Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [117]
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 on, 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 tail, 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 distil 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