"Well, it's cold up here."
"It's colder still down below, where the gossies lie," Oyre retorted.
"You keep a watch on your tongue, young woman. You're no friend of the academy if you distract Vry from her proper work."
Her face became cold and hawklike; she turned away quickly, as if to shield Oyre and Vry from its sight, and climbed back downstairs without further words.
"Oh, I shall pay for this," Vry said. "I shall have to be extra humble to make up for this."
"You're too humble, Vry, and she's too haughty. Scumb her academy. She's scared of the sky, like most people. That's her trouble, sorceress or no sorceress. She puts up with stupid people like Amin Lim because they pander to her haughtiness."
She clutched Vry with a sort of angry passion and began to list the stupidities of everyone she knew.
"What upsets me is that we did not get the chance to make her look through our telescope," Vry said.
It was the telescope that had made the greatest difference to Vry's astronomical interest. When Aoz Roon had become lord, and had gone to live in the big tower, Oyre had been free to grub through all kinds of decaying possessions stored there in trunks. The telescope had come to light tucked among moth-riddled clothes which fell to pieces at the touch. It was simply made – perhaps by the long-defunct glass-makers corps – being no more than a leather tube which held two lenses in place; but when turned upon the wandering stars, the telescope had the power to change Vry's perceptions. For the wanderers showed distinct discs. In that, they resembled the sentinels, though they did not emit light.
From this discovery, Vry and Oyre had concluded that the wanderers were near to the earth, and the stars far away – some very far. From trappers who worked by starlight they had the names of the wanderers: Ipocrene, Aganip, and Copaise. And there was the fast one they had named themselves, Kaidaw. Now they sought to prove that these were worlds like their own, possibly even with people in them.
Gazing at her friend, Vry saw only the general outlines of that beautiful face and powerful head, and recognised how much Oyre resembled Aoz Roon. Both Oyre and her father seemed so full of spirit – and Oyre had been born outside agreements. Vry wondered if by chance – by any remote chance – Oyre had been with a man, in the dark of a brassimip or elsewhere. Then she shut the naughty thought away and turned her gaze to the sky.
They stayed rather soberly on the top of their tower until Hour-Whistler sounded again. A few minutes later Kaidaw rose and sailed up to the zenith.
•••
Earth Observation Station Avernus – Vry's Kaidaw – hung high over Helliconia, while the continent of Campannlat turned beneath it. The station's crew devoted most of their attention to the world below, but the other three planets of the binary system were also under constant surveillance by automatic instrumentation.
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 lager 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 Frayr.
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 th
ey 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.
There was no smell except terror. Every death had its immutable position. No comets flared down here; this was the realm of entropy absolute, without change, the event death of the universe, to which life could respond only with terror.
As the soul did now.
The land-octaves wound over real territory. They could be likened to paths, except that they more resembled winding walls, endlessly dividing the world, only their tops showing above the surfaces. Their real substance went down deep into the seamless ground, penetrating to the original boulder on which the disc of the world rested.
In the original boulder, at the bottom of their appropriate land-octaves, the gossies and fessups were stacked, like thousands of ill-preserved flies.
The gaunt soul of Shay Tal sank down on its predestined land-octave, negotiating a course between the fessups. They resembled mummies; their stomachs and eye sockets were hollow, their boney feet dangled; their skins were coarse as old sacking, yet transparent, allowing a glimpse of luminescent organs beneath. Their mouths were open like fish, as if they still recalled the days when they breathed air. Less ancient gossies had their mouths stuffed with things like fireflies which issued forth in smokey dust. All these old put-away things were without motion, yet the wandering soul could sense their fury – a fury more intense than any of them could have experienced before obsidian claimed them.
As the soul settled between their ranks, it saw them suspended in irregular rows which stretched to places she could not travel, to Borlien, to the seas, to Pannoval, to far Sibornal, and even to the icy wildernesses of the east. All were relegated here to being units of one great collection, filed under their appropriate land-octaves.
To living senses, there were no directions. Yet there was a direction. The soul had its own sail. It had to be alert. A fessup had little more volition than dust, yet fury pent in its eddre gave it strength. A fessup could swallow any soul sailing too close, thus freeing itself to walk upon the earth again, causing terror and disease wherever it went.
Well aware of danger, the soul sank through the obsidian world, through what Lailanun had called scratched emptiness. It arrived finally before the gossie of Shay Tal's mother. The drab thing appeared made of wires and twigs, which formed patterns like dried halters of breasts and thrusting hipbones. It glared at its daughter-soul. It showed its old brown teeth in its slack lower jaw. It was itself a brown stain. Yet all its details could be viewed, as a pattern of lichen on a wall can perfectly depict a man or a necropolis.
The gossie emitted a noise of unceasing complaint. Gossies are negatives of human lives and believe nothing good of life in consequence. No gossie considers that its life on earth was long enough, or that its tenure there achieved the happiness it deserved. Nor can it believe that it has earned such oblivion. It craves living souls. Only living souls can give ear to its endless grievances.
"Mother, I come dutifully before you again and will listen to your complaints."
"You faithless child, when did you last come, how long, and reluctant, oh, always reluctant, evermore reluctant, as in those thankless days – I should have known, I should have known – when I bore you not wishing another offspring squeezed from my poor sore loins –"
"I will listen to your complaints –"
"Pah, yes, reluctantly, just as your father cared nothing, nothing for my pain, knew nothing, did nothing, just like all men but who's to say children are any better sucking your life from you – oh, I should have known – I tell you I despised that clod of a man always demanding, demanding everything, more than I had to give, never – never – satisfied, the nights of grief, the days, caught in that trap, that's what it was, and you come here, a trap designed to swindle me out of my youth, pretty, yes, yes, I was pretty, that damned disease – I see you laughing at me now, little you care –"
"I care, I care, Mother, it's agony to behold you!"
"Yes, but you and he you cheated me out of it, out of all I had and all I hoped for, he with his lust, the filthy pig, if men only knew the hatreds they stir when they overpower us, override us in the dim unendurable dark, and you with that piddling feebleness, that ever sucking mouth forever with that mouth like his prod demanding too much, too much by far in patience and your scumble ever needing wiping, witless, wailing, wanting something all the while, the days, the years, those years, draining my strength, ah my strength, my sweet strength and I once so lovely, all stolen, no pleasure left for life, I should have known, no life my mother promised me at her breast and then she too no better than the rest dying damn her dying curse the stinking milkless bitch that bore me dying when I needed her... ."
The little thing's voice scratched against the pane of obsidian, trying to get at the soul.
"I do sorrow for you, Mother. I am now going to ask you a question to help take your mind off your sorrows. I will ask you to pass that question on to your mother, and to her mother and her mother's mother, and so down to remote depths. You must find me an answer to the question, and then I shall be so proud of you. I wish to discover if Wutra really exists. Does Wutra exist, and who or what is he? You must send the question back and back until some far fessup returns an answer. The answer must be full. I wish to understand how the world works. The answer must come back to me. Do you understand?"
A reply was screamed at her before she had finished speaking.
"Why should I do anything for you after the way you spoilt my life and why and why and why and what care I down here for any of your stupid problems you mean little piddling fool, it lasts for ever being down here, you hear, for ever and my sorrow too – "
The soul broke into the monologue.
"You have heard my demand, Mother. If you do not carry it out to the letter, I shall never visit you again in the world below. No one will address you ever again."
The gossie made a quick gulp at the soul. The soul remained just out of harm's reach, watching dusty sparks issue from the unbreathing mouth.
Without another word, the gossie began to pass on Shay Tal's question, and the fessups below snapped in fury at it.
All hung suspended in obsidian.
The soul was aware of other fessups nearby, hanging like shabby jackets on pegs in a midnight hall. Loilanun was there, and Loil Bry, and Little Yuli. Even Great Yuli was hanging here somewhere, reduced to a furious shade. The soul's father's gossie was nearby, more feared even than its mother's gossie, its wrath surging at her like a tide.
And the voice of the father's gossie was like the scratching of the nails of a hand on a windowpane.
"… and another thing, ungrateful girl, why weren't you a boy, you wretched failure you knew I needed a boy wanted a boy a good son to carry on the miserable suffering of our line, so I'm regarded as a laughingstock by all my friends not that I thought aught of that gang of miserable cowards, ran from danger they did, ran when the wolves howled and I ran with them not knowing if I could have my time again my time again – oh yes my damned time again – and the wind blowing fresh in the lungs and every joint on the move down the trail where the deer flickered free with their white scuts bobbing – oh, the time again – and no involvements with that sexless breastless hag you call your mother here in the clutches of this unbreathing stone I hate her hate her hate you too you prattling scumble you'll be here one day soon yourself yes here for ever in the tomb you'll see… ."
And there were other messages from other dried mouths, tail ends of grunts, sticking into her fabric like old animal bones protruding from soil, verdigrised over with earth, age, eddre, envy, and poisonous to the touch.
The soul of Shay Tal waited amid the venoms, sail aquiver, waited for her answer. And eventually a message travelled up from dry insensate mouth to dry insensate mouth through the obsidian, passing something like a response to the question through the crystallized centuries.