Helliconia Spring

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.

In adolescence, she rejected the gentle tutelage of Loil Bry and Little Yuli. She screamed at them that she hated the cloistered atmosphere of their room—which, as they grew older, they were increasingly reluctant to leave. After a violent quarrel, she left them, went to live in another tower with relations.

There was plenty of work. Loilanun became useful at grinding and tanning. While making a pair of hunting boots, she met their future wearer and fell in love with him. She was scarcely at the age of puberty. She ran out with the hunter on bright nights, when no one could sleep. There was the world in all its appalling beauty about her for the first time. She became his woman. She would have died for him.

Manners were changing in Oldorando. He took Loilanun out with him on a deer hunt. Once Dresyl would never have permitted women running with them; but his command had become less certain as he grew older. The deer hunters met with a stungebag in a narrow defile. Before Loilanun’s eyes, her man was run down and pierced through by one of the creature’s horns. He died before he could be carried home.

Brokenhearted, Loilanun returned to her parents. They received her back, placidly absorbing her, comforting her. As she lay in the scented shadows, life stirred in her womb. She had conceived. She remembered the joy of that occasion when her time came and she gave birth to a son. She called him Laintal Ay, and him too her parents placidly accepted. It was spring of the Year After Union 13, or 31 by the old calendar of Lordly Years.

“He will grow into a better world,” said Loil Bry to her daughter, regarding the baby with her lustrous eyes. “Histories tell that a time will come when the rajabarals will be thrown open, and the air will be heated with the heat of the earth. Food will be plentiful, snow will disappear, people will be naked to each other. How I longed for that time when I was young. Laintal Ay may see it. How I wish he had been a girl—girls feel and see more than boys.”

The child liked to watch his grandmother’s porcelain window. It was unique in Oldorando, though Little Yuli maintained that there had once been many more, all now broken. Year after year, Laintal Ay’s grandparents had lifted their eyes from their ancient documents to watch the window turn pink, orange, and crimson with sunset, as Freyr or Batalix descended into a bath of fire. The colours would die. Night would stain the porcelain black.

In the old days, childrims had come, fluttering about the towers of Oldorando, those selfsame apparitions the first Yuli had seen when struggling across the white wilderness with his father.

Childrims came only at night. Sparks like feathers would flare behind the porcelain window, and the childrims would be there, slowly circling, a single wing flapping. Or was it a wing? When the people ran out to look at them, their outlines were confusing, never clear.

The childrims caused strange thoughts in human minds. Yuli and Loil Bry would lie upon their rugs and skins and feel that all the thoughts in their heads were coming alive at the same time. They saw scenes they had forgotten, and scenes they had never known. Loil Bry often cried and covered her eyes. She said it was like communing with a dozen fessups at once. Afterwards, she longed to experience some of the unexpected scenes once more, but once they had gone they could never more be recalled; their confusing beauty vanished like a fragrance.

The childrims sailed on. No man could fathom their going or their coming.

Their rightful habitat was the upper troposhere. Occasionally, electric pressures forced them to descend close to the surface of the planet. Neural currents in the brains of men and animals held a brief attraction for them, causing them to pause and circle as if they too were creatures of intelligence. Then they rose again and were gone. Depending on local whims of the great magnetic storm sweeping across the Helliconian system, the childrims might sail in any direction, onwards, upwards, swept along with the magnetic tides, circulating without perception or need of rest.

Yet not circulating for ever. Because the electric entities that human beings called childrims could not change. So nothing was more vulnerable to change than they.

Temperatures across the tropical continent of Campannlat varied greatly at any one time. On a mild day in the summer, while Loilanun sat playing listlessly with her young son, the ground temperature in Oldorando climbed several degrees above zero. Only a comparatively few miles north, by Lake Dorzin, there might be ten degrees of frost. In summer, when the sentinels worked day and night, there was no frost at all in sheltered parts, and cereal crops grew.

Three thousand miles from Oldorando, in the Nktryhk, daily temperatures showed wide variation, from minus twelve degrees centigrade to minus one hundred and fifty degrees, about the temperature at which krypton turns to liquid.

Change accumulated, at first as what may be termed latent change. Then its effects were rapid, as temperature gradients in the upper atmosphere responded to increased radiations from Freyr. The process was steady but quantal. On one occasion, Earth Observation Station Avernus recorded a twelve-degree rise in temperature at a 16.6-mile equatorial altitude within the course of an hour.

With this warming up, stratospheric circulation increased strongly, and the planet was swept by storms. Jet streams were observed over Nktryhk travelling at speeds in excess of two hundred seventy-five miles per hour.

Suddenly, the childrims were no more.

The beginnings of what was to spell a renascence for mankind and animals brought disaster for the childrims. The conditions that created them dispersed between one year and the next. Their vortices of piezoelectric dusts and charged particles were too fragile to survive a more dynamic system. They were gone, leaving behind them evanescent trails of sparks in the rarefied upper air. The sparks soon died.

Yuli and Loil Bry looked in vain for the childrims. Laintal Ay soon forgot he had ever seen them.

Groups of phagors were emerging under the greenish sky common at that altitude, where the sentinels—when not buried in cloud—directed their rays through multitudinous ice crystals. The phagors, stalluns and gillots alike, moved into position with their inhuman gait. Many had birds perched on their shoulders or flying just above them. The birds and the phagors were white, the terrain white or brown and exsiccated black, the sky beyond livid green. The living things were outlined against the Hhryggt Glacier.

The course of the glacier was divided at one point by a massif of plutonic rock which, like an infernal castle, had withstood centuries of siege. The ice had scoured its walls, yet it survived, rearing its bunched towers towards the sky. Where the ice river fell away was a firn-covered plateau. Here stood the ancipital leader, immobile, while the cohorts of his crusade assembled.

It was the components belonging to the kzahhns of Hrastyprt who first decided to bring destruction upon the Sons of Freyr who lived in the remote plains. The young kzahhn was Hrr-Brahl Yprt. He would lead the crusade. It was his grandstallun, the great Kzahhn Hrr-Tryhk Hrast, who had been destroyed by those distant Sons. Under Hrr-Brahl Yprt would the legions ride forth in revenge.

For under Hrr-Brahl Yprt the component had prospered, regaining strength lost since Freyr last burned the world. Force of numbers as much as conscious decision urged it from its altitudinous fastnesses to begin this migration of irresistible scale.

Vengeance moved in their harneys, but action was triggered by favourable temperature gradients in the stratosphere. A heat message thrilled along the five- hundred-mile length of the glacier, as it spilled down from the airless plateau of High Nktryhk to the excoriated valleys east of the Oldorandan plain, drawing out ancipitals from its eaves and crevices.

Hrr-Brahl Yprt waited, motionless. He too heard the heat message across his air- octave.

The precursor of major climatic change activated other forms of life in the region, forms on which the phagors were in part dependent for protein. Protognostic tribes called Madis also occupied the boulder-strewn land of the glaciers. Gaunt, perpetually undernourished, they too began to resume a nomadic habit. They drove before them goat and arang, the quadruped that lived on lichens or rocklice. The Madis sought lower pastures. But they would not travel before the phagor crusade left the way clear.

The young Hrr-Brahl Yprt growled an order to mount. Only the highest among his officers had kaidaws to ride. These rusty red steeds were mounted as soon as the order came, the officers seating themselves behind their animals’ humps.

That order came late in the Year 13, according to Loil Bry’s modest calendar. According to the ancipital calendar, it was the Air-Turn or Year 353 After Small Apotheosis of Great Year 5,634,000 Since Catastrophe. By a more modern reckoning, it was late in the year 433.

Laintal Ay was then an infant, dandled on the knee of his widowed mother.

The time would come when he would have to confront the whole might of Hrr- Brahl Yprt’s crusade.

Beside the kzahhn’s kaidaw stood a creaght, or young male phagor, bearing a towering standard.

Hrr-Brahl Yprt was as tall as a well-built man and weighed almost half as much again. His keratinous three-toed feet formed a base for thick flanks, massive thews, and a chest broader than any man’s.

His head, wedged between sturdy shoulders, was remarkable. It was long, narrow, boney, with prominent ridges above the eyes, giving those eyes, sheltered by long sweeping lashes on which frost glittered, a marked stare. His horns, set back behind his ears, curved forward before turning upwards, in the manner of his line. They were veined grey, as if made of marble, and their edges were deadly sharp. These weapons were used only in combat with other phagors, never against other species; their tips could never be sullied by the red blood of a Son of Freyr.

Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s prominent muzzle was black behind the arches of his nostrils, just as his grandstallun’s had been. It accentuated the command of his gaze. An air of ferocious authority was reinforced by his every movement.

An elaborate face crown had been wrought by his weapon makers for this crusade. The crown formed almost a fleur-de-lys pattern down the young kzahhn’s long nose. It curved about the base of his horns and sprouted two sharp iron horns of its own, which protruded laterally.

When threatening a subordinate, the kzahhn wrinkled up his lip to show two lines of blunt longitudinally ridged teeth, flanked by long incisors.

His body was accoutred with armour: chiefly, a sleeveless jacket of stiff kaidaw skin with three capes and a belt, which latter broadened over his girth into a sort of sporran serving to conceal his genitals swinging under the coarse matted hair of his pelvis.

The name of his kaidaw was Rukk-Ggrl. After mounting Rukk-Ggrl, the young kzahhn raised his hand. An immense curled musical instrument, reamed from a stungebag horn, was sounded by a human slave. Its diaphony echoed across the grey wastes.

Following this mournful call, other slaves appeared from a cave in the plutonian massif, carrying between them the figures of Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s father and great- grandstallun.

These illustrious forebears were in a state of tether, slowly sinking towards the final vortices of nonbeing. This marked diminution of the life process had caused them to shrink in size. The great-grandstallun was now almost entirely transformed into keratin.

At the appearance of the totem objects, a stir went through the hosts of the component assembled, male and female. They stretched over the frozen ground, many standing out against the sky on nearby ridges or banks of shattered stone, where their outlines were confused by the brilliant cloud piling up. Some leaned on spears, their huge birds above them. All, when stationary, assumed the daunting immobility of their kind. Only an occasional flicking ear indicated that they were alive. They shifted their positions so as to direct their regard on their young leader and the leaders of the past.

The totem figures were presented to the kzahhn. The human slaves knelt in abasement before him.

Hrr-Brahl Yprt dismounted, to stand between his ancestors and his kaidaw. After making a bow, he humbly buried his face in the rufous hair of the flank of Rukk-Ggrl. His comprehension left his harneys. In a kind of trance, he summoned the spirits of his father and great-grandstallun back to the living present.

The spirits came before him. They were little whiskery figures, no higher than snow rabbits. They uttered squeaks of greeting. As they had never done in real life, they ran on all fours.

“O my sacred forebears, now integrating with earth,” cried the young kzahhn, in the thick tongue of his kind, “at last I go to avenge him who should be standing now between you, my valorous grand-stallun, Great Kzahhn Hrr-Tryhk Hrast, who was killed by the peltless Sons of Freyr. Years of trial lie ahead. Strengthen my arm, warn us of danger, hold horns high.”

His great-grandstallun appeared to be standing deep inside Rukk-Ggil. The keratinous image said, “Go, hold horns high, remember enmities. Beware friendship with the Sons of Freyr.”

This remark was useless to Hrr-Brahl Yprt. He scarcely thought himself likely to feel other than hatred for the traditional enemy. Those in tether were not always wiser than those in air.

The keratinous image of his father was larger than that of the great-grandstallun since he had entered tether more recently. The image bowed to his son and spoke, sketching a series of pictures in his son’s harneys.

Hrr-Anggl Hhrot showed his son an image which the young kzahhn understood only in part. To a human, it would have been incomprehensible. Yet it was a view of the known universe, as pictured by the ancipital race, a view that largely conditioned their approach to life.

A busy organ pumped lustily, expanding and contracting. It consisted of three parts, each somewhat resembling a human fist clenched tight. The parts were interdependent, and of different colours. The grey third was the known world, the dazzling white third Batalix, the mottled black third Freyr. When Freyr puffed itself large, the other parts shrank; when Batalix grew, so did the known world.

This busy organ was surrounded by steam. Through the steam ran yellow threads, the air-octaves. The air-octaves wavered as if in flight from Freyr, yet nevertheless curled about it in some instances. The Freyr-third put forth black exopodites which tugged at the air-octaves, drawing it closer to the known world. It frothed. It grew.

These images were familiar to the young kzahhn and intended to reassure him before be set forth. He understood also the warning that the pictures conveyed: that the air-octaves the crusade would have to follow were becoming more chaotic, and that the perfect sense of direction he and all his kind possessed would be disturbed. The crusade would make slow progress, taking many air-turns, or years.

He thanked the keratinous image with deep churring in his throat.

Hrr-Anggl Hhrot revealed more pictures. These had the scent of ancient things. They were drawn from a well of remembered wisdom, from the heroic ages when Freyr was negligible. An angellike army of keratinous predecessors could be seen, confirming the images.

Hrr-Anggl Hhrot showed what would happen when air-turns to near a stallun’s number of toes and fingers had lapsed across the triple organ. Slowly, mottled black Freyr would drag itself into concealment behind Batalix. Twenty times in successive air-turns would it behave so. This was the terrifying paradox: that though the Freyr-part grew larger, it would hide itself behind the shrinking Batalix- part.

The twenty concealments marked the beginning of Freyr’s period of cruel dominance. From the twentieth concealment onwards, the ancipital component nations would fall under the power of the Sons of Freyr.

Such was the warning—but it contained hope.

The poor ignorant Sons would become terrified by the concealments of Freyr, who whelped them. The third concealment would demoralise them most. That was the time to strike against them, that was the time to arrive outside the town where the great kzahhn, Hrr-Tryhk Hrast, had been destroyed. That was the time of revenge. The time to burn and kill.

Remember. Be valiant. Hold horns high. War has begun!

Hrr-Brahl Yprt behaved as if he had received the flow of wisdom for the first time. He had received it many times. It was unalterable. It served him for thought. All of his component with ancestors in tether had received the same images many times over previous quarters. The images came from the known world, from the air, from the long dead.They were incontrovertible.

All component decisions were the result of such flows of wisdom from keratinous ancestors. Those who made the past outnumbered the living. The old heroes lived in an heroic age, when Freyr waxed puny.

The young kzahhn emerged from his moment of tether. The host about him stirred, flicked ears. The birds above them were stationary. Again the discordant horn was blown, and the doll-like images were carried away to their cave in the natural fortress.

It was time to move forward.

Hrr-Brahl Yprt swung himself up into Rukk-Ggrl’s high saddle. The movement dislodged Zzhrrk, his white cowbird. It wheeled up into the air, and then settled again on Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s shoulder. Many of the host had their own cowbirds. The harsh croak of the cowbird was sweet to a phagor ear. The birds played a useful role in ridding the phagors of the ticks that infested their bodies.

This tick, an unconsidered creature, formed a vital link in the complex ecological structure of the world—and an undisclosed bond between deadly enemies.

While the young kzahhn was in tetherlike communication with his ancestors, livid clouds had drawn over the snowscape. Light was reflected back and forth between overcast and ground. In the diffused, nonpolarized illumination, where no shadows were cast and living things became spectres, human beings would have been lost. There was no horizon. Everything was pearly grey.

Whiteout meant little to the ancipital army, with its air-octaves to follow. Now that the communication ceremony was finished, foot servants led four kaidaw ponies forward through the whiteout. The single humps of the animals were scarcely fleshed out; their rough coats were still dapple. Astride each pony was one of the kzahhn’s four fillocks. Each fillock wore eagle feathers or pallid papilionaceous rock flowers woven into her head-hair. This quartet of young beauties had been selected by the component to keep the Kzahhn Hrr-Brahl Yprt company during the years of the crusade.

A cool breeze, forty degrees below zero, blew from the glacial heights to the east, to ruffle the delicate filaments of the coats of the ancipital damsels. Beneath those filaments lay the thickly matted phagor coat, almost impenetrable to cold except when soaked with water.

The breeze stirred the cloud cover. As though a shutter had been opened at a window, the shapes of the known world returned. The host of creatures was revealed, and the sheer walls of Hhryggt behind them, and the four fillocks, ghostly pale at first. The whiteout thinned. Ahead, bleak defiles became visible which would lead to a place of destiny twelve thousand metres nearer sea level.

The Hrastyprt standard was raised.

The young kzahhn raised a hand as signal, pointed forward.

He dug his horned toes into Rukk-Ggrl’s flank. The beast lifted its horned head and moved forward over the brittle firn. The host got slowly under way with its unnatural shambling movements. Slate grated, ice rang. Cowbirds floated high on updraughts. The crusade had begun.

Its consummation would come as the ancestral images predicted, when Freyr concealed itself behind Batalix for the third time. Then the kzahhn’s army would strike the Sons of Freyr who lived in that accursed town where Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s noble grandstallun had been killed. That great old kzahhn had been forced to jump from the top of a tower to his death below. Vengeance was on its way: the town would be obliterated.

Perhaps it was no wonder that the infant Laintal Ay cried at his mother’s knee.

Year by year, the crusade progressed. The inhabitants of Oldorando remained in ignorance of that distant nemesis. They laboured in the toils of their own history.

Dresyl was no longer as energetic a leader as he had been. He stayed more and more in town, fussing with details of organisations which had gone smoothly before he interfered. His sons hunted in his stead.

The scent of change made everyone restless. Young men in the makers corps wanted to leave and take up hunting and trapping. The young hunters themselves would not behave. Dresyl already had a hunter under his command who had a natural daughter by an older man’s wife. Such behaviour was becoming common, and fights with it.

“We behaved better than that when I was a lad,” Dresyl complained to Aoz Roon, forgetting the pranks of his own youth. “We’ll be murdering each other next, like the savages of the Quzint.”

Dresyl could not decide whether to try and crush Aoz Roon or make the man conform by praising him. He inclined to the latter, for Aoz Roon was becoming famed as a cunning hunter, but such moves angered Dresyl’s son Nahkri, who felt enmity for Aoz Roon, for the sort of reasons known only to the young.

Dly Hoin, Dresyl’s unsatisfactory wife, fell ill and died, even as the Year 17 After Union died away. Father Bondorlonganon came and buried her on her side in her land-octave. When she had gone, a gap opened in Dresyl’s life, and he felt he loved her for the first time. Sorrow ruled his heart thereafter.

Despite his years, he learned the arts of father-communing and achieved pauk in order to speak again with his departed Dly Hoin. He met her gossie drifting in the world below. She upbraided him for lack of love, for wasting their life, for being cold of temperament, and many other things that made his heart grieve. He fled from her vituperation, her snapping jaws, and ever after was a more silent man.

Sometimes he spoke to Laintal Ay. The boy was brighter of mind than Nahkri or Klils. But Dresyl stayed away from his old cousin-brother, Little Yuli; whereas before he had felt contempt for Yuli, now he felt envy.Yuli had a living woman to love and make happy.

Yuli and Loil Bry continued in their tower, and tried not to take note of their grey hairs. Loilanun kept an eye on Laintal Ay, and watched as he entered more fully into the rude pleasures of a new generation.

Remote under the Quzints lived a religious sect called the Takers. The first Yuli had once had a glimpse of them. Secure in a gigantic cavern heated by interior warmth, the sect was virtually impervious to temperature gradients in the upper atmosphere. But they maintained a clandestine liaison with Pannoval; from that warren came a perception that, in its way, induced as important a change as any temperature gradient.

Although the perception was wrongheaded, it held beauty for the rigid minds of the Takers, and seemed to possess the truth that goes with beauty.

Takers, male and female, wore an elaborate garment which enveloped them from the chin to the ground. In profile they presented the look of a half-open flower turned upside down. Only this external garment, the charfral, was worn.

The charfral could be seen as emblematic of Taker thinking. Their understandings had become codified through many generations, the ramifications of their theology manifold. They were at once lascivious and puritanical. Even the repressive stratification of their religion contained its paradoxes, and had led to a neurotic form of hedonism.

Belief in the Great Akha was not incompatible with organised lechery, for one basic reason: Great Akha paid no attention to mankind. He fought against the destructive light of Wutra, and this served mankind’s interest; but it was not for mankind but himself that Akha fought. It did not matter what mankind did. The ethics of eudemonism sprang from man’s powerlessness.

Long after his death, the prophet Naba changed all that. Naba’s words eventually filtered down from Pannoval to the cavern. The prophet promised that if men and women forswore concupiscence, and lying so indiscriminately one with another that no one knew his own father, then the Great Father, Akha himself, would have regard for them. He would allow them to participate as warriors in the war against Wutra. The war would be brought to an early close. Mankind—this was the essence of Naba’s message—was not powerless unless it chose to be so.

Mankind was not powerless. For the buried Takers, the message was persuasive. It could never be so persuasive in the Holies of Pannoval; there, people had always taken it for granted that mankind could act. But down in the cavern, the charfrals began to burn. Chastity set in.

Within a year, the Takers changed their temperament. The old rigid codification was directed to a restrictive virtue, in the name of the stone god. Those who could not conform to the new morality were executed by the sword, or fled before the sword fell.

In the heat and dialectic of the revolution, it was not enough for the Takers to convert themselves. It never is. Revolutionaries must go forth and convert others. The Faith-Trip of Akha’s Naba was undertaken. Through a hundred miles of underground passages, the Faith-Trip went to spread the message. And the first stop on the way was Pannoval.

Pannoval was indifferent to the returning word of its own prophet, who had been executed and forgotten long ago. It was actively against an invasion of fanatics.

The militia turned out in strength, and battle was joined. The fanatics were prepared to fight. They wanted nothing better than to die for the cause. If others died too, so much the better. Their gossies, howling down the land-octaves, urged them to conquer. They flung themselves forward. The militia did its best throughout a long, bloody day. Then it turned and ran.

So Pannoval bowed to the message of potency and to the new regime. Charfrals were hastily made up especially to be burnt. Those who did not conform fled or were killed.

Those who fled made their way to the open world of Wutra, to the everlasting plains of the north. They went at a time when the snow was in retreat. Grasses grew. The two sentinels kept better watch over the skies, and Wutra himself seemed less savage. They survived.

Year by year, they spread northwards in search of food and a sheltered corner of land. They spread along the Lasvalt River to the east of the great plains. They raided the migratory herds of yelk and gunnadu. And they moved towards the isthmus of Chalce.

At the same time, those ameliorating temperatures were causing a stir among the peoples of the frigid continent of Sibornal. Wave after wave of rugged colonisers moved southwards, down the isthmus of Chalce into Campannlat.

One day, when Freyr ruled alone in the sky, the northernmost tribe from Pannoval met the southernmost part of the exodus from Sibornal. What happened then had happened many times before—and was fated to happen again.

Wutra and Akha would see to that.

Such was the state of the world when Little Yuli left it. Salt traders from the Quzints arrived in Oldorando with news of avalanches and freak happenings. Yuli—now quite ancient—hastened down to see them when they arrived, slipped on some steps, broke his leg. Within a week, the holy man from Borlien was calling, and Laintal Ay was delighting in his carved dog with the moveable jaw.

An epoch was over. The reign of Nahkri and Klils was about to begin.