Helliconia Spring

IX • IN AND OUT OF A HOXNEY SKIN

The enchanted wildernesses began to chart their riverbanks with succulent- stemmed trees. Mists and fogs were syphoned from reviving bournes.

The great continent of Campannlat was some fourteen thousand miles long by five thousand miles wide. It occupied most of the tropical zone in one entire hemisphere of the planet of Helliconia. It contained staggering extremes of temperature, of height and depth, of calm and storm. And now it was reawakening to life.

A process of ages was bringing the continent, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down into the turbid seas that fringed its coastline. A similar trend, as remorseless, as far-reaching, was increasing its energy levels. Climatic change triggered an acceleration in metabolism, and the ferment of the two suns brought forth eructations from the veins of the world: tremors, volcanic eruptions, subsidences, fumaroles, immense suppurations of lava. The bed of the giant creaked.

These hypogean stresses had their parallels on the planetary surface, where carpets of colour sprang from the old icefields, green spears thrusting up before the last dregs of snow rotted into the soil, so urgently did Freyr call them forth. But the seeds had packaged themselves against precisely that advantageous moment. The flower responded to the star.

After the flower, again the seed. And those seeds provided the energy requirements for new animals that streamed across the new veldts. The animals too were packaged to the moment. Where few species had been, proliferation was. Crystalline states of cataplexy were exercised away under cantering hoofs. Moulting, they left haystacks of discarded winter hair behind them, which was seized upon immediately for nesting material by birds, while their dung provided foodstuffs for insects.

The long fogs were alive with darting birds.

Multitudinous winged life flashed like jewels across what had been sterile icefields only a moment before. In a torment of life, the mammals stretched their legs in full gallop towards summer.

All the manifold terrestrial changes following the one inexorable astronomical change were so complex that no man or woman could comprehend them. But the human spirit responded to them. Eyes opened and saw afresh. All across Campannlat, the human embrace had new passion in its sap.

People were healthier, yet disease spread. Things were better, yet things were worse. More people died, yet more people lived. There was more to eat, yet more people went hungry. For all these contradictions, the prompting was ever outward. Freyr called, and even the deaf responded.

The eclipse that Vry and Oyre had anticipated occurred. The fact that they alone in Embruddock had expected it was a source of satisfaction, although otherwise the effects of the eclipse were alarming. They perceived how terrifying the event was to the uninitiated. Even Shay Tal dropped on her bed and hid her eyes. Bold hunters stayed indoors. Old men had heart attacks.

Yet the eclipse was not total.

The slow erosion of Freyr’s disc began early in the afternoon. Perhaps it was the sloth of the whole thing which was so disturbing, and its duration. Hour by hour, the erosion of Freyr increased. When the suns set, they were still locked together. There was no guarantee that they would appear again, or appear again whole. Most of the population ran out into the open to watch this unprecedented sunset. In ashen silence, the maimed sentinels slid from view.

“It’s the death of the world!” cried a trader. “Tomorrow the ice will be back!”

As darkness descended, rioting broke out. People ran madly with torches. A new wooden building was set on fire.

Only the immediate intervention of Aoz Roon, Eline Tal, and some of their strong-armed friends saved a more general madness. A man died in the fire and the building was lost, but the rest of the night remained quiet. Next morning, Batalix rose as usual, then Freyr, entire. All was well—except that the geese of Embruddock stopped laying for a week.

“What happens next year?” Oyre and Vry asked each other. Independently of Shay Tal, they began serious work on the problem.

On the Earth Observation Station, the eclipses were merely a part of a pattern predicated by the two intersecting ecliptics of Star A and Star B, which were inclined to each other at an angle of ten degrees. The ecliptics intersected 644 and 1428 terrestrial years after apastron or, in Helliconian terms, 453 and 1005 years after apastron. On either side of the intersections were ranged annual eclipses; in the case of Year 453, an imposing array of twenty eclipses.

The partial eclipse of 632, heralding the series of twenty, was viewed by the scholars on the Observation Station with correct scientific detachment. The ragged fellows barging through the lanes of Embruddock were treated to compassionate smiles by the gods who rode high overhead.

After the mists, after the eclipse, floods. What was cause, what effect? Nobody wading through the residual mud could tell. The land to the east of Oldorando, as far as Fish Lake and beyond, lost its herds of deer, and food became scarce. The swollen Voral acted as a barrier to the west, where abundant animal life was frequently sighted.

Aoz Roon showed his gift for leadership. He made his peace with Laintal Ay and Dathka and, with their aid, drove the citizens to build a bridge across the river.

Such a project had never been attempted in living memory. Timber was scarce, and a rajabaral had to be cut into suitable lengths. The metal-makers corps produced two long saws with which an appropriate tree was sawn up. A temporary workshop was established between the women’s house and the river. The two boats stolen from Borlienian marauders were carefully broken up and reassembled to form parts of the superstructure. The rajabaral was turned into a thicket of chocks, wedges, planks, bars, struts, and posts. For weeks, the whole place was a timberyard; curls of shavings floated away downstream among the geese; Oldorando was full of sawdust and the fingers of its labourers of splinters. Thick piles were hauled and driven with difficulty into the bed of the river. Slaves stood up to their necks in the flood, tied to one another for safety; amazingly, no lives were lost.

Slowly, the bridge grew, and Aoz Roon stood there, calling them on. The first row of piers was washed away in a storm. Work began again. Wood was driven against wood. The thuggish heads of sledgehammers took their arcs from the air to land with a thwack on great wooden wedges, the tops of which turned to fur under repeated blows. A narrow platform crept out across the waters and proved secure. Dominating the operation stood the bear-wrapped figure of Aoz Roon, swinging his arms, wielding a mallet or a whip, encouraging or cursing, ever active. They remembered him long afterwards over their rathel, saying, with admiration, “What a devil he was!”

The work prospered. The workers cheered. A bridge four planks wide with a handrail along one side spanned the dark Voral. Many of the women refused to cross it, disliking the glimpse of fast water through the gaps between the planks, and the everlasting splap-flub of current again the piles. But access to the western plains had been won. Game was plentiful there, and starvation was averted. Aoz Roon had reason to be pleased.

With the arrival of summer, Freyr and Batalix parted company, rising and setting at different times. Day was rarely so bright, night rarely entire. In the increased hours of daylight, everything grew.

For a while, the academy also grew. During the heroic period of the bridge building, everyone worked together. The shortage of meat meant for the first time an increased awareness of the importance of grain. The handful of seeds that Laintal Ay had pressed on Shay Tal became a clutch of fields, where barley, oats, and rye grew in profusion and were guarded from marauders as being among the precious possessions of the Den tribe.

Now that several women could reckon and write, the grain that was harvested was weighed and stored and fairly rationed; any carcasses brought in were tallied; fish yields were noted. Every pig and goose in the town was entered on a balance sheet. Agriculture and accountancy brought their own rewards. Everyone was busy.

Vry and Oyre had charge of the cereal fields, and of the slaves working there. From the nearer acres, they could see the big tower in the distance, over the waving ears of grain, with a sentry standing there on watch. They still studied the constellations; their star chart was as complete as they could make it. Stars were in their conversation often as they prowled among the grasses.

“The stars are always on the move, like fish in a clear lake,” Vry said. “All the fish turn together at the same moment. But the stars aren’t fish. I wonder what they are, and what they swim in.”

Oyre held a grass stalk up to the nose that Laintal Ay admired so much and closed first one eye and then the other.

“The stalk seems to move back and forth across my vision, yet I know it’s still all the while. Perhaps the stars are still and it’s we who move…”

Vry received this and was silent. Then she said in a small voice, “Oyre, my beauty, perhaps it’s so. Perhaps it’s the earth that moves all the while. But then …”

“What about the sentinels?”

“Why, they don’t move either… That’s right, we move, we go round and round like an eddy in the river. And they’re far away, like the stars…”

“… But coming nearer, Vry, because it’s getting warmer…”

They gazed at each other, mouths open, eyebrows slightly raised, breathing lightly. Beauty and intelligence flowed in them.

The hunters, released by the bridge into the west, gave little thought to the revolving sky. The plains were open for their despoliation. Green rose up everywhere, crushed under their running feet, their sprawling bodies. Flowers burst. Insects that flew no more than a man’s height above the ground blundered among pale petals. Game in plenty was near at hand, to be brought down and dragged back to the town, spotting the new bridge with its dull blood.

With the growth of Aoz Roon’s reputation, Shay Tal’s went into eclipse. The diversion of women into labour connected either with the bridge or with agriculture weakened her hold on the intellectual life of the community. It hardly appeared to bother Shay Tal; since her return from the world below, she increasingly shunned companionship. She avoided Aoz Roon, and her gaunt figure was seen less often about the lanes. Only her friendship with old Master Datnil prospered.

Although Master Datnil had never again allowed her as much as a glimpse of the secret book of his corps, his mind wandered frequently to the past. She was content to listen to him unwinding the skein of his reminiscence, peopled with bygone names; it was not unlike, she thought, a visit to the fessups. What seemed dark to her held luminance for him.

“To the best of my belief, Embruddock was once more complicated that it is now. Then it suffered a catastrophe, as you know… There was a mason-makers corps but it was destroyed some centuries ago. The master of the corps was particularly well thought of.”

Shay Tal had observed before his endearing habit of speaking as if he were present during the events he described. She guessed he was recalling something he had read in his secret book.

“How was so much building achieved in stone?” she asked him. “We know the labour of working in wood.”

They were sitting in the master’s dim room. Shay Tal squatted before him on the floor. Because of his age, Master Datnil sat on a stone set against the wall, so that he could rise easily. Both his old woman and Raynil Layan, his chief boy—a mature man with a forked beard and unctuous manners—came and went in the room; the master kept his talk guarded in consequence.

He answered Shay Tal’s question by saying, “Let us go down and walk in the sun for a few paces, Mother Shay. The warmth is good for my bones, I find.”

Outside, he put his arm through hers and they walked down the lane where curly-haired pigs foraged. Nobody was about, for the hunters were away in the west veldt and many of the women were in the fields, keeping company with the slaves. Mangy dogs slept in the light of Freyr.

“The hunters are now away so much,” Master Datnil said, “that the women misbehave in their absence. Our male Borlienian slaves harvest the women as well as the crops. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

“People copulate like animals. The cold for intellect, the warmth for sensuality.” She looked above their heads, where little wanton birds swooped into holes in the stonework of the towers, bearing insects for their young.

He patted her arm and looked into her pinched face. “Don’t you fret. Your dream of going to Sibornal is your kind of satisfaction. We all must have something.”

“Something? What?” She frowned at him.

“Something to hang on to. A vision, a hope, a dream. We don’t live only by bread, even the basest of us. There’s always some kind of inner life—that’s what survives when we become gossies.”

“Oh, the inner life … It can be starved to death, can’t it?”

He stopped by the herb tower and she paused with him. They regarded the blocks of stone forming the tower. Despite the ages, the tower stood well. The blocks fitting neatly one into the other raised unanswered questions. How was stone quarried and cut? How was it built up so that it formed a tower which could stand for nine centuries?

Bees droned round their feet. A flight of large birds moved across the sky and disappeared behind one of the towers. She felt the day going by in her ears, and longed to be seized up in something great and all-embracing.

“Perhaps we could make a small tower out of mud. Mud dries good and solid. A small mud tower first. Stone later. Aoz Roon should build mud walls round Oldorando. At present the village is virtually unguarded. Everyone’s away. Who will blow the warning horn? We are open to raiders, human and inhuman.”

“I read once that a learned man of my corps made a model of this world in the form of a globe which could be rotated to show the lands on it—where was once Embruddock, where Sibornal, and so on. It was stored in the pyramid with much else.”

“King Denniss feared more than the cold. He feared invaders. Master Datnil, I have kept silent for a while with respect to many of my secret thoughts. But they torment me and I must speak… I have learnt from my fessups that Embruddock …” She paused, aware of the burden of what she was going to say, before completing her sentence. “… Embruddock was once ruled by phagors.”

After a moment, the old man said, in a light conversational tone, “That’s enough sunlight. We can go in again.”

On the way up to his room, he stopped on the third floor of the tower. This was the assembly room of his corps, smelling strongly of leather. He stood listening. All was silent.

“I wanted to make sure that my chief boy was out. Come in here.”

Off the landing was a small room. Master Datnil pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, looking round once more, anxiously. Catching Shay Tal’s eye, he said, “I don’t want anyone butting in. What I’m about to do in sharing the secrets of our corps carries the death penalty, as you understand. Ancient though I may be, I want the last few years of my life out.”

She looked round as she stepped into the small cubbyhole off the assembly room with him. For all their caution, neither of them saw Raynil Layan—as chief boy of the corps, due to inherit Master Datnil’s mantle when the old man retired. He stood in the shadows, behind a post supporting the wooden stair. Raynil Layan was a cautious, precise man, whose manner was always circumspect; he stood at this moment absolutely rigid, without breathing, showing no more movement than the post that partly protected him from view.

When the master and Shay Tal had entered the cubbyhole and closed the door behind them, Raynil Layan moved with some alacrity, his step light for so large a man. He applied his eye to a crack between two boards which he had engineered himself some while ago, the better to observe the movements of the man he would supplant.

Distorting his face by tugging considerably on his forked beard—a nervous habit imitated by his enemies—he watched Datnil Skar remove from its box the secret record of the tawyers and tanner corps. The ancient spread it open before the gaze of the woman. When that information was laid before Aoz Roon, it would mark the end of the old master—and the beginning of the rule of the new. Raynil Layan descended the stairs one step at a time, moving with quiet deliberation.

With trembling finger, Master Datnil pointed to a blank in the pages of his musty tome. “This is a secret which has weighed heavy on me for many years, Mother, and I trust your shoulders are not too frail for it. At the darkest, coldest time of an earlier epoch, Embruddock was overrun by the accursed phagors. Its very name is a corruption of an ancipital name: Hrrm-Bhhrd Ydohk… Our corps was then driven out into caves in the wild. But both men and women were kept here. Our kind was then in servitude, and the phagors ruled… Isn’t that a disgrace?”

She thought of the phagor god Wutra, worshipped in the temple. “A disgrace not yet past. They ruled us,” she said, “and are worshipped still. Doesn’t that make us a race of slaves to this day?”

A fly with viridian plates on its body, of a kind only recently seen in the settlement, buzzed from a dusty corner and alighted on the book.

Master Datnil looked up at Shay Tal in sudden fear. “I should have resisted the temptation to show you this. It’s nothing you should know.” His face was haggard. “Wutra will punish me for this.”

“You believe in Wutra despite the evidence?”

The old man was trembling, as if he heard a step outside that spelt his doom. “He’s all about us… We are his slaves…”

He struck out at the fly, but it eluded him as it set off in a spiral for a distant target of its own.

The hunters watched the hoxneys in professional amazement. Of all the life that invaded the western plains, it was the hoxney that, in its sportiveness, most embodied the new spirit. Beyond the settlement was the bridge, and beyond the bridge the hoxneys.

Freyr had called forth the glossies from their long hibernation. The signal had gone from sun to gland; life filled their eddres, they unrolled and lived again, crawling out of their dark comfortable places to stretch, to abound in movement—to rejoice and be hoxneys. To be herds and herds of hoxneys, to be careless as a breeze, to be striped and hornless, to resemble asses or small kaidaws, to gallop and gambol and graze and plunge hock-deep into delicious grasses. To be able to outstrip almost anything else that ran.

Every hoxney bore stripes of two colours, running horizontally from nose to tail. The stripes might be vermilion and black, or vermilion and yellow, or black and yellow, or green and yellow, or green and sky blue, or sky blue and white, or white and cerise, or cerise and vermilion. When the herds threw themselves down to rest, sprawling like cats, their legs carelessly stretched, they faded into the landscape, which also had put on new shows for the new seasons. Just as the homeys had broken from the glossy state, so “the flower-thrilling plain” transformed itself back from song into reality.

At first, the hoxneys had no fear of the hunters.

They galloped among the men, snorting with glee, tossing their manes, throwing up their heads, showing wide teeth made crimson by chomping veronika, raige, and the scarlet dogthrush. The hunters stood perplexed, caught between delight and the lust of the hunt, laughing back at the sportive beasts, whose ramps zithered with fire where the light of the sentinels touched them. These were the beasts that drew the dawn across the plains. In the first enchantments of meeting, they seemed impossible to kill.

Then they’d fart and be off like volted zephyrs, thundering between the pointless brown steeples that ants were raising everywhere, wheeling about, gazing mischievously back, shaking manes, whinneying, often charging back again to prolong the game. Or, when they tired of that, and of grazing with their soft muzzles to the floor, the stallions would set upon their fillies, rolling them in delight among the tall white orling flowers. Calling with shrill dove notes like laughter, they plunged their striped prods into the willing quemes of the mares, then pranced off, dripping still, to the applause of the hunters.

The mood of ease had its effect on the men. No longer were they so keen to return to their stone rooms. After they had brought down a capering animal, they delighted in lying by the fire that roasted it, talking of women, bragging, singing, sniffing the sage, dogthrush, and scantiom that blossomed about them and, crushed by their bodies, gave out pleasing aromas.

Generally speaking, they were harmonious. When Raynil Layan appeared—it was unusual to see a man of the corps in the hunting grounds—the mood was broken for a while. Aoz Roon went apart from the others and talked to Raynil Layan with his face to the far horizon. When be returned, his expression was grim, and he would not tell Laintal Ay and Dathka what had been said.

When false evening came to Oldorando, and one or other of the two sentinels scattered its ashes over the western sky, the hoxney herds scented a familiar challenge. Lifting their nostrils to the flushed air, they watched for sabre-tongues.

Their enemies also sported bright colours. Sabre-tongues were striped like their prey, always black and one other colour, a blood colour, generally scarlet or a rich maroon. Sabre-tongues bore a close resemblance to hoxneys, although their legs were shorter and thicker, and their heads rounder, the rotundity emphasised by lack of visible ears. The head, set on a sturdy neck, housed the sabre-tongue’s chief weapon: fast in pursuit over short distances, the sabre-tongue could project a sword-sharp tongue from its throat and sever the leg of a hoxney as it fled.

Having once seen this predator in action, the hunters held it in respect. The sabre-tongue, for its part, showed the men neither fear nor aggression; mankind had never appeared on its menu nor, as far as it knew, was it on mankind’s.

Fire seemed to attract the animal. Sabre-tongues developed a habit of slouching up to the campfire in twos, male and female, to sit or sprawl there. They licked each other with their white sword tongues and would devour pieces of meat the men threw them. Yet they would never allow themselves to be touched, drawing away snarling from a cautiously proffered hand. The snarl was sufficient warning for the hunters; they had seen what damage that terrible tongue could do, used in anger.

Brakes of thorn tree and dogthrush were in blossom about the landscape. Beneath their heavy boughs the men slept. They dwelt among blossom and its cloying scents, with flowers never seen or smelt before except by long-gone fessups. In the dogthrush thickets they found the hives of wild bees, some brimming with honey. The honey fermented easily to make beethel. On the glutinous beethel the men got drunk and pursued one another through the grasses, laughing, shouting, wrestling, until the curious hoxneys came to see what all the fun was about. The hoxneys too would not permit a man to touch them, although many a man tried when caught up by the beethel, running across the veldt after the frolicking animals until he fell over and slept where he lay.

In the old days, the return home had been the crowning pleasure of the hunt. The challenge of the chill snowfields had been exchanged for warmth and sleep. That was altered. The hunt had become play. Their muscles were no longer stretched, and there was warmth on the flowering veldt.

Also, Oldorando held less attraction for the hunters. The hamlet was growing crowded as more children survived the hazards of their first year on earth. The men preferred convivial beethel binges on the plain to the complaints that often attended their return.

So they no longer came back boastfully in the old tight-knit bunch, straggling home instead in ones and twos, in a less obtrusive way.

These new-style returns held one excitement previously absent, at least as far as the women were concerned; for if the men had their irresponsibility, the women had their vanity.

“Let’s see what you’ve brought me!”

That, with variations, was the popular cry, as women dragged their brats out to meet their men. They went as far as the new bridge and waited there, standing on the east bank of the Voral while the kids threw stones at the ducks and geese, waiting impatiently for the men to arrive with meat—and skins.

The meat was their due, their necessity, and it was no good a hunter coming back without meat.

But what aroused frenzies of delight in the hearts of the women were the skins, the brilliant hoxney skins. Never before in their impoverished lives had they visualised a change of garb. Never before had the tanners been in such demand. Never before had the men been driven out to kill for the sake of killing. Every woman wished to possess a hoxney skin—preferably more than one—and to dress her offspring in one.

They competed with each other for brighter skins. Blue, magenta, aquamarine, cherry. They blackmailed the men in ways men enjoyed. They preened themselves, they stained their lips. They paraded. They dressed their hair. They even took to washing themselves.

Correctly worn, with those electric stripes running vertically up the body, hoxney skins could make even a dumpy woman look elegant. The skins had to be properly cut. A new trade prospered in Oldorando: tailor. As flowers put forth bells and spikes and faces along the lanes between the ancient worn towers, and flowering ivies climbed the towers themselves, so the women began more to resemble flowers. They docked themselves in bright colours their mothers had never set eyes on.

It was not long before the men, in self-defence, also cut off their old heavy furs and took to hoxney skins.

The weather became still and threatening, and the rajabarals steamed from their flat lids.

Oldorando was silent under towering cumulus. The hunters were away. Shay Tal sat alone in her room writing. She no longer cared about her appearance, and still went round in her old ill-fitting skins. In her head she still heard the creaking voices of fessups and her parents’ gossies. She still tried to dream of perfection and travel.

When Vry and Amin Lim came down from the room above, Shay Tal looked up sharply and said, “Vry, what would you think of a globe as a model of the world?”

Vry said, “It would make sense. A globe rotates most smoothly of all figures, and the other wanderers are round. So we must be too.”

“A disc, a wheel? We’ve been brought up to believe that the original boulder rests on a disc.”

“Much we were brought up to believe is incorrect. You taught us that, Mother,” Vry said. “I believe our world revolves round the sentinels.”

Shay Tal sat where she was, contemplating them, and they fidgeted under her inspection. Both of the younger women had shed their old skins and wore bright hoxney suits. Stripes of cerise and grey ran up Vry’s body. The ears of the dead animal adorned her shoulders. Despite all Aoz Roon’s threatened restrictions on the academy, the skins had been presented to her by Dathka. She walked more confidently. She had acquired glamour.

Suddenly, Shay Tal’s temper flared up. “You stupid wenches, you silly gillies, you are defying me. Don’t pretend you aren’t. I know what goes on under that air of meekness. Look at the way you dress nowadays! We get nowhere with our understanding, nowhere. Everything seems to lead us to fresh complexities. I shall have to go to Sibornal, to find this great wheel the gossies speak of. Perhaps real freedom, clear truth, lives there. Here is only the curse of ignorance… Where are you two going, in any case?”

Amin Lim spread her hands to demonstrate their innocence. “Nowhere, ma’am, only to the fields, to see if we’ve cured the mildew on the oats.”

She was a big girl, even bigger at this time with the seed her man had planted within her. She stood there pleadingly, released by a slight flicker of assent in Shay Tal’s eye, whereon she and Vry almost scuttled from the oppressive room.

As they retreated down the dirty stone steps, Vry said resignedly, “There she goes again, blowing up, as regular as the Hour-Whistler. Poor thing, something is really worrying her.”

“Where’s this pool you mentioned? I don’t feel like walking far in my condition.”

“You’ll love it, Amin Lim. It’s only a little way beyond the northern fields, and we can walk slowly. I expect Oyre’s there.”

The air had thickened to an extent where it no longer carried the scent of flowers, but emanated a metallic trace of its own. Colour appeared dazzling in the actinic light, the geese looked supernaturally white.

They passed between the columns of great rajabarals. The stark cylinders with their concave curve were better suited to the geometries of a winter landscape; with the growing lushness they formed a forbidding contrast.

“Even the rajabarals are changing,” Amin Lim said. “How long has steam been coming out of their tops?”

Vry did not know and was not particularly interested. She and Oyre had discovered a warm pool, knowledge of which they had so far kept to themselves. In a narrow valley, the mouth of which pointed away from Oldorando, fresh springs had burst forth from the ground, some at a temperature near boiling, some rushing down to meet the Voral in a cloud of vapour. One spring, damned by rock, flowed a different way and formed a secluded pool, fringed by verdure but open to the sky. It was to this pool that Vry led Amin Lim.

As they parted the bushes and saw the figure standing by the pool, Amin Lim shrieked and threw her hand to her mouth.

Oyre stood on the bank. She was naked. Her skin shone with moisture and water dripped from her ample breasts. With no sign of shyness she turned and waved excitedly to her friends. Behind her lay her discarded hoxney skins.

“Come on, where you have been? The water’s glorious today.”

Amin Lim stood where she was, blushing, still covering her mouth. She had never seen anyone naked before.

“It’s all right,” Vry said, laughing at her friends expression. “It’s lovely in the water. I’m going to strip off and go in. Watch me—if you dare.”

She ran forward to where Oyre stood and began unlacing the cerise and grey suit. Hoxneys were tailored to be climbed in and out of. In another minute, the suit was thrown aside and Vry stood there naked, her more slender lines contrasting with Oyre’s sturdy beauty. She laughed in delight.

“Come on, Amin Lim, don’t be stuffy. A swim will be good for your baby.”

She and Oyre jumped into the water together. As it swallowed up their limbs, they squealed with delight.

Amin Lim stood where she was and squealed with horror.

They had gorged down an enormous feast, with bitter fruits to follow the slabs of meat. Their faces still shone with fat.

The hunters were heavier than they had been last season. Food was all too plentiful. The hoxneys could be slaughtered without anyone’s having to run. The animals continued to come close, capering among the hunters and rolling their parti-coloured bodies against the hides of their dead fellows.

Still wearing his old black furs, Aoz Roon had been talking apart to Goija Hin, the slave master, whose broad back was still visible as he trudged towards the distant towers of Oldorando. Aoz Roon returned to the company. He grabbed up a chunk of rib still sizzling on a stone and rolled over in the grass with it. Curd, his great hound, frisked playfully with him, growling, until Aoz Roon brought a branch of fragrant dogthrush down to keep the brute from his meat.

He kicked out at Dathka in a friendly way.

“This is the life, friend. Take it easy, eat as much as you can before the ice returns. By the original boulder, I’ll never forget this season as long as I live.”

“Splendid.” That was all Dathka said. He had finished eating, and sat with his arms wrapped round his knees, watching the hoxneys, a herd of which was wheeling fast through the grass not a quarter of a mile away.

“Damn you, you never say anything,” Aoz Roon exclaimed good-humouredly, pulling at his meat with his strong teeth. “Talk to me.”

Dathka turned his head so that his cheek rested on his knee and gave Aoz Roon a knowing look. “What’s going on between you and Goija Hin then?”

Aoz Roon’s mouth went hard. “That’s private between the pair of us.”

“So you won’t talk either.” Dathka turned away and regarded the cantering hoxneys once more, where they wheeled below the high cumulus piling up on the western horizon. The air was full of green light, robbing the hoxneys of their brilliant colour.

Finally, as if he could feel the black regard of Aoz Roon through his shoulder blades, he said, without shifting his gaze, “I was thinking.”

Aoz Roon flung his chewed bone to Curd and lay flat under the blossoming bough. “All right, then, out with it. What have you been saving up all your lifetime to think?”

“How to catch a live hoxney.”

“Ha! What good would that do you?”

“I wasn’t thinking of good, any more than you were when you called Nahkri to the top of the tower.”

A heavy silence followed, in which Aoz Roon said no word. Eventually, as distant thunder sounded, Eline Tal brought round some beethel. Aoz Roon demanded angrily of the company in general, “Where’s Laintal Ay? Wandering again, I suppose. Why is he not with us? You men are getting too lazy and disobedient. Some of you are in for a surprise.”

He got up and walked heavily away, followed at a respectful distance by his hound.

Laintal Ay was not studying hoxneys like his silent friend. He was after other game.

Since that night, four long years ago, when he was witness to the murder of his uncle Nahkri, the incident had haunted him. He had ceased to blame Aoz Roon for the murder, for he now understood better that the Lord of Embruddock was a tormented man.

“I’m sure he thinks himself under a curse,” Oyre had once told Laintal Ay.

“He can be forgiven a lot for the western bridge,” Laintal Ay replied, in a practical way. But he felt himself spoiled by his involvement in the murder, and increasingly kept his own counsel.

The bond between him and the beautiful Oyre had been both strengthened and distorted by that night when too much rathel had been drunk. He had even become wary with her.

He had spelt out the difficulty to himself. “If I am to rule in Oldorando, as my lineage decrees, then I must kill the father of the girl I wish to make mine. It’s impossible.”

No doubt Oyre also understood his dilemma. Yet she was marked out as his and no one else’s. He would have fought to the death any other man who went near her.

His wild instincts, his sense for the cunning trap, for the unregarding moment that spells disaster, made him see as clearly as did Shay Tal that Oldorando was now left regularly vulnerable to attack. In the present warm spell, nobody was alert. Sentries droused at their posts.

He raised the question of defence with Aoz Roon, who had a reasonable answer.

Aoz Roon said dismissively that nobody, friend or foe, travelled far any more. A mantle of snow had made it easy for men to go wherever they pleased; now everywhere was choked with green things, with thickets growing denser every day. The time for raids was past.

Besides, he added, they had had no phagor raids since the day Mother Shay Tal performed her miracle at Fish lake. They were safer than they had ever been. And he passed Laintal Ay a tankard of beethel.

Laintal Ay was not satisfied with the answer. Uncle Nahkri had considered himself perfectly safe that night he had climbed the stairs of the big tower. Within a couple of minutes, he was lying in the lane below with his neck broken.

When the hunters went out today, Laintal Ay had got no further than the bridge. There he turned silently back, determined to make a survey of the village and see how it would fare under an unexpected attack.

As he commenced circling the outskirts, the first thing he observed was a light plume of steam on the Voral. It rode along on a certain line in midstream, never deviating, seeming to advance above the dark rapid glide of the water, yet ever remaining in the identical place. Feathers of vapour shredded back from it along the breast of the river. What it signified he could not determine. He proceeded with a sense of unease.

The atmosphere grew heavier. Saplings were springing up over mounds that had once been buildings. He viewed the remaining towers through their slender bars. Aoz Roon was right in one respect: it had become difficult to get round Oldorando.

Yet warning images formed in his mind. He saw phagors riding kaidaws, leaping obstacles and charging into the heart of the settlement. He saw the hunters straggling home, loaded with bright skins, their heads heavy from too much beethel. They had time to witness their homes burnt, their women and children dead, before they too were trampled under savage hoof.

He forced his way through prickly bushes.

How the phagors rode! What could be more wonderful than to mount a kaidaw and ride it, master it, share its power, be one with its action? Those ferocious beasts submitted to no mount but a phagor: or so the legends said, and he had never heard of the man who had ridden a kaidaw. The very notion made one dizzy. Men went on foot… But a man on a kaidaw would be more than the equal of a phagor on a kaidaw.

Half concealed by bushes, he could see across to the north gate, which stood open and unguarded. Two birds perched on top of the gate, twittering. He wondered if a sentry had been posted that morning, or if the man had deserted his post. The silence, through the heavy air, took on a booming quality.

A shambling figure came into his line of vision. It was immediately recognisable as the slave master, Goija Hin. Behind him went Myk, led by a rope.

“There now, you’ll enjoy this afternoon’s work,” Laintal Ay heard the slave master say. He stopped beyond the gate and tied the phagor to a small tree. The creatures legs were already chained. He patted Myk almost affectionately.

Myk looked at Goija Hin with apprehension. “Myk can sit here in the sunshine some time.”

“Not sit, stand. You stand, Myk, you do as you’re told, or you know what you’ll get. We’re going to do exactly as Aoz Roon says, or we’ll both be in trouble.”

The old phagor made a growling sound. “Trouble is always all round us in the air-octaves. What are you Sons of Freyr but trouble?”

“Any more of that I rip your stinking hide off,” Goija Hin said, without malice. “You stay there and do what we were told and you’ll have your chance on one of us Sons of Freyr in a minute.”

He left the monster where he was concealed from gaze and marched off with his flat-footed walk, back towards the towers. Myk promptly lay down on the ground and was lost to Laintal Ay’s view.

Like the trail of vapour riding on the Voral, this incident made Laintal Ay uneasy. He stood waiting, listening, wondering. The twittering stillness was one he would have regarded as unnatural only a few years ago. He shrugged his shoulders and walked on.

Oldorando was unguarded. An undertaking must be made to rouse the hunters to a sense of peril. He observed that steam seeped from the caps of the bare rajabarals. There was another portent he could not interpret. Thunder rumbled, far to the north, yet with intimate menace.

He crossed a brook which bubbled and let forth steam, the vapour snarling itself among teeth of fern growing from the bank. When he bent to dip his hand, he found the water tolerably warm. A dead fish floated past, tail uppermost, just under the surface. He squatted there, looking across it at the tangle of new green through which the tops of the towers showed. No hot spring had existed here before.

The ground trembled. Reed trailed in the water, for ever uncurling; newts flashed in it then were gone. Birds rose crying over the towers, then sank again.

As he waited for the tremor to be repeated, the Hour-Whistler blew nearby, the sound of Oldorando he remembered since the cradle. It lasted a fraction longer than usual. He knew exactly how long it lasted; this time, the note was sustained for an instant more than it should have been.

He rose and continued his perimeter prowl. When moving with difficulty through raige bushes which reached to his thigh, he heard voices. With the prompt response of a hunter, Laintal Ay froze, then moved forward cautiously, bent double. Ahead was a sharp rise in the ground, patched by thyme bushes. He sank down on his hands among the fragrant leaves, to peer forward cautiously. He felt his stomach swing under him—his lean arc of belly had become convex with recent good living.

Voices—female—again. He raised his head and looked over the mound.

Whatever he had expected to see, the reality was far more delightful. He found himself gazing into a hollow, in the centre of which lay a deep pool surrounded by verdure. Wisps of steam rose from the water and drifted into the bushes round about, which dripped moisture back into the pool. On the far side of this pool were two women dressing themselves in their hoxney skins; one was heavy with child; he quickly identified her as Amin Lim and her companion as Vry. Standing near him on the edge of the pool, her beautiful back turned to him, was his adored and self-willed Oyre, naked.

When he realised who it was, he gasped with pleasure, and lay where he was, regarding those shoulders, that sweep of back, those glowing buttocks and legs, with a delight that caught his breath.

Batalix had broken free from one of the giant purple castles of cloud, to flood the land below with gold. The sentinel’s rays scattered obliquely over Oyre’s cinnamon skin, which was pearled about her shoulders and breasts with water drops. Runnels of water chased themselves down the mazes of her flesh, finally spreading to the stone on which she stood, as if to unite her, naiadlike, to the nearby element they shared. Her pose was relaxed, her feet were slightly apart. One hand was raised, to wipe away water from her eyelashes as she watched her friends preparing to leave. Oyre’s was the carelessness of an animal—unconscious at this moment of the hunter’s predatory regard, yet poised for escape if need be.

Her dark hair clung wetly to her skull, damp tails of it curling about her shoulders and throat, lending her an otterlike quality.

Laintal Ay could catch only glimpses of her face from where he crouched. He had never seen any naked body before, male or female; custom, reinforcing cold, had banished nudity from Oldorando. Overcome by what he saw, he allowed his face to sink into the fragrant thyme. Pulses beat heavily in his temples.

When he could raise his head and look upon the sight again, the movement of her buttocks as she waved her friends good-bye and turned away worked a strong enchantment in him. He breathed a different air. Oyre now regarded the pool almost drowsily, gazing into its pure depths, her lashes gleaming against her cheeks. At her next movement, he could consider her pudendum, covered with tiny wet pigtails, her superb belly, and the cunning whorl of her navel. All was momentarily revealed as she flung up her arms and jumped into the pool.

He was alone with the heavy sunlight and the steam rolling into the bushes until she surfaced again, laughing.

She climbed out quite near him, her breasts swinging clear of her body, jellying lightly against each other.

“Oyre, golden Oyre!” he called in ecstasy.

He rose.

She stood in a crouch before him, a pulse throbbing by a little hollow on her neck. Her regard was heavy upon him, her dark eyes lustrous, yet with a kind of sensuous dullness induced by the general ripe warmth. He saw anew the beauty of the short oval of her face, framed in otter hair, and the sweetness about her eyebrows and the folds of her eyelids. Those eyebrows were arched at present, but after her first surprise she showed no fear, simply looking at him with parted lips, awaiting his next move as if puzzled as to what it might be. Then, belatedly, she curled one hand down and covered her queme. The gesture was more provocative than protective. Well aware of her beauty, she possessed a natural composure.

Four little lascivious birds fluttered down between them, overcome by the heaviness of the afternoon.

Laintal Ay strode across the grass and clutched her, looking fiercely into her eyes, feeling her body against his furs. He reached forward and grasped her, kissing her passionately on the lips.

Oyre stepped back and licked those lips, smiling slightly, her eyes narrowed.

“Strip yourself. Let Batalix see how you are made,” she said.

The words were part invitation, part taunt. He unlaced his neckties, then grasped the opening of his tunic and tugged, so that the stitches tore. With loud ripping sounds, the tunic came away and he flung it down. Then he treated his trousers similarly, and kicked them off. He was aware of how his prod stood out stiff from his body, as he crossed to her.

Oyre grasped his outstretched arm, pulled, kicked at his shin, and stepped back swiftly, propelling him full length into the water.

The moist lips of the pool closed over Laintal Ay. It felt astonishingly hot. He surfaced, yelling for breath.

She leaned down laughing with her hands on her handsome knees.

“You wash yourself before you are fit for me, you flea-bitten warrior!”

He splashed her, smacking the surface of the water between laughter and anger.

When she helped him out, she was considerably softer. She felt slippery in his grasp. As they knelt down in the grass, he slid a hand between her legs, feeling her fine details. Immediately, his seed burst from him across the grass.

“Oh, you fool, you fool!” she cried, and caught him a slap across the chest, her face distorted by disappointment.

“No, no, Oyre, it’s all right. Give me a minute, please. I love you, Oyre, with all my eddre. I want you always, always. Come to me, rouse me again.”

But Oyre stood up, full of annoyance and inexperience. Despite his coaxing words, he felt enraged with her, with himself. He jumped up beside her.

“Scumb you, you shouldn’t be so pretty, you minx!”

He grabbed hold of her arm, swung her brutally round, and thrust her towards the steaming pool. She grabbed his hair, snarling and screeching. Together they tumbled into the water.

He got an arm about her back, caught her underwater, kissed her as they surfaced, grabbing a breast with his left hand. Laughing, they climbed to the muddy bank, rolling over together. He hooked a leg round hers and climbed on top. She kissed him passionately on the lips, thrusting her tongue into his mouth even as he entered her queme.

There they lay in the secret place, serene, ecstatic, making love. The mud beneath them, plastering their sides, emitted comfortable noises, as if full of microbes all copulating to express their joy in life.

She was climbing languorously into her hoxney skins. The soft pelts were distinctively marked with dark blue and light blue stripes, each stripe varying in width as it chased its way down Oyre’s body. The afternoon had become stifling, and thunder rumbled near at hand, occasionally breaking into claps like sharp cries of protest.

Laintal Ay sprawled close, watching Oyre’s movements, eyes half-closed.

“I’ve always wanted you,” he said. “For years. Your flesh is a hot spring. You’ll be my woman. We’ll come here every afternoon.”

She said nothing. She started singing under her breath.

“I want you badly, every day, Oyre. You want me too, don’t you?” She looked at him and said, “Yes, yes, Laintal Ay, I wanted you. But I cannot be your woman.”

He felt the ground tremble under him.

“What do you mean?”

She seemed to hesitate, then she leaned towards him. When he automatically reached for her, she pulled herself away, tucked her breasts into her tunic, and said, “I love you, Laintal Ay, but I am not going to become your woman.

“I always suspected that the academy was just a diversion—a consolation for silly women like Amin Lim. Now the weather’s fine, it has fallen apart. To be honest, only Vry and Shay Tal care about it—and possibly old Master Datnil. Yet I value Shay Tal’s example of independence, and imitate it. Shay Tal will not submit to my father—though I expect she desires him madly, as everyone does—and I follow her example: if I become your possession, I become nothing.”

He scrambled up on his knees, looking wretched. “Not so, not so. You’ll be—everything, Oyre, everything. We’re nothing without each other.”

“For a few weeks, yes.”

“What do you expect?”

“What do I expect…” Her eyes rolled upwards, and she sighed. She smoothed back her still damp hair and looked away, at the young bushes, at the sky, at the birds. “It’s not that I have such a high regard for myself. I can do so little. By remaining independent like Shay Tal, perhaps I can achieve something.”

“Don’t talk that way. You need someone to protect you. Shay Tal, Vry—they’re not happy. Shay Tal never laughs, does she? Besides, she’s old. I’d look after you and make you happy. I want nothing better.”

She was buttoning up her tunic, looking down at the toggles which she herself had designed (to the tailor’s amazement), so that the skins could be put on and off without trouble.

“Oh, Laintal Ay, I’m so difficult. I have difficulty with myself. I don’t really know what I want. I long to dissolve and flow like this wonderful water. Who knows where it comes from, where it goes to?—from the very eddre of earth, maybe… I do love you, though, in my horrid way. Listen, we’ll have an arrangement.”

She stopped fiddling with her tunic and came to stand looking down at him, hands on her hips.

“Do something great and astonishing, one thing, one deed, and I’ll be your woman for ever. You understand that? A great deed, Laintal Ay—a great deed and I’m yours. I’ll do whatever you wish.”

He got up and stood away from her, surveying her. “A great deed? What sort of great deed do you mean? By the original boulder, Oyre, you are a strange girl.”

She tossed her damp hair. “If I told you, then it would no longer be great. Do you understand that? Besides, I don’t know what I mean. Strive, strive … You’re getting fat already, as if you were pregnant…”

He stood without moving, his face hard. “How is it that when I tell you I love you you insult me in return?”

“You tell me truth—I hope; I tell you truth. But I don’t mean to hurt you. Really I’m gentle. You just released things in me, things I’ve said to no one else. I long for … no, I can’t say what the longings are for … glory. Do something great, Laintal Ay, I beg you, something great, before we grow too old.”

“Like killing phagors?”

Suddenly she laughed on rather a harsh note, narrowing her eyes. For a moment, her resemblance to Aoz Roon was marked. “If that’s all you can think of. Provided you kill a million of them.”

He looked baffled.

“So you imagine you’re worth a million phagors?”

Oyre pretended to smite herself hard on the forehead, as if her harneys had come loose. “It’s not for me, don’t you see? It’s for yourself. Achieve one great thing for your own sake. Here we’re stuck in what Shay Tal says is a farmyard—at least make it a legendary farmyard.”

The ground trembled again. “Scumble,” he said. “The earth really is moving.”

They stood up, shaken out of their argument, ignoring each other. A bronze overcast spread from the aerial castles, which now took on purple hearts and yellow edges. The heat became intense, and they stood in the midst of an oppressive silence; backs to each other, looking about.

A repeated smacking sound made them turn towards the pool. Its surface was marred by yellow bubbles which rose and grew until they burst, to spread filth through the hitherto clear water. The bubbles sailed up from the depths, releasing a stink of rotten eggs, coming faster and blacker. Thick mist filled the hollow.

A jet of mud burst from the pool and sprayed into the air. Gobbets of scalding filth flew, pocking the foliage all about. The humans ran in terror, she in her garb the colour of summer skies.

Within a minute of their leaving, the pool was a mass of black seething liquid.

Before they could get back to Oldorando, the skies opened, and down came the rain, grey, and chilling to the flesh.

As they climbed into the big tower, voices could be heard overhead, Aoz Roon’s prominent among them. He had just arrived back with allies of his own generation, Tanth Ein, Faralin Ferd, and Eline Tal, all sturdy warriors and good hunters; with them were their women, exclaiming over new hoxney skins, and Dol Sakil, who sat sulkily apart on the window sill, regardless of the rain beating down. Also in the room was Raynil Layan, his skins perfectly dry; he fingered his forked beard and looked anxiously back and forth, without either speaking or being spoken to.

Aoz Roon spared his natural daughter no more than a look before saying challengingly to Laintal Ay, “You’ve been missing again.”

“For a while, yes. I’m sorry. I was inspecting the defences. I—”

Aoz Roon laughed curtly and looked at his companions as he said, “When you enter in that state, with Oyre with her fancy garb unlaced, I know you have been inspecting something other than the defences. Don’t lie to me, you young fighting cock!”

The other men laughed. Laintal Ay went crimson.

“I’m no liar. I went to inspect our defences—but we have no defences. There are no sentries, no guards, while you were lying drinking in the wilderness. Oldorando could fall to one single armed Borlienian. We’re taking life too easy, and you set a poor example.”

He felt Oyre’s steadying hand on his arm.

“He spends little time here now,” Dol called, in a teasing voice, but was ignored, for Aoz Roon had turned to his other companions and said, “You see what I have to endure from my lieutenants, so-called. Always impudence. Oldorando is now concealed and protected by green, growing higher every week. When the warlike weather returns, as return it will, that will be time enough for war. You’re trying to make trouble, Laintal Ay.”

“Not so. I’m trying to prevent it.”

Aoz Roon walked forward and confronted him, his immense black figure towering over the youth.

“Then keep quiet. And don’t lecture me.”

Above the noise of the downpour, cries could be heard outside. Dol turned to stare out of the window and called that someone was in trouble. Oyre ran to join her.

“Stand back,” Aoz Roon shouted, but the three older women also jostled to get close to the window. The room became even darker.

“We’ll go and see what’s happening,” Tanth Ein said. He started down the stairs, his great shoulders almost blocking the trap as he descended, with Faralin Ferd and Eline Tal after him. Raynil Layan remained in the shadows, watching them go. Aoz Roon made as if to stop them, then stood indecisively in the middle of the dull room, regarded only by Laintal Ay.

The latter came forward and said, “My temper ran away with me; you shouldn’t have called me a liar. Don’t let that mean that my warning goes unheeded. Our responsibility is to keep the place guarded as we used to.”

Aoz Roon bit his lip and did not listen.

“You get your ideas from that damned woman Shay Tal.” He spoke absently, one ear cocked to the noises outside. Masculine shouts were now added to the earlier cries. The women at the window also set up a great noise, running about and clinging to Dol and to each other.

“Come away!” cried Aoz Roon, grabbing Dol angrily. Curd, the great yellow hound, started to howl.

The world danced to drumming rain. The figures below the tower were grey in the downpour. Two of the three burly hunters were lifting a body from the mud, while the third, Faralin Ferd, was endeavouring to put his arms about two old women in rain-soaked furs and direct them towards shelter. The old women, uninterested in comfort, raised their faces in grief, rain pouring into their open mouths. They were recognisable as Datnil Skars woman and an ancient widow, the aunt of Faralin Ferd.

The women had dragged the body in from the north gate between them, covering it and themselves with mud in the process. As the hunters straightened up with their burden, the body was revealed. Its visage was distorted and masked by blood so caked that the rain did not wash it away. Its head fell back as the hunters heaved it high. Blood still gouted across its face and garments. Its throat had been bitten out, as cleanly as a man bites a great mouthful from an apple.

Dol began to shriek. Aoz Roon pushed past her, thrust his burly shoulders into the window space, and called down at those below, “Don’t bring that thing in here.”

The men chose to disregard him. They were making for the nearest shelter. Jets of rainwater were spewing down from the parapets above them. They floundered in the muck with their muddy burden.

Aoz Roon cursed and ran from the room, charging downstairs, Curd following. Caught by the drama of the moment, Laintal Ay followed, with Oyre, Dol, and the other women behind him, jostling on the narrow steps. Raynil Layan came more slowly in the rear.

The hunters and the old women dragged or escorted the dead body into the low- ceilinged stable to drop it on scattered straw. The men stood away, wiping their faces with their hands, as a puddle of water in which blood spiralled leaked from the body, to set afloat wisps of straw, which turned uncertainly on the flood like boats seeking an estuary. The old women, grotesque bundles, cried on each other’s shoulders monumentally. Although the face of the dead man was plastered with blood and hair there was no doubt of his identity. Master Datnil Skar, with Curd sniffing at his cold ear, lay dead before them.

Tanth Ein’s woman was a personable creature, by name Farayl Musk. She broke into a series of long wailing cries, which she was unable to stifle.

Nobody could mistake the deadly neck wound for anything but a phagor bite. The mode of execution common in Pannoval had been passed on, for when need arose, as it rarely did, by Yuli the Priest. Somewhere outside in the pouring rain was Wutra, waiting. Wutra, for ever at war. Laintal Ay thought of Shay Tal’s alarming claim that Wutra was a phagor. Perhaps there really was a god, perhaps he really was a phagor. His mind went back to the time earlier in the day, before he had found Oyre naked, when he had seen Goija Hin leading Myk to the north gate. There was no doubt who was responsible for this death; he thought how Shay Tal would have fresh cause for sorrow.

He looked at the stricken faces about him—and RayniI Layan’s gloating one—and took courage. In a loud voice, he said, “Aoz Roon, I name you the killer of this good old man.” He pointed at Aoz Roon as if imagining that some present did not know whom he designated.

All eyes turned to the Lord of Embruddock, who stood with his head against the rafters, his face pale. He said harshly, “Don’t dare speak against me. One word more from you, Laintal Ay, and I will strike you down.”

But Laintal Ay could not be stopped. Full of anger, be cried mockingly, “Is this another of your cruel blows against knowledge—against Shay Tal?”

The others murmured, restless in the confined space. Aoz Roon said, “This is justice. I have information that Datnil Skar allowed outsiders to read the secret book of his corps. It’s a forbidden act. Its just penalty is now, as it always was, death.”

“Justice! Does this look like justice? This blow has all the stealth of murder. You’ve all seen—it’s carried out like the murder of—”

Aoz Roon’s attack was hardly unexpected, but its ferocity knocked his guard away. He struck back at Aoz Roon’s face, dancing black with rage before him. He heard Oyre shriek. Then a fist caught him squarely on the side of the jaw.

Detachedly, he saw himself stagger backwards, trip over the sodden corpse, and sprawl powerless on the stable floor.

He was aware of screams, shouting, boots trampling round him. He felt the kicks in his ribs. There was confusion as they took him up like the body they had dropped—he attempting to protect his skull from knocking against a wall—and carried him outside into the downpour. He heard thunder like a giant pulse.

From the steps, they flung him bodily into the mud. The rain came flying down into his face. As he sprawled there, he realised that he was no longer Aoz Roon’s lieutenant. From now on, their enmity was out in the open, apparent to all.

Rain continued to fall. Belts of dense cloud rolled across the central continent. An atmosphere of stalemate prevailed over the affairs of Oldorando.

The distant army of the young kzahhn, Hrr-Brahl Yprt, was forced to halt its advance, to shelter among the shattered hills of the east. Its components went into a sort of tether rather than face the downpour.

The phagors also experienced earth tremors, which originated from the same source as those afflicting Oldorando. Far to the north, old rift zones in the Chalce region were undergoing violent seismic upheaval. As the burden of ice disappeared, the earth shook and rose up.

By this period, the ocean that girdled Helliconia became free of ice even beyond the wide tropical zones, which stretched from the equator to latitudes thirty-five degrees north and south. The westward circulation of oceanic waters built up in a series of tsunami, which devastated coastal regions all round the globe. The floodings often combined with vulcanism to alter the land area.

All such geological events were monitored by the instruments of the Earth Observation Station, which Vry called Kaidaw. The readings were signalled back to distant Earth. No planet in the galaxy was watched more intensely than Helliconia.

Account was taken of the dwindling herds of yelk and biyelk which inhabited the northern Campannlat plain; their pasturage was threatened. Kaidaws, on the other hand, were multiplying as marginal lands, hitherto barren, provided grazing.

There were two sorts of ancipital community on the tropical continent: static components without kaidaws, which lived close to the land, and mobile or nomadic groups with kaidaws. Not only was the kaidaw a highly mobile animal in its own right; its fodder consumption forced those who domesticated it to move continuously in search of new foraging grounds. The army of the young kzahhn, for example, consisted of numerous small components committed to a nomadic and often warlike existence. Their crusade was only one aspect of a migration, which would take decades to complete, from east to west of the entire continent.

A tremor which brought down avalanches about the kzahhn’s army marked the tail end of an upheaval in the planet’s crust which deflected a river of meltwater flowing from the Hhryggt Glacier. A new valley opened. The new river coursed through it, and henceforth flowed westwards instead of north, as previously.

This river burst its way down to become a tributary of the river Takissa, streaming southwards to empty into the Sea of Eagles. Its waters ran black for many years; they carried with them dozens of metric tons of demolished mountain every day.

Flooding caused by the new river through its new valley forced one insignificant group of phagors of the nomadic type to disperse in the direction of Oldorando instead of heading east. Their destiny was to encounter Aoz Roon at a later date. Though their deflection at the time was of little seeming importance even to the ancipitals themselves, it was to alter the social history of the sector.

There were, on the Avernus, those who studied the social history of Helliconian cultures; but it was the heliographers who regarded their science as the most valuable. Before all else came the light.

Star B, which the natives below called Batalix, was a modest spectral class G4 sun. In real terms slightly smaller than Sol, its radius being 0.94 Sol’s, its apparent size as seen from Helliconia was 76 percent that of Sol seen from Earth. With a photosphere temperature of 5600 Kelvin, its luminosity was only 0.8 that of Sol. It was about five billion years old.

The more distant star, known locally as Freyr, about which Star B revolved, was a much more impressive object as viewed from the Avernus. Star A was a brilliant white spectral class A-type supergiant, with a radius sixty-five times that of Sol’s, and a luminosity sixty thousand times as great. Its mass was 14.8 times Sol’s, and its surface temperature 11000K, as opposed to Sol’s 5780K.

Although Star B had its constant students, Star A was a greater magnet for attention, especially now that the Avernus was moving, along with the rest of Star B’s system, nearer to the supergiant.

Freyr was between ten and eleven million years old. It had evolved away from the main sequence of stars and was already entering its old age.

Such was the intensity of the energy it poured out that the disc of Star A was always more intense as viewed from Helliconia than that of Star B, though it never appeared so large, owing to its much greater distance. It was a worthy object for ancipital fear—and for Vry’s admiration.

Vry stood alone on the top of her tower, her telescope by her side. She waited. She watched. She felt the history of private relationships flowing towards the morrow like a silt-laden river; what had been fresh was clogged with sediment. Beneath her passivity was an unformulated longing to be seized up by some larger thing which would provide wider, purer perspectives than faulty human nature could command.

When darkness fell, she would look again at the stars—provided the cloud cover parted sufficiently.

Oldorando was now surrounded by palisades of green. Day by day, new leaves unfurled and mounted higher, as if nature had a plan to bury the town in forest. Some of the more distant towers had already been overwhelmed by vegetation.

She saw a large white bird hover above one such mound without paying it particular attention. She watched and admired its effortless hovering above the earth.

Distantly came the sound of men singing. The hunters were back in Oldorando from a hoxney hunt, and Aoz Roon was holding a feast. The feast was in honour of his three new lieutenants, Tanth Ein, Faralin Ferd, and Eline Tal. These friends of his childhood supplanted Dathka and Laintal Ay, who were now relegated to the chase.

Vry tried to keep her thoughts abstract, but they drifted back continually to the more emotional subject of defeated hope—hers, Dathka’s, whose desires she could not find it in herself to encourage, Laintal Ay’s. Her mood was in tune with the long-protracted evening. Batalix was down, the other sentinel would follow in an hour. This was a time when men and beasts made preparations against the reign of night. This was a time to bring out a stub of candle against some undreamed-of emergency, or to resolve to sleep until the light of dawn.

From her eyrie, Vry saw the common people of Oldorando—whether or not further on with their hopes—coming home. Among them was the thin crooked shape of Shay Tal.

Shay Tal returned to the tower with Amin Lim, looking grimy and tired. Since the murder of Master Datnil, she had become increasingly remote. The curse of silence had fallen on her too. She was currently trying to follow a suggestion made by the dead master, to dig her way into King Denniss’s pyramid, out by the sacrificial ground. Despite the aid of slaves, she had no success. People who went to look at the earth-work being thrown up laughed, openly or secretly, for the stepped walls of the pyramid went on down into the earth without feature. For every foot dug, Shay Tal’s mouth grew grimmer.

Moved by both pity and her own loneliness, Vry went down to speak to Shay Tal. The sorceress seemed to have precious little that was magical about her, almost alone among the women of Oldorando, she still wore the old clumsy furs, hanging ungracefully about her body, giving her an outdated air. Everyone else was in hoxneys.

Afflicted by the older woman’s woebegone air, Vry could not resist giving some advice.

“You make yourself so unhappy, ma’am. The ground is full of the dark and the past—do stop scratching there.”

With a flash of humour, Shay Tal said, “We neither of us see happiness as our prime duty.”

“Your attention’s so downcast.” She pointed out of the window. “Look it that white bird, circling gracefully in the air. Doesn’t the sight lift your spirits? I’d like to be that bird, and fly up to the stars.”

Somewhat to Vry’s surprise, Shay Tal went to the window and looked in the direction Vry pointed. Then she turned, brushing her hair from her brow, and said calmly, “You observe it’s a cowbird you pointed out?”

“I suppose so. What of it?” Shadows were already gathering in the room.

“Do you not recall Fish Lake and other encounters? Those birds are the familiars of phagors.”

She spoke placidly, in her detached academy manner. Vry was frightened, thinking how self-absorbed she had been to neglect an elementary fact. She put her hand to her mouth looking from Shay Tal to Amin Lim and back.

“Another attack? What should we do?”

“It appears that I have ceased to communicate with the Lord of Embruddock, or he with me. Vry, you must go and inform him that the enemy may be at his gates while he feasts with his cronies. He will know that I can’t be relied on to forestall the brutes, as once I did. Go right away.”

As Vry hastened down the path, rain started to drip again. She followed the singing. Aoz Roon and his cronies sit in the lowest room in the tower of the metal- makers corps. Their faces were ripe with the food and beethel set before them. A trencher piled with geese stuffed with raige and scantiom formed the chief dish; its aroma made the starved Vry’s mouth water. Those present included the three new lieutenants and their women, the newest master of the council, Raynil Layan, and Dol and Oyre. The last two alone looked pleased at Vry’s entry. As Vry knew—as Rol Sakil had proudly announced—Dol now carried Aoz Roon’s child inside her.

Candles burned already on the tables; dogs milled in the shadows under the tables. Flavours of cooked goose and raw dogs’ piss intermingled.

Although the men were red and shining, despite the piped heating the room felt cold. Rain gusted in, causing streamlets to run between the flags. It was a small dirty room, with cobwebs festooning every corner. Vry took it all in as she broke her news nervously to Aoz Roon.

She had once been familiar with every adze mark on the beams overhead. Her mother had served as a slave to the metal makers, and she had lived in this room, or in a corner of it, and witnessed the degradation of her mother every night.

Although he had looked far gone in drink a moment earlier, Aoz Roon jumped up immediately. Curd started to bark furiously, and Dol kicked him into silence. The other feasters stared at each other rather stupidly, reluctant to digest Vry’s news.

Aoz Roon marched round the table, clouting their shoulders as he issued an order to each.

“Tanth Ein, alert everyone and turn out the hunters. God’s eddre, why aren’t we properly guarded? Mount sentries on all towers, report when all’s done. Faralin Ferd, fetch in all women and children. Lock them in the women’s house for safety. Dol, Oyre, you two remain here, and you other women. Eline Tal, you have the loudest voice—you stay on top of this tower and relay any messages needed… Raynil Layan, you’re in charge of all corps men. Have them paraded at once, go.”

After this rapid fire of orders, he shouted them into action, himself pacing about furiously. Then he turned to Vry, “All right, woman, I want to see the lie of the land for myself. Yours is the northernmost tower—I’ll look from there. Move, everyone, and let’s hope this is a false alarm.”

He set off rapidly down to the door, his great hound bursting past him. With a last glance at the stuffed geese, Vry followed. Soon, shouts resounded among the leprous old buildings. The rain was tapering off. Yellow flowers, abloom in the lanes, unbent their heads and stood erect again.

Oyre ran after Aoz Roon and fell in by his side, smiling despite his growled dismissal. She sprang along in her dark blue and light blue hoxney with something like glee.

“It’s not often I see you unprepared, Father.”

He shot her one of his black looks. She thought merely, He has grown older of late.

At Vry’s tower, he gestured to his daughter to stay, and entered the pile at a run. As he climbed the crumbling steps, Shay Tal emerged on her landing. He spared her only a nod and continued upwards. She followed him to the top, catching his scent.

He stood by the parapet, scrutinising the darkening land. He set his hands in a platform across his eyebrows, elbows out, legs apart. Freyr was low, its light spilling through rifts of western cloud. The cowbird was still circling, and not far distant. No movement could be observed in the bushes beneath its wings.

Shay Tal said from behind his broad back, “There’s only the one bird.”

He gave no answer.

“And so perhaps no phagors.”

Without turning or changing his attitude, he said, “How the place is altered since we were children.”

“Yes. Sometimes I miss all the whiteness.”

When he did turn, it was with an expression of bitterness on his face, which he seemed to remove with an effort.

“Well, there’s evidently little danger. Come and see, if you wish.”

He then went down without hesitation, as if regretting his invitation. Curd stayed close as ever. She followed to where the others waited.

Laintal Ay came up, spear in hand, summoned by the shouting.

He and Aoz Roon glared at each other. Neither spoke. Then Aoz Roon drew out his sword and marched down the path in the direction of the cowbird.

The vegetation was thick. It scattered water over them. The women got the worst of it as the men pressed back boughs which showered in the faces of those who followed.

They turned a bend where young damson trees were growing, trunks thinner than a man’s arm. There was a ruined tower, reduced to two floors and swamped by vegetation. Beside it under the leprous stone, in a tunnel of sullen green gloom, a phagor sat astride a kaidaw.

The cowbird could be seen through branches overhead, croaking a warning.

The humans halted, the women instinctively drawing together. Curd crouched, snarling.

Horny hands resting together on the pommel of its saddle, the phagor sat its tall mount. Its spears trailed behind it in an unprepared way. It widened its cerise eyes and twitched an ear. Otherwise, it made no move.

The rain had soaked the phagor’s fur, which clung about it in heavy grey clumps. A bead of water hung and twinkled at the tip of one forward-curving horn. The kaidaw was also immobile, its head outstretched, its furled horns twisting below its jaws and then up. Its ribs showed, and it was spattered with mud and gashes on which its yellow blood had caked.

The unreal tableau was broken, unexpectedly, by Shay Tal. She pushed past Aoz Roon and Laintal Ay to stand alone on the path in front of them. She raised her right hand above her head in a commanding gesture. No response came from the phagor; it certainly did not turn to ice.

“Come back, ma’am,” called Vry, knowing the magic would not work.

As if under compulsion, Shay Tal moved forward, bringing all her attention to bear on the hostile figure of mount and rider. Twilight was encroaching, light dying: that would be to the advantage of the adversary, whose eyes saw in the dark.

Taking pace after pace forward, she had to raise her eyes to watch the phagor for any unexpected movement. The stillness of the creature was uncanny. Drawing nearer, she saw that this was a female. Heavy brownish dugs showed beneath the soaked fur.

“Shay Tal, get back!” As he spoke, Aoz Roon ran forward, passing her, his sword ready.

The gillot moved at last. She raised a weapon with a curved blade and spurred her mount.

The kaidaw came on with extraordinary speed. At one moment it was still, at the next charging towards the humans down the narrow path, horns first. Screarning, the women dived into the dripping undergrowth. Curd, without being told, raced in, dodging under the kaidaw’s prognathous jaw to nip it in the fetlock.

Baring her gums and incisors, the gillot leaned from her saddle and struck at Aoz Roon. Ducking backwards, he felt the crescent slice by his nose. Farther back down the path, Laintal Ay stuck the butt of his spear in the ground, fell on one knee, and pointed the weapon at the chest of the kaidaw. He crouched before its charge.

But Aoz Roon reached out for the leather girth that was strapped around the animal’s body, clasping it as the brute thundered by. Before the phagor could get in a second swipe, he worked with the momentum of the charge and swung himself up on the kaidaw’s back, behind its mount.

For a second it seemed that he would fall over on the far side. But he hooked his left arm about the gillot’s throat and stayed in place, head well out of reach of the deadly sharp horns.

She swung her head about. Her skull was as heavy as a club. One blow would have knocked the man senseless, but he ducked under her shoulder and tightened his strangehold on her neck.

The kaidaw halted as suddenly as it had started into action, missing Laintal Ay’s point by inches. Beset by Curd, it sheered about, furiously trying to toss the great hound with its horns. As it plunged, Aoz Roon brought up his sword with all the force he could muster, and thrust it between the ribs of the gillot, into her knotted intestines.

She stood up in her leather stirrups and screamed, a harsh, rending noise. She threw up her arms and her curved sword went flying into the nearest branches. Terrified, the kaidaw pranced on its hind legs. The phagor fell free, and Aoz Roon with her. He twisted as they fell, so that she bore the brunt of the tumble. Her left shoulder struck the ground jarringly.

From the dusky sky, the cowbird came swooping in, screeching, to defend its mistress. It dived at Aoz Roon’s face. Curd leapt high and caught it by a leg. It slashed at him with curved beak, it battered his head with furious wings, but he tightened his grip and dragged it to the ground. A quick change of grip and he had its throat. In no time, the great white bird was dead, its pinions sprawled without motion across the muddy path.

The gillot also was dead. Aoz Roon stood over it, panting.

“By the boulder, I’m too fat for this kind of activity,” he gasped. Shay Tal stood apart and wept. Vry and Oyre inspected the dead brute, regarding its open mouth, from which a yellow ichor seeped.

They heard Tanth Ein shouting in the distance, and answering shouts coming nearer. Aoz Roon kicked the gillot’s corpse so that it rolled on to its back, causing a heavy white milt to flop from the jaws. The face was severely wrinkled, the grey skin wormlike where it stretched over bone. The body hair was moulting; patches of bare skin showed.

“It has some filthy disease perhaps,” Oyre said. “That’s why it was so feeble. Let’s get away from it, Laintal Ay. Slaves will bury its corpse.”

But Laintal Ay had dropped to his knees and was uncoiling a rope from the corpse’s waist. He looked up to say grimly, “You wanted me to perform some great deed. Perhaps I can.”

The rope was fine and silken, finer than any rope woven from stungebag fibre in Oldorando. He coiled it about his arm.

Curd was holding the kaidaw at bay. The mount, taller at the shoulder than an average man, stood a-tremble, head high, eyes rolling, making no attempt to escape. Laintal Ay tied a noose in the rope and flung it over the animal’s neck. He drew it tight and approached the trembling creature step by step, until he could pat its flank.

Aoz Roon had recovered his composure. He wiped his sword on his leg and sheathed it as Tanth Ein arrived on the scene.

“We’ll keep watch, but this was a solitary brute—a renegade near death. We have reason for continuing our celebrations, Tanth Ein.”

As they clapped each other’s shoulders, Aoz Roon looked about him. Ignoring Laintal Ay, he concentrated his regard on Shay Tal and Vry.

“We have no quarrel, whatever you imagine to the contrary,” he told the women. “You did well to sound the alarm. Come with Oyre and me and join the festivities—my lieutenants will welcome you.”

Shay Tal shook her head. “Vry and I have other things to do.”

But Vry remembered the stuffed geese. She could still smell them. It would be worth enduring even that hated room for a taste of that superb flesh. She looked in torment at Shay Tal, but her stomach won. She yielded to temptation.

“I’ll come,” she told Aoz Roon, flushing.

Laintal Ay had his hand on the kaidaw’s trembling flank. Oyre stood with him. She turned to her father and said coldly, “I shall not come. I’m happier with Laintal Ay.”

“You please yourself—as usual,” he said, and marched off along the dripping lane with Tanth Ein, leaving the humiliated Vry to follow behind as best she could.

The kaidaw stood tossing its great bracketted head up and down, looking sideways at Laintal Ay.

“I’m going to make a pet of you,” he said. “We shall ride you, Oyre and I, ride you over the plains and mountains.”

They made their way through a gathering crowd, all pressing to see the body of the vanquished enemy. Together, they went back to Embruddock, whose towers stood like decaying teeth against the last rays of Freyr. They walked hand in hand, differences submerged in this decisive moment, pulling the quivering animal after them.