One Member of the Oligarchy cried out against “those preachers in their cowls running to and fro, spreading false rumours among the common folk”—thus unconsciously echoing Erasmus on Earth many centuries earlier. But the Oligarchy was no defender of humanism. It could respond to the oppressed only with more oppression.
Enantiodromia once more. Just when the ranks were closing, a gulf opened; when unity was within reach, the divisions became widest.
The Oligarchy turned everything to its advantage. It could use the new unrest in its countries as an excuse for yet firmer measures. The army returning from its success in Bribahr was redeployed in the towns and villages of Uskutoshk. A sullen and cowed population stood by while its village priests were shot.
The dissention reached even Kharnabhar.
Ebstok Esikananzi called upon Luterin to discuss the trouble, and watched his mouth rather than his eyes when Luterin counselled caution. Other worthy officials representing one side or other also called. Luterin found himself closeted with Secretary Evanporil and staff for many hours. With his own fate hanging over him, he was unable to decide the fate of his province.
The Great Wheel was involved in the dispute. While it was itself run by the Church, its territory was under the control of a lay governor appointed by the Keeper. The gulf between lay and ecclesiastic widened. Chubsalid was not forgotten.
After two days of argumentation, Luterin did what he had done before when feeling oppressed. He escaped.
Taking with him a good hound and a huntsman, he rode off into the wilds, the almost limitless wilderness of mountain round Kharnabhar. A blizzard was blowing, but he disregarded it. Lost here and there among the valleys, or punctuating breaks in the caspiarn forests, were hunting lodges and shrines where a man could stable his mount, shelter, and sleep. Like his father, he simply disappeared from human ken.
Often he hoped that he might encounter his father. He saw the meeting in his mind’s eye. Saw his father the centre of a group of heavily garbed hunters, the snow swirling about them. Masked hawks sat on leather shoulders. A biyelk dragged a sled carrying dead game. The breath of the hounds rose up. His father descended stiffly from his saddle and came towards him, arms outstretched.
Always his father had learnt of his heroism at Isturiacha, and congratulated him on his escape from death at Koriantura. They embraced…
He and his companion met no one, heard nothing but the clash of glaciers. They slept in remote lodges, where the aurora flickered high above the forests.
However tired he was, however many animals they had slain, the nights brought bad dreams to Luterin. The obsession overwhelmed him that he was climbing, not amid forests, but through rooms stuffed with meaningless furniture and ancient possessions. In those rooms, a sense of horror gathered. He could neither find nor evade the thing that hunted him.
Often he awoke and imagined that he was again laid flat by paralysis. Knowledge of his real surroundings returned only slowly. Then he would try to calm his mind with thoughts of Toress Lahl; but ever and again Insil stood beside her.
At least his mother had taken to her bed after the feast she had given in his honour, so news that he would not marry Insil had not spread. He saw in how many ways Insil was fitted to be his wife in the years to come; in her was the true unyielding Kharnabhar spirit.
Toress Lahl, by contrast, was an exile, a foreigner. Had he said he would marry her merely to prove his independence?
He hated the fact that he was still undecided. Yet he could not decide finally until his own uncertain situation was made clear. That entailed a confrontation with his father.
Night after night, lying with beating heart inside his sleeping bag, he came to see that confrontation there must be. He could marry Insil only if his father did not force him to it. His father must accept his viewpoint.
He must be hero or outcast. There were no other alternatives. He had to face rejection. Sex, when all was said, was a question of power.
Sometimes, as the aurora cast its glow inside the dark lodges, he saw his brother Favin’s face. Had he also challenged his father in some way—and lost?
Luterin and the huntsman rose early every dawn, when night birds were still in flight. They shared their food together as equals, but never a private thought did they let pass from one to the other.
However badly the nights passed, the days were all happiness. Every hour brought a changing light and changing conditions. The habits of the animals they stalked differed from hour to hour. With the decline of the small year, the days grew shorter, and Freyr remained always close to the horizon. But sometimes they would climb a ridge and see through foliage the old ruler himself, still blazing, throwing his light into another valley brimming in its depths with shadow like a sea, as a king might carelessly fill a glass with wine.
The stoic silence of nature was all about them, increasing their sense of infinity. Infinity came through all their senses. The rocks down which they scrambled to drink at some snow-bearded mountain stream seemed new, untouched by time. Through the silence ran a great music, translated in Luterin’s blood as freedom.
On their sixth day in the wilderness, they spied a party of six horned phagors crossing a glacier on kaidaw-back. The cowbirds sailing above their shoulders gave them away. They stalked the phagors for a day and a half, until they could get ahead of them and ambush them in a ravine.
They killed all six ancipitals. The cowbirds fled, screeching. The kaidaw were good specimens. Luterin and the huntsman managed to round up five of them and decided to drive them back to the family estate. It was possible that the Shokerandit stables could breed a domesticated strain of kaidaw.
The expedition had ended in modest triumph.
The tongues of the sullen bells of the mansion could be heard to toll long before the building loomed out of the blue mists.
So Luterin returned home, to find uproar, and his father’s yelk being combed down in the stables, dead game lying everywhere, and his father’s bodyguard throwing back fresh-brewed yadahl in the gunroom.
Unlike Luterin’s imagined meeting with Lobanster Shokerandit, the real reunion between father and son contained no embraces.
Luterin hurried into the reception hall, throwing off only his outer garments, retaining his boots, his revolver, his bell. His hair was long and unkempt. It fluttered about his ears as he ran towards his father.
Skewbald hounds skulked about the chamber and pissed against the wall hangings. A group of armed men stood by the door, backs to the main party, looking round suspiciously as if plotting.
About Lobanster Shokerandit were gathered his wife, Lourna, and her sister, and friends such as the Esikananzis—Ebstok, his wife, Insil, and her two brothers. They were talking together. Lobanster’s back was turned to Luterin, and his mother saw him first. She called his name.
The talk ceased. They all turned to look at him.
Something in their faces—an unpleasant complicity—told him they had been discussing him. He faltered in mid-stride. They continued to regard him and yet, curiously, their true attention still remained with the black-clad man in their midst.
Lobanster Shokerandit could command the attention of any group. This was less by his stature, which was no more than average, than by a sort of stillness which emanated from him. It was a quality all noticed, yet no one had word for it. Those who hated him, his slaves and servants, said that he froze you with a glance; his friends and allies said that he had an amazing power of command or that he was a man apart. His hounds said nothing, but slunk about his legs with their tails tucked down.
His hands were neat and precise, his nails pointed. Lobanster Shokerandit’s hands were noticeable. They were active while the rest of him remained rigid. They frequently travelled up to visit his throat, which was always swathed in black silk, moving with a startled action not unlike that of crabs or hawks searching for concealed prey. Lobanster had a goitre, which his cravat concealed and his hands betrayed. The goitre lent a pillarlike solidity to the neck, sufficient to support a large head.