It sank into the eddre of the ground and was gone.
Now was the time of dimday, which prevailed in summer and autumn, and which almost alone distinguished those seasons from even less merciful times. Dimday suffused a dazed half-light across the night sky. Only at times of New Year would Batalix and Freyr rise and set together. At present their lives were solitary, hidden frequently behind cloud which was the billowing smoke from Wutra’s war.
In the manner of day’s turning to dimday, Yuli read the weather omens. Driving winds would soon be conjured up with snow on their breath. He recalled the rhyme they chanted in Old Olonets, the tongue of magic, of past things, of red ruin, the tongue of catastrophe, fair women, giants, and rich food, the tongue of an inaccessible yesterday. The rhyme had been recalled in the croupy caves of the Barriers:
As if responding to the changing light, a general shudder passed across the mass of yelk, and they stopped. Groaning, they settled where they were upon the trampled ground, tucking their legs beneath their bodies. For the enormous biyelk, this manoeuvre was not possible. They stood where they were and slept, ears across eyes. Some of the phagor groups gathered themselves together for companionship; most simply flung themselves down indifferently and slept where they fell, jamming their backs against the flanks of supine yelk.
Everything slept. The two figures sprawled on the rock ledge dragged their sheltering skin over their heads and dreamed, empty-bellied, with their faces buried in their folded arms. Everything slept, except for the mist of biting and sucking insects.
Things that were capable of dreams struggled through the uneasy mirages that dimday brought with it.
In general, the view, with its lack of shadow and constant level of suffering, might have appeared to anyone scrutinising it for the first time to represent not so much a world as a place awaiting formal creation.
At this stage of quiescence, there was a motion in the sky hardly more energetic than the unfolding of the aurora which had hung above the scene earlier. From the direction of the sea came a solitary childrim, sailing through the air some metres above the prostrate mass of living things. It looked to be no more than a great wing, glowing red like the embers of a dying fire, beating with a steady lethargy. As it passed over the deer, the animals twitched and heaved. It skimmed over the rock where the two humans lay, and Yuli and his father twitched and heaved, like the yelk seeing strange visions in their sleep. Then the apparition was gone, heading on lonely for the mountains in the south, leaving behind it a trail of red sparks to die in the atmosphere like an echo of itself.
After a while, the animals woke and rose to their feet. They shook their ears, which bled from the attentions of the gnats, and again started forward. With them went the biyelks and gunnadus, scuttling here and there. With them too went the phagors. The two humans roused, and watched them go.
Throughout another day the great progress continued, and blizzards raged, plastering the animals with snow. Towards evening, when wind was blowing tattered cloud across the sky and the cold held a whistling edge, Alehaw sighted the rear of the herd.
The rear was not as tight as the vanguard had been. Stragglers from the herd trailed back several miles, some limping, some coughing pitifully. Behind and beside them scurried long furry things with bellies near the ground, waiting the chance to nip a fetlock and bring a victim crashing down.
The last of the phagors marched past the ledge. They did not walk at the rear, either from respect for the low-bellied carnivores or because the going was difficult over such trampled ground, piled with scumble.
And now Alehaw rose, motioning his son to do likewise. They stood, clutching their weapons, and then slithered down to level ground.
“Good!” said Akhaw.
The snow was strewn with dead animals, in particular round the banks of the Vark. The break in the ice was plugged with drowned bodies. Many of those creatures who had been forced to lie down where they stood had frozen to death as they rested, and were now turned to ice. The lumps of which they composed the red core were unrecognizable in shape after the blizzard.
Delighted to be able to move, young Yuli ran and jumped and cried aloud. Dashing to the frozen river, he skipped dangerously from one unidentifiable lump to another, waving his hands and laughing. His father called him sharply to heel.
Alehaw pointed down through the ice. Black shapes moved, obscurely seen, partly defined by trails of bubbles. They streaked the turbid medium in which they swam with crimson, boring up beneath the frozen layers to attack the banquet provided for their benefit.
Other predators were arriving by air, large white fowl coming in from the east and the sullen north, fluttering heavily down, brandishing ornate beaks with which they bored through the ice to the flesh underneath. As they devoured, they fixed on the hunter and his son eyes heavy with avian calculation.
But Alehaw wasted no time on them. Directing Yuli to follow, he moved to where the herd had stumbled across fallen trees, calling and waving his spear as he went, to frighten off predators. Here dead animals were readily accessible. Although badly trampled, they still preserved one part of their anatomies intact, their skulls. It was to these that Alehaw addressed his attention. He prized open the dead jaws with the blade of a knife, and adroitly cut out their thick tongues. Blood spilled over his wrists onto the snow.
Meanwhile, Yuli climbed among the tree trunks, collecting broken wood. He kicked the snow away from one fallen trunk, contriving a sheltered place in which he could make a small fire. Wrapping his bowstring round a pointed stick, he rubbed it to and fro. The crumbled wood smouldered. He blew gently. A tiny flame sprang up, as he had seen it do often under the magical breath of Onesa. When the fire was burning well, he set his bronze pot on it, and piled snow in to melt, adding salt from a leather pocket he carried in his furs. He was ready when his father brought seven shiny tongues in his arms, and slipped them into the pot.
Four of the tongues were for Alehaw, three for Yuli. They ate with grunts of satisfaction; Yuli trying to catch his father’s eye and smile, to show satisfaction; but Alehaw, kept his brows knit as he chewed, and his gaze down at the trampled ground.
There was work still to be done. Even before they had finished eating, Alehaw got to his feet and kicked the smouldering embers aside. The scavenger birds nearby rose momentarily, and then settled again to their feast. Yuli emptied the bronze pot and secured it to his belt.
They were almost at the place when the great herd of animals reached the western limit of its migration. Here, on higher ground, they would seek out lichen under the snow, and graze on the strands of shaggy green moss that wrapped the larch forests about. Here, too, on a low plateau, some of the animals would reach their due term and bring forth their young. It was to this plateau, no more than a mile off, that Alehaw and his son made their way through the grey daylight. In the distance, they saw groups of other hunters, heading in the same direction; each group deliberately ignored the others. No other group consisted of two people only, Yuli noted; that was the penalty his family paid for being not of the plain, but of the Barrier. For them, everything was more arduous.
They walked bent double, up the incline. The way was strewn with boulders, where an ancient sea had once withdrawn in the face of encroaching cold—but of that aspect of affairs they knew and cared nothing; only the present was of importance to Alehaw and his son.