Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [338]
The Madura Desert: Matrassyl began to seem a long way off. But the stars came nearer overhead and, on clear nights, the sickle of Yarap-Rombry’s Comet blazed like a signpost on their way.
SartoriIrvrash stood shivering in the small hours when the fire had died and the other travellers were sleeping. He could not entirely lose his fever. He thought of BillishOwpin. His story of having come from another world seemed more likely here than it had done at the palace.
He walked by the tethered kaidaws and encountered the Pointer of the Way, standing silently smoking. The two men talked in low voices. The kaidaws uttered sniggering grunts.
‘The animals are quiet enough,’ SartoriIrvrash said. ‘History pictures them as almost unmanageable brutes. To be ridden only by phagors. I’ve never seen a phagor riding one, any more than I have ever seen a cowbird with a phagor. Perhaps history was wrong on that point, too. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to disentangle history from legend.’
‘Perhaps they aren’t so different,’ the Pointer said. ‘I can’t read a single letter, so I have no strong opinion in the matter. But we smoke these kaidaws when they’re mere calves – puff a veronikane up their nostrils. It seems to make them calm.
‘I’ll tell you a tale, since you can sleep no more than I.’ He sighed heavily in preparation for the burden of narrative. ‘Many years ago now, I went eastwards with my master, through the provinces controlled by Unndreid, up into the wilderness of the Nktryhk. It’s a different world up there, very harsh world, with little air to breathe, yet people remain fit.’
‘Less infection at high altitudes,’ commented SartoriIrvrash.
‘That’s not what the people of the Nktryhk say. They say that Death is a lazy fellow who doesn’t readily bother to climb mountains. I’ll tell you one thing. Fish is a popular food. Often the fish may be caught in a river a hundred or more miles away. Yet it doesn’t decay. You catch a fish here at dawn, it’s bad by Freyr-set. Up in the Nktryhk, it remains good to eat for a small year.’
He leaned over the back of one of the patient kaidaws and smiled. ‘It was fine up there when you got used to it. Cold by night, of course. No rain, never. And there, in the high valleys, is land ruled only by fuggies. They’re not as submissive as here. I tell you, it’s a different world. The fuggies ride kaidaws, ride them like the wind – aye, and have cowbirds to sail at their shoulders. My understanding is, that they come down and invade the lowlands when snow falls here, whenever that may be. When Freyr fails.’
Nodding his head with interest and some disbelief, SartoriIrvrash said, ‘But there can be few phagors at those altitudes, surely? What can they eat, apart from your ever-fresh fish? There’s no food.’
‘That isn’t so. They grow crops of barley in the valleys – right up to the snowbanks. All they need is irrigation. Every drop of water and urine is precious. There’s a virtue in that thin air – they have crops of barley that ripen in three weeks.’
‘Half a tenner from sowing? Incredible.’
‘Nevertheless it is so,’ said the Pointer. ‘And the phagors share the grain and never quarrel or use money. And the white cowbirds drive out all other winged things bar the eagles. I saw it with my own eyes, when I stood no higher than this quadruped’s shoulders. I mean to go back one day – no king or laws there.’
‘I’ll make a note of all that, if you don’t mind,’ said SartoriIrvrash. As he wrote, he thought of JandolAnganol among his abandoned buildings.
After the Madura, the long desolation of Hazziz. Twice they had to pass through strips of vegetation, stretching from one bleak horizon to another like god’s hedges. Trees, shrubs, a riot of flowers, drew a line across the face of the grasslands.
‘This is / will be the uct,’ said Dienu Pasharatid, employing a translation of a Sibish continuous present tense. ‘It stretches across the continent from east to west,