II. The Past That Was Like a Dream
Laintal Ay, overcome by warmth and fatigue, fell asleep long before the celebrations were over. The stories went on over his head, much as the winds blew about the planet, in a cold fury of possession.
The stories were of the activities of men, above all of his heroism, of the way he killed such-and-such a devil animal, of the way enemies were defeated, and in particular — on this evening after the burial — of how the first Yuli had come down out of darkness to found a new way of life.
Yuli captured their imaginations because he had been a holy man, yet had rejected faith in favour of his people. He had battled with and defeated gods who now had no name.
An elemental quality in Yuli’s character, something between ruthlessness and fair-mindedness, awoke a response in the tribe. His legend grew in their minds. So that even his great-grandson, another Yuli, ‘Little’ Yuli, could ask himself in times of stress, ‘What would Yuli have done?’
That first place he named Oldorando, to which he went with Iskador from the mountain, did not prosper. It could do no more than survive. It existed precariously on the edge of a frozen lake. Lake Dorzin, and could merely bow beneath the elemental furies of winter, unaware that those furies were about to exhaust themselves. Of that, there was no hint in Yuli’s lifetime. Perhaps that was another reason why the present generation in the stone towers of Embruddock liked to speak of him: he was their ancestor who lived in deep winter. He represented their survival. Their legends were the first part of their awareness to admit of the possibility of a change in climate.
Together with the towns hived in the great mountain ranges of the Quzint, that first wooden Oldorando lay close to the equator, in the middle of the extensive tropical continent of Campannlat. Of the concept of that continent, nobody in Yuli’s time had knowledge; their world was limited by the hunting territory and the encampment. Only Yuli had experience of the tundras and zastrugi which stretched away to the north of the Quzint. Only Yuli had experience of the foothills of that enormous natural feature which formed the western end of the continent, known as the Barriers. There, among fast-moving frosts, volcanoes situated over four thousand metres above sea level added their own kind of intransigence to the weather, spreading a lava plateau over the ancient impact rocks of Helliconia.
He was spared knowledge of the awesome territories of Nktryhk.
To the east of Campannlat looms the Eastern Range. Hidden from the eyes of Yuli and all other men behind cloud and storm, the earth here gathers itself up into range after enormous mountain range, culminating in a volcanic shield across which glaciers grind their way down from peaks over fourteen thousand metres high. Here the elements of fire and earth and air existed almost in their pure form, held in a cold fury too great to permit a mellowing into alloys less opposed. Yet even here, at a slightly later date — by the time of the death of Little Yuli — even on ice sheets penetrating almost to the stratosphere, ancipital life might be observed, clinging to existence, rejoicing in the storm.
The howling white wilderness of the Eastern Shield was known to the phagors. They called it Nktryhk, and believed it to be the throne of a white wizard who would cast the Sons of Freyr, the hated man-things, out of the world.
Stretching north and south for almost three and a half thousand miles, Nktryhk separated the inner part of the continent from the chill eastern seas. Those seas lashed against the cliffs of Nktryhk, which reared precipitously eighteen hundred metres above the waters. The waves turned to ice as they burst upwards, bearding the cliffs with icicles or falling back to the swell as hail. Of this the scattered human tribes knew nothing.
Those generations lived by the hunt. The hunt formed the subject matter of most of the stories to be told. Although hunters hunted together and helped each other, ultimately the hunt concerned one man’s courage as he faced alone the savage beast who turned to confront him. Either he lived or he died. And if he lived, then others might live, the women and children back in safety. If he died, the tribe died, very likely.
So Yuli’s people, that small band by the frozen lake, lived as they had to, as committed as animals to their mode of existence. The listeners to the story enjoyed accounts of the lake settlement. There, fish were trapped in ways still so minutely described that the methods had been imitated in the Voral. Heads of deer were thrown into melt holes by the river’s edge to collect much-relished eels, just as Yuli had once done.
Yuli’s people also fought giant stungebags, killed deer and savage boar, and defended themselves against phagor raids. Depending on season, quick crops of barley and rye were grown. The blood of enemies was drunk.
Men and women produced few children. In Oldorando, they matured by the age of seven years and were ageing by the time they were twenty. Even when they laughed and rejoiced, frost stood by their elbows.
The first Yuli, the frozen lake, the phagors, the intense cold, the past that was like a dream: these vivid elements of legend were known to everyone, and often retold. For the little herd of people who sheltered out their lives in Embruddock were confined in ways to which that confinement blinded them. At puberty, they were each stitched into the skins of animals; the animals enfolded them. But dreams, and the past that was like a dream, gave them extra dimensions in which they could all live.
Huddled close in Nahkri’s and Klils’ tower, after Little Yuli’s funeral, everyone took pleasure once more in sharing in the past that was like a dream. To make the past more vivid, or perhaps to dim the present, everyone drank rathel, dispensed by Nahkri’s slaves. Rathel was the most highly valued liquid in Embruddock, after red blood.
Little Yuli’s funeral gave them the chance to break the unvarying routine of life, and to live imaginatively. So the great tale of the past, of two tribes uniting, even as man and woman unite, was again retold. The tale was passed from mouth to mouth, much like the rathel mug, one narrator taking over from the next with hardly a pause.
The children of the tribe were present, eyes gleaming in the smouldering light, as they sipped rathel from their parents’ wooden mugs. The tale they heard was called familiarly the Great Tale. At any festival, not merely at a burial or a coming of age, or at the festival of the Double Sunset, someone would be sure to cry, as darkness came slanting in, ‘Let’s have the Great Tale!’
It was a history of their past, and much more than that. It was all the art the tribe had. Music they lacked, and painting, and literature, and almost anything fine. What had existed, the cold had devoured. But there remained the past that was a dream; that survived to be told.
No one was more responsive to this tale than Laintal Ay, when he could manage to stay awake for it. One of its themes was the union of two conflicting sides; that he understood, for the division concealed by that union, in which the tribe had to believe as an article of faith, was — had been — a part of his family life. Only later, as he grew up, did he discover how there was never union in anything, only stifled dissent. But the narrators in the fuggy hall, in this Year Nineteen After Union, gleefully conspired to tell the Great Tale as one of unity and success. That was their art.
The narrators jumped up one by one, declaiming their piece with varied assurance. The first narrators spoke of Great Yuli, and of how he came from the white wildernesses north of Pannoval to the frozen lake called Dorzin. But one generation gives place to another, even in legend, and soon another narrator rose, to speak of those, scarcely less mighty, who followed Yuli. This narrator was Rol Sakil, the midwife, who had her man and her pretty daughter, Dol, by her side; she gave a certain emphasis to the spicier aspects of her share of the tale, which was much relished by her audience.