Malafrena
Page 39
“Has anybody ever sailed down the Kiassa?”
“Pier Sorentay took a rowboat down once on a dare. Broke up on a rock just past the village.”
“Hoy! Hoy there!”
“There’s Papa dancing about.”
“Shall we turn?”
“No,” said Piera.
They went on. The hails from Mazeppa ceased.
“I don’t suppose they’re sinking,” Piera said doubtfully, looking back.
“No. Envious,” said Itale, whose heart was growing lighter as they sailed on through the wind and sun. But their wind was beginning to fail them, and the lake lay glassy.
“Are we going to have to row?”
“Probably when we come under the lee of the Hunter.”
“It’s so still; it’s like sailing in air…”
Their wind lasted until they entered the gulf of Evalde in the shadow of the overhanging mountain. There the air was hot and still in the fire of noon, the clear brown water utterly motionless. Itale rowed. Before them loomed the dark cliffs and basalt columns of the shore; they heard but could not see the cascade, hidden from them by the cleft it had cut itself in the jutting cliffs.
“Like rowing in oil,” he said, whispering, in the strange hush of the gulf that had no sound in it but the dull vibration of the river plunging to the lake.
They came to the landing place, a gravel beach a few yards long, to the right of the Hermit’s Rock. Itale raised the oars and got his breath a minute before landing the boat. “Winded,” he said, with reference to the general direction of Piera.
She did not say anything, but took the little dipper from under the stern seat, dipped it up full of the transparent lake water, and offered it to him. He took it from her and drank.
He ran the boat up on the beach with one great push of the oars and a flying leap, when it touched gravel, to pull it up so that Piera could step out dryshod: his timing was perfect, elegant, and he was smiling with pleasure as he handed Piera out of the boat.
Mazeppa was just at the entrance of the gulf, a black blot on the bright water.
“Are they rowing yet?”
Farsighted like Guide, he looked and said, “Yes.”
“No lunch for a while, then.”
The cascade thundered across the water, muted, tremendous.
“Let’s go up to the top of the falls.”
A path of sorts wound up past the Hermit’s Rock to the top of the cliffs. Piera set off at once, very quick in her dark red skirt, unhesitating even when the way was nothing but a jump from one boulder to another, or when the black broken rock of the cliffside slid and rattled underfoot. Long after her, Itale came out at the top of the climb, in open sunlight, at the head of the falls where the river escaped from the cavern to plunge down its vertical cleft to the lake. They watched it till they were dizzy and deafened, and still went on watching it; at last they went to sit on the stone-broken grass under a low wall-like cliff, the outer wall of the caverns. The dark rock was full of a vibration like distant thunder: the roar of the imprisoned river.
“Will they know we’re up here?”
“Laura will bring them. We always came up here.”
Piera got up again, trying to see the other boat through the pines below the clearing. The sunlit air was warm about them. Restless, nervous, she wandered down the wild slope among the rocks, near the edge of the falls.
“Piera.”
“Yes?”
“What is this?”
She came over slowly, listening for the voices of their people through the dull roar of the river. Itale held out to her a spray of small rock plant. She took it, and sat down with a small sigh.
“I don’t know. It’s pretty; like a fern with flowers.”
“It only grows here.”
Piera sat twirling the flowered spray, gazing at the contorted rocks, the pines that grew tall among them, the bright lake out beyond the gulf. The sun, straight overhead in the dark blue sky, poured down heat and light till the clearing brimmed like a cup.
“Piera, I need to ask you…Is Laura in love?”
“Of course,” she said without turning.
“Francesco spoke to me last night. He said if I decided he should not, he won’t speak to father. I don’t know what I should do.”
She was watching now; not with the reproach or irony he had feared.
“Of course it’s up to Laura. But it will upset father badly. Not without reason. Francesco is a homeless man, dependent on his sister’s sending enough to live on. Austria will hound him all his life, I suppose. He could go to France or England, but what would Laura do there? She never wanted to leave Malafrena…I brought him here. It is my responsibility. I don’t know what to say.”
“Why shouldn’t she leave Malafrena? It was me that wanted to stay. She has always wanted to go, to see things. Where he is would be her home.”
Itale was silent for a bit. “He can’t leave now. They’ll arrest him at the border.”
“Perhaps not with a wife and a false name,” Piera suggested, mildly, but startling Itale.
“You and Laura have talked about this?”
“Not about that…We haven’t really ever said much at all. About that. I know she loves him. Why can’t they stay here? As long as they want to, I mean. Nobody’s using the old Dowerhouse. I thought of having it fitted up. He certainly is a very useful man on a farm.”
“Yes, he is,” Itale said, bemused.
“You could take him into partnership.”
“Into partnership.”
“Then if one of you wanted to go back down there, there would be one of you running the estate.”
“Yes.”
“And since no one is using the Dowerhouse, they could live there. I’d like to have it looked after.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. Then presently, “It all seems practicable. You must—you must have thought about this a good deal?”
“Of course I have.”
Her voice trembled as she spoke. He looked at her again intently, wonderingly; his face was grave and still.
“There was something I wanted to say to you, too,” she said; her voice, over-controlled, sounded thin. He nodded, acceptant; she paused for a long time.
“There are so many reasons. Habit. And the land adjoining at so many places. And so on. And I suppose they talked about it when we were children, people always do. I’m sorry I was unpleasant to you, that night, last winter. That was stupid. I was just trying to say what I want to say now. That people will think we will—we are likely to get married, but they’re mistaken; and that keeps us from being friends.” The small, strained voice trembled continually, like the trembling of water, but remained clear. “I should like to be your friend.”
“You are,” he said almost inaudibly; but his heart said, you are my house, my home; the journey and the journey’s end; my care, and sleep after care.
“All right,” she said, this time with a great sigh; and they were silent for a while, there on the grass in the great heat and light of noon.
“You will go back, down there, some day, won’t you?”
“When I can.”
“Good,” she said, and smiled suddenly. “I wasn’t sure…”
“Then will you keep the Vita Nova?”
“I said I was sorry,” she said angrily.
“Up this way, Count Orlant!” called Laura’s voice down among the pines.
“You have to keep it,” he said with intensity. “I didn’t know why I left till I came back—I have to come back to find that I have to go again. I haven’t even begun the new life yet. I am always beginning it. I will die beginning it. Will you keep it for me, Piera?”
“There they are!” Sangiusto proclaimed from the top of the path.
Piera looked at Itale directly for one instant, then scrambled to her feet and went to greet the others. “Well, well, well,” said Count Orlant surmounting the last steps of the way heavily, “what a pull. Hello, daughter.”
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“Did you have to row? You took so long.”
“Indeed we did. Laura and I pulled two strokes to Mr Sangiusto’s one, and still we went in circles.”
“I thought you two would be keeping cool in the caverns,” said Laura. “It’s as hot as summer here!”
“Have an apple, your face is purple,” said Sangiusto, proffering the hamper.
“What a lovely thing of you to say! Yes, I will. Do we want lunch now?”
“Yes,” Itale said. “All of it.”
“No, I want to see the caverns,” Sangiusto announced, stretching his strong arms and looking about him blissfully.
“Then give me an apple, fratello mio.”
“Stay him with flagons,” Count Orlant said, “comfort him with apples. Are you all going, then?”
“Won’t you come, count?”
“No, I want to sit down right here. Caverns and torrents and all that are for the young. Leave me with the lunch. Go on! You don’t think I’ll eat it all?”
“All right, we’ll be back in half an hour.”
“Wear your hat if you’re sitting out in the sun, papa.”
“Leave us some bones and peelings, count!”
“Go on, go on.”
Ursula K. Le Guin was born in California in 1929. Her contributions to the literary world have come over the past decade. In that time she has published a large body of work and has won four Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, the Jupiter Award, the 1969 Boston Globe Horn Book Award, a Newbery Honor Citation, and the National Book Award. She currently lives and writes in Oregon.