Brian Aldiss: Helliconia

They were trudging ahead, making heavy weather of getting uphill with their burden. They soon sensed the boy following them, and turned now and again, halfheartedly trying to drive him off with threats and gestures. Evidently they did not think him worth expending a spear on.

When Alehaw recovered consciousness, the two phagors stopped, set him on his feet, and made him walk between them, encouraging him with blows. Uttering a series of whistles, Yuli let his father know that he was nearby; but whenever the older man ventured to look over his shoulder, he received a clout from one of the phagors that sent him reeling.

The phagors slowly caught up with another party of their own kind, consisting of a female and two males; one of the latter was old and walked with a stick as tall as himself, on which he leaned heavily in his progress uphill. Every now and again, he stumbled in the piles of yelk droppings.

Eventually, the scatters of scumble appeared no more, and the smell died from their nostrils. They were moving along an upward path the migratory herd had not taken. The winds had dropped, and spruce trees grew on the slope. There were now several knots of phagors climbing up the hillside, many of them bowed beneath carcasses of yelk. And behind them trailed a nine-year-old human being, fear in his heart, trying to keep his father in sight.

The air grew thick and heavy, as if under enchantment. The pace was slower, the larches closer, and the phagors were forced to bunch more closely. Their rough song, scraped across their horny tongues, sounded loudly, a hum that on occasions rose to a scalding crescendo and then died again. Yuli was terrified, and fell further behind, darting from tree to tree.

He could not understand why Alehaw did not break from his captors and run back downhill; then he could grasp his spear again, and together the two of them would stand side by side and kill all the shaggy phagors. Instead, his father remained captive, and now his slighter figure was lost among the crowding figures in the twilight under the trees.

The humming song rose harshly and died. A smokey greenish light glowed ahead, promising a new crisis. Yuli sneaked forward, running doubled up to the next tree. Some kind of building stood ahead, fronted by a double gate, which opened slightly. Within, the faint fire showed. The phagors were shouting, and the gate opened more. They began to crowd in. The light was revealed as a brand, which one of their kind held aloft.

‘Father, Father!’ screamed Yuli. ‘Run, Father! I’m here.’

There was no answer. In the murk, which the torch further confused, it was impossible to see whether or not Alehaw had already been pushed inside the gate. One or two phagors turned indifferently at the shouts, and shooed Yuli away without animosity.

‘Go and zzhout at the wind!’ one cried in Olonets. They wanted only full-grown human slaves.

The last burly figure entered the building. Amid more shouting, the gates closed. Yuli ran to them crying, banging against their rough wood as he heard a bolt being shot home on the other side. He stood there for a long while with his forehead against the grain, unable to accept what had happened.

The gates were set in a stone fortification, the blocks of which were crudely fitted into each other and patched with long-tailed mosses. The edifice was no more than an entrance to one of the underground caves in which the phagors, as Yuli knew, had their existence. They were indolent creatures, and preferred to have humans working for them.

For a while, he ranged round about the gate, climbing up the steep hillside, until he found what he expected to find. It was a chimney, three times his height and of impressive circumference. He could climb it with ease, because it tapered towards the top and because the blocks of stone of which it was made were crudely set together, allowing plenty of foothold. The stones were not as freezingly cold as might have been expected, and free of frost.

At the top, he incautiously stuck his face over the lip, and was immediately jerked backwards, so that he lost his hold and fell, landing on his right shoulder and rolling in the snow.

A blast of hot, foetid air, mixed with wood smoke and stale exhalation, had erupted at him. The chimney was a ventilator for the phagor warrens below ground. He knew he could not climb in that way. He was shut out, and his father was lost to him forever.

He sat miserably in the snow. His feet were covered by skins, laced in place up the legs. He wore a pair of trousers and a tunic of bear fur, stitched in place by his mother with the fur next to his skin. For additional warmth, he had on a parka with a fur hood. Onesa, during a period when she was feeling well enough, had decorated the parka with white scuts of an ice rabbit round the shoulders, three scuts to each shoulder, and had embroidered the neck with red and blue beads. Despite which, Yuli presented a forlorn sight, for the parka was stained with the remains of food and fat drippings, while dirt caked the fur of his garments; they smelt strongly of Yuli. His face, a light yellow or beige when clean, was wrinkled brown and black with dirt, and his hair straggled greasily about his temples and collar. He had a flat-nostrilled nose, which he began to rub, and a broad, sensuous mouth, which began to pucker, revealing a broken front tooth among its white neighbours, as he started to cry and punch the snow.

After a while, he rose and walked about among the forlorn larches, trailing his father’s spear behind him. He had no alternative but to retrace his steps and try to return to his sick mother, if he could find his way back through the snowy wastes.

He realised also that he was hungry.

Desperately forsaken, he started a hullabaloo at the closed gates. There was no kind of response. Snow began to fall, slowly but without cease. He stood with fists raised above his head. He spat, the gob landing on the panels. That for his father. He hated the man for being a weakling. He recalled all the beatings he had received from his father’s hand — why had his father not beaten the phagors?

At last, he turned away through the falling snow in disgust, and began to walk downhill.

He flung his father’s spear away into a bush.

Hunger battled with fatigue and got him back as far as the Vark. His hopes were immediately dashed. None of the dead yelk remained undevoured. Predators had arrived from every corner and torn away their meat. Only carcasses and piles of bare bones by the river awaited him. He howled in wrath and dismay.

The river had frozen over and snow lay on the solid ice. He scraped the snow away with his foot and stared down. The bodies of some of the drowned animals still remained in the ice; he saw one where the head of the yelk hung down into the dark current below. Large fish ate at its eyes.

Working strenuously with his spear and a sharp horn, Yuli bored a hole in the ice, enlarged it, and waited, standing above it with spear poised. Fins flashed in the water. He struck. A blue-flecked fish, its mouth open in amazement, shone at the spear-point as he pulled it forth dripping. It was as long as his two hands outstretched and placed thumb to thumb. He roasted it over a small fire and it tasted delicious. He belched, and slept for an hour, propped between logs. Then he started to trek southwards, along a trail the migration had all but obliterated.

Freyr and Batalix changed sentry duty in the sky, and still he walked, the only figure moving in the wilderness.

‘Mother,’ cried old Hasele to his wife, before he even got back to his hut. ‘Mother, see what I found by the Three Harlequins.’

And his ancient crone of a wife, Lorel, lame since childhood, hobbled to the door, stuck her nose out in the biting cold air, and said, ‘Never mind what you found. There’s gentlemen from Pannoval waiting to do business with thee.’