“You told your mother’s gossie to stop talking?”
“Don’t look so shocked. My man used to beat me. I was scared of him…”
She was panting and lost her voice. They crowded thankfully into the warmth of the house. The soak pit of the tannery steamed. In niches, thick candles made from goose fat burned with a sound like hair being ripped from hide. Twenty-odd women were gathered there, yawning and scratching themselves.
Shay Tal and Loilanun ate lumps of bread together, and took their ration of rathel, or pig’s counsel, before moving over to one of the pestles. The older woman, now her face could be seen more clearly, looked ghastly, with hollows under her eyes and her hair matted.
“Did the gossie tell you anything useful? Anything to help? Did she say anything about Laintal Ay?”
“She said we must collect knowledge. Respect knowledge. She scorned me.” Talking through her face full of bread, she added, “She said knowledge was more important than food. Well, she said it was food. Probably she was confused—not being used to it down there. It’s hard to understand all they say…”
As the supervisor appeared, they moved over to the grain.
Shay Tal looked sideways at her friend, the hollows of whose face were now filled with an ashen light from the eastern window. “Knowledge can’t be food. However much we knew, we’d still have to grind the corn for the village.”
“When Mother was alive, she showed me a drawing of a machine powered by the wind. It ground the grain and women didn’t lift a finger, she said. The wind did the women’s work.”
“The men wouldn’t care for that,” Shay Tal said, with a laugh.
Despite her caution, Shay Tal’s resolution hardened; she became the most extreme of the women in defying what was unthinkingly accepted.
Her special work was in the boilery. Here, the flour was kneaded with animal fat and salt, and steamed over troughs of rapid-flowing water from the hot underground springs. When the dark brown loaves were ready, they were cooled, and a lean girl named Vry distributed them to everyone in Oldorando. Shay Tal was the expert of this process; her loaves had the reputation of tasting better than those of any other cook.
Now she saw mysterious perspectives beyond the loaves of bread. Routine no longer contented her, and her manner became more remote. When Loilanun fell ill of a wasting disease, Shay Tal took her and Laintal Ay into her house, despite her father’s protests, and patiently tended the older woman. They talked together for hours. Sometimes Laintal Ay listened; more often, he grew bored and went off on his own.
Shay Tal began to pass ideas to the other women in the boilery. She talked in particular to Vry, who was at a malleable age. She talked about the human preference for truth over lies as resembling the need for light above dark. The women listened, muttering uneasily.
And not only the women. In her dark furs, Shay Tal had a majesty felt by the men, too—Laintal Ay, among others. With her proud bearing went proud talk. Both the looks and the talk attracted Aoz Roon. He would listen and argue. He released a vein of flirtatiousness in Shay Tal, who responded to his air of authority. She approved of his support of Dathka against Nahkri; but she allowed him no liberties. Her own liberty depended on allowing him none.
The weeks passed, and great storms roared over the towers of Embruddock. Loilanun’s voice grew weaker, and one afternoon she passed away. In her illness, she had transmitted some of Loil Brys knowledge to Shay Tal and to other women who came to see her. She made the past real to them, and all that she said was filtered through Shay Tal’s dark imagination.
Loilanun, as she faded, helped Shay Tal to found what they called the academy. The academy was intended for women; there they would seek together to be something other than drudges. Many of the drudges stood wailing by her deathbed until Shay Tal, in a fit of impatience, threw them out.
“We can observe the stars,” Vry said, raising her waiflike face. “Have you ever studied how they move on regular paths? I would like to understand the stars better.”
“Everything valuable is buried in the past,” Shay Tal said, looking down at the countenance of her dead friend. “This place cheated Loilanun, and cheats us. The gossies wait for us. Our lives are so circumscribed! We need to make better people just as we need to bake better loaves.”
She jumped up and flung open the worn window shutter.
Her shrewd intellect saw immediately that the academy would be mistrusted by the men of Embruddock, and by Nahkri and Klils above all. Only the callow Laintal Ay would support her, though she hoped to win over Aoz Roon and Eline Tal. She saw that whatever opposition the academy met with, she would have to fight—and that fight was necessary to give new spirit to all. She would defy the general lethargy; time had come for progress.
Inspiration moved Shay Tal. As her poor friend was buried and she stood with a hand on Laintal Ay’s shoulder, she caught the eye of Aoz Roon. She burst into speech. Her words carried wild and loud among the geysers.
“This woman was forced to be independent. What she knew helped her. Some of us are not to be owned like slaves. We have a vision of better things. Hear what I say. Things will be different.” They gaped at her, pleased at the novelty of her outburst.
“You think we live at the centre of the universe. I say we live in the centre of a farmyard. Our position is so obscure that you cannot realise how obscure.
“This I tell you all. Some disaster happened in the past, in the long past. So complete was it that no one now can explain to you what it was or how it came about. We know only that it brought darkness and cold.
“You try to live the best you can. Good, good, live well, love one another, be kind. But don’t pretend that the disaster has nothing to do with you. It may have happened long ago, yet it infects every day of our lives. It ages us, it wears us out, it devours us, it tears our children from us, as it has torn Loilanun. It makes us not only ignorant but in love with ignorance. We’re infested with ignorance.
“I’m going to propose a treasure hunt—a quest, if you like. A quest in which every one of us can join. I want you to be aware of our fallen state, and to maintain constant vigilance for evidence as to its nature. We have to piece together what has happened to reduce us to this chilly farmyard; then we can improve our lot, and see to it that the disaster does not befall us and our children again.
“That’s the treasure I offer you. Knowledge. Truth. You fear it, yes. But you must seek it. You must grow to love it.
“Seek the light!”
As children, Oyre and Laintal Ay had often explored beyond the barricades. Dotted about the wilderness were stone pillars, the insignia of old tracks, which served as perches for the large birds doing sentry duty over their domain. Together, they scrambled across forlorn ruins, skull-like remains of habitations, backbones of ancient walls, where rime scoured gate towers and age under-ate everything. Little the kids had cared. Their laughter echoed against these stranded anatomies.
Now the laughter was subdued, the expeditions more strained. Laintal Ay had reached puberty; he underwent the blood-drinking ceremony, and was initiated into the chase. Oyre had developed a mischievous will, and walked with a more springy tread. Their play became tentative; old charades were abandoned as carelessly as the structures they haunted, never to be reenacted.
The truce of innocence between them was ended finally when Oyre insisted that her father’s slave, Calary, come on one of their excursions. This development marked their last expedition together, though neither realised it at the time; they pretended to hunt for treasure as before.