Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [55]
Three other people in the room appeared dominated by Loil Bry and her shadow. On a couch in one corner lay Little Yuli, his chin jutting above the furs that covered him. He was twenty-nine years old, and worn out. The old man was muttering. Loilanun, Laintal Ay’s mother, sat next to him, clutching her elbows with her hands, a woebegone look on her sallow face. She had not yet noticed her son. The man from Borlien, Father Bondorlonganon, sat nearest Laintal Ay, his eyes closed, praying aloud.
It was the prayer as much as anything which halted Laintal Ay. Normally he loved to be in this room, full of his grandmother’s mysteries. Loil Bry knew so many fascinating things, and to some extent took the place of Laintal Ay’s father, who had been killed while on a stungebag hunt.
Stungebags contributed to the foetid honey smell in the room. One of the monsters had been caught recently, and brought home bit by bit. Broken shards of plating, chopped from its back, helped fuel the fire and keep the cold at bay. The pseudo-wood burned with a yellow flame, sizzling as it burned.
Laintal Ay looked at the west wall. There was his grandmother’s porcelain window. Faint light from outside transfused it with a sullen orange glow, scarcely competition for the firelight.
‘It looks funny in here,’ he said at last.
He came up one more step, and the bright eyes of the brazier gleamed at him.
The father unhurriedly finished his prayer to Wutra and opened his eyes. Netted among the compressed horizontal lines of his face, they were unable to open far, but he fixed them gently on the boy and said, without preliminary greeting, ‘You’d better come here, my lad. I’ve brought something from Borlien for you.’
‘What’s that?’ He held his hands behind his back,
‘Come and see.’
‘Is it a dagger?’
‘Come and see.’ He sat perfectly still. Loil Bry sobbed, the dying man groaned, the fire spat.
Laintal Ay approached the father warily. He could not grasp how people could live in places other than Oldorando: it was the centre of the universe – elsewhere there was only wilderness, the wilderness of ice that stretched for ever and occasionally erupted in phagor invasions.
Father Bondorlonganon produced a little hound and placed it in the boy’s palm. It was scarcely longer than the palm. It was carved, as he recognised, out of kaidaw horn, with a wealth of detail which delighted him. Thick coat curled over the hound’s back, and the minute paws had pads. He examined it for a while before discovering that the tail moved. When it was wagged up and down, the dog’s lower jaw opened and closed.
There had never been a toy like it. Laintal Ay ran round the room in excitement, barking, and his mother jumped up to shush him, catching him in her arms.
‘One day, this lad will be Lord of Oldorando,’ Loilanun said to the father, as if by way of explanation. ‘He will inherit.’
‘Better he should love knowledge and study to know more,’ said Loil Bry, almost as an aside. ‘Such was my Yuli’s preference.’ She wept afresh into her hands.
Father Bondorlonganon squeezed his eyes a little more and enquired Laintal Ay’s age.
‘Six and a quarter years.’ Only foreigners had to ask such questions.
‘Well, you’re almost at manhood. In another year, you’ll become a hunter, so you’d better soon decide. Which do you want more, power or knowledge?’
He stared at the floor.
‘Both, sir … or whichever comes easier.’
The priest laughed, and dismissed the boy with a gesture, waddling over to see his charge. He had ingratiated himself: