Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [306]
The old lower kzahhn’s mottled face hung over his arm as he extended it to her gaze. Of her horns, one had been broken halfway and its tip replaced with a wooden peg.
She pulled herself up in a squatting position and called to two of the younger stalluns.
‘Do what the thing demands,’ she said.
*
The escort stopped when a pair of houses was sighted in the distance. They would go no farther. Billy Xiao Pin removed the watch from his wrist and offered it to them. After contemplating it for a while, they refused to accept it.
He could not understand their explanation. They seemed to have lapsed from Hurdhu into Native. He grasped that numbers were involved. Perhaps they feared the ever-changing numbers. Perhaps they feared the unknown metal. Their refusal was made without emotion; they simply would not take it; they wanted nothing. ‘JandolAnganol,’ they said. Evidently they still respected the king’s name.
As he went forward, Billy looked back at them, partly obscured by a spray of flowering creeper hanging from a tree. They did not move. He feared them; he also felt a kind of marvel, that he had been in their company and was still sane.
Soon he found himself moving from that dream to another just as wonderful, as he walked in the narrow streets of Matrassyl. The winding way took him under the great rock on which the palace stood. He began to recognise where he was. This and this he had seen through the optics of the Avernus. He could have embraced the first Helliconians he saw.
Churches had been built into the rock; the stricter religious orders imitated the preferences of their masters in Pannoval and locked themselves away from the light. Monasteries huddled against the rock, three stories high, the more prosperous ones built in stone, the poorer in wood. Despite himself, Billy lingered, to feel the grain of the timber, running his nails in its cracks. He came from a world where everything was renewed – or destroyed and reconstituted – as soon as it aged. This ancient wood with the grain outstanding: how superb the accident of its design!
The world was choked with detail he could never have imagined.
The monasteries were cheerfully painted red and yellow, or red and purple, carrying the circle of Akhanaba in those colours. Their doors bore representations of the god, descending in fire. Black locks of hair escaped from his topknot. His eyebrows curled upwards. The smile on his half-human face revealed sharp white teeth. In each hand he carried torches. A cloth garment wound itself like a serpent about his blue body.
There were representations too, on banners, of saints and familiars and bogeys: Yuli the Priest, Denniss the King, Withram and Wutra, and streams of Others, large and black, small and green with claws for toe-nails and rings on their toes. Among these supernatural beings – fat and bald or shaggy – went humans, generally in supplicatory postures.
Humans were shown small. Where I come from, Billy said to himself, humans would be shown large. But here they went in supplicatory postures, only to be mown down by the gods in one way or another. By flames, by ice, by the sword.
Memories of school lessons came to Billy, fertilised by reality. He had learnt how important religions were on backward Helliconia. Sometimes nations had been converted to a different religion in a day – it had happened to Oldorando, he recalled. Other nations, losing their religion as suddenly, had collapsed and disappeared without trace. Here was the very bastion of Borlien’s creed. As an atheist, Billy was both attracted and repelled by the lurid fates depicted on all sides.
The monks looked not too stricken by the dreadful state of the world; devastation was merely part of a greater cycle, the background of their placid existences.
‘The colours!’ Billy said aloud. The colours of devastation were like paradise. There is