Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [465]
The years passed. That tumultuous generation faded one by one … Long after the queen was lost to mortal sight, much that was immortal of her travelled across the immeasurable gulfs of space and was received on Earth. There, those lineaments and that face lived again. Her sufferings, joys, failings, virtues – all were called up once more for the peoples of Earth.
On Helliconia itself, all memories of the queen were soon lost, as waves are lost on the beach.
T’Sehn-Hrr shone overhead. The moonlight was blue. Even by day, when Batalix shone through the cool mists, the daylight was blue.
Everything perfectly suited the ancipital kind. Temperatures were low. They held horns high and saw no need to hurry. They lived among the tropical mountains and forests of the Pegovin Peninsula of Hespagorat. They were at peace with one another.
As the runts grew slowly to creighthood and then full adulthood, their coats became dense and black. Under that shapeless pelage, they were immensely strong. They threw roughly shaped spears which could kill at a hundred yards. With those weapons they slew members of other components who infringed their territory.
They had other arts. Fire was their chained and domesticated pet. They travelled with their hearths on their shoulders, and groups of them were to be seen, climbing down to the coast on occasions, where they would trap fish, with names borne on stone slabs upon their broad shoulders.
Bronze accoutrements were not beyond their understanding. With that metal they decorated themselves; the warm gleam of bronze might be caught about the smoking firesides of their mountain caves. They mastered pottery sufficiently to make coil pots, often of intricate design, shaped to resemble the pods of the fruits they ate. Coarse body coverings were woven from reeds and creepers. They had the gift of language. Stalluns and gillots went out to hunt together, or cultivated their scanty vegetables together in cleared patches. There was no quarrel between male and female.
The ancipital components kept animals as pets. Asokins lived commensally with them, and served as hunting dogs when they went out to hunt. Their Others were of less practical use; the naughty thieving tricks of Others were tolerated for the amusement their antics gave.
When Batalix set and light drained from the cool world, the ancipitals sank indifferently to sleep. They slept humbly as cattle, lying where they had stood. They switched off. No dreams haunted their long skulls during the silent hours of night.
Only when the moon T’Sehn-Hrr was full, they mated and hunted instead of sleeping. That was their great time. They killed any animal they came across, any bird, any other ancipital. There was no reason in the killing; they killed because it was their way.
By daylight, some of the components, those who lived to the south, hunted flambreg. That vast continent, the southern polar continent of Hespagorat, was populated by millions of head of flambreg. With the flambreg went clouds of flies. With the clouds of flies went the yellow fly. So the phagors killed the flambreg, massacred them separately or by the scores, killed the heads of herds, killed does, gravid or otherwise, killed the young, tried to fill the world with their carcasses.
The flambreg were never deterred from charging northwards across the lowlands of the Pegovin Peninsula. The ancipitals never wearied of killing them. The years came and went, and the centuries, and still the great herds plunged towards the untiring spears. There was no history among the components, except the history of this constant killing.
Mating took place at full moon: a year later, parturition occurred at full moon. The runts slowly became adult. Everything was slow, as if heartbeats themselves took their time, and the leisurely pace at which a tree grew was a standard for all things. When the great white disc of moon sank into the mists of the horizon, all was much as it had been when it rose from