Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [107]
‘They’re too far away to influence us,’ said Shay Tal.
‘Not so. All are Wutra’s. What he does there will influence us.’
‘You were afraid underground,’ said Shay Tal.
‘And I believe the stars scare you, ma’am,’ retorted Vry promptly.
Laintal Ay was amazed to hear this shy young woman, no older than he, drop her usual deferential manner and speak out to Shay Tal in this way; she had changed as much as the weather of late. Shay Tal appeared not to mind.
‘Of what use are the underground passages?’ he asked. ‘What do they signify?’
‘They’re just a relic of some old forgotten past,’ Vry said. ‘The future lies in the heavens.’
But Shay Tal said firmly, ‘They demonstrate what Aoz Roon denies, that this farmyard in which we live was once a grand place, filled with arts and sciences, and people that were better than we. There were more people, there must have been – all now transformed to fessups – dressed grandly, as Loil Bry used to dress. And they had many thoughts like brilliant birds in their heads. We are all that remains, us, with mud in our heads.’
Throughout the conversation, Shay Tal referred ever and again to Aoz Roon, gazing intensely into the dark corner of the room as she spoke.
The cold went, and rains came, then cold again, as if the weather at this period was specially designed to plague the people of Embruddock. The women did their work and dreamed of other places.
The plain was striped by folds which ran roughly in an east-west direction. Remains of snowdrifts still lay cupped in the synclines on northern sides of crests – tattered reminders of the snow desert that had once swathed the whole land. Now green stalks poked through the stippled snow, each stalk creating its own miniature rounded valley over which it was sole ruler.
Against the snow lay gigantic puddles, the most remarkable feature of the new landscape. They barred the entire landscape with parallel fish-shaped lakes, each reflecting fragments of the cloudy sky overhead.
This area had once formed rich hunting grounds. The game had gone with the snows, heading for drier grazing in the hills. In their place were flocks of black birds, wading phlegmatically on the margin of the transient lakes.
Dathka and Laintal Ay sprawled on a ridge, watching some moving figures. Both young hunters were soaked to the skin and in a bad humour. Dathka’s long hard face was creased into a scowl which hid his eyes. Where their fingers pressed into the mud, half-moons of water appeared. All about them were the sipping sounds of hydropic earth. Some way behind, six disappointed hunters squatted on their haunches, concealed behind a ridge; as they waited indifferently for a command from their leaders, their eyes followed birds winging overhead, and they blew softly on their damp thumbs.
The figures being observed were walking eastwards in single file along the top of a ridge, heads low before a fine drizzle. Behind the file lay a broad curve of the Voral. Moored against the Voral’s banks were three boats which had brought the hunters to invade traditional Oldorandan hunting grounds.
The invaders wore heavy leather boots and scoop-shaped hats which betrayed their origins.
‘They’re from Borlien,’ Laintal Ay said. ‘They’ve driven off what game there was. Well have to drive them off.’
‘How? They’re too many.’ Dathka spoke without taking his gaze from the moving figures in the distance. ‘This is our land, not theirs. But there are more than four handsful of them …’
‘There’s one thing we can do: burn their boats. The fools have left only two men behind to guard them. We can deal with them.’
With no game to hunt, they might as well hunt Borlienians.
From one of the southerners they had recently captured, they knew the state of unrest that prevailed in Borlien. The people there lived in mud buildings, generally two stories high, with the animals below and their owners above. Recent unprecedented rains had washed the huts out of existence; whole populations were homeless.
As Laintal Ay’s party made its way towards