Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [70]
He said that the posts bore a symbol in which power radiated from a centre towards a circumference, as power radiated from ancestors to descendants, or from fessups via gossies to the living. The pillars marked land-octaves. Every man or woman born was born on one octave or another. The power in land-octaves varied with the season, determining whether infants were born male or female. The land-octaves flowed everywhere until they reached the distant seas. People lived most happily when they conformed to their own land-octaves.
Only when they were buried on their correct land-octaves could they, as gossies, hope to communicate with their living children. And their children, when their time came to make the journey to the world below, should also lie along the correct land-octave.
With his hand held like a chopper, old Asurr Tal chopped at the hills and valleys about them.
‘Remember that simple regulation, and father-communing can be established. The word grows fainter, like an echo along mountain valleys, from one vanished generation to the next, throughout the kingdoms of the dead, who outnumber the living as lice outnumber men.’
As Little Yuli regarded the barren mountainside, a strong revulsion rose in him against this teaching. Not long since, his interest had been only with the living, and he had felt himself free.
‘This business of talking to the dead,’ he said heavily. ‘The living should have no traffic with the dead. Our place is here, travelling on this earth.’
The old man snickered, caught Yuli’s furred sleeve in a familiar way, and pointed downwards.
‘You may think so, you may think so. Unfortunately, it is the rule of existence that our place is both here and down below, down in the grit. We must learn to use the gossies as we use animals for our benefit.’
‘The dead should keep in their place.’
‘Oh, well … as for that, you’ll be dead one day, yourself. Besides, Mistress Loil Bry wishes you to learn these things, does she not?’
Yuli desired to shout, ‘I hate the dead and want nothing of them.’ But he bit off the words and stood silent. And so he was lost.
Although he learned how to perform the rituals of father-communicating, Little Yuli was never able to communicate with his father, much less with the first Yuli. The dead yielded no response. Loil Bry explained this by saying that his parents had been buried in an incorrect land-octave. Nobody fully understood the mysteries of the world below. In trying to understand more, he sank further under his woman’s power.
All this time, Dresyl worked for the community, consulting with the old lord. He never lost his love for Yuli, even making his two sons study some of the lore that their strange aunt readily poured forth. But he never permitted them to stay long, lest they become bewitched.
Two years after Nahkri was born to Dresyl, Loil Bry presented Little Yuli with a daughter. They named her Loilanun. With the midwife’s help, Loilanun was born in the tower under the porcelain window.
Loil Bry, assisted by Yuli, gave their daughter a special present. They gave her, and through her all Oldorando, a calendar.
Owing to the disruptions of the centuries, Embruddock had had more than one calendar. Of the three old calendars, the most generally known was the so-called Lordly. The Lordly simply counted years from the accession of the last lord. The other two were antiquated, and one, the Ancipital, regarded as sinister; it had been abandoned for that reason,