Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [168]
Grey picked up speed as she moved downhill, encouraged by her master. Soon they were going at full gallop, the ground flying beneath them, and all human beings lost to view. Aoz Roon raised his clenched right fist high in the air.
‘Good riddance to the hag-bitch,’ he cried. Savage laughter was torn from his throat as he rode.
Earth Observation Station Avernus saw everything as it passed overhead. All change was monitored and all data transmitted back to Earth. In the Avernus, members of the eight learned families were at work, synthesising the new knowledge.
They charted not only the movement of human populations but also those of the phagorian populations, both white and black. Every advance or retreat was transformed into an impulse which would eventually make its way across the light-years to the globe and computers back in the Helliconian Centronics Institute on Earth.
From the window of the station, the team could observe the planet below, and the progress of the eclipse, as it spread a grey necrosis over the oceans and the tropical continent.
On one bank of monitor screens, another progress was under survey – the progress of the kzahhn’s crusade towards Oldorando. By its own peculiar travelling time, the crusade was now precisely one year away from its anticipated target, the destruction of the old town.
In codified form, these signals were relayed back to Earth. There, many centuries later, Helliconia-watchers assembled to see the final agonies of the drama.
The bleak regions of Mordriat, its echoing canyons, its shattered walls of rock, its moors with their unexpected air of privacy, its drab high valleys through which cloud forever smouldered, as if fire rather than ice had moulded the unyielding contours of its desolation, lay behind.
The straggling crusade, broken into many separate groups, was wending its way over lower country, empty save for Madis with their flocks, and dense flights of birds. Indifferent to their surroundings, the phagors continued towards the southeast.
The kzahhn of Hrastyprt, Hrr-Brahl Yprt, led them onwards. Vengeance was still strong in their harneys, as they made their way through the floods of the east Oldorandan plain; yet many of them had died. Sickness and attacks from merciless Sons of Freyr had cut down their numbers.
Nor had they been well received by small components of phagors through whose land they travelled. Those components without kaidaws pursued a settled way of living, often with large gangs of human or Madi slaves, and fiercely resisted any invasion of their territory.
Hrr-Brahl Yprt had come victorious through everything. Only sickness was beyond his power to command. As news of his columns preceded him, so living things in his path moved away, causing the ripples of his progress to spread across half a continent.
Now the leaders stood with Hrr-Brahl Yprt before a wide-flowing river. The waters of the river were icy; they plunged down, though the phagor host knew it not, from the same Nktryhk uplands from which the crusade against the Sons of Freyr had started, a thousand miles away.
‘Here by these torrents we will stay while Batalix makes her way twice across the sky.’ Hrr-Brahl Yprt said to his commanders. ‘Leader scouts will diverge to either side and find us a dry crossing; the air-octaves will guide them.’
He whistled down his cowbird, who began to search his pelage for ticks. It was done abstractedly, for the kzahhn had other matters on his harneys; but the minute creatures were suddenly irritating. Perhaps it was the warmth of the valley surrounding them. Green cliffs rose on all sides, trapping the unwelcome heat as cupped hands hold water. The third blindness would soon be upon them. Later, a retreat to colder quarters must commence.
But first came vengeance.
He gestured the graceful Zzhrrk away, and strode off to obtain an understanding of the overall situation, his bird remaining above him