‘You touch it.’
‘No, you.’
‘You daren’t, coward!’
‘You’re a coward too!’
Putting forth chubby fingers, they touched the leg together.
Heavy musculature moved below a rug of hair. The limb lifted, the three-toed foot stamped down in the mud.
Though these monstrous creatures could master the Olonets tongue, they were far from human. The thoughts in the harneys of their heads ran aslant. Old hunters knew that inside their barrel bodies they carried their intestines above their lungs. From their machinelike walk, it could be seen how their limbs were jointed in a different way from a man’s; at what should have been elbow and knee, phagors could bend lower arms and legs in impossible attitudes. That distinction alone was enough to strike terror into small boys’ hearts.
For a moment they were in contact with the unknown. Pulling back their hands as if they had been burnt — in truth, the ancipital body temperature was cooler than man’s — the two urchins looked at each other with wild eyes.
Then they burst into howls of fear. Dly Hoin swept the boys into her arms. By then, Dresyl and others had shifted the monster on.
Although the great animal struggled in its bonds, it was hammered through the entrance and into the tower. The crowd, restless in the square, listened to the noise within, which worked its way up the building. A cheer rose in the thick air as the first hunter emerged on the roof. Behind everybody, the kaidaw carcass roasted, untended; its flavours mingled with wood smoke to fill the bowl of the square, full of upturned faces. A second cheer, louder than the first, arose when the phagor chief was dragged into view, black against the sky.
‘Throw it down!’ screamed the crowd, united in hate.
The monstrous chief fought with his jostling captors. He roared as they prodded him with daggers. Then, as if realising that the game was up, he jumped up onto the parapet and stood there, glaring down at the jostling mob below.
With a last burst of rage, he snapped his bonds. He jumped forward, arms outstretched, with a massive spring that carried him away from the tower. The crowd tried too late to scatter. The great body hurtled down, crushing three people beneath it, a man, a woman, a child. The child was killed outright. A groan of terror and dismay rose from the rest there assembled.
Even then, the great animal was not killed. He raised himself up on his shattered legs to confront the avenging blades of the hunters. Everyone pierced him through, through the thick coat, through the dense flesh. He struggled on until his curdled yellow blood streamed across the trampled ground.
While these terrible events took place, Little Yuli remained in his chamber with Loil Bry and their infant daughter. When he made to dress and join the fight, Loil Bry cried that she felt unwell and needed his company. She clung to him, kissing his lips with her pale mouth, and would not let him go.
After this, Dresyl felt contempt for his cousin-brother. But he did not go and kill him, as he had a mind to, although these were savage times. For he remembered a lesson and recognised that killing divided tribes. When his sons ruled, this was forgotten.
This forbearance of Dresyl’s — based on a friendship begun in his boyhood, before Dresyl had a beard or grey in it — stood the community in good stead, and earned him new respect. And the things Little Yuli learned at the expense of his fighting spirit were fruitful in the days to come.
Immediately after the shock caused by the appearance of the phagor chief in its midst, the community underwent another ordeal. A mysterious illness, accompanied by fever, cramps, and body rash, seized half the population of Oldorando. The first to go down were the hunters who had pushed the phagor to the top of the herb tower. For some days, little hunting was done. The domesticated pigs and geese had to be eaten instead. A woman with child died of fever, and the whole hamlet sorrowed to lose two precious lives to the world below. Yuli and Loil Bry, together with their daughter, escaped the illness.
Soon the communal bloodstream was purged of its malady, and life went on as usual. But the news of the slaying of the phagor spread forth from the community.
And for a while the climate continued harsh towards mankind. The cold winds picked out the seams of any badly stitched garment.
The two sentinels of light, Freyr and Batalix, went about their duties as appointed, and the Hour-Whistler continued to blow.
For half of the year, the sentinels shone together in the skies. Then the hours of their setting slipped further apart, until gradually Freyr ruled the sky by day and Batalix the sky by night; then night scarcely seemed night, day scarcely light enough to be called day. Then the sentinels again became reconciled: days became bright with both lights, nights became pitch.
One quarter, when there were only shrill stars looking down on Oldorando, when cold and dark were intense, the old lord, Wall Ein Den, died; he descended to the world below, to become himself a gossie and sink down to the original boulder.
Another year was finished, and another. A generation grew up, another grew old. Slowly numbers increased under Dresyl’s peaceful rule, while the suns performed their sentry duties overhead.
Although Batalix showed the larger disc, Freyr always gave out more light and more warmth. Batalix was an old sentinel, Freyr young and lusty. From one generation to the next, no man could positively swear that Freyr grew towards manhood, but so said the legends. Humanity endured — suffering or rejoicing — from generation to generation, and lived in the hope that Wutra would be victorious in the world above, and ever sustain Freyr.
These legends carried reality within them, as a flower bulb carries the flower within its flesh. So humans knew without knowing they knew.
As for the animals and birds, still many in numbers though few in species, their senses were more closely bound by the magnetic fluctuations of the globe than were mankind’s. They also knew without knowing they knew. Their comprehensions told them that ineluctable change was already at hand — was indeed rising under the earth, in the bloodstream, in the air, in the stratosphere, and in all that was in the biosphere.
Above the stratosphere rode a small self-contained world built from the elements of metals gathered in the rich fields among the stars. From the surface of Helliconia, this world appeared in the night sky as a star itself, travelling swiftly overhead.
It was the Earth Observation Station Avernus.
The binary system of Freyr and its companion, Batalix, was closely watched by the Avernus. In particular, the families on the station studied Helliconia, and had done so for more than one of its slow Great Years about Freyr — or Star A, as it was known on the station.
Helliconia was of unique interest of the people of Earth, and never more so than at this period. Helliconia revolved about Batalix — Star B, as it was known on the station. Both sun and planet were beginning to accelerate in their orbit. They were still almost six hundred times as distant from Freyr as Earth is from its primary. But the distance was diminishing, week by week.
The planet was now several centuries past apastron, the coldest part of its orbit. There was new purpose in the corridors of the Observation Station; everyone could read the message in the increasingly favourable temperature gradients.
IV. Favourable Temperature Gradients
Children follow their parents or they do not. Laintal Ay grew up knowing his mother as a quiet woman, given to the same kind of studious seclusion as her mother and father. But Loilanun had not always behaved like that, before life defeated her.