Oyre held a grass stalk up to the nose that Laintal Ay admired so much and closed first one eye and then the other.
‘The stalk seems to move back and forth across my vision, yet I know it’s still all the while. Perhaps the stars are still and it’s we who move…’
Vry received this and was silent. Then she said in a small voice, ‘Oyre, my beauty, perhaps it’s so. Perhaps it’s the earth that moves all the while. But then…’
‘What about the sentinels?’
‘Why, they don’t move either… That’s right we move, we go round and round like an eddy in the river. And they’re far away, like the stars…’
‘… But coming nearer, Vry, because it’s getting warmer…’
They gazed at each other, mouths open, eyebrows slightly raised, breathing lightly. Beauty and intelligence flowed in them.
The hunters, released by the bridge into the west, gave little thought to the revolving sky. The plains were open for their despoliation. Green rose up everywhere, crushed under their running feet, their sprawling bodies. Flowers burst. Insects that flew no more than a man’s height above the ground blundered among pale petals. Game in plenty was near at hand, to be brought down and dragged back to the town, spotting the new bridge with its dull blood.
With the growth of Aoz Roon’s reputation, Shay Tal’s went into eclipse. The diversion of women into labour connected either with the bridge or with agriculture weakened her hold on the intellectual life of the community. It hardly appeared to bother Shay Tal; since her return from the world below, she increasingly shunned companionship. She avoided Aoz Roon, and her gaunt figure was seen less often about the lanes. Only her friendship with old Master Datnil prospered.
Although Master Datnil had never again allowed her as much as a glimpse of the secret book of his corps, his mind wandered frequently to the past. She was content to listen to him unwinding the skein of his reminiscence, peopled with bygone names; it was not unlike, she thought, a visit to the fessups. What seemed dark to her held luminance for him.
‘To the best of my belief, Embruddock was once more complicated than it is now. Then it suffered a catastrophe, as you know… There was a mason-makers corps but it was destroyed some centuries ago. The master of the corps was particularly well thought of.’
Shay Tal had observed before his endearing habit of speaking as if he were present during the events he described. She guessed he was recalling something he had read in his secret book.
‘How was so much building achieved in stone?’ she asked him. ‘We know the labour of working in wood.’
They were sitting in the master’s dim room. Shay Tal squatted before him on the floor. Because of his age, Master Datnil sat on a stone set against the wall, so that he could rise easily. Both his old woman and Raynil Layan, his chief boy — a mature man with a forked beard and unctuous manners — came and went in the room; the master kept his talk guarded in consequence.
He answered Shay Tal’s question by saying, ‘Let us go down and walk in the sun for a few paces, Mother Shay. The warmth is good for my bones, I find.’
Outside, he put his arm through hers and they walked down the lane where curly-haired pigs foraged. Nobody was about, for the hunters were away in the west veldt and many of the women were in the fields, keeping company with the slaves. Mangy dogs slept in the light of Freyr.
‘The hunters are now away so much,’ Master Datnil said, ‘that the women misbehave in their absence. Our male Borlienian slaves harvest the women as well as the crops. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’
‘People copulate like animals. The cold for intellect, the warmth for sensuality.’ She looked above their heads, where little wanton birds swooped into holes in the stonework of the towers, bearing insects for their young.
He patted her arm and looked into her pinched face. ‘Don’t you fret. Your dream of going to Sibornal is your kind of satisfaction. We all must have something.’
‘Something? What?’ She frowned at him.
‘Something to hang on to. A vision, a hope, a dream. We don’t live only by bread, even the basest of us. There’s always some kind of inner life — that’s what survives when we become gossies.’
‘Oh, the inner life… It can be starved to death, can’t it?’
He stopped by the herb tower and she paused with him. They regarded the blocks of stone forming the tower. Despite the ages, the tower stood well. The blocks fitting neatly one into the other raised unanswered questions. How was stone quarried and cut? How was it built up so that it formed a tower which could stand for nine centuries?
Bees droned round their feet. A flight of large birds moved across the sky and disappeared behind one of the towers. She felt the day going by in her ears, and longed to be seized up in something great and all-embracing.
‘Perhaps we could make a small tower out of mud. Mud dries good and solid. A small mud tower first. Stone later. Aoz Roon should build mud walls round Oldorando. At present the village is virtually unguarded. Everyone’s away. Who will blow the warning horn? We are open to raiders, human and inhuman.’
‘I read once that a learned man of my corps made a model of this world in the form of a globe which could be rotated to show the lands on it — where was once Embruddock, where Sibornal, and so on. It was stored in the pyramid with much else.’
‘King Denniss feared more than the cold. He feared invaders. Master Datnil, I have kept silent for a while with respect to many of my secret thoughts. But they torment me and I must speak… I have learnt from my fessups that Embruddock…’ She paused, aware of the burden of what she was going to say, before completing her sentence. ‘… Embruddock was once ruled by phagors.’
After a moment, the old man said, in a light conversational tone, ‘That’s enough sunlight. We can go in again.’
On the way up to his room, he stopped on the third floor of the tower. This was the assembly room of his corps, smelling strongly of leather. He stood listening. All was silent.
‘I wanted to make sure that my chief boy was out. Come in here.’
Off the landing was a small room. Master Datnil pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, looking round once more, anxiously. Catching Shay Tal’s eye, he said, ‘I don’t want anyone butting in. What I’m about to do in sharing the secrets of our corps carries the death penalty, as you understand. Ancient though I may be, I want the last few years of my life out.’
She looked round as she stepped into the small cubbyhole off the assembly room with him. For all their caution, neither of them saw Raynil Layan — as chief boy of the corps, due to inherit Master Datnil’s mantle when the old man retired. He stood in the shadows, behind a post supporting the wooden stair. Raynil Layan was a cautious, precise man, whose manner was always circumspect; he stood at this moment absolutely rigid, without breathing, showing no more movement than the post that partly protected him from view.
When the master and Shay Tal had entered the cubbyhole and closed the door behind them, Raynil Layan moved with some alacrity, his step light for so large a man. He applied his eye to a crack between two boards which he had engineered himself some while ago, the better to observe the movements of the man he would supplant.
Distorting his face by tugging considerably on his forked beard — a nervous habit imitated by his enemies — he watched Datnil Skar remove from its box the secret record of the tawyers and tanner corps. The ancient spread it open before the gaze of the woman. When that information was laid before Aoz Roon, it would mark the end of the old master — and the beginning of the rule of the new. Raynil Layan descended the stairs one step at a time, moving with quiet deliberation.