Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [622]
‘What she learned from the man from another world concerned the nature of the plague. She was told by the strange man that the Fat Death was necessary, that it brought to those who survived a metamorphosis, a change in bodily metabolism which would enable them best to survive the winter. Without that metamorphosis, humans cannot hope to live through the heart of the Weyr-Winter.
‘The plague is carried by ticks which live on phagors and transfer to men and women. The bite of the tick gives you plague. The plague brings metamorphosis. So you see that man cannot survive the Weyr-Winter without phagors.
‘This knowledge the lady Muntras tried to teach in Kharnabhar, centuries past. Yet still they are killing phagors, and the State does everything in its power to keep the plague at bay. It would be better to improve medicine, so that more people who caught the plague could survive.’
So she used to talk, scanning her boy’s face in the semidarkness.
The boy listened. Then he went to play among the treasures left in the chests which had once belonged to the wicked king.
One evening, as he was playing and his mother reading by the firelight, there came a knocking at the door of the chapel.
Like the slow seasons, the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar always completed its revolutions.
For Luterin Shokerandit, the Wheel at last came full circle. The cell that had been his habitation returned to the opening. Only a wall 0.64 metres thick separated it from the cell ahead, into which a volunteer was even then stepping, to commence ten years in the darkness, rowing Helliconia towards the light.
There were guards waiting in the gloom. They helped him from his place of confinement. Instead of releasing him, they took him slowly up a winding side stair. The light grew steadily brighter; he closed his eyes and gasped.
They took him into a small room in the monastery of Bambekk. For a while he was left alone.
Two female slaves came, regarding him out of the corner of their eyes. They were followed by male slaves, bearing a bath and hot water, a silver looking glass, towels and shaving equipment, fresh clothes.
‘These are by courtesy of the Keeper of the Wheel,’ said one of the women. ‘ ’Tisn’t every wheeler gets this treatment, be sure of that.’
As the scent of hot water and herbs reached him, Luterin realised how he stank, how the methaney odours of the Wheel clung to him. He allowed the women to strip off his ragged furs. They led him to the bath. He lay glorying in the sensation as they washed his limbs. Every smallest event threatened to overwhelm him. He had been as if dead.
He was powdered and dried and dressed in the thick new clothes.
They led him to the window to peer out, although the light at first almost blinded him.
He was looking down on the village of Kharnabhar from a great height. He could see houses buried up to their roofs in snow. The only things that moved were a sledge pulled by three yelk and two birds circling in the sky overhead, creating that eternal spectre of the wheel.
Visibility was good. A snowstorm was dying, and clouds blew away to the south, leaving pockets of undiluted blue sky. It was all too brilliant. He had to turn away, covering his eyes.
‘What’s the date?’ he asked one of the women.
‘Why, ’tis 1319, and tomorrow’s Myrkwyr. Now, how about having that beard cut off and looking a few thousand years younger?’
His beard had grown like a fungus in the dark. It was streaked with grey and hung to his navel.
‘Cut it off,’ he said. ‘I’m not yet twenty-four. I’m still young, aren’t I?’
‘I’ve certainly heard of people being older,’ said the woman, advancing with the scissors.
He was then to be taken before the Keeper of the Wheel.
‘This will be merely a formal audience,’ said the usher who escorted him through the labyrinth of the monastery. Luterin had little to say. The new impressions crowding in were almost more than he could receive; he could not help thinking how he had