To many older people, these changes were unwelcome. They recalled untrammelled vistas of snow from their youth. The middle-aged welcomed the changes, but shook their heads and said that it was too good to last. The young had never known anything different. Life burned in them as in the air. They had a greater variety of things to eat; they produced more children; and fewer of those children died.
As for the two sentinels, Batalix appeared the same as ever. But every week, every day, every hour, Freyr was growing brighter, hotter.
Set amid this drama of climate was the human drama, which every living soul must play out, to his own satisfaction or disappointment. To most people, this weaving of minute circumstance was of the utmost importance, each seeing himself the centre of the stage. All over the great globe Helliconia, wherever small groups of men and women struggled to live, this was so.
And the Earth Observation Station recorded everything.
When be became Lord of Oldorando, Aoz Roon lost his lighthearted manner. He grew morose, for a while shunning even the witnesses and accomplices to his crime. Even those who maintained some access to him did not perceive how much his self-imposed isolation owed to ceaseless fermentation of guilt; people do not trouble to understand one another. Tabus against murder were strong; in a small community where all were related, even if distantly, and where the loss of even one ablebodied person was felt, consciousness was so precious that the dead themselves were not allowed to depart utterly from their fellows.
It happened that neither Klils nor Nahkri had children by their women, so that only their women were left to communicate with their men’s gossies. Both reported from the spirit world only raging anger. The anger of gossies is painful to endure, for it can never be relieved. The anger was attributed to a fury the brothers would naturally feel at an outburst of drunken fratricidal madness; the women were excused further communication. The brothers and their hideous end ceased to be a common topic of conversation. The secret of the murder was kept for the present.
But Aoz Roon never forgot. On the dawn of the day after the killing, he had risen wearily and rinsed his face in icy water. The chill merely reinforced a fever he had been suppressing. His whole body raged with a pain that seemed to lumber from organ to organ.
Shivering with an anguish he dared not communicate to his companions, he hurried from his tower, his hound Curd by his side. He got himself into the lane where, in the phantasmal mists of first light, only swathed bodies of women were to be seen, moving slowly to work. Avoiding them, Aoz Roon stumbled towards the north gate. He had to pass by the big tower. Before he knew it, he was confronting the broken body of Nahkri, sprawled at his feet, its eyes still open in terror. He found the ugly corpse of Klils, lying on the opposite side of the tower base. The bodies had not yet been discovered or the alarm given. Curd whimpered and jumped back and forth over Klils’ sodden body.
A thought pierced his daze. Nobody would believe that the brothers had killed each other if they were found lying on different sides of the tower. He grasped Klils’ arm and tried to move the body. The corpse was stiff, and immobile as if it had rooted itself in the ground. He was forced to bend down, thrusting his face almost in the wet rotted hair, to pick up the body under its arms. He heaved again. Something had happened to his great careless strength. Klils would not move. Gasping, whimpering he went to the other end and tugged at the legs. Geese honked distantly, mocking his efforts.
At last he shifted the corpse. Klils had fallen face downwards, and his hands and one side of his face had frozen to the mud. Now they broke away, and the body bumped over the dead ground. He dumped it by its brother, an unmoving, meaningless thing which he tried to wipe from his mental vision. Then he ran for the north gate.