Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [67]
As for Loil Bry, she sat there like a little puppy, watching, smiling behind her high cheekbones, her hands folded in her lap. Of course, she encouraged him, needless to say. She wore a long heavy gown, decorated with beads, not furs like the rest of us. I heard that she wore furs underneath. But that gown was extraordinary, and reached almost to the ground. I’d like a gown like that …
The way she speaks, it still is a bit of a mixture of poetry and riddles. Yuli’d never heard anything like it up on Lake Dorzin. It flummoxed him. He boasted all the more. He was bragging about what a hunter he was when she said – you know her musical voice – ‘We live out our lives in all kinds of darkness. Should we ignore them or explore them?’
He just goggled at her, sitting there looking lovely in her cloth garment. It had beads stitched on it, as I said, lovely beads. He asked if it was dark in her room. She laughed at him.
‘Where do you think is the darkest place in the universe, Yuli?’
Poor fool, he said, ‘I’ve heard that far Pannoval is dark. Our great ancestor, whose name I bear, came from Pannoval, and he said it was dark there. He said it was under a mountain, but I don’t believe that. It was just a way of speaking in those times.’
Loil Bry regarded her fingertips, resting like little pink beads on the lap of that lovely garment.
‘I think the darkest place in the universe is inside human skulls.’
He was lost. She made a proper fool of him. Still, I must watch my tongue about the dead, mustn’t I? He was a bit soft, though …
She used to bemuse him with romantic talk. You know what she used to say? ‘Have you ever thought how we know so much more than we can ever tell?’ It’s true, isn’t it? ‘I long to have someone,’ she’d say, ‘someone to whom I could tell everything, someone for whom talk is like a sea on which to float. Then I’d hoist my dark sail …’ I don’t know what she said to him.
And Yuli would lie awake, clutching his wound and who knows what else, thinking of this magical woman, thinking of her beauty, and her troubling words. ‘… Someone for whom talk is a sea on which to float …’ Even the way she turned her sentence seemed to him to be Loil Bry’s way and no one else’s. He’d long to be on that sea, sailing with her, wherever it was.
‘That’s enough of your womanly nonsense,’ cried Klils, struggling to his feet. ‘She put a spell about him, Father said so. Father also told us of the good things Uncle Yuli did at first, before she made him stupid.’ He went on to tell them.
Little Yuli got to know every inch of Oldorando while he was recovering. He saw how it is laid out, with the big tower at one end of the main street and the old temple at the other. In between, the women’s house, the hunter’s homes on one side, the towers of the makers corps on the other. The ruins farther out. How all our towers have the heating system of stone pipes carrying hot water from springs through them. We couldn’t build anything half so marvellous today.
When he saw how the place was, he saw how it should be. With the aid of my father, Yuli planned proper fortifications, so that there would be no more attacks – especially no more phagor attacks. You’ve heard how everyone was set to digging a mound with a ditch on its outer side and a stout palisade on top. It was a good idea, though it cost a few blisters. Regular lookouts were drilled and posted at the four corners, as they still are. That was Yuli’s and my father’s doing. The lookouts were given horns to blow in case of a raid – the self-same horns we use today.
There were proper hunts as well as proper lookouts. People were almost starved before the merging of the tribes. Once the entire town was enclosed, Dresyl, my father, got the