Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [431]
Two days later, the king halted his force only a few miles short of Oldorando. Wisps of smoke trailed across the rolling landscape.
He stood by one of the aged stone pillars which dotted the landscape. Impatient for the rear of the phagor column to catch up, JandolAnganol traced with one finger the worn design on the stone, a familiar pattern of two concentric circles with curving lines running from inner to outer circle. Just for a moment, he wondered what the pillar and its pattern could signify; but such enigmas – presumably never capable of resolution, any more than he expected to be told what long-dead king had erected the stones – occupied his mind only for a moment. His thoughts were all on what lay immediately ahead.
They had reached a region which was in fact a hinterland of the fabled city they were approaching.
Of that city, there was as yet no sign. The view comprised low rolling hills, the foothills of the foothills of the Quzint Mountains, running like an armoured spine over the continent. Ahead, sprawling across the ground, was one of the ucts, threading its way into the distance on either side.
The uct here formed a tawny rather than a green line, comprising few large trees but many bushes and cyclads, entwined by gaudy mantle flowers, the seeds of which migrant tribes chewed as they progressed.
No road was as wide as this uct. Unlike a road, however, it was not to be travelled by humans. Despite the depredations of arang and fhlebiht, it had become impenetrable. The Madi tribes with their animals travelled along its edge. There, scattering seeds and droppings, the protognostics unthinkingly widened the uct. Year by year it spread, becoming a strip of forest.
Not that the strip was regular. Alien growths like shoatapraxi, introduced as burrs on the coats of animals, had prospered in places where they could take advantage of favourable soil conditions, and spread in thickets. The Madi skirted the new thickets, or else plunged through them leaving a trail later obliterated by further waves of aliens.
What was incidental became established. The uct served as a barrier. Butterflies and small animals found on one side of the barrier were not to be seen on the other. There were birds and rodents and a deadly golden snake which kept to the shelter of the uct and never ventured beyond its confines as they spread across the continent. Several kinds of Others lived their pranksome lives out in the uct.
Humans, too, recognised the existence of the uct by using it as a frontier. This uct marked the frontier between Northern Borlien and the land of Oldorando.
And that frontier was on fire.
A lava flow from a newly erupting volcano had set the uct ablaze. It had begun to burn along its length like a fusee.
Instruments on the Avernus were recording details of increasing volcanic activity on the world approaching periastron below. Data relayed to Earth concerning Mount Rustyjonnik showed that the material from the eruption rose to a height of 50 kilometres. The lower layers of this cloud were carried rapidly eastwards, circling the globe in 15 days. The material rising above 21 kilometres moved westwards with the prevailing flow of the lower stratosphere, to circle the globe in 60 days.
Similar readings were obtained for other eruptions. Dust clouds gathering in the stratosphere were about to double Helliconia’s albedo, reflecting the increasing heat of Freyr away from the surface. Thus the elements of the biosphere worked like an interrelated body or machine to preserve its vital processes.
During the decades when Freyr was closest to Helliconia, the planet would be shielded by acidic dust layers