustache.
On his last evening in Askitosh, Fashnalgid was with a woman he currently favoured, by name Rostadal. She lived in an attic only a few streets from the barracks.
Fashnalgid liked Rostadal and pitied her. She was a displaced person. She had come from a village in the north. She had nothing. No possessions. No political or religious beliefs. No relations. She still managed to be kind, and made her little rented room homely.
He sat up suddenly in bed and said, ‘I’ll have to go, Rostadal. Get me a drink, will you?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Just get me a drink. It’s the weight of misery. I can’t stay.’
Without complaint, she slipped out of bed and brought him a glass of wine. He threw it down his throat.
She looked down at him and said, ‘Tell me what’s worrying you.’
‘I can’t. It’s too terrible. The world’s full of evil.’ He began dressing. She slipped into her soiled keedrant, wordless now, wondering if he would pay her. There was only an oil lamp to light the scene.
After lacing up his boots, he collected the book he had set by the bedside and put down some sibs for her. His look was one of misery. He saw her fright but could do nothing to comfort her.
‘Will you come back, Harbin?’ she asked, clasping her hands together.
He looked up at the cracked ceiling and shook his head. Then he went out.
A spiteful rain fell over Askitosh, setting its gutters foaming. Fashnalgid took no notice. He walked briskly through the deserted streets, trying to wear out his thoughts.
On the previous night, a messenger on an exhausted yelk had ridden through these same streets. He rode to the army headquarters at the top of the hill. Although the incident had been hushed up, the officers’ mess soon heard about it. The messenger was an agent of the Oligarch. He brought a report concerning Asperamanka, announcing the victory of the latter’s forces against the combined armies of Campannlat, and the relief of Isturiacha. Asperamanka, said the report, was expecting a triumphal reception on his return to Sibornal.
The messenger bearing this letter dismounted in the square and fell flat on his face. He was suffering all the symptoms of the Fat Death. A senior officer shot the man as he lay.
Only an hour or two later, Fashnalgid’s mother came to him distraught in a dream, saying, ‘Brother shall slay brother.’ He was himself dangling from a hook.
Two days passed and Fashnalgid was posted to Koriantura.
As he took his orders from Major Gardeterark, he saw clearly the plan the Oligarch had devised. There was one factor which would disrupt the scheme for carrying Sibornal through the Weyr-Winter. That factor was more divisive even than the cold: the Fat Death. In the madness the Fat Death carried with it, brother would devour brother.
The death of his midnight messenger warned the Oligarch that the return of Asperamanka’s army would bring the plague from the Savage Continent. So a rational decision had been arrived at: the army must not return. The First Guard, of which Fashnalgid was an officer, was in Koriantura for one reason only: to annihilate Asperamanka’s army as it approached the frontier. The antiplague regulations, the Restrictions of Persons in Abodes Act, imposed on the city and on Eedap Mun Odim, were moves to make the massacre when it came more acceptable to the population.
These terrible reflections ran through Harbin Fashnalgid’s head as he lay in his billet under Odim’s roof. Unlike Major Gardeterark, he was not an early riser. But he could not escape into sleep from the vision in his head. The Oligarchy he now saw as a spider, sitting somewhere in the darkness, sustaining itself through the ages at whatever cost to ordinary people.
That was the implication behind his father’s remark that he had bought the promise of the future. He had bought it with his son’s life. His father had ensured his own safety as an ex-Member of the Oligarchy, at no matter what expense to others.
‘I’ll do something about it,’ Fashnalgid said, as he finally dragged himself out of bed. Light was filtering through his small window. All round him, he could hear Odim’s vast family beginning to stir.