by Brian Aldiss
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 advan
ce 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 agains
t 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.