An elemental quality in Yuli’s character, something between ruthlessness and fair-mindedness, awoke a response in the tribe. His legend grew in their minds. So that even his great-grandson, another Yuli, “Little” Yuli, could ask himself in times of stress, “What would Yuli have done?”
That first place he named Oldorando, to which he went with Iskador from the mountain, did not prosper. It could do no more than survive. It existed precariously on the edge of a frozen lake, Lake Dorzin, and could merely bow beneath the elemental furies of winter, unaware that those furies were about to exhaust themselves. Of that, there was no hint in Yuli’s lifetime. Perhaps that was another reason why the present generation in the stone towers of Embruddock liked to speak of him: he was their ancestor who lived in deep winter. He represented their survival. Their legends were the first part of their awareness to admit of the possibility of a change in climate.
Together with the towns hived in the great mountain ranges of the Quzint, that first wooden Oldorando lay close to the equator, in the middle of the extensive tropical continent of Campannlat. Of the concept of that continent, nobody in Yuli’s time had knowledge, their world was limited by the hunting territory and the encampment. Only Yuli had experience of the tundras and zastrugi which stretched away to the north of the Quzint. Only Yuli had experience of the foothills of that enormous natural feature which formed the western end of the continent, known as the Barriers. There, among fast-moving frosts, volcanoes situated over four thousand metres above sea level added their own kind of intransigence to the weather, spreading a lava plateau over the ancient impact rocks of Helliconia.
He was spared knowledge of the awesome territories of Nktryhk.
To the east of Campannlat looms the Eastern Range. Hidden from the eyes of Yuli and all other men behind cloud and storm, the earth here gathers itself up into range after enormous mountain range, culminating in a volcanic shield across which glaciers grind their way down from peaks over fourteen thousand metres high. Here the elements of fire and earth and air existed almost in their pure form, held in a cold fury too great to permit a mellowing into alloys less opposed. Yet even here, at a slightly later date—by the time of the death of Little Yuli—even on ice sheets penetrating almost to the stratosphere, ancipital life might be observed, clinging to existence, rejoicing in the storm.
The howling white wilderness of the Eastern Shield was known to the phagors. They called it Nktryhk, and believed it to be the throne of a white wizard who would cast the Sons of Freyr, the hated man-things, out of the world.
Stretching north and south for almost three and a half thousand miles, Nktryhk separated the inner part of the continent from the chill eastern seas. Those seas lashed against the cliffs of Nktryhk, which reared precipitously eighteen hundred metres above the waters. The waves turned to ice as they burst upwards, bearding the cliffs with icicles or falling back to the swell as hail. Of this the scattered human tribes knew nothing.
Those generations lived by the hunt. The hunt formed the subject matter of most of the stories to be told. Although hunters hunted together and helped each other, ultimately the hunt concerned one man’s courage as he faced alone the savage beast who turned to confront him. Either he lived or he died. And if he lived, then others might live, the women and children back in safety. If he died, the tribe died, very likely.
So Yuli’s people, that small band by the frozen lake, lived as they had to, as committed as animals to their mode of existence. The listeners to the story enjoyed accounts of the lake settlement. There, fish were trapped in ways still so minutely described that the methods had been imitated in the Voral. Heads of deer were thrown into melt holes by the river’s edge to collect much-relished eels, just as Yuli had once done.
Yuli’s people also fought giant stungebags, killed deer and savage boar, and defended themselves against phagor raids. Depending on season, quick crops of barley and rye were grown. The blood of enemies was drunk.