Rain continued to fall. Belts of dense cloud rolled across the central continent. An atmosphere of stalemate prevailed over the affairs of Oldorando.
The distant army of the young kzahhn, Hrr-Brahl Yprt, was forced to halt its advance, to shelter among the shattered hills of the east. Its components went into a sort of tether rather than face the downpour.
The phagors also experienced earth tremors, which originated from the same source as those afflicting Oldorando. Far to the north, old rift zones in the Chalce region were undergoing violent seismic upheaval. As the burden of ice disappeared, the earth shook and rose up.
By this period, the ocean that girdled Helliconia became free of ice even beyond the wide tropical zones, which stretched from the equator to latitudes thirty-five degrees north and south. The westward circulation of oceanic waters built up in a series of tsunami, which devastated coastal regions all round the globe. The floodings often combined with vulcanism to alter the land area.
All such geological events were monitored by the instruments of the Earth Observation Station, which Vry called Kaidaw. The readings were signalled back to distant Earth. No planet in the galaxy was watched more intensely than Helliconia.
Account was taken of the dwindling herds of yelk and biyelk which inhabited the northern Campannlat plain; their pasturage was threatened. Kaidaws, on the other hand, were multiplying as marginal lands, hitherto barren, provided grazing.
There were two sorts of ancipital community on the tropical continent: static components without kaidaws, which lived close to the land, and mobile or nomadic groups with kaidaws. Not only was the kaidaw a highly mobile animal in its own right; its fodder consumption forced those who domesticated it to move continuously in search of new foraging grounds. The army of the young kzahhn, for example, consisted of numerous small components committed to a nomadic and often warlike existence. Their crusade was only one aspect of a migration, which would take decades to complete, from east to west of the entire continent.
A tremor which brought down avalanches about the kzahhn’s army marked the tail end of an upheaval in the planet’s crust which deflected a river of meltwater flowing from the Hhryggt Glacier. A new valley opened. The new river coursed through it, and henceforth flowed westwards instead of north, as previously.
This river burst its way down to become a tributary of the river Takissa, streaming southwards to empty into the Sea of Eagles. Its waters ran black for many years; they carried with them dozens of metric tons of demolished mountain every day.
Flooding caused by the new river through its new valley forced one insignificant group of phagors of the nomadic type to disperse in the direction of Oldorando instead of heading east. Their destiny was to encounter Aoz Roon at a later date. Though their deflection at the time was of little seeming importance even to the ancipitals themselves, it was to alter the social history of the sector.
There were, on the Avernus, those who studied the social history of Helliconian cultures; but it was the heliographers who regarded their science as the most valuable. Before all else came the light.
Star B, which the natives below called Batalix, was a modest spectral class G4 sun. In real terms slightly smaller than Sol, its radius being 0.94 Sol’s, its apparent size as seen from Helliconia was 76 percent that of Sol seen from Earth. With a photosphere temperature of 5600 Kelvin, its luminosity was only 0.8 that of Sol. It was about five billion years old.
The more distant star, known locally as Freyr, about which Star B revolved, was a much more impressive object as viewed from the Avernus. Star A was a brilliant white spectral class A-type supergiant, with a radius sixty-five times that of Sol’s, and a luminosity sixty thousand times as great. Its mass was 14.8 times Sol’s, and its surface temperature 11000K, as opposed to Sol’s 5780K.
Although Star B had its constant students, Star A was a greater magnet for attention, especially now that the Avernus was moving, along with the rest of Star B’s system, nearer to the supergiant.
Freyr was between ten and eleven million years old. It had evolved away from the main sequence of stars and was already entering its old age.
Such was the intensity of the energy it poured out that the disc of Star A was always more intense as viewed from Helliconia than that of Star B, though it never appeared so large, owing to its much greater distance. It was a worthy object for ancipital fear—and for Vry’s admiration.
Vry stood alone on the top of her tower, her telescope by her side. She waited. She watched. She felt the history of private relationships flowing towards the morrow like a silt-laden river; what had been fresh was clogged with sediment. Beneath her passivity was an unformulated longing to be seized up by some larger thing which would provide wider, purer perspectives than faulty human nature could command.
When darkness fell, she would look again at the stars—provided the cloud cover parted sufficiently.
Oldorando was now surrounded by palisades of green. Day by day, new leaves unfurled and mounted higher, as if nature had a plan to bury the town in forest. Some of the more distant towers had already been overwhelmed by vegetation.
She saw a large white bird hover above one such mound without paying it particular attention. She watched and admired its effortless hovering above the earth.
Distantly came the sound of men singing. The hunters were back in Oldorando from a hoxney hunt, and Aoz Roon was holding a feast. The feast was in honour of his three new lieutenants, Tanth Ein, Faralin Ferd, and Eline Tal. These friends of his childhood supplanted Dathka and Laintal Ay, who were now relegated to the chase.
Vry tried to keep her thoughts abstract, but they drifted back continually to the more emotional subject of defeated hope—hers, Dathka’s, whose desires she could not find it in herself to encourage, Laintal Ay’s. Her mood was in tune with the long-protracted evening. Batalix was down, the other sentinel would follow in an hour. This was a time when men and beasts made preparations against the reign of night. This was a time to bring out a stub of candle against some undreamed-of emergency, or to resolve to sleep until the light of dawn.
From her eyrie, Vry saw the common people of Oldorando—whether or not further on with their hopes—coming home. Among them was the thin crooked shape of Shay Tal.
Shay Tal returned to the tower with Amin Lim, looking grimy and tired. Since the murder of Master Datnil, she had become increasingly remote. The curse of silence had fallen on her too. She was currently trying to follow a suggestion made by the dead master, to dig her way into King Denniss’s pyramid, out by the sacrificial ground. Despite the aid of slaves, she had no success. People who went to look at the earth-work being thrown up laughed, openly or secretly, for the stepped walls of the pyramid went on down into the earth without feature. For every foot dug, Shay Tal’s mouth grew grimmer.
Moved by both pity and her own loneliness, Vry went down to speak to Shay Tal. The sorceress seemed to have precious little that was magical about her, almost alone among the women of Oldorando, she still wore the old clumsy furs, hanging ungracefully about her body, giving her an outdated air. Everyone else was in hoxneys.
Afflicted by the older woman’s woebegone air, Vry could not resist giving some advice.
“You make yourself so unhappy, ma’am. The ground is full of the dark and the past—do stop scratching there.”
With a flash of humour, Shay Tal said, “We neither of us see happiness as our prime duty.”