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 Alla Pasfal was carried down. With certain other old men and women of the farborns, she had demanded the dangerous job of bringing arms to the defenders of the barricades, which meant miming 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, Alla 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 burning stuff down from the roofs. They can’t break in so they’re going to burn 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 bhanmeal 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. These, 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 farborns?”
“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 enzymoids. 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 than you hilfs are.”
“So that you’re dark-skinned and we light?”
“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, warming 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 o
r 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!” 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, Huru,” 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 corner 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.
14
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 twilit 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 have 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. “Alterra!” 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 turn aside. Stars eclipsed behind the black roofpeaks 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 born, 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 sea-cliff. 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 dart-tip to act; it had almost been a second too long. The round mouth still snapped open and shut, the legs with their flat, splayed, snow-shoe 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 whistli
ng 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 fight, 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 fight.
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…”
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