Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [341]
While SartoriIrvrash made notes of these matters, there was a great cry from the lookout, and the captain hurried on deck, cursing in a way the Azoiaxic One would hardly have commended.
Through the drizzle loomed brown clouds and, somewhere in the clouds, men were bellowing. The clouds became shrouds and sails. At the last possible minute, a ship as big as their own slid by, with hardly a foot of leeway between hulls. Lanterns were seen, faces – mainly savage and accompanied by shaking fists – and then all were gone, back into the hanging soup. The Sibornal-bound ship was alone again in its sepia isolation.
Passengers explained to the foreigner that they had just passed one of the Uskut ‘herring-coaches’, fishing with curtain nets off the coast. The herring-coach was a little factory, since it carried salters and coopers among its crew, who gutted and packed the catch at sea, storing it in barrels.
Thoroughly upset by the near collision, SartoriIrvrash was in no mood to listen to a eulogy on the Sibornalese herring trade. He retired to his damp bunk, still wrapped in his coat, and shivered. When they landed in Askitosh, he reminded himself, they would be on a latitude of 30° N, and only five degrees south of the Tropic of Carcampan.
On the morning of the seventh day of the voyage, the banks of fog rolled back, though visibility remained poor. The sea was dotted with herring-coaches.
After a while, a sluggish stain on the horizon resolved itself into the coastline of the northern continent. It was no more than a ruled line of sandstone dividing almost waveless sea from undulating land.
Moved by something like enthusiasm for the sight of her homeland, Madame Dienu Pasharatid delivered SartoriIrvrash a brief geography lesson. He saw how the water was dotted with small ships. Uskutoshk had been forced to became a maritime nation because of the advance of ice southwards from the Circumpolar Regions – these regions being mentioned with hushed tones. There was little land for cultivation between sea and ice. The seas had to be harvested and sea lanes opened to the two great rich grain prairies of the continent – which she indicated as being distant with a sweep of her arm.
How distant, he asked.
Pointing westward and yet more westward, she named the nations of Sibornal, pronouncing their titles with varied inflections, as if she knew them personally, as if they were personages standing on a narrow strip of land glaring southwards, with cold draughts from the Circumpolar Regions freezing their backs – and all with a strong inclination to march down into Campannlat, SartoriIrvrash muttered to himself.
Uskutoshk, Loraj, Shivenink, where the Great Wheel was situated, Bribhar, Carcampan.
The grainlands were in Bribhar and Carcampan.
Her roll call ended with a finger pointing to the east.
‘And so we have rounded the globe. Most of Sibornal, you see, is isolated in the extreme, caught between ocean and ice. Hence our independence. We have mountainous Kuj-Juvec coming after Carcampan – it is scarcely populated by humans – and then the troubled region of Upper Hazziz, leading into the Chalce Peninsula; then we are safe back in Uskutoshk, the most civilised nation. You arrive at a time of year when we have both Freyr and Batalix in the sky. But for over half the Great Year, Freyr is eternally below the horizon, and then the climate becomes severe. That’s the Weyr-Winter of legend … The ice moves south, and so do the Uskuts, as we call ourselves, if we can. But many die. Many die.’ She used a future-continuous tense.
Warm though it was, she shivered at the thought. ‘Some other people’s lifetimes,’ she murmured. ‘Fortunately, such cruel times are still far away, but they are hard to forget. It’s a race memory, I suppose … We all know that Weyr-Winter will come again.’
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