Little Yuli heard the lord’s words as if in a trance. When he attempted to reply, no words rose to his bloodless lips, and he felt the power drain from his inner eddre.
One of the old men, between pitying and sniggering, said, ‘The youth has a wound.’
As Yuli staggered forward, they backed away. Behind them was a low archway with a passage beyond, dimly lit from an overhead grating. Unable to stop now that he had started, he marched down the passage, dragging his feet. You know that feeling, friends, whenever you are drunk — as now.
It was damp in the passage, and warm. He felt the heat on his cheek. To one side was a stone stairway. He could not understand where he was, and his senses were failing.
And a young woman appeared on the stair, holding a taper before her. She was fairer than the skies. Her face swam before his vision.
‘It was my grandmother!’ cried Laintal Ay, shrill with pride. He had been listening excitedly, and was confused when everyone laughed.
At that time, the lady had no thought of bestowing any little Laintal Ays upon the world. She stared at Little Yuli with wild eyes, and said something to him which he could not understand.
He attempted a reply. The words would not come to his throat. His knees buckled. He sank down to the floor. Then he collapsed entirely, and all there believed him to be dead.
At this thrilling juncture, the storyteller made way for an older speaker, a hunter, who took matters less dramatically.
Wutra saw fit to spare Yuli’s life on that occasion. Dresyl took command of the situation while his cousin-brother lay recovering from his wound. I believe that Dresyl was ashamed of his bloodlust and now took care to behave in a more civilised way, finding himself among civilised people like us. He may also have remembered the kindness of his father, Sar Gotth, and the sweetness of his mother, Iyfilka, killed by the hated phagor herd. He took over Prast’s Tower, where we used to store salt, living at the top of it and issuing orders like a true commander, while Yuli lay in bed in a low room beneath.
Many at the time, myself included, disliked Dresyl, and treated him as a mere invader. We hated being ordered about. Yet when we understood what he intended, we cooperated, and appreciated his undoubted good points. We of Embruddock were demoralised at that time. Dresyl gave us our fighting spirit back, and built up the defences.
‘He was a great man, my father, and I’ll fight anyone who criticises him,’ shouted Nahkri, jumping up and shaking his fist. He shook it so energetically that he almost fell over backwards, and his brother had to prop him up.
None speaks against Dresyl. From the top of his tower, he could survey our surrounding country, the higher ground to the north, where he had come from, the lower to the south, and the geysers and hot springs, then strange to him. In particular, he was struck by the Hour-Whistler, our magnificent regular geyser, bursting up and whistling like a devil wind.
I recall he asked me about the giant cylinders, as he called them, spread all over the landscape. He had never seen rajabarals before. To him they looked like the towers of a magician, flat on top, made of strange wood. Though not a fool, he did not know them for trees.
He was mainly for doing, not looking. He ordered where all his tribe from the frozen lake would be quartered, distributed in different towers. There he showed a wisdom we might all follow, Nahkri. Although many grumbled at the time, Dresyl saw to it that his people lived in with ours. No fighting was allowed, and everything fairly shared. That rule as much as anything has caused us to intermingle happily.
While he was billeting families, he had everyone counted. He could not write, but our corpsmen kept a tally for him. The old tribe here numbered forty-one men, forty-five women, and eleven children under the age of seven. That made ninety-seven folk in all. Sixty-one folk from the frozen lake had survived the battle, which made one hundred and fifty-eight people all told. A goodly number. As a boy, I was glad to have some life round the place again. After the deaths, I mean.
I said to Dresyl, ‘You’ll enjoy being in Embruddock.’
‘It’s called Oldorando now, boy,’ he said. I can still remember how he looked at me.
‘Let’s hear more about Yuli,’ someone called out, risking the wrath of Nahkri and Klils. The hunter sat down, puffing, and a younger man took his place.
Little Yuli made a slow recovery from his wound. He became able to walk out a short way with his cousin-brother and survey the territory in which they found themselves, to see how it could best be hunted and defended.
In the evenings, they talked with the old lord. He tried to teach them both the history of our land, but they were not always interested. He talked of centuries of history, before the cold descended. He told how the towers had once on a time been built of baked clay and wood, which the primitive peoples had developed in a time of heat. Then stone had been substituted for clay, but the same trusted pattern observed. And the stone withstood many centuries. There were some passages underground, and had been many more, in better times.
He told them the sorrow of Embruddock, that we are now merely a hamlet. Once a noble city stood here, and its inhabitants ruled for thousands of miles. There were no phagors to be feared in those days, men say.
And Yuli and his cousin-brother Dresyl would stride about the old lord’s room, listening, frowning, arguing, yet generally respectful. They asked about the geysers, whose hot springs supply warmth to us. Our old lord told them all about the Hour-Whistler, our unfailing symbol of hope.
He told how the Hour-Whistler has blown punctually every hour ever since time began. It’s our clock, isn’t it? We don’t need sentinels in the sky.
The Hour-Whistler helps the authorities keep written records, as the masters of corps are duty-bound to do. The cousin-brothers were astonished to find how we divide the hour into forty minutes and the minute into one hundred seconds, just as the day contains twenty-five hours and the year four hundred and eighty days. We learn such things on our mothers’ laps. They also had to learn that it was Year 18 by the Lordly calendar; eighteen years had our old lord ruled. No such civilised arrangements existed by the frozen lake.
Mind, I say no word against the cousin-brothers. Barbarians though they were, they both soon mastered our system of makers corps, with the seven corps, each with different arts — the metal makers being the best, to which I’m proud to say, without boasting, I belong. The masters of each corps sat on the lord’s council then, as they do now. Though, in my opinion, there should be two representatives from the metal-makers corps, because we are the most important, make no mistake.
Following a lot of jeering and laughter, the rathel was passed round again, and a woman in late middle age continued the legend.
Now I’ll spin you a tale a lot more interesting than writing or timekeeping. You’ll be asking what befell Little Yuli when he got better of his wound. Well, I’ll tell you in a dozen words. He fell in love — and that proved worse than his wound, because the poor fellow never recovered from it.
Our old Lord Wall Ein wisely kept his daughter — poor pampered Loil Bry Den, who was in such a pother today — out of harm’s way. He waited until he was sure that the invaders weren’t a bad lot. Loil Bry was then very lovely, and with a well-developed figure, enough for a man to get hold of, and she had a queenly way of walking, which you will all remember. So our old lord introduced her to Little Yuli one day, up in his room.