In the murk at the far end of the lane, under the big tower where Laintal Ay and his family lived, the procession halted. Slaves appeared to deal with the dogs—they would be housed in the stable under the tower—while the holy father climbed stiffly from his perch and bundled into shelter.
At the same time a hunter approached the temple from the south gate. It was a black bearded man called Aoz Roon, whom the boy greatly admired for his swaggering air. Behind him, shackles clamped round horny ankles, trudged an ancient phagor slave, Myk.
“Well, Laintal, I see the father has arrived from Borlien. Aren’t you going to welcome him?”
“No.”
“Why not? You remember him, don’t you?”
“If he didn’t come, my grandfather wouldn’t be dying.”
Aoz Roon clapped him on the shoulder.
“You’re a good lad, you’ll survive. One day, you will rule Embruddock yourself.” He used the old name for Oldorando, the name in fashion before Yuli’s people came, two generations before the present Yuli, who now lay awaiting the priest’s rites.
“I’d rather have Grandfather alive than be a ruler.”
Aoz Roon shook his head. “Don’t say that. Anyone would rule, given the opportunity. I would.”
“You’d make a good ruler, Aoz Roon. When I grow up, I’m going to be like you, and know everything and kill everything.”
Aoz Roon laughed. Laintal Ay thought what a fine figure he cut, as his teeth flashed between bearded lips. He saw ferocity, but not the priest’s slyness. Aoz Roon was in many ways heroic. He had a natural daughter called Oyre, almost Laintal Ay’s age. And he wore a suit of black skins unlike anyone else’s, cut from a giant mountain bear he had slain single-handed.
Carelessly, Aoz Roon said, “Come on, your mother will want you at this time. Climb on Myk and he’ll give you a ride.”
The great white phagor put out his horned hands and allowed the boy to scramble up his arms onto his bowed shoulders. Myk had been in servitude in Embruddock a long while; his kind lived longer than humans. He said, in his thick, choking voice, “Come on, boy.”
Laintal Ay reached up and clasped the horns of the ancipital for security. As a sign of his enslavement the sharp double edges of Myk’s horns had been filed smooth.
The three figures trudged up the time-worn street, heading towards warmth as the dark closed in on another of the countless nights of winter—a winter that had ruled over this tropical continent for centuries. Wind shifted powdery snow from ledges; it drifted down on them.
As soon as holy father and dogs had entered the big tower, the onlookers disappeared, scurrying back to their billets. Myk set down Laintal Ay in the trampled snow. The boy gave Aoz Roon a cheery wave as he dashed himself against the double doors set in the base of the building.
A stench of fish greeted him in the murk. The dog team had been fed on gout hooked from the frozen Voral. They jumped up as the boy entered, barking savagely on their leashes, showing their sharp teeth. A human slave who had accompanied the father shouted ineffectually to them to keep quiet. Laintal Ay growled back, keeping his fingers wrapped under his arms, and climbed the wooden stairs.
Light filtered from above. Six floors were piled above the stable. He slept in a corner on the next floor. His mother and grandparents were on the top floor. Between lived various hunters in his grandfather’s service; as the boy passed by, they turned their broad backs to him, being already busy packing. Laintal Ay saw, as he climbed to his floor, that Father Bondorlonganon’s few belongings had been deposited here. The man had installed himself, and would sleep nearby. No doubt he would snore; grown-ups generally did. He stood looking down at the priest’s blanket, marvelling at the strangeness of its texture, before going upstairs to where his grandfather lay.
Laintal Ay paused with his head through the hatch, staring into the room, viewing everything from the perspective of the floor. This was really his grandmother’s room, the room of Loil Bry since girlhood, since the time of her father, Wall Ein Den, who had been lord of the Den tribe, Lord of Embruddock. It was filled now with Loil Bry’s shadow. She stood with her back to a fire burning in an iron brazier close by the opening through which her grandson peered. The shadow loomed upon walls and low-beamed ceiling, threateningly. Of the elaborate tapestried gown that his grandmother always wore, nothing transferred to the walls but an uncertain outline, with sleeves converted to wings.
Three other people in the room appeared dominated by Loil Bry and her shadow. On a couch in one corner lay Little Yuli, his chin jutting above the furs that covered him. He was twenty-nine years old, and worn out. The old man was muttering. Loilanun, Laintal Ay’s mother, sat next to him, clutching her elbows with her hands, a woebegone look on her sallow face. She had not yet noticed her son. The man from Borlien, Father Bondorlonganon, sat nearest Laintal Ay, his eyes closed, praying aloud.
It was the prayer as much as anything which halted Laintal Ay. Normally he loved to be in this room, full of his grandmother’s mysteries. Loil Bry knew so many fascinating things, and to some extent took the place of Laintal Ay’s father, who had been killed while on a stungebag hunt.
Stungebags contributed to the foetid honey smell in the room. One of the monsters had been caught recently, and brought home bit by bit. Broken shards of plating, chopped from its back, helped fuel the fire and keep the cold at bay. The pseudo-wood burned with a yellow flame, sizzling as it burned.
Laintal Ay looked at the west wall. There was his grandmother’s porcelain window. Faint light from outside transfused it with a sullen orange glow, scarcely competition for the firelight.
“It looks funny in here,” he said at last.
He came up one more step, and the bright eyes of the brazier gleamed at him.
The father unhurriedly finished his prayer to Wutra and opened his eyes. Netted among the compressed horizontal lines of his face, they were unable to open far, but he fixed them gently on the boy and said, without preliminary greeting, “You’d better come here, my lad. I’ve brought something from Borlien for you.”
“What’s that?” He held his hand’s behind his back.
“Come and see,”
“Is it a dagger?”
“Come and see.” He sat perfectly still. Loil Bry sobbed, the dying man groaned, the fire spat.
Laintal Ay approached the father warily. He could not grasp how people could live in places other than Oldorando: it was the centre of the universe—elsewhere there was only wilderness, the wilderness of ice that stretched for ever and occasionally erupted in phagor invasions.
Father Bondorlonganon produced a little hound and placed it in the boy’s palm. It was scarcely longer than the palm. It was carved, as he recognised, out of kaidaw horn, with a wealth of detail which delighted him. Thick coat curled over the hound’s back, and the minute paws had pads. He examined it for a while before discovering that the tail moved. When it was wagged up and down, the dog’s lower jaw opened and closed.
There had never been a toy like it. Laintal Ay ran round the room in excitement, barking, and his mother jumped up to shush him, catching him in her arms.
“One day, this lad will be Lord of Oldorando,” Loilanun said to the father, as if by way of explanation. “He will inherit.”
“Better he should love knowledge and study to know more,” said Loil Bry, almost as an aside. “Such was my Yuli’s preference.” She wept afresh into her hands.
Father Bondorlonganon squeezed his eyes a little more and enquired Laintal Ay’s age.