Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Winter

Luterin dismounted, climbed the steps, and pulled the doorbell.

He was a broad-shouldered youth, already lofty in the Sibomalese manner, with a round face seemingly built naturally for merriment: although, at this moment, awaiting sight of Insil, his brows were knit, his lips compressed. The tension of his expression caused him to resemble his father, but his eyes were of a clear grey, very different from his father’s dark, in-dwelling pupils.

His hair, curling riotously about his head and the nape of his neck, was light brown, and formed a contrast to the neat dark head of the girl into whose presence he was ushered.

Insil Esikananzi had the airs of one born into a powerful family. She could be sharp and dismissive. She teased. She lied. She cultivated a helpless manner; or, if it suited her better, a look of command. Her smiles were wintery, more a concession to politeness than an expression of her spirit. Her violet eyes looked out of a face she kept as blank as possible.

She was carrying a jug of water through the hall, clasped in both hands. As she came towards Luterin she lifted her chin slightly into the air, in a kind of mute exasperated enquiry. To Luterin, Insil was intensely desirable, and no less desirable for her capriciousness.

This was the girl he was to marry, according to the arrangement drawn up between his father and hers at Insil’s birth, to cement the accord between the two most powerful men of the district.

Directly he was in her presence, Luterin was caught up once more into their old conspiracy, into that intricate teasing web of complaint which she wove about herself.

“I see, Luterin, you are on your two feet again. How excellent. And like a dutiful husband-to-be, you have perfumed yourself with sweat and hoxney before presuming to call and present your compliments. You have certainly grown while in bed—at least in the region of your waistline.”

She fended off an embrace with the jug of water. He put an arm about her slender waist as she led him up the immense staircase, made more gloomy by dark portraits from which dead Esikananzis stared as if in tether, shrunken by art and time.

“Don’t be provoking, Sil. I’ll soon be slim again. It’s wonderful to have my health back.”

Her personal bell uttered its light clap on every stair.

“My mother’s so sickly. Always sickly. My slimness is illness, not health. You are lucky to call when my tedious parents and my equally tedious brothers, including your friend Umat, are all attending a boring ceremony elsewhere. So you can expect to take advantage of me, can’t you? Of course, you suspect that I have been had by stable boys while you were in your year’s hibernation. Giving myself in the hay to sons of slaves.”

She guided him along a corridor where the boards creaked under their worn Madi carpets. She was close, phantasmal in the little light that filtered here through shuttered windows.

“Why do you punish my heart, Insil, when it is yours?”

“It’s not your heart I want, but your soul.” She laughed. “Have more spirit. Hit me, as my father does. Why not? Isn’t punishment the essence of things?”

He said heatedly, “Punishment? Listen, we’ll be married and I’ll make you happy. You can hunt with me. We’ll never be apart. We’ll explore the forests—”

“You know I’m more interested in rooms than forests.” She paused with a hand on a door latch, smiling provocatively, projecting her shallow breasts toward him under their linens and laces.

“People are better outside, Sil. Don’t grin. Why pretend I’m a fool? I know as much about suffering as you. That whole small year spent prostrate—wasn’t that about the worst punishment anyone could imagine?”

Insil put a finger on his chin and slid it up to his lip. “That clever paralysis allowed you to escape from a greater punishment—having to live here under our repressive parents, in this repressive community— where you for instance were driven to cohabit with non-humans for relief…”

She smiled as he blushed, but continued in her sweetest voice. “Have you no insight into your own suffering? You often accused me of not loving you, and that may be so, but don’t I pay you better attention than you pay yourself?”

“What do you mean, Insil?” How her conversation tormented him.

“Is your father at home or away on the hunt?”

“He’s at home.”

“As I recall, he had returned from the hunt not more than two days before your brother committed suicide. Why did Favin commit suicide? I suspect that he knew something you refuse to know.”

Without taking her dark gaze from his eyes, she opened the door behind her, pushing it so that it opened to allow sunshine to bathe them as they stood, conspiratorial yet opposed, on the threshold. He clutched her, tremulous to discover that she was as necessary to him as ever, and as ever full of riddles.

“What did Favin know? What am I supposed to know?” The mark of her power over him was that he was always questioning her.

“Whatever your brother knew, it was that which sent you escaping into your paralysis—not his actual death, as everyone pretends.” She was twelve years and a tenner, not much more than a child: yet a tension in her gestures made her seem much older. She raised an eyebrow at his puzzlement.

He followed her into the room, wishing to ask her more, yet tongue-tied. “How do you know these things, Insil? You invent them to make yourself mysterious. Always locked in these rooms…”

She set the jug of water down on a table beside a bunch of white flowers which she had picked earlier. The flowers lay scattered on the polished surface, their faces reflected as in a misted mirror.

As though to herself, she said, “I try to train you not to grow up like the rest of the men here…”

She walked over to the window, framed in heavy brown curtains which hung from ceiling to floor. Although she stood with her back to him, he sensed that she was not looking out. The dual sunlight, shining in from two different directions, dissolved her as if it were liquid, so that her shadow on the tiled floor appeared more substantial than she. Insil was demonstrating once more her elusive nature.

It was a room he had not entered before, a typical Esikananzi room, loaded with heavy furniture. It held a tantalising scent, in part repugnant. Perhaps its only purpose was to hoard furniture, most of it wooden, against the day when the Weyr-Winter came and no more furniture would be made. There was a green couch with carved scrollwork, and a massive wardrobe which dominated the chamber. All the furniture had been imported; he saw that by its style.

He shut the door, remaining there contemplating her. As if he did not exist, she began arranging her flowers in a vase, pouring water from the jug into the vase, shuffling the stems peremptorily with her long fingers.

He sighed. “My mother is always sickly, too, poor thing. Every day of her life she goes into pauk and communes with her dead parents.”

Insil looked up sharply at him. “And you—while you were lying flat on your back—I suppose you’ve fallen into the habit of pauk too?”

“No. You’re mistaken. My father forbad me… besides, it’s not just that…”

Insil put fingers to her temples. “Pauk is what the common people do. It’s so superstitious. To go into a trance and descend into that awful underworld, where bodies rot and those ghastly corpses are still spitting the dregs of life… oh, it’s disgusting. You’re sure you don’t do it?”

“Never. I imagine my mother’s sickness comes from pauk.”

“Well, sherb you, I do it every day. I kiss my grandmother’s corpse-lips and taste the maggots…” Then she burst into laughter. “Don’t look so silly. I’m joking. I hate the thought of those things underground and I’m glad you don’t go near them.”