Children of the Gates

by Andre Norton

  “I saw.” He broke the small moment of silence which had fallen. “This—” He slapped the back of the chair in which she had sat with force enough to make it quiver a little as if it were not firmly fastened to any base. “This—ship—of yours gave death to the city. But not only to the city.” He paused as if searching for words to make his meaning very clear to her.

  “We were a great people—did you not see? We were not then dwellers in ill-made huts! What were we, what might we have been had this not come to us?”

  The girl moistened her lips with the point of her tongue. For that she had no answer. It was true that the city she had seen both in her dream and on the screen was something greater than any existing now on this world. Just as, and now she would admit it, in her eyes this Stans was different from the Raski she knew. In him must linger something of the ability which built Kal-Nath-Tan.

  “You were a great people,” she acknowledged. “A city died, a people were left in shock and despair. But—” She moistened her lips again. “What happened after?” Her own mind began to throw aside the heavy load of sorrow and despair which had clouded her thoughts.

  “What happened here was long and long ago. Not in a few years does nature so overlay ruins—or this ship be buried so deeply. Why have your people not found again their stairway upward? They live in their mud huts, they fear all which is different from them, they do not try to be other than they are.”

  His frown was black, his lips parted as if he would shout her down, she felt his rage building. Then. . . . The hand which had been deep clenched upon the back of the chair loosened its hold a trifle.

  “Why?” he repeated. She thought he did not ask that of her in return, but rather of himself.

  The moment of silence between them stretched even longer this time. His intent stare had shifted from her to the now dead screen behind her shoulders.

  “I never thought—” His voice was lower, the anger in him was yielding. “Why?” Now he demanded that of the screen. “Why did we sink into the mud and remain there? Why do our people bow knee to a King-Head such as Galdor who cares nothing save to fill his belly and reach for a woman? Why?”

  Now his eyes came once more to her. There was a fierceness rising in him as if he would have the answers out of her by the force of his will.

  “Ask that of the Raski,” Elossa answered him, “not the Yurth.”

  “Yes, the Yurth!”

  She had made a mistake, focusing on her once again his attention. Still, though there was still anger in him, it was not so great.

  “What have you of the Yurth?” He watched her warily as if he expected her at any moment to produce some weapon. “What have you that we hold not? You live in caves and branch huts, no better housed than the rog or the sargon. You wear rough cloth such as cover our laborers in the fields. You have nothing of outward show—nothing! Yet you can walk among us and each and every one, even full of hate, will not raise hand to you. You weave spells. Do you then live among those spells, Yurth?”

  “We might. We do not choose to do so. If one deceives himself then he loses everything.” Elossa had never really talked to a Raski except on small matters, such as chaffering for food in some market place. What he said, yes, it was a puzzle. She glanced around her at the chamber in which they stood.

  This had been made by Yurth, the same Yurth who now lived, as Stans had pointed out, in caves and huts far more primitive than the dwellings of the Raski. Cloth of her own weaving was on her body, and it was coarse and near colorless. She had never really looked upon herself, her people. She had accepted all as part of life. Now, drawing even a little apart, she wondered for the first time. Their life was deliberately austere and grim. Part of the punishment laid upon them?

  The same years had passed for Yurth as for Raski. Even as the Raski had not regained what they had lost, so did the Yurth make no move to better the punishment laid upon them. Were both races to live ever so?

  “Deceive himself?” Stans broke into her thoughts. “What is deceit, Yurth? Do we inwardly say, we of the Raski, great things were taken from us, so we dare not try to rise to such heights again? Is this our deceit? If so it is time that we face the truth and do not flee from it. And you, Yurth—you who had the stars, because one of your blood made a mistake long ago—are you to walk in penance forever?”

  Elossa drew a deep breath. He had challenged her. Perhaps Yurth had gained much with the awakening of the Upper Sense. But, also, perhaps they had accepted that as much of life as they could expect. Now she had a question of her own.

  “Have you never asked such questions before, Stans of the House of Philbur?”

  He still frowned, but not at her, she guessed. Rather he was seeking some thought he had not tried to capture before.

  “I have not, Yurth.”

  “My name—” Oddly irritated at his form of address, the girl interrupted him, “—is Elossa—we count no Houses in our reckoning.”

  He looked startled. “I thought—it was always said among us—that the Yurth never spoke their names.”

  It was her turn to be surprised. What he said was true! She had never known a Yurth to talk so easily to a Raski that names were exchanged. Thought the Raski, by custom, were always ready to give their own and that of the First Ancestor of their House. Yet to her now it seemed needful that he stop calling her “Yurth,” perhaps because she knew that among his own kind that was a term which was unpleasant.

  “They do not,” Elossa admitted now, “to those outside the clan.”

  “But I am not of any clan of yours,” he persisted.

  “I know.” She raised her fingers to press upon her temples. “I am confused. This—this is different.”

  He nodded. “Yes, Yurth and Raski, by rights we should be in arms against each other. I—I was so earlier. Now I am not.” His astonishment was apparent. “In Kal-Nath-Tan there was a horror which entered into me and I did what that made me do. It was not me, and yet a part of me welcomed it. Now I can only wonder at that and see it for a part of the darkness which was, which has always lain there. I ask no forgiveness of you, Elossa.” He stumbled a little in pronouncing her name. “For a man who is bred to a task must see it through to the best of his ability. I failed in part, but I do stand where none of my kind have before. I have seen yonder—” He pointed to the screen. “—of the beginning of our hatred, and, also, for the first time seen what I cannot yet understand, the lack in us which keeps us what we are—dirt grubbers who do not dream.

  “Are dreams illusions, Elossa? Your kind spin them to aid you. But it seems to me that dreams can in a way serve a man better. He must have something beyond dull thoughts centered on himself and the earth under him to become greater. You Yurth conquered the stars. You are not sky-devils as we think. Now I know that. Rather you are people such as ourselves who had a dream of far voyaging and lived to make it come true.

  “Where lies that dream within you now, Elossa? Has it been killed because of your feeling of sin and guilt? What do you think beyond yourselves and the ground under you?”

  “Little,” she answered quietly. “True we seek purpose in all dreams, but we do not use them to change our lives. We are as bound by ancient fears and fates as you. We use our minds to store of knowledge but only within narrow limits. To us the Raski are alien. But why?” She hesitated.

  “Why should that be so? In the beginning because you would have been hunted and slain by those maddened by the catastrophe we saw pictured. Later, when your power of mind changed, you—you no longer thought us of any more account than beasts of the woodland. We two speak the truth here and now—is not that the truth?”

  “We were lesser beings, children, to move hither and thither at your bidding when we crossed your path or caught your notice in some fashion. Can you not see that by such an opinion of us you fostered and kept alive the shadow born in Kal-Nath-Tan?”

  Elossa accepted the logic of what he said. The bitterness of the city’s destruction, the com
ing of a space-traversing race such as the Yurth destroyed and then replaced with another pattern of thinking. How—how arrogant the Yurth had been—were! They had locked themselves in that arrogance, seeking, they believed, to atone by their own self-exile and austerity. But what they did was sterile, worthless.

  Granted that at first they could not live at peace with the Raski, granted that their employment of their machines had altered them irrevocably, yet as time passed they might have sought contacts, turned their talents to the service of the Raski instead of jealously using the Upper Sense for unproductive learning. Their pride of martyrdom was their abiding error. She recognized for the first time Yurth life for what it was, and knew sorrow that it had not been otherwise.

  “It is so,” Elossa said sadly. “We judged you, and you have been right to judge us. Repentance is necessary, but there are other forms of righting a wrong. In choosing our selfish one we have only compounded the original act many times over. Why have we not seen this?” She ended with rising passion.

  “Why have we not also seen that we lie in the dust because we have allowed the past to bury us so?” he countered. “We did not need Yurth to build anew. Yet no man reached for the first stone to set as a foundation. We have been locked in our pride also, we of the House of Philbur, looking always to the past and seeking only vengeance for what dashed us from our throne. We have been blind and groping.”

  “We have been blind and not even groping,” she matched him. “Yes, we have talents but we use them only in a little. What might grow here if we harnessed them to a freed will and a living cause?” It was as if she were awaking in this instant from a drugged and drugging sleep in which she had lain all her life, awaking to understand the possibilities which could be ahead. But she was only one. Against her the weight of tradition and custom stood strong, perhaps too stout a wall for her to hope to break.

  “Where do we go now, and what do we do?” She was at a loss, seeing this new-found enlightenment as perhaps an even more weighty burden to bear.

  “That is a question for both of us,” he agreed. The tenseness had gone out of his body as he fronted her. “The blind do not always welcome sight thrust upon them. They must wish it or they will be frightened. And fear feeds anger and distrust. Between us lies too great a chasm.”

  “One which can never be bridged?” There was a lost feeling in her. In part this emotion was like that which had come upon her when she witnessed the Yurth farewell to the stars. Were they to be ever imprisoned in the narrow cleft of their misreading or responsibility?

  “Only, I think, when Yurth and Raski can speak one with the other face to face, setting aside the past with a whole heart and mind.”

  “As we have done here?”

  Stans nodded. “As we have done here.”

  “If I,” she said slowly, “return to my clan and tell them what has happened, I am not sure I will be heard with any open minds. There are illusions here. We have both dealt with those, suffered from them. Those who made this Pilgrimage before me must have faced the same or their like. Therefore it can be said that I am suffering from a more subtle and deadly illusion. And,” she was being honest not only with him but herself now, “I think that that will be said. At least by those who have made the Pilgrimage and know the nature of this place.”

  “If I,” he echoed her, “now return to my people and preach cooperation with the Yurth I shall die.” His words were blunt but that they were in truth she did not doubt.

  “But if I return and do not share what I have learned,” Elossa continued, “then I am betraying that part of me which is the deepest and best, for I shall testify to a lie which I might have threatened with the truth. We cannot lie, not and remain Yurth. That is another part of the burden laid upon us by the Upper Sense.”

  “And if I return and am killed for speaking the truth—” He smiled a faint shadow of a smile. “—then what profit do my people gain? So it would seem we must be liars in spite of ourselves, Lady Elossa. And if it be true that you indeed cannot lie, then you face even worse.”

  “There are mountains here,” Elossa said musingly, “and I can live alone. Yurth blood has this—we are not bred to soft lying or over much food. Who can tell what may lie in the future? Another may come here on the Pilgrimage and see as clearly. A handful of such, from small seed do high-reaching trees eventually grow.”

  “You need not be alone. Our own enlightenment is not yet old. Maybe some thinking together upon ways and means can show the two of us how we can do better than stay in perpetual exile. I know that the Yurth choose to dwell apart. Do you still hold to that, also, my lady?”

  He was using the address of a high-born Raski to one of equal breeding. She looked at him in wonder as he raised his hand and held it out to her. What he suggested countered every teaching of her life to this minute. But was it not that teaching which had laid hampering bonds upon all her and her blood? Was it not that which must be broken?

  “I do not hold to that which would imprison the mind in a false way of thought,” she replied. She put out her hand slowly, fighting the distaste for flesh meeting alien flesh. There was so much she would have to fight, and to learn, in the future. The time to begin was now.

  9

  There was a bite in the wind which wailed and moaned around the last vestiges of Kal-Hath-Tan, raised grit of sterile earth to add to the mounding which already half hid the death ship from the sky. Elossa, in spite of her life among stark heights, knowing well the breath of winter there, shivered as she stood at the foot of the walkway which led up into the ancient Yurth ship.

  It was not only the chill of that wind which troubled her, there was an inner chill also. She, who had come here to seek out the Secret of Yurth after the custom of her people, had made a hard choice indeed. Learning the manner of the burden which death had laid upon her kind, she had deliberately thereafter chosen not to follow the years-old pattern and return to her clan but rather to try to think in a new way, to hunt a middle road in which Yurth might some day be at peace with Raski and the past be as buried as Kal-Hath-Tan and the ship.

  “There is harsh weather to come.” Her companion’s nostrils quivered as if, like any of the feral dwellers in the heights, he could scent some change in wind which was a warning. “We shall need shelter.” It was difficult for Elossa to believe, even now, that she and a Raski could speak together as if they were of one blood and clan. Most carefully she kept tight rein upon her thought-send, knowing that unless she was ever aware of that, she might unconsciously communicate, or try to, without words. While to the Raski such communication was a dire, abhorred invasion.

  She must learn carefully, if not slowly, since they had made this uncertain alliance. Stans claimed to be of a House which had ruled in Kal-Hath-Tan, bred and trained himself for the task of revenge upon the Yurth. But he was also the first of his blood to enter the half-buried ship, and therein learn the truth of what had happened in the very long ago. Learning so, he had deliberately set aside his long-fostered hatred, being intelligent enough to understand that, grievous as the destruction of the city had been through an error of the Yurth space ship, yet upon his people also lay some of the fault. For what had happened since? They had allowed themselves to sink back from the civilization they had once known, choosing to be less than they might be.

  Yurth and Raski—Elossa’s whole person shrank from any close contact with him, even as he must find in her much which to him was unnatural and perhaps even repulsive.

  He did not look at her now, rather he stood gazing out across the mounded ruins of the city toward that distant rise of hills and heights on the other side of the cup-like valley in which Kal-Hath-Tan stood. As tall as she, his darker skin and close-cropped black hair was strange to her eyes. He wore the leather and thick wool of a hunter, and the weapons he carried were those of a roving plainsman.

  Accustomed to the standards of the Yurth, Elossa could not truthfully judge, she decided fleetingly, whether he might even be ter
med fair appearing or not. But his determination, his strength of spirit and resolve, that she accepted as fact.

  “There is still time,” she said slowly.

  As if he, too, had the Yurth power of mind-speech, Stans answered her before she had put her thought entirely into words.

  “To forget what we heard and saw, Lady? To go back to those who are willfully blind and who squat in the mud like children who are self-willed and resist all which they should learn? No.” He shook his head. “There is no longer any such time for me. Yonder—” With one hand he sketched a gesture to the distant hills. “We can find shelter. And it is best that we strive to do so. Winter comes early in these heights and bad storms strike sometimes with little warning.”

  Stans did not suggest that they take refuge in the ship, or in that chamber in the mound where he had imprisoned her on her first coming into the ruins. In that choice he was right, Elossa knew. They must both be free of the ancient taint which stained all which lay here. Only away from the evidences of the past could they really confront the future.

  Thus together they struck out from ruins and ship, While the star ship’s entrance closed behind them, sealing the secret once more to be ready at the coming of another Yurth seeker. Perhaps a seeker who might also be persuaded to realize the truth that what lay in the years behind must not be held about one as a cloak to deaden in turn the future.

  Clouds gathered overhead and the wind grew stronger, pressing at their backs, as they crossed the valley, as if it moved to expel them from both ruins and ship. Stans went warily, continually eyeing the terrain ahead as if expecting some attack. Elossa allowed her mind-search to range a little. There was no life here. But she felt it was best not to bring to the attention of her companion the results of a gift so dreaded and hated by all his kind. This, save for them, was a barren land, left to the long dead.