The Earth colony of Landin had been stranded
on distant Eltanin for ten years. But ten of Eltanin's
years were six hundred Terrestrial years, and the lonely and dwindling human
settlement was beginning to feel the strain.
Every winter—a season which lasted for
fifteen of our years—the Earthmen had neighbors. These were the humanoid hilfs,
a nomadic people who only settled down when they burrowed in for the cruel long
cold spell. Yet the hilfs feared the Earthmen, whom they thought of as witches
and called the farboms. And their fear kept the lost colony lonely.
But hilfs and farboms had common enemies: the
hordes of ravaging barbarians called Gaals and the eerie preying snowghouls.
And in the terrible winter of the Tenth Year, the only hope of hilf and farbom
was to join forces or be annihilated.
Turn
this book over for second complete novel
Planet of Exile
by
URSULA K. LeGUIN
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
PLANET OF EXILE
Copyright
©, 1966, by
Ursula K. LeGuin An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Jerome Podivil.
By the same author: ROCANNON'S WORLD (G-574)
MANKIND UNDER THE LEASH
Copyright ©,
1966, by Thomas L. Disch
Printed in U.S.A.
CHAPTER ONE: A Handful of Darkness
In
the last days of
the last moonphase of Autumn a wind blew from the
northern ranges through the dying forests of Askatevar, a cold wind that
smelled of smoke and snow. Slight and shadowy as a wild animal in her light
furs, the girl Rolery slipped through the woods, through the storming of dead
leaves, away from the walls that stone by stone were rising on the hillside of
Tevar and from the busy fields of the last harvest. She went alone and no one called
after her. She followed a faint path that led west, scored and rescored in
grooves by the passing southward of the footroots, choked in places by fallen
trunks or huge drifts of leaves.
Where
the path forked at the foot of the Border Ridge she went on straight, but
before she had gone ten steps she turned back quickly towards a pulsing rustle
that approached from behind.
A
runner came down the northward track, bare feet beating in the surf of leaves,
the long string that tied his hair whipping behind him. From the north he came
at a steady,
pounding, lung-bursting pace, and never glanced at
Rolery among the trees but pounded past and was gone. The wind blew him on his
way to Tevar with his news—storm, disaster, winter, war . . . Incurious, Rolery
turned and followed her own evasive path, which zigzagged upward among the
great, dead, groaning trunks until at last on the ridge-top she saw sky break
clear before her, and beneath the sky the sea.
The
dead forest had been cleared from the west face of the ridge. Sitting in the
shelter of a huge stump, she could look out on the remote and radiant west, the
endless gray reaches of the tidal plain, and, a little below her and to the
right, walled and red-roofed on its sea-cliffs, the city of the farborns.
High,
bright-painted stone houses jumbled window below window and roof below roof
down the slanting cliff-top to the brink. Outside the walls and beneath the
cliffs where they ran lower south of the town were miles of pastureland and
fields, all dyked and terraced, neat as patterned carpets. From the city wall
at the brink of the cliff, over dykes and dunes and straight out over the beach
and the slick-shining tidal sands for half a mile, striding on immense arches
of stone, a causeway went, linking the city to a strange black island among the
sands. A sea-stack, it jutted up black and black-shadowed from the sleek planes
and shining levels of the sands, grim rock, obdurate, the top of it arched and
towered, a carving more fantastic than even wind or sea could make. Was it a
house, a statue, a fort, a funeral cairn? What black skill had hollowed it out
and built the incredible bridge, back in timepast when the farborns were mighty
and made war? Rolery had never paid much heed to the vague tales of witchcraft
that went with mention of the far-boms, but now looking at that black place on
the sands she saw that it was strange—the first thing truly strange to her that
she had ever seen: built in a timepast that had nothing to do with her, by
hands that were not kindred flesh and blood, imagined by alien minds. It was
sinister, and it drew her. Fascinated, she watched a tiny figure that walked on
that high causeway, dwarfed by its great length and height, a little dot or
stroke of darkness creeping out to the black towers among the shining sands.
The
wind here was less cold; sunlight shone through cloud-rack in the vast west,
gilding the streets and roofs below her. The town drew her with its
strangeness, and without pausing to summon up courage or decision, reckless,
Rolery went lightly and quickly down the mountainside and entered the high
gate.
Inside,
she walked as light as ever, careless-willful, but that was mostly from pride:
her heart beat hard as she followed the gray, perfectly flat stones of the
alien street. She glanced from left to right, and right to left, hastily, at
the tall houses all built above the ground, with sharp roofs, and windows of
transparent stone—so that tale was truel—and at the narrow dirt-lots in front
of some houses where bright-leaved kellem and hadun vines, crimson and orange,
went climbing up the painted blue or green walls, vivid among all the gray and
drab of the autumnal landscape. Near the eastern gate many of the houses stood
empty, color stripping and scabbing from the stone, the glittering windows gone.
But farther down the streets and steps the houses were lived in, and she began
to pass farborns in the street.
They
looked at her. She had heard that farborns would meet one's eyes straight on,
but did not put the story to test. At least none of them stopped her; her
clothing was not unlike theirs, and some of them, she saw in her quick
flicking glances, were not very much darker-skinned than men. But in the faces
that she did not look at she sensed the unearthly darkness of the eyes.
All
at once the street she walked on ended in a broad open place, spacious and
level, all gold-and-shadow-streaked by the westering sun. Four houses stood
about this square, houses the size of little hills, fronted with great rows of
arches and above these with alternate gray and transparent stones. Only four
streets led into this square and each could be shut with a gate that swung from
the walls of the four great houses; so the square was a fort within a fort or a
town within a town. Above it all a piece of one building stuck straight up into
the air and towered there, bright with sunlight.
It was a mighty place, but almost empty of
people.
In
one sandy corner of the square, itself large as a field, a few farbom boys were
playing. Two youths were having a fierce and skillful wrestling match, and a
bunch of younger boys in padded coats and caps were as fiercely practicing
cut-and-thrust with wood swords. The wrestlers were wonderful to watch,
weaving a slow dangerous dance about each other, then
engaging with deft and sudden grace. Along with a couple of farboms, tall and
silent in their furs, Rolery stood looking on. When all at once the bigger
wrestler went sailing head over heels to land flat on his brawny back she gave
a gasp that coincided with his, and then laughed with surprise and admiration.
"Good throw, Jonkendyl" a farbom near her called out, and a woman on
the far side of the arena clapped her hands. Oblivious, absorbed, the younger
boys fought on, thrusting and whacking and parrying.
She
had not known the witchfolk bred up warriors, or prized strength and skill.
Though she had heard of their wrestling, she had always vaguely imagined them
as hunched back and spiderlike in a gloomy den over a potter's wheel, making
the delicate bits of pottery and clear-stone that found their way into the
tents of mankind. And there were stories and rumors and scraps of tales; a
hunter was "lucky as a farbom"; a certain kind of earth was called
witch-ore because the witchfolk prized it and would trade for it. But scraps
were all she knew. Since long before her birth the Men of Askatevar had roamed
in the east and north of then-range. She had never come with a harvestload to
the storerooms under Tevar Hill, so she had never been oir this west-em border
at all till this moonphase, when all the Men of the Range of Askatevar came
together with their flocks and families to build the Winter City over the
buried granaries. She knew nothing, really, about the alien race, and when she
became aware that the winning wrestler, the slender youth called Jonkendy, was
staring straight into her face, she turned her head away and drew back in fear
and distaste.
He came up to her, his naked body shining
black with sweat. "You come from Tevar, don't you?" he asked, in human
speech, but sounding half the words wrong. Happy with his victory, brushing
sand off his lithe arms, he smiled at her.
!7es"
"What can we do for
you here? Anything you want?"
She
could not look at him from so close, of course, but his tone was both friendly
and mocking. It was a boyish voice; she thought he was probably younger than
she. She would not be mocked. "Yes," she said coolly. "I want to
see that black rock on the sands."
"Go
on out. The
causeway's open."
He
seemed to be trying to peer into her lowered face. She turned further from him.
"If
anybody stops you, tell them Jonkendy Li sent
you," he said, "or should I go with you?"
She
would not even reply to this. Head high and gaze down she headed for the street
that led from the square towards the causeway. None of these grinning black
false-men would dare think she was afraid . . .
Nobody
followed. Nobody seemed to notice her, passing her in the short street. She
came to the great pillars of the causeway, glanced behind her, looked ahead and
stopped.
The
bridge was immense, a road for giants. From up on the ridge it had looked
fragile, spanning fields and dunes and sand with the light rhythm of its
arches; but here she saw that it was wide enough for twenty men to walk abreast
on, and led straight to the looming black gates of the tower-rock. No rail
divided the great walkway from the gulf of air. The idea of walking out on it
was simply wrong. She could not do it; it was not a walk for human feet.
A
sidestreet led her to a western gate in the city wall. She hurried past long,
empty pens and byres and slipped out the gate, intending to go on round the
walls and be off home.
But
here where the cliffs ran lower, with many stairs cut in them, the fields below
lay peaceful and patterned in the yellow afternoon; and just across the dunes
lay the wide beach, where she might find the long green seaflowers that women
of Askatevar kept in their chests and on feastdays wreathed in their hair. She
smelled the queer smell of the sea. She had never walked on the sea-sands in
her life. The sun was not low yet. She went down a cliff stairway and through
the fields, over the dykes and dunes and ran out at last onto the flat and
shining sands that went on arid on out of sight to the north and west and
south.
Wind
blew, faint sun shone. Very far ahead in the west she heard an unceasing sound,
an immense, remote voice murmuring, lulling. Firm and level and endless, the
sand lay under her feet. She ran for the joy of running, stopped and looked
with a laugh of exhilaration at the causeway arches marching solemn and huge
beside the tiny wavering line of her footprints, ran on again and stopped again
to pick up silvery shells that lay half buried in the sand. Bright as a handful
of colored pebbles the farbom town perched on the cliff-top behind her. Before
she was tired of salt wind and space and solitude, she was out almost as far as
the tower-rock, which now loomed dense black between her and the sun.
Cold lurked in that long shadow. She shivered
and set off running again to get out of the shadow, keeping a good long ways
from the black bulk of rock. She wanted to see how low the sun was getting, how
far she must run to see the first waves of the sea.
Faint and deep on the wind a voice rang in
her ears, calling something, calling so strangely and urgently that she
stopped still and looked back with a qualm of dread at the great black island
rising up out of the sand. Was the witch-place calling to her?
On
the unrailed causeway, over one of the piers that stuck down into the island
rock, high and distant up there, a black figure stood calling to her.
She
turned and ran, then stopped and turned back. Terror grew in her. Now she
wanted to run, and did not. The terror overcame her and she could not move hand
or foot but stood shaking, a roaring in her ears. The witch of the black tower
was weaving his spider-spell about her. Flinging out his arms he called again
the piercing urgent words she did not understand, faint on the wind as a
seabird's call, staak,
staakl The
roaring in her ears grew and she cowered down on the sand.
Then all at once, clear and quiet inside her
head, a voice said, "Run. Get up and run. To the
island—now, quick." And before she knew, she had got to her feet;
she was running. The quiet voice spoke again to guide her. Unseeing, sobbing
for breath, she reached black stairs cut in the rock and began to struggle up
them. At a turning a black figure ran to meet her. She reached up her hand and
was half led, half dragged, up one more staircase, then released. She fell
against the wall, for her legs would not hold her. The black figure caught her,
helped her stand, and spoke aloud in the voice that had spoken inside her
skull: "Look," he said, "there it comes."
Water
crashed and boiled below them with a roar that shook the solid rock. The waters
parted by the island joined white and roaring, swept on, hissed and foamed and
crashed on the long slope to the dunes, stilled to a rocking of bright waves.
Rolery
stood clinging to the wall, shaking. She could not stop shaking.
^The
tide comes in here just a bit faster than a man can run," the quiet voice
behind her said. "And when it's in, it's about twenty feet deep here
around the Stack. Come on up this way . . . That's why we lived out here in the
old days, you see. Half of the time it's an island. Used to lure an enemy army
out onto the sands just before the tide came in, if they didn't know much about
the tides . . . Are you all right?"
Rolery
shrugged slightly. He did not seem to understand the gesture, so she said,
"Yes." She could understand his speech, but he used a good many words
she had never heard, and pronounced most of the rest wrong.
"You come from
Tevar?"
She
shrugged again. She felt sick and wanted to cry, but did not. Climbing the next
flight of stairs cut in the black rock, she put her
hair straight, and from its shelter glanced up for a split second sideways at
the farbom's face. It was strong, rough, and dark, with grim, bright eyes, the
dark eyes of the alien.
"What
were you doing on the sands? Didn't anyone warn you about the tide?"
"I didn't know,"
she whispered.
"Your
Elders know. Or they used to last Spring when your tribe was living along the
coast here. Men have damn short memories." What he said was harsh, but his
voice was always quiet and without harshness. "This way
now. Don't worry—the whole place is empty. It's been a long time since
one of you people set foot on the Stack ..."
They
had entered a dark door and tunnel and come out into a room which she thought
huge till they entered the next one. They passed through gates and courts open
to the sky, along arched galleries that leaned far out above the sea, through
rooms and vaulted halls, all silent, empty, dwelling places of the sea-wind.
The sea rocked its wrinkled silver far below now. She felt light-headed,
insubstantial.
"Does nobody live
here?" she asked in a small voice.
"Not now."
"It's your Winter
City?"
"No,
we winter in the town. This was built as a fort. We had a lot of enemies in the
old Years . . . Why were you on the sands?"
"I wanted to see ..
"See what?"
"The sands. The ocean. I was in your town first, I wanted
to see . . ."
"All right! No harm in that." He led her through a
gallery so high it made her dizzy. Through the tall, pointed arches crying
seabirds flew. Then passing down a last narrow corridor they came out under a
gate, and crossed a clanging bridge of swordmetal onto the causeway.
They walked between tower
and town, between sky and sea, in silence, the wind pushing them always towards
the right. Rolery was cold, and unnerved by the height and strangeness of the
walk, by the presence of the dark false-man beside her, walking with her pace
for pace.
As
they entered the town he said abruptly, "I won't mind-speak you again. I
had to then."
"When you said to run—" she began, then hesitated, not sure what he was talking about, or what
had happened out on the sands.
"I thought you were one of us," he
said as if angry, and then controlled himself. "I couldn't stand and watch
you drown. Even if you deserved to. But don't worry. I
won't do it again, and it didn't give me any power over you. No matter what
your Elders may tell you. So go on, you're free as air and ignorant as
ever."
His harshness was real, and it frightened
Rolery. Impatient with her fear she inquired, shakily but with impudence,
"Am I also free to come back?"
At
that the farbom looked at her. She was aware, though she could not look up at
his face, that his expression had changed. "Yes.
You are. May I know your name, daughter of Askatevar?"
"Rolery
of Wold's Kin."
"Wold's your grandfather?—your father?
He's still alive?"
"Wold
closes the circle in the Stone Pounding," she said loftily, trying to
assert herself against his air of absolute authority. How could a farbom, a
false-man, kinless and beneath law, be so grim and lordly?
"Give
him greeting from Jakob Agat Alterra. Tell him that I'll come to Tevar tomorrow
to speak to him. Farewell, Rolery." And he put out his hand in the salute
of equals so that without thinking she did the same, laying her open palm
against his.
Then she turned and hurried up the steep
streets and steps, drawing her fur hood up over her head, turning from the few
farboms she passed. Why did they stare in one's face so, like corpses or fish?
Warm-blooded animals and human beings did not go staring in one another's eyes
that way. She came out of the landward gate with a great sense of relief, and
made her quick way up the ridge in the last reddish sunlight, down through the
dying woods, and along the path leading to Tevar. As twilight verged into
darkness, she saw across the stubble-fields little stars of firelight from the
tents encircling the unfinished Winter City on the hill. She hurried on towards
warmth and dinner and humankind. But even in the big sister-tent of her Kin,
kneeling by the fire and stuffing herself with stew
among the womenfolk and children, still she felt a strangeness lingering in her
mind. Closing her right hand, she seemed to hold against her palm a handful of
darkness, where his touch had been.
CHAPTER
TWO: In the Red Teta
"This
slop's cold,"
he growled, pushing it away. Then seeing old Kerly's patient look as she took
the bowl to reheat it, he called himself a cross old fool. But none of his
wives-he had only one left—none of his daughters, none of the women could cook
up a bowl of bhan-meal the way Shaka-tany had done. What a cook she had been,
and young . . . his last young wife. And she had died, out there in the east-em
range, died young while he went on living and living, waiting for the bitter Winter to come.
A
girl came by in a leather tunic stamped with the trifoliate mark of his Kin, a
granddaughter probably. She looked a little like Shakatany. He spoke to her,
though he did not remember her name. "Was it you that came in late last
night, kinswoman?"
He
recognized the turn of her head and smile. She was the one he teased, the one
that was indolent, impudent, sweet-natured, solitary;
the child born out of season. What the devil was her name?
"I bring you a message, Eldest."
"Whose
message?"
"He
called himself by a big name—Jakat-abat-bolterra? I can't remember it all."
"Alterra? That's what the farborns call their chiefs. Where did you see this
man?"
"It
wasn't a man, Eldest, it was a farborn. He sent greetings, and a message that
he'll come today to Tevar to speak to the Eldest."
"Did he, now?" said Wold, nodding a little, admiring her effrontery. "And you're his
message-bearer?" "He chanced to speak to me . . ."
"Yes,
yes. Did you know, kinswoman, that among the Men of
Pemmek Range an unwed woman who speaks to a farborn is . . . punished?"
"Punished how?"
"Never
mind."
"The
Pemmek men are a lot of kloob-eaters, and they shave their heads. What do they
know about farboms, anyway? They never come to the coast. ... I heard once in some tent that the
Eldest of my Kin had a farborn wife. In other days."
"That
was true. In other days." The girl waited, and
Wold looked back, far back into another time: timepast, the Spring.
Colors, fragrances long faded, flowers that had not
bloomed for forty moonphases, the almost forgotten sound of a voice . . .
"She was young. She died young. Before Summer ever
came." After a while he added, "Besides, that's not the same
as an unwed girl speaking to a farborn. There's a difference, kinswoman."
"Why so?"
Though
impertinent, she deserved an answer. There are several reasons, and some are
better than others. This mainly: a farborn takes only one wife, so a true-woman marrying him would bear no sons."
"Why would she not,
Eldest?"
"Don't women talk in the sister-tent any
more? Are you all so ignorant? Because human and farborn can't conceive together!
Did you never hear of that? Either a sterile mating or else
miscarriages, misformed monsters that don't come to term. My wife,
Arilia, who was farborn, died in miscarrying a child.
Her people have no rule; their women are like men, they marry whom they like.
But among Mankind there is law: women lie with human men, marry human men, bear human children!"
She
looked a little sick and sorry. Presently, looking off at the scurry and bustle
on the walls of the Winter City, she said, "A fine law for women who have
men to lie with . . ."
She
looked to be about twenty moonphases old, which meant she was the one born out
of season, right in the middle of the Summer Fallow when children were not bom.
The sons of Spring would by now be twice or three
times her age, married, remarried, prolific; the Fall-bom were all children
yet. But some Spring-born fellow would take her for third or fourth wife; there
was no need for her to complain. Perhaps he could arrange a marriage for her,
though that depended on her affiliations. "Who is your mother, kinswoman?"
She looked straight at his belt-clasp and
said, "Shakatany was my mother. Have you forgotten her?"
"No,
Rolery," he replied after a little while. "I haven't. Listen now,
daughter, where did you speak to this Alterra? Was his name Agat?"
"That was part of his
name."
"So I knew his father and his father's
father. He is of the kin of the woman . . . the farbom we spoke of. He would be
perhaps her sister's son or brother's son."
"Your nephew then. My cousin," said the girl, and gave a sudden laugh. Wold also
grinned at the grotesque logic of this affiliation.
"I met him when I went to look at the
ocean," she explained, "there on the sands. Before
I saw a runner coming from the north. None of the women know. Was there
news? Is the Southing going to begin?"
"Maybe, maybe," said Wold. He had
forgotten her name again. "Run along, child, help your sisters in the
fields there," he said, and forgetting her, and the bowl of bhan he had
been waiting for, he got up heavily and went round his great red-painted tent
to gaze at the swarming workers on the earth-houses and the walls of the Winter
City, and beyond them to the north. The northern sky this morning was very
blue, clear, cold, over bare hills.
Vividly he remembered the life in those
peak-roofed warrens dug into the earth: the huddled bodies of a hundred
sleepers, the old women-waking and fighting the fires that sent heat and smoke
into all his pores, the smell of boiling wintergrass, the noise, the stink, the
close warmth of winter in those burrows under the frozen ground. And the cold cleanly stillness of the world above, wind-scoured or
snow-covered, when he and the other young hunters ranged far from Tevar hunting
the snowbirds and korio and the fat wespries that followed the frozen rivers
down from the remotest north. And over there, right across the valley,
from a patch of snowcrop there had risen up the lolling white head of a snowghoul. . . . And before then, before the snow and ice
and white beasts of Winter, there had once before been
bright weather like this: a bright day of golden wind and blue sky, cold above
the hills. And he, no man, only a brat among the brats and women, looking up at
flat white faces, red plumes, capes of queer, feathery grayish fur; voices had
barked like beasts in words he did not understand, while the men of his Kin and
the Elders of Askatevar had answered in stem voices, bidding the flat-faces go
on. And before that there had been a man who came running from the north with
the side of his face burnt and bloody, crying, "The Gaal, the Gaall They
came through our camp at Pekna! . . ."
Clearer than any present voice he heard that
hoarse shout ring across his lifetime, the sixty moonphases that lay between
him and that staring, listening brat, between this bright day and that bright
day. Where was Pekna? Lost under the rains, the snows; and the thaws of Spring had washed away the bones of the massacred, the
rotted tents, the memory, the name.
There
would be no massacres this time when the Gaal came south through the Range of
Askatevar. He had seen to that. There was some good in outliving your time and
remembering old evils. Not one clan or family of the Men of all this Range was
left out in the Summerlands to be caught unawares by the Gaal or the first
blizzard. They were all here. Twenty hundreds of them, with the little
Fall-boms thick as leaves skipping about under your feet, and women chattering
and gleaning in the fields like flocks of migratory birds, and men swarming to
build up the houses and walls of the Winter City with the old stones on the old
foundations, to hunt the last of the migrant beasts, to cut and store endless
wood from the forests and peat from the Dry Bog, to round up and settle the
hann in great byres and feed them until the wintergrass should begin to grow.
All of them, in this labor that had gone on half a moonphase now, had obeyed
him, and he had obeyed the old Way of Man. When the Gaal came they would shut
the city gates; when the blizzards came they would shut the earth-house doors,
and they would survive till Spring. They would
survive.
He
sat down on the ground behind his tent, lowering himself heavily, sticking out
his gnarled, scarred legs into the sunlight. Small and whitish the sun looked,
though the sky was flawlessly clear; it seemed half the size of the great sun
of Summer, smaller even than the moon. "Sun
shrunk to moon, cold comes soon . . ." The ground was damp with the long
rains that had plagued them all this moonphase, and scored here and there with
the little ruts left by the migrating footroots. What was it the girl had asked
him— about farboms, about the runner, that was it. The fellow had come panting
in yesterday—was it yesterday?—with a tale of the Gaal attacking the Winter
City of Tlokna, up north there near the Green Mountains. There was he or panic
in that tale. The Gaal never attacked stone walls. Flat-nosed barbarians, in
their plumes and dirt, running southward like homeless animals at the approach
of Winter—they couldn't take a city. And anyway, Pekna
was only a little hunting camp, not a walled city. The runner lied. It was all
right. They would survive. Where was the fool woman with his breakfast? Here,
now, it was warm, here in the sun . . .
Wold's
eighth wife crept up with a basket of steaming bhan,
saw he was asleep, sighed grumpily, and crept away again to the cooking-fire.
That
afternoon when the farborn came to his tent, dour guards around him and a
ragtag of leering, jeering children trailing behind, Wold remembered what the
girl had said, laughing: "Your nephew, my cousin." So he heaved
himself up and stood to greet the farborn with averted face and hand held out
in the greeting of equals.
As
an equal the alien greeted him, unhesitating. They had always that arrogance,
that air of thinking themselves as good as men, whether or not they really
believed it. This fellow was tall, well-made, still
young; he walked like a chief. Except for his darkness and his dark, unearthly
eyes, he might have been thought to be human.
"I am Jakob Agat,
Eldest."
"Be
welcome in my tent and the tents of my Kin, Al-terra."
"I
hear with my heart," the farborn said, making Wold grin a little; he had
not heard anybody say that since his father's time. It was strange how farborns
always remembered old ways, digging up things buried in timepast. How could
this young fellow know a phrase that only Wold and perhaps a couple of the
other oldest men of Tevar remembered? It was part of the farboms' strangeness,
which was called witchery, and which made people fear the dark folk. But Wold
had never feared them.
"A
noblewoman of your Kin dwelt in my tents, and I walked in the streets of your
city many times in Spring. I remember this. So I say
that no man of Tevar will break the peace between our people while I
five."
"No man of Landin will break it while I
five."
The
old chief had been moved by his little speech as he made it; there were tears
in his eyes, and he sat down on his chest of painted hide clearing his throat
and blinking. Agat stood erect, black-cloaked, dark eyes in a dark face. The
young hunters who guarded him fidgeted, children peered whispering and shoving
in the open side of the tent. With one gesture Wold blew them afi away. The
tentside was lowered, old Kerly fit the tentfire and scurried out again, and he
was alone with the alien. "Sit down," he said. Agat did not sit down.
He said, "I listen," and stood there. If Wold did not ask him to be
seated in front of the other humans, he would not be seated when there were
none to see. Wold did not think all this nor decide upon it, he merely sensed
it through a skin made sensitive by a long lifetime of leading and controlling
people.
He
sighed and said, "Wife!" in his cracked bass voice. Old Kerly
reappeared, staring. "Sit down," Wold said to Agat, who sat down
crosslegged by the fire. "Go away," Wold growled to his wife, who
vanished.
Silence. Elaborately and laboriously, Wold undid the
fastenings of a small leather bag that hung from the waist-strap of his tunic,
extracted a tiny lump of solidified gesin-ofi, broke from it a still tinier
scrap, replaced the lump, retied the bag, and laid the scrap on a hot coal at
the edge of the fire. A little curl of bitter greenish smoke went up; Wold and
the alien both inhaled deeply and closed their eyes. Wold leaned back against
the big pitch-coated urine basket and said, "I listen."
"Eldest, we have had
news from the north."
"So
have we. There was a runner yesterday." Was it yesterday?
"Did he speak of the Winter City at
Tlokna?"
The
old man sat looking into the fire a while, breathing deep as if to get a last
whiff of the gesin, chewing the inside of his lips, his face (as he well knew)
dull as a piece of wood, blank, senile.
"I'd
rather not be the bearer of ill news," the alien said in his quiet, grave
voice.
"You
aren't. We've heard it already. It is very hard, Al-terra, to know the truth in
stories that come from far away, from other tribes in other ranges. It's eight days' journey even for a runner from Tlokna to
Tevar, twice that long with tents and hann. Who knows? The gates of Tevar will
be ready to shut, when the Southing comes by. And you in your city that you
never leave, surely your gates need no mending?"
"Eldest,
it will take very strong gates this time. Tlonka had walls, and gates, and
warriors. Now it has none. This is no rumor. Men of Landin were there, ten days
ago; they've been watching the borders for the first Caal. But the Gaal are
coming all at once—"
"Alterra,
I listen . . . Now you listen. Men sometimes get frightened and run away before
the enemy ever comes. We hear this tale and that tale too. But I am old. I have
seen autumn twice, I have seen Winter come, I have
seen the Gaal come south. I will tell you the truth."
"I listen," the
alien said.
"The
Gaal live in the north beyond the farthest ranges of men who speak our
language. They have great grassy Sum-merlands there, so the story says, beneath
mountains that have rivers of ice on their tops. After Mid-Autumn the cold and
the beasts of the snow begin to come down into their lands from the farthest
north where it is always Winter, and like our beasts
the Gaal move south. They bring their tents, but build no cities and save no
grain. They come through Tevar Range while the stars of the Tree are rising at
sunset and before the Snowstar rises, at the turn from Fall
to Winter. If they find families traveling unprotected, hunting camps,
unguarded flocks or fields, they'll kill and steal. If they see a Winter City
standing built, and warriors on its walls, they go by
waving their spears and yelling, and we shoot a few darts into the backsides of
the last ones. . . . They go on and on, and stop only somewhere far south of
here; some men say it's warmer where they spend the
Winter—who knows? But that is the Southing. I know. I've seen
it, Alterra, and seen them return north again in the thaws when the forests are
growing. They don't attack stone cities. They're like water, water
running and noisy, but the stone divides it and is not moved. Tevar is
stone."
The young farbom sat with bowed head,
thinking, long enough that Wold could glance directly at his face for a moment.
"All
you say, Eldest, is truth, entire truth, and has always been true in past
Years. But this is ... a new time. ... I am a leader among my people, as you
are of yours. I come as one chief to another, seeking help. Believe me—listen
to me, our people must help each other. There is a great man among the Gaal, a
leader, they call him Kubban or Kobban. He has united all their tribes and made
an army of them. The Gaal aren't stealing stray harm along their way, they're
besieging and capturing the Winter Cities in all the Ranges along the coast,
killing the Spring-born men, enslaving the women, leaving Gaal warriors in each
city to hold and rule it over the Winter. Come Spring,
when the Gaal come north again, they'll stay; these lands will be their
lands—these forests and fields and Summerlands and cities and all their people—what's
left of them . .."
The
old man stared aside a while and then said very heavily, in anger, "You
talk, I don't listen. You say my people will be beaten, killed, enslaved. My
people are men and you're a farbom. Keep your black talk for your own black
fate!"
"If
men are in danger, we're in worse danger. Do you know how many of us there are
in Landin now, Eldest? Less than two thousand."
"So few? What of the other towns? Your people lived on the coast to the north,
when I was young."
"Gone. The survivors came to us."
"War? Sickness? You have
no sickness, you farboms."
"It's
hard to survive on a world you weren't made for," Agat said with grim
brevity. "At any rate we're few, we're weak in numbers: we ask to be the
allies of Tevar when the Gaal come. And they'll come within thirty days."
"Sooner than that, if
there are Gaal at Tlonka now. They're late already, the snow will fall any
day. They'll be hurrying-"
"They're
not hurrying, Eldest. They're coming slowly because
they're coming all together—fifty, sixty, seventy thousand of them!"
Suddenly
and most horribly, Wold saw what he said: saw the endless horde filing rank
behind rank through the mountain passes, led by a tall slab-faced chief, saw
the men of Tlonka—or was it of Tevar?—lying slaughtered under the broken walls
of their city, ice forming in splinters over puddled blood. . . . He shook his
head to clear out these visions. What had come over him? He sat silent a while
chewing the inside of his lips.
"Well, I have heard
you, Alterra."
"Not
entirely, Eldest." This was barbarian rudeness, but the fellow was an
alien, and after all a chief of his own kind. Wold let him go ahead. "We
have time to prepare. If the men of Askatevar and the men of Allakskat and of
Pernmek will make alliance, and accept our help, we can make an army of our
own. If we wait in force, ready for the Gaal, on the north border of your three
Ranges, then the whole Southing rather than face that much strength might turn
aside and go down the mountain trails to the east. Twice in earlier Years our
records say they took that eastern way. Since it's late and getting colder, and
there's not much game left, the Gaal may turn aside and hurry on if they meet
men ready to fight. My guess is that Kubban has no real tactic other than surprise
and multitude. We can turn him."
"The men of Pemmek and Allakskat are in
their Winter Cities now, like us. Don't you know the Way of Men yet? There are
no battles fought in Winter!"
"Tell
that law to the Gaal, Eldest! Take your own counsel, but believe my words!"
The farbom rose, impelled to his feet by the intensity of his pleading and
warning. Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not
seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their fives and acts
are wasted between desire and fear.
"I have heard you," he said with
stolid kindliness. "The Elders of my people will hear what you've
said."
"Then may I come tomorrow to hear—"
"Tomorrow, next day . . ."
"Thirty days, EldestI Thirty days at
most!"
"Alterra,
the Gaal will come, and will go. The Winter will come
and will not go. What good for a victorious warrior to return to an unfinished
house, when the earth turns to ice? When we're ready for Winter well worry
about the Gaal. . . . Now sit down again." He dug
into his pouch again for a second bit of gesin for their closing whiff.
"Was your father Agat also? I knew him when he was young. And one of my
worthless daughters told me that she met you while she was walking on the
sands."
The farbom looked up rather quickly, and then
said, "Yes, so we met. On the sands between tides."
CHAPTER THREE: The True Name of the Sun
What
caused the tides along this
coast, the great diurnal swinging in and swinging out of fifteen to fifty feet
of water? Not one of the Elders of the City of Tevar could answer that
question. Any child in Landin could: the moon caused the tides, the puli of the
moon. . . .
And
moon and earth circled each other, a stately circle taking four hundred days to
complete, a moonphase. And together the double planet circled the sun, a great
and solemnly whirling dance in the midst of nothingness. Sixty
moon-phases that dance lasted, twenty-four thousand days, a lifetime, a Year.
And the name of the center and sun—the name of the sun was Eltanin: Gamma
Draconis.
Before
he entered under the gray branches of the forest, Jakob Agat looked up at the
sun sinking into a haze above the western ridge and in his mind called it by
its true name, the meaning of which was that it was not simply the Sun, but a
sun: a star among the stars.
The
voice of a child at play rang out behind him on the slopes of Tevar Hill,
recalling to him the jeering, sidelong-looking faces, the mocking whispers that
hid fear, the yells behind his back—"There's a farborn herel Come and look
at him!" Agat, alone under the trees, walked faster, trying to outwalk
humiliation. He had been humiliated among the tents of Tevar and had suffered
also from the sense of isolation. Having lived all his life in a little
community of his own kind, knowing every name and face and heart, it was hard
for him to face strangers. Especially hostile strangers of a
different species, in crowds, on their own ground. The fear and
humiliation now caught up with him so that he stopped walking altogether for a
moment. Til
he damned if I'll go back there! he thought. Let the old fool have his way, and sit
smoke-drying himself in his stinking tent till the Goal come. Ignorant,
bigoted, quarrelsome, mealy-face, yellow-eyed barbarians, wood-headed hilfs,
let 'em all burn!
"Alterra?"
The
girl had come after him. She stood a few yards behind him on the path, her
hand on the striated white trunk of a basuk tree. Yellow eyes blazed with
excitement and mockery in the even white of her face. Agat stood motionless.
"Alterra?"
she said again in her light, sweet voice, looking aside.
"What do you
want?"
She
drew back a bit. "I'm Rolery," she said. "On the sands—"
"I
know who you are. Do you know who I am? I'm a false-man, a farborn. If your
tribesmen see you with me they'll either castrate me or ceremonially rape you—I
don't know which rules you follow. Now go home!"
"My
people don't do that. And there is kinship between you and me," she said,
her tone stubborn but uncertain.
He turned to go.
"Your mother's sister
died in our tents—"
"To our shame,"
he said, and went on. She did not follow.
He
stopped and looked back when he took the left fork up the ridge. Nothing
stirred in all the dying forest, except one belated footroot down among the
dead leaves, creeping with its excruciating vegetable obstinacy southward,
leaving a thin track scored behind it.
Racial
pride forbade him to feel any shame for his treatment of the girl, and in fact
he felt relief and a return of confidence. He would have to get used to the
hilfs' insults and ignore their bigotry. They couldn't help it; it was their
own land of obstinacy, it was their nature. The old chief had shown, by his own
lights, real courtesy and patience. He, Jakob Agat, must be equally patient,
and equally obstinate. For the fate of his people, the life of mankind on this world, depended on what these hilf tribes did and did not do
in the next thirty days. Before the crescent moon next rose, the history of a
race for six hundred moonphases, ten Years, twenty generations, the long
struggle, the long pull might end. Unless he had luck, unless
he had patience.
Dry,
leafless, with rotten branches, huge trees stood crowded and aisled for miles
along these hills, their roots withered in the earth. They were ready to fall
under the push of the north wind, to he under frost
and snow for thousands of days and nights, to rot in the long, long thaws of
Spring, to enrich with their vast death the earth where, very deep, very deeply
sleeping, their seeds lay buried now. Patience, patience . . .
In
the wind he came down the bright stone streets of Landin to the Square, and passing
the school-children at their exercises in the arena, entered the arcaded,
towered building that was called by an old name: the Hall of the League.
Like
the other buildings around the Square, it had been built five years ago when
Landin was the capital of a strong and flourishing little nation, the time of
strength. The whole first floor was a spacious
meeting-hall. All around its gray walls were broad, delicate designs picked out
in gold. On the east wall a stylized sun surrounded by nine planets faced the
west wall's partem of seven planets in very long ellipses round their sun. The
third planet of each system was double, and set with crystal. Above the doors
and at the far end, round dial-faces with fragile and ornate hands told that
this present day was the 391st day of the 45th moonphase of the Tenth Local
Year of the Colony on Gamma Draconis III. They
also told that it was the two hundred and second day of Year 1405 of the League
of All Worlds; and that it was the twelfth of August at home.
Most
people doubted that there was still a League of All Worlds, and a few
paradoxicalists liked to question whether there ever had in fact been a home.
But the clocks, here in the Great Assembly and down in the Records Room underground,
which had been kept running for six hundred League Years, seemed to indicate by
their origin and their steadfastness that there had been a League and that
there still was a home, a birthplace of the race of man. Patiently they kept
the hours of a planet lost in the abyss of darkness and years. Patience,
patience . . .
The
other Alterrans were waiting for him in the library upstairs, or came in soon,
gathering around the driftwood fire on the hearth: ten of them all together.
Seiko and Alia Pasfal lighted the gas jets and turned them low. Though Agat had
said nothing at all, his friend Hum Pilotson coming to stand beside him at the
fire said, "Don't let 'em get you, Jakob. A herd of stupid stubborn
nomads—they'll never learn."
"Have I been sending?"
"No, of course not." Hutu
giggled. He was a quick,
slight, shy fellow, devoted to Jakob Agat. That he was a homosexual
and that Agat was not was a fact well-known to them both, to everybody around
them, to everyone in Landin indeed. Everybody in Landin knew
everything, and candor, though wearing and difficult, was the only possible
solution to this problem of over-communication.
"You expected too much when you left,
that's all. Your disappointment shows. But don't let 'em get you, Jakob.
They're just hilfs."
Seeing
the others were listening, Agat said aloud, "I told the old man what I'd
planned to; he said he'd tell their Council. How much he understood and how
much he believed, I don't know."
"If
he listened at all it's better than I'd hoped," said Alia Pasfal, sharp
and frail, with blueblack skin, and white hair crowning her worn face.
"Wold's been around as long as I have—longer. Don't expect him to welcome
wars and chang-es.^
"But
he should be well disposed—he married a human," Dermat said.
"Yes, my cousin Arilia, Jakob's aunt—the exotic one in Wold's
female zoo. I
remember the courtship," Alia Pasfal said with such bitter sarcasm that
Dermat wilted.
"He
didn't make any decision about helping us? Did you tell him your plan about
going up to the border to meet the Gaal?" Jonkendy Li stammered, hasty and
disappointed. He was very young, and had been hoping for a fine war with
marchings-forth and trumpets. So had they all. It beat being starved to death
or burned alive.
"Give
them time. They'll decide," Agat said gravely to the boy.
"How did Wold receive you?" asked
Seiko Esmit. She was the last of a great family. Only the sons of the first
leader of the Colony had borne that name Esmit. With her it would die. She was
Agat's age, a beautiful and delicate woman, nervous, rancorous, repressed. When
the Alterrans met, her eyes were always on Agat. No matter who spoke she
watched Agat.
"He
received me as an equal."
Alia
Pasfal nodded approvingly and said, "He always had more sense than the
rest of their males." But Seiko went on, "What about the others?
Could you just walk through their camp?" Seiko could always dig up his
humiliation no matter how well he had buried and forgotten it. His cousin ten
times over, his sister-playmate-lover-companion, she possessed an immediate
understanding of any weakness in him and any pain he felt, and her sympathy,
her compassion closed in on him like a trap. They were too close. Too close,
Hum, old Alia, Seiko, all of them. The isolation that
had unnerved him today had also given him a glimpse of distance, of solitude,
had perhaps waked a craving in him. Seiko gazed at him, watching him with
clear, soft, dark eyes, sensitive to his every mood and word. The hilf girl,
Rolery, had never yet looked at him, never met his gaze. Her look always was
aside, away, glancing, golden, alien.
"They
didn't stop me," he answered Seiko briefly. "Well, tomorrow maybe
they'll decide on our suggestion. Or the next day.
How's the provisioning of the Stack been going this afternoon?" The talk
became general, though it tended always to center around and be referred back
to Jakob Agat. He was younger than several of them, and all ten Alterrans were
elected equal in their ten-year terms on the council, but he was evidently and
acknowledgedly their leader, their center. No especial reason for this was
visible unless it was the vigor with which he moved and spoke; is authority
noticeable in the man, or in the men about him? The
effects of it, however, showed in him as a certain tension and somberness, the
results of a heavy load of responsibility that he had borne for a long time,
and that got daily heavier.
"I
made one slip," he said to Pilotson, while Seiko and the other women of
the council brewed and served the little, hot, ceremonial cupfuls of steeped basuk
leaves called ti. "I
was trying so hard to convince the old fellow that there really is danger from
the Gaal, that I think I sent for a moment. Not verbally; but he looked like
he'd seen a ghost."
"You've
got very powerful sense-projection, and lousy control
when you're under strain. He probably did see a ghost."
"We've
been out of touch with the hilfs so long—and we're so ingrown
here, so damned isolated, I can't trust my control. First I bespeak that girl
down on the beach, then I project to Wold—they'll be turning on us as witches
if this goes on, the way they did in the first Years. . . . And we've got to
get them to trust us. In so short a time. If only we'd known about the Gaal
earlier!"
"Well,"
Pilotson said in his careful way, "since there are no more human
settlements up the coast, it's purely due to your foresight in sending scouts
up north that we have any warning at all. Your health, Seiko," he added,
accepting the tiny, steaming cup she presented.
Agat
took the last cup from her tray, and drained it. There was a slight
sense-stimulant in freshly brewed ti, so that he was vividly aware of its
astringent, clean heat in his throat, of Seiko's intense gaze, of the bare,
large, firelit room, of the twilight outside the windows. The cup in his hand,
blue porcelain, was very old, a work of the Fifth Year. The handpress books in
cases under the windows were old. Even the glass in the windowframes was old.
All their luxuries, all that made them civilized, all that kept them Alterran,
was old. In Agat's lifetime and for long before there had been no energy or
leisure for subtle and complex affirmations of man's skill and spirit. They did
well by now merely to preserve, to endure.
Gradually,
Year by Year for at least ten generations, their numbers had been dwindling;
very gradually, but always there were fewer children born. They retrenched,
they drew together. Old dreams of dominion were forgotten utterly. They came
back—if the Winters and hostile hilf tribes did not
take advantage of their weakness first—to the old center, the first colony,
Landin. They taught their children the old knowledge and the old ways, but
nothing new. They lived always a little more humbly, coming to value the simple
over the elaborate, calm over strife, courage over success. They withdrew.
Agat, gazing into the tiny cup in his hand,
saw in its clear, pure translucency, the perfect skill of its making and the
fragility of its substance, a land of epitome of the spirit of his people.
Outside the high windows the air was the same translucent blue. But cold: a
blue twilight, immense and cold. The old terror of his childhood came over
Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this world on
which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three
generations had been bom, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly,
they were always aware of it. They were the Farborn. And little by little, with
the majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution,
this world was killing them—rejecting the graft.
They were perhaps too submissive to this
process, too willing to die out. But a land of submission—their iron adherence
to the League Laws—had been their strength from the very beginning; and they
were still strong, each one of them. But they had not the knowledge or the
skill to combat the sterility and early abortion that reduced their
generations. For not all wisdom was written in the League Books, and from day
to day and Year to Year a little knowledge would always be lost, supplanted by
some more immediately useful bit of information concerning daily existence
here and now. And in the end, they could not even understand much of what the
books told them. What truly remained of their Heritage, by now? If ever the
ship, as in the old hopes and tales, soared down in fire from the stars, would
the men who stepped from it know them to be men?
But
no ship had come, or would come. They would die; their presence here, their
long exile and struggle on this world, would be done with, broken like a bit of
clay.
He
put the cup very carefully down on the tray, and wiped the sweat off his
forehead. Seiko was watching him. He turned from her abruptly and began to
listen to Jon-kendy, Dermat and Pilotson. Across his bleak rush of foreboding
he had recalled briefly, irrelevant and yet seeming both an explanation and a
sign, the light, lithe, frightened figure of the girl Rolery, reaching up her
hand to him from the dark, sea-besieged stones.
CHAPTER FOUR: The Tall Young Men
The
sound of rock
pounded on rock, hard and unrever-berant, rang out
among the roofs and unfinished walls of the Winter City to the high red tents
pitched all around it. Ak ak ak ak, the sound went on for a long time, until suddenly a second pounding
joined it in counterpoint, kadak ak ak kadak. Another came in on a higher note, giving a tripping rhythm, then
another, another, more, until any measure was lost in the clatter of constant
sound, an avalanche of the high dry whack of rock hitting rock in which each
individual pounding rhythm was submerged, indistinguishable.
As
the sound-avalanche went ceaselessly and stupefyingly on, the Eldest Man of the
Men of Askatevar walked slowly from his tent and between the aisles of tents
and cookfires from which smoke rose through slanting Iate-aftemoon, late-autumn
light. Stiff and ponderous the old man went alone through the camp of his
people and entered the gate of the Winter City, followed a twisting path or
street among the tent-like wooden roofs of the houses, which had no side-walls
aboveground, and came to an open place in the middle of the roofpeaks. There a
hundred or so men sat, knees to chin, pounding rock on rock, pounding, in a
hypnotic toneless trance of percussion. Wold sat down, completing the circle.
He picked up the smaller of two heavy waterworn rocks in front of him and with
satisfying heaviness whacked it down on the bigger one: Klak! klak! klak! To right and left of him the clatter went on and on, a rattling roar of
random noise, through which every now and then a snatch
of a certain rhythm could be discerned. The
rhythm vanished, recurred, a chance concatenation of noise. On its return
Wold caught it, fell in with it and held it. Now to him it dominated the
clatter. Now his neighbor to the left was beating it, their two stones rising
and falling together; now his neighbor to the right. Now others across the
circle were beating it, pounding together. It came clear of the noise,
conquered it, forced each conflicting voice into its own single ceaseless
rhythm, the concord, the hard heartbeat of the Men of Askatevar, pounding on,
and on, and on.
This was all their music,
all their dance.
A
man leaped up at last and walked into the center of the ring. He was
bare-chested, black stripes painted up his arms and legs, his hair a black
cloud around his face. The rhythm lightened, lessened, died away. Silence.
"The
runner from the north brought news that the Gaal follow the Coast Trail and
come in great force. They have come to Tlokna. Have you all heard this?"
A rumble of assent.
"Now
listen to the man who called this Stone-Pounding," the shaman-herald
called out; and Wold got up with difficulty. He stood in his place, gazing
straight ahead, massive, scarred, immobile, an old boulder of a man.
"A
farbom came to my tent," he said at last in his age-weakened, deep voice.
"He is chief of them in Landin. He said the farboms have grown few and ask
the help of men."
A rumble from all the heads of clans and families that sat moveless,
knees to chin, in the circle. Over the circle, over the wooden roofpeaks about them, very high up in
the cold, golden light, a white bird wheeled, harbinger of winter.
"This farbom said the Southing comes not
by clans and tribes but all in one horde, many thousands led by a great
chief."
"How
does he know?" somebody roared. Protocol was not strict in the
Stone-Poundings of Tevar; Tevar had never been ruled by its shamans as some
tribes were. "He had scouts up north!" Wold roared back. "He
said the Gaal besiege Winter Cities and capture them. That is what the runner
said of Tlokna. The farbom says that the warriors of Tevar should join with the
farboms and with the men of Pernmek and Allakskat, go up in the north of our
range, and rum the Southing aside to the Mountain Trail. These things he said
and I heard them. Have you all heard?"
The
assent was uneven and turbulent, and a clan chief was on his feet at once.
"Eldest! from your mouth we hear the truth always.
But when did a farbom speak truth? When did men listen to farboms? I hear
nothing this farbom said. What if his City perishes in the Southing? No men
live in itl Let them perish and then we men can take their Range."
The
speaker, Walmek, was a big dark man full of words; Wold had never liked him,
and dislike influenced his reply. "I have heard Walmek. Not for the first
time. Are the farboms men or not—who knows? Maybe they fell out of the sky as
in the tale. Maybe not. No one ever fell out of the
sky this Year . . . They look like men; they fight like men. Their women are
like women, I can tell you that! They have some wisdom. It's better to listen
to them . . ." His references to farbom women had them all grinning as
they sat in their solemn circle, but he wished he had not said it. It was
stupid to remind them of his old ties with the aliens. And it was wrong . . .
she had been his wife, after all. . .
He sat down, confused, signifying he would speak no more. Some of the
other men, however, were impressed enough by the runner's tale and Agat's
warning to argue with those who discounted or distrusted the news. One of
Wold's Spring-bom sons, Umaksuman who loved raids and forays, spoke right out
in favor of Agat's plan of marching up to the border.
"It's
a trick to get our men away up north on the Range, caught in the first snow,
while the farboms steal our flocks and wives and rob the granaries here.
They're not men, there's no good in them!" Walmek ranted. Rarely had he
found so good a subject to rant on.
"That's
all they've ever wanted, our women. No wonder they're growing few and dying
out, all they bear is monsters. They want our women so they can bring up human
children as theirs!" This was a youngish family-head, very excited.
"Aagh!" Wold growled, disgusted at this mishmash of misinformation, but he
kept sitting and let Umaksuman set the fellow straight.
"And what if the farborn spoke
truth?" Umaksuman went on. "What if the Gaal come through our Range
all together, thousands of them? Are we ready to fight them?"
"But
the walls aren't finished, the gates aren't up, the last harvest isn't
stored," an older man said. This, more than distrust of the aliens, was
the core of the question. If the able men marched off to the north, could the
women and children and old men finish all the work of readying the Winter City
before winter was upon them? Maybe, maybe not. It was
a heavy chance to take on the word of a farborn.
Wold
himself had made no decision, and looked to abide by that of the Elders. He
liked the farborn Agat, and would guess him neither deluded nor a liar; but
there was no telling. AH men were alien one to another, at times, not only
aliens. You could not tell. Perhaps the Gaal were coming as an army. Certainly
the Winter was coming. Which enemy first?
The
Elders swayed toward doing nothing, but Umaksu-man's faction prevailed to the
extent of having runners sent to the two neighboring Ranges, Allakskat and
Pernmek, to sound them out on the project of a joint defense. That was all the
decision made; the shaman released the scrawny hann he had caught in case a
decision for war was reached and must be sealed by lapidation, and the Elders
dispersed.
Wold
was sitting in his tent with men of his Kin over a good hot pot of bhan, when
there was a commotion outside. Umaksuman went out, shouted at everybody to
clear out, and reentered the great tent behind the farbom Agat.
"Welcome,
Alterra," said the old man, and with a sly glance at his two grandsons,
"will you sit with us and eat?"
He
liked to shock people; he always had. That was why he had always been running
off to the farborns in the old days. And this gesture freed him in his mind,
from the vague shame he suffered since speaking before the other men of the
farbom girl who had so long ago been his wife.
Agat, calm and grave as before, accepted and
ate enough to show he took the hospitality seriously; he waited till they were
all done eating, and Ukwet's wife had scuttled out with the leavings, then he
said, "Eldest, I listen."
"There's not much to hear," Wold
replied. He belched. "Runners go to Pemmek and Allakskat. But few spoke
for war. The cold grows each day now: safety lies inside walls, under roofs. We
don't walk about in timepast as your people do, but we know what the Way of Man
has always been and is, and hold to it."
"Your
way is good," the farbom said, "good enough, maybe, that the Gaal
have learned it from you. In past Winters you were
stronger than the Gaal because your clans were gathered together against them.
Now the Gaal too have learned that strength lies in numbers."
"If
that news is true,"
said Ukwet, who was one of Wold's grandsons, though older than Wold's son
Umaksuman.
Agat
looked up at him in silence. Ukwet turned aside at once from that straight,
dark gaze.
"If
it's not true, then why are the Gaal so late coming south?" said
Umaksuman. "What's keeping them? Have they ever waited till the harvests
were in before?"
"Who
knows?" said Wold. "Last Year they came long before the Snowstar
rose, I remember that. But who remembers the Year before last?"
"Maybe
they're following the Mountain Trail," said the other grandson, "and
won't come through Askatevar at all."
"The
runner said they had taken Tlokna," Umaksuman said sharply, "and
Tlokna is north of Tevar on the Coast Trail. Why do we disbelieve this news, why do we wait to act?"
"Because men who fight wars in Winter don't live till Spring," Wold growled. "But
if they come—" "If they come, we'll fight."
There
was a little pause. Agat for once looked at none of them, but kept his dark
gaze lowered like a human.
"People say,"
Ukwet remarked with a jeering note, sensing triumph, "that the farboms
have strange powers. I know nothing about all that, I was born on the
Summerlands and never saw farboms before this moonphase, let alone sat to eat
with one. But if they're witches and have such powers, why would they need our
help against the Gaal?"
"I
do not hear you!" Wold thundered, his face purple
and his eyes watering. Ukwet hid his face. Enraged by this insolence to a
tent-guest, and by his own confusion and
indeci-siveness which made him argue against both sides, Wold sat breathing
heavily, staring with inflamed eyes at the young man, who kept his face hidden.
"I
talk," Wold said at last, his voice still loud and deep, free for a little
from the husldness of old age. "I talk: listen! Runners will go up the
Coast Trail until they meet the Southing. And behind them, two days behind, but
no farther than the border of our Range, warriors will follow—all men bom between
Midspring and the Summer Fallow. If the Gaal come in force, the warriors will
drive them east to the mountains; if not, they will come back to Tevar."
Umaksuman
laughed aloud and said, "Eldest, no man leads us but you!"
Wold
growled and belched and settled down. "You'll lead the warriors,
though," he told Umaksuman dourly.
Agat,
who had not spoken for some time, said in his quiet way, "My people can
send three hundred and fifty men. We'll go up the old beach road, and join with
your men at the border of Askatevar." He rose and held out his hand. Sulky
at having been driven into this commitment, and still shaken by his emotion,
Wold ignored him. Umaksuman was on his feet in a flash, his hand against the
farbom's. They stood there for a moment in the firelight like day and night. Agat dark, shadowy, somber, Umaksuman fak-skinned, light-eyed,
radiant.
The
decision was made, and Wold knew he could force it upon the other Elders. He
knew also that it was the last decision he would ever make. He could send them
to war: but Umaksuman would come back, the leader of the warriors, and thereby
the strongest leader among the Men of
Askatevar. Wold's action was his own
abdication. Umaksu-man would be the young chief. He would close the circle of
the Stone-Pounding, he would lead the hunters in
Winter, the forays in Spring, the great wanderings of the long days of Summer.
His Year was just beginning . . .
"Go
on," Wold growled at them all. "Call the Stone-Pounding for tomorrow,
Umaksuman. Tell the shaman to stake out a hann, a fat one with some blood in
it." He would not speak to Agat. They left, all the tall young men. He sat
crouched on his stiff hams by his fire, staring into the yellow flames as if
into the heart of a lost brightness, Summer's
irrecoverable warmth.
CHAPTER FIVE: Twilight in the Woods
The
fahbohn came out
of Umaksuman's tent and stood a minute talking with the young chief, both of
them looking to the north, eyes narrowed against the biting gray wind. Agat
moved his outstretched hand as if he spoke of the mountains. A flaw of wind
carried a word or two of what he said to Rolery where she stood watching on the
path up to the city gate. As she heard him speak a tremor went through her, a
little rush of fear and darkness through her veins, making her remember how
that voice had spoken in her mind, in her flesh, calling her to him.
Behind
that like a distorted echo in her memory came the harsh command, outward as a
slap, when on the forest path he had turned on her, telling her to go, to get
away from him.
All
of a sudden she put down the baskets she was carrying. They were moving today
from the red tents of her nomad childhood into the warren of peaked roofs and
underground halls and tunnels and alleys of the Winter City, and all her
cousin-sisters and aunts and nieces were bustling and squealing and scurrying
up and down the paths and in and out of the tents and the gates with furs and
boxes and pouches and baskets and pots. She set down her armload there beside
the path and walked off toward the forest.
"Roleryl
Ro-o-oleryl" shrilled the voices that were forever shrilling after her,
accusing, calling, screeching at her back. She never
turned, but walked right on. As soon as she was well into the woods she began
to run. When all sound of voices was lost in the soughing, groaning silence of
the wind-strained trees, and nothing recalled the camp of her people except a
faint, bitter scent of woodsmoke in the wind, she slowed down.
Great
fallen trunks barred the path now in places, and must be climbed over or
crawled under, the stiff dead branches tearing at her clothes, catching her
hood. The woods were not safe in this wind; even now, somewhere off up the
ridge she heard the muttering crash of a tree falling before the wind's push.
She did not care. She felt like going down onto those gray sands again and
standing still, perfectly still, to watch the foaming thirty-foot wall of water
come down upon her ... As suddenly as
she had started off, she stopped, and stood still on the twiht path.
The
wind blew and ceased and blew. A murky sky writhed and lowered over the network
of leafless branches. It was already half dark here. All anger and purpose
drained out of the girl, leaving her standing in a kind of scared stupor,
hunching her shoulders against the wind. Something white flashed in front of
her and she cried out, but did not move. Again the white movement passed, then
stilled suddenly above her on a jagged branch: a great beast or bird, winged,
pure white, white above and below, with short, sharp hooked hps that parted and
closed, and staring silver eyes. Gripping the branch with four naked talons the
creature gazed down at her, and she up at it, neither moving. The silver eyes
never blinked. Abruptly great white wings shot out, wider than a man's height,
and beat among the branches, breaking them. The creature beat its white wings
and screamed, then as the wind gusted launched out into the air and made its
way heavily off between the branches and the driving clouds.
"A stormbringer." Agat spoke, standing on the path a few yards behind her. "They're
supposed to bring the blizzards."
The
great silver creature had driven all her wits away. The little rush of tears
that accompanied all strong feelings in her race blinded her a moment. She had
meant to stand and mock him, to jeer at him, having
seen the resentment under his easy arrogance when people in Tevar slighted him,
treated him as what he was, a being of a lower kind. But the white creature,
the stormbringer, had frightened her and she broke out, staring straight at him
as she had at it, "I hate you, you're not a man, I hate youl"
Then
her tears stopped, she looked away, and they both stood there in silence for
quite a while.
"Rolery," said
the quiet voice, "look at me."
She
did not. He came forward, and she drew back crying, "Don't touch me!"
in a voice like the stormbringer's scream, her face distorted. "Get hold
of yourself," he said. "Here-take my hand,
take it!" He caught her as she struggled to break away, and held both her
wrists. Again they stood without moving.
"Let
me go," she said at last in her normal voice. He released her at once.
She drew a long breath.
"You
spoke—I heard you speak inside me. Down there on the sands.
Can you do that again?"
He
was watching her, alert and quiet. He nodded. "Yes. But I told you then
that I never would."
"I
still hear it. I feel your voice." She put her hands over her ears.
"I
know . . . I'm sorry. I didn't know you were a hilf— a Tevaran, when I called
you. It's against the law. And anyhow it shouldn't have worked . . ."
"What's a hilf?"
"What we call
you."
"What
do you call yourselves?" "Men."
She looked around them at the groaning twilit
woods, gray aisles, writhing cloud-roof. This gray world in motion was very
strange, but she was no longer scared. His touch, his actual hand's touch
canceling the insistent impalpable sense of his presence, had given her calm,
which grew as they spoke together. She saw now that she had been half out of
her mind this last day and night.
"Can all your people do that . . . speak that way?" "Some
can. It's a skil] one can leam. Takes practice. Come
here, sit down a while. You've had it rough." He was always harsh and yet
there was an edge, a hint of something quite different in his voice now: as if
the urgency with which he had called to her on the sands were transmuted into
an infinitely restrained, unconscious appeal, a reaching out. They sat down on
a fallen basuk-tree a couple of yards off the path. She noticed how differently
he moved and sat than a man of her race; the schooling of his body, the sum of
his gestures, was very slightly, but completely, unfamiliar. She was
particularly aware of his dark-skinned hands, clasped together between his
knees. He went on, "Your people could learn mindspeech if they wanted to.
But they never have, they call it witchcraft, I think . . . Our books say that
we ourselves learned it from another race, long ago, on a world called Rokanan. It's a skill as well as
a gift." "Can you hear my
mind when you want?" "That is forbidden," he said with such
finality that her fears on that score were quite disposed of.
"Teach
me the skill," she said with sudden childishness. "It would take all Winter." "It took you all Fall?"
"And
part of Summer too." He grinned slightly. "What
does hilf mean?"
"It's
a word from our old language. It means 'Highly intelligent life-form."
"Where is another world?"
"Well—there are a lot of them. Out there. Beyond sun and moon."
"Then
you did fall out of the sky? What for? How did you get from behind the sun to
the seacoast here?"
"I'll
tell you if you want to hear, but it's not just a tale, Rolery. There's a lot
we don't understand, but what we do know of our history is true."
"I
hear," she whispered in the ritual phrase, impressed, but not entirely
subdued.
"Well, there were many worlds out among
the stars, and many kinds of men living on them. They made ships that could
sail the darkness between the worlds, and kept traveling about and trading and
exploring. They allied themselves into a League, as your clans ally with one
another to make a Range. But there was an enemy of the League of All Worlds. An enemy coming from far off. I don't know how far. The
books were written for men who knew more than we know
He was always using words that sounded like
words, but meant nothing; Rolery wondered what a ship was, what a book was. But
the grave, yearning tone in which he told his story worked on her and she
listened fascinated.
"For
a long time the League prepared to fight that enemy. The stronger worlds helped
the weaker ones to arm against the enemy, to make ready. A little as we're
trying to make ready to meet the Gaal, here. Mindhearing was one skill they
taught, I know, and there were weapons, the books say, fires that could burn up
whole planets and burst the stars . . . Well, during that time my people came
from their home-world to this one. Not very many of them.
They were to make friends with your peoples and see if they wanted to be a
world of the League, and join against the enemy. But the enemy came. The ship
that brought my people went back to where it came from, to help in fighting the
war, and some of the people went with it, and the . . . the far-speaker with
which those men could talk to one another from world to world. But some of the
people stayed on here, either to help this world if the enemy came here, or
because they couldn't go back again: we don't know. Their records say only that
the ship left. A white spear of metal, longer than a whole
city, standing up on a feather of fire. There are pictures of it. I
think they thought it would come back soon . . . That was ten Years ago."
"What of the war with the enemy?"
"We
don't know. We don't know anything that happened since the day the ship left.
Some of us figure the war must have been lost, and others think it was won, but
hardly, and the few men left here were forgotten in the years of fighting. Who
knows? If we survive, some day well find out; if no one ever comes, we'll make
a ship and go find out . . ." He was yearning, ironic. Rolery's head spun
with these gulfs of time and space and incomprehension. "This is hard to
five with," she said after a while.
Agat
laughed, as if startled. "No—it gives us our pride. What is hard is to
keep alive on a world you don't belong to. Five Years ago we were a great
people. Look at us now."
"They say farboms are
never sick, is that true?"
"Yes.
We don't catch your sicknesses, and didn't bring any of our own. But we bleed
when we're cut, you know . . . And we get old, we die, like humans . . ."
"Well of course,"
she said disgustedly.
He
dropped his sarcasm. "Our trouble is that we don't bear enough children.
So many abort and are stillborn, so few come to term."
"I
heard that. I thought about it. You do so strangely. You conceive children any
time of the Year, during the Winter Fallow even—why is that?"
"We
can't help it, it's how we are." He laughed again, looking at her, but she
was very serious now. "I was born out of season, in the Summer
Fallow," she said. "It does happen with us, but very rarely; and you
see—when Winter's over I'll be too old to bear a
Spring child. Ill never have a son. Some old man will take me for a fifth wife
one of these days, but the Winter Fallow has begun, and come Spring I'll be old
... So I will die barren. It's better
for a woman not to be born at all than to be bom out of season as I was . . .
And another thing, it is true what they say,
that a farbom man takes only one wife?"
He nodded.
Apparently that meant what a shrug meant to her.
"Well, no wonder
you're dying out!"
He
grinned, but she insisted, "Many wives—many sons. If you were a Tevaran
you'd have five or ten children already! Have you any?"
"No, I'm not
married."
"But haven't you ever
lain with a woman!"
"Well,
yes," he said, and then more assertively, "Of course! But when we
want children, we marry."
"If you were one of us—"
"But
I'm not one of you," he said. Silence ensued. Finally he said, gently
enough, "It isn't manners and mores that make the difference. We don't
know what's wrong, but it's in the seed. Some doctors have thought that because
this sun's different from the sun our race was born under, it affects us,
changes the seed in us little by little. And the change kills."
Again
there was silence between them for a time. "What was the other world
like—your home?"
"There
are songs that tell what it was like," he said, but when she asked timidly
what a song was, he did not reply. After a while he said, "At home, the
world was closer to its sun, and the whole year there wasn't even one moonphase
long. So the books say. Think of it, the whole Winter
would only last ninety days . . ." This made them both laugh. "You
wouldn't have time to light a fire," Rolery said.
Real
darkness was soaking into the dimness of the woods. The path in front of them
ran indistinct, a faint gap among the trees leading left to her city, right to
his. Here, between, was only wind, dusk, solitude. Night was corning quickly. Night and winter and war, a time of dying. "I'm afraid
of the Winter," she said, very low.
"We
all are," he said. "What will it be like? . . . We've only known the
sunlight."
There was no one among her people who had
ever broken her fearless, careless solitude of mind; having no agemates, and
by choice also, she had always been quite alone, going her own way and caring
little for any person. But now as the world had turned gray and nothing held
any promise beyond death, now as she first felt fear, she had met him, the dark
figure near the tower-rock over the sea, and had heard a voice that spoke in
her blood.
"Why will you never
look at me?" he asked.
"I
will," she said, "if you want me to." But she did not, though
she knew his strange shadowy gaze was on her. At last she put out her hand and
he took it.
"Your
eyes are gold," he said. "I want ...
I want . . . But if they knew we were together, even now . . ."
"Your people?"
"Yours. Mine care nothing about it."
"And
mine needn't find out." They both spoke almost in whispers, but urgently,
without pauses.
"Rolery, I leave for the north two
nights from now." "I know that." "When I come back—"
"But
when you don't come back!" the girl cried out, under the pressure of the
terror that had entered her with Autumn's end, the
fear of coldness, of death. He held her against him telling her quietly that he
would come back. As he spoke she felt the beating of his heart and the beating
of her own. "I want to stay with you," she said, and he was saying,
"I want to stay with you."
It
was dark around them. When they got up they walked slowly in a grayish
darkness. She came with him, towards his city. "Where can we go?" he
said with a kind of bitter laugh. "This isn't like love in Summer . . . There's a hunter's shelter down the ridge a way
. . . They'll miss you in Tevar."
"No," she
whispered, "they won't miss me."
CHAPTER
SIX: Snow
The
fore-runners had
gone; tomorrow the Men of Askatevar would march north on the broad vague trail
that divided their Range, while the smaller group from Landin would take the
old road up the coast. Like Agat, Umaksuman had judged it best to keep the two
forces apart until the eve of fighting. They were allied only by Wold's
authority. Many of Umaksuman's men, though veterans of many raids and forays
before the Winter Peace, were reluctant to go on this un-seasonal war; and a
sizable faction, even within his own Kin, so detested this alliance with the
farboms that they were ready to make any trouble they could. Ukwet and others
had said openly that when they had finished with the Gaal they would finish off
the witches. Agat discounted this, foreseeing that victory would modify, and
defeat end, their prejudice; but it worried Umaksuman, who did not look so far
ahead.
"Our
scouts will keep you in sight all along. After all, the Gaal may not wait on
the border for us."
"The
Long Valley under Cragtop would be a good place for a battle," Umaksuman
said with his flashing smile. "Good luck, Alterral"
"Good
luck to you, Umaksuman." They parted as friends, there under the
mud-cemented stone gateway of the Winter City. As Agat turned
something flickered in the dull afternoon air beyond the arch, a wavering
drifting movement. He looked up startled, then
turned back. "Look at that."
The
native came out from the walls and stood beside him a minute, to see for the
first time the stuff of old men's tales. Agat held his hand out palm up. A
flickering speck of white
touched his wrist and was gone. The long vale of
stubble-fields and used-up pasture, the creek, the dark inlet of the forest and
the farther hills to south and west all seemed to tremble very slightly, to
withdraw, as random flakes fell from the low sky, twirling and slanting a
little, though the wind was down.
Children's
voices cried in excitement behind them among the high-peaked wooden roofs.
"Snow
is smaller than I thought," Umaksuman said at last, dreamily.
"I thought it would be colder. The air
seems warmer than it did before . . ." Agat roused himself from the
sinister and charming fascination of the twirling fall of the snow. "Till
we meet in the north," he said, and pulling his fur collar close around his neck against the queer, searching touch of
the tiny flakes, set out on the path to Landin.
A
half-kilo into the forest he saw the scarcely marked side path that led to the
hunter's shelter, and passing it felt as if his veins were running liquid
light. "Come on, come on," he told himself, impatient with this
recurrent loss of self-control. He had got the whole thing perfectly straight
in the short intervals for thinking he had had today. Last night —had been last
night. All right, it was that and nothing more. Aside from the fact that she
was, after all, a hilf and he was human, so there was no future in the thing,
it was foolish on other counts. Ever since he had seen her face, on the black
steps over the tide, he had thought of her and yearned to see her, like an
adolescent mooning after his first girl; and if there was anything he hated it
was the stupidity, the obstinate stupidity of uncontrolled passion. It led men
to take blind risks, to hazard really important things for a mere moment of
lust, to lose control over their acts. So, in order to stay in control, he had
gone with her last night: that was merely sensible, to get the fit over with.
So he told himself once more, walking along very rapidly, his head high, while
the snow danced thinly around him. Tonight he would meet her again, for the
same reason. At the thought, a flood of warm light and an aching joy ran
through his body and mind; he ignored it. Tomorrow he was off to the north, and
if he came back, then there would be time enough to explain to the girl that
there could be no more such nights, no more lying together on his fur cloak in
the shelter in the forest's heart, starlight overhead and the cold and the
great silence all around . . . no, no more . . . The absolute happiness she had
given him came up in him like a tide, drowning all thought. He ceased to tell
himself anything. He walked rapidly with his long stride in the gathering
darkness of the woods, and as he walked, sang under his breath, not knowing
that he did so, some old love-song of his exiled race.
The
snow scarcely penetrated the branches. It was getting dark very early, he
thought as he approached the place where the path divided, and this was the
last thing in his mind when something caught his ankle in midstride and sent
him pitching forward. He landed on his hands and was halfway up when a shadow
on his left became a man, silvery-white in the gloom, who knocked him over
before he was fairly up. Confused by the ringing in his ears, Agat struggled
free of something holding him and again tried to stand up. He seemed to have
lost his bearings and did not understand what was happening, though he had an
impression that it had happened before, and also that
it was not actually happening. There were several more of the silvery-looking
men with stripes down their legs and arms, and they held him by the arms while
another one came up and struck him with something across the mouth. There was pain, the darkness was full of pain and rage. With a furious
and skillful convulsion of his whole body he got free of the silvery men,
catching one under the jaw with his fist and sending him out of the scene
backward: but there were more and more of them and he could not get free a
second time. They hit him and when he hid his face in his arms against the mud
of the path they kicked his sides. He lay pressed against the blessed harmless
mud, trying to hide, and heard somebody breathing very strangely. Through that
noise he also heard Umak-suman's voice. Even he, then . . . But he did not
care, so long as they would go away, would let him be. It was getting dark
very early.
It
was dark: pitch dark. He tried to crawl forward. He wanted to get home to his
people who would help him. It was so dark he could not see his hands.
Soundlessly and unseen in the absolute blackness, snow fell on him and around
him on the mud and leafmold. He wanted to get home. He was very cold. He tried
to get up, but there was no west or east, and sick with pain he put his head
down on his arm. "Come to me," he tried to call in the mindspeech of
Alterra, but it was too hard to call so far into the darkness. It was easier to
lie still right here. Nothing could be easier.
In a
high stone house in Landin, by a driftwood fire, Alia Pasfal lifted her head
suddenly from her book. She had a distinct impression that Jakob Agat was
sending to her, but no message came. It was queer. There were all too many
queer by-products and aftereffects and inexplicables involved
in mindspeech; many people here in Landin never
learned it, and those who did used it very sparingly. Up north in Atlantika
colony they had mindspoken more freely. She herself was a refugee from
Atlantika and remembered how in the terrible Winter of
her childhood she had mindspoken with the others all the time. And after her
mother and father died in the famine, for a whole moonphase after, over and
over again she had felt them sending to her, felt their presence in her
mind—but no message, no words, silence.
"Jakobl"
She bespoke him, long and hard, but there was no answer.
At
the same time, in the Armory checking over the expedition's supplies once more, Huru Pilotson abruptly gave way to the uneasiness
that had been preying on him all day and burst out, "What the hell does
Agat think he's doingl"
"He's
pretty late," one of the Armory boys affirmed. "Is he over at Tevar
again?"
"Cementing
relations with the mealy-faces," Pilotson said, gave a mirthless giggle,
and scowled. "All right, come on, let's see about the parkas."
At the same time, in a room paneled with wood
like ivory sarin, Seiko Esmit burst into a fit of silent crying, wringing her
hands and struggling not to send to him, not to bespeak him, not even to
whisper his name aloud: "Jakob!"
At
the same time Rolery's mind went quite dark for a while. She simply crouched
motionless where she was.
She
was in the hunter's shelter. She had thought, with all the confusion of the
move from the tents into the warren-like Kinhouses of the city, that her
absence and very late return had not been observed last night. But today was
different; order was reestablished and her leaving would be seen. So she had
gone off in broad daylight as she so often did, trusting that no one would take
special notice of that; she had gone circuitously to the shelter, curled down
there in her furs and waited till dark should fall and finally he should come.
The snow had begun to fall; watching it made her sleepy; she watched it,
wondering sleepily what she would do tomorrow. For he would
be gone. And everyone in her clan would know she had been out all night.
That was tomorrow. It would take care of itself. This was tonight, tonight . .
. and she dozed off, till suddenly she woke with a great start, and crouched
there a little while, her mind blank, dark.
Then
abrupdy she scrambled up and with flint and tin-derbox lighted the
basket-lantern she had brought with her. By its tiny glow she headed downhill
till she struck the path, then hesitated, and turned west. Once she stopped and
said, "Alterra . . ." in a whisper. The forest was perfectly quiet in
the night. She went on till she found him lying across the path.
The
snow, falling thicker now, streaked across the lantern's dim, small glow. The
snow was sticking to the ground now instead of melting, and it had stuck in a
powdering of white all over his torn coat and even on his hair. His hand, which
she touched first, was cold and she knew he was dead. She sat down on the wet,
snow-rimmed mud by him and took his head on her knees.
He
moved and made a land of whimper, and with that Rolery came to herself. She stopped her silly gesture of smoothing the
powdery snow from his hair and collar, and sat intent for a minute. Then she
eased him back down, got up, automatically tried to rub the sticky blood from
her hand, and with the lantern's aid began to seek around the sides of the path
for something. She found what she needed and set to work.
Soft, weak sunlight slanted down across the
room. In that warmth it was hard to wake up and he kept sliding back down into
the waters of sleep, the deep tideless lake. But the light always brought him
up again; and finally he was awake, seeing the high gray walls about him and
the slant of sunlight through glass.
He lay still while the shaft of watery golden
light faded and returned, slipped from the floor and pooled on the farther
wall, rising higher, reddening. Alia Pasfal came in, and seeing he was awake
signed to someone behind her to stay out. She closed the door and came to kneel
by him. Alterran houses were sparsely furnished; they slept on pallets on the
carpeted floor, and for chairs used at most a thin cushion. So Alia knelt, and
looked down at Agat, her worn, black face lighted strongly by the reddish shaft
of sun. There was no pity in her face as she looked at him. She had borne too
much, too young, for compassion and scruple ever to rise from very deep in her,
and in her old age she was quite pitiless. She shook her head a little from
side to side as she said softly, "Jakob . . . What have you done?"
He found that his head hurt him when he tried
to speak, so having no real answer he kept still. "What have you done . .
."
"How
did I get home?" he asked at last, forming the
words so poorly with his smashed mouth that she raised her hand to stop him.
"How you got here—is that what you asked? She brought you. The hilf girl. She made a sort of travois out of some
branches and her furs, and rolled you onto it and hauled you over the ridge and
to the Land Gate. At night in the snow. Nothing left
on her but her breeches—she had to tear up her tunic to tie you on. Those hilfs
are tougher than the leather they dress in. She said the snow made it easier to
pull ... No snow left now. That was
night before last. You've had a pretty good rest all in all."
She
poured him a cup of water from the jug on a tray nearby and helped him drink.
Close over him her face looked very old, delicate with age. She said to him
with the mind-speech, unbelievingly, How could you do this? You were always a proud
man, Jakob!
He
replied the same way, wordlessly. Put into words what he told her was: 7 cant get on without her.
The
old woman flinched physically away from the sense of his passion, and as if in
self-defense spoke aloud: "But what a time to pick for a love affair, for
a romance! When everyone depended on you—"
He
repeated what he had told her, for it was the truth and all he could tell her.
She bespoke him with harshness: But you're not going to marry her, so you'd better learn to get on
without her.
He replied only, No.
She
sat back on her heels a while. When her mind opened again to his it was with a
great depth of bitterness. Well, go ahead, what's the difference. At this point whatever we do, any
of us, alone or together, is wrong. We cant do the
right thing, the lucky thing. We can
only go on committing suicide, little by little, one by one. Till we're all
gone, till Alterra is gone, all the exiles dead . . .
"Alia,"
he broke in aloud, shaken by her despair, "the . . . the men went . . .
P"
"What
men? Our army?" She said the words sarcastically.
"Did they march north yesterday—without you?"
"Pilotson—"
"If Pilotson had led them anywhere it
would have been to attack Tevar. To avenge you. He was
crazy with rage yesterday."
"And they ..."
"The hilfs? No, of course they didn't go. When it became
known that Wold's daughter is running off to sleep with a farborn in the woods,
Wold's faction comes in for a certain amount of ridicule and discredit—you can
see that? Of course, it's easier to see it after the fact; but I should have
thought—"
"For God's sake,
Alia."
"All right. Nobody went north. We sit here and wait for the Gaal to arrive when
they please."
Jakob
Agat lay very still, trying to keep himself from falling headfirst, backwards,
into the void that lay under him. It was the blank and real abyss of his own
pride: the self-deceiving arrogance from which all his acts had sprung: the fie. If he went under, no matter.
But what of his people whom he had betrayed?
Alia
bespoke him after a while: Jakob, it was a very little hope at best. You did what you could. Man
and unman can't work together. Six hundred home-years of failure should tell you that. Your folly was only their
pretext. If they hadn't turned on us
over it, they would have found something ebe very soon. They're our enemies as
much as the Gaal. Or the Winter. Or the rest of this planet that doesn't want us. We can make no alliances but among
ourselves. We're on our own. Never hold your hand out to any creature that
belongs to this world . . .
He
turned his mind away from hers, unable to endure the finality of her despair.
He tried to lie closed in on himself, withdrawn, but something worried him
insistently, dragged at his consciousness, until suddenly it came clear, and
struggling to sit up he stammered, "Where is she? You didn't send her
back—"
Clothed in a white Alterran robe, Rolery sat
crosslegged, a little farther away from him than Alia had been. Alia was gone;
Rolery sat there busy with some work, mending a sandal it seemed. She had not seemed to notice that he spoke; perhaps he
had only spoken in dream. But she said presently in her light voice, "That
old one upset you. She could have waited. What can you do now? ... I think none of them knows how to take
six steps without you."
The last red of the sunlight made a dull glory on the wall behind her. She sat with a quiet face, eyes cast
down as always, absorbed in mending a sandal.
In
her presence both guilt and pain eased off and took their due proportion. With
her, he was himself. He spoke her name aloud.
"Oh, sleep now; it hurts you to
talk," she said with a flicker of her timid mockery. "Will you
stay?" he asked. "Yes."
"As
my wife," he insisted, reduced by necessity and pain to the bare
essential. He imagined that her people would kill her if she went back to them;
he was not sure what his own people might do to her. He was her only defense,
and he wanted the defense to be certain.
She
bowed her head as if in acceptance; he did not know her gestures well enough to
be sure. He wondered a little at her quietness now. The little while he had
known her she had always been quick with motion and emotion. But it had been a
very little while ... As she sat
there working away her quietness entered into him, and with it he felt his
strength begin to return.
CHAPTER
SEVEN: The Southing
Bright
above the roofpeaks burned
the star whose rising told the start of Winter, as
cheerlessly bright as Wold remembered it from his boyhood sixty moonphases
ago. Even the great, slender crescent moon opposite it in the sky seemed paler
than the Snowstar. A new moonphase had begun, and a new season. But not auspiciously.
Was it true what the
farboms used to say, that the moon was a world like Askatevar and the other
Ranges, though without living creatures, and the stars too were worlds, where
men and beasts lived and summer and winter came? . . . What sort of men would
dwell on the Snowstar? Terrible beings, white as snow, with pallid lipless
mouths and fiery eyes, stalked through Wold's imagination. He shook his head
and tried to pay attention to what the other Elders were saying. The
fore-runners had returned after only five days with various rumors from the
north; and the Elders had built a fire in the great court of Tevar and held a
Stone-Pounding. Wold had come last and closed the circle, for no other man
dared; but it was meaningless, humiliating to him. For the war he had declared
was not being fought, the men he had sent had not gone, and the alliance he had
made was broken.
Beside him, as silent as he, sat Umaksuman. The others shouted and wrangled, getting
nowhere. What did they expect? No rhythm had risen out of the pounding of stones, there had been only clatter and conflict. After
that, could they expect to agree on anything? Fools, fools,
Wold thought, glowering at the fire that was too far away to warm him.
The others were mostly younger, they could keep warm
with youth and with shouting at one another. But he was an old man and furs did
not warm him, out under the glaring Snowstar in the wind of Winter.
His legs ached now with cold, his chest hurt, and he did not know or care what
they were all quarreling about.
Umaksuman
was suddenly on his feet. "Listenl" he said, and the thunder of his
voice (He got that from me, thought Wold) compelled them, though there
were audible mutters and jeers. So far, though everybody had a fair idea what
had happened, the immediate cause or pretext of their quarrel with Landin had
not been discussed outside the walls of Wold's Kinhouse; it had simply been
announced that Umaksuman was not to lead the foray, that there was to be no
foray, that there might be an attack from the farboms. Those of other houses
who knew nothing about Rolery or Agat knew what was actually involved: a
power-struggle between factions in the most powerful clan. This was covertly
going on in every speech made now in the Stone-Pounding, the subject of which
was, nominally, whether the farboms were to be treated as enemies when met
beyond the walls.
Now
Umaksuman spoke: "Listen, Elders of Tevar! You say this, you say that, but
you have nothing left to say. The Gaal are coming: within three days they are
here. Be silent and go sharpen your spears, go look to our gates and walls,
because the enemy comes, they come down on us—seel" He flung out his arm
to the north, and many turned to stare where he pointed, as if expecting the
hordes of the Southing to burst through the wall that moment, so urgent was
Umak-suman's rhetoric.
"Why
didn't you look to the gate your kinswoman went out of, Umaksuman?"
Now it was said.
"She's your kinswoman too, Ukwet,"
Umaksuman said wrathfully.
One
of them was Wold's son, the other his grandson; they spoke of his daughter. For
the first time in his life Wold knew shame, bald, helpless shame before all the
best men of his people. He sat moveless, his head bowed down.
"Yes,
she is; and because of me, no shame rests on our Kin! I and my brothers knocked
the teeth out of the dirty face of that one she lay with, and I had him down to
geld him as he-animals should be gelded, but then you stopped us, Umaksuman.
You stopped us with your fool talk—"
"I
stopped you so that we wouldn't have the farboms to fight along with the Gaal,
you fool! She's of age to sleep with a man if she chooses, and this is
no—"
"He was no man,
kinsman, and I am no fool."
"You
are a fool, Ukwet, for you jumped at this as a chance to make quarrel with the
farboms, and so lost us our one chance to turn aside the Gaall"
"I do not hear you,
liar, traitor!"
They met with a yell in the middle of the
circle, axes drawn. Wold got up. Men sitting near him looked up expecting him,
as Eldest and clan-chief, to stop the fight. But he did not. He turned away
from the broken circle and in silence, with his stiff, ponderous shuffle, went
down the alley between the high slant roofs, under projecting eaves, to the
house of his Kin.
He clambered laboriously down earthen stairs
into the stuffy, smoky warmth of the immense dug-out room. Boys and womenfolk
came asking him if the Stone-Pounding was over and why he came alone.
"Umaksuman and Ukwet are fighting," he said to get rid of them, and sat
down by the fire, his legs right in the firepit. No good would come of this. No
good would come of anything any more. When crying women brought in the body of
his grandson Ukwet, a thick path of blood dropping behind them from the
ax-split skull, he looked on without moving or speaking. "Umaksuman killed
him, his kinsman, his brother," Ukwet's wives shrilled at Wold, who never
raised his head. Finally he looked around at them heavily like an old animal
beset by hunters, and said in a thick voice, "Be still . . . Can't you be
still . . ."
It snowed again next day. They buried Ukwet,
the first-dead of the Winter, and the snow fell on the
corpse's face before the grave was filled. Wold thought then and later of
Umaksuman, outlawed, alone in the hills, in the snow. Which was better off?
His
tongue was very thick and he did not like to talk. He stayed by the fire and
was not sure, sometimes, whether outside it was day or night. He did not sleep
well; he seemed somehow always to be waking up. He was just waking up when the
noise began outside, up above ground.
Women
came shrieking in from the side-rooms, grabbing up their little Fall-born
brats. "The Gaal, the Gaal!" they screeched. Others were quiet as
befitted women of a great house, and put the place in order and sat down to
wait.
No man came for Wold.
He
knew he was no longer a chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with
the babies and women by the fire, in a hole in the ground?
He
had endured public shame, but the loss of his own self-respect he could not
endure, and shaking a litde he got up and began to rummage in his old painted
chest for his leather vest and his heavy spear, the spear with which he had
killed a snow-ghoul singlehanded, very long ago. He was stiff and heavy now and
all the bright seasons had passed since then, but he was the same man, the same
that had killed with that spear in the snow of another winter. Was he not the
same man? They should not have left him here by the fire, when the enemy came.
His
fool womenfolk came squealing around him, and he got mixed up and angry. But
old Kerly drove them all off, gave him back his spear that one of them had
taken from him, and fastened at his neck the cape of gray korio-fur she had
made for him in autumn. There was one left who knew what a man was. She watched
him in silence and he felt her grieving pride. So he walked very erect. She was
a cross old woman and he was a foolish old man, but pride remained. He climbed
up into the cold, bright noon, hearing beyond the walls the calling of foreign
voices.
Men
were gathered on the square platform over the smoke-hole of the House of
Absence. They made way for him when he hoisted himself up the ladder. He was wheezing and trembling so that at first he could see
nothing. Then he saw. For a while he forgot everything in the
unbelievable sight.
The
valley that wound from north to south along the base of Tevar Hill to the
river-valley east of the forest was full-full as the river in the flood-time,
swarming, overrunning with people. They were moving southward, a sluggish, jumbled,
dark flood, stretching and contracting, stopping and starting, with yells,
cries, calls, creaking, snapping whips, the hoarse bray of hann, the wail of babies,
the tuneless chanting of travois-pullers; the flash of color from a rolled-up
red felt tent, a woman's painted bangles, a red plume, a spearhead; the stink,
the noise, the movement—always the movement, moving southward, the Southing.
But in all timepast there had never been a Southing like this, so many all
together. As far as eye could follow up the widening valley northward there
were more coming, and behind them more, and behind them more. And these were
only the women and the brats and the baggage-train . . . Beside that slow
torrent of people the Winter City of Tevar was nothing. A
pebble on the edge of a river in flood.
At
first Wold felt sick; then he took heart, and said presently, "This is a
wonderful thing . . ." And it was, this migration of all the nations of
the north. He was glad to have seen it. The man next to him, an Elder, Anweld
of Siokman's Kin, shrugged and answered quietly, "But it's the end of
us."
"If
they stop here."
"These won't. But the
warriors come behind."
They
were so strong, so safe in their numbers, that their warriors came behind. . .
.
"They'll
need our stores and our herds tonight, to feed all those," Anweld went on.
"As soon as these get by, they'll attack."
"Send
our women and children out into the hills to the west, then. This City is only
a trap against such a force."
"I listen,"
Anweld said with a shrug of assent.
"Now—quickly—before
the Gaal encircle us."
"This
has been said and heard. But others say we can't send our women out to fend for
themselves while we stay in the shelter of the walls."
"Then
let's go with them!" Wold growled. "Can the Men of Tevar decide
nothing?"
"They
have no leader," Anweld said. "They follow this man and that man and
no man." To say more would be to seem to blame Wold and his kinsmen; he
said no more except, "So we wait here to be destroyed."
"I'm
going to send my womenfolk off," Wold said, irked by Anweld's cool
hopelessness, and he left the mighty spectacle of the Southing, to lower
himself down the ladder and go tell his kinfolk to save themselves while there
was some chance. He meant to go with them. For there was no fighting such
odds, and some, some few of the people of Tevar must survive.
But
the younger men of his clan did not agree and would not take his orders. They
would stand and fight.
"But you'll die," said Wold,
"and your women and children might go free—if they're not here with
you." His tongue was thick again. They could hardly wait for him to
finish.
"We'll
beat off the Gaal," said a young grandson. "We are warriors!"
"Tevar
is a strong city, Eldest," another said, persuasive, flattering. "You
told us and taught us to build it well."
"It
will stand against Winter," Wold said. "Not
against ten thousand warriors. I would rather see my women die of the cold in
the bare hills, than live as whores and slaves of the Gaal." But they were
not listening, only waiting for him to be done talking.
He
went outside again, but was too weary now to climb the ladders to the platform
again. He found himself a place to wait out of the way of the coming and going
in the narrow alleys: a niche by a supporting buttress of the south wall, not
far from the gate. If he clambered up on the slanting mud-brick buttress he
could look over the wall and watch the Southing going by; when the wind got
under his cape he could squat down, chin on knees, and have some shelter in the
angle. For a while the sun shone on him there. He squatted in its warmth and
did not think of much. Once or twice he glanced up at the sun, the Winter sun, old, weak in its old age.
Winter
grasses, the short-lived hasty-flowering little plants that would thrive
between the blizzards until midwinter when the snow did not melt and nothing
lived but the rootless snowcrop, already were pushing up through the trampled
ground under the wall. Always something lived, each creature biding its time
through the great Year, flourishing and dying down to wait again.
The long hours went by.
There
was crying and shouting at the northwest corner of the walls. Men went running
by through the ways of the little city, alleys wide enough for one man only
under the overhanging eaves. Then the roar of shouting was behind Wold's back
and outside the gate to his left. The high wooden slide-gate, that lifted from
inside by means of long pulleys, rattled in its frame. They were ramming a log
against it. Wold got up with difficulty; he had got so stiff sitting there in
the cold that he could not feel his legs. He leaned a minute on his spear, then
got a footing with his back against the buttress and held his spear ready, not
with the thrower but poised to use at short range.
The
Gaal must be using ladders, for they were already inside the city over at the
north side, he could tell by the noise. A spear sailed clear over the roofs,
overshot with a thrower. The gate rattled again. In the old days they had no
ladders and rams, they came not by thousands but in ragged tribes, cowardly
barbarians, running south before the cold, not staying to live and die on their
own Range as true men did. . . . There came one with a wide, white face and a
red plume in his horn of pitch-smeared hair, mnning to open the gate from
within. Wold took a step forward and said, "Stop there!" The Gaal
looked around, and the old man drove his six-foot iron-headed spear into his
enemy's side under the ribs, clear in. He was still trying to pull it back out
of the shivering body when, behind him, the gate of the city began to split.
That was a hideous sight, the wood splitting like rotten leather, the snout of
a thick log poking through. Wold left his spear in the Gaal's belly and ran
down the alley, heavily, stumbling, towards the House of his Kin. The peaked
wooden roofs of the city were all on fire ahead of him.
CHAPTER EIGHT: In The Alien City
The
strangest thing
in all the strangeness of this house was the painting on the wall of the big
room downstairs. When Agat had gone and the rooms were deathly still she stood
gazing at this picture till it became the world and she the wall. And the world
was a network: a deep network, like interlacing branches in the woods, like
inter-running currents in water, silver, gray, black, shot through with green
and rose and a yellow like the sun. As one watched then-deep network one saw in
it, among it, woven into it and weaving it, little and great patterns and
figures, beasts, trees, grasses, men and women and other creatures, some like
far-borns and some not; and strange shapes, boxes set on round legs, birds,
axes, silver spears and feathers of fire, faces that were not faces, stones
with wings and a tree whose leaves were stars.
"What
is that?" she asked the farbom woman whom Agat had asked to look after
her, his kinswoman; and she in her way that was an effort to be kind replied,
"A painting, a picture—your people make pictures, don't they?"
"Yes,
a little.
What is it telling of?"
"Of the other worlds and our home. You see the people in it ... It was painted long ago, in the first
Year of our exile, by one of the sons of Esmit."
"What is that?"
Rolery pointed, from a respectful distance.
"A
building—the Great Hall of the League on the world called Davenant."
^And thatT
"An
erkar."
"I listen again," Rolery said
politely—she was on her best manners at every moment now—but when Seiko Esmit
seemed not to understand the formality, she asked, "What is an
erkar?"
The farbom woman pushed out her lips a little
and said indifferently, "A . . . thing to ride in, like a . . . well, you
don't even use wheels, how can I tell you? You've seen
our wheeled carts? Yes? Well, this was a cart to ride in, but it flew in the
sky."
"Can your people make such cars
now?" Rolery asked in pure wonderment, but Seiko took the question wrong.
She replied with rancor, "No. How could we keep such skills here, when the
Law commanded us not to rise above your level? For six hundred years your
people have failed to leam the use of wheels!"
Desolate in this strange place, exiled from
her people and now alone without Agat, Rolery was frightened of Seiko Es-mit
and of every person and every thing she met. But she would not be scorned by a
jealous woman, an older woman. She said, "I ask to learn. But I think your
people haven't been here for six hundred years."
"Six hundred home-years is ten Years here." After a moment Seiko Esmit went
on, "You see, we don't know all about the erkars and many other things
that used to belong to our people, because when our ancestors came here they
were sworn to obey a law of the League, which forbade them to use many things
different from the things the native people used. This was called Cultural
Embargo. In time we would have taught you how to make tilings—like wheeled
carts. But the Ship left. There were few of us here, and no word from the
League, and we found many enemies among your nations in those days. It was hard
for us to keep the Law and also to keep what we had and knew. So perhaps we
lost much skill and knowledge. We don't know."
"It was a strange
law," Rolery murmured.
"It was made for your sakes—not
ours," Seiko said in her hurried voice, in the hard distinct farbom accent
like Agat's. "In the Canons of the League, which we study as children, it
is written: No
Religion or Congruence shall be disseminated, no technique or theory shall be
taught, no cultural set or pattern shall be exported, nor shall paraverbal
speech be used with any non-Communicant high-intelligence life-form, on any
Colonial Planet, until it be judged by the Area Council with the consent of the
Plenum that such a planet be ready for Control or for Membership ... It means, you see, that we were to live
exactly as you live. In so far as we do not, we have broken our own Law."
"It
did us no harm," Rolery said. "And you not much good."
"You cannot judge us," Seiko said
with that rancorous coldness; then controlling herself once more, "There's
work to be done now. Will you come?"
Submissive,
Rolery followed Seiko. But she glanced back at the painting as they left. It
had a greater wholeness than any object she had ever seen. Its somber, silvery,
unnerving complexity affected her somewhat as Agat's presence did; and when he
was with her, she feared him, but nothing else. Nothing, no
one.
The
fighting men of Landin were gone. They had some hope, by guerilla attacks and
ambushes, of harrying the Gaal on southward towards less aggressive victims. It
was a bare hope, and the women were working to ready the town for siege. Seiko
and Rolery reported to the Hall of the League on the great square, and there
were assigned to help round up the herds of hann from the long fields south of
town. Twenty women went together; each as she left the Hall was given a packet
of bread and hann-milk curd, for they would be gone all day. As forage grew
scant the herds had ranged far south between the beach and the coastal ridges.
The women hiked about eight miles south and then beat back, zigzagging to and
fro, collecting and driving the little, silent, shaggy beasts in greater and
greater numbers.
Rolery
saw the farbom women in a new light now. They had seemed delicate, childish,
with their soft fight clothes, their quick voices and quick minds. But here
they were out in the ice-rimmed stubble of the hills, in furs and trousers like
human women, driving the slow, shaggy herds into the north wind, working
together, cleverly and with determination. They were wonderful with the
beasts, seeming to lead rather than drive them, as if they had some mastery
over them. They came up the road to the Sea Gate after the sun had set, a handful of women in a shaggy sea of trotting,
high-haunched beasts. When Landin walls came in sight a woman lifted up her
voice and sang. Rolery had never heard a voice play this game with pitch and
time. It made her eyes blink and her throat ache, and her feet on the dark road
kept the music's time. The singing went from voice to voice up and down the
road; they sang about a lost home they had never known, about weaving cloth and
sewing jewels on it, about warriors killed in war; there was a song about a
girl who went mad for love and jumped into the sea, "O the waves they roll
far out before the tide . . ." Sweet-voiced, making song out of sorrow,
they came with the herds, twenty women walking in the windy dark. The tide was
in, a soughing blackness over the dunes to their left. Torches on the high
walls flared before them, making the city of exile an island of light.
All
food in Landin was strictly rationed now. People ate communally in one of the
great buildings around the square, or if they chose took their rations home to
their houses. The women who had been herding were late. After a hasty dinner in
the strange building called Thiatr, Rolery went with Seiko Esmit to the house
of the woman Alia Pasfal. She would rather have gone to Agat's empty house and
been alone there, but she did whatever she was asked to do. She was no longer a
girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an Al-terran, and a prisoner on
sufferance. For the first time in her life, she obeyed.
No
fire burned in the hearth, yet the high room was warm; lamps without wicks burned
in glass cages on the wall. In this one house, as big as a whole Kinhouse of
Tevar, one old woman lived by herself. How did they bear the loneliness? And
how did they keep the warmth and light of summer inside the walls? And all Year
long they lived in these houses, all their lives, never wandering, never living
in tents out on the range, on the broad Summerlands, wandering . . . Rolery
pulled her groggy head erect and stole a glance at the old one, Pasfal, to see
if her sleepiness had been seen. It had. The old one saw everything; and she
hated Rolery.
So did they all, the Alterrans, these farbom
Elders. They hated her because they loved Jakob Agat with a jealous love;
because he had taken her to wife; because she was human and they were not.
One
of them was saying something about Tevar, something very strange that she did
not believe. She looked down, but fright must have showed in her face, for one
of the men, Dermat Alterra, stopped listening to the others and said,
"Rolery, you didn't know that Tevar was lost?" "I listen,"
she whispered.
"Our
men were harrying the Gaal from the west all day," the farbom explained.
"When the Gaal warriors attacked Tevar, we attacked their baggage-line and
the camps their women were putting up east of the forest. That drew 'some of
them off, and some of the Tevarans got out—but they and our men got scattered.
Some of them are here now; we don't really know what the rest are doing, except
it's a cold night and they're out there in the hills . . ."
Rolery
sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was
taken, destroyed. Could that be true? She had left her people; now her people
were all dead, or homeless in the hifls in the Winter
night. She was left alone. The aliens talked and talked in their hard voices.
For a while Rolery had an illusion, which she knew for an illusion, that there
was a thin film of blood on her hands and wrists. She felt a little sick, but
was not sleepy any longer; now and then she felt herself entering the
outskirts, the first stage, of Absence for a minute. The bright, cold eyes of
the old one, Pasfal the witch, stared at her. She could not move. There was
nowhere to go. Everyone was dead.
Then
there was a change. It was like a small light far off in darkness. She said aloud,
though so softly only those nearest her heard, "Agat is coming here."
"Is he bespeaking
you?" Alia Pasfal asked sharply.
Rolery
gazed for a moment at the air beside the old woman she feared; she was not
seeing her. "He's coming here," she repeated.
"He's
probably not sending, Alia," said the one called Pilotson. "They're
in steady rapport, to some degree."
"Nonsense, Hutu,"
"Why nonsense? He told us he sent to her very hard, on the
beach, and got through; she must be a Natural. And that established a rapport.
It's happened before."
"Between
human couples, yes," the old woman said. "An untrained child can't
receive or send a paraverbal message,
Hum; a Natural is the rarest thing in the
world. And this is a hilf, not a human!"
Rolery
meanwhile had got up, slipped away from the circle and gone to the door. She
opened it. Outside was empty darkness and the cold.
She looked up the street, and in a moment could make out a man coming down it
at a weary jogtrot. He came into the shaft of yellow light from the open door,
and putting out his hand to catch hers, out of breath, said her name. His smile
showed three front teeth gone; there was a blackened bandage around his head
under his fur cap; he was grayish with fatigue and pain. He had been out in the
hills since the Gaal had entered Askatevar Range, three days and two nights
ago. "Get me some water to drink," he told Rolery softly, and then
came on into the light, while the others all gathered around him.
Rolery
found the cooking-room and in it the metal reed with a flower on top which you
turned to make water run out of the reed; Agat's house also had such a device.
She saw no bowls or cups set out anywhere, so she caught the water in a hollow
of th. loose hem of her
leather tunic, and brought it thus to her husband in the other room. He gravely
drank from her tunic. The others stared and Pasfal said sharply, "There
are cups in the cupboard." But she was a witch no longer; her malice fell
like a spent arrow. Rolery knelt beside Agat and heard his voice.
CHAPTER
NINE: The Guerillas
The
weather had warmed
again after that first snow. There was sun, a little rain, northwest wind,
light frost at night, much as it had been all the last moonphase of Autumn.
Winter was not so different from what went
before; it was a bit hard to believe the records of previous
Years that told of ten-foot snowfalls, and whole
moonphases when the ice never thawed. Maybe that came later. The problem now
was the Gaal. . .
Paying very little attention to Agat's
guerillas, though he had inflicted some nasty wounds on their army's flanks,
the northerners had poured at a fast march down through As-katevar Range,
encamped east of the forest, and now on the third day were assaulting the Winter
City. They were not destroying it, however; they were obviously trying to save
the granaries from the fire, and the herds, and perhaps the women. It was only
the men they slaughtered. Perhaps, as reported, they were going to try to
garrison the place with a few of their own men. Come Spring the Gaal
returning from the south could march from town to town of an Empire.
It was not like the hilfs, Agat thought as he
lay hidden under an immense fallen tree, waiting for his little army to take
their positions for their own assault on Tevar. He had been in the open,
fighting and hiding, two days and nights now. A cracked rib from the beating he
had taken in the woods, though well bound up, hurt, and so did a shallow
scalp-wound from a Gaal slingshot yesterday; but with immunity to infection
wounds healed very fast, and Agat paid scant attention to anything less than a
severed artery. Only a concussion had got him down at all. He was thirsty at
the moment and a bit stiff, but his mind was pleasantly alert as Tie got this
brief enforced rest. It wasn't like the hilfs, this planning ahead. Hilfs did
not consider either time or space in the linear, imperialistic fashion of his
own species. Time to them was a lantern lighting a step before, a step behind—the rest was indistinguishable dark. Time was this day, this
one day of the immense Year. They had no historical vocabulary; there was
merely today and "timepast." They looked ahead only to the next
season at most. They did not look down over time but were in it as the lamp in
the night, as the heart in the body. And so also with space: space to them was
not a surface on which to draw boundaries but a range, a heartland, centered on the self and clan and tribe. Around the
Range were areas that brightened as one approached them and dimmed as one
departed; the farther, the fainter. But there were no lines, no limits. This
planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across both
space and time, was untypical; it showed—what? An autonomous
change in a hilf culture-pattern, or an infection from the old northern
colonies and forays of Man?
It
would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically,
that they ever learned an idea from us. Next well be catching their colds. And
that'll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off . . .
There
was in him a deep and mostly unconscious bitterness against the Tevarans, who
had smashed his head and ribs, and broken their covenant, and whom he must now
watch getting slaughtered in their stupid little mud city under his eyes. He
had been helpless to fight against them, now he was almost helpless to fight
for them. He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him.
At
that moment—just as Rolery was starting back towards Landin behind the
herds—there was a rustle in the dry leaf-dust in the hollow behind him. Before
the sound had ceased he had his loaded dartgun trained on the hollow.
Explosives
were forbidden by the Law of Cultural Embargo, which had become a basic ethos
of the Exiles; but some native tribes, in the early Years of fighting, had used
poisoned spears and darts. Freed by this from taboo, the doctors of Landin had
developed some effective poisons which were still in the hunting-fighting
repertory. There were stunners, paralyzers, slow and quick killers; this one
was lethal and took five seconds to convulse the nervous system of a large
animal, such as a Gaal. The mechanism of the dart-gun was neat and simple,
accurate within a little over fifty meters. "Come on out," Agat
called to the silent hollow, and his still swollen hps stretched out in a grin.
All things considered, he was ready to kill another
hilf.
"Alterra?"
A
hilf rose to his full height among the dead gray bushes of the hollow, his arms
by his sides. It was Umaksuman.
"Helll"
Agat said, lowering his gun, but not all the way. Repressed violence shook him
a moment with a spastic shudder.
"Alterra,"
the Tevaran said huskily, "in my father's tent we were friends."
"And
afterwards—in the woods?"
The
native stood there silent, a big, heavy figure, his fair hair filthy, his face
clayey with hunger and exhaustion.
"I
heard your voice, with the others. If you had to avenge your sister's honor,
you could have done it one at a time." Agat's finger was still on the
trigger; but when Umaksuman answered, his expression changed. He had not hoped
for an answer.
"I
was not with the others. I followed them, and stopped them. Five days ago I
killed Ukwet, my nephew-brother, who led them. I have been in the hills since
then."
Agat uncocked his gun and
looked away.
"Come
on up here," he said after a while. Only then did both of them realize
that they had been standing up talking out loud, in these hills full of Gaal
scouts. Agat gave a long noiseless laugh as Umaksuman slithered into the niche
under the log with him. "Friend, enemy, what the hell," he said.
"Here." He passed the hilf a hunk of bread from his wallet.
"Rolery is my wife, since three days ago."
Silent,
Umaksuman took the bread, and ate it as a hungry man eats.
"When
they whistle from the left, over there, we're going to go in all together,
heading for that breach in the walls at the north comer, and make a ran through
the town, to pick up any Tevarans we can. The Gaal are looking for us around
the Bogs where we were this morning, not here. It's the only time we're going
for the town. You want to come?"
Umaksuman nodded.
"Are you armed?"
Umaksuman
lifted his ax. Side by side, not speaking, they crouched watching the burning
roofs, the tangles and spurts of morion in the wrecked alleys of the little
town on the hill facing them. A gray sky was closing off the sunlight; smoke
was acrid on the wind.
Off
to their left a whistle shrilled. The hillsides west and north of Tevar sprang
alive with men, little scattered figures crouch-running down into the vale and
up the slope, piling over the broken wall and into the wreckage and confusion
of the town.
As
the men of Landin met at the wall they joined into squads of five to twenty
men, and these squads kept together, whether in attacking groups of Gaal
looters with dartguns, bolos and knives, or in picking up whatever Tev-aran women
and children they found and making for the gate with them. They went so fast
and sure that they might have rehearsed the raid; the Gaal, occupied in
cleaning out the last resistance in the town, were taken off guard.
Agat
and Umaksuman kept pace, and a group of eight or ten coalesced with them as
they ran through the Stone-Pounding Square, then down a narrow tunnel-alley to a lesser square, and burst into one of the big Kinhouses. One after another leapt down the earthen stairway into the dark
interior. White-faced men with red plumes twined in their horn-like hair
came yelling and swinging axes, defending their loot.
The dart from Agat's gun shot straight into the open mouth of one; he saw
Umaksuman take the arm off a Gaal's shoulder as an axman lops a branch from a
tree. Then there was silence. Women crouched in silence in the half-darkness. A
baby bawled and bawled. "Come with usl" Agat shouted. Some of the
women moved towards him, and seeing him, stopped.
Umaksuman
loomed up beside him in the dim light from the doorway, heavy laden with some
burden on his back. "Come, bring the children!" he roared, and at the
sound of his known voice they all moved. Agat got them grouped at the stairs
with his men strung out to protect them, then gave the
word. They broke from the Kinhouse and made for the gate. No Gaal stopped their
run—a queer bunch of women, children, men, led by Agat with a Gaal ax running
cover for
Umaksuman, who carried on
his shoulders a great dangling burden, the old chief, his father Wold.
They
made it out the gate, ran the gauntlet of a Gaal troop in the old
tenting-place, and with other such flying squads of Landin men and refugees in
front of them and behind them, scattered into the woods. The whole run through
Tevar had taken about five minutes.
There
was no safety in the forest. Gaal scouts and troops were scattered along the
road to Landin. The refugees and rescuers fanned out singly and in pairs
southward into the woods. Agat stayed with Umaksuman, who could not defend himself carrying the old man. They struggled through the
underbrush. No enemy met them among the gray aisles and hummocks, the fallen
trunks and tangled dead branches and mummied bushes. Somewhere
far behind them a woman's voice screamed and screamed.
It took them a long time to work south and
west in a half-circle through the forest, over the ridges and back north at
last to Landin. When Umaksuman could not go any farther, Wold walked, but. he could go only very slowly. When they came out of the
trees at last they saw the lights of the City of Exile flaring far off in the
windy dark above the sea. Half-dragging the old man, they struggled along the
hillside and came to the Land Gate.
"Hilfs
coming!" guards sang out before they got within clear sight, spotting
Umaksuman's fair hair. Then they saw Agat and the voices cried, "The
Alterra, the Alterral"
They
came to meet him and brought him into the city, men who had fought beside him,
taken his orders, saved his skin for these three days of guerilla-fighting in
the woods and hills.
They
had done what they could, four hundred of them against an enemy that swarmed
like the vast migrations of the beasts—fifteen thousand men, Agat had guessed.
Fifteen thousand warriors, between sixty or seventy thousand Gaal in all, with
their tents and cookpots and travois and hann and fur rugs and axes and armlets
and cradleboards and tinderboxes, all their scant belongings, and their fear of
the Winter, and their hunger. He had seen Gaal women in their encampments
gathering the dead lichen off logs and eating it. It did not seem probable that
the little City of Exile still stood, untouched by this flood of violence and
hunger, with torches alight above its gates of iron and carved wood, and men to
welcome him home.
Trying
to tell the story of the last three days, he said, "We came around behind
their line of march, yesterday afternoon." The
words had no reality; neither had this warm room, the faces of men and women he
had known all his life, listening to him. "The . . . the
ground behind them, where the whole migration had come down some of the narrow
valleys—it looked like the ground after a landslide. Raw
dirt. Nothing. Everything trodden to dust, to
nothing . . ."
"How
can they keep going? What do they eat?" Hum muttered.
"The Winter stores in the cities they
take. The land's all stripped by now, the crops are
in, the big game gone south. They must loot every town on their course and live
off the hann-herds, or starve before they get out of the snow-lands."
"Then they'll come here," one of
the Alterrans said quietly.
"I
think so. Tomorrow or next day." This was true,
but it was not real either. He passed his hand over his face, feeling the dirt
and stiffness and the unhealed soreness of his hps. He had felt he must come
make his report to the government of his city, but now he was so tired that he
could not say anything more, and did not hear what they were saying. He turned
to Rolery, who knelt in silence beside him. Not raising her amber eyes, she
said very softly, "You should go home, Alterra."
He
had not thought of her all those endless hours of fighting and running and
shooting and hiding in the woods. He had known her for two weeks; had talked
with her at any length perhaps three times; had lain with her once; had taken
her as his wife in the Hall of Law in the early morning three days ago, and an
hour later had left to go with the guerillas. He knew nothing much about her,
and she was not even of his species. And in a couple of days more they would
probably both be dead. He gave his noiseless laugh and put his hand gently on
hers. "Yes, take me home," he said. Silent, delicate, alien, she
rose, and waited for him as he took his leave of the others.
He
had told her that Wold and Umaksuman, with about two hundred more of her
people, had escaped or been rescued from the violated Winter City and were now
in refugee quarters in Landin. She had not asked to go to them. As they went up
the steep street together from Alla's house to his, she asked, "Why did
you enter Tevar to save the people?"
"Why?" It seemed a strange question
to him. "Because they wouldn't save themselves."
"That's no reason, Alterra."
She seemed submissive, the shy native wife
who did her lord's will. Actually, he was learning, she was stubborn, willful,
and very proud. She spoke softly, but said exactly what she meant.
"It
is a reason, Rolery. You can't just sit there watching the bastards kill off
people slowly. Anyhow, I want to fight-to fight back . . ."
"But
your town: how do you feed these people you brought here? If the Gaal lay
siege, or afterwards, in Winter?"
"We
have enough. Food's not our worry. All we need is men."
He stumbled a little from weariness. But the
clear cold night had cleared his mind, and he felt the rising of a small spring
of joy that he had not felt for a long time. He had some sense that this little
relief, this lightness of spirit, was given him by her presence. He had been
responsible for everything so long. She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien
blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or
his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with
him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it
were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that
in joining them together, freed them.
They entered his unlocked front door. No
light burned in the high narrow house of roughly dressed stone. It had stood
here for three Years, a hundred and eighty moonphases; his great-grandfather
had been bom in it, and his grandfather, and his father, and himself. It was as
familiar to him as his own body. To enter it with her, the nomad woman whose
only home would have been this tent or that on one hillside or another, or the
teeming burrows under the snow, gave him a peculiar pleasure. He felt a tenderness towards her which he hardly knew how to
express. Without intent he said her name not aloud but paraverbally. At once
she turned to him in the darkness of the hall; in the darkness, she looked into
his face. The house and city were silent around them. In his mind he heard her
say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss.
"You
bespoke me," he said aloud, unnerved, marveling. She said nothing but once
more he heard in his mind, along his blood and nerves, her mind that reached
out to him: Agat,
Agat. . .
CHAPTER
TEN: The Old Chief
The
old chief was
tough. He survived stroke, concussion, exhaustion, exposure, and disaster with
intact will, and nearly intact intelligence.
Some things he did not understand,
and others were not present to his mind at all times. He was if anything glad
to be out of the stuffy darkness of the Kinhouse, where sitting by the fire had
made such a woman of him; he was quite clear about that. He liked—he had always
liked—this rock-founded, sunlit, windswept city of the farborns, built before
anybody alive was bom and still standing changeless in the same place. It was a
much better built city than Tevar. About Tevar he was not always clear.
Sometimes he remembered the yells, the burning roofs, the hacked and disemboweled
corpses of his sons and grandsons. Sometimes he did not. The will to survive
was very strong in him.
Other
refugees trickled in, some of them from sacked Winter Cities to the north; in
all there were now about three hundred of Wold's race in the farboms' town. It
was so strange to be weak, to be few, to live on the charity of pariahs, that
some of the Tevarans, particularly among the middle-aged men, could not take
it. They sat in Absence, legs crossed, the pupils of their eyes shrunk to a
dot, as if they had been rubbing themselves with gesin oil. Some of the women,
too, who had seen their men cut into gobbets in the streets and by the hearths
of Tevar, or who had lost children, grieved themselves into sickness or
Absence. But to Wold the collapse of the Tevaran world was only part of the
collapse of his own life. Knowing that he was very far along the way to death,
he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or
farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting.
Sunlight shone now in the stone streets,
bright on the painted housefronts, though there was a vague dirty smear along
the sky above the dunes northward. In the great square, in front of the house
called Thiatr where all the humans were quartered, Wold was hailed by a farbom.
It took him a while to recognize Jakob Agat. Then he cackled a bit and said,
"Alterral you used to be a handsome fellow. You look like a Pernmek shaman
with his front teeth pulled. Where is . . . (he forgot her name) where's my
kinswoman?" "In my house, Eldest."
"This is shameful," Wold said. He
did not care if he offended Agat. Agat was his lord and leader now, of course;
but the fact remained that it was shameful to keep a mistress in one's own tent
or house. Farbom or not, Agat should observe the fundamental decencies.
"She's my wife. Is that the shame?"
"I hear wrongly, my ears are old,"
Wold said, wary. "She is my wife."
Wold
looked up, meeting Agat's gaze straight on for the first time. Wold's eyes were
dull yellow like the winter sun, and no white showed under the slanting lids.
Agat's eyes were dark, iris and pupil dark, white-cornered in the dark face:
strange eyes to meet the gaze of, unearthly.
Wold
looked away. The great stone houses of the farboms stood all about him, clean
and bright and ancient in the sunlight.
"I
took a wife from you, Farborn," he said at last, "but I never thought
you'd take one from me . . . Wold's daughter married among the false-men, to
bear no sons—"
"You've
got no cause to mourn," the young farbom said unmoving, set as a rock.
"I am your equal, Wold. In all but age. You had a
farbom wife once. Now you've got a farbom son-in-law. If you
wanted one you can swallow the other."
"It
is hard," the old man said with dour simplicity. There was a pause.
"We are not equals, Jakob Agat. My people are dead or broken. You are a
chief, a lord. I am not. But I am a man, and you are not. What likeness between
us?"
"At least no grudge, no hate," Agat
said, still unmoving.
Wold
looked about him and at last, slowly, shrugged assent.
"Good,
then we can die well together," the farbom said with his surprising laugh.
You never knew when a farbom was going to laugh. "I think the Gaal will
attack in a few hours, Eldest."
"In a few—P"
"Soon. When the sun's high maybe." They were
standing by the empty arena. A light discus lay abandoned by their feet. Agat
picked it up and without intent, boyishly, sailed it across the arena. Gazing
where it fell he said, "There's about twenty of them to one of us. Sq if they get over the walls or through the gate . . . I'm sending all the
Fall-bom children and their mothers out to the Stack. With the drawbridges
raised there's no way to take it, and it's got water and supplies to last five
hundred people about a moonphase.
There ought to be some men with the
womenfolk. Will you choose three or four of your men, and the women with young
children, and take them there? They must have a chief. Does this plan seem good
to you?"
"Yes. But I will stay
here," the old man said.
"Very
well, Eldest," Agat said without a flicker of protest, his harsh, scarred
young face impassive. "Please choose the men to go with your women and
children. They should go very soon. Kemper will take our group out."
"I'll
go with them," Wold said in exactly the same tone, and Agat looked just a
trifle disconcerted. So it was possible to disconcert him. But he agreed
quietly. His deference to Wold was courteous pretense, of course—what reason
had he to defer to a dying man who even among his own defeated tribe was no longer
a chief?—but he stuck with it no matter how foolishly Wold replied. He was
truly a rock. There were not many men like that. "My lord, my son, my
like," the old man said with a grin, putting his hand on Agat's shoulder,
"send me where you want me. I have no more use, all I can do is die. Your black rock looks like an evil
place to die, but I'll do it there if you want. . ."
"Send
a few men to stay with the women, anyway," Agat said, "good steady
ones that can keep the women from panicking. I've got to go up to the Land
Gate, Eldest. Will you come?"
Agat,
lithe and quick, was off. Leaning on a farbom spear of bright metal, Wold made
his way slowly up the streets and steps. But when he was only halfway he had to
stop for breath, and then realized that he should turn back and send the young
mothers and their brats out to the island, as Agat had asked. He turned and
started down. When he saw how his feet shuffled on the stones he knew that he
should obey Agat and go with the women to the black island, for he would only
be in the way here.
The
bright streets were empty except for an occasional farbom hurrying purposefully
by. They were all ready or getting ready, at their posts and duties. If the
clansmen of Tevar had been ready, if they had marched north to meet the Gaal,
if they had looked ahead into a coming
time the way Agat seemed to do . . . No wonder people called far-boms witchmen.
But then, it was Agat's fault that they had not marched. He had let a woman come between allies. If he, Wold, had known that the girl had ever
spoken again to Agat, he would have had her killed behind the tents, and her
body thrown into the sea, and Tevar might still be standing. . . . She came out
of the door of a high stone house, and seeing Wold, stood
still.
He
noticed that though she had tied back her hair as married women did, she still
wore leather tunic and breeches stamped with the trifoliate dayflower,
clan-mark of his Kin.
They did not look into each
other's eyes.
She
did not speak. Wold said at last—for past was past, and he had called Agat
"son"—"Do you go to the black island or stay here,
kinswoman?"
"I stay here,
Eldest."
"Agat
sends me to the black island," he said, a little vague, shifting his stiff
weight as he stood there in the cold sunlight, in his bloodstained furs,
leaning on the spear.
"I
think Agat fears the women won't go unless you lead them, you or Umaksuman. And
Umaksuman leads our warriors, guarding the north wall."
She
had lost all her lightness, her aimless, endearing insolence; she was urgent
and gentle. All at once he recalled her vividly as a little child, the only
little one in all the Summer-lands, Shakatany's daughter, the summer-bom.
"So you are the Alterra's wife?" he said, and this idea coming on top
of the memory of her as a wild, laughing child confused him again so he did not
hear what she answered.
"Why
don't all of us in the city go to the island, if it can't be taken?"
"Not
enough water, Eldest. The Gaal would move into this city, and we would die on
the rock."
He
could see, across the roofs of the League Hall, a glimpse of the causeway. The tide was in; waves glinted beyond the
black shoulder of the island fort.
"A house built upon sea-water is no
house for men," he said heavily. "It's too close to the land under
the sea . . . Listen now, there was a thing I meant to
say to Arilia—to Agat. Wait. What was it, I've forgotten. I can't hear my mind
. . ." He pondered, but nothing came. "Well, no matter. Old men's
thoughts are like dust. Goodbye, daughter."
He
went on, shuffling halt and ponderous across the Square to the Thiatr, where he
ordered the young mothers to collect their children and come. Then he led his
last foray— a flock of cowed women and little crying children, following him
and the three younger men he chose to come with him, across the vast dizzy
air-road to the black and terrible house.
It
was cold there, and silent. In the high vaults of the rooms there was no sound
at all but the sound of the sea sucking and mouthing at the rocks below. His
people huddled together all in one huge room. He wished old Kerly were there,
she would have been a help, but she was lying dead in Tevar or in the forests.
A couple of courageous women got the others going at last; they found grain to
make bhan-meal, water to boil it, wood to boil the water. When the women and
children of the farborns came with their guard of ten men, the Tevarans could
offer them hot food. Now there were five or six hundred people in the fort,
filling it up pretty full, so it echoed with voices and there were brats
underfoot everywhere, almost like the women's side of a Kin-house in the Winter
City. But from the narrow windows, through the transparent rock that kept out
the wind, one looked down and down to the water spouting on the rocks below, the
waves smoking in the wind.
The
wind was turning and the dirtiness in the northern sky had become a haze, so
that around the little pale sun there hung a great pale circle: the snowcircle.
That was it, that was what he had meant to tell Agat.
It was going to snow. Not a shake of salt like last time, but snow, winter
snow. The blizzard . . . The word he had not heard or said for so long made him
feel strange. To die, then, he must return across the bleak, changeless
landscape of his boyhood, he must reenter the white world of the storms.
He still stood at the window, but did not see
the noisy water below. He was remembering Winter. A
lot of good it would do the Gaal to have taken Tevar, and Landin
too. Tonight and tomorrow they could feast on hann and grain. But how far would
they get, when the snow began to fall? The real snow, the blizzard that leveled
the forests and filled the valleys; and the winds that followed, bitter cold.
They would run when that enemy came down the roads at them! They had stayed North too long. Wold suddenly cackled out loud, and turned
from the darkening window. He had outlived his chiefdom, his sons, his use,
and had to die here on a rock in the sea; but he had great allies, and great
warriors served him—greater than Agat, or any man. Storm and Winter
fought for him, and he would outlive his enemies.
He
strode ponderously to the hearth, undid his gesin-pouch, dropped a tiny
fragment on the coals and inhaled three deep breaths. After that he bellowed,
"Well, women! Is the slop ready?" Meekly they served him; contentedly
he ate.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Siege of
the City
All
the first day of
the siege Rolery's job had been with those who kept the men on the walls and
roofs supplied with lances—long, crude, unfinished slivers of holn-grass
weighing a couple of pounds, one end slashed to a long point. Well aimed, one
would kill, and even from unskilled hands a rain of them was a good deterrent
to a group of Gaal trying to raise a ladder against the curving landward wall.
She had brought bundles of these lances up endless stairs, passed them up as
one of a chain of passers on other stairs, run with them through the windy
streets, and her hands still bristled with hair-thin, stinging splinters. But now
since daybreak she had been hauling rocks for the katapuls, the rock-throwing-things like huge
slingshots, which were set up inside the Land Gate. When the Gaal crowded up to
the gate to use their rams, the big rocks whizzing and whacking down among them
scattered and rescattered them. But to feed the katapuls took an awful pile of
rocks. Boys kept at work prising paving-stones up from the nearby streets, and
her crew of women ran these eight or ten at a time on a little roundlegged box
to the men working the katapuls. Eight women pulled together, harnessed to
ropes. The heavy box with its dead load of stone would seem immovable, until at
last as they all pulled its round legs would suddenly turn, and with it
clattering and jolting behind, they would pull it uphill to the gate all in one
straining rush, dump it, then stand panting a minute and wipe the hair out of
their eyes, and drag the bucking, empty cart back for more. They had done this
all morning. Rocks and ropes had blistered Rolery's hard hands raw. She had
torn squares from her thin leather skirt and bound them on her palms with
sandal-thongs; it helped, and others imitated her.
"I
wish you hadn't forgotten how to make erkars," she shouted to Seiko Esmit
once as they came clattering down the street at a run with the unwieldy cart
jouncing behind them. Seiko did not answer; perhaps she did not hear. She kept
at this grueling work—there seemed to be no soft ones among the farboms—but the
strain they were under told on Seiko; she worked like one in a trance. Once as
they neared the gate the Gaal began shooting fire-brands that fell smoking and smoldering on the stones and the tile
roofs. Seiko had struggled in the ropes like a beast in a snare, cowering as
the flamingo things shot over. "They go out, this city won't bum,"
Rolery had said softly, but Seiko turning her unseeing face had said, "I'm
afraid of fire, I'm afraid of fire . . ."
But
when a young crossbowman up on the wall, struck in the face by a Gaal
slingshot, had been thrown backwards off his narrow ledge and crashed down
spread-eagled beside them, knocking over two of the harnessed women and spattering
their skirts with his blood and brains, it had been Seiko that went to him and
took that smashed head on her knees, whispering goodbye to the dead man.
"That was your kinsman?" Rolery asked as Seiko resumed her harness
and they went on. The Alterran woman said, "We are all kinsman in the
City. He was Jonkendy Li—the youngest of the Council."
A young wrestler in the arena in the great square, shining with sweat
and triumph, telling her to walk where she liked in his city. He was the first farbom that had spoken to
her.
She
had not seen Jakob Agat since the night before last, for each person, human and
farbom, left in Landin had his job and place, and Agat's was everywhere,
holding a city of fifteen hundred against a force of fifteen thousand. As the
day wore on and weariness and hunger lowered her strength, she began to see him
too sprawled out on bloody stones, down at the other main attack-point, the Sea
Gate above the cliffs. Her crew stopped work to eat bread and dried fruit
brought by a cheerful lad hauling a roundleg-cart of provisions; a serious
little maiden lugging a skin of water gave them to drink. Rolery took heart.
She was certain that they would all die, for she had seen, from the rooftops,
the enemy blackening the hills: there was no end to them,
they had hardly begun the siege yet. She was equally certain that Agat could
not be killed, and that since he would live, she would live. What had death to
do with him? He was life; her life. She sat on the cobbled street comfortably
chewing hard bread. Mutilation, rape, torture and horror encompassed her within
a stone's throw on all sides, but there she sat chewing her bread. So long as they
fought back with all their strength, with all their heart, as they were doing,
they were safe at least from fear.
But
not long after came a very bad time. As they dragged their lumbering load
towards the gate, the sound of the clattering cart and all sounds were drowned
out by an incredible howling noise outside the gate, a roar like that of an
earthquake, so deep and loud as to be felt in the bone, not heard. And the gate
leaped on its iron hinges, shuddering. She saw Agat then, for a moment. He was
running, leading a big group of archers and dartgunners up from the lower part
of town, yelling orders to another group on the walls as he ran.
All
the women scattered, ordered to take refuge in streets nearer the center of
town. Howw, hovow, houyw! went the crowd-voice at the Land Gate, a noise so
huge it seemed the hills themselves were making it, and would rise and shake
the city off the cliffs into the sea. The wind was bitter cold. Her crew was
scattered, all was confusion. She had no work to lay her hand to. It was
getting dark. The day was not that old, it was not time yet for darkness. All
at once she saw that she was in fact going to die, believed in her death; she
stood still and cried out under her breath, there in the empty street between
the high, empty houses.
On a side street a few boys were prising up
stones and carrying them down to build up the barricades that had been built
across the four streets that led into the main square, reinforcing the gates.
She joined them, to keep warm, to keep doing something. They labored in
silence, five or six of them, doing work too heavy for them.
"Snow," one of them said, pausing
near her. She looked up from the stone she was pushing foot by foot down the
street, and saw the white flakes whirling before her, falling thicker every
moment. They all stood still. Now there was no wind, and the monstrous voice
howling at the gate fell silent. Snow and darkness came together, bringing
silence.
"Look
at it," a boy's voice said in wonder. Already they could not see the end
of the street. A feeble yellowish glimmer was the fight from the League Hall,
only a block away.
"We've
got all Winter to look at the stuff," said
another lad. "If we live that long. Come onl They must be passing out supper at the Hall."
"You
coming?" the youngest one said to Rolery.
"My
people are in the other house, Thiatr, I think."
"No,
we're all eating in the Hall, to save work. Come on." The boys were shy,
gruff, comradely. She went with them.
The
night had come early; the day came late. She woke in Agat's house, beside him,
and saw gray light on the gray walls, slits of dimness leaking through the
shutters that hid the glass windows. Everything was still, entirely still.
Inside the house and outside it there was no noise at all. How could a besieged
city be so silent? But siege and Gaals seemed very far off, kept away by this
strange daybreak hush. Here there was warmth, and Agat
beside her lost in sleep. She lay very still.
Knocking
downstairs, hammering at the door, voices. The charm broke; the best moment
passed. They were calling Agat. She roused him, a hard job; at last, still
blind with sleep, he got himself on his feet and opened window and shutter,
letting in the light of day.
The third day of siege, the first of storm. Snow lay a foot deep in the streets and was
still falling, ceaseless, sometimes thick and calm, mostly driving on a hard
north wind. Everything was silenced and transformed by snow. Hills, forest,
fields, all were gone; there was no sky. The near rooftops faded off into
white. There was fallen snow, and falling snow, for a little ways, and then you
could not see at all.
Westward,
the tide drew back and back into the silent storm. The causeway curved out into
void. The Stack could not be seen. No sky, no sea. Snow drove down over the
dark cliffs, hiding the sands.
Agat
latched shutter and window and turned to her. His face was still relaxed with
sleep, his voice was hoarse. "They can't have gone," he muttered. For
that was what they had been calling up to him from the street: "The Gaal
have gone, they've pulled out, they're running south .
. ."
There
was no telling. From the walls of Landin nothing could be seen but the storm.
But a little way farther into the storm there might be a thousand tents set up
to weather it out; or there might be none.
A
few scouts went over the walls on ropes. Three returned saying they had gone
up the ridge to the forest and found no Gaal; but they had come back because
they could not see even the city itself from a hundred yards off. One never
came back. Captured, or lost in the storm?
The
Alterrans met in the library of the Hall; as was customary, any citizen who
wished came to hear and deliberate with them. The Council of the Alterrans was
eight now, not ten. Jonkendy Li was dead and so was Haris, the youngest and the
oldest. There were only seven present, for Pilotson was on guard duty. But the
room was crowded with silent listeners.
"They're
not gone . . . They're not close to the city . . . Some . . . some are . .
." Alia Pasfal spoke thickly, the pulse throbbed in her neck, her face was muddy gray. She was best trained of all the
farborns at what they called mind-hearing: she could hear men!s
thoughts farther than any other, and could listen to a mind that did not know
she heard it.
That
is forbidden, Agat
had said long ago—a week ago? —and he had spoken against this attempt to find
out if the Gaal were still encamped near Landin. "We've never broken that
law," he said, "never in all the Exile." And he said,
"We'll know where the Gaal are as soon as the snow lets up; meanwhile
we'll keep watch."
But
others did not agree with him, and they overrode his will. Rolery was confused
and distressed when she saw him withdraw, accepting their choice. He had tried
to explain to her why he must; he said he was not the chief of the city or the Council, that ten Alterrans were chosen and ruled together,
but it all made no sense to Rolery. Either he was their leader or he was not;
and if he was not, they were lost.
Now
the old woman writhed, her eyes unseeing, and tried to speak in words her
unspeakable half-glimpses into alien minds whose thoughts were in an alien
speech, her brief inarticulate grasp of what another being's hands touched—
"I hold—I hold—1-line—rope—" she stammered.
Rolery
shivered in fear and distaste; Agat sat turned from Alia, withdrawn.
At
last Alia was still, and sat for a long time with bowed head.
Seiko Esmit poured out for each of the seven
Alterrans and Rolery the tiny ceremonial cup of ti; each, barely touching it
with his lips, passed it on to a fellow-citizen, and lie to another till it was
empty. Rolery looked fascinated at the bowl Agat gave to her, before she drank
and passed it on. Blue, leaf-frail, it let the light pass through it like a
jewel.
"The Gaal have gone," Alia Pasfal
said aloud, raising her ravaged face. "They are on the move now, in some
valley between two ranges—that came very clear."
"Giln
Valley," one of the men murmured. "About ten kilos
south from the Bogs."
"They
are fleeing from the Winter. The walls of the city are
safe."
"But
the law is broken," Agat said, his hoarsened voice cutting across the
murmur of hope and jubilation. "Walls can be mended. Well, we'll see . .
."
Rolery
went with him down the staircase and through the vast Assembly Room, crowded
now with trestles and tables, for the communal dining-hall was there under the
golden clocks and the crystal patterns of planets circling their suns.
"Let's go home," he said, and pulling on the big hooded furcoats that
had been issued to everyone from the storerooms underneath the Old Hall, they
went out together^into the blinding wind in the Square. They had not gone ten
steps when out of the blizzard a grotesque figure plastered with red-streaked
white burst on them, shouting, "The Sea Gate, they're inside the walls, at
the Sea Gate—"
Agat
glanced once at Rolery and was gone into the storm. In a moment the clangor of
metal on metal broke out from the tower overhead, booming, snow-muffled. They
called that great noise the bell, and
before the siege began had all learned its signals. Four, five strokes, then
silence, then five again, and again: all men to the Sea Gate, the Sea Gate . .
.
Rolery
dragged the messenger out of the way, under the arcades of the League Hall,
before men came bursting from the doors, coatless or struggling into their
coats as they ran, armed and unarmed, pelting into the whirling snow, vanishing
in it before they were across the Square.
No
more came. She could hear some noise in the direction of the Sea Gate, seeming
very remote through the sound of the wind and the hushing of the snow. The
messenger leaned on her, in the shelter of the arcade. He was bleeding from a
deep wound in his neck, and would have fallen if she had let him. She
recognized his face; he was the Alterran called Pilotson, and she used his name
to rouse him and keep him going as she tried to get him inside the building. He
staggered with weakness and muttered as if still trying to deliver his
message, "They broke in, they're inside the walls
. . ."
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Siege of
the Square
The
high, narrow Sea Gate
clashed to, the bolts shot home. The battle in the storm was over. But the men
of the city turned and saw, over the red-stained drifts in the street and
through the still-falling snow, shadows running.
They took up their dead and wounded hastily
and returned to the Square. In this blizzard no watch could be kept against
ladders, climbers; you could not see along the walls more than fifteen feet to
either hand. A Gaal or a group of them had slipped in, right under the noses of
the guards, and opened the Sea Gate to the assault. That assault had been
driven out, but the next one could come anywhere, at any time, in greater
force.
"I
think," Umaksuman said, walking with Agat towards the barricade between
the Thiatr and the College, "that most of the Gaal went on south
today."
Agat nodded. "They must have. If they
don't move on they starve. What we face now is an occupying force left behind
to finish us off and live on our stores. How many do you think?"
"Not
more than a thousand were there at the gate," the native said doubtfully.
"But there may be more. And they'll all be inside the walls— There!" Umaksuman pointed to a quick cowering shape
that the snow-curtains revealed for a moment halfway up the street. "You
that way," the native muttered and vanished abruptly to the left. Agat
circled the block from the right, and met Umaksuman in the street again.
"No luck," he said.
"Luck,"
the Tevaran said briefly, and held up a bone-inlaid Gaal ax which he had not
had a minute ago. Over their heads the bell of the Hall tower kept sending out
its soft dull clanging through the snow: one, two—one, two-one, two— Retreat to
the Square, to the Square . . . All who had fought at the Sea Gate, and those
who had been patrolling the walls and the Land Gate, or asleep in their houses
or trying to watch from the roofs, had come or were coming to the city's heart,
the Square between the four great buildings. One by one they were let through
the barricades. Umaksuman and Agat came along at last, knowing it was folly to
stay out now in these streets where shadows ran. "Let's go, Alterra!"
the native urged him, and Agat came, but reluctantly. It was hard to leave his
city to the enemy.
The
wind was down now. Sometimes, through the queer complex hush of the storm,
people in the Square could hear glass shattering, the splintering of an ax
against a door, up one of the streets that led off into the falling snow. Many
of the houses had been left unlocked, open to the looters: they would find very
little in them beyond shelter from the snow. Every scrap of food had been
turned in to the Commons here in the Hall a week ago. The water-mains and the
natural-gas mains to all buildings except the four around the Square had been
shut off last night. The fountains of Landin stood dry, under their rings of
icicles and burdens of snow. All stores and granaries were underground, in the
vaults and cellars dug generations ago beneath the Old Hall and the
League Hall. Empty, icy, lightless, the deserted houses
stood, offering nothing to the invaders.
"They
can live off our herds for a moonphase—even without feed for them, they'll
slaughter the hann and dry the meat—" Dei-mat Alterra had met Agat at the
very door of the League Hall, full of panic and reproach.
"They'll
have to catch the hann first," Agat growled in reply.
"What do you
mean?"
"I
mean that we opened the byres a few minutes ago, while we were there at the Sea
Gate, and let 'em go. Paol Herdsman was with me and he sent out a panic. They
ran like a shot, right out into the blizzard."
"You
let the hann go—the herds? What do we live on the rest of the Winter—if the Gaal leave?"
"Did
Paol mindsending to the hann panic you too, Der-mat?" Agat fired at him.
"D'you think we can't round up our own animals?
What about our grain stores, hunting, snow-crop—what the devil's wrong with
you!" .
"Jakob,"
murmured Seiko Esmit, coming between him and the older man. He realized he had
been yelling at Dermat, and tried to get hold of himself. But it was damned
hard to come in from a bloody fight like that defense of the Sea Gate and have
to cope with a case of male hysteria. His head ached violently; the scalp wound
he had got in one of then-raids on the Gaal camp still hurt, though it should
have healed already; he had got off unhurt at the Sea Gate, but he was filthy
with other men's blood. Against the high, unshuttered windows of the library
the snow streaked and whispered. It was noon; it seemed dusk. Beneath the windows
lay the Square with its well-guarded barricades. Beyond those lay the
abandoned houses, the defenseless walls, the city of snow and shadows.
That
day of their retreat to the Inner City, the fourth day of siege, they stayed
inside their barricades; but already that night, when the snowfall thinned for
a while, a reconnoitering party slipped out via the roofs of the College. The
blizzard grew worse again around daybreak, or a second storm perhaps followed
right on the first, and under cover of the snow and
cold the men and boys of Landin played guerilla in their own streets. They went
out by twos or threes, prowling the streets and roofs and rooms, shadows among
the shadows. They used knives, poisoned darts, bolos, arrows. They broke into
their own homes and killed the Gaal who sheltered there, or were killed by
them.
Having
a good head for heights, Agat was one of the best at playing the game from roof
to roof. Snow made the steep-pitched tiles pretty slippery, but the chance to
pick off Gaal with darts was irresistible, and the chances of getting killed no
higher than in other versions of the sport, street-corner dodging or
house-haunting.
The
sixth day of siege, the fourth of storm: this day the snowfall was fine,
sparse, wind-driven. Thermometers down in the basement
Records Room of the old Hall, which they were using now as a hospital, read
—4°C. outside, and the anemometers showed gusts well over a hundred kmh. Outside
it was terrible, the wind lashing that fine snow at one's face like gravel, whirling
it in through the smashed glass of windows whose shutters had been torn off to
build a camp-fire, drifting it across splintered floors. There was little
warmth and little food anywhere in the city, except inside the four buildings
around the Square. The Gaal huddled in empty rooms, burning mats and broken
doors and shutters and chests in the middle of the floor, waiting out the
storm. They had no provisions—what food there was had gone with the Southing.
When the weather changed they would be able to hunt, and finish off the
townsfolk, and thereafter live on the city's winter stores. But while the storm
lasted, the attackers starved.
They
held the causeway, if it was any good to them. Watchers in the League Tower had
seen their one hesitant foray out to the Stack, which ended prompdy in a rain
of lances and a raised draw-bridge. Very few of them had been seen venturing on
the low-tide beaches below the cliffs of Landin; probably they had seen the
tide come roaring in, and had no idea how often and when it would come next,
for they were inlanders. So the Stack was safe, and some of the trained
paraverbalists in the city had been in touch with one or another of the men and
women out on the island, enough to know they were getting on well, and to tell
anxious fathers that there were no children sick. The Stack was all right. But
the city was breached, invaded, occupied; more than a hundred of its people
already killed in its defense, and the rest trapped in a few buildings. A city of snow, and shadows, and blood.
Jakob
Agat crouched in a gray-walled room. It was empty except for a litter of torn
felt matting and broken glass over which fine snow had sifted. The house was
silent. There under the windows where the pallet had been, he and Rolery had
slept one night; she had waked him in the morning. Crouching there, a
housebreaker in his own house, he thought of Rolery with bitter tenderness.
Once—it seemed far back in time, twelve days ago maybe—he had said in this same
room that he could not get on without her; and now he had no time day or night
even to think of her. Then let me think of her now, at least think of her, he
said ragefully to the silence; but all he could think was that she and he had
been born at the wrong time. In the wrong season. You
cannot begin a love in the beginning of the season of death.
Wind
whistled peevishly at the broken windows. Agat shivered. He had been hot all
day, when he was not freezing cold. The thermometer was still dropping, and a
lot of the rooftop guerillas were having trouble with what the old men said was
frostbite. He felt better if he kept moving. Thinking did no good. He started
for the door out of a lifetime's habit, then getting
hold of himself went softly to the window by which he had entered. In the
ground-floor room of the house next door a group of Gaal were
camped. He could see the back of one near the window. They were a fair people;
their hair was darkened and made stiff with some kind of pitch or tar, but the
bowed, muscular neck Agat looked down on was white. It was strange how little
chance he had had actually to see his enemies. You shot from a distance, or
struck and ran, or as at the Sea Gate fought too close and fast to look. He
wondered if their eyes were yellowish or amber like those of the Tevarans; he
had an impression that they were gray, instead. But this was no time to find
out. He climbed up on the silL swung out on the gable, and left his home via
the roof.
His
usual route back to the Square was blocked: the Gaal were beginning to play the
rooftop game too. He lost all but one of his pursuers quickly enough, but that
one, armed with a dart-blower, came right after him, leaping an eight-foot gap
between two houses that had stopped the others. Agat had to drop down into an
alley, pick himself up and run for it.
A
guard on the Esmit Street barricade, watching for just such escapes, flung down
a rope ladder to him, and he swarmed up it. Just as he reached the top a dart
stung his right hand. He came sliding down inside the barricade, pulled the thing
out and sucked the wound and spat. The Gaal did not poison their darts or
arrows, but they picked up and used the ones the men of Landin shot at them,
and some of these, of course, were poisoned. It was a rather neat demonstration
of one reason for the canonical Law of Embargo. Agat had a very bad couple of
minutes waiting for the first cramp to hit him; then decided he was lucky, and
thereupon began to feel the pain of the messy little wound in his hand. His
shooting hand, too.
Dinner
was being dished out in the Assembly Hall, beneath the golden clocks. He had
not eaten since daybreak. He was ravening hungry until he sat down at one of
the tables with his bowl of hot bhan and salt meat; then he could not eat. He
did not want to talk, either, but it was better than eating, so he talked with
everyone who gathered around him, until the alarm rang out on the bell in the
tower above them: another attack.
As
usual, the assault moved from barricade to barricade; as usual it did not
amount to much. Nobody could lead a prolonged attack in this bitter weather.
What they were after in these shifting, twilight raids was the chance of
slipping even one or two of their men over a momentarily unguarded barricade
into the Square, to open the massive iron doors at the back of Old Hall. As
darkness came, the attackers melted away. The archers shooting from upper
windows of the Old Hall and College held their fire and presently called down
that the streets were clear. As usual, a few defenders had been hurt or killed:
one crossbowman picked off at his window by an arrow from below, one boy who,
climbing too high on the barricade to shoot down, had been hit in the belly
with an iron-headed lance; several minor injuries. Every day a few more were
killed or wounded, and there were less to guard and fight. The subtraction of a
few from too few . . .
Hot
and shivering again, Agat came in from this action. Most of the men who had
been eating when the alarm came went back and finished eating. Agat had no
interest in food now except to avoid the smell of it. His scratched hand kept
bleeding afresh whenever he used it, which gave him an excuse to go down to the
Records Room, underneath Old Hall, to have the bonesetter tie it up for him.
It
was a very large, low-ceilinged room, kept at even warmth and even soft fight
night and day, a good place to keep old instruments and charts and papers, and
an equally good place to keep wounded men. They lay on improvised pallets on
the felted floor, little islands of sleep and pain dotted about in the silence
of the long room. Among them he saw his wife coming towards him, as he had
hoped to see her. The sight, the real certain sight of her, did not rouse in
him that bitter tenderness he felt when he thought about her: instead it simply
gave him intense pleasure.
"Hullo,
Rolery," he mumbled and turned away from her at once to Seiko and the
bonesetter Wattock, asking how Huru Pilotson was. He did not know what to do
with delight any more, it overcame him.
"His
wound grows," Wattock said in a whisper. Agat stared at him, then realized he was speaking of Pilotson.
"Grows?" he repeated uncomprehending, and went over to kneel by
Pilotson's side.
Pilotson was looking up at him.
"How's it going, Hum?"
"You made a very bad
mistake," the wounded man said.
They
had known each other and been friends all their lives. Agat knew at once and
unmistakably what would be on Pilotson's mind: his marriage. But he did not
know what to answer. "It wouldn't have made much difference," he began
finally, then stopped; he would not justify himself.
Pilotson said, "There
aren't enough, there aren't enough."
Only
then did Agat realize that his friend was out of his head. "It's all
right, Hum!" he said so authoritatively that Pilotson after a moment
sighed and shut his eyes, seeming to accept this blanket reassurance. Agat got
up and rejoined Wattock. "Look, tie this up, will you, to stop the
bleeding. —What's wrong with Pilotson?"
Rolery
brought cloth and tape. Wattock bandaged Agat's hand with a couple of expert turns.
"Alterra," he said, "I don't know. The Gaal must be using a
poison our antidotes can't handle. I've tried 'em all. Pilotson Alterra isn't
the only one. The wounds don't close; they swell up. Look at this boy here.
It's the same thing." The boy, a street-guerilla of sixteen or so, was
moaning and struggling like one in nightmare. The spear-wound in his thigh
showed no bleeding, but red streaks ran from it under the skin, and the whole
wound was strange to look at and very hot to the touch.
"You've
tried antidotes?" Agat asked, looking away from the boy's tormented face.
"All
of them. Alterra, what it reminds me of is the wound you got, early in Fall, from the klois you
treed. Remember that? Perhaps they make some poison from the blood or glands of
klois. Perhaps these wounds will go away as that did. Yes, that's the scar—
When he was a young fellow like this one," Wattock explained to Seiko and
Rolery, "he went up a tree after a klois, and the scratches it gave him
didn't seem much, but they puffed up and got hot and made him sick. But in a
few days it all went off again."
"This one won't get well," Rolery
said very softly to Agat.
"Why do you say
that?"
"I used to ... to watch the medicine-woman of my clan.
I learned a litde . . . Those streaks, on his
leg there, those are what they call death-paths."
"You know this poison, then,
Rolery?"
"I
don't think it's poison. Any deep wound can do it. Even a small wound that doesn't bleed, or that gets dirty.
It's the evil of the weapon—"
"That is superstition," the old
bonesetter said fiercely.
"We
don't get the weapon-evil, Rolery," Agat told her, drawing her rather
defensively away from the indignant old doctor. "We have an—"
"But
the boy and Pilotson Alterra do have it! Look here—" She took him over to
where one of the wounded Tevarans sat, a cheerful little middle-aged fellow,
who willingly showed Agat the place where his left ear had been before an ax
took it off. The wound was healing, but was puffed, hot, oozing . . .
Unconsciously
Agat put his hand up to his own throbbing, untended scalp-wound.
Wattock had followed them. Glaring at the
unoffending hilf, he said, "What the local hilfs call 'weapon-evil' is, of
course, bacterial infection. You studied it in school, Alterra. As human beings
are not susceptible to infection by any local bacterial or viral life-forms,
the only harm we can suffer is damage to vital organs, exsanguination, or
chemical poisoning, for which we have antidotes—"
T)ut the
boy is dying, Elder," said Rolery in her soft, unyielding voice. "The
wound was not washed out before it was sewed together—"
The
old doctor went rigid with fury. "Get back among your own kind and don't
tell me how to care for humans—"
"That's enough,"
Agat said.
Silence.
"Rolery," Agat said, "if you
can be spared here a while, I thought we might go . . ." He had been about
to say, "go home." "To get some dinner,
maybe," he finished vaguely.
She
had not eaten; he sat with her in the Assembly Room, and ate a litde. Then they
put on their coats to cross the unlit, wind-whistling Square to the College
building, where they shared a classroom with two other couples. The dormitones
in Old Hall were more comfortable, but most of the married couples of which the
wife had not gone out to the Stack preferred at least this semi-privacy, when
they could have it. One woman was sound asleep behind a row of desks, bundled
up in her coat Tables had been up-ended to seal the broken windows from stones
and darts and wind. Agat and his wife put their coats down on the unmatted
floor for bedding. Before she let him sleep, Rolery gathered clean snow from a
windowsill and washed the wounds in his hand and scalp with it. It hurt, and he
protested, short-tempered with fatigue; but she said, "You are the
Alterra—you don't get sick—but this will do no harm. No harm . . ."
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN: The Last Day
In
his feverish sleep,
in the cold darkness of the dusty room, Agat spoke aloud sometimes, and once
when she was asleep he called to her from his own sleep, reaching out across
the unlit abyss, calling her name from farther and farther away. His voice
broke her dreaming and she woke. It was still dark.
Morning
came early: light shone in around the upturned tables, white streaks across the
ceiling. The woman who had been there when they came in last night still slept
on in exhaustion, but the other couple, who had slept on one of the
writing-tables to avoid the drafts, roused up. Agat sat up, looked around, and
said in his hoarse voice, with a stricken look, "The storm's over . .
." Sliding one of the tables aside a little they peered out and saw the
world again: the trampled Square, snow-mounded barricades, great shuttered
facades of the four buildings, snow-covered roofs beyond them, and a glimpse of
the sea. A white and blue world, brilliantly clear, the shadows blue and every
point touched by the early sunlight dazzling white.
It
was very beautiful; but it was as if the walls that protected them had been
torn down in the night.
Agat
was thinking what she thought, for he said, "We'd better get on over to
the Hall before they realize they can sit up on the rooftops and use us for
target-practice."
"We
can use the basement tunnels to get from one building to another," one of
the others said. Agat nodded. "We will," he said. "But the
barricades have got to be manned . . ."
Rolery
procrastinated till the others had gone, then managed to persuade the
impatient Agat to let her look at his head-wound again. It was improved or at
least no worse. His face still showed the beating he had got from her kinsmen;
her own hands were bruised from handling rocks and ropes, and full of sores
that the cold had made worse. She rested her battered hands on his battered
head and began to laugh. "Like two old warriors," she said. "O
Jakob Agat, when we go to the country under the sea, will you have your front
teeth back?"
He
looked up at her, not understanding, and tried to smile, but failed.
"Maybe
when a farbom dies he goes back to the stars— to the other worlds," she
said, and ceased to smile.
"No,"
he said, getting up. "No, we stay right here. Come along, my wife."
For all the brilliant light from the sun and
sky and snow, the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe. They were
hurrying across the square to the arcades of the League Hall when a noise
behind them made them turn, Agat with his dartgun drawn, both ready to duck and
run. A strange shrieking figure seemed to fly up over the barricade and crashed
down headfirst inside it, not twenty feet from them: a Gaal, two lances
bristling out between his ribs. Guards on the barricades stared and shouted,
archers loaded their crossbows in haste, glancing up at a man who was yelling
down at them from a shuttered window on the east side of the building above
them. The dead Gaal lay face down in the bloody, trampled snow, in the blue
shadow of the barricade.
One
of the guards came running up to Agat, shouting, "Alterra, it must be the
signal for an attack—" Another man, bursting out of the door of the
College, interrupted him, "No, I saw it, it was chasing him, that's why he
was yelling like that-"
"Saw what? Did he
attack like that all by himself?"
"He
was running from it—trying to save his life! Didn't you see it, you on the
barricade? No wonder he was yelling. White, runs like a man, with a neck
like—God, like this, Al-terra! It came around the corner after him, and then
turned back."
"A
snowghoul," Agat said, and turned for confirmation to Rolery. She had
heard Wold's tales, and nodded. "White, and tall, and the head going from
side to side . . ." She imitated Wold's grisly imitation, and the man who
had seen the thing from the window cried, "That's it." Agat mounted
the barricade to try and get a sight of the monster. She stayed below, looking
down at the dead man, who had been so terrified that he had run on his enemy's
lances to escape. She had not seen a Gaal up close, for no prisoners were
taken, and her work had been underground with the wounded. The body was short
and thin, rubbed with grease till the skin, whiter than her
own, shone like fat meat; the greased hair was interbraided with red
feathers. Ill-clothed, with a felt rag for a coat, the dead man lay sprawled in
his abrupt • death, face buried as if still hiding from the white beast that
had hunted him. The girl stood motionless near him in the bright, icy shadow of
the barricade.
"There!"
she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the
wall, built of paving-stones and rocks from the seacliffs. He came down to her,
his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the League Hall. "Saw it just for
a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running,
it swung its head towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?"
She did not know; she only knew Wold's story
of having killed a snowghoul single-handed, among last Winter's
mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory.
Umaksuman said positively that snow-ghouls often ran in packs, but the farboms
would not take a hilf's word, and had to go look in their books. The book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the
first storm of the Ninth Winter running in a pack of twelve to fifteen.
"How
do the books say? They make no sound. Is it like the mindspeech you speak to me?"
Agat looked at her. They were at one of the
long tables in the Assembly Room, drinking the hot, thin grass-soup the
farborns liked; ti, they called it.
"No—well,
yes, a little. Listen, Rolery, I'll be going outside in a minute. You go back
to the hospital. Don't mind Wattock's temper. He's an old man and he's tired.
He knows a lot, though. Don't cross the Square if you have to go to another
building, use the tunnels. Between the Gaal archers and those creatures . .
." He gave a kind of laugh. "What next, I wonder?" he said.
"Jakob Agat, I wanted to ask you . .
."
In
the short time she had known him, she had never
learned for certain how many pieces his name came into, and which pieces she
should use.
"I listen," he
said gravely.
"Why
is it that you don't speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to—to go. As you told me on the beach to run to the Stack. As your
herdsman told the hann . . ."
"Men
aren't hann," he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of
them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.
"The old one—Pasfal—she listened to the
Gaal, when the big army was starring on south."
"Yes. People with the gift and the
training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind's knowing
it. That's a bit like what any person does in a crowd of people, he feels their
fear or joy; there's more to mindhearing than that, but it's without words. But
the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is different. An untrained man, if
you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he's heard anything.
Especially if what he hears isn't what he himself wants or believes.
Non-Communicants have perfect defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal
communication is mainly to leam how to break down one's own defenses."
"But the animals hear?"
"To some extent. That's done without words again. Some people have that knack for
projecting to animals. It's useful in herding and hunting, all right. Did you
never hear that farborns were lucky hunters?"
"Yes,
it's why they're called witches. But am I like a hann, then? I heard you."
"Yes.
And you bespoke me—once, in my house— It happens
sometimes between two people: there are no barriers, no defenses." He
drained his cup and looked up broodingly at the pattern of sun and jeweled
circling worlds on the long wall across the room. "When that
happens," he said, "it's necessary that they love each other.
Necessary ... I can't send my fear or hate against the Gaal. They wouldn't
hear. But if I turned it on you, I could kill you. And you me, Rolery . .
."
Then
they came wanting him out' in the square, and he must leave her. She went down
to look after the Tevaran men in the hospital, which was her assigned job, and
also to help the wounded farborn boy to die: a hard death that took all day.
The old bonesetter let her take care of the boy. Wattock was bitter and
rageful, seeing all his skill useless. "We humans don't die your foul
death!" he stormed once. "The boy was bom with some blood
defect!" She did not care what he said. Neither did the boy, who died in
pain, holding onto her hand.
New wounded were brought down into the big,
quiet room, one or two at a time. Only by this did they know that there must be
bitter fighting, up in the sunlight on the snow. Umaksuman was carried down,
knocked unconscious by a Gaal slingshot. Great-limbed and stately he
lay, and she looked at him with a dull
pride: a warrior, a brother. She thought him near death, but after a while he sat up,
shaking his head, and then stood up. "What place is this?" he demanded,
and she almost laughed when she answered. Wold's kin were hard to kill off. He
told her that the Gaal were running an attack against all the barricades at
once, a ceaseless push, like the great attack on the Land Gate when the whole
force of them had tried to scale the walls on one another's shoulders.
"They are stupid warriors," he said, rubbing the great lump over his
ear. "If they sat up on the roofs around this Square for a week and shot
at us with arrows, we wouldn't have men enough left to hold the barricades.
All they know is to come running all at once, yelling . . ." He rubbed
his head again, said, "What did they do with my spear?" and went back
up to the fighting.
The
dead were not brought down here, but laid in an open shed in the Square till
they could be burned. If Agat had been killed, she would not know it. When
bearers came with a new patient she looked up with a surge of hope: if it were
Agat wounded, then he was not dead. But it was never him. She wondered if, when
he was killed, he would cry out to her mind before he died; and if that cry
would kill her.
Late
in the unending day the old woman Alia Pasfal was carried down. With certain
other old men and women of the farboms, she had demanded the dangerous job of
bringing arms to the defenders of the barricades, which meant running across
the Square with no shelter from the enemy's fire. A Gaal lance had pierced her
throat from side to side. Wattock could do very little for her. A little,
black, old woman, she lay dying among the young men. Caught by her gaze,
Rolery went to her, a basin of bloody vomit in her hands. Hard, dark, and
depthless as rock the old eyes gazed at her; and Rolery looked straight back,
though it was not a thing her people did.
The bandaged throat
rattled, the mouth twisted.
To break down one's own
defenses . . .
"I
listen!" Rolery said aloud, in the formal phrase of her people, in a
shaking voice.
They will go, Alia Pasfal's voice, tired and faint, said in
her mind: They'll
try to follow the others south. They fear us, the snowghouls, the houses and
streets. They are afraid,
they will go after this attack. Tell Jakob. I can hear, I can
hear them. Tell Jakob they will go—tomorrow—
"I'll
tell him," Rolery said, and broke into tears. Moveless, speechless, the
dying woman stared at her with eyes like dark stones.
Rolery
went back to her job, for the hurt men needed attention and Wattock had no
other assistant. And what good would it do to go seek out Agat up there in the
bloody snow and the noise and haste, to tell him, before he was killed, that a
mad old woman dying had said they would survive?
She
went on about her work with tears still running down her face. One of the
farborns, badly wounded but eased by the wonderful medicine Wattock used, a
little ball that, swallowed, made pain lessen or cease, asked her, "Why
are you crying?" He asked it drowsily, curiously, as one child might ask
another. "I don't know," Rolery told him. "Go to sleep."
But she did know, though vaguely, that she was crying because hope was
intolerably painful, breaking through into the resignation in which she had
lived for days; and pain, since she was only a woman, made her weep.
There
was no way at all of knowing it down here, but the day must be ending, for
Seiko Esmit came with hot food on a tray for her and Wattock and those of the
wounded that could eat. She waited to take the bowls back, and Rolery said to
her, "The old one, Pasfal Alterra, is dead."
Seiko
only nodded. Her face was tight and strange. She said in a high voice,
"They're shooting firebrands now, and throwing
birrning stuff down from the roofs. They can't break in so they're going to bum
the buildings and the stores and then we all can starve together in the cold.
If the Hall catches fire you'll be trapped down here. Burnt
alive."
Rolery
ate her food and said nothing. The hot bhan-meal had been flavored with meat
juice and chopped herbs. The farborns under siege were better cooks than her
people in the midst of Autumn plenty. She finished up
her bowL and also the half-bowlful a wounded man left, and another scrap or
two, and brought the tray back to Seiko, only wishing there had been more.
No
one else came down for a long time. The men slept, and moaned in their sleep.
It was warm; the heat of the gas-fires rose up through the gratings making it
comfortable as a fire-warmed tent. Through the breathing of the men sometimes
Rolery could hear the tick, tick, tick of the round-faced things on the walls,
and they, and the glass cases pushed back against the wall, and the high rows
of books, winked in gold and brown glimmerings in the
soft, steady light of the gas-flares.
"Did
you give him the analgesic?" Wattock whispered, and she shrugged yes,
rising from beside one of the men. The old bonesetter looked half a Year older
than he was, as he squatted down beside Rolery at a study table to cut
bandages, of which they had run short. He was a very great doctor, in Rolery's
eyes. To please him in his fatigue and discouragement she asked him,
"Elder, if it's not the weapon-evil that makes a wound rot, what thing
does?"
"Oh—creatures. Little beasts, too small to see. I could only
show 'em to you with a special glass, like that one in the case over there.
They live nearly everywhere; they're on the weapon, in the air, on the skin. If
they get into the blood, the body resists 'em and the battle is what causes the
swelling and all that. So the books say. It's nothing that ever concerned me as
a doctor."
"Why don't the
creatures bite farboms?"
"Because they don't like foreigners." Wattock snorted at his small joke. "We
are foreign, you know. We can't even digest food here unless we take periodic
doses of certain enzy-moids. We have a chemical structure that's very slightly
different from the local organic norm, and it shows up in the cytoplasm— You don't know what that is. Well, what it means is, we're
made of slightly different stuff that you hilfs are."
"So that you're
dark-skinned and we fight?"
"No, that's unimportant. Totally superficial variations, color and eye-structure and all
that. No, the difference is on a lower level, and is very small—one
molecule in the hereditary chain," Wattock said with relish, wanning to
his lecture. "It causes no major divergence from the Common Hominid Type
in you hilfs; so the first colonists wrote, and they knew. But it means that we
can't interbreed with you; or digest local organic food without help; or react
to your viruses . . . Though as a matter of fact, this enzymoid business is a
bit overdone. Part of the effort to do exactly as the First Generation did. Pure superstition, some of that. I've seen people come in
from long hunting-trips, or the Atlantika refugees last Spring,
who hadn't taken an enzymoid shot or pill for two or three moonphases, but
weren't failing to digest. Life tends to adapt, after all." As he said
this Wattock got a very odd expression, and stared at her. She felt guilty,
since she had no idea what he had been explaining to her: none of the key words
were words in her language. "Life what?" she inquired timidly.
"Adapts. Reacts. Changes! Given enough pressure, and
enough generations, the favorable adaptation tends to prevail. . . . Would the
solar radiation work in the long run towards a sort of local biochemical norm ... all the stillbirths and miscarriages
then would be overadaptations, or maybe incompatibility between the mother and
a normalized fetus . . ." Wattock stopped waving his scissors and bent to
his work again, but in a moment he was looking up again in his unseeing, intense
way and muttering, "Strange, strange, strange! . . . That would imply, you know, that cross-fertilization might take place."
"I listen again,"
Rolery murmured.
"That men and hilfs could breed
together!"
This
she understood at last, but did not understand whether he said it as a fact or
a wish or a dread. "Elder, I am too stupid to hear you," she said.
"You
understand him well enough," said a weak voice nearby: Pilotson Alterra,
lying awake. "So you think we've finally turned into a drop in the bucket,
Wattock?" Pilotson had raised up on his elbow.
His dark eyes glittered in his gaunt, hot, dark face.
"If
you and several of the others do have infected wounds, then the fact's got to
be explained somehow."
"Damn
adaptation then. Damn your crossbreeding and fertility I" the sick man said, and looked at Rolery.
"So long as we've bred true we've been Man. Exiles, Alterrans, humans. Faithful to the knowledge and the
Laws of Man. Now, if we can breed with the hilfs, the drop of our human
blood will be lost before another Year's past. Diluted, thinned out to nothing.
Nobody will set these instruments, or read these books. Jakob Agat's grandsons
will sit pounding two rocks together and yelling, till the end of time . . .
Damn you stupid barbarians, can't you leave men alone—alone!" He was
shaking with fever and fury. Old Wattock, who had been fiddling with one of his
little hollow darts, filling it up, now reached over in his smooth doctorly way
and shot poor Pilotson in the forearm.-"Lie down, Hum,"
he said, and with a puzzled expression the wounded man obeyed. "I don't
care if I die of your filthy infections," he said in a thickening voice,
"but your filthy brats, keep them away from here, keep 'em out of the . .
. out of the City . . ."
"That'll
hold him down a while," Wattock said, and sighed. He sat in silence while
Rolery went on preparing bandages. She was deft and steady at such work. The
old doctor watched her with a brooding face.
When she straightened up to ease her back she
saw the old man too had fallen asleep, a dark pile of skin and bones hunched up
in the comer behind the table. She worked on, wondering if she had understood
what he said, and if he had meant it: that she could bear Agat's son.
She
had totally forgotten that Agat might very well be dead already, for all she
knew. She sat there among the sleep of wounded men, under the ruined city full
of death, and brooded speechlessly on the chance of life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The First Day
The
cold gripped harder as
night fell. Snow that had thawed in sunlight froze as slick ice. Concealed on nearby roofs or in attics, the Gaal shot over their
pitch-tipped arrows that arched red and gold like birds of fire through the
cold twi-lit air. The roofs of the four beleaguered buildings were of
copper, the walls of stone; no fire caught. The attacks on the barricades
ceased, no more arrows of iron or fire were shot. Standing up on the barricade,
Jakob Agat saw the darkening streets slant off empty between dark houses.
At
first the men in the Square waited for a night attack, for the Gaal were
plainly desperate; but it grew colder, and still colder. At last Agat ordered
that only the minimum watch be kept, and let most of
the men go to get their wounds looked after, and get food and rest. If they
were exhausted, so must the Gaal be, and they at least were clothed against
this cold while the Gaal were not. Even desperation would not drive the
northerners out into this awful, starlit clarity, in their scant rags of fur
and felt. So the defenders slept, many at their posts, huddled in the halls and
by the windows of warm buildings. And the besiegers, without food, pressed
around campfires built in high stone rooms; and their dead lay stiff-limbed in
the ice-crusted snow below the barricades.
Agat
wanted no sleep. He could not go inside the buildings, leaving the Square
where all day long they had fought for their lives,
and which now lay so still under the Winter constellations. The Tree; and the
Arrow; and the Track of five stars; and the Snowstar itself, fiery above the
eastern
roofs: the stars of Winter. They burned like
crystals in the profound, cold blackness overhead.
He knew this was the last night—his own last
night, or his city's, or the last night of
battle—which one, he did not know. As the hours wore on, and the Snowstar rose higher, and utter silence held the Square and the streets
around it, a kind of exultation got hold of him. They slept, all the enemies
within these city walls, and it was as if he alone waked: as if the city
belonged, with all its sleepers and all its dead, to him alone. This was his
night.
He would not spend it locked in a trap within
a trap. With a word to the sleepy guard, he mounted the
Esmit Street barricade and swung himself down on the other side.
"Alter-ral" someone called after him in a hoarse whisper; he only
turned and gestured that they keep a rope ready for him to get back up on, and
went on, right up the middle of the street. He had a conviction of his
invulnerability with which it would be bad luck to argue. He accepted it, and
walked up the dark street among his enemies as if he were taking a stroll after dinner.
He
passed his house but did not rum aside. Stars eclipsed behind the black
roof-peaks and reappeared, their reflections glittering in the ice underfoot.
Near the upper end of town the street narrowed and turned a little between
houses that had been deserted since before Agat was bom, and then opened out
suddenly into the little square under the Land Gate. The catapults still stood
there, partly wrecked and dismantled for firewood by the Gaal, each with a heap
of stones beside it. The high gates themselves had been opened at one point,
but were bolted again now and frozen fast. Agat climbed up the steps beside one
of the gate-towers to a post on the wall; he remembered looking down
from that post, just before the snow began, on the whole battle-force of the
Gaal, a roaring tide of men like the seatide down on the beach. If they had had
more ladders it would have all been over with that day . . . Now nothing moved;
nothing made any sound. Snow, silence, starlight over the slope
and the dead, ice-laden trees that crowned it.
He
looked back westward, over the whole City of Exile: a little clutter of roofs
dropping down away from his high post to the wall over the seacliff. Above that
handful of stone the stars moved slowly westward. Agat sat motionless, cold
even in his clothing of leather and heavy furs, whistling a jig-tune very
softly.
Finally
he felt the day's weariness catching up with him, and descended from his perch.
The steps were icy. He slipped on the next to bottom step, caught himself from
falling by grabbing the rough stone of the wall, and then still staggering
looked up at some movement that had caught his eyes across the little square.
In
the black gulf of a street opening between two house-walls, something white moved, a slight swaying motion like a wave seen in the dark.
Agat stared, puzzled. Then it came out into the vague gray of the starlight: a
tall, thin, white figure running towards him very quickly as a man runs, the
head on the long, curving neck swaying a little from side to side. As it came
it made a little wheezing, chirping sound.
His dartgun had been in his hand all along,
but his hand was stiff from yesterday's wound, and the glove hampered him: he
shot and the dart struck, but the creature was already on him, the short clawed
forearms reaching out, the head stuck forward with its weaving, swaying motion,
a round toothed mouth gaping open. He threw himself down right against its
legs in an effort to trip it and escape the first lunge of that snapping
mouth, but it was quicker than he. Even as he went down it turned and caught at
him, and he felt the claws on the weak-looking little arms tear through the
leather of his coat and clothing, and felt himself pinned down. A terrible
strength bent his head back, baring his throat; and he saw the stars whirl in
the sky far up above him, and go out.
And
then he was trying to pull himself up on hands and knees, on the icy stones
beside a great, reeking bulk of white fur that twitched and trembled. Five
seconds it took the poison on the darttip to act; it had almost been a second
too long. The round mouth still snapped open and shut,
the legs with their flat, splayed, snowshoe feet pumped as if the snowghoul
were still running. Snowghouls hunt in packs, Agat's memory said suddenly, as
he stood trying to get his breath and nerve back. Snowghouls hunt in packs . .
. He reloaded his gun clumsily but methodically, and, with it held ready,
started back down Esmit Street; not running lest he slip on the ice, but not
strolling, either. The street was still empty, and serene, and very long.
But as he neared the
barricade, he was whistling again.
He
was sound asleep in the room in the College when young Shevik, their best
archer, came to rouse him up, whispering urgently, "Come on, Alterra,
come on, wake up, you've got to come . . ." Rolery had not come in during
the night; the others who shared the room were all still asleep.
"What
is it, what's wrong?" Agat mumbled, on his feet and
struggling into his torn coat already.
"Come on to the
Tower," was all Shevik said.
Agat
followed him, at first with docility, then, waking up fully, with beginning
understanding. They crossed the Square, gray in the
first bleak light, ran up the circular stairs of the League Tower, and looked
out over the city. The Land Gate was open.
The Gaal were gathered
inside it, and going out of it.
It
was hard to see them in the half-light before sunrise; there were between a
thousand and two thousand of them, the men watching with Agat guessed, but it
was hard to tell. They were only shadowy blots of motion under the walls and on
the snow. They strung out from the Gate in knots and groups, one after another
disappearing under the walls and then reappearing farther away on the hillside,
going at a jogtrot in a long irregular line, going south. Before they had gone
far the dim light and the folds of the hill hid them; but before Agat stopped
watching the east had grown bright, and a cold radiance reached halfway up the
sky.
The
houses and the steep streets of the city lay very quiet in the morning light.
Somebody began to ring the
bell, right over their heads in the tower there, a steady rapid clamor and
clangor of bronze on bronze, bewildering. Hands over their ears, the men in the
tower came running down, meeting other men and women halfway. They laughed and
they shouted after Agat and caught at him, but he ran on down the rocking
stairs, the insistent jubilation of the bell still hammering at him, and into
the League Hall. In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the
walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the
alien, the stranger, his wife. He finally found her, and taking her hands he
said, "They're gone, they're gone, they're gone
Then
he turned and roared it with all the force of his lungs at everybody—
"They'ie gonel"
They
were all roaring at him and at one another, laughing and crying. After a
minute he said to Rolery, "Come on with me—out to the Stack."
Restless, exultant, bewildered, he wanted to be on the move, to get out into
the city and make sure it was their own again. No one else had left the Square
yet, and as they crossed the west barricade Agat drew his dartgun. "I had
an adventure last night," he said to Rolery, and she, looking at the
gaping rent in his coat, said, "I know."
"I killed it."
"A snowghoulp"
"Right."
"Alone?"
"Yes. Both of us, fortunately."
The
solemn look on her face as she hurried along beside him made him laugh out loud
with pleasure.
They
came out onto the causeway, running out in the icy wind between the bright sky
and the dark, foam-laced water.
The
news of course had already been given, by the bell and by mindspeech, and the
drawbridge of the Stack was lowered as soon as Agat set foot on the bridge. Men
and women and little sleepy, fur-bundled children came running to meet them,
with more shouts, questions, and embraces.
Behind the women of Landin, the women of
Tevar hung hack, afraid and unrejoicing. Agat saw Rolery going to one of these,
a young woman with wild hair and dirt-smudged face. Most of them had hacked
their hair short and looked unkempt and filthy, even the few hilf men who had
stayed out at the Stack. A little disgusted by this grimy
spot on his bright morning of victory, Agat spoke to Umaksuman, who had come
out to gather his tribesmen together. They stood on the drawbridge,
under the sheer wall of the black fort. Hilf men and women had collected around
Umaksuman, and Agat lifted up his voice so they all could hear. "The Men
of Tevar kept our walls side by side with the Men of Landin. They are welcome
to stay with us or to go, to live with us or leave us, as they please. The
gates of my city are open to you, all Winter long. You
are free to go out them, but welcome within them!"
"I hear," the
native said, bowing his fair head.
"But where's the
Eldest, Wold? I wanted to tell him—"
Then
Agat saw the ash-smeared faces and ragged heads with a new eye. They were in
mourning. In understanding that he remembered his own dead, his friends, his
kinsmen; and the arrogance of triumph went out of him.
Umaksuman
said, "The Eldest of my Kin went under the sea with his sons who died in
Tevar. Yesterday he went. They were building the dawn-fire when they heard the
bell and saw the Gaal going south."
"I
would watch this fire," Agat said, asking Umaksuman's permission. The
Tevaran hesitated, but an older man beside him said firmly, "Wold's
daughter is this one's wife: he has clan right."
So
they let him come, with Rolery and all that were left of her people, to a high
terrace outside a gallery on the seaward side of the Stack. There on a pyre of
broken wood the body of the old man lay, age-deformed and powerful, wrapped in
a red cloth, death's color. A young child set the torch and the fire burnt red
and yellow, shaking the air, paled by the cold early light of the sun. The tide
was drawing out, grinding and thundering at the rocks below the sheer black
walls. East over the hills of Askatevar Range and west over the sea the sky was
clear, but northward a bluish dusk brooded: Winter.
Five thousand nights of Winter,
five thousand days of it: the rest of their youth and maybe the rest of their
fives.
Against
that distant, bluish darkness in the north, no triumph showed up at all. The
Gaal seemed a little scurry of vermin, gone already, fleeing before the true
enemy, the true lord, the white lord of the Storms. Agat stood by Rolery in
front of the sinking death-fire, in the high sea-beleaguered fort, and it
seemed to him then that the old man's death and the young man's victory were the same thing. Neither grief nor pride had so much
truth in them as did joy, the joy that trembled in the cold wind between sky
and sea, bright and brief as fire. This was his fort, his city, his world;
these were his people. He was no exile here.
"Come,"
he said to Rolery as the fire sank down to ashes, "come, let's go
home."
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