Freyr and Batalix changed sentry duty in the sky, and still he walked, the only figure moving in the wilderness.
‘Mother,’ cried old Hasele to his wife, before he even got back to his hut. ‘Mother, see what I found by the Three Harlequins.’
And his ancient crone of a wife, Lorel, lame since childhood, hobbled to the door, stuck her nose out in the biting cold air, and said, ‘Never mind what you found. There’s gentlemen from Pannoval waiting to do business with thee.’
‘Pannoval, eh? Wait till they see what I found by the Three Harlequins. I need help here, mother. Come, it’s not cold. You waste your life stuck in that house.’
The house was rude in every extreme. It consisted of piles of boulders, several of them taller than a man, interspersed with planks and timbers, and roofed over with hides on top of which turfs grew. The interstices of the boulders were stuffed with lichen and mud, to make the interior windproof, while spars and whole tree trunks propped the edifice at many points, so that the whole affair most resembled a defunct porcupine. To the main structure, additional rooms had been added in the same spirit of improvisation which had prompted the original. Bronze chimneys thrust up into the sour sky, smoking gently; in some rooms, pelts and hides were dried, in others sold. Hasele was a trader and trapper, and had made enough of a living so that now, towards the end of his life, he could afford a wife and a sledge pulled by three dogs.
Hasele’s house perched on a low escarpment which curved away eastwards for several miles. This escarpment was strewn with boulders, in some places split, in others piled one on top of the other. These boulders provided shelter for small animals, and so made good hunting grounds for the old trapper, who was no longer inclined to wander as far afield as he had done in the days of his youth. On some of the more monumental piles of stone, he had bestowed names, the Three Harlequins being one. At the Three Harlequins, he dug in salt deposits for the mineral he needed to cure his hides.
Smaller stones littered the escarpment, each subtending from its eastern side a raked cone of snow, its size varying according to the nature of the stone, pointing precisely away from the point from which the west wind whistled off the distant Barriers. This had once been a beach, belonging to a long-vanished sea coast, the north coast of the continent of Campannlat, when times had been more favourable.
To the eastern side of the Three Harlequins grew a little thicket of thorn bushes, taking advantage of the shelter of the granite to thrust forth an occasional green leaf. Old Hasele valued these green leaves in his pot, and set snares all round the bushes in order to keep off animals. Unconscious and entangled in the sharp twigs lay the youth he had discovered, whom he now dragged with Lorel’s aid into the smokey sanctuary of his hut.
‘He’s no savage,’ said Lorel admiringly. ‘See here how his parka is decorated with beads, red and blue. Pretty, ain’t they?’
‘Never mind that. Give him a mouthful of soup, mother.’
She did so, stroking the lad’s throat until the soup went down, when her patient stirred, coughed, sat up, and whispered for more. As Lorel fed him she looked down, pursing her lips, at the swollen cheeks and eyes and ears, where countless insect bites had caused blood to flow and mat beneath his collar. He took more soup, then groaned and slumped back again into a coma. She held him to her, putting an arm round him, under his armpit, rocking him, remembering ancient happinesses to which she could no longer give a name.
Guiltily looking round for Hasele, she found he had padded off already, eager to do business with the gentlemen from Pannoval.
She laid the youth’s dark head down, sighing, and followed her husband. He was sipping spirits with the two large-built traders. Their parkas steamed in the warmth. Lorel tugged at Hasele’s sleeve.
‘Maybe these two gentlemen will take this sick youth you’ve found back with them to Pannoval. We can’t feed him here. We’re starving as it is. Pannoval is fat and rich.’
‘Leave us, mother. We’re negotiating,’ Hasele said, in a lordly way.
She hobbled out the back of the building, and watched as their captive phagor, shuffling under his chains, secured their dogs in the snow kennel. She looked beyond that bowed back to the gritty grey landscape to the miles of desolation that faded into a desolate sky. From somewhere out in that wilderness, the youth had come. Perhaps once or twice a year, people, alone or in pairs, straggled dying from the ice deserts. Lorel could never gain any clear impression of where they came from, only that beyond the desert were mountains colder still. One fugitive had babbled of a frozen sea that could be crossed. She made the holy circle over her dry breasts.
In her younger days, it had teased to have no clearer picture. Then she had gone wrapped to stand on the escarpment and stare northwards. And childrims flew overhead, waving their solitary wings, and she had fallen to her knees with a dazed impression of men — massed and holy, rowing the great flat wheel of the world to some place where the snow did not always fall or the wind always blow. She went indoors crying, hating the hope the childrims brought her.
Though old Hasele had dismissed his wife in a lordly way, he took note of what she said, as he always did. When his deal with the two gentlemen from Pannoval was concluded, and a small pile of precious herbs and spices and wool fibres and flour balanced against the skins the men would load on their sledge, Hasele raised the question of their taking the sick youth with them back to civilisation. He mentioned that the youth wore a good decorated parka, and therefore — just possibly, gentlemen — might be someone of importance, or at least the son of someone important.
Rather to his surprise, the two gentlemen agreed that they would be very happy to take the youth with them. They would have to make a small charge of an extra yelk skin, to cover the youth and defray the extra expense. Hasele muttered a bit, and then gave in with a good grace; he could not afford to feed the boy if he lived and, if he died — it never pleased him to feed human remains to his dogs, and the native habit of mummification and aerial burial was not his way.
‘Done,’ he said, and went to fetch the least good skin he could quickly lay his hands on.
The youth was awake now. He had accepted more soup from Lorel, and a warmed leg of snow rabbit. When he heard the men coming, he lay back and closed his eyes, one hand tucked inside his parka.
They surveyed him only casually, then turned away. Their plan was to load the sledge with their acquisitions, spend some hours here being entertained by Hasele and his wife, getting drunk, sleeping it off, and then set out on the challenging journey south to Pannoval.
All this was done, and a fine noise was made as Hasele’s spirits were consumed. Even when the gentlemen slept on a pile of skins, their snores were loud. And Lorel secretively tended Yuli, feeding him, bathing his face, smoothing his thick hair, hugging him.
In early dimday, when Batalix was low, he was gone from her, still feigning unconsciousness as the gentlemen lifted him on to their sledge, cracked their whips, scowled to achieve some fortification between their hangovers and the brow-clamping cold, and were off.
The two gentlemen, whose lives were hard, robbed Hasele and any other trapper they visited to the maximum extent that the trappers allowed themselves to be robbed, knowing as they did so that they would themselves be robbed and cheated when, in their turn, they had to trade in the skins. Cheating was one of their methods of survival, like wrapping up well. Their simple plan was, as soon as they were out of sight of Hasele’s ramshackle edifice, to slit the windpipe of their newly acquired invalid, to pitch his body into the nearest snowdrift, and to see to it that only the good decorated parka — together possibly with the under tunic and trousers — reached the safety of the market in Pannoval.