Aoz Roon shook his fist. It was going to be dark soon, for a short while. Instinct prompted him to light a fire. He busied himself about the task, thanking Wutra that he was feeling stronger, yet puzzled that he felt mysteriously sick. It might be hunger, he told himself; but food was at hand, once he had a fire.
After collecting twigs and rotted wood, and creating a sheltered place among stones, he set to work like a good hunter, rubbing a stick between his palms. The tinder smouldered. The miracle happened, and a small flame burned. The harsh lines of Aoz Roon’s face relaxed slightly as he looked down at the glow between his hands. The phagor stood at its distance and watched, unmoving.
‘Son of Freyr, you are make warm,’ he called.
Looking up, Aoz Roon saw his adversary only in outline, silhouetted against the gold of the western sky.
‘I make warm, and what’s more I’m going to cook and eat your cowbird, fuggie.’
‘You give me a share cowbird.’
‘The floods will go down in a day or two. Then we can both go home. You stay where you are for the present.’
The phagor’s articulation was thick. He said something Aoz Roon did not understand. The latter squatted by his fire, peering across the dark water at the adversary, whose silhouette was now fading into the general silhouette of trees and hills, black against the sunset. Aoz Roon was scratching himself, raking with his nails under his furs, swaying to and fro.
‘You, Son of Freyr, are sick and will die in the night.’ He had difficulty pronouncing the sibilants, rendering them as heavy z’s.
‘Zick? Yes, I’m zick, but I’m still Lord of Embruddock, scumb you.’
Aoz Roon began to call Curd, but no answer came. It was too dark on the ground to see if the phagor group continued to wait by the flood. The whole world was drowning in night, becoming nothing but a shadowy reflection.
Fearful in his weakness, he thought the phagor crouched, as if it was about to attempt to jump the space that intervened between them.
He waved a fist ‘You stick to your world, I’ll stick to mine.’
Merely uttering the words exhausted him. He held his hands over his eyes, panting as Curd had panted after a day’s hunting.
The phagor made no reply for a long while, as if trying to digest the man’s remark and finally deciding to reject it. This he did without gesture, saying, ‘We live and die in zame world, zame world. That is why we muzz fight.’
The words came to Aoz Roon over the water. He could not understand their meaning. He remembered only that he had shouted to Shay Tal that they would survive by unity. Now he was confused. It was typical of her not to be at hand when he needed her.
Turning to his fire, he fell upon his knees, pushed more branches on the blaze, and began the bloody job of cutting up the bird. He wrenched off one of its legs, from which sinews dangled, and skewered it on a stick. He was preparing to push it into the flames when he realised that the agony of the rash on his skin was echoed throughout his bones; his skeleton felt as if it were on fire. Sickness washed over him. The thought of eating anything was suddenly revolting.
He staggered back to his feet, trod in the fire, blundered forward into the water, went in circles, crying, holding aloft the bloody limb. The water noise was loud. It seemed to him that the river became motionless; the island was a slim boat, moving at speed across the surface of a lake; he could not control its flight; and the lake went on forever, into a great cavern of darkness.
The mouth of the cavern closed, swallowing him.
‘You have the bone fever,’ said the phagor. He was called Yhamm-Whrrmar. He was no warrior. He and his friends were itinerant woodmen and fungusmongers. Their kaidaws were stolen. When two Sons of Freyr had appeared in their midst, they had merely done their bounden duty, with the result that Yhamm-Whrrmar was now in some difficulty.
The fungusmongers had been driven westwards by a combination of factors. They were striking in the opposite direction, following favourable air-octaves, when they met humble dwellers like themselves, who spoke of a great crusade advancing, destroying all before it. Although alarmed, the fungusmongers had continued their quest for cooler ground, but had deflected up a long valley where the air-octaves were tainted. Floods had come. They had been forced to retreat. Unkindness and confusion assailed their very eddres.
He stood motionless on the edge of the flood, awaiting the death of the evil seminal being, Freyr. Its disappearance into darkness brought him relief. He unfroze and massaged his injured arm. Night was welcome.
Some distance away, his enemy lay sprawled across a heap of stones. There would be no further trouble from that quarter. After all, parasitic curse though they were, the Sons of Freyr were to be pitied: they all eventually fell sick in the presence of the Ancipital Race. It was no more than justice. Yhamm-Whrrmar stood motionless, letting hours pass.
‘You are zick and will die,’ he called. But he also felt bad air inside him. He scratched his neck with the hand of his good arm, and surveyed the great dark area in which he stood. Complete blackness was already fading. Somewhere to the east, Batalix, that good soldier, Batalix, father of the ancipital race, was already putting forth pale tidings of his presence. Yhamm-Whrrmar retired to the roofless hut and lay down; his magenta eyes closed; he slept without dream or movement.
Over the great floodwaters stole a glimmer from the east, promise of Batalix-dawn. Batalix would rise many times before the floods died, for those floods were fed by enormous reservoirs of water held in the remote Nktryhk. Time would come when the flood scoured for itself a regular riverbed. Later still, shifts in the land mass would deflect the river elsewhere. By the period — still many centuries distant — when Freyr reached its maximum glory, this land would become parched and form a sector of the Madura Desert, traversed by nations as yet a part of futurity unglimpsed.
As man and phagor slept, neither realised that water would flow past their flimsy strip of island for an age to come. It was a temporary inundation: but that inundation would last for another two hundred Batalix-years.
XIII. View from a Half Roon
On the Earth Observation Station, the term ‘bone fever’ was well understood. It was part of a complex disease-mechanism caused by the virus known to the learned families on the Avernus as the helico virus, and its workings were better understood by them than by those who suffered and died from it on the planet below.
Research into Helliconian microbiology was far enough advanced for the Earthmen to know that the virus manifested itself twice in every 1825 years of the Helliconian great year. However it might appear to the contrary to the Helliconians, these manifestations were not random. They occurred invariably during the period of the twenty eclipses which marked the beginning of true spring, and again during the period of the six or seven eclipses occurring later in the great year. Climatic changes coincident with the eclipses acted as triggers to the phases of viral hyperactivity, which formed, as it were, mirror images of each other, their effects being equally devastating though entirely different at the different periods.
To the inhabitants of the world below, the two scourges were separate phenomena. They raged more than five Helliconian small centuries (that is, slightly over seven Earth centuries) apart. So they went by separate names, the bone fever and the fat death.
The disease stream of the virus, like an irresistible flood, affected the history of all through whose lands it swept its ways. Yet an individual virus, like a single drop of water, was negligible.