Having once seen this predator in action, the hunters held it in respect. The sabre-tongue, for its part, showed the men neither fear nor aggression; mankind had never appeared on its menu nor, as far as it knew, was it on mankind’s.
Fire seemed to attract the animal. Sabre-tongues developed a habit of slouching up to the campfire in twos, male and female, to sit or sprawl there. They licked each other with their white sword tongues and would devour pieces of meat the men threw them. Yet they would never allow themselves to be touched, drawing away snarling from a cautiously proffered hand. The snarl was sufficient warning for the hunters; they had seen what damage that terrible tongue could do, used in anger.
Brakes of thorn tree and dogthrush were in blossom about the landscape. Beneath their heavy boughs the men slept. They dwelt among blossom and its cloying scents, with flowers never seen or smelt before except by long-gone fessups. In the dogthrush thickets they found the hives of wild bees, some brimming with honey. The honey fermented easily to make beethel. On the glutinous beethel the men got drunk and pursued one another through the grasses, laughing, shouting, wrestling, until the curious hoxneys came to see what all the fun was about. The hoxneys too would not permit a man to touch them, although many a man tried when caught up by the beethel, running across the veldt after the frolicking animals until he fell over and slept where he lay.
In the old days, the return home had been the crowning pleasure of the hunt. The challenge of the chill snowfields had been exchanged for warmth and sleep. That was altered. The hunt had become play. Their muscles were no longer stretched, and there was warmth on the flowering veldt.
Also, Oldorando held less attraction for the hunters. The hamlet was growing crowded as more children survived the hazards of their first year on earth. The men preferred convivial beethel binges on the plain to the complaints that often attended their return.
So they no longer came back boastfully in the old tight-knit bunch, straggling home instead in ones and twos, in a less obtrusive way.
These new-style returns held one excitement previously absent, at least as far as the women were concerned; for if the men had their irresponsibility, the women had their vanity.
“Let’s see what you’ve brought me!”
That, with variations, was the popular cry, as women dragged their brats out to meet their men. They went as far as the new bridge and waited there, standing on the east bank of the Voral while the kids threw stones at the ducks and geese, waiting impatiently for the men to arrive with meat—and skins.
The meat was their due, their necessity, and it was no good a hunter coming back without meat.
But what aroused frenzies of delight in the hearts of the women were the skins, the brilliant hoxney skins. Never before in their impoverished lives had they visualised a change of garb. Never before had the tanners been in such demand. Never before had the men been driven out to kill for the sake of killing. Every woman wished to possess a hoxney skin—preferably more than one—and to dress her offspring in one.
They competed with each other for brighter skins. Blue, magenta, aquamarine, cherry. They blackmailed the men in ways men enjoyed. They preened themselves, they stained their lips. They paraded. They dressed their hair. They even took to washing themselves.
Correctly worn, with those electric stripes running vertically up the body, hoxney skins could make even a dumpy woman look elegant. The skins had to be properly cut. A new trade prospered in Oldorando: tailor. As flowers put forth bells and spikes and faces along the lanes between the ancient worn towers, and flowering ivies climbed the towers themselves, so the women began more to resemble flowers. They docked themselves in bright colours their mothers had never set eyes on.
It was not long before the men, in self-defence, also cut off their old heavy furs and took to hoxney skins.
The weather became still and threatening, and the rajabarals steamed from their flat lids.
Oldorando was silent under towering cumulus. The hunters were away. Shay Tal sat alone in her room writing. She no longer cared about her appearance, and still went round in her old ill-fitting skins. In her head she still heard the creaking voices of fessups and her parents’ gossies. She still tried to dream of perfection and travel.
When Vry and Amin Lim came down from the room above, Shay Tal looked up sharply and said, “Vry, what would you think of a globe as a model of the world?”
Vry said, “It would make sense. A globe rotates most smoothly of all figures, and the other wanderers are round. So we must be too.”
“A disc, a wheel? We’ve been brought up to believe that the original boulder rests on a disc.”
“Much we were brought up to believe is incorrect. You taught us that, Mother,” Vry said. “I believe our world revolves round the sentinels.”
Shay Tal sat where she was, contemplating them, and they fidgeted under her inspection. Both of the younger women had shed their old skins and wore bright hoxney suits. Stripes of cerise and grey ran up Vry’s body. The ears of the dead animal adorned her shoulders. Despite all Aoz Roon’s threatened restrictions on the academy, the skins had been presented to her by Dathka. She walked more confidently. She had acquired glamour.
Suddenly, Shay Tal’s temper flared up. “You stupid wenches, you silly gillies, you are defying me. Don’t pretend you aren’t. I know what goes on under that air of meekness. Look at the way you dress nowadays! We get nowhere with our understanding, nowhere. Everything seems to lead us to fresh complexities. I shall have to go to Sibornal, to find this great wheel the gossies speak of. Perhaps real freedom, clear truth, lives there. Here is only the curse of ignorance… Where are you two going, in any case?”
Amin Lim spread her hands to demonstrate their innocence. “Nowhere, ma’am, only to the fields, to see if we’ve cured the mildew on the oats.”
She was a big girl, even bigger at this time with the seed her man had planted within her. She stood there pleadingly, released by a slight flicker of assent in Shay Tal’s eye, whereon she and Vry almost scuttled from the oppressive room.
As they retreated down the dirty stone steps, Vry said resignedly, “There she goes again, blowing up, as regular as the Hour-Whistler. Poor thing, something is really worrying her.”
“Where’s this pool you mentioned? I don’t feel like walking far in my condition.”
“You’ll love it, Amin Lim. It’s only a little way beyond the northern fields, and we can walk slowly. I expect Oyre’s there.”
The air had thickened to an extent where it no longer carried the scent of flowers, but emanated a metallic trace of its own. Colour appeared dazzling in the actinic light, the geese looked supernaturally white.
They passed between the columns of great rajabarals. The stark cylinders with their concave curve were better suited to the geometries of a winter landscape; with the growing lushness they formed a forbidding contrast.
“Even the rajabarals are changing,” Amin Lim said. “How long has steam been coming out of their tops?”
Vry did not know and was not particularly interested. She and Oyre had discovered a warm pool, knowledge of which they had so far kept to themselves. In a narrow valley, the mouth of which pointed away from Oldorando, fresh springs had burst forth from the ground, some at a temperature near boiling, some rushing down to meet the Voral in a cloud of vapour. One spring, damned by rock, flowed a different way and formed a secluded pool, fringed by verdure but open to the sky. It was to this pool that Vry led Amin Lim.