City of Illusions hc-3

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  Falk reached across the embers, caught the woman's hand, and led her over the body of the man he had killed into the dark.

  Fine snow on a light wind sifted and whirled, taking their breaths with cold. Estrel breathed in sobs. His left hand holding her wrist and his right his gun, Falk set off west among the scattered tents, which were barely visible as slits and webs of dim orange. Within a couple of minutes even these were gone, and there was nothing at all in the world but night and snow.

  Handlasers of Eastern Forest make had several settings and functions: the handle served as a lighter, and the weapon-tube converted to a not very efficient flashlight. Falk set his gun to give a glow by which they could read the compass and see the next few steps ahead, and they went on, guided by the mortal light.

  On the long rise where the Basnasska winter-camp stood the wind had thinned the snowcover, but as they went on, unable to pick their course ahead, the compass West their one guideline in the confusion of the snowstorm that mixed air and ground into one whirling mess, they got onto lower land. There were four– and five-foot drifts through which Estrel struggled gasping like a spent swimmer in high seas. Falk pulled out the rawhide drawstring of his hood and tied it around his arm, giving her the end to hold, and then went ahead, making her a path. Once she fell and the tug on the line nearly pulled him down; he turned and had to seek for a moment with the light before he saw her crouching in his tracks, almost at his feet. He knelt, and in the wan, snowstreaked sphere of light saw her face for the first time clearly. She was whispering, "This is more than I bargained for…"

  "Get your breath a while. We're out of the wind in this hollow."

  They crouched there together in a tiny bubble of light, around which hundreds of miles of wind-driven snow hurtled in darkness over the plains.

  She whispered something which at first he did not understand: "Why did you kill the man?"

  Relaxed, his senses dulled, drawing up resources of strength for the next stage of their slow, hard escape, Falk made no response. Finally with a kind of grin he muttered, "What else…?"

  "I don't know. You had to."

  Her face was white and drawn with strain; he paid no attention to what she said. She was too cold to rest there, and he got to his feet, pulling her up with him. "Come on. It can't be much farther to the river."

  But it was much farther. She had come to his tent after some hours of darkness, as he thought of it—there was a word for hours in the Forest tongue, though its meaning was imprecise and qualitative, since a people without business and communication across time and space have no use for timepieces—and the winter night had still a long time to run. They went on, and the night went on.

  As the first gray began to leaven the whirling black snowrubble of the storm they struggled down a slope of frozen tangled grass and shrubs. A mighty groaning bulk rose up straight in front of Falk and plunged off into the snow. Somewhere nearby they heard the snorting of another cow or bull, and then for a minute the great creatures were all about them, white muzzles and wild liquid eyes catching the light, the driven snow hillocky and bulking with flanks and shaggy shoulders. Then they were through the herd, and came down to the bank of the little river that separated Basnasska from Samsit territory. It was fast, shallow, unfrozen. They had to wade, the current tugging at their feet over loose stones, pulling at their knees, icily rising till they struggled waist-deep through burning cold. Estrel's legs gave way under her before they were clear across. Falk hauled her up out of the water and through the ice-crusted reedbeds of the west bank, and then again crouched down by her in blank exhaustion among the snowmounded bushes of the overhanging shore. He switched off his lightgun. Very faint, but very large, a stormy day was gaining on the dark.

  "We have to go on, we've got to have a fire."

  She did not reply.

  He held her in his arms against him. Their boots and leggings and parkas from the shoulders down were frozen stiff already. The woman's face, bowed against his arm, was deathly white.

  He spoke her name, trying to rouse her. "Estrel! Estrel, come on. We can't stay here. We can get on a little farther. It won't be so hard. Come on, wake up, little one, little hawk, wake up…" In his great weariness he spoke to her as he had used to speak to Parth, at daybreak, a long time ago.

  She obeyed him at last, struggling to her feet with his help, getting the line into her frozen gloves, and step by step following him across the shore, up the low bluffs, and on through the tireless, relentless, driving snow.

  They kept along the rivercourse, going south, as she had told him they would do when they had planned their run. He had no real hope they could find anything in this spinning whiteness, as featureless as the night storm had been. But before long they came to a creek tributary to the river they had crossed, and turned up it, rough going for the land was broken. They struggled on. It seemed to Falk that by far the best thing to do would be to lie down and fall asleep, and he was only unable to do this because there was someone who was counting on him, someone a long way off, a long time ago, who had sent him on a journey; he could not lie down, for he was accountable to someone…

  There was a croaking whisper in his ear, Estrel's voice. Ahead of them a clump of high cottonwood boles loomed like starving wraiths in the snow, and Estrel was tugging at his arm. They began to stumble up and down the north side of the snow-choked creek just beyond the cottonwoods, searching for something. "A stone," she kept saying, "a stone," and though he did not know why they needed a stone, he searched and scrabbled in the snow with her. They were both crawling on hands and knees when at last she came on the landmark she was after, a snowmounded block of stone a couple of feet high.

  With her frozen gloves she pushed away the dry drifts from the east side of the block. Incurious, listless with fatigue, Falk helped her. Their scraping bared a metal rectangle, level with the curiously level ground. Estrel tried to open it. A hidden, handle clicked, but the edges of the rectangle were frozen shut. Falk spent his last strength straining to lift the thing, till finally he came to his wits and unsealed the frozen metal with the heatbeam in the handle of his gun. Then they lifted up the door and looked down a neat steep set of stairs, weirdly geometric amidst this howling wilderness, to a shut door

  "It's all right," his companion muttered, and going down the stairs—crawling backwards, as on a ladder, because she could not trust her legs—she pushed the door open, and then looked up at Falk. "Come on!" she said.

  He came down, pulling the trapdoor to above him as she directed. It was abruptly utterly dark, and crouching on the steps Falk hastily pressed the stud of his handgun for light. Below him Estrel's white face glimmered. He came down and followed her in the door, into a place that was very dark and very big, so big his light could only hint at the ceiling and the nearer walls. It was silent, and the air was dead, flowing past them in a faint unchanging draft.

  "There should be wood over here," Estrel's soft, strain-hoarsened voice said somewhere to his left. "Here. We need a fire; help me with this…"

  Dry wood was stacked in high piles in a corner near the entrance. While he got a blaze going, building it up inside a circle of blackened stones nearer the center of the cavern, Estrel crept off into some farther corner and returned dragging a couple of heavy blankets. They stripped and rubbed down, then huddled on the blankets, inside their Basnasska sleep-rolls, up close to the fire. It burned hot as if in a chimney, drawn up by a high draft that also carried off the smoke. There was no warming the great room or cave, but the firelight and heat relaxed and cheered them. Estrel got dried meat out of her bag, and they munched as they sat, though their lips were sore with frostbite and they were too tired to be hungry. Gradually the warmth of the fire began to soak into their bones.

  "Who else has used this place?"

  "Anyone that knows of it, I suppose."

  "There was a mighty House here once, if this was the cellar," Falk said, looking into the shadows that flickered and thickened into impe
netrable black at a distance from the fire, and thinking of the great basements under the house of Fear.

  "They say there was a whole city here. It goes on a long way from the door, they say. I don't know."

  "How did you know of it—are you a Samsit woman?"

  "No."

  He asked no further, recalling the code; but presently she said in her submissive way, "I am a Wanderer. We know many places like this, hiding places…I suppose you've heard of the Wanderers."

  "A little," said Falk, stretching out and looking across the fire at his companion. Tawny hair curled about her face as she sat huddled in the shapeless bag, and a pale jade amulet at her throat caught the firelight.

  "They know little of us in the Forest."

  "No Wanderers came as far east as my House. What was told of them there fits the Basnasska better—savages, hunters, nomads." He spoke sleepily, laying his head down on his arm.

  "Some Wanderers might be called savages. Others not. The Cattle-Hunters are all savages and know nothing beyond their own territories, these Basnasska and Samsit and Arksa. We go far. We go east to the Forest, and south to the mouth of the Inland River, and west over the Great Mountains and the Western Mountains even to the sea. I myself have seen the sun set in the sea, behind the chain of blue isles that lies far off the coast, beyond the drowned valleys of California, earthquake-whelmed…" Her soft voice had slipped into the cadence of some archaic chant or plaint. "Go on," Falk murmured, but she was still, and before long he was fast asleep. For a while she watched his sleeping face. At last she pushed the embers together, whispered a few words as if in prayer to the amulet chained around her neck, and curled down to sleep across the fire from him.

  When he woke she was making a stand of bricks over the fire to support a kettle filled with snow. "It looks like late afternoon outside," she said, "but it could be morning, or noon for that matter. The storm's as thick as ever. They can't track us. And if they did, still they couldn't get in this place…This kettle was in the cache with the blankets. And there's a bag of dried peas. We'll do well enough here." The hard, delicate face turned to him with a faint smile. "It's dark, though. I don't like the thick walls and the dark."

  "It's better than bandaged eyes. Though you saved my life with that bandage. Blind Horressins was better off than dead Falk." He hesitated and then asked, "What moved you to save me?"

  She shrugged, still with the faint, reluctant smile. "Fellow prisoners…They always say Wanderers are clever at ruses and disguises. Did you not hear them call me Fox Woman? Let me look at those hurts of yours. I brought my bag of tricks."

  "Are Wanderers all good healers, too?"

  "We have certain skills."

  "And you know the Old Tongue; you have not forgotten man's old way, like the Basnasska."

  "Yes, we all know Galaktika. Look there, the rim of your ear was frostbitten yesterday. Because you took the tie from your hood for me to hold."

  "I can't look at it," Falk said amiably, submitting to her doctoring. "I don't need to, usually."

  As she dressed the still unhealed cut on his left temple she glanced once or twice sidelong at his face, and at last she ventured: "There are many Foresters with such eyes as yours, no doubt."

  "None."

  Evidently the code prevailed. She asked nothing, and he, having resolved to confide in no one, volunteered nothing. But his own curiosity got the better of him and he said, "They don't frighten you, then, these cat-eyes?"

  "No," she answered in her quiet way. "You frightened me only once. When you shot—so fast—"

  "He would have raised the whole camp."

  "I know, I know. But we carry no guns. You shot so quick, I was frightened—it was like a terrible thing I saw once, when I was a child. A man who killed another with a gun, quicker than thought, like that. He was one of the Razes."

  "Razes?"

  "Oh, one meets with them in the Mountains sometimes."

  "I know very little of the Mountains."

  She explained, though as if unwillingly. "You know the Law of the Lords. They do not kill—you know. When there is a murderer in their city, they cannot kill him to stop him, so they make him into a Raze. It is something they do to the mind. They can turn him loose and he starts to live anew, innocent. This man I spoke of was older than you, but had a mind like a little child. But he got a gun in his hands, and his hands knew how to use it, and he—shot a man very close up, like you did—"

  Falk was silent. He glanced across the fire at his handgun, lying atop his pack, the marvelous little tool that had started his fires, provided his meat, and lighted his darkness all his long way. There had been no knowledge in his hands of how to use the thing—had there? Metock had taught him how to shoot. He had learned from Metock, and grown skillful by hunting. He was sure of it. He could not be a mere freak and criminal given a second chance by the arrogant charity of the Lords of Es Toch…

  Yet was that not more plausible than his own vague dreams and notions of his origin?

  "How do they do this to a man's mind?"

  "I do not know."

  "They might do it," he said harshly, "not only to criminals, but to—to rebels?"

  "What are rebels?"

  She spoke Galaktika much more fluently than he, but she had never heard that word.

  She had finished dressing his hurt and was carefully tucking her few medicaments away in their pouch. He turned around to her so abruptly that she looked up startled, drawing back a little.

  "Have you ever seen eyes like mine, Estrel?"

  "No."

  "You know—the City?"

  "Es Toch? Yes, I have been there."

  "Then you have seen the Shing?"

  "You are no Shing."

  "No. But I am going among them." He spoke fiercely. "But I dread—" He stopped.

  Estrel closed the medicine-pouch and put it in her pack. "Es Toch is strange to men from the Lonely Houses and the far lands," she said at last in her soft, careful voice. "But I have walked its streets with no harm; many people live there, in no fear of the Lords. You need not go in dread. The Lords are very powerful, but much is told of Es Toch that is not true…"

  Her eyes met his. With sudden decision, summoning what paraverbal skill he had, he bespoke her for the first time: "Then tell me what is true of Es Toch!"

  She shook her head, answering aloud, "I have saved your life and you mine, and we are companions, and fellow-Wanderers perhaps for a while. But I will not bespeak you or any person met by chance; not now, nor ever."

  "Do you think me a Shing after all?" he asked ironically, a little humiliated, knowing she was right.

  "Who can be sure?" she said, and then added with her faint smile, "Though I would find it hard to believe of you…There, the snow in the kettle has melted down. I'll go up and get more. It takes so much to make a little water, and we are both thirsty. You…you are called Falk?"

  He nodded, watching her.

  "Don't mistrust me, Falk," she said. "Let me prove myself to you. Mindspeech proves nothing; and trust is a thing that must grow, from actions, across the days."

  "Water it, then," said Falk, "and I hope it grows."

  Later, in the long night and silence of the cavern, he roused from sleep to see her sitting hunched by the embers, her tawny head bowed on her knees. He spoke her name.

  "I'm cold," she said. "There's no warmth left…"

  "Come over to me." He spoke sleepily, smiling. She did not answer, but presently she came to him across the red-lit darkness, naked except for the pale jade stone between her breasts. She was slight, and shaking with the cold. In his mind which was in certain aspects that of a very young man he had resolved not to touch her, who had endured so much from the savages; but she murmured to him, "Make me warm, let me have solace." And he blazed up like fire in the wind, all resolution swept away by her presence and her utter compliance. She lay all night in his arms, by the ashes of the fire.

  Three more days and nights in the cavern,
while the blizzard renewed and spent itself overhead, Falk and Estrel passed in sleep and lovemaking. She was always the same, yielding, acquiescent. He, having only the memory of the pleasant and joyful love he had shared with Parth, was bewildered by the insatiability and violence of the desire Estrel roused in him. Often the thought of Parth came to him accompanied by a vivid image, the memory of a spring of clear, quick, water that rose among rocks in a shadowy place in the forest near the Clearing. But no memory quenched this thirst, and again he would seek satisfaction in Estrel's fathomless submissiveness and find, at least, exhaustion. Once it all turned to uncomprehended anger. He accused her; "You only take me because you think you have to, that I'd have raped you otherwise."

  "And you would not?"

  "No!" he said, believing it. "I don't want you to serve me, to obey me—Isn't it warmth, human warmth, we both want?"

  "Yes," she whispered.

  He would not come near her for a while; he resolved he would not touch her again. He went off by himself with his lightgun to explore the strange place they were in. After several hundred paces the cavern narrowed, becoming a high, wide, level tunnel. Black and still, it led him on perfectly straight for a long time, then turned without narrowing or branching and around the dark turning went on and on. His steps echoed dully. Nothing caught any brightness or cast any shadow from his light. He walked till he was weary and hungry, then turned. It was all the same, leading nowhere. He came back to Estrel, to the endless promise and unfulfillment of her embrace.