She hid her face, wondering if her thin body, her torpid queme, could entice and hold a man.
Pulling her wrists from his grasp, she backed away. Her hands, now free, flew like birds to her face to try to conceal the agitation she felt.
‘Don’t tempt me, don’t play with me.’
‘You need tempting, my doe.’
Narrowing his eyes, he opened the purse at his belt, and brought forth some coins. These he extended towards her, like a man tempting a wild hoxney with food. She came cautiously to inspect them.
‘The new currency, Vry. Coins. Take them. They’re going to transform Oldorando.’
The three coins were improperly rounded and crudely stamped. There was a small bronze coin stamped ‘Half Roon’, a larger copper coin stamped ‘One Roon’, and a small gold coin stamped ‘Five Roons’. In the middle of each coin was the legend:
Vry laughed with excitement as she examined them. Somehow, the money represented power, modernity, knowledge. ‘Roons!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s rich.’
‘The very key to riches.’
She set them on her worn table. ‘I’ll test your intelligence with them, Raynil Layan.’
‘What a way you do court a man!’ He laughed, but saw by her narrow face that she was serious.
‘Let the Half Roon be our world, Hrl-Ichor. The big One Roon is Batalix. This little gold one is Freyr.’ With her finger, she made the Half Roon circle about the Roon. ‘This is how we move through the upper air. One circle is one year — in which time, the Half Roon has revolved like a ball four hundred and eighty times. See? When we think we see the Roon move, it is we who move on the Half Roon. Yet the Roon is not still. There’s a general principle involved, much like love. As a child’s life revolves about its mother, so does the Half Roon’s about the Roon — and so also does the Roon, I have decided, about the Five Roons.’
‘You have decided? A guess?’
‘No. Simple observation. But no observation, however simple, can be made except by those predisposed to make it. Between winter and spring solstices, the Half Roon moves its maximum to either side of the Roon.’ She demonstrated the diameter of its orbit. ‘Imagine that behind the Five Roons there are a number of tiny sticks standing to represent fixed stars. Then imagine you are standing on the Half Roon. Can you imagine that?’
‘More, I can imagine you standing there with me.’
She thought how quick he was, and her voice shook as she said, ‘There we stand, and the Half Roon goes first this side of the Roon, then the other… What do we observe? Why, that the Five Roons appears to move against the fixed stars behind it.’
‘Only appears?’
‘In that respect, yes. The movement shows both that Freyr is close compared to the stars, and that it is we who really move and not the sentinels.’
Raynil Layan contemplated the coins.
‘But you say that the two small denominations move about the Five Roons?’
‘You know that we share a guilty secret. There’s the matter of your predecessor illegally presenting Shay Tal with information from your corps book… From King Denniss’s dating we know that this is the year he would call 446. That is the number of years after someone — Nadir…’
‘I’ve had a better chance than you to puzzle that dating out, my doe, and other dates to compare it with. The date Zero is a year of maximum cold and dark, according to the Denniss calendar.’
‘Exactly what I believe. It is now 446 years since Freyr was at its feeblest. Batalix never changes its light intensity. Freyr does — for some reason. Once, I believed that it grew bright or dim at random. But now I think that the universe is no more random than a stream is random. There are causes for things; the universe is a machine, like this astronomical clock which seeks to imitate it. Freyr is getting brighter because it approaches — no, vice versa — we approach Freyr. It’s hard to shake off the old ways of thought when they are embedded in the language. In the new language, the Half Roon and the Roon are approaching the Five Roons…’
He fiddled with the little ribbons on his beard. Vry watched him thinking over her statement.
‘Why is the approach theory preferable to the dim-bright theory?’
She clapped her hands. ‘What a clever question to ask. If Batalix doesn’t fluctuate from dim to bright, why should Freyr? The Half Roon always approaches the Roon, though the Roon always moves out of the way. So I think the Roon approaches the Five Roons in the same way — taking the Half-Roon with it. Which brings us to the eclipses.’ She circulated the two lower denomination coins again.
‘You see how the Half Roon reaches a point each year where observers on it — you and I — would not see the Five because the One would get in the way? That is an eclipse.’
‘So why isn’t there an eclipse every year? It spoils all your theory if one part of it is wrong, just as a hoxney won’t run with only three legs.’
You’re smart, she thought — much smarter than Dathka or Laintal Ay — and I like clever men, even when they’re unscrupulous.
‘Oh, there’s a reason for it, which I can’t properly demonstrate. That’s why I am trying to build this model. I’ll show you soon.’
He smiled and took her slender hand again. She trembled as if she were down the brassimip tree.
‘You shall have that craftsman here tomorrow, working in gold to your specifics, if you will agree to be mine and let me publish the news. I want you close — in my bed.’
‘Oh, you’ll have to wait… please… please…’ She fell trembling into his arms as he clutched her. His hands moved over her body seeking her narrow contours. He does want me, she thought, in a whirl, he wants me in a way Dathka doesn’t dare. He’s more mature, far more intelligent. He’s not half so bad as they make out. Shay Tal was wrong about him. She was wrong about a lot of things. Besides, manners are different in Oldorando now and, if he wants me, he shall have me…
‘The bed,’ she gasped, tearing at his clothes. ‘Quick, before I change my mind. I’m so divided… Quick, I’m ready. Open.’
‘Oh, my trousers, have a care…’ But he was pleased by her haste. She felt, she saw, his rising excitement, as he lowered his bulk onto her. She groaned as he laughed. She had a vision of the two of them, one flesh, whirling among the stars in the grip of a great universal power, anonymous, eternal…
The hospice was new and not yet complete. It stood near the fringes of the town, extending from what had been called Prast’s Tower in the old days. Here came those travellers who had fallen sick on their journeyings. Across the street was the establishment of a veterinary surgeon which received sick animals.
Both hospice and surgery had a bad name — it was claimed that the tools of their respective trades were interchangeable; but the hospice was efficiently run by the first woman member of the apothecary’s corps, a midwife and teacher at the academy known to all as Ma Scantiom, after the flowers with which she insisted on decking the wards under her command.
A slave took Laintal Ay to her. She was a tall sturdy person of middle age, with plenty of bosom, and a kindly expression on her face. One of her aunts had been Nahkri’s woman. She and Laintal Ay had been on good terms for many years.
‘I’ve two patients in an isolation ward I want you to see,’ she said, selecting a key from a number that hung at her belt. She had discarded hoxneys in favour of a long saffron apron-dress which hung almost to the floor.