He shook his head, darting his gaze nervously round the rooth. The women waited, motionless as phagors in the old dull room. He spoke again.
“Many people have died. There was a great plague, the Fat Death. Invasions … the Seven Blindnesses … tales of woe. We hope our present Lord—” again a glance round the room—“will prove as wise as King Denniss. The good king founded our corps in a year called 249 Before Nadir. We do not know who Nadir was. What we do know is that I—allowing for a break in the record—am the sixty- eighth master of the tanners and tawyers corps. The sixty-eighth …” He peered shortsightedly at Shay Tal.
“Sixty-eight …” Trying to hide her dismayed astonishment, she gathered her furs about her with a characteristic gesture. “That’s many generations, stretching back to antiquity.”
“Yes, yes, stretching right back.” Master Datnil nodded complacently, as if personally acquainted with vast stretches of time. “It’s nearly seven centuries since our corps was founded. Seven centuries, and still it freezes of nights.”
Embruddock in its surrounding wilderness was a beached ship. It still gave the crew shelter, though it would never sail again.
So greatly had time dismantled a once proud city that its inhabitants did not realise that what they regarded as a town was nothing more than the remains of a palace, which had stood in the middle of a civilisation obliterated by climate, madness, and the ages.
As the weather improved, the hunters were forced to go in increasingly long expeditions in search of game. The slaves planted fields and dreamed of impossible liberty. The women stayed at home and grew neurotic.
While Shay Tal fasted and became more solitary, Vry became full of a repressed energy and developed her friendship with Oyre. With Oyre, she talked over all that Master Datnil had said, and found a sympathetic listener. They agreed that there were puzzling riddles in history, yet Oyre was lightly sceptical.
“Datnil Skar is old and a bit gaga—Father always says so,” she said, and limped round the room in parody of the Master’s gait exclaiming in a piping voice, “ ‘Our corps is so exclusive we didn’t even let King Denniss join…’ ”
When Vry laughed, Oyre said, more seriously, “Master Datnil could be executed for showing his corps Master Book about—that’s proof he’s gaga.”
“And even then he wouldn’t let us look at it properly.” Vry was silent, and then burst out, “If only we could put all the facts together. Shay Tal just collects them, writes them down. There must be a way of making a—a structure from them. So much has been lost—Master Datnil is right there. The cold was so bitter, once on a time, that almost everything inflammable was burnt—wood, paper, all records. You realise we don’t even know what year it is?—Though the stars might tell us. Loil Bry’s calendar is stupid, calendars should be based on years, not people. People are so fallible … and so am I. Oh, I’ll go mad, I swear!”
Oyre burst out laughing and hugged Vry.
“You’re the sanest person I know, you idiot.” They fell to discussing the stars again, sitting on the bare floor close together. Oyre had been with Laintal Ay to look at the fresco in the old temple. “The sentinels are clearly depicted, with Batalix above Freyr as usual, but almost touching, above Wutra’s head.”
“Every year, the two suns get closer,” Vry said, decisively. “Last month, they virtually touched as Batalix overtook Freyr, and no one paid any notice. Next year, they will collide. What then? … Or maybe one passes behind the other.”
“Perhaps that’s what Master Datnil meant by a Blindness? It would suddenly be dimday, wouldn’t it, if one sentinel disappeared? Perhaps there will be Seven Blindnesses, as once before.” She looked frightened, and moved nearer her friend. “It will be the end of the world. Wutra will appear, looking furious, of course.”
Vry laughed and jumped to her feet. “The world didn’t end last time and won’t do so this time. No, perhaps it will mark a new beginning.” Her face became radiant. “That’s why the seasons are growing warmer. Once Shay Tal has done her ghastly pauk, we will tackle the question anew. I shall work at my mathematics. Let the Blindnesses come—I embrace them!”
They danced round the room, laughing wildly.
“How I long for some great experience!” Vry cried.
Shay Tal, meanwhile, showed more clearly than before the little bird bones below her flesh, and her dark skins hung more loosely about her body. Food was brought her by the women, but she would not eat.
“Fasting suits my ravenous soul,” she said, pacing about her chilly room, when Vry and Oyre remonstrated with her, and Amin Lim stood meekly by. “Tomorrow I will go into pauk. You three and Rol Sakil can be with me. I will dredge up ancient knowledge from the well of the past. Through the fessups I will reach to that generation which built our towers and corridors. I will descend centuries if necessary, and confront King Denniss himself.”
“How wonderful!” Amin Lim exclaimed.
Birds came to perch on her crumbling window sill and be fed the bread Shay Tal would not touch.
“Don’t sink into the past, ma’am,” Vry counselled her. “That’s the way of old men. Look ahead, look outward. There’s no profit in interrogating the dead.”
So unused to argument had Shay Tal grown that she had difficulty in refraining from scolding her chief disciple. She looked and saw, almost with startlement, that the diffident young thing was now a woman. Her face was pallid, with shadows under her eyes, and Oyre’s the same.
“Why are you two so pale? Are you ill?”
Vry shook her head.
“Tonight there’s an hour of darkness before dimday. I’ll show you then what Oyre and I are doing. While the rest of the world was sleeping, we have been working.”
The evening was clear at Freyr-set. Warmth departed from the world as the younger women escorted Shay Tal up to the roof of the ruinous tower. A lens of ghost light stretched upwards from the horizon where Freyr had set, reaching halfway to zenith. There was little cloud to conceal the heavens; as their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the stars overhead flashed out in brilliance. In some quarters of the sky, the stars were relatively sparse, in others they hung in clusters. Overhead, trailing from one horizon to the other, was a broad, irregular band of light, where the stars were as thick as mist and there occasional brilliances burned.
“It’s the most magnificent sight in the world,” Oyre said. “Don’t you think so, ma’am?”
Shay Tal said, “In the world below hang fessups like stars. They are the souls of the dead. Here you see the souls of the unborn. As above, so below.”
“I think we have to look to an entirely different principle to explain the sky,” Vry said firmly. “All motions here are regular. The stars advance about that bright star there, which we call the polar star.” She pointed to a star high above their heads. “In the twenty-five hours of the day, the stars rotate once rising in the east and setting in the west like the two sentinels. Doesn’t that prove they are similar to the two sentinels, only much farther from us?”
The young women showed Shay Tal the star map they were making, with the relative positions of stars marked on a vellum sheet. She evinced little interest, and said, “The stars cannot affect us as the gossies do. How does this hobby of yours advance knowledge? You’d better to sleep at night.”
Vry sighed. “The sky is alive. It’s not a tomb, like the world below. Oyre and I have stood here and seen comets flaring, landing on the earth. And there are four bright stars that move differently from all the others, the wanderers, of which the old songs sing. Those wanderers sometimes double back in their passage across the sky. And one comes over very fast. We’ll see it presently. We think it’s close to us, and we call it Kaidaw, because of its speed.”