Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Spring

It was his fortune to fall in with a decent fatherly trader called Kyale, who, with his wife, ran a stall in one of the small squares of Market. Kyale was a sorrowful man with a downward-turning mouth partly concealed by blackish moustaches. He befriended Yuli for reasons Yuli could not understand, and protected him from swindlers. He also went to some trouble to introduce Yuli to this new world.

Some of the echoing noises of Market were attributable to a stream, the Vakk, which ran through the rear end of Market, deep in its own chasm. This was the first free-flowing stream Yuli had ever seen, and it remained for him one of the wonders of the settlement. The splashing waters filled him with pleasure and, with his animistic faith, he regarded the Vakk as almost a living thing.

The Vakk had been bridged, so that access was gained to the end area of Market, where increasing steepness of the ground necessitated many steps, which culminated in a wide balcony housing a huge statue of Akha, carved from the rock. This figure could be seen, its shoulders rising from shadows, even from the far side of Market. Akha held in his outstretched hands a real flame, which a priest replenished at regular intervals, appearing from a door in Akha’s stomach to do so. The people of Akha presented themselves to the feet of their god regularly; there they offered up all manner of gifts to him, which were accepted by the priests, unobtrusive in black-and-white-striped robes. The supplicants prostrated themselves, and a novice swept the ground with a feathery brush, before they dared gaze hopefully up at the black stone eyes high above them in the web of shadow, and retreat to less holy ground.

Such ceremonials were a mystery to Yuli. He asked Kyale about them, and received a lecture that left him more confused than before. No man can explain his religion to a stranger. Nevertheless, Yuli received a strong impression that this ancient being, repsesented in stone, fought off the powers raging in the outer world, particularly Wutra, who ruled the skies and all the ills associated with the skies. Akha was not greatly interested in humans; they were too puny for his concern. What he wanted was their regular offerings, to keep him strong in the struggle with Wutra, and a powerful Akhan ecclesiastical body existed to see that Akha’s desires in this respect were carried out, in order that disaster did not descend on the community.

The priesthood,in alliance with the militia, had the governance of Pannoval; there was no one overall ruler, unless one counted Akha himself, who was generally supposed to be out prowling the mountains with a celestial club, looking for Wutra and such of his dreadful accomplices as the worm.

This was surprising to Yuli. He knew Wutra. Wutra was the great spirit before whom his parents, Alehaw and Onesa, offered prayers in time of danger. They had represented Wutra as benevolent, the bringer of light. And, as far as he recalled, they never mentioned Akha.

Various passages, as labyrinthine as the laws issued by the priesthood, led to various chambers adjoining Market. Some of these chambers were accessiible, some forbidden of entry to common folk. About the forbidden regions, people were reluctant to talk. But he soon observed wrongdoers being dragged off there, hands tied behind their backs, winding up dark stairways into the aularian shadows, some to the Holies, some to a punishment farm behind Market called Twink.

In due course of time, Yuli traversed a narrow passage choked with steps which led to a large regularised cave called Reck. Reck also contained its enormous statue of Akha, here seen with an animal hanging on a chain about his neck, and dedicated to sport; Reck was the site at which mock battles, displays, athletic contests, and gladiatorial combats were held. Its walls were painted crimson and sang-de-boeuf, with swirling decorations. Much of the time Reck was almost empty, and voices boomed through its hollow spaces; then citizens with an especial bent for holiness came and wailed up into the high-vaulted dark. But on the glowing occasions of the games—then music sounded, and the cavern was crowded to overflowing.

Other important caverns opened from Market. At its eastern side, a nest of small squares or large mezzanines led up between flights of steps impeded by heavy balustrades to an extensive residential cavern called Vakk, after the stream that surfaced here, sunk deep in its gurgling ravine. Over Vakk’s great entrance arch was much elaborate carving, with globular bodies entwined between flowing waves and stars, but much of it had been destroyed in some forgotten roof-fall.

Vakk was the oldest cavern after Market, and was filled with “livings,” as they were called, dating back many centuries. To one arriving on its threshold from the outer world, viewing—or rather, guessing at—its mounting and confused terraces that climbed back into obscurity, Vakk in the uncertain light was a daunting dream where substance could not be distinguished from shadow, and the child of the Barrier felt his heart quail in his chest. A force like Akha was needed to save anyone who trod in such a thronged necropolis!

But he adapted with the flexibility of youth. He came to look on Vakk as a prodigal town. Falling in with guild apprentices of his own age, he roamed its muddle of livings which were clustered on many floors, often leading one from another. Cubicle was stacked on cubicle in profusion, the furniture in each fixed because carved from the same rock as floors and walls, all in one flowing line. The story of rights of ways and privacies in these organic warrens was complex, but always related to the guild system of Vakk, and always, in case of dispute, to be settled by the judgement of a priest.

In one of these livings, Tusca, Kyale’s kindly wife, found Yuli a chamber of his own, only three doors from where she and Kyale lived. It was roofless and its walls curved; he felt as if he had been set down within a stone flower.

Vakk sloped steeply, and was dimly lit by natural light—more dimly than Market. The air was sooty with the exhalations of fat lamps, but clerics collected tax on every lamp, which had numbers stamped on their clay bases, so that they were used sparingly. The mysterious fogs which afflicted Market had less power in Vakk.

From Vakk, a gallery led direct to Reck. There were also, on lower ground, ragged arches leading to a high-roofed cavern called Groyne, which had good clean air, although the inhabitants of Vakk thought the inhabitants of Groyne rather barbarous, chiefly because they were members of more lowly guilds, slaughterers, tanners, diggers of chert and clay and fossil wood.

In the honeycombed rock adjoining both Groyne and Reck was another large cavern full of habitations and cattle. This was Prayn, which many avoided. It was being energetically extended by the sappers’ guild when Yuli arrived. Prayn collected all the night soil from the other suburbs and fed it to swine and noctiferous crops, which thrived on heat. Some of the farmers in Prayn bred as a sideline a strain of bird called a preet, which had luminous eyes and luminescent patches on its wings. Preets were popular as cage birds; they added a little brightness to the livings of Vakk and Groyne—though they also were the subject of taxes collected by priests for Akha.

“In Groyne they are gruff, in Prayn pretty tough,” went a local saying. But Yuli found the people lifeless, except when roused by the games, rare exceptions being those few traders and trappers living in Market in terraces of their own guild, who regularly had occasion to be blessed by Akha and sent on business in the outside world, as had been the case with the two gentlemen of his acquaintance.

From all the major caverns, and from smaller ones, paths and tunnels led into the blind rock, some ascending, some descending. Pannoval was full of legends of magical beasts that came in from the primordial dark of the rock, or of people who were spirited away from their livings into the mountain. Best to stay put in Pannoval, where Akha looked after his own with his blind eyes. Better Pannoval, too, and taxes, than the cold glare of outside.