Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [97]
All was activity. In no time, despite apparent chaos and indirection, the sharp-furs were moving, running beside and behind their sledge, pushing or braking as was needed, leaping over and on top of it, screaming, chattering, throwing up their gourd helmets and catching them, travelling over the uneven ground at speed, heading towards the glooms of the valley.
Bewailing their fate with gusto, the deserted tummy-bellies slunk back towards their cave, averting their eyes from the newcomers. As the yipping progress of the sharp-furs dwindled, Yattmur heard her baby’s cry from the cave. Forgetting everything else, she ran and picked him up, dandled him until he gurgled with joy at her, and then took him outside to speak once more with the bulky figure.
It began to orate directly Yattmur reappeared.
‘Those sharp-teeth sharp-fur kind have fled from me. Leaf-brained idiots they are – nothing more, animals with toads in their heads. Though they will not listen to me now, the time will come when they will have to listen. Their kind will be driven like hail on the winds.’
As the creature talked on, Yattmur observed him thoroughly, with growing amazement. She could not understand him properly, for his head, an enormous fish-like affair with a broad lower lip which turned down so far that it nearly concealed his lack of chin, was out of all proportion with the rest of his body. His legs, though bowed, were human in appearance, his arms were wrapped unmoving behind his ears, while from his chest a hairy, head-like growth seemed to emerge. Now and again she caught a glimpse of a large tail hanging behind him.
The pair of tattooed women stood by him, staring blankly ahead without appearing to see or think – or indeed to perform any activity more elaborate than breathing.
Now this strange bulky figure broke off his oration to gaze up at the thick clouds that masked the sun.
‘I will sit,’ he said. ‘Place me on a suitable boulder, women. Soon the sky will clear, and then we shall see what we see.’
The order was not addressed to Yattmur, or the tummy-bellies, who clustered forlornly at their cave mouth, but to the tattooed women. They watched as he moved forward with his dull retinue.
A tumble of boulders lay nearby. One was large and flat-topped. By this the odd trio halted – and the bulky figure split into two as the woman lifted the top part off the bottom! Half of him lay flat and fishy on the boulder, the other half stood bowed nearby.
Comprehension made Yattmur gasp, even as the tummy-bellies behind her wailed in dismay and raced each other into the cave. The bulky creature, the catch-carry-kind as the sharp-furs called him, was two separate creatures! A giant fish shape, much like one of the dolphins she had seen during their voyage over the wastes of the ocean, had been carried by a stooped old human.
‘You are two people!’ she exclaimed.
‘Indeed I am not!’ said the dolphin-thing from its slab. ‘I am known as the Sodal Ye, greatest of all Sodals of the catch-carry-kind, Prophet of the Nightside Mountains, who brings you the true word. Have you intelligence, woman?’
About the man who had carried him clustered the two tattooed women. They did nothing effectual. They waved their hands at him without speaking. One of them grunted. As for the man, he had obviously been at his carrying for many seasons of fruit. Though the weight had gone from his shoulders, he remained bent as if he bore it yet, standing like a statue of dejection with his withered arms still circling the air above him, his back bowed, his eyes fixed only on the ground. Occasionally he shifted his stance; otherwise he was immobile.
‘I asked you if you had intelligence, woman,’ said the being who called himself Sodal Ye, his voice as thick as liver. ‘Speak, since you can speak.’
Yattmur pulled her eyes away from this horrifying porter and said, ‘What do you want here? Have you come to be helpful?’
‘Spoken like a human woman!’
‘Your women here don’t seem to speak much!’
‘They’re not human! They cannot speak, as you should know.