Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [539]
Toress Lahl looked at Shokerandit in dismay.
‘Will they attack us?’
‘They have a marked aversion to water, but they could easily get along that spit of sand and board us. We’d better see if we can find any fit members of the crew – and quickly.’
‘We were the first to go down with the Fat Death, so we may be the first to recover.’
‘We must see if there are any weapons to defend the ship with.’
Their search of the ship horrified them. It had become a slaughterhouse. There had been no escape from the plague. Those who had locked themselves into cabins alone had succumbed and, in some cases, died alone. Where two or three had shut themselves away, the first to show symptoms had perhaps been killed. Any animals aboard had been killed and devoured, their remains fought over. Cannibalism had prevailed in the large hold, where the Odim family was. Of twenty-three members of the family, eighteen were already dead, killed mainly by their relations. Of the five remaining alive, three were still suffering from the madness of the disease and fled when shouted at. Two young women were able to speak; they had undergone the full metamorphosis. Toress Lahl took them to the safety of the closet where she and Shokerandit had sheltered.
The hatches to the crew’s quarters were locked in place. From below came animal noises and a peculiar singsong, intoning endlessly
‘He saw his fair maid’s incision
O, that terminal vision …
O, that terminal vision …’
In a forward storage cupboard, they discovered the bodies of Besi Besamitikahl and the old grannie. Besi lay staring upwards, a puzzled expression frozen on her face. Both were dead.
In the forward hold, they came on some sturdy square boxes which had remained untouched throughout the disaster which had overwhelmed the ship.
‘Praise be, cases of rifles,’ Shokerandit exclaimed. He opened the nearest box and pulled away some sacking. There, each item wrapped in tissue paper, lay a complete dinner set in purest porcelain, decorated with pleasant domestic scenes. Other boxes contained more porcelain, the finest that Odim exported. These were Odim’s presents for his brother in Shivenink.
‘This will not keep the phagors off,’ Toress Lahl said, half laughing.
‘Something has to.’
Time seemed to be suspended as they wandered the bloodied ship. Because it was small summer, the hours of Batalix’s daylight were long. Freyr was rarely far above the horizon, rarely far below. The cold wind blew continually. Once a sound like thunder came with its breath.
After the thunder, silence. Only the dull pound of the sea, the occasional knock of a small ice floe against the wooden hull. Then the thunder again, this time clear and continuous. Shokerandit and Toress Lahl looked at each other in puzzlement, unable to imagine what the noise was. The phagors understood it without thought. For them, the noise of a flambreg herd on the move was unmistakable.
The flambreg lived in their millions below the skirts of the polar ice cap. Their progeny filled the Circumpolar Regions. Loraj, of all the countries of Sibornal, offered a variety of territories most suited to flambreg, with extensive forests of the hardy eldawon tree, and a landscape of low rolling hills and lakes. The flambreg, unlike yelk, were mildly carnivorous, with a fondness for any rodents and birds they could catch. Their main diet was of lichen, fungi, and grass, supplemented with bark. The flambreg also ate the indigestible moss called flambreg moss by the primitive tribes of Loraj which hunted them. The moss contained a fatty acid which protected the animals’ cell membranes from the effects of cold, enabling the cells to continue efficient functioning at low temperatures.
A herd of over two million individuals was nearing the coast. Many of the