“Then they’ll come here,” one of the Alterrans said quietly.
“I think so. Tomorrow or next day.” This was true, but it was not real either. He passed his hand over his face, feeling the dirt and stiffness and the unhealed soreness of his lips. He had felt he must come make his report to the government of his city, but now he was so tired that he could not say anything more, and did not hear what they were saying. He turned to Rolery, who knelt in silence beside him. Not raising her amber eyes, she said very softly, “You should go home, Alterra.”
He had not thought of her all those endless hours of fighting and running and shooting and hiding in the woods. He had known her for two weeks; had talked with her at any length perhaps three times; had lain with her once; had taken her as his wife in the Hall of Law in the early morning three days ago, and an hour later had left to go with the guerillas. He knew nothing much about her, and she was not even of his species. And in a couple of days more they would probably both be dead. He gave his noiseless laugh and put his hand gently on hers. “Yes, take me home,” he said. Silent, delicate, alien, she rose, and waited for him as he took his leave of the others.
He had told her that Wold and Umaksuman, with about two hundred more of her people, had escaped or been rescued from the violated Winter City and were now in refugee quarters in Landin. She had not asked to go to them. As they went up the steep street together from Alla’s house to his, she asked, “Why did you enter Tevar to save the people?”
“Why?” It seemed a strange question to him. “Because they wouldn’t save themselves.”
“That’s no reason, Alterra.”
She seemed submissive, the shy native wife who did her lord’s will. Actually, he was learning, she was stubborn, wilful, and very proud. She spoke softly, but said exactly what she meant.
“It is a reason, Rolery. You can’t just sit there watching the bastards kill off people slowly. Anyhow, I want to fight—to fight back…”
“But your town: how do you feed these people you brought here? If the Gaal lay siege, or afterwards, in Winter?”
“We have enough. Food’s not our worry. All we need is men.”
He stumbled a little from weariness. But the clear cold night had cleared his mind, and he felt the rising of a small spring of joy that he had not felt for a long time. He had some sense that this little relief, this lightness of spirit, was given him by her presence. He had been responsible for everything so long. She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.
They entered his unlocked front door. No light burned in the high narrow house of roughly dressed stone. It had stood here for three Years, a hundred and eighty moonphases; his great-grandfather had been born in it, and his grandfather, and his father, and himself. It was as familiar to him as his own body. To enter it with her, the nomad woman whose only home would have been this tent or that on one hillside or another, or the teeming burrows under the snow, gave him a peculiar pleasure. He felt a tenderness towards her which he hardly knew how to express. Without intent he said her name not aloud but paraverbally. At once she turned to him in the darkness of the hall; in the darkness, she looked into his face. The house and city were silent around them. In his mind he heard her say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss.
“You bespoke me,” he said aloud, unnerved, marveling. She said nothing but once more he heard in his mind, along his blood and nerves, her mind that reached out to him: Agat, Agat…
10
The Old Chief
THE OLD CHIEF WAS TOUGH. He survived stroke, concussion, exhaustion, exposure, and disaster with intact will, and nearly intact intelligence.
Some things he did not understand, and others were not present to his mind at all times. He was if anything glad to be out of the stuffy darkness of the Kinhouse, where sitting by the fire had made such a woman of him; he was quite clear about that. He liked—he had always liked—this rock-founded, sunlit, windswept city of the farborns, built before anybody alive was born and still standing changeless in the same place. It was a much better built city than Tevar. About Tevar he was not always clear. Sometimes he remembered the yells, the burning roofs, the hacked and disemboweled corpses of his sons and grandsons. Sometimes he did not. The will to survive was very strong in him.
Other refugees trickled in, some of them from sacked Winter Cities to the north; in all there were now about three hundred of Wold’s race in the farborns’ town. It was so strange to be weak, to be few, to live on the charity of pariahs, that some of the Tevarans, particularly among the middle-aged men, could not take it. They sat in Absence, legs crossed, the pupils of their eyes shrunk to a dot, as if they had been rubbing themselves with gesin-oil. Some of the women, too, who had seen their men cut into gobbets in the streets and by the hearths of Tevar, or who had lost children, grieved themselves into sickness or Absence. But to Wold the collapse of the Tevaran world was only part of the collapse of his own life. Knowing that he was very far along the way to death, he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting.
Sunlight shone now in the stone streets, bright on the painted housefronts, though there was a vague dirty smear along the sky above the dunes northward. In the great square, in front of the house called Thiatr where all the humans were quartered, Wold was hailed by a farborn. It took him a while to recognize Jakob Agat. Then he cackled a bit and said, “Alterra! you used to be a handsome fellow. You look like a Pernmek shaman with his front teeth pulled. Where is…” He forgot her name. “Where’s my kinswoman?”
“In my house, Eldest.”
“This is shameful,” Wold said. He did not care if he offended Agat. Agat was his lord and leader now, of course; but the fact remained that it was shameful to keep a mistress in one’s own tent or house. Farborn or not, Agat should observe the fundamental decencies.
“She’s my wife. Is that the shame?”
“I hear wrongly, my ears are old,” Wold said, wary.
“She is my wife.”
Wold looked up, meeting Agat’s gaze straight on for the first time. Wold’s eyes were dull yellow like the winter sun, and no white showed under the slanting lids. Agat’s eyes were dark, iris and pupil dark, white-cornered in the dark face: strange eyes to meet the gaze of, unearthly.
Wold looked away. The great stone houses of the farborns stood all about him, clean and bright and ancient in the sunlight.
“I took a wife from you, Farborn,” he said at last, “but I never thought you’d take one from me…Wold’s daughter married among the false-men, to bear no sons—”
“You’ve got no cause to mourn,” the young farborn said unmoving, set as a rock. “I am your equal, Wold. In all but age. You had a farborn wife once. Now you’ve got a farborn son-in-law. If you wanted one you can swallow the other.”
“It is hard,” the old man said with dour simplicity. There was a pause. “We are not equals, Jakob Agat. My people are dead or broken. You are a chief, a lord. I am not. But I am a man, and you are not. What likeness between us?”
“At least no grudge, no hate,” Agat said, still unmoving.
Wold looked about him and at last, slowly, shrugged assent.
“Good, then we can die well together,” the farborn said with his surprising laugh. You never knew when a farborn was going to laugh. “I think the Gaal will attack in a few hours, Eldest.”
“In a few—?”
“Soon. When the sun’s high maybe.” They were standing by the empty arena. A light discus lay abandoned by their feet. Agat picked it up and without intent, boyishly, sailed it across the arena. Gazing where it fell he s
aid, “There’s about twenty of them to one of us. So if they get over the walls or through the gate…I’m sending all the Fallborn children and their mothers out to the Stack. With the drawbridges raised there’s no way to take it, and it’s got water and supplies to last five hundred people about a moonphase. There ought to be some men with the womenfolk. Will you choose three or four of your men, and the women with young children, and take them there? They must have a chief. Does this plan seem good to you?”
“Yes. But I will stay here,” the old man said.
“Very well, Eldest,” Agat said without a flicker of protest, his harsh, scarred young face impassive. “Please choose the men to go with your women and children. They should go very soon. Kemper will take our group out.”
“I’ll go with them,” Wold said in exactly the same tone, and Agat looked just a trifle disconcerted. So it was possible to disconcert him. But he agreed quietly. His deference to Wold was courteous pretense, of course—what reason had he to defer to a dying man who even among his own defeated tribe was no longer a chief?—but he stuck with it no matter how foolishly Wold replied. He was truly a rock. There were not many men like that. “My lord, my son, my like,” the old man said with a grin, putting his hand on Agat’s shoulder, “send me where you want me. I have no more use, all I can do is die. Your black rock looks like an evil place to die, but I’ll do it there if you want…”
“Send a few men to stay with the women, anyway,” Agat said, “good steady ones that can keep the women from panicking. I’ve got to go up to the Land Gate, Eldest. Will you come?”
Agat, lithe and quick, was off. Leaning on a farborn spear of bright metal, Wold made his way slowly up the streets and steps. But when he was only halfway he had to stop for breath, and then realized that he should turn back and send the young mothers and their brats out to the island, as Agat had asked. He turned and started down. When he saw how his feet shuffled on the stones he knew that he should obey Agat and go with the women to the black island, for he would only be in the way here.
The bright streets were empty except for an occasional farborn hurrying purposefully by. They were all ready or getting ready, at their posts and duties. If the clansmen of Tevar had been ready, if they had marched north to meet the Gaal, if they had looked ahead into a coming time the way Agat seemed to do…No wonder people called farborns witchmen. But then, it was Agat’s fault that they had not marched. He had let a woman come between allies. If he, Wold, had known that the girl had ever spoken again to Agat, he would have had her killed behind the tents, and her body thrown into the sea, and Tevar might still be standing…She came out of the door of a high stone house, and seeing Wold, stood still.
He noticed that though she had tied back her hair as married women did, she still wore leather tunic and breeches stamped with the trifoliate dayflower, clanmark of his Kin.
They did not look into each other’s eyes.
She did not speak. Wold said at last—for past was past, and he had called Agat “son”—“Do you go to the black island or stay here, kinswoman?”
“I stay here, Eldest.”
“Agat sends me to the black island,” he said, a little vague, shifting his stiff weight as he stood there in the cold sunlight, in his bloodstained furs, leaning on the spear.
“I think Agat fears the women won’t go unless you lead them, you or Umaksuman. And Umaksuman leads our warriors, guarding the north wall.”
She had lost all her lightness, her aimless, endearing insolence; she was urgent and gentle. All at once he recalled her vividly as a little child, the only little one in all the Summerlands, Shakatany’s daughter, the Summerborn. “So you are the Alterra’s wife?” he said, and this idea coming on top of the memory of her as a wild, laughing child confused him again so he did not hear what she answered.
“Why don’t all of us in the city go to the island, if it can’t be taken?”
“Not enough water, Eldest. The Gaal would move into this city, and we would die on the rock.”
He could see, across the roofs of the League Hall, a glimpse of the causeway. The tide was in; waves glinted beyond the black shoulder of the island fort.
“A house built upon sea-water is no house for men,” he said heavily. “It’s too close to the land under the sea…Listen now, there was a thing I meant to say to Arilia—to Agat. Wait. What was it, I’ve forgotten. I can’t hear my mind…” He pondered, but nothing came. “Well, no matter. Old men’s thoughts are like dust. Goodbye, daughter.”
He went on, shuffling halt and ponderous across the Square to the Thiatr, where he ordered the young mothers to collect their children and come. Then he led his last foray—a flock of cowed women and little crying children following him and the three younger men he chose to come with him—across the vasty dizzy air-road to the black and terrible house.
It was cold there, and silent. In the high vaults of the rooms there was no sound at all but the sound of the sea sucking and mouthing at the rocks below. His people huddled together all in one huge room. He wished old Kerly were there, she would have been a help, but she was lying dead in Tevar or in the forests. A couple of courageous women got the others going at last; they found grain to make bhan-meal, water to boil it, wood to boil the water. When the women and children of the farborns came with their guard of ten men, the Tevarans could offer them hot food. Now there were five or six hundred people in the fort, filling it up pretty full, so it echoed with voices and there were brats underfoot everywhere, almost like the women’s side of a Kinhouse in the Winter City. But from the narrow windows, through the transparent rock that kept out the wind, one looked down and down to the water spouting on the rocks below, the waves smoking in the wind.
The wind was turning and the dirtiness in the northern sky had become a haze, so that around the little pale sun there hung a great pale circle: the snowcircle. That was it, that was what he had meant to tell Agat. It was going to snow. Not a shake of salt like last time, but snow, winter snow. The blizzard…The word he had not heard or said for so long made him feel strange. To die, then, he must return across the bleak, changeless landscape of his boyhood, he must reenter the white world of the storms.
He still stood at the window, but did not see the noisy water below. He was remembering Winter. A lot of good it would do the Gaal to have taken Tevar, and Landin too. Tonight and tomorrow they could feast on hann and grain. But how far would they get, when the snow began to fall? The real snow, the blizzard that leveled the forests and filled the valleys; and the winds that followed, bitter cold. They would run when that enemy came down the roads at them! They had stayed North too long. Wold suddenly cackled out loud, and turned from the darkening window. He had outlived his chiefdom, his sons, his use, and had to die here on a rock in the sea; but he had great allies, and great warriors served him—greater than Agat, or any man. Storm and Winter fought for him, and he would outlive his enemies.
He strode ponderously to the hearth, undid his gesin-pouch, dropped a tiny fragment on the coals and inhaled three deep breaths. After that he bellowed, “Well, women! Is the slop ready?” Meekly they served him; contentedly he ate.
11
The Siege of the City
ALL THE FIRST DAY of the siege Rolery’s job had been with those who kept the men on the walls and roofs supplied with lances—long, crude, unfinished slivers of holngrass weighing a couple of pounds, one end slashed to a long point. Well aimed, one would kill, and even from unskilled hands a rain of them was a good deterrent to a group of Gaal trying to raise a ladder against the curving landward wall. She had brought bundles of these lances up endless stairs, passed them up as one of a chain of passers on other stairs, run with them through the windy streets, and her hands still bristled with hair-thin, stinging splinters. But now since daybreak she had been hauling rocks for the katapuls, the rock-throwing-things like huge slingshots, which were set up inside the Land Gate. When the Gaal crowded up to the gate to use their rams, the big rocks whizzing and wh
acking down among them scattered and rescattered them. But to feed the katapuls took an awful pile of rocks. Boys kept at work prising paving-stones up from the nearby streets, and her crew of women ran these eight or ten at a time on a little roundlegged box to the men working the katapuls. Eight women pulled together, harnessed to ropes. The heavy box with its dead load of stone would seem immovable, until at last as they all pulled its round legs would suddenly turn, and with it clattering and jolting behind, they would pull it uphill to the gate all in one straining rush, dump it, then stand panting a minute and wipe the hair out of their eyes, and drag the bucking, empty cart back for more. They had done this all morning. Rocks and ropes had blistered Rolery’s hard hands raw. She had torn squares from her thin leather skirt and bound them on her palms with sandal-thongs; it helped, and others imitated her.
“I wish you hadn’t forgotten how to make erkars,” she shouted to Seiko Esmit once as they came clattering down the street at a run with the unwieldy cart jouncing behind them. Seiko did not answer; perhaps she did not hear. She kept at this grueling work—there seemed to be no soft ones among the farborns—but the strain they were under told on Seiko; she worked like one in a trance. Once as they neared the gate the Gaal began shooting fire-brands that fell smoking and smoldering on the stones and the tile roofs. Seiko had struggled in the ropes like a beast in a snare, cowering as the flaming things shot over. “They go out, this city won’t burn,” Rolery had said softly, but Seiko turning her unseeing face had said, “I’m afraid of fire, I’m afraid of fire…”
But when a young crossbowman up on the wall, struck in the face by a Gaal slingshot, had been thrown backwards off his narrow ledge and crashed down spread-eagled beside them, knocking over two of the harnessed women and spattering their skirts with his blood and brains, it had been Seiko who went to him and took that smashed head on her knees, whispering goodbye to the dead man. “That was your kinsman?” Rolery asked as Seiko resumed her harness and they went on. The Alterran woman said, “We are all kinsmen in the City. He was Jonkendy Li—the youngest of the Council.”
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