Although Master Datnil had never again allowed her as much as a glimpse of the secret book of his corps, his mind wandered frequently to the past. She was content to listen to him unwinding the skein of his reminiscence, peopled with bygone names; it was not unlike, she thought, a visit to the fessups. What seemed dark to her held luminance for him.
“To the best of my belief, Embruddock was once more complicated that it is now. Then it suffered a catastrophe, as you know… . There was a mason-makers corps but it was destroyed some centuries ago. The master of the corps was particularly well thought of.”
Shay Tal had observed before his endearing habit of speaking as if he were present during the events he described. She guessed he was recalling something he had read in his secret book.
“How was so much building achieved in stone?” she asked him. “We know the labour of working in wood.”
They were sitting in the master’s dim room. Shay Tal squatted before him on the floor. Because of his age, Master Datnil sat on a stone set against the wall, so that he could rise easily. Both his old woman and Raynil Layan, his chief boy—a mature man with a forked beard and unctuous manners—came and went in the room; the master kept his talk guarded in consequence.
He answered Shay Tal’s question by saying, “Let us go down and walk in the sun for a few paces, Mother Shay. The warmth is good for my bones, I find.”
Outside, he put his arm through hers and they walked down the lane where curly-haired pigs foraged. Nobody was about, for the hunters were away in the west veldt and many of the women were in the fields, keeping company with the slaves. Mangy dogs slept in the light of Freyr.
“The hunters are now away so much,” Master Datnil said, “that the women misbehave in their absence. Our male Borlienian slaves harvest the women as well as the crops. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”
“People copulate like animals. The cold for intellect, the warmth for sensuality.” She looked above their heads, where little wanton birds swooped into holes in the stonework of the towers, bearing insects for their young.
He patted her arm and looked into her pinched face. “Don’t you fret. Your dream of going to Sibornal is your kind of satisfaction. We all must have something.”
“Something? What?” She frowned at him.
“Something to hang on to. A vision, a hope, a dream. We don’t live only by bread, even the basest of us. There’s always some kind of inner life—that’s what survives when we become gossies.”
“Oh, the inner life … It can be starved to death, can’t it?”
He stopped by the herb tower and she paused with him. They regarded the blocks of stone forming the tower. Despite the ages, the tower stood well. The blocks fitting neatly one into the other raised unanswered questions. How was stone quarried and cut? How was it built up so that it formed a tower which could stand for nine centuries?
Bees droned round their feet. A flight of large birds moved across the sky and disappeared behind one of the towers. She felt the day going by in her ears, and longed to be seized up in something great and all-embracing.
“Perhaps we could make a small tower out of mud. Mud dries good and solid. A small mud tower first. Stone later. Aoz Roon should build mud walls round Oldorando. At present the village is virtually unguarded. Everyone’s away. Who will blow the warning horn? We are open to raiders, human and inhuman.”
“I read once that a learned man of my corps made a model of this world in the form of a globe which could be rotated to show the lands on it—where was once Embruddock, where Sibornal, and so on. It was stored in the pyramid with much else.”
“King Denniss feared more than the cold. He feared invaders. Master Datnil, I have kept silent for a while with respect to many of my secret thoughts. But they torment me and I must speak… . I have learnt from my fessups that Embruddock …” She paused, aware of the burden of what she was going to say, before completing her sentence. “… Embruddock was once ruled by phagors.”