Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [130]
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,