On all four planets, temperatures were rising. Improvement overall was steady; only on the ground did anomalies register on tender flesh.
Helliconia’s drama of generations in travail was set upon a stage sparsely structured by a few overriding circumstances. The planet’s year about Batalix — Star B to the scholars of the Avernus — took 480 days (the ‘small’ year). But Helliconia also had a Great Year, of which the people of Embruddock knew nothing in their present state. The Great Year was the time Star B, and its planets with it, took to make an orbit round Freyr, the Star A of the scholars.
That Great Year took 1825 Helliconian ‘small’ years. Since one Helliconian small year was the equivalent of 1.42 terrestrial years, this meant a Great Year of 2592 terrestrial years — a period during which many generations flourished and departed from the scene.
The Great Year represented an enormous elliptical journey. Helliconia was slightly larger than Earth, with a mass 1.28 times Earth’s; in many respects, it was Earth’s sister planet. Yet on that elliptical journey across thousands of years, it became almost two planets — a frozen one at apastron, when farthest from Freyr, an overheated one at periastron, when nearest Freyr.
Every small year, Helliconia drew nearer to Freyr. Spring was about to signify its arrival in spectacular fashion.
Midway between the high stars in their courses and the fessups sinking slowly towards the original boulder, two women squatted one on either side of a bracken bed. The light in the shuttered room was dim enough to render them anonymous, giving them the aspect of two mourning figures set on either side of the prostrate figure on the couch. It could be determined only that one was plump and no longer youthful, and the other gripped by the desiccating processes of age.
Rol Sakil Den shook her grizzled head and looked down with lugubrious compassion on the figure before her.
‘Poor dear thing, she used to be so nice as a girl, she’s no right to torture herself as she does.’
‘She should have kept to her loaves, I say,’ said the other woman, to make herself agreeable.
‘Feel how thin she is. Feel her loins. No wonder she’s gone weird.’
Rol Sakil was herself as thin as a mummy, her frame eroded by arthritis. She had been midwife to the community before growing too old for such exertions. She still tended those in pauk. Now that Dol was off her hands, she hung on the fringes of the academy, always ready to criticise, rarely prepared to think.
‘She’s got so narrow she couldn’t bring forth a stick from that womb of hers, never mind a baby. Wombs have to be tended — they are the central part of a woman.’
‘She has much to look to beside babies,’ said Amin Lim.
‘Oh, I’ve as much respect for knowledge as the next person, but when knowledge gets in the way of the natural facilities of copulation, then knowledge should move over.’
‘As for that,’ Amin Lim said with some asperity, from the other side of the bed, ‘her natural facilities were set aback when your Dol settled herself in Aoz Roon’s bed. She feels deeply for him, as who doesn’t? A presentable man, Aoz Roon, besides being Lord of Embruddock.’
Rol Sakil sniffed. ‘That’s no reason why she should go off intercourse entirely. She could always fill in time elsewhere, to keep herself in training. Besides, he won’t come round knocking at her door again, you mark my words. He’s got his hands full with our Dol.’
The old woman beckoned Amin Lim nearer to bestow a confidence and they put their heads together over the supine body of Shay Tal. ‘Dol always keeps him at it — both by inclination and policy. A course I’d recommend to any woman, you included, Amin Lim. I hazard you enjoy a length now and again — it ain’t human not to, at your age. You ask your man.’
‘Oh, I daresay there isn’t a woman as hasn’t fancied Aoz Roon, for all his tempers.’
Shay Tal sighed in her pauk. Rol Sakil took her hand in her own withered one and said, still using a confidential mode, ‘My Dol tells me as he mutters terribly in his sleep. I tell her that’s the sign of a guilty conscience.’
‘What’s he got to be guilty about, then?’ Amin Lim asked.
‘Now, then — there I could tell you a tale… That morning, after all the drinking and carrying on, I was about early, as of old. And as I went out, well wrapped against the cold of morning, I come on a body in the dark and I says to myself, “Why here’s some fool drunk out of his wits, lying asleep on the ground.” There he was, at the base of the big tower.’
She paused to observe the effect of her story on Amin Lim, who, having nothing else to do, was listening intently. Rol Sakil’s little eyes became almost hidden in wrinkles as she continued.
‘I’d never have thought a mite more of it — I likes a drop of pig’s counsel myself. But round the other side of the tower, what do I find but another body lying there. “That’s two fools drunk out of their wits, lying asleep on the ground,” says I to myself. And I’d never have thought a mite more of it, but when it’s given out that young Klils and his brother Nahkri were found dead together, lying at the bottom of their tower, why, that’s another matter…’ She sniffed.
‘Everyone said that’s where they were found.’
‘Ah, but I found them first, and they weren’t together. So they didn’t fight together, did they? That’s fishy, Amin Lim, isn’t it? So I says to myself, “Someone went and pushed them two brothers off the top of the tower.” Who might it be, who stood most to gain by their deaths? Well, girl, that’s something I leave to others to judge. All I says is, I says to our Dol, “You cultivate your fear of heights, Dol. Don’t you go near no edges of towers while you’re with Aoz Roon,” I says. “Don’t you go near no edges of towers and you’ll be all right…” That’s what I says.’
Amin Lim shook her head. ‘Shay Tal wouldn’t love Aoz Roon if he did that kind of thing. And she’d know. She’s wise, she’d know for sure.’
Rol Sakil rose and hobbled nervously about the stone room, shaking her head in doubt. ‘Where men’s concerned, Shay Tal is the same as the rest of us. She doesn’t always think with her harneys — sometimes she uses the thing between her legs instead.’
‘Oh, hush with you.’ Amin Lim looked sorrowfully down at her friend and mentor. Privately, she wished that Shay Tal’s life were ruled more in the way Rol Sakil indicated: she might then be happier.
Shay Tal lay stretched out stiffly on her left side, in the pauk attitude. Her eyes seemed barely closed. Her breathing was scarcely audible, punctuated by long-drawn-out sighs. Looking at the austere contours of that loved face, Amin Lim thought she was watching someone facing death with composure. Only the mouth, growing tighter occasionally, indicated the terror it was impossible to suppress in the presence of the denizens of the world below.
Although Amin Lim had once gone into pauk herself, under guidance, the fright of seeing her father again had been enough for her. The extra dimension was now closed; she would never again visit that world until her final call came.
‘Poor thing, poor little thing,’ she said as she stroked her friend’s head, lovingly regarding its grey hairs, hoping to ease her passage through the black realm lying below life.
Though the soul had no eyes, yet it could see in a medium where terror replaced vision.
It looked down, as it began to fall, into a space more enormous than the night sky. Into that space, Wutra could never come. This was a region of which Wutra the Undying had no cognisance. With his blue face, his undaunted gaze, his slender horns, he belonged to the great frosty battle taking place elsewhere. This region was hell because he was not. Every star that gleamed was a death.