Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [143]
‘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 between 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,