Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss Page A

been a blue like that; it seemed to tint the piled snow and fill the world.
    Ahead was a ruined building. Although it had been solidly built in the long past, weather had broken it open like an old treefungus. Before it stood a flight of shallow steps, now ruined. Onesa flung down her twigs and sprang so eagerly up the steps that she almost skipped. She raised her gloved hands as she went, and even offered a snatch of song to the crisp air.
    Rarely had Yuli seen his mother in such spirits. Why did she feel like that? Why not more often? Not daring to put these questions direct, yet longing to have some personal word from her, he asked, ‘Who built this place, Mother?’
    ‘Oh, it’s always been here. It’s as old as the hills …’
    ‘But who built it, Mother?’
    ‘I don’t know – my father’s family, probably, long ago. They were great people, with stores of grain.’
    This legend of his mother’s family’s greatness was well-known to him, and the detail of the store of grain. He marched up the ruined steps, and pushed open a reluctant door. Snow scattered in a cloud as he shouldered his way inside. There was the grain, golden, piles of it, enough for them all for ever more. It started running towards him in a river, great piles of it cascading down, over the steps. And from under the grain, two dead bodies heaved to view, struggling blindly towards the light.
    He sat up with a great cry, sprang to his feet, stood up, paced to the cell door. He could not understand where these alarming visions came from; they seemed not to be a part of him.
    He thought to himself,
Dreams are not for you, dodger. You’re too tough. You think of your mother now, yet you never showed her affection. You were too afraid of your father’s fist. You know, I really believe I hated my father. I believe I was glad when the phagors carried him off – weren’t you?
    No, no … It’s just that my experiences have made me hard. You’re hard, dodger, hard and cruel. You killed those two gentlemen. What are you going to be? Better to confess to the murders and see what happens. Try and love me, try and love me …
    I know so little. That’s it. The whole world – you want to find out. Akha must know. Those eyes see everything. But me – you’re so small, dodger – life’s no more than one of those funny feelings when the childrim flies overhead
.
    He marvelled at his own thoughts. Finally he cried for the guards to open his door, and found that he had been incarcerated for three days.
*
    For a year and a day, Yuli served in the Holies as a novice. He was not allowed to leave the halls, but dwelt in a monastic nocturne, not knowing whether Freyr and Batalix swam separately or together in the sky. A wish to run through the white wilderness gradually left him, erased by the penumbral majesty of the Holies.
    He had confessed to the murder of the two gentlemen. No punishment followed.
    The thin grey priest with the blinking eyes, Father Sifans, was the charge-father over Yuli and other novices. He clasped his hands and said to Yuli, ‘That unhappy incident of the murders is now sealed behind the wall of the past. Yet you must never allow yourself to forget it, lest in forgetting, you come to believe that it never happened. Like the many suburbs of Pannoval, all things in life are interwoven. Your sin and your longing to serve Akha are of a piece. Did you imagine that it was holiness that led a man to serve Akha? Not so. Sin is a more powerful mover. Embrace the dark – through sin you come to terms with your own inadequacy.’
    ‘Sin’ was a word often on Father Sifans’ lips at one period. Yuli watched it there with interest, with the absorption pupils devote to their masters. The way the lips moved was something he imitated to himself later, alone, using the movements to repeat all that he had to learn by heart.
    While the father had his own private apartment to which he withdrew after instruction, Yuli slept in a dormitory with