So did they all, the Alterrans, these farborn Elders. They hated her because they loved Jakob Agat with a jealous love; because he had taken her to wife; because she was human and they were not.
One of them was saying something about Tevar, something very strange that she did not believe. She looked down, but fright must have showed in her face, for one of the men, Dermat Alterra, stopped listening to the others and said, “Rolery, you didn’t know that Tevar was lost?”
“I listen,” she whispered.
“Our men were harrying the Gaal from the west all day,” the farborn explained. “When the Gaal warriors attacked Tevar, we attacked their baggage-line and the camps their women were putting up east of the forest. That drew some of them off, and some of the Tevarans got out—but they and our men got scattered. Some of them are here now; we don’t really know what the rest are doing, except it’s a cold night and they’re out there in the hills. . . .”
Rolery sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was taken, destroyed. Could that be true? She had left her people; now her people were all dead, or homeless in the hills in the Winter night. She was left alone. The aliens talked and talked in their hard voices. For a while Rolery had an illusion, which she knew for an illusion, that there was a thin film of blood on her hands and wrists. She felt a little sick, but was not sleepy any longer; now and then she felt herself entering the outskirts, the first stage, of Absence for a minute. The bright, cold eyes of the old one, Pasfal the witch, stared at her. She could not move. There was nowhere to go. Everyone was dead.
Then there was a change. It was like a small light far off in darkness. She said aloud, though so softly only those nearest her heard, “Agat is coming here.”
“Is he bespeaking you?” Alla Pasfal asked sharply.
Rolery gazed for a moment at the air beside the old woman she feared; she was not seeing her. “He’s coming here,” she repeated.
“He’s probably not sending, Alla,” said the one called Pilotson. “They’re in steady rapport, to some degree.”
“Nonsense, Huru.”
“Why nonsense? He told us he sent to her very hard, on the beach, and got through; she must be a Natural. And that established a rapport. It’s happened before.”
“Between human couples, yes,” the old woman said. “An untrained child can’t receive or send a paraverbal message, Huru; a Natural is the rarest thing in the world. And this is a hilf, not a human!”
Rolery meanwhile had got up, slipped away from the circle and gone to the door. She opened it. Outside was empty darkness and the cold. She looked up the street, and in a moment could make out a man coming down it at a weary jogtrot. He came into the shaft of yellow light from the open door, and putting out his hand to catch hers, out of breath, said her name. His smile showed three front teeth gone; there was a blackened bandage around his head under his fur cap; he was grayish with fatigue and pain. He had been out in the hills since the Gaal had entered Askatevar Range, three days and two nights ago. “Get me some water to drink,” he told Rolery softly, and then came on into the light, while the others all gathered around him.
Rolery found the cooking-room and in it the metal reed with a flower on top which you turned to make water run out of the reed; Agat’s house also had such a device. She saw no bowls or cups set out anywhere, so she caught the water in a hollow of the loose hem of her leather tunic, and brought it thus to her husband in the other room. He gravely drank from her tunic. The others stared and Pasfal said sharply, “There are cups in the cupboard.” But she was a witch no longer; her malice fell like a spent arrow. Rolery knelt beside Agat and heard his voice.
9
The Guerillas
THE WEATHER HAD WARMED AGAIN after the first snow. There was sun, a little rain, northwest wind, light frost at night, much as it had been all the last moonphase of Autumn. Winter was not so different from what went before; it was a bit hard to believe the records of previous Years that told of ten-foot snowfalls, and whole moonphases when the ice never thawed. Maybe that came later. The problem now was the Gaal. . . .
Paying very little attention to Agat’s guerillas, though he had inflicted some nasty wounds on their army’s flanks, the northerners had poured at a fast march down through Askatevar Range, encamped east of the forest, and now on the third day were assaulting the Winter City. They were not destroying it, however; they were obviously trying to save the granaries from the fire, and the herds, and perhaps the women. It was only the men they slaughtered. Perhaps, as reported, they were going to try to garrison the place with a few of their own men. Come Spring the Gaal returning from the south could march from town to town of an Empire.
It was not like the hilfs, Agat thought as he lay hidden under an immense fallen tree, waiting for his little army to take their positions for their own assault on Tevar. He had been in the open, fighting and hiding, two days and nights now. A cracked rib from the beating he had taken in the woods, though well bound up, hurt, and so did a shallow scalp-wound from a Gaal slingshot yesterday; but with immunity to infection wounds healed very fast, and Agat paid scant attention to anything less than a severed artery. Only a concussion had got him down at all. He was thirsty at the moment and a bit stiff, but his mind was pleasantly alert as he got this brief enforced rest. It wasn’t like the hilfs, this planning ahead. Hilfs did not consider either time or space in the linear, imperialistic fashion of his own species. Time to them was a lantern lighting a step before, a step behind—the rest was indistinguishable dark. Time was this day, this one day of the immense Year. They had no historical vocabulary; there was merely today and “timepast.” They looked ahead only to the next season at most. They did not look down over time but were in it as the lamp in the night, as the heart in the body. And so also with space: space to them was not a surface on which to draw boundaries but a Range, a heartland, centered on the self and clan and tribe. Around the Range were areas that brightened as one approached them and dimmed as one departed; the farther, the fainter. But there were no lines, no limits. This planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across both space and time, was untypical; it showed—what? An autonomous change in a hilf culture-pattern, or an infection from the old northern colonies and forays of Man?
It would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically, that they ever learned an idea from us. Next we’ll be catching their colds. And that’ll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off. . . .
There was in him a deep and mostly unconscious bitterness against the Tevarans, who had smashed his head and ribs, and broken their covenant; and whom he must now watch getting slaughtered in their stupid little mud city under his eyes. He had been helpless to fight against them, now he was almost helpless to fight for them. He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him.
At that moment—just as Rolery was starting back towards Landin behind the herds—there was a rustle in the dry leaf-dust in the hollow behind him. Before the sound had ceased he had his loaded dartgun trained on the hollow.
Explosives were forbidden by the Law of Cultural Embargo, which had become a basic ethos of the Exiles; but some native tribes, in the early Years of fighting, had used poisoned spears and darts. Freed by this from taboo, the doctors of Landin had developed some effective poisons which were still in the hunting-fighting repertory. There were stunners, paralyzers, slow and quick killers; this one was lethal and took five seconds to convulse the nervous system of a large animal, such as a Gaal. The mechanism of the dartgun was neat and simple, accurate within a little over fifty meters. “Come on out,” Agat called to the silent hollow, and his still swollen lips stretched out in a grin. All things considered, he was ready to kill another hilf.
“Alterra?”
A hilf rose to his full height among the dead gray bushes of the hollow, his arms by his sides. It was Umaksuman.
“Hell!” Agat said, lowering his gun, but not all the way. Repressed violence shook him a momen
t with a spastic shudder.
“Alterra,” the Tevaran said huskily, “in my father’s tent we were friends.”
“And afterwards—in the woods?”
The native stood there silent, a big, heavy figure, his fair hair filthy, his face clayey with hunger and exhaustion.
“I heard your voice, with the others. If you had to avenge your sister’s honor, you could have done it one at a time.” Agat’s finger was still on the trigger; but when Umaksuman answered, his expression changed. He had not hoped for an answer.
“I was not with the others. I followed them, and stopped them. Five days ago I killed Ukwet, my nephew-brother, who led them. I have been in the hills since then.”
Agat uncocked his gun and looked away.
“Come on up here,” he said after a while. Only then did both of them realize that they had been standing up talking out loud, in these hills full of Gaal scouts. Agat gave a long noiseless laugh as Umaksuman slithered into the niche under the log with him. “Friend, enemy, what the hell,” he said. “Here.” He passed the hilf a hunk of bread from his wallet. “Rolery is my wife, since three days ago.”
Silent, Umaksuman took the bread, and ate it as a hungry man eats.
“When they whistle from the left, over there, we’re going to go in all together, heading for that breach in the walls at the north corner, and make a run through the town, to pick up any Tevarans we can. The Gaal are looking for us around the Bogs where we were this morning, not here. It’s the only time we’re going for the town. You want to come?”
Umaksuman nodded.
“Are you armed?”
Umaksuman lifted his ax. Side by side, not speaking, they crouched watching the burning roofs, the tangles and spurts of motion in the wrecked alleys of the little town on the hill facing them. A gray sky was closing off the sunlight; smoke was acrid on the wind.
Off to their left a whistle shrilled. The hillsides west and north of Tevar sprang alive with men, little scattered figures crouch-running down into the vale and up the slope, piling over the broken wall and into the wreckage and confusion of the town.
As the men of Landin met at the wall they joined into squads of five to twenty men, and these squads kept together, whether in attacking groups of Gaal looters with dartguns, bolos and knives, or in picking up whatever Tevaran women and children they found and making for the gate with them. They went so fast and sure that they might have rehearsed the raid; the Gaal, occupied in cleaning out the last resistance in the town, were taken off guard.
Agat and Umaksuman kept pace, and a group of eight or ten coalesced with them as they ran through the Stone-Pounding Square, then down a narrow tunnel-alley to a lesser square, and burst into one of the big Kinhouses. One after another leapt down the earthen stairway into the dark interior. White-faced men with red plumes twined in their horn-like hair came yelling and swinging axes, defending their loot. The dart from Agat’s gun shot straight into the open mouth of one; he saw Umaksuman take the arm off a Gaal’s shoulder as an axman lops a branch from a tree. Then there was silence. Women crouched in silence in the half-darkness. A baby bawled and bawled. “Come with us!” Agat shouted. Some of the women moved towards him, and seeing him, stopped.
Umaksuman loomed up beside him in the dim light from the doorway, heavy laden with some burden on his back. “Come, bring the children!” he roared, and at the sound of his known voice they all moved. Agat got them grouped at the stairs with his men strung out to protect them, then gave the word. They broke from the Kinhouse and made for the gate. No Gaal stopped their run—a queer bunch of women, children, men, led by Agat with a Gaal ax running cover for Umaksuman, who carried on his shoulders a great dangling burden, the old chief, his father Wold.
They made it out the gate, ran the gauntlet of a Gaal troop in the old tenting-place, and with other such flying squads of Landin men and refugees in front of them and behind them, scattered into the woods. The whole run through Tevar had taken about five minutes.
There was no safety in the forest. Gaal scouts and troops were scattered along the road to Landin. The refugees and rescuers fanned out singly and in pairs southward into the woods. Agat stayed with Umaksuman, who could not defend himself carrying the old man. They struggled through the underbrush. No enemy met them among the gray aisles and hummocks, the fallen trunks and tangled dead branches and mummied bushes. Somewhere far behind them a woman’s voice screamed and screamed.
It took them a long time to work south and west in a half-circle through the forest, over the ridges and back north at last to Landin. When Umaksuman could not go any farther, Wold walked, but he could go only very slowly. When they came out of the trees at last they saw the lights of the City of Exile flaring far off in the windy dark above the sea. Half dragging the old man, they struggled along the hillside and came to the Land Gate.
“Hilfs coming!” Guards sang out before they got within clear sight, spotting Umaksuman’s fair hair. Then they saw Agat, and the voices cried, “The Alterra, the Alterra!”
They came to meet him and brought him into the city, men who had fought beside him, taken his orders, saved his skin for these three days of guerilla-fighting in the woods and hills.
They had done what they could, four hundred of them against an enemy that swarmed like the vast migrations of the beasts—fifteen thousand men, Agat had guessed. Fifteen thousand warriors, between sixty or seventy thousand Gaal in all, with their tents and cookpots and travois and hann and fur rugs and axes and armlets and cradleboards and tinderboxes, all their scant belongings, and their fear of the Winter, and their hunger. He had seen Gaal women in their encampments gathering the dead lichen off logs and eating it. It did not seem probable that the little City of Exile still stood, untouched by this flood of violence and hunger, with torches alight above its gates of iron and carved wood, and men to welcome him home.
Trying to tell the story of the last three days, he said, “We came around behind their line of march, yesterday afternoon.” The words had no reality; neither had this warm room, the faces of men and women he had known all his life, listening to him. “The . . . the ground behind them, where the whole migration had come down some of the narrow valleys—it looked like the ground after a landslide. Raw dirt. Nothing. Everything trodden to dust, to nothing . . .”
“How can they keep going? What do they eat?” Huru muttered.
“The Winter stores in the cities they take. The land’s all stripped by now, the crops are in, the big game gone south. They must loot every town on their course and live off the hann-herds, or starve before they get out of the snow-lands.”
“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.
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