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 coming 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 age-mates, 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.”
6
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 unseasonable war; and a sizable faction, even within his own Kin, so detested this alliance with the farborns 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, Alterra!”
“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 his 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 half-way 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 skilful 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 Umaksuman’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 leaf-mold. H
e 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, Alla 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.
“Jakob!” 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 doing!”
“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 satin, 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 abruptly she scrambled up and with flint and tinderbox 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 kind 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. Alla 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 Alla 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 the 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 mindspeech, 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: I can’t 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 can’t 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…
“Alla,” he broke in aloud, shaken by her despair, “the…the men went…?”
“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, Alla.”
“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 lie. If he went under, no matter. But what of his people whom he had betrayed?
Alla 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 else 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 Alla had been. Alla 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.
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