Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [139]
After a moment, the old man said, in a light conversational tone, ‘That’s enough sunlight. We can go in again.’
On the way up to his room, he stopped on the third floor of the tower. This was the assembly room of his corps, smelling strongly of leather. He stood listening. All was silent.
‘I wanted to make sure that my chief boy was out. Come in here.’
Off the landing was a small room. Master Datnil pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, looking round once more, anxiously. Catching Shay Tal’s eye, he said, ‘I don’t want anyone butting in. What I’m about to do in sharing the secrets of our corps carries the death penalty, as you understand. Ancient though I may be, I want the last few years of my life out.’
She looked round as she stepped into the small cubbyhole off the assembly room with him. For all their caution, neither of them saw Raynil Layan – as chief boy of the corps, due to inherit Master Datnil’s mantle when the old man retired. He stood in the shadows, behind a post supporting the wooden stair. Raynil Layan was a cautious, precise man, whose manner was always circumspect; he stood at this moment absolutely rigid, without breathing, showing no more movement than the post that partly protected him from view.
When the master and Shay Tal had entered the cubbyhole and closed the door behind them, Raynil Layan moved with some alacrity, his step light for so large a man. He applied his eye to a crack between two boards which he had engineered himself some while ago, the better to observe the movements of the man he would supplant.
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