Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [264]
Motion and murmur flowed past him. Suddenly, there was his sign!
‘Oh, I thank you!’ he exclaimed, and moved forward.
One of the Madis, a female driving arang, had turned her gaze away from the trail, to look directly at him, giving him the Look of Acceptance. It was an anonymous look, gone as soon as it came, a gleam of intelligence not to be sustained. He fell in beside the female, but she paid him no further attention; the Look had been passed.
He had become a part of the Ahd.
With the migrants went their animals, pack animals such as the yelk, trapped in the animals’ great summer grazing grounds, as well as the semi-domesticated animals: several kinds of arang, sheep, and fhlebiht – all hoofed animals – together with dogs and asokins, which seemed as dedicated to the migratory life as their masters.
The youth, who called himself only Roba and detested the title of prince, remembered with scorn how the bored ladies of his father’s court would yawn and wish they were ‘as free as the wandering Madi’. The Madi, with no more consciousness than a clever dog, were enslaved by the pattern of their lives.
Every day, camp was struck before dawn. At sunrise, the tribe would be off, moving to an untidy pattern. Throughout the day, rest periods occurred along the column, but the rests were brief and took no account of whether two suns or one ruled in the sky. Roba became convinced that such matters did not enter their minds; they were eternally bound to the trail.
Some days, there were obstacles on the route, a river to be crossed, a mountainside. Whatever it was, the tribe would accomplish it in their undemonstrative way. Often a child was drowned, an old person killed, a sheep lost. But the Ahd went on, and the harmony of their discourse did not cease.
At Batalix-set, the tribe came to a slow halt.
Then were chanted over and over the two words that meant ‘water’ and ‘wool’. If there was a Madi god, he was composed of water and wool.
The men saw to it that all the animals of their herd had water before they prepared the main meal of the day. The women and girls took down crude looms from their pack animals and on them wove rugs and garments of dyed wool.
Water was their necessity, wool their commodity.
‘Water is Ahd, wool is Ahd.’ The song had no precision, but it recognised truth.
The men sheared the wool from their animals and dyed it, the women from the age of four walked along the trail teasing the wool onto their distaffs. All the articles they made were made from wool. The wool of the long-legged fhlebiht was finest and went to make satara gowns fit for queens.
The woven articles were either stowed on pack animals or else worn by male and female alike under their drab outer garments. Later, they were traded at a town along the route, Distackc, Yicch, Oldorando, Akace …
After the evening meal, eaten as dusk thickened, all the tribe slept huddled together, male, female, animal.
The females came on heat rarely. When it was the time of the female Roba travelled with, she turned to him for her satisfaction, and he found delight in that fluttering embrace. Her orgasms were marked by peals of song.
The path the Madis took was as pre-ordained as the pattern of their days. They journeyed to the east or to the west by different trails; those trails sometimes crossed, sometimes wandered a hundred miles apart. A journey in one direction took an entire small year, so that such knowledge of passing time as they had was spoken of in terms of distance – that understanding was Roba’s entry point into hr’Madi’h.
That the Journey had been in progress for centuries, and perhaps for centuries before that, was evidenced by the flora growing along its way. These flower-faced creatures, who owned nothing but their animals, nevertheless dropped things all along their route. Faeces and seeds were scattered. As they walked, the women were in the habit of plucking herbs and plants such as afram,