Helliconia Spring. Part one
CONTENTS
PRELUDE Yuli
Embruddock
I Death of a Grandfather
II The Past That Was Like a Dream
III A Leap from the Tower
IV Favourable Temperature Gradients
V Double Sunset
VI “When I Were All Befuddock …”
VII A Cold Welcome for Phagors
VIII In Obsidian
IX In and Out of a Hoxney Skin
X Laintal Ay’s Achievement
XI When Shay Tal Went
XII Lord of the Island
XIII View from a Half Roon
XIV Through the Eye of a Needle
XV The Stench Of Burning
Why have so many heroic deeds recurrently dropped out of mind and found no shrine in lasting monuments of fame? The answer, I believe, is that this world is newly made; its origin is a recent event, not one of remote antiquity.
That is why even now some arts are still being perfected: the process of development is still going on. Yes, and it is not long since the truth about nature was first discovered, and I myself am even now the first who has been found to render this revelation into my native speech… .
Lucretius: De Rerum Natura
55 BC
PRELUDE Yuli
This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.
Yuli was seven years old, virtually a grown man, when he crouched under a skin bivouac with his father and gazed down the wilderness of a land known even at that time as Campannlat. He had roused from a light doze with his father’s elbow in his rib and his harsh voice saying, “Storm’s dying.”
The storm had been blowing from the west for three days, bringing with it snow and particles of ice off the Baffiers. It filled the world with howling energy, transforming it to a grey-white darkness, like a great voice that no nun could withstand. The ledge on which the bivouac was pitched afforded little protection from the worst of the blast; father and son could do nothing but he where they were under the skin, dozing, once in a while chewing on a piece of smoked fish, while the weather battered away above their heads.
As the wind expired, the snow arrived in spurts, twitching in feather-like flurries across the drab landscape. Although Freyr was high in the sky—for the hunters were within the tropics—it seemed to hang there frozen. The lights rippled overhead in shawl after golden shawl, the fringes of which seemed to touch the ground, while the folds rose up and up until they vanished in the leaden zenith of heaven. The lights gave little illumination, no warmth.
Both father and son rose by instinct, stretching, stamping their feet, throwing their arms violently about the massive barrels of their bodies. Neither spoke. There was nothing to say. The storm was over. Still they had to wait. Soon, they knew, the yelk would be here. Not for much longer would they have to maintain their vigil.
Although the ground was broken, it was without feature, being covered with ice and snow. Behind the two men was higher ground, also covered with the mat of whiteness. Only to the north was there a dark grim greyness, where the sky came down like a bruised arm to meet the sea. The eyes of the men, however, were fixed continually on the east. After a period of stamping and slapping, when the air about them filled with the foggy vapour of their breath, they settled down again under the skins to wait.
Alehaw arranged himself with one befurred elbow on the rock, so that he could tuck his thumb deep into the hollow of his left cheek, propping the weight of his skull on his zygomatic bone and shielding his eyes with four curled gloved fingers.
His son waited with less patience. He squirmed inside his stitched skins. Neither he nor his father was born to this kind of hunting. Hunting bear in the Barriers was their way of life, and their fathers’ before them. But intense cold, exhaled from the high hard hurricane mouths of the Barriers had driven them, together with the sick Onesa, down to the gentler weather of the plains. So Yuli was uneasy and excited.