by Brian Aldiss
Only when she heard the squelch of three pairs of boots retreating did she deign to glance out the window. She watched his broad back as he trudged with his young lieutenants towards the north gate, Curd trotting at his heel. She understood his loneliness. None better.
As his woman, she would surely not have lost stature, or whatever it was she valued so highly. Too late to think of that now. The rift was between them, and an empty-headed doll kept his bed warm.
“You’d better all go home,” she said, afraid to look directly at the women.
When they got back to the muddy main square, Aoz Roon ordered Laintal Ay to stay away from the academy.
Lainfal Ay flushed. “Isn’t it time that you and the council gave up your prejudice against the academy? I hoped you’d think better of it since the miracle of Fish Lake. Why upset the women? They’ll hate you for it. The worst the academy can do is keep the women content.”
“It makes the women idle. It causes division.”
Laintal Ay looked at Dathka for support, but Dathka was gazing at his boots. “It’s more likely to be your attitude that causes division, Aoz Roon. Knowledge never hurt anyone; we need knowledge.”
“Knowledge is slow poison—you’re too young to understand. We need discipline. That’s how we survive and how we always have survived. You stay away from Shay Tal—she exerts an unnatural power over people. Those who don’t work in Oldorando get no food. That’s always been the rule. Shay Tal and Vry have ceased working the boilery, so in future they will have nothing to eat. We’ll see how they like that.”
“They’ll starve.”
Aoz Roon drew his brows together and glared at Laintal Ay, “We will all starve if we do not cooperate. Those women have to be brought to heel, and I will not tolerate you siding with them. Argue with me any more and I’ll knock you down.”
When Aoz Roon had gone, Laintal Ay gripped Dathka’s shoulder. “He is getting worse. It’s his personal battle with Shay Tal. What do you think?”
Dathka shook his head. “I don’t think. I do what I’m told.”
Laintal Ay regarded his friend sarcastically. “And what are you told to do now?”
“I’m going up by the brassimips patch. We’ve killed a stungebag.” He exhibited a bleeding hand.
“I’ll be there in a while.”
He walked by the Voral, idly watching the geese swimming and parading, before following his friend. He thought to himself that he understood both Aoz Roon’s and Shay Tal’s points of view. To live, all had to cooperate, yet was it worth living if they merely cooperated? The conflict oppressed him and made him long to leave the hamlet—as he would do if only Oyre were to agree to come with him. He felt that he was too young to understand how the argument, the growing division, would resolve itself. Slyly, seeing nobody was looking, he brought out from his pocket a carved dog given him long ago by the old priest from Borlien. He held it forward and worked its tail. The dog began to bark furiously at nearby geese.
Someone else was wending her way towards the brassimips and heard the imitation dog bark. Vry saw Laintal Ay’s back between two towers. She did not intrude on him, for that was not her way.
She skirted the hot springs and the Hour-Whistler. An easterly breeze took the steam from the waters as it emerged from the ground, to blow it hissing across wet rock. Vry’s furs were pearled with a bead of moisture at every hair end.
The waters ran gargling, yellow and chalky in their crevices, full of an infectious fury to be somewhere. She squatted down on a rock and absentmindedly dipped her hand in a spring. Hot water ran up her fingers and explored her palm.
Vry licked the liquid off her fingers. She knew the sulphurous flavour from childhood. Children were playing here now, calling to each other, running across slippery rock without falling, agile as arangs.
The more adventurous children ran naked, despite the stiff breeze, inserting their androgynous bodies into clefts between rocks. Spurning waters cascaded up their stomachs and over their shoulders.
“Here comes the Whistler,” they called to Vry. “Look out, missus, or you’ll get a soaking.” They laughed heartily at the thought.
Taking the warning, Vry moved away. She thought that a stranger here would credit the children with a sixth sense, able to predict exactly when the Hour- Whistler blew.
Up it went, a solid column of water, muddy for a moment then brilliant pure. Ascending, it whistled on an ascending note—its unvarying note, sustained for an unvarying duration. The water sailed upwards to about three times the height of a man before falling back. The wind curved the jet towards the west, hammering the rocks where Vry had squatted a moment earlier.
The whistle stopped. The column died back into the black lips of earth from which it had sprung.
Vry waved to the children and continued up the brassimip track. She knew how they knew when the geyser was about to blow. She still remembered the thrill of wriggling naked between ochre rocks, plugging one’s body into the streaming earth, toes among hot slimes, flesh tickled by bursting bubbles. When the hour was near, a tremor shook the ground. One wedged oneself into the rock and felt in every fibre the strength of the earth gods as they tensed themselves to deliver their triumphant ejaculation of hot liquids.
The path she followed was trodden mainly by women and pigs. It wandered hither and thither, unlike straighter paths created by hunters, since its course had been dictated largely by that wayward creature, the hairy black sow of Embruddock. To follow the direction in which the track tended was to arrive eventually at Lake Dorzin; but the path ceased long before that, at the brassimip patch. The rest of the way was still a wilderness of marsh and frost.
As she moved up the path, Vry wondered if all things aspired to a highest level, and if there was a competing force trying to drag them to the lowest. One looked up to the stars, one ended as a gossie, a fessup. The Hour-Whistler was an embodiment of the two opposed forces. Its spouting waters always fell back to earth. In her unobtrusive way, she willed her spirit to soar to the sky, the region she studied without Shay Tal’s aid, the place of sublime movement, the riddling place of stars and suns, of as many secret passages as the body.
Two men came towards her. She could see little of them but legs, elbows, and the tops of their heads, as they staggered downhill under heavy loads. She could identify Sparat Lim by his spindly legs. The men were carrying slabs of stungebag. After them came Dathka, carrying only a spear.
Dathka gave her a grin of welcome and stood to one side of the path, surveying her with his dark eyes. His right hand was bloody, and a thin trail of blood ran down the spear shaft.
“We killed a stunge,” he said, and that was all. As usual, Vry was both embarrassed and comforted by his lack of words. It was pleasant that he never boasted, unlike many of the young hunters, less pleasant that he never revealed his thoughts. She tried to feel something for him.
She halted. “It must have been a big one.”
“I’ll show you.” He added, “If you’ll let me.”
He turned back along the track and she followed, unsure whether she ought to speak or not. But that was silly, she told herself; she understood perfectly that Dathka desired to communicate with her.
She blurted out the first thing that came into her head.
“How do you account for human beings in the world, Dathka?”
Without a backward glance, he said, “We came up from the original boulder.” He spoke without the consideration she would have wished him to give to such an important matter, and there the conversation languished.
She regretted that there were no priests in Oldorando; she could have talked to them. Legends and songs related that Embruddock had once had its fair share of priests, administering an elaborate religion which united Wutra with the living of this world and the fessups of the world below. One dark season before Wall Ein Den ruled, when breath froze to people’s lips as it issued forth, the population rose and slew the priesthood. Sacrifices had ceased from then o
n, except on festival days. The old god, Akha, was no longer worshipped. No doubt a body of learning had also been lost. The temple had been stripped. Now pigs were housed in it. Perhaps other enemies of knowledge had been about, when pigs were preferred to priests.
She risked another question of the ascending back.
“Do you wish you understood the world?”
“I do,” it said.
She was left wrestling with the brevity of the reply; did he understand or did he wish he understood, she asked herself.
The forces that had thrown up the Quzint Mountains had folded the earth in all directions, causing attendant deformations like buttresses, like the roots of trees, to extend outwards for many miles from the mountains themselves. Between two such rocky extrusions grew a line of brassimips which had long been essential to the local economy. Today, the plot was a scene of mild excitement, and several women were clustered round the open tops of the brassimips, warming themselves and herding their pigs while watching the work in progress.
Dathka indicated that this was where the stungebag was killed.
His gesture was scarcely necessary. The carcass lay about in piles, sprawling up the desolate hillside. Towards its tall, Aoz Roon himself was investigating it, his yellow hound about his heels. The stubby legs of the immense corpse pointed into the air, fringed by stiff black hairs and spines.
A group of men waited about the body, laughing and talking. Goija Hin supervised the slaves, human and phagorian, who wielded axes. They were splitting the fibrous carcass into slabs that could be carried down to the hamlet. They stood up to their knees in coir and woody sections of the stungebag’s flesh. Great splinters flew as they dismembered the remains.
Two older women dodged about with buckets, gathering up spongey white entrails. They would boil the mess down later to distill a coarse sugar from it. The coir would be used for ropes and mats, the flesh for fuel for the various corps.
From the paddlelike digging paws of the stungebag, oils would be extracted to form a narcotic called rungebel.
The older women were exchanging impolite remarks with the men, who grinned and stood in nonchalant poses about the hillside. It was unusual for stungebags to venture near human habitation. The beasts were easy to kill, and every part of them was useful to the fragile economy. The present kill was thirty metres long, and would benefit the community for days to come.
Pigs ran squealing round Vry’s feet as they rooted among the fibrous debris. Their swineherds were working below in the brassimips. Nothing of the giant trees was visible above ground except heavy fungoid leaves, cossetting the earth with their twisted growth pattern. The leaves stirred like elephant ears, not from the prevailing breeze but from draughts of warm air blowing out of the crowns of the trees.
A dozen brassimips formed the patch. The tree rarely grew singly. The soil about each tree bulged upwards and was starred with cracks, suggesting the considerable bulk of vegetation below. The heat that the trees syphoned up to their leaf system enabled the plants to thaw frozen ground, so that they continued to grow even in permafrost conditions.
Jassiklas lived under the leathery leaves. They took advantage of the sheltering warmth to put forth timid brown-blue flowers. As Vry stooped to pick one, Dathka returned to her side and spoke.
“I’m going into the tree.”
She construed this as an invitation to join him, and followed. A slave was pulling up leather buckets full of chips from the interior and throwing them to the pigs. Pulped brassimip chips had fed Embruddock’s pigs through the dark centuries.
“That’s what attracted the stungebag,” Vry said. The monstrous animals were as fond of brassimip as the pigs.
A wood ladder led into the tree. As she followed Dathka down, her eyes came for a moment level with the ground. As if drowning in earth, she saw the leather leaves waving about her. Beyond the backs of the pigs were the men, fur-clad, standing among the wreckage of the giant stungebag. There was snowy high ground and a sky of slate over all. She climbed down into the tree.
Warm air assailed her cheeks, making her blink, carrying with it a perfumed rotting smell that both repelled and attracted her. The air had come from a long way down; brassimip roots bored far into the crust. With age, the core of the tree commenced a fermenting process which released a hardening substance resembling keratin. A tube formed through the centre of the tree. A heat pump was established, warming leaves and underground branches with heat trapped at lower levels.
This favourable environment created a refuge for several sorts of animal, some decidedly nasty.
Dathka reached out a hand to steady Vry. She climbed off the ladder beside him and stood in a bulb-shaped natural chamber. Three dirty-looking women were working there. They greeted Vry, then went on scraping chips of brassimip flesh from the walls of the trees, loading them into the bucket.
Brassimip had a flavour rather like parsnip or turnip, but was bitter. Humans ate it only in times of starvation. Normally, it made pig feed—in particular, feed for the sows whose milk went to the making of rathel, Oldorando’s staple winter drink.
A narrow gallery opened to one side. It led into the topmost branch of the tree, the leaves of which would surface in a bunch some distance away. Mature brassimips had six branches. The topmost branches were generally left to grow without interference; being nearest to the surface, they harboured a variety of sheltering nasties.
Dathka indicated the central tube going down into the darkness. He climbed down. After a moment’s hesitation, Vry followed, and the women paused in their labours to watch her go, smiling part in sympathy, part in mockery. Directly she got into the tube, it was completely dark. Below was only the eternal night of earth. She thought that she, like Shay Tal, was having to descend into the world of fessups to gather knowledge, despite her protests.
The tube was marked by growth rings which formed ridges. The ridges were used as steps. The tube was narrow enough for anyone ascending or descending to plant her back securely against the opposite side of the tube.
Rising air whispered in their ears. A cobwebby thing, a living ghost, brushed Vry’s cheek. She resisted an impulse to scream.
They climbed down to a point where the second branches left the main trunk. Here the bulb-shaped chamber was even smaller than the one above; they stood close, heads together. Vry could smell Dathka and feel his body against hers. Something stirred in her.
“See the lights?” Dathka said.
There was tension in his voice. She fought with herself, terrified by the lust that flooded her. Should he lay a finger on her, this silent man, she would fall into his arms, would rip away her furs, strip herself naked, fall copulating with him in the dark subterranean bed. Obscenely delightful images filled her.
“I want to go up again,” she said, forcing the words from her throat.
“Don’t be scared. Look at the lights.”
In a daze, she looked about, still catching his scent. She was staring into the second branch down from the surface. There spots of light, starlike—galaxies of red stars, imprisoned in the tree.
He shuffled in front of her, eclipsing constellations with his shoulder. He thrust something pillowlike into her arms. It was light, covered with what she took for coir, as stiff as the hairs of a stungebag. Its star eyes looked unwinkingly up at her. In her confused state she did not identify it.
’What is it?”
For answer—perhaps he felt her desire after all; but could he make no stronger response, if so?—Dathka stroked her face with a clumsy tenderness.
“Oh, Dathka,” she sighed. Trembling took her, beginning from the viscera and spreading through her eddre. She could not control herself.
“We’ll take it up. Don’t be scared.”
The black-haired pigs were scuttling among the brassimip leaves as they emerged into daylight. The world seemed blindingly bright, the ring of axes intolerably loud, the scent of jassiklas unduly strong.
Vry sank down and listlessly
regarded the small crystalline animal she held. It was in a state like the phagor’s tether, curled into a ball with its nose tucked into its tail, its four legs folded neatly into its stomach. It was immobile, and felt as if made of glass. She could not uncurl it. Its eyes fixed her with a remote gaze, unwinking between immobile lids. Through its dusty grey coat, striations of faded colour showed.
In some way, she hated it, as she hated him—so insensitive to a woman’s feelings that he had mistaken her trembling for the vibrations of fear. Yet she was grateful that his stupidity had prevented her from certain disgrace, grateful and resentful.
“It’s a glossy,” Dathka said, squatting by her, looking aslant into her face as if puzzled.
“A gossie?” For a moment she wondered if he was trying to be uncharacteristically funny.
“A glossy. They hibernate in the brassimips, where it’s warm. Take it home.”
“Shay Tal and I have seen them west of the river. Hoxneys. That’s what they’re called when they emerge from hibernation.” And what would Shay Tal have thought if …
“Take it,” he repeated. “A present from me.”
“Thank you,” she said, with contempt. She rose, emotions in place again.
She found she had blood on her cheek, where he had stroked her with his cut hand.
The slaves were still hacking away at the monstrous carcass. Laintal Ay had arrived, and was talking to Tanth Ein and Aoz Roon. The latter summoned Dathka vigorously, waving his hand over his head in command. With a resigned look of farewell to Vry, Dathka made off towards the Lord of Embruddock.
The busy things men did were nothing to her. She tucked the glossy between her arm and her shallow bosom and turned downhill towards the distant towers.
When she heard the sound of someone running to catch her up, she said to herself, Well, he’s too late now, but it was Laintal Ay.
“I’ll walk down with you, Vry,” he said. As she remarked, he seemed in a carefree mood.