Phagors carried the legs and carcasses back to the jolly boat.
Another round of killing took place. Meanwhile, the Pasharatids had brought a sledge from the boat. Four sturdy phagors seized up the traces and pulled it to the shore. SartoriIrvrash was invited to follow.
‘We will give you a short trip to view the country,’ Jeseratabhar said, with a tight smile. He thought that this was their excuse to seize a respite from the ship. He fell in beside her, matching her pace.
A strong smell of farmyard met them. The flambreg were cantering about as if nothing had happened, while the white birds fought for offal. Following the sledge, the humans laboured up the slope. They saw other animals resembling flambreg, but with shaggier, greyer coats and ringed horns. These were yelk. Dienu Pasharatid said disdainfully that yelk should have been shot instead of flambreg. Red meat was better than yellow.
No one responded to this comment. SartoriIrvrash glanced at Io. The man’s face was closed. He seemed entirely remote. Was he possibly thinking about the queen?
They made their way up between immense boulders deposited by a vanished glacier. On some boulders were scratched ancient names and dates, where convicts had sought to memorialise themselves.
The party reached more level ground. Breathing deeply, they surveyed the panorama. The two ships lay on the fringes of a black sheet of water to which the shelves of a black sky came down. Small icebergs stood here and there; some, caught in a current, moved rapidly towards the sombre distance and could be mistaken for sails. But there was no other human life.
On their other hand lay the land of Loraj, which stretched into the Circumpolar Regions. The mists were still dispersing, to reveal a plain almost without feature. In its very blankness was a grandeur of a kind. Beneath their feet, the ground was grassless, stamped with the imprints of thousands upon thousands of hoofprints.
‘These plains belong to the flambreg, the yelk, and the giant yelk,’ Dienu Pasharatid said. ‘And not just the plains, but the whole land.’
‘It’s not a place for men and women,’ said Io Pasharatid.
‘Flambreg and yelk look similar, yet differ anatomically,’ said Odi Jeseratabhar. ‘The yelk are necrogenes. Their young are born from their corpses and feed on their carrion instead of milk. Flambreg are viviparous.’
SartoriIrvrash said nothing. He was still shaken from the slaughter on the shore. The guns were still firing. The object of the ships’ putting in to Persecution was precisely to obtain fresh meat.
The four phagors now pulled the four humans along in the sledge. The plain proved to be sodden, pitted with ponds and muskegs. Progress was slow. To the north stretched low mustard-coloured hills, their flanks patched with dwarf spruce and other hardy trees. The trees had less success on the plain, where their branches were weighed down with the clumsy nests of birds, built from sticks and driftwood. The leaves of the trees were fouled with white droppings.
The ships and the sea sank from view. The air was chill, less loaded with sea taint. A stink of rutting animals lay over the ground. The sound of firing died in the distance. They travelled for almost an hour without speaking, relishing the great space about them.
The Priest-Militant Admiral called a halt beside a striated ochre boulder. They climbed from the sledge, marching about separately, swinging their arms. The boulder loomed over them. The only sounds were bird cries and the sough of the wind, until they detected a distant rumbling.
To SartoriIrvrash, the rumble suggested only a distant glacier breaking. He dismissed it in his pleasure at having ground beneath his feet again. The women, however, looked gravely at each other and climbed without speaking to stand on top of the boulder. They scanned the landscape and gave cries of alarm.
‘You, brutes, draw the sledge close under the rock,’ Odi Jeseratabhar called in Hurdhu to the phagors.
The rumble became a thunder. The thunder rose from the earth, from everywhere. Something was happening to the low slopes to the west. They were in motion. With the terror of someone faced with a natural event beyond the scope of his imagination, SartoriIrvrash ran to the rock and began to climb. Io Pasharatid helped him scramble to a shoulder where there was room for all four of them. The phagors stood against the boulder, milts flicking up their nose slots.
‘We’ll be safe here till they pass,’ said Odi Jeseratabhar. Her voice shook.
‘What is it?’ SartoriIrvrash asked.
Through a thin haze, the distance was rolling itself up like a rug and tumbling towards them. They could only watch in silence. The rug resolved itself into an avalanche of flambreg, advancing on a wide front.
SartoriIrvrash tried to count them. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred — it was impossible. The front of the advance was a mile wide — two, five miles wide, and comprised herd after herd of animals. Endless ranks of yelk and flambreg were converging on the plain where the boulder stood.
The ground, the rock, the very air, vibrated.
Necks extended, eyes glaring, saliva flowing free from open mouths, the herds came on. They wove their living streams about the boulder, joined them at its far side, and passed on. White cowbirds sailed above them, keeping pace with no more than an occasional dip of a wing.
In their excitement the four humans stretched out their arms, screamed, waved, cheered with exhilaration.
Beneath them was a sea of hoofed life stretching back to and beyond the horizon. Not a single beast looked up at the gesticulating humans; each knew that to miss its footing meant death.
The human exhilaration soon faded. The four sat down, huddling close. They looked about with increasing listlessness. Still the herd passed. Batalix rose, Batalix set in concentric aurioles of light. Still there was no sign of the end of the herd. The animals continued to flow by in their thousands.
Some flambreg detached themselves from the stampede to mill about by the bay. Others plunged straight into the sea. Still others galloped in a trance over the cliffs to their death. The main body of animals thundered down into the dip and up the other side, heading towards the northeast. Hours passed. The animals continued with their monotonous drumbeats of noise.
Overhead, magnificent curtains of light unfolded and flashed, rising to the zenith. But the humans became despondent: the life which had exhilarated them earlier now depressed them. They huddled together on their ledge. The four phagors stood pressed against the wall of rock, the sledge before them for protection.
Freyr sloped shallowly towards the horizon. Rain began to fall, at first uncertainly. The lights overhead were extinguished as the fall became heavier, soaking the ground and changing the sound of the hoof-beats.
Icy rain fell for hours. Once it had established itself, it prevailed like the herd, with no variation to its monotony.
The darkness and noise isolated SartoriIrvrash and Odi Jeseratabhar slightly from the others. They clung together for protection.
The hammer of animals and elements penetrated him. He crouched with his brow against the rib cage of the admiral, expecting death, reviewing his life.
It was the loneliness that did it, he thought. A deliberate loneliness, lifelong. I allowed myself to drift away from my brothers. I neglected my wife. Because I was so lonely. My learning sprang from that awful sense of loneliness: by my learning I set myself further apart from my fellows. Why? What possessed me?
And why did I tolerate JandolAnganol for so long? Did I recognise a torment in him similar to mine? I admire JandolAnganol — he lets the pain come to the surface. But when he took hold of me, it was like a rape. I can’t forgive that, or the deliberate wanton accursed burning of my books. He burnt my defences. He’d burn the world down if he could…