Brian Aldiss - Helliconia

He dared say no more to Father Sifans, hearing the distaste in the old priest’s voice. To himself, he said over and over again, ‘Those evil brutes. Those evil brutes. Akha should have no part of them.’ But the phagors were all over the Holies, padding patiently along with the militia, their noctilucent eyes peering here and there under their craggy brows.

One day Yuli tried to explain to his charge-father how his father had been caught and killed by phagors in the wild.

‘You do not know for sure they killed him. Phagors are not always entirely evil. Sometimes Akha subdues their spirit.’

‘I’m sure he’s dead by now. There’s no way of being certain, though?’

He heard the father lick his lips as he hesitated, and then leaned towards Yuli in the blackness.

‘There is a way of being sure, my son.’

‘Oh, yes, if you mounted a great expedition from Pannoval north—’

‘No, no… other ways, more subtle. You will one day understand the complexities of Pannoval more fully. Or perhaps you won’t. For there are entirely other orders of the priesthood, warrior mystics, of which you do not know. Perhaps I had better say no more…’

Yuli urged him on. The priest’s voice sank still lower, until it was almost lost under the splash of a water drip near at hand.

‘Yes, warrior mystics, who forswear the pleasures of the flesh and in return gain mysterious powers…’

‘That’s what Naab advocated, and was murdered for it.’

‘Executed after trial. The superior orders prefer us, the administrative orders, to remain as we are… But they… they communicate with the dead. If you were one of them, you could speak with your father after death.’

Into the dark, Yuli stammered his amazement.

‘There are many human and divine capacities which can be trained, my son. I myself, when my father died, fell into a fast through sorrow, and after the passage of many days saw him clear, suspended in the earth which is Akha’s as if in another element, with his hands over his ears, as if he heard some sound he disliked. Death is not an end, but our extension in Akha — you recall the teaching, my son.’

‘I’m still angry with my father. Perhaps I have difficulty because of that. He was weak at the end. I wish to be strong. Where are these — these warrior mystics of whom you speak, Father?’

‘If you do not believe my words, as I sense, it is pointless my telling you anything further.’ The voice held a nicely calculated shade of petulance.

‘I’m sorry, Father. I’m a savage, just as you say… You think the priesthood should reform itself, as Naab claimed, don’t you?’

‘I take a middle way.’ He sat leaning forward tensely for a while, blinking as if there was more to be said, and Yuli heard his dry eyelids flutter. ‘Many schisms divide the Holies, Yuli, as you will come to see if you take your orders. Things are less easy than they were when I was a boy. Sometimes it seems to me…’

The water drops went splash-splash-splash and someone coughed distantly.

‘What, Father?’

‘Oh… you have heretical thoughts enough, without my planting more. I can’t imagine why I talk to you. That’s the end of instruction for today, boy.’

Talking not to Sifans, who liked to proceed by equivocation, but to his fellows, Yuli gradually learnt something of the power structures that held the community of Pannoval together. The administration was in the hands of the priests, and they worked with the militia, one reinforcing the other. There was no final arbitrator, no great chief, like the chiefs in the tribes of the wilderness. Behind each order of the priesthood lay another. They faded off into the metaphysical darkness, in obscure hierarchies, none finally with the power to command all the others.

Some orders, went the rumour, lived in more distant caverns in the mountain chain. In the Holies, habits were lax. Priests might serve as soldiers and vice versa. Women came and went among them. Under all the prayer and learning was confusion. Akha was elsewhere. Somewhere — somewhere there was greater faith.

Somewhere along the receding chain of command, thought Yuli, must be Sifans’ order of warrior-mystics, who could commune with the dead and perform other amazing acts. The rumours, really no more to be listened to than the drip of water down a wall, whispered of an order elsewhere, set above the inhabitants of the Holies, who were referred to, when they were referred to at all, as the Keepers.

The Keepers, according to the whisper, were a sect to which admission was by election. They combined the dual role of soldiering and priesthood. What they kept was knowledge. They knew things unknown even in the Holies, and that knowledge gave them power. By keeping the past, they laid claim to the future.

‘Who are these Keepers? Do we see them?’ Yuli asked. The mystery excited him, and as soon as he heard of them he longed to be part of the mysterious sect.

He was speaking again to Father Sifans, almost at the end of his term. The passage of time had matured him; he no longer mourned his parents, and the Holies kept him busy. He had discovered recently in his charge-father an intense relish of gossip. The eyes blinked faster, the lips trembled, and the morsels slipped out. Every day, as the two men worked together in the prayer hall of their order, Father Sifans allowed himself a small ration of revelation.

‘The Keepers can mix among us. We do not know who they are. Outwardly, they look no different from us. I might also be a Keeper, for all you know…’

Next day, after prayer, Father Sifans beckoned Yuli with a mittened hand and said, ‘Come, since your novice term is nearly up, I’ll show you something. You recollect what we were talking about yesterday?’

‘Of course.’

Father Sifans pursed his lips, squeezed his eyes together, raised his little sharp nose like a shrew’s towards the ceiling, and nodded his head sharply a dozen times. Then he set off at a stiff mincing pace, leaving Yuli to follow.

Lights were rare in this section of the Holies and, in some places, forbidden entirely. The two men moved now with assurance through total darkness. Yuli kept the fingers of his right hand extended, lightly touching a carved skein unwinding on the wall of the corridor. They were passing through Warrborw, and Yuli was now wall-reading.

Steps were indicated ahead. Two of the luminous-eyed preets fluttered in a wicker cage, punctuating the junction between the main passage, a side one, and the steps. Yuli and his old charge-father progressed steadily upwards, clack-clack-clack , up stairs, along passages punctuated by more stairs, avoiding by habit others who walked in the limestoned dark.

Now they were in Tangwild. The wall-scroll on the rock under Yuli’s fingers told him so. In a never-repeating design of intertwined branches sported small animals which Yuli considered must have been figments of some long dead artist’s imagination — animals that hopped and swam and climbed and rolled. For some reason, Yuli imagined them all in vivid colours. The band of wall-scroll carving ran for miles in all directions, never more than a hand-span wide. This was one of the secrets of the Holies; nobody could get lost in the labyrinthine dark once he had memorised the various patterns that identified the sectors and the coded signs signalling turns or steps or corridor divisions, all woven into the design.

They turned into a low gallery which the resonance of sound told them was otherwise unoccupied. Here, the wall-scroll was of quaint men squatting with out-turned hands among wooden huts. They must be outside somewhere, Yuli thought, enjoying the scenery beneath his palm.

Sifans halted, and Yuli bumped into him. As he apologised, the old man rested against the wall.