Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [221]
‘Until our day, few could imagine it! For each of us can expect only forty years of life. It would take forty-six of our lifetimes to add up to one whole circle of this world about Freyr. Many of our lives find no echo, yet are part of that greater thing. That is why such knowledge is difficult to grasp and easy to lose in time of trouble.’
She was seized up by her new power, seduced by her own eloquence.
‘What is the trouble, what is this disaster of which Shay Tal told us, large enough to make us mislay such important knowledge? Why, simply that the light of Freyr varies according to the time of the great year. We have come through many generations of poor light, of winter, when the earth lay dead under snow. Tomorrow you should rejoice when the eclipse comes – the blindness, when distant Freyr slips behind Batalix – for it is a sign that Freyr’s light grows nearer … We enter spring of the great year tomorrow. Rejoice! Have the sense, the knowledge, to rejoice! Throw away the mess of your lives that ignorance causes, and rejoice! Better times are coming for all of us.’
Shoatapraxi deflected them. The woody grass had been growing in clumps as they approached lower ground. The clumps became thickets. Now they tried to find their way through a region choked with it.
The vegetation rose above their heads. It was broken only by drumlins, up which it was possible to climb occasionally in order to get a bearing. With the shoatapraxi was entwined a thin-stemmed bramble, making progress both difficult and painful. The phagor army ahead had travelled another way. They were forced to follow the more meandering tracks of animals, yet the going remained bad for the yelk. They were nervous of the grass, as if disliking its pungent scent; their sweeping horns caught on the hollow stems, and the thorns underfoot penetrated to the softer parts of their hoofs. So the men dismounted, leading their necrogenes as they progressed on foot.
‘How much farther, barbarian?’ Skitosherill asked.
‘Not far,’ Laintal Ay responded. It was his stock answer to the stock question. They had slept uncomfortably in the forest, rising at dawn with frost in their clothes. He felt refreshed, still rejoicing in his lighter form, but he saw how weary the others were becoming. Aoz Roon was a shadow of what he had once been; in the night, he had called out in a strange language.
They came to marshy ground, where, to everybody’s relief, the shoatapraxi thinned. After pausing to see that all was quiet, they moved on, scattering flights of small birds before them. Ahead loomed a valley, with soft mounds rising on either side. They went that way, rather than moving on to higher ground, chiefly because of their fatigue; but as soon as they entered the neck of the valley, they were assailed by a chill wind, which rushed at them like an animal and bit to their bones. It was a time for struggling on grimly, with the head down.
The wind brought fog with it. The fog curled about their bodies, though their heads were above it. Laintal Ay understood the wind, knowing that a layer of cold air poured down like water from the distant mountains on their left flank, down over the mounds into the valley, seeking lower ground. It was a local wind; the sooner they left its numbing grip, the better.
Skitosherill’s wife gave a faint cry and halted, leaning against her yelk and burying her face against her arm.
Skitosherill returned to her concernedly and placed a grey-clad arm round her. The icy air wrapped his cloak about his leg.
He looked worriedly up at Laintal Ay. ‘She can’t go on,’ he said.
‘We’ll die if we stay here.’
Dashing the moisture from his eyes, he looked forward.