She put out a tongue at him. “Conceited! I thought you looked silly.”
He saw that the celebrations were going to have their more serious side.
VI • “WHEN I WERE ALL BEFUDDOCK…”
All he could see before him was the land rearing up, making a clear bow of horizon close at hand. The tiny springy plants underfoot stretched to that horizon and, away below him, to the valley. Laintal Ay stopped, resting with his hands on one knee, breathing heavily, and looked back. Oldorando was six days’ walk away.
The other side of the valley was bathed in a clear blue light which picked out every detail with lucidity. The sky above was slatey purple with future snowstorms. Where he stood, all was in shadow.
He resumed his upward trudge. More land emerged over the curved near horizon, black, black, unassailable. He had never been there. Farther, the top of a tower rose as the near horizon sank beneath his progress. Stone, ruined, built long ago to an Oldorando mould, with the same inward-sloping walls, and windows placed at each of the four corners on each of the floors. Only four floors stood.
At last Laintal Ay surmounted the slope. Large grey birds cropped outside the tower, which was surrounded by its own debris. Behind, the unassailable hill, enormous, its blackness lit by the slate sky. A line of rajabarals interposed themselves between him and infinity. Chill wind rattled against his teeth, so that he drew his lips together.
What was the tower doing, so far from Oldorando?
Not so far if you were a bird, not so far at all. Not so far if you were a phagor mounted on a kaidaw. No distance if you were a god.
As if to emphasize the point, the birds took off, wings clattering, flying low over the moor. He watched them until they were out of sight and he alone in the great landscape.
Oh, Shay Tal must be right. The world had once been different. When he had talked about her speech to Aoz Roon, Aoz Roon had said that such matters were not important; they could not be changed; what was important was the survival of the tribe, its unity; if Shay Tal had her way, the unity would be lost. Shay Tal said that unity was unimportant beside the truth.
His head occupied by thoughts that moved across his consciousness like cloud shadows over the landscape, he went into the tower and looked up. It was a hollow ruin. The wooden flooring had been pulled out for fuel. He set his pack and spear down in a corner and climbed up the rough stonework, taking advantage of every foothold, until he stood perched on the top of one of the walls. He looked about him. First he looked for phagors—this was phagor country—but only barren and inanimate shapes met his survey.
Shay Tal never left the village. Perhaps she had to invent mysteries. Yet there was a mystery. Looking over the gigantic landforms, he asked himself in awe, Who made them? What for?
High on the great round hill behind him—not even a foothill to the foothills of the Nktryhk—he saw bushes moving. They were small, a sickly green under the dense light. Watching intently, he recognised them as protognostics, clad in shaggy coats, bent double as they climbed. They drove before them a herd of goat or arang.
He deliberately let the time go by, experienced the drag of it across the world, to watch the distant beings, as if they held the answer to his questions, or to Shay Tal’s. The people were probably Nondads, itinerant tribesmen speaking a language unrelated to Olonets. As long as he watched, they toiled through their allotted landscape and seemed to make no progress.
Closer to Oldorando were the herds of deer that supplied the villages with much of their food. There were several ways of killing deer. This was the method preferred by Nahkri and Klils.
Five tame hinds were kept as decoys. The hunters led these beasts on leather reins to where the herd grazed. By walking in a crouched position behind the deer, the men could manoeuvre their mobile cover close to the herd. Then the hunters would rush forth and hurl their spears with the aid of spear throwers, killing as many animals as possible. Later, they dragged the carcasses home, and the decoys had to carry their dead fellows on their backs.