Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [602]
However tired he was, however many animals they had slain, the nights brought bad dreams to Luterin. The obsession overwhelmed him that he was climbing, not amid forests, but through rooms stuffed with meaningless furniture and ancient possessions. In those rooms, a sense of horror gathered. He could neither find nor evade the thing that hunted him.
Often he awoke and imagined that he was again laid flat by paralysis. Knowledge of his real surroundings returned only slowly. Then he would try to calm his mind with thoughts of Toress Lahl; but ever and again Insil stood beside her.
At least his mother had taken to her bed after the feast she had given in his honour, so news that he would not marry Insil had not spread.
He saw in how many ways Insil was fitted to be his wife in the years to come; in her was the true unyielding Kharnabhar spirit.
Toress Lahl, by contrast, was an exile, a foreigner. Had he said he would marry her merely to prove his independence?
He hated the fact that he was still undecided. Yet he could not decide finally until his own uncertain situation was made clear. That entailed a confrontation with his father.
Night after night, lying with beating heart inside his sleeping bag, he came to see that confrontation there must be. He could marry Insil only if his father did not force him to it. His father must accept his viewpoint.
He must be hero or outcast. There were no other alternatives. He had to face rejection. Sex, when all was said, was a question of power.
Sometimes, as the aurora cast its glow inside the dark lodges, he saw his brother Favin’s face. Had he also challenged his father in some way – and lost?
Luterin and the huntsman rose early every dawn, when night birds were still in flight. They shared their food together as equals, but never a private thought did they let pass from one to the other.
However badly the nights passed, the days were all happiness. Every hour brought a changing light and changing conditions. The habits of the animals they stalked differed from hour to hour. With the decline of the small year, the days grew shorter, and Freyr remained always close to the horizon. But sometimes they would climb a ridge and see through foliage the old ruler himself, still blazing, throwing his light into another valley brimming in its depths with shadow like a sea, as a king might carelessly fill a glass with wine.
The stoic silence of nature was all about them, increasing their sense of infinity. Infinity came through all their senses. The rocks down which they scrambled to drink at some snow-bearded mountain stream seemed new, untouched by time. Through the silence ran a great music, translated in Luterin’s blood as freedom.
On their sixth day in the wilderness, they spied a party of six horned phagors crossing a glacier on kaidaw-back. The cowbirds sailing above their shoulders gave them away. They stalked the phagors for a day and a half, until they could get ahead of them and ambush them in a ravine.
They killed all six ancipitals. The cowbirds fled, screeching. The kaidaw were good specimens. Luterin and the huntsman managed to round up five of them and decided to drive them back to the family estate. It was possible that the Shokerandit stables could breed a domesticated strain of kaidaw.
The expedition had ended in modest triumph.
The tongues of the sullen bells of the mansion could be heard to toll long before the building loomed out of the blue mists.
So Luterin returned home, to find uproar, and his father’s yelk being combed down in the stables, dead game lying everywhere, and his father’s bodyguard throwing back fresh-brewed yadahl in the gunroom.
Unlike Luterin’s imagined meeting with Lobanster Shokerandit, the real reunion between father and son contained no embraces.
Luterin hurried into the reception hall, throwing off only his outer garments, retaining his boots, his revolver, his bell. His hair was long and unkempt. It fluttered about his ears as he ran towards his father.
Skewbald hounds skulked about the chamber and pissed