Much more she said, but this was all Luterin could remember when he woke up.
Toress Lahl lay beside him. Not only were her eyes shut: her whole countenance presented a closed appearance. A lock of hair lay across her face; she bit it, as recently she had bitten the fox tail to preserve her from the cold of the trail. She scarcely breathed. He recognised that she was in pauk.
Finally she returned. She stared and looked at him almost without recognition.
“You never visit those below?” she said in a small voice.
“Never. We Shokerandits regard it as gross superstition.”
“Do you not wish to speak with your dead brother?”
“No.”
After a silence, he clutched her hand and asked, “You have been communing with your husband again?”
She nodded without speaking, knowing it was bitter to him. After a moment, she said, “Isn’t this world we live in like an evil dream?”
“Not if we live by our beliefs.”
She clung to him then and said, “But isn’t it true that one day we shall grow old, and our bodies decay, and our wits fail? Isn’t that true? What could be worse than that?”
They made love again, this time more from fear than affection.
After he had done the rounds of the estate the next day, and found everything quiet, he went to visit his mother.
His mother’s rooms were at the rear of the mansion. A young servant girl opened the door to him, and showed him into his mother’s anteroom. There stood his mother, in characteristic pose, hands clasped tightly before her, head slightly on one side as she smiled quizzingly at him.
He kissed her. As he did so, the familiar atmosphere that she carried round with her enveloped him. Something in her attitude and her gestures suggested an inward sorrow, even—he had often thought it— an illness of some kind: and yet an illness, a sorrow, so familiar that Lourna Shokerandit drew on them almost as a substitute for other marked characteristics.
As she spoke gently to her son, not reproaching him for failing to come earlier, compassion rose in his heart. He saw how age had increased its tyranny upon her since their last meeting. Her cheeks and temples were more hollow, her skin more papery. He asked her what she had been doing with herself.
She put out a hand and touched him with a small pressure, as if uncertain whether to draw him nearer or push him away.
“We won’t talk here. Your aunt would like to see you too.”
Lourna Shokerandit turned and led him into the small wood-panelled room within which much of her life was spent. Luterin remembered it from childhood. Lacking windows, its walls were covered with paintings of sunlit glades in sombre caspiarn forests. Here and there, lost among representations of foliage, women’s faces gazed into the room from oval frames. Aunt Yaringa, the plump and emotional Yaringa, was sitting in a corner, embroidering, in a chair upholstered somewhat along her own lines.
Yaringa jumped up and uttered loud soblike noises of welcome.
“Home at last, you poor poor thing! What you must have been through…”
Lourna Shokerandit lowered herself stiffly into a velvet-covered chair. She took her son’s hand as he sat beside her. Yaringa perforce retreated to her padded corner.
“It’s happiness to see you back, Luterin. We had such fears for you, particularly when we heard what happened to Asperamanka’s army.”
“My life was spared through a piece of good fortune. All our fellow-countrymen were slain as they returned to Sibornal. It was an act of deep treachery.”
She looked down at her thin lap, where silences had a habit of nestling. Finally she said, without glancing up, “It is a shock to see you as you are. You have become so … fat.” She hesitated on the last word, in view of her sister’s presence.
“I survived the Fat Death and am in my winter suit, Mother. I like it and feel perfectly well.”
“It makes you look funny,” said Yaringa, and was ignored.
He told the ladies something of his adventures, concluding by saying, “And I owe my survival in great part to a woman called Toress Lahl, widow of a Borldoranian I killed in battle. She nursed me devotedly through the Fat Death.”
“From slaves, devotion is to be expected,” said Lourna Shokerandit. “Have you been to see the Esikananzis yet? Insil will be eager to see you again, as you know.”
“I have not yet spoken to her. No.”
“I shall arrange a feast for tomorrow night, and Insil and her family shall come. We will all celebrate your return.” She clapped her hands once, without sound.
“I shall sing for you, Luterin,” said Yaringa. It was her speciality.
Lourna’s expression changed. She sat more upright in her chair.
“And Evanporil tells me that you are countermanding the new Act to destroy all phagors.”
“We could cull them gradually, Mother. But to lose all six hundred at once would be to disrupt the working of the estate. We are hardly likely to get six hundred human slaves to replace them—apart from the greater expense of human slaves.”
“We must obey the State.”
“I thought we would wait for Father’s return.”
“Very well. Otherwise, you will comply with the law? It is important for us Shokerandits to set an example.”
“Of course.”
“I should tell you that a foreign female slave was arrested in your rooms this morning. We have her in a cell, and she will go before the local Board when they meet next.”
Shokerandit stood up. “Why was this done? Who dared intrude into my rooms?”
With composure, his mother answered, “The servant you had ordered to attend the slave woman reported that she went into a state of pauk. Pauk is proscribed by law. No less a personage than Priest- Supreme Chubsalid has gone to the stake for refusing to comply with the law. Exception can hardly be made for a foreign slave woman.”
“In this case, an exception will be made,” Shokerandit said, pale of face. “Excuse me.” He bowed to his mother and aunt and left their rooms.
In a fury, he stamped through the passages to the Estates Office. He relieved his anger by bellowing at the staff.
As he summoned the estate guard captain, Shokerandit said to himself, Very well, I shall marry Toress Lahl. I must protect her from injustice. She’ll be safe, married to a future Keeper of the Wheel… and perhaps this scare will persuade her not to visit the gossie of her husband so often.
Toress Lahl was released from the cell without trouble and restored to Shokerandit’s rooms. They embraced.
“I bitterly regret this indignity imposed on you.”
“I have become used to indignity.”
“Then you shall become used to something better. When the right opportunity arises, I will take you to meet my mother. She will see the kind of person you are.”
Toress Lahl laughed. “I am sure that I shall not greatly impress the Shokerandits of Khamabhar.”
The feast to mark Luterin’s return was well attended. His mother had shaken off her lethargy to invite all local dignitaries as well as such Shokerandit relations as were in favour.
The Esikananzi family arrived in force. With Member Ebstok Esika-nanzi came his sickly-looking wife, two sons, his daughter Insil Esikananzi, and a train of subsidiary relations.
Since Luterin and Insil had last met, she had developed into an attractive woman, though a heaviness in her brow prevented true beauty—as well as suggesting that tendency to meet fate head-on which had long been a quality of the Esikananzis. She was elegantly dressed in a grey velvet gown reaching to the floor, adorned by the sort of wide lace collar she favoured. Luterin noted how the formal politeness with which she covered her disgust at his metamorphosis studiedly emphasised that disgust.
All the Esikananzis tinkled to a great extent; their hip-bells were very similar in tone. Ebstok’s was the loudest. In a loud whisper, he spoke of his bottomless sorrow at the death of his son Umat at Isturia-cha. Luterin’s protest that Umat was killed in the great massacre outside Koriantura was swept aside as lies and Campannlatian propaganda. Member Ebstok Esikananzi was a thickset man of dark and intricate countenance. The cold endured on his frequent hunts had brought a maze of red veins creeping like a species of plant life over his cheeks. He watched the mouths, not the eyes, of those who addressed him.