As they parted the bushes and saw the figure standing by the pool, Amin Lim shrieked and threw her hand to her mouth.
Oyre stood on the bank. She was naked. Her skin shone with moisture and water dripped from her ample breasts. With no sign of shyness she turned and waved excitedly to her friends. Behind her lay her discarded hoxney skins.
“Come on, where you have been? The water’s glorious today.”
Amin Lim stood where she was, blushing, still covering her mouth. She had never seen anyone naked before.
“It’s all right,” Vry said, laughing at her friends expression. “It’s lovely in the water. I’m going to strip off and go in. Watch me—if you dare.”
She ran forward to where Oyre stood and began unlacing the cerise and grey suit. Hoxneys were tailored to be climbed in and out of. In another minute, the suit was thrown aside and Vry stood there naked, her more slender lines contrasting with Oyre’s sturdy beauty. She laughed in delight.
“Come on, Amin Lim, don’t be stuffy. A swim will be good for your baby.”
She and Oyre jumped into the water together. As it swallowed up their limbs, they squealed with delight.
Amin Lim stood where she was and squealed with horror.
They had gorged down an enormous feast, with bitter fruits to follow the slabs of meat. Their faces still shone with fat.
The hunters were heavier than they had been last season. Food was all too plentiful. The hoxneys could be slaughtered without anyone’s having to run. The animals continued to come close, capering among the hunters and rolling their parti-coloured bodies against the hides of their dead fellows.
Still wearing his old black furs, Aoz Roon had been talking apart to Goija Hin, the slave master, whose broad back was still visible as he trudged towards the distant towers of Oldorando. Aoz Roon returned to the company. He grabbed up a chunk of rib still sizzling on a stone and rolled over in the grass with it. Curd, his great hound, frisked playfully with him, growling, until Aoz Roon brought a branch of fragrant dogthrush down to keep the brute from his meat.
He kicked out at Dathka in a friendly way.
“This is the life, friend. Take it easy, eat as much as you can before the ice returns. By the original boulder, I’ll never forget this season as long as I live.”
“Splendid.” That was all Dathka said. He had finished eating, and sat with his arms wrapped round his knees, watching the hoxneys, a herd of which was wheeling fast through the grass not a quarter of a mile away.
“Damn you, you never say anything,” Aoz Roon exclaimed good-humouredly, pulling at his meat with his strong teeth. “Talk to me.”
Dathka turned his head so that his cheek rested on his knee and gave Aoz Roon a knowing look. “What’s going on between you and Goija Hin then?”
Aoz Roon’s mouth went hard. “That’s private between the pair of us.”
“So you won’t talk either.” Dathka turned away and regarded the cantering hoxneys once more, where they wheeled below the high cumulus piling up on the western horizon. The air was full of green light, robbing the hoxneys of their brilliant colour.
Finally, as if he could feel the black regard of Aoz Roon through his shoulder blades, he said, without shifting his gaze, “I was thinking.”
Aoz Roon flung his chewed bone to Curd and lay flat under the blossoming bough. “All right, then, out with it. What have you been saving up all your lifetime to think?”
“How to catch a live hoxney.”
“Ha! What good would that do you?”
“I wasn’t thinking of good, any more than you were when you called Nahkri to the top of the tower.”
A heavy silence followed, in which Aoz Roon said no word. Eventually, as distant thunder sounded, Eline Tal brought round some beethel. Aoz Roon demanded angrily of the company in general, “Where’s Laintal Ay? Wandering again, I suppose. Why is he not with us? You men are getting too lazy and disobedient. Some of you are in for a surprise.”
He got up and walked heavily away, followed at a respectful distance by his hound.
Laintal Ay was not studying hoxneys like his silent friend. He was after other game.
Since that night, four long years ago, when he was witness to the murder of his uncle Nahkri, the incident had haunted him. He had ceased to blame Aoz Roon for the murder, for he now understood better that the Lord of Embruddock was a tormented man.
“I’m sure he thinks himself under a curse,” Oyre had once told Laintal Ay.
“He can be forgiven a lot for the western bridge,” Laintal Ay replied, in a practical way. But he felt himself spoiled by his involvement in the murder, and increasingly kept his own counsel.
The bond between him and the beautiful Oyre had been both strengthened and distorted by that night when too much rathel had been drunk. He had even become wary with her.
He had spelt out the difficulty to himself. “If I am to rule in Oldorando, as my lineage decrees, then I must kill the father of the girl I wish to make mine. It’s impossible.”
No doubt Oyre also understood his dilemma. Yet she was marked out as his and no one else’s. He would have fought to the death any other man who went near her.
His wild instincts, his sense for the cunning trap, for the unregarding moment that spells disaster, made him see as clearly as did Shay Tal that Oldorando was now left regularly vulnerable to attack. In the present warm spell, nobody was alert. Sentries droused at their posts.
He raised the question of defence with Aoz Roon, who had a reasonable answer.
Aoz Roon said dismissively that nobody, friend or foe, travelled far any more. A mantle of snow had made it easy for men to go wherever they pleased; now everywhere was choked with green things, with thickets growing denser every day. The time for raids was past.
Besides, he added, they had had no phagor raids since the day Mother Shay Tal performed her miracle at Fish lake. They were safer than they had ever been. And he passed Laintal Ay a tankard of beethel.
Laintal Ay was not satisfied with the answer. Uncle Nahkri had considered himself perfectly safe that night he had climbed the stairs of the big tower. Within a couple of minutes, he was lying in the lane below with his neck broken.
When the hunters went out today, Laintal Ay had got no further than the bridge. There he turned silently back, determined to make a survey of the village and see how it would fare under an unexpected attack.
As he commenced circling the outskirts, the first thing he observed was a light plume of steam on the Voral. It rode along on a certain line in midstream, never deviating, seeming to advance above the dark rapid glide of the water, yet ever remaining in the identical place. Feathers of vapour shredded back from it along the breast of the river. What it signified he could not determine. He proceeded with a sense of unease.
The atmosphere grew heavier. Saplings were springing up over mounds that had once been buildings. He viewed the remaining towers through their slender bars. Aoz Roon was right in one respect: it had become difficult to get round Oldorando.
Yet warning images formed in his mind. He saw phagors riding kaidaws, leaping obstacles and charging into the heart of the settlement. He saw the hunters straggling home, loaded with bright skins, their heads heavy from too much beethel. They had time to witness their homes burnt, their women and children dead, before they too were trampled under savage hoof.
He forced his way through prickly bushes.
How the phagors rode! What could be more wonderful than to mount a kaidaw and ride it, master it, share its power, be one with its action? Those ferocious beasts submitted to no mount but a phagor: or so the legends said, and he had never heard of the man who had ridden a kaidaw. The very notion made one dizzy. Men went on foot… But a man on a kaidaw would be more than the equal of a phagor on a kaidaw.