Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [493]
In a low voice, he said, ‘They didn’t think I would be any good in battle, so at Koriantura I was put in charge of animal fodder. There’s an insult for a man whose father is Keeper of the Wheel! I had to learn those figures, woman, but I saw the sense in them. I grasped their meaning. Year by year, the growing season is getting shorter – just a day at either end. This summer is a disappointment to farmers. The Isthmus of Chalce is famine-stricken. You’ll see. All this Asperamanka knows. Whatever you think of him, he’s no fool. An expedition such as this, which set out with over eleven thousand men, cannot be launched ever again.’
‘So my unfortunate continent is safe at last from your hateful Sibish interference.’
He laughed. ‘Peace at a price. An army marching through the land is like a plague of locusts – and the locusts die when there’s no food in their path. That settlement will soon be entirely cut off. It’s doomed.
‘The world is becoming more hostile, woman. And we waste what resources we have …’
Luterin lay against her rigid body, burying his face in his arms. But before sleep and drink overpowered him, he heaved himself up again to ask how old she was. She refused to say. He struck her hard across the face. She sobbed and admitted to thirteen plus one tenner. She was his junior by two tenners.
‘Young to be a widow,’ he said with relish. ‘And – don’t think you’ll get off lightly tomorrow night. I’m not the animal fodder officer anymore. No talk tomorrow night, woman.’
Toress Lahl made no reply. She remained awake, unstirring, gazing miserably up at the stars overhead. Clouds veiled the sky as Batalix-dawn drew near. Groans of the dying reached her ears. There were twelve more deaths from the plague during the night.
But in the morning those who survived rose as usual, stretched their limbs, and were blithe, joking with friends of this and that as they queued for their rations at the bread wagons. A two-pound loaf each, she remembered bitterly.
There was no soldier on that long trail homeward who would admit to enjoying himself. Yet it was probable that everyone took some pleasure in the routine of making and breaking camp, in the camaraderie, in the feeling that progress was being made, and in the chance of being in a different place each day. There was simple pleasure in leaving behind the ashes of an old fire and pleasure in building a new one, in watching the young flames take hold of twigs and grass.
Such activities, with the enjoyments they generated, were as old as mankind itself. Indeed, some activities were older, for human consciousness had flickered upward – like young flames taking hold – amid the challenges of mankind’s first long peregrination eastwards from Hespagorat, when forsaking the protection of the ancipital race and the status of domesticated animal.
The wind might blow chill from the north, from the Circumpolar Regions of Sibornal, yet to the soldiers returning home the air tasted good in their lungs, the ground felt good beneath their feet.
The officers were less lighthearted than their men. For the general soldiery, it was enough to have survived the battle and to be returning home to whatever welcome awaited them. For those who thought more deeply, the matter was more complex. There was the question of the increasingly severe regime within the frontiers of Sibornal. There was also the question of their success.
Although the officers, from Asperamanka downwards, talked repeatedly of victory, nevertheless, under that terrible enantiodromia which gripped the world, under that inevitable and incessant turning of all things into their opposites, the victory came to feel more and more like a defeat – a defeat from which they were retreating with little to show but scars, a list of the dead, and extra mouths to feed.
And always, to heighten this oppressive sense of failure, the Fat Death was among them, keeping pace easily with the fastest troops.
In the spring of the Great Year was the bone fever, cutting down human populations, pruning the