The path she followed was trodden mainly by women and pigs. It wandered hither and thither, unlike straighter paths created by hunters, since its course had been dictated largely by that wayward creature, the hairy black sow of Embruddock. To follow the direction in which the track tended was to arrive eventually at Lake Dorzin; but the path ceased long before that, at the brassimip patch. The rest of the way was still a wilderness of marsh and frost.
As she moved up the path, Vry wondered if all things aspired to a highest level, and if there was a competing force trying to drag them to the lowest. One looked up to the stars, one ended as a gossie, a fessup. The Hour-Whistler was an embodiment of the two opposed forces. Its spouting waters always fell back to earth. In her unobtrusive way, she willed her spirit to soar to the sky, the region she studied without Shay Tal’s aid, the place of sublime movement, the riddling place of stars and suns, of as many secret passages as the body.
Two men came towards her. She could see little of them but legs, elbows, and the tops of their heads, as they staggered downhill under heavy loads. She could identify Sparat Lim by his spindly legs. The men were carrying slabs of stungebag. After them came Dathka, carrying only a spear.
Dathka gave her a grin of welcome and stood to one side of the path, surveying her with his dark eyes. His right hand was bloody, and a thin trail of blood ran down the spear shaft.
‘We killed a stunge,’ he said, and that was all. As usual, Vry was both embarrassed and comforted by his lack of words. It was pleasant that he never boasted, unlike many of the young hunters, less pleasant that he never revealed his thoughts. She tried to feel something for him.
She halted. ‘It must have been a big one.’
‘I’ll show you.’ He added, ‘If you’ll let me.’
He turned back along the track and she followed, unsure whether she ought to speak or not. But that was silly, she told herself; she understood perfectly that Dathka desired to communicate with her.
She blurted out the first thing that came into her head.
‘How do you account for human beings in the world, Dathka?’
Without a backward glance, he said, ‘We came up from the original boulder.’ He spoke without the consideration she would have wished him to give to such an important matter, and there the conversation languished.
She regretted that there were no priests in Oldorando; she could have talked to them. Legends and songs related that Embruddock had once had its fair share of priests, administering an elaborate religion which united Wutra with the living of this world and the fessups of the world below. One dark season before Wall Ein Den ruled, when breath froze to people’s lips as it issued forth, the population rose and slew the priesthood. Sacrifices had ceased from then on, except on festival days. The old god, Akha, was no longer worshipped. No doubt a body of learning had also been lost. The temple had been stripped. Now pigs were housed in it. Perhaps other enemies of knowledge had been about, when pigs were preferred to priests.
She risked another question of the ascending back.
‘Do you wish you understood the world?’
‘I do,’ it said.
She was left wrestling with the brevity of the reply; did he understand or did he wish he understood, she asked herself.
The forces that had thrown up the Quzint Mountains had folded the earth in all directions, causing attendant deformations like buttresses, like the roots of trees, to extend outwards for many miles from the mountains themselves. Between two such rocky extrusions grew a line of brassimips which had long been essential to the local economy. Today, the plot was a scene of mild excitement and several women were clustered round the open tops of the brassimips, warming themselves and herding their pigs while watching the work in progress.
Dathka indicated that this was where the stungebag was killed.
His gesture was scarcely necessary. The carcass lay about in piles, sprawling up the desolate hillside. Towards its tail, Aoz Roon himself was investigating it, his yellow hound about his heels. The stubby legs of the immense corpse pointed into the air, fringed by stiff black hairs and spines.
A group of men waited about the body, laughing and talking. Goija Hin supervised the slaves, human and phagorian, who wielded axes. They were splitting the fibrous carcass into slabs that could be carried down to the hamlet. They stood up to their knees in coir and woody sections of the stungebag’s flesh. Great splinters flew as they dismembered the remains.
Two older women dodged about with buckets, gathering up spongey white entrails. They would boil the mess down later to distil a coarse sugar from it. The coir would be used for ropes and mats, the flesh for fuel for the various corps.
From the paddlelike digging paws of the stungebag, oils would be extracted to form a narcotic called rungebel.
The older women were exchanging impolite remarks with the men, who grinned and stood in nonchalant poses about the hillside. It was unusual for stungebags to venture near human habitation. The beasts were easy to kill, and every part of them was useful to the fragile economy. The present kill was thirty metres long, and would benefit the community for days to come.
Pigs ran squealing round Vry’s feet as they rooted among the fibrous debris. Their swineherds were working below in the brassimips. Nothing of the giant trees was visible above ground except heavy fungoid leaves, cosseting the earth with their twisted growth pattern. The leaves stirred like elephant ears, not from the prevailing breeze but from draughts of warm air blowing out of the crowns of the trees.
A dozen brassimips formed the patch. The tree rarely grew singly. The soil about each tree bulged upwards and was starred with cracks, suggesting the considerable bulk of vegetation below. The heat that the trees syphoned up to their leaf system enabled the plants to thaw frozen ground, so that they continued to grow even in permafrost conditions.
Jassiklas lived under the leathery leaves. They took advantage of the sheltering warmth to put forth timid brown-blue flowers. As Vry stooped to pick one, Dathka returned to her side and spoke.
‘I’m going into the tree.’
She construed this as an invitation to join him, and followed. A slave was pulling up leather buckets full of chips from the interior and throwing them to the pigs. Pulped brassimip chips had fed Embruddock’s pigs through the dark centuries.
‘That’s what attracted the stungebag,’ Vry said. The monstrous animals were as fond of brassimip as the pigs.
A wood ladder led into the tree. As she followed Dathka down, her eyes came for a moment level with the ground. As if drowning in earth, she saw the leather leaves waving about her. Beyond the backs of the pigs were the men, fur-clad, standing among the wreckage of the giant stungebag. There was snowy high ground and a sky of slate over all. She climbed down into the tree.
Warm air assailed her cheeks, making her blink, carrying with it a perfumed rotting smell that both repelled and attracted her. The air had come from a long way down; brassimip roots bored far into the crust. With age, the core of the tree commenced a fermenting process which released a hardening substance resembling keratin. A tube formed through the centre of the tree. A heat pump was established, warming leaves and underground branches with heat trapped at lower levels.
This favourable environment created a refuge for several sorts of animal, some decidedly nasty.
Dathka reached out a hand to steady Vry. She climbed off the ladder beside him and stood in a bulb-shaped natural chamber. Three dirty-looking women were working there. They greeted Vry, then went on scraping chips of brassimip flesh from the walls of the trees, loading them into the bucket.