This warm stream of air carried with it birds, insects, spores, pollen, and microorganisms. It was gone in a few hours, and forgotten almost as soon as gone; nevertheless, it played its part in altering the scheme of things that had been.
As it passed, it brought some comfort to a man sitting uncomfortably in the branches of a tree. The tree grew on an island in the middle of a fast-flowing flood mightily becoming a tributary of the river Takissa. The man had injured one leg and perched in his place of safety in some pain.
Below the tree squatted a large male phagor. Perhaps he waited to make some kind of attack. Whatever he waited for, he remained without movement, beyond occasionally flicking an ear. His cowbird sat on a branch of the tree, as far as it could get from the injured man.
Man and phagor had been washed onto the shores of the island, half-drowned. The former had climbed to the one point of safety he, in his injured state, could find. He clung to the trunk of the tree when the wind blew.
The wind was too warm for the phagor. He moved at last, standing swiftly and turning without a backward look, to pick his way among the boulders that filled most of the narrow island. After watching for a while with its head craned forward, the cowbird extended its wings and flapped after its host.
The man thought to himself, If I could catch and kill that bird, it would be a victory of sorts – and it would be worth eating.
But Aoz Roon had more pressing problems than hunger. First he had to overcome the phagor. Through the sheltering leaves as dawn came, he could see the riverbanks from which he had been brushed. There, on marshy ground, stood four phagors, each with a cowbird perched on his shoulder or wheeling lazily above him; one held the mane of a kaidaw. They had been standing there for hours, almost without movement, staring towards the island.
Keeping a safe distance from them along the water margin was Curd. The hound sat uneasily, he whined, he paced back and forth, scanning the darkly swirling floods.
Biting his bearded lower lip against the pain, Aoz Roon tried to slide farther along his branch, so as to watch his immediate adversary's retreat. It moved slowly. Since there appeared to be nowhere to go on the island, he imagined that the monster would merely make a circuit and come back; had he been in better fettle, he might have devised some unpleasant surprise for it when it returned.
He squinted out at the sky. Freyr was disentangling itself from a barrier of trees, apparently intact after its experiences of the previous day. Batalix, having risen already, was lost in cloud. Aoz Roon longed to sleep but dared not. The phagor probably felt the same way.
There was neither sight nor sound of the monster. All that could be heard was the perpetual gargle of water in the rush of its progress southwards. It had been icy cold – Aoz Roon remembered that well. His enemy would be suffering from the immersion.
It seemed likely that the phagor would be setting a trap for him. Despite his pain, he felt a compulsion to climb from the tree and investigate. The decision made, he waited a few minutes to gather his strength. He scratched himself.
Movement was difficult. His limbs had stiffened. His great black skins were still heavy with water. The main problem was his left leg; it was painfully swollen and hard; he could not bend his knee. Nevertheless, he managed to slither down the tree, finally falling flat on the ground. He lay there in agony, panting, unable to rise, expecting at any moment to feel the phagor leap out and kill him.
The phagors on the bank had seen his move and were calling, but their voices, which lacked the carrying power of a man's, could scarcely be heard above the rushing water. Curd also set up a howl.
Aoz Roon got to his feet. By the foaming edge of the water, he found a branch stripped to its bark, which served as a crutch. Fear, cold, sickness, swirled in him like floodwater, almost causing him to collapse. He felt his flesh heavy on him – chill yet enflamed. He stared about in desperation, scratching himself, mouth hanging open, watching for attack. The phagor was nowhere to be seen.
"I'll get you, you scumble, if I never manage anything more…. I'm Lord of Embruddock yet…."
He moved forward step by step, keeping the piles of boulders that cluttered the spine of the island between him and the nearer bank, so that the phagors standing vigil could not see him. To his right, stones, debris, lank grass, trailed down into the flood, whose smooth treachery whirled away towards a distant bank. Mist allied itself to the water, curling above its marbled surface.
Malnourished saplings and older trees shared his shipwreck, many dismasted by boulders heaved against them by early inundations. This complex area of natural disaster was no more than twelve metres across at its widest; yet its length – like the spine of a great submerged creature – divided the flood for farther than eye could see.
Like a wounded bear, he limped forward, taking care, in his anxious tour of inspection, to lumber on the margins of the water and keep as much space as he could between himself and possible attack.
A stag, head high, eyes aflash, burst from a fern thicket in front of him. He fell in startlement as it plunged into the flood until only its red-brown head bearing three-pointed antlers was above the water. Uttering a plaintive bellow, it yielded its powerful body to the greater power of the waters, which carried it away in a wide arc. The creature appeared unable to gain the farther bank, and was still swimming bravely when Aoz Roon lost sight of it in banks of mist.
Later, clambering over a fallen tree, he sighted the cowbird again.
It was watching him with its lapidary reptile eye, perched on the sod-and-boulder roof of a hut. The hut's walls were of cut stone; piled shingle, ferns, spavined saplings sought to turn the hut into a natural object. Aoz Roon worked his way round to the front of this refuge, concluding that the phagor must be inside.
Where the ground dipped, water swirled within three feet of the door. Here, the island had broken down. It emerged a few metres farther upstream, to continue its circumscribed course, a thin ship bearing a purposeless freight of stones. Its two parts were divided by a stretch of eddying water no more than knee-deep. The bear-man could wade to better safety. The phagor, with that hatred of water which marked its species, would never follow.
The chill of the current bit into his bones like alligator's teeth. He was groaning loudly as he staggered to the continuation of the island. He fell. He remained prone, scrabbling among rock, twisting to look back at the hut. The adversary must be inside – sick, injured, as he himself was.
He dragged himself up and toured the island, casting about stupidly, eventually using his knife to cut two firm stakes. Tucking them under one arm, he thrust himself back into the cruel stream, hobbling across with the aid of his crutch. He kept his gaze fixed on the hut door.
As he reached it, there was movement over his head. The cowbird swooped down and slashed open his temple with the barb of its beak. Dropping crutch and stakes, he sliced the air with his knife. The next time the bird plunged, he cut its breast. It banked clumsily and landed on a log, shedding feathers speckled with its red blood.
He staggered forward and jammed the two stakes in place, one under the latch, the other under the upper hinge of the door. The door began immediately to shake. Hammering and bellowing followed, as the phagor fought to get out. The stakes held firm.
He picked up his crutch. As he turned to beat his retreat back to the islet, his gaze fell on the cowbird. It was hopping from one foot to the other, blood dripping from its breast. He lifted his crutch above his head and brought it down hard, killing the bird.
Holding it under one arm, he hobbled through the freezing water a third time.
On the other side, he threw himself down to massage some life back into his legs. He cursed the pain in his bones. The hammering on the hut door continued. Sooner or later, one of the stakes would work out of place, but for the present the phagor was put of action and the Lord of Embruddock triumphant.
Dragging the cowbird, Aoz Roon crawled between two trees that leaned together, pulling stones rou
nd himself for protection. Weakness flowed over him in waves. He fell asleep with his face buried in the still warm breast feathers of the bird.
Cold and numbness roused him. Freyr was low in the western sky, drowning in golden haze. By wriggling round in his niche, he could observe the nearer bank. The phagors still waited there. Behind them, the ground rose; he could make out the place where Eline Tal had fallen. Behind that, hazy, loomed the greater sentinel. There was no sign of Curd beside the flood.
The leg was less painful. He worked his way backwards out of his hole, dragging the dead bird, and stood up.
The phagor was waiting only a few metres away across the stream. Behind him was the hut, its door still intact. Its roof was broken, its stones rolled aside; that way had the phagor escaped.
Snorting, the phagor turned his head to one side and then the other, his horns catching the sun as he made this enigmatic gesture. He was a doleful specimen, his coat matted from the recent immersion in the river.
He hurled a clumsy spear as Aoz Roon presented him with a full target. Aoz Roon was too stiff, too surprised, to duck, but the missile went wide. He saw it was one of the stakes he had cut to prop against the door. Perhaps the poor throw signified that the phagor had injured his arm.
Aoz Roon shook his fist. It was going to be dark soon, for a short while. Instinct prompted him to light a fire. He busied himself about the task, thanking Wutra that he was feeling stronger, yet puzzled that he felt mysteriously sick. It might be hunger, he told himself; but food was at hand, once he had a fire.
After collecting twigs and rotted wood, and creating a sheltered place among stones, he set to work like a good hunter, rubbing a stick between his palms. The tinder smouldered. The miracle happened, and a small flame burned. The harsh lines of Aoz Roon's face relaxed slightly as he looked down at the glow between his hands. The phagor stood at its distance and watched, unmoving.
"Son of Freyr, you are make warm," he called.
Looking up, Aoz Roon saw his adversary only in outline, silhouetted against the gold of the western sky.
"I make warm, and what's more I'm going to cook and eat your cowbird, fuggie."
"You give me a share cowbird."
"The floods will go down in a day or two. Then we can both go home. You stay where you are for the present."
The phagor's articulation was thick. He said something Aoz Roon did not understand. The latter squatted by his fire, peering across the dark water at the adversary, whose silhouette was now fading into the general silhouette of trees and hills, black against the sunset. Aoz Roon was scratching himself, raking with his nails under his furs, swaying to and fro.
"You, Son of Freyr, are sick and will die in the night." He had difficulty pronouncing the sibilants, rendering them as heavy z's.
"Zick? Yes, I'm zick, but I'm still Lord of Embruddock, scumb you."
Aoz Roon began to call Curd, but no answer came. It was too dark on the ground to see if the phagor group continued to wait by the flood. The whole world was drowning in night, becoming nothing but a shadowy reflection.
Fearful in his weakness, he thought the phagor crouched, as if it was about to attempt to jump the space that intervened between them.
He waved a fist. "You stick to your world, I'll stick to mine."
Merely uttering the words exhausted him. He held his hands over his eyes, panting as Curd had panted after a day's hunting.
The phagor made no reply for a long while, as if trying to digest the man's remark and finally deciding to reject it. This he did without gesture, saying, "We live and die in zame world, zame world. That is why we muzz fight."
The words came to Aoz Roon over the water. He could not understand their meaning. He remembered only that he had shouted to Shay Tal that they would survive by unity. Now he was confused. It was typical of her not to be at hand when he needed her.
Turning to his fire, he fell upon his knees, pushed more branches on the blaze, and began the bloody job of cutting up the bird. He wrenched off one of its legs, from which sinews dangled, and skewered it on a stick. He was preparing to push it into the flames when he realised that the agony of the rash on his skin was echoed throughout his bones, his skeleton felt as if it were on fire. Sickness washed over him. The thought of eating anything was suddenly revolting.
He staggered back to his feet, trod in the fire, blundered forward into the water, went in circles, crying, holding aloft the bloody limb. The water noise was loud. It seemed to him that the river became motionless; the island was a slim boat, moving at speed across the surface of a lake; he could not control its flight; and the lake went on forever, into a great cavern of darkness.
The mouth of the cavern closed, swallowing him.
•••
"You have the bone fever," said the phagor. He was called Yhamm-Whrrmar. He was no warrior. He and his friends were itinerant woodmen and fungusmongers. Their kaidaws were stolen. When two Sons of Freyr had appeared in their midst, they had merely done their bounden duty, with the result that Yhamm-Whrrmar was now in some difficulty.
The fungusmongers had been driven westwards by a combination of factors. They were striking in the opposite direction, following favourable air-octaves, when they met humble dwellers like themselves, who spoke of a great crusade advancing, destroying all before it. Although alarmed, the fungusmongers had continued their quest for cooler ground, but had deflected up a long valley where the air-octaves were tainted. Floods had come. They had been forced to retreat. Unkindness and confusion assailed their very eddres.
He stood motionless on the edge of the flood, awaiting the death of the evil seminal being, Freyr. Its disappearance into darkness brought him relief. He unfroze and massaged his injured arm. Night was welcome.
Some distance away, his enemy lay sprawled across a heap of stones. There would be no further trouble from that quarter. After all, parasitic curse though they were, the Sons of Freyr were to be pitied: they all eventually fell sick in the presence of the Ancipital Race. It was no more than justice. Yhamm-Whrrmar stood motionless, letting hours pass.
"You are zick and will die," he called. But he also felt bad air inside him. He scratched his neck with the hand of his good arm, and surveyed the great dark area in which he stood. Complete blackness was already fading. Somewhere to the east, Batalix, that good soldier, Batalix, father of the ancipital race, was already putting forth pale tidings of his presence. Yhamm-Whrrmar retired to the roofless hut and lay down; his magenta eyes closed, he slept without dream or movement.
Over the great floodwaters stole a glimmer from the east, promise of Batalix-dawn. Batalix would rise many times before the floods died, for those floods were fed by enormous reservoirs of water held in the remote Nktryhk. Time would come when the flood scoured for itself a regular riverbed. Later still, shifts in the land mass would deflect the river elsewhere. By the period – still many centuries distant – when Freyr reached its maximum glory, this land would become parched and form a sector of the Madura Desert, traversed by nations as yet a part of futurity unglimpsed.
As man and phagor slept, neither realised that water would flow past their flimsy strip of island for an age to come. It was a temporary inundation: but that inundation would last for another two hundred Batalix-years.
XIII - View from a Half Roon
* * *
On the Earth Observation Station, the term "bone fever" was well understood. It was part of a complex disease-mechanism caused by the virus known to the learned families on the Avernus as the helico virus, and its workings were better understood by them than by those who suffered and died from it on the planet below.
Research into Helliconian microbiology was far enough advanced for the Earthmen to know that the virus manifested itself twice in every 1825 years of the Helliconian great year. However it might appear to the contrary to the Helliconians, these manifestations were not random. They occurred invariably during the period of the twenty eclipses which marked the beginning of true spr
ing, and again during the period of the six or seven eclipses occurring later in the great year. Climatic changes coincident with the eclipses acted as triggers to the phases of viral hyperactivity, which formed, its it were, mirror images of each other, their effects being equally devastating though entirely different at the different periods.
To the inhabitants of the world below, the two scourges were separate phenomena. They raged more than five Helliconian small centuries (that is, slightly over seven Earth centuries) apart. So they went by separate names, the bone fever and the fat death.
The disease stream of the virus, like an irresistible flood, affected the history of all through whose lands it swept its ways. Yet an individual virus, like a single drop of water, was negligible.
A helico virus would have to be magnified ten thousand times before it became visible to the human eye. Its size was ninety-seven millimicrons. It consisted of a bag partly covered in icosahedrons, made up of lipids and proteins, and containing RNA; in many ways, it resembled the pleomorphic helico virus responsible for an extinct terrestrial disease called mumps.
Both the scholars on the Avernus and the Helliconia-watchers back on Earth had deduced the function of this devastating virus. Like the ancient Hindu god Shiva, it represented the ancipital principles of destruction and preservation. It killed, and existence followed in its deadly wake. Without the presence of the helico virus on the planet, neither human nor phagorian life would have been possible.
Because of its presence, no person from Earth could set foot on Helliconia and survive. On Helliconia, the helico virus ruled, and set a cordon sanitaire about the planet.