by Brian Aldiss
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 hoxneys 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 rumps 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, whinnying, 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 he 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 decked 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 friend’s 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 betw
een 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.’