His long skull was thrust forward in typical phagor fashion, low between his shoulders. On either arm he wore hide straps, to which were attached outward-pointing horns, their extremities tipped with metal. With these, the creature could prod away any animal that walked too close to him. Otherwise, he was unarmed; but to a nearby yelk, a bundle of possessions had been tied, a bundle including spears and a hunting harpoon. Adjacent animals also involuntarily carried baggage belonging to the other phagors in the group.
Behind the leader were two more males — so Yuli assumed — followed by a female phagor. She was of slighter build, and carried some kind of bag tied round her middle. Under her long white hair, pinkish dugs swung. On her shoulders rode an infant phagor, clutching uncomfortably at its mother’s neck fur, its head clamped down on her head. Its eyes were closed. The female walked automatically, as though in a daze. It was a matter for conjecture for how many days she and the others had been walking, or how far.
And there were other phagors, spread thinly round the outskirts of the moving concourse. The animals took no notice of them, accepting them as they accepted the flies, because there was no alternative to acceptance.
The noise of the drumming hoofs was punctuated by laboured breathing and coughing and breaking wind. Another sound rose. The phagor who led the small group was emitting a kind of hum or growl, a rough noise delivered over a vibrating tongue which varied in pitch; perhaps it was intended to cheer the three who followed. The sound terrified Yuli. Then it was gone, and the phagors too. More animals streamed by and eventually more phagors, continuing stanchlessly. Yuli and his father lay where they were, occasionally spitting flies from their mouths, waiting for the time to strike and win the meat they desperately needed.
Before sunset, the wind got up again, blowing as before off the icecaps of the Barriers, into the faces of the migratory army. The attendant phagors marched with their heads down, eyes slitted, and long trails of saliva fanned from the corners of their mouths and froze across their chests, as fat freezes when thrown out on the ice.
The atmosphere was iron. Wutra, god of the skies, had withdrawn his shawls of light and shrouded his domain with overcast. Perhaps another battle had been lost to him.
From under this dark curtain, Freyr became visible only when it reached the horizon. Blankets of cloud rumpled back to reveal the sentinel smouldering in a perspective of golden ashes. It shone out with spirit over the wastes — small but bright, its disc no more than a third as large as that of its companion star, Batalix, yet Freyr’s light was greater, fiercer.
It sank into the eddre of the ground and was gone.
Now was the time of dimday, which prevailed in summer and autumn, and which almost alone distinguished those seasons from even less merciful times. Dimday suffused a dazed half-light across the night sky. Only at times of New Year would Batalix and Freyr rise and set together. At present their lives were solitary, hidden frequently behind cloud which was the billowing smoke from Wutra’s war.
In the manner of day’s turning to dimday, Yuli read the weather omens. Driving winds would soon be conjured up with snow on their breath. He recalled the rhyme they chanted in Old Olonets, the tongue of magic, of past things, of red ruin, the tongue of catastrophe, fair women, giants, and rich food, the tongue of an inaccessible yesterday. The rhyme had been recalled in the croupy caves of the Barriers:
Wutra in sorrow
Will put Freyr to barrow
And us to the billow
As if responding to the changing light, a general shudder passed across the mass of yelk, and they stopped. Groaning, they settled where they were upon the trampled ground, tucking their legs beneath their bodies. For the enormous biyelk, this manoeuvre was not possible. They stood where they were and slept, ears across eyes. Some of the phagor groups gathered themselves together for companionship; most simply flung themselves down indifferently and slept where they fell, jamming their backs against the flanks of supine yelk.
Everything slept. The two figures sprawled on the rock ledge dragged their sheltering skin over their heads and dreamed, empty-bellied, with their faces buried in their folded arms. Everything slept, except for the mist of biting and sucking insects.
Things that were capable of dreams struggled through the uneasy mirages that dimday brought with it.
In general, the view, with its lack of shadow and constant level of suffering, might have appeared to anyone scrutinising it for the first time to represent not so much a world as a place awaiting formal creation.
At this stage of quiescence, there was a motion in the sky hardly more energetic than the unfolding of the aurora which had hung above the scene earlier. From the direction of the sea came a solitary childrim, sailing through the air some metres above the prostrate mass of living things. It looked to be no more than a great wing, glowing red like the embers of a dying fire, beating with a steady lethargy. As it passed over the deer, the animals twitched and heaved. It skimmed over the rock where the two humans lay, and Yuli and his father twitched and heaved, like the yelk seeing strange visions in their sleep. Then the apparition was gone, heading on lonely for the mountains in the south, leaving behind it a trail of red sparks to die in the atmosphere like an echo of itself.
After a while, the animals woke and rose to their feet. They shook their ears, which bled from the attentions of the gnats, and again started forward. With them went the biyelks and gunnadus, scuttling here and there. With them too went the phagors. The two humans roused, and watched them go.
Throughout another day the great progress continued, and blizzards raged, plastering the animals with snow. Towards evening, when wind was blowing tattered cloud across the sky and the cold held a whistling edge, Alehaw sighted the rear of the herd.
The rear was not as tight as the vanguard had been. Stragglers from the herd trailed back several miles, some limping, some coughing pitifully. Behind and beside them scurried long furry things with bellies near the ground, waiting the chance to nip a fetlock and bring a victim crashing down.
The last of the phagors marched past the ledge. They did not walk at the rear, either from respect for the low-bellied carnivores or because the going was difficult over such trampled ground, piled with scumble.
And now Alehaw rose, motioning his son to do likewise. They stood, clutching their weapons, and then slithered down to level ground.
‘Good!’ said Alehaw.
The snow was strewn with dead animals, in particular round the banks of the Vark. The break in the ice was plugged with drowned bodies. Many of those creatures who had been forced to lie down where they stood had frozen to death as they rested, and were now turned to ice. The lumps of which they composed the red core were unrecognisable in shape after the blizzard.
Delighted to be able to move, young Yuli ran and jumped and cried aloud. Dashing to the frozen river, he skipped dangerously from one unidentifiable lump to another, waving his hands and laughing. His father called him sharply to heel.
Alehaw pointed down through the ice. Black shapes moved, obscurely seen, partly defined by trails of bubbles. They streaked the turbid medium in which they swam with crimson, boring up beneath the frozen layers to attack the banquet provided for their benefit.
Other predators were arriving by air, large white fowl coming in from the east and the sullen north, fluttering heavily down, brandishing ornate beaks with which they bored through the ice to the flesh underneath. As they devoured, they fixed on the hunter and his son eyes heavy with avian calculation.
But Alehaw wasted no time on them. Directing Yuli to follow, he moved to where the herd had stumbled across fallen trees, calling and waving his spear as he went, to frighten off predators. Here dead animals were readily accessible. Although badly trampled, they still preserved one part of their anatomies intact, their skulls. It was to these that Alehaw addressed his attention. He prised open the dead jaws with the blade of a knife, and adroitly cut out their thick tongues. Blood spilled over his wrists onto the snow.