Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Spring

The gongs were struck, the wardens shouted, the prisoners strained their grudging bodies. The phagors shambled back and forth, sticking their milts up their slotted nostrils, and occasionally exchanging a grunted word with each other. Yuli hated their presence. He was watching four prisoners under the eye of one of Dravog’s warders trawl in the fish pool. To do this, the men were forced to get into the freezing water up to their stomachs. When their net was full, they were allowed to climb out and drag the catch onto the bank.

The fish were gout. They were a pale strawy white, with blind blue eyes. They struggled hopelessly as they were dragged from their natural element.

A rubble cart was passing, pushed by two prisoners. One of its wheels struck a stone. The prisoner shouldering the nearside shaft staggered and fell. As he went, he struck one of the fishers, a youth stooping to get a hold on the end of the net, who plunged head first into the water.

The warder began to shout and struck about him with his stave. His phagor hopped forward and grasped the prisoner who had slipped, lifting him off his feet. Dravog and another warder came running up in time to beat the young prisoner about his head as he dragged himself from the pool.

Yuli grasped Dravog’s arm.

“Leave him alone. It was an accident. Help him out.”

“He’s not allowed in the pool on his own,” Dravog said savagely, elbowing Yuli out of the way and striking again.

The prisoner climbed out with blood and water pouring from his head. Another warder rushed up, his brand hissing in the rain, his phagor behind him, eyes pink in the shadows. He shouted, sorry to have missed the excitement. He joined with Dravog and the other warders in booting the half-drowned prisoner back to his cell in the next cavern.

When the commotion had died and the mob disappeared, Yuli cautiously approached the cell, in time to hear a prisoner in the adjoining cell call, “Are you all right, Usilk?”

Yuli went to Dravog’s office and collected the master key. He unlocked the cell door, took a fat lamp from a niche in the passage, and entered.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor in a pool of water. He was supporting his torso with his arms, so that the outline of his shoulder blades stuck painfully through his shirt. Head and cheek were bleeding.

He turned a sullen look at Yuli, then, without change of expression, let his head droop again.

Yuli looked down at the soaked and battered skull. Tormented, he squatted by the man, setting the lamp down on the filthy floor.

“Scumb off, monk,” the man growled.

“I’ll help you if I can.”

“You can’t help. Scumb it!”

They remained in the same positions, without moving or speaking, and water and blood mingled in the puddle.

“Your name’s Usilk, I believe?”

No response. The thin countenance remained pointing down at the floor.

“Is your father’s name Kyale? Living in Vakk?”

“Leave me alone.”

“I know—I knew him well. And your mother. She looked after me.”

“You heard what I said…” With a sudden burst of energy, the prisoner flung himself on Yuli, beating at him rather feebly. Yuli rolled over and disengaged himself, jumping up like an asokin. He was about to fling himself into the attack when he paused. With an effort of will, he controlled himself and pulled back. Without a word more, he collected the lamp and left the cell.

“A dangerous one, that,” Dravog said to him, permitting himself a sly grin at the priest’s expense, seeing his flustered appearance. Yuli retreated to the brothers’ chapel, and prayed in the dark to an unresponsive Akha.

There was a story Yuli had heard in Market, a story not unknown to the ecclesiastics in the Holies, about a certain worm.

The worm was sent by Wutra, wicked god of the skies. Wutra put the worm into the labyrinth of passages in Akha’s holy mountain. The worm is large and long, its girth being about equal to that of a passageway. It is slimy, and it slides along noiselessly in the dark. Only its breathing can be heard, issuing from its flabby lips. It eats people. They are safe one moment; the next, they hear the evil breathing, the rustle of long whiskers, and then they are swallowed.

A spiritual equivalent of Wutra’s worm was now at large in the labyrinths of Yuli’s thought. He could not prevent himself seeing, in the thin shoulders and blood of the prisoner, the gulf that lay between preachments and practice in Akha. It was not that the preachments were so pious, for mainly they were practical, stressing service; nor was it that life was so bad; what troubled him was that they were at odds.

There returned to his memory something that Father Sifans had said to him. “It is not goodness and holiness that lead a man to serve Akha. More often it is sin such as yours.” Which implied that many among the priesthood were murderers and criminals—little better than the prisoners. Yet they were set over the prisoners. They had power.

He went about his duties grimly. He smiled less than he had. He never felt happy working as a priest. The nights be spent in prayer the days in thought—and in trying, when possible, to forge some sort of contact between himself and Usilk.

Usilk shunned him.

Finally, Yuli’s time in Punishment was completed. He entered a period of meditation before going to work with the Security Police. This branch of the militia had come under his notice while working in the cells, and he found within himself the ghost of a dangerous idea.

After only a few days in Security, Wutra’s worm became ever more active in his mind. His task was to see men beaten and interrogated and to administer a final blessing to them when they died. Grimmer and grimmer he became, until his superiors commended him and gave him cases of his own to handle.

The interrogations were simple, for there were few categories of crime. People cheated or stole or spoke heresy. Or they went to places that were forbidden or plotted revolution—the crime that had been Usilk’s. Some even tried to escape to Wutra’s realm, under the skies. It was now that Yuli realised that a kind of illness gripped the dark world; everyone in authority suspected revolution. The illness bred in the darkness, and accounted for the numerous petty laws that governed life in Pannoval. Including the priesthood, the settlement numbered almost six and three quarter thousand people, every one of whom was forced into a guild or order. Every living, guild, order, dormitory, was infiltrated by spies, who themselves were not trusted, and also had an infiltrated guild of their own. The dark bred distrust, and some of its victims paraded, hangdog, before Brother Yuli.

Although he loathed himself for it, Yuli found he was good at the work. He felt enough sympathy to lower his victim’s guard, enough destructive rage to tear the truth out. Despite himself, he developed a professional’s taste for the job. Only when he felt secure did he have Usilk brought before him.

At the end of each day’s duty, a service was held in the cavern called Lathorn. Attendance was compulsory for the priesthood, optional for any of the militia who wished to attend. The acoustics of Lathorn were excellent: choir and musicians filled the dark air with swelling veins of music. Yuli had recently taken up a musical instrument. He was becoming expert on the fluggel, a bronze instrument no bigger than his hand, which he at first despised, seeing other musicians play enormous peetes, vrachs, baranboims, and double-clows. But the tiny fluggel could turn his breath into a note that flew as high as a childrim, soaring up to the clouded roof of Lathorn above all conspiring melody. With it, Yuli’s spirit also flew, to the traditional strains of “Caparisoned,” “In His Penumbra,” and, his favourite, the richly counterpointed “Oldorando.”