by Brian Aldiss
Luterin Shokerandit helped Toress Lahl down from the sledge. The churn of snowflakes had confused her. She stood with bowed shoulder, sheltering her eyes.
‘Where are we?’
‘Home.’
She saw nothing, only the animal dark, rolling, rolling towards her. Dimly, she made out Shokerandit, a bear walking, as he staggered towards the front of the sledge. There he embraced both Uuundaamp and the Ondod mother, clutching her infant into the coloured blanket.
Uuundaamp lifed his whip in farewell and flashed his unreliable smile. Came the jar-jar of his warning bell, the slice of his whip over the team, and the outfit was swallowed immediately by the whirling murk.
Bent almost double, Shokerandit and Toress Lahl made their way to a gate beyond which a dim light burned. He pulled a metal bell handle. They leaned exhaustedly against the stone pillar of the gate until a muffled military figure appeared from a shelter somewhere beyond the bars. The gate swung open.
They sheltered, panting, saying nothing to each other, until the guard returned after securing the gate and scrutinised them under his lantern.
The guard’s lineaments were those of an old soldier. His mouth was tight, his gaze evaded other eyes, his expression gave nothing away. He stood his ground and asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘You’re speaking to a Shokerandit, man. Where are your wits?’
The challenging tone made the guard look more closely. With no change of expression, he said finally, ‘You wouldn’t be Luterin Shokerandit?’
‘Have I been away that long, you fool? Will you stand there and have me freeze?’
The man allowed his glance to take in Luterin’s metamorphosed bulk in one mute, insulting glare. ‘A cab to take you up the drive, sir.’
As he turned away, Luterin, still nettled at not being recognised, said, ‘Is my father in residence?’
‘At present not, sir.’
The guard put his free hand to the side of his mouth and bawled to a slave lurking at the rear of the guardhouse. In a short while, the cabriolet appeared through the blizzard, drawn by two yelk already encrusted in snow.
It was a mile from the gate to the ancient house, through land still known as the Vineyard. Now it was rough pasturage, where a local strain of yelk was bred.
Shokerandit alighted. The snow whirled round the corner of the house as if personally interested in turning them to ice. The woman closed her eyes and clutched Shokerandit’s skins. Following ghostly materialisations of the structure, they climbed steps to the iron-banded front door. Above them sounded the dismal tolling bell, long drawn out, like a sound heard underwater. Other bells, drowning farther off, added their tongues.
The door opened. Dim guardian figures showed, helping the two new arrivals inside. The snow ceased, the roaring and clanging ceased, as bolts were shot home behind them.
In an echoing darkened hall, Shokerandit exchanged words with a servant unseen. A lamp glittered high on a marble wall, not yielding its illumination beyond the frosty surface which reflected it. They padded upstairs, each step with its own protesting noise. A heavy curtain was drawn back as if to abet the powers of darkness and stealth. They entered. While the woman stood, the servant lit a light and quit the room, bowing.
The room smelt dead. Shokerandit turned up the wick of his lamp. An impression of space, a low ceiling, shutters ineffectively barring out the night, a bed … They struggled out of their filthy garments.
They had been travelling for thirty-one days and, since Sharagatt, had been allowed only six and a half hours of sleep a day, rarely more, sometimes less, according to whether Uuundaamp considered the police were closing on them. Their faces were blackened by frost and lined by exhaustion.
Toress Lahl took a blanket from a couch and prepared to lie beside the bed. He climbed into the bed and beckoned her to join him.
‘You sleep with me now,’ he said.
She stood before him, her expression still dazed from the journey. ‘Tell me what place we are in now.’
He smiled. ‘You know where we are. This is my father’s house in Kharnabhar. Our troubles are over. We are safe here. Get in.’
She attempted a smile in return. ‘I am your slave and so I obey, master.’
She got in beside him. Her answer did not satisfy him, but he put his arms about her and made love to her. After which, he fell asleep immediately.
When she awoke, Shokerandit had gone. She lay gazing at the ceiling, wondering what he was trying to demonstrate by leaving her on her own. She felt herself unable to move from the comfortable bed, to face the challenges that would have to be met. Luterin was well disposed to her, and more than that; she had no doubts on that score. For him, she could feel only hatred. His casual handing over of her to the animal who drove the sledge, a humiliation still fresh in her mind, was merely the latest of his coarse treatments. Of course, she reflected, he did not do these things to her personally; he was merely conforming to fashion and treating her as slaves were treated.
She had good reason to hope that he might restore her social status. She would be a slave no more. But if that entailed marrying him, her husband’s murderer, she did not think she could go through with it, even to ensure her own safety.
To make matters worse, she felt a dread of this place to which she had been brought. A spirit seemed to brood over it, chill, hostile.
She rolled over unhappily in the great bed, to discover that a female slave was waiting silently, kneeling by the door. Toress Lahl sat up, pulling the sheet over her naked breasts.
‘What are you doing there?’
‘Master Luterin sent me in to attend you and bathe you when you woke, lady.’ The girl bowed her head as she spoke.
‘Don’t call me lady. I am a slave just as you are.’
But the response merely embarrassed the girl. Resigning herself to the situation and half-amused, Toress Lahl climbed naked from the bed. She raised an imperious hand.
‘Attend me!’ she said.
Nodding compliantly, the girl came forward and escorted Toress Lahl to a bathroom, where warm water ran from a brass tap. The whole mansion was heated by biogas, the slave explained, and the water too.
As Toress Lahl reclined in the luxurious water, she surveyed her body. It had grown less bulky with the rigours of the journey. Down both sides of her thighs, the scratches inflicted by Uuundaamp’s claws were slowly healing. Rather worse, she suspected that she might be pregnant. By whom she could not say, but she thanked the Beholder that matings between Ondods and humans were never fertile.
Borldoran and her home town of Oldorando were thousands of miles away. If she ever saw the pleasant land of her birth again, she would be more than lucky. A female slave’s life was generally wretched and short. She thought to ask the girl attending her about that, then considered it wiser to hold her tongue. If Luterin married her, she would be a thousand times better off.
What would he say? Would he ask her? Tell her? She would have to go through with it, whatever he did.
After the maid had dried her, she put on a satara gown provided for her. She sank back on the bed and delivered herself into a state of pauk. It was the first time that she had descended into the world of the gossies since leaving Rivenjk. There below her, in obsidian where all decisions had finally been made, waited the spark of her dead husband, calling her to him.
*
The estate looked as beautiful as ever. The continuing wind from the north had blown most of the night’s snow into drifts. Exposed areas were clear. To the south of every tree lay a line of snow, fine honed as a bird’s bone. The Chief Steward, an agreeable man Luterin had known since his childhood, accompanied him on his survey. Ordinary life was beginning again.
Great caspiarns and brassimips stood in wind-deflecting parade. On all sides, distant or near, rose snowy peaks, the daughters of the chain, generally sulking in cloud. To the north, the cloud allowed glimpses of the Holy Mountain, in which was the Great Wheel. Luterin broke off the c
onversation to raise his gloved hand in salute.
He wore a warm greatcoat over his clothes, and had attached his hip-bell to his belt. In the stable yard, slaves naked to the waist had brought a young gunnadu for him to ride. These two-legged, large-eared creatures balanced themselves by means of long tails, and ran on clawed birdlike feet. Like the yelk and biyelk with which they associated in the wild, the gunnadu were necrogenes. Thus they belonged to a category of animal which could give birth only through its own death. Luterin’s mother had said bitterly to him once, ‘Not unlike humanity.’ Gunnadu were without wombs; the sperm developed into grubs inside the stomach, where they fed, working outwards until reaching an artery. From there they exploded throughout the maternal body, causing rapid death. The grubs pupated through several stages, feeding on the carrion, until of a size to survive in the outside world as small gunnadu.
Fully grown gunnadu made docile mounts, but tired easily. They were ideal for short journeys, such as an inspection of the Shokerandit estate.
He felt himself safe here. The police would never enter one of the great estates. While his father was away enjoying the hunt, Luterin was in charge. Despite his long absence, despite his metamorphosis, he fell into the role with ease. From the Chief Steward down to the lowest slave, everyone knew him. It was absurd to think of any other life. And he was the perfect only son.
He had duties. Those he would attend to. He must introduce Toress Lahl to his mother. And he would have to speak to Insil Esikananzi; that might be a little awkward … Meanwhile, there were more important duties.
He had matured. He caught himself reflecting that it was no bad thing that his father was absent. Always before this, he had missed him. Lobanster Shokerandit’s word hereabouts was law, as it was with his one remaining son. But the formidable Keeper of the Wheel was frequently absent. He liked to live rough, he said, and his hunting trips took up two or three tenners at a time. Off he would go, taking his dogs and his yelk with him. Sometimes he went accompanied only by his mute hunt captain, Liparotin. A farewell wave and he would be away, into the trackless wilds.
From his childhood, Luterin remembered that casual gesture of the hand upraised. Less a sign of love for him and his mother as they watched him depart, more a sign of acknowledgement to the spirit which presided over the lonely mountains.
Luterin had grown up missing his father. His withdrawn mother was hardly compensating company. Once he had insisted on accompanying his father and his brother, Favin. He had been proud then, among the proud caspiarns; but Lobanster had appeared vexed with his sons, and they had returned home after no more than a week away.
He sniffed. He told himself that he too was a solitary, like his father. And then his thoughts swung back to Harbin Fashnalgid, last seen when Uuundaamp had turned him off the sledge. Only now did he realise he liked Fashnalgid, and should try to do something for him. His jealous anger at the man for possessing Toress Lahl was over.
Now he could recall Harbin uttering his unseemly oath, and smile. What an outcast the man was! Perhaps that was why it rankled when he called Luterin a victim of the system, or whatever the phrase was. The captain also had had a good side to his nature.
He and the Chief Steward visited the stungebag enclosure. The slow creatures were much as he remembered them. It was said that the Shokerandits had bred stungebags through four Great Years. The stungebags looked like badly thatched caterpillars or, when stretched to their full length, like fallen trees. They were combined animal and plant, a sport born at the melting time when the planet was showered by high-energy radiation.
Slaves were working in the hoxney paddock. Droves of hoxneys had once roved the uplands. Now they were starting to go into hibernation. In one of the corners of the estate, slaves were collecting the animals and storing them away in dry barns, prising them out of the nooks and crannies in which they had hidden. The animals relapsed swiftly into a shrunken, glassy state, their energies draining. They would come to resemble small translucent figures. Already, some were losing their dull brown colour and exhibiting colourful horizontal stripes, as they had done in the Great Spring.
In the hibernatory state, the hoxneys were known as glossies, perhaps not only for their shine, but because, like gossies, they were not entirely dead.
The estate manager, a freeman, came up and touched his hat.
‘Glad to see you back, master. We’re packing the glossies with hay between, as you may observe, to protect the creatures. They should be all right when spring arrives, if so happen it ever does.’
‘It’ll come. It’s only a matter of centuries.’
‘So you scholars say,’ said the man, with a conspiratorial grin at the steward.
‘The principle is to organise for spring now. By storing these hoxneys safely, instead of leaving them to the vagaries of nature, we guarantee a good riding herd when the time comes.’
‘ ’Twill be long past our lifetimes.’
‘Someone will be here, I don’t doubt, to be grateful for our providence.’
But he spoke absentmindedly, with Fashnalgid still on his mind.
When he got back to the mansion, he summoned his father’s secretary, a learned withdrawn man called Evanporil. He gave Evanporil instructions that four armed liegemen were to be sent on two giant biyelk as far down the road as Noonat, to seek out Fashnalgid if he was to be found. Fashnalgid was to be brought back to the safety of the Shokerandit estate. The secretary left about his task.
Luterin ate some lunch, and only then thought that he should visit his mother.
The hall of the great house was gloomy. There were no windows on the lower floor, so as to render the structure more impervious to ice, snow, and flood. A great heavy chair stood empty on the marble tiling; as far as Luterin knew, no one had ever sat in it.
Between the dim wall lamps, fed from the biogas chambers, skulls of phagors projected from the walls. These were specimens that Lobanster and other Shokerandits before him had killed. They remained now with their horns held high, their shadowed eye sockets observing with melancholy the far recesses of the hall.
He paused on the way to his mother’s quarters, aware of an uproar outside. Someone was shouting in a thick drunken voice. Shokerandit ran for a side door, hip-bell clattering. A slave hastily flung back the bolts to allow him passage.
In a court overlooked by the upper windows of the mansion, a liegeman and two freemen were brandishing swords. They had cornered six dehorned phagors. One of the phagors, a gillot with thin withered dugs which spoke of years in captivity, was calling out in a hoarse voice, in Sibish, ‘You not to kill, you vile Sons of Freyr! This Hrl-Ichor Yhar come back belong to us, the ancipitals! Stop! Stop!’
‘Stop!’ Shokerandit said.
The men had already killed one of the ahumans. A swordsman had disembowelled a stallun with a downward slash of his sword. Ancipital eddre lodged in their carcasses above their lungs. As Shokerandit bent over the corpse, which was still in spasm, the intestines slithered forth on a tide of yellow blood.
The mass loosened itself and began slowly to evacuate the cavern of the ribs like a concoction of soft-boiled eggs in jelly. Beige shadows ran between little glistening mounds which came creeping out of the wound like a living mass, flowing thickly over the flags and into the cracks between the flags, flowing until all poured forth, separate organs no longer distinguishable in the general exodus, leaving a hollow behind them.
Shokerandit tugged back the dead creature’s ear to expose its blaze mark.
He glared at the men.
‘These are our slave ancipitals. What are you doing?’
The liegeman was scowling. ‘Best mind out the way, master. Orders are to kill off all phagors, whether ours or otherwise.’
The five phagors began shouting hoarsely and scrambling to get past the men, who immediately brought their swords to the ready.
‘Stop. Drikstalgil, who gave you these orders?’ He remembered the liegeman’s name.
Keepi
ng one eye on the ancipitals and his sword ready, the liegeman dipped into his left pocket and brought out a folded paper.
‘Secretary Evanporil issued me this this morning. Now, stand back, if you would not mind, master, or you’ll get crushed.’
He handed Shokerandit a poster, which Shokerandit flapped open with an angry gesture. It was printed in heavy black letters.
The poster announced that a New Act had been passed, in a further attempt to keep down the Plague known as the Fat Death. The Ancipital Race had been identified as the main Carrier of the Plague. All Phagors must therefore be killed. Phagor slaves must be put down. Wild Phagors should be shot on sight. A bounty would be paid of One Sib per ancipital head by the appropriate authority in each District. Henceforth, the possession of Phagors was illegal, under Penalty of Death. By Order of the Oligarch.
‘Put up your swords until I give you further orders,’ Shokerandit said. ‘No more killing till I say so. And get this corpse away from here.’
When the men reluctantly did as he instructed, Shokerandit went back into the house, marching angrily upstairs to see the secretary.
The mansion was full of ancient prints, many of them engraved by a steel process in Rivenjk, when that city had boasted an artistic colony. Most of the prints depicted scenes suitable to wild mountainous areas: hunters coming unexpectedly upon bears in clearings, bears coming unexpectedly upon hunters, stags at bay, men mounted on yelk leaping into chasms, women being stabbed in gloomy forests, lost children dying in pairs upon exposed crags.
Beside the secretary’s door was a print of a soldier-priest on guard before the very portals of the Great Wheel. He stood stiffly upright while spearing to death an immense phagor which had leaped from a hole to attack him. The engraving was entitled – the Sibish lettering executed with many a curlicue – ‘An Old Antagonism’.