Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “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 light 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 on! 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 . . .” Alla 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 mindhearing: 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—line —rope—” she stammered.

  Rolery shivered in fear and distaste; Agat sat turned from Alla, withdrawn.

  At last Alla 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 he 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,” Alla 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 fur coats 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 all had 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. . . .”

  12

  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—” Dermat 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, Dermat?” Agat fired at him. “D’you think we can’t round up our own animals? What about our grain stores, hunting, snowcrop—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 their 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, streetcorner 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 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 campfire, 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 promptly in a rain of lances and a raised drawbridge. Very few of them had been seen venturing on the lowtide 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 a
ctually 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 . . .