Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [66]
Little Yuli made a slow recovery from his wound. He became able to walk out a short way with his cousin-brother and survey the territory in which they found themselves, to see how it could best be hunted and defended.
In the evenings, they talked with the old lord. He tried to teach them both the history of our land, but they were not always interested. He talked of centuries of history, before the cold descended. He told how the towers had once on a time been built of baked clay and wood, which the primitive peoples had developed in a time of heat. Then stone had been substituted for clay, but the same trusted pattern observed. And the stone withstood many centuries. There were some passages underground, and had been many more, in better times.
He told them the sorrow of Embruddock, that we are now merely a hamlet. Once a noble city stood here, and its inhabitants ruled for thousands of miles. There were no phagors to be feared in those days, men say.
And Yuli and his cousin-brother Dresyl would stride about the old lord’s room, listening, frowning, arguing, yet generally respectful. They asked about the geysers, whose hot springs supply warmth to us. Our old lord told them all about the Hour-Whistler, our unfailing symbol of hope.
He told how the Hour-Whistler has blown punctually every hour ever since time began. It’s our clock, isn’t it? We don’t need sentinels in the sky.
The Hour-Whistler helps the authorities keep written records, as the masters of corps are duty-bound to do. The cousin-brothers were astonished to find how we divide the hour into forty minutes and the minute into one hundred seconds, just as the day contains twenty-five hours and the year four hundred and eighty days. We learn such things on our mothers’ laps. They also had to learn that it was Year 18 by the Lordly calendar; eighteen years had our old lord ruled. No such civilised arrangements existed by the frozen lake.
Mind, I say no word against the cousin-brothers. Barbarians though they were, they both soon mastered our system of makers corps, with the seven corps, each with different arts – the metal makers being the best, to which I’m proud to say, without boasting, I belong. The masters of each corps sat on the lord’s council then, as they do now. Though, in my opinion, there should be two representatives from the metal-makers corps, because we are the most important, make no mistake.
Following a lot of jeering and laughter, the rathel was passed round again, and a woman in late middle age continued the legend.
Now I’ll spin you a tale a lot more interesting than writing or timekeeping. You’ll be asking what befell Little Yuli when he got better of his wound. Well, I’ll tell you in a dozen words. He fell in love – and that proved worse than his wound, because the poor fellow never recovered from it.
Our old Lord Wall Ein wisely kept his daughter – poor pampered Loil Bry Den, who was in such a pother today – out of harm’s way. He waited until he was sure that the invaders weren’t a bad lot. Loil Bry was then very lovely, and with a well-developed figure, enough for a man to get hold of, and she had a queenly way of walking, which you will all remember. So our old lord introduced her to Little Yuli one day, up in his room.
Yuli had already seen her once. On that terrible night of the battle when, as we’ve heard, he nearly died of his wound. Yes, this was the black-eyed beauty with the ivory cheekbones and lips like a bud’s wing, whom our friend mentioned. She was the beauty of her day, for the women from Lake Dorzin were a plain lot, to my mind. All her features were precisely drawn on the velvet of her skin, and those lips, so trimly curving, were painted in delicate cinnamon. To speak truth, I looked a bit like that myself when I was a young girl.
Such was Loil Bry when Yuli first saw her. She was the greatest wonder of the town. A difficult, solitary girl – people didn’t care for her, but I liked her manner. Yuli was overwhelmed. He forever sought occasions when he could be alone with her – either outside or, better