Wind whistled peevishly at the broken windows. Agat shivered. He had been hot all day, when he was not freezing cold. The thermometer was still dropping, and a lot of the rooftop guerillas were having trouble with what the old men said was frostbite. He felt better if he kept moving. Thinking did no good. He started for the door out of a lifetime’s habit, then getting hold of himself went softly to the window by which he had entered. In the ground-floor room of the house next door a group of Gaal were camped. He could see the back of one near the window. They were a fair people; their hair was darkened and made stiff with some kind of pitch or tar, but the bowed, muscular neck Agat looked down on was white. It was strange how little chance he had had actually to see his enemies. You shot from a distance, or struck and ran, or as at the Sea Gate fought too close and fast to look. He wondered if their eyes were yellowish or amber like those of the Tevarans; he had an impression that they were gray, instead. But this was no time to find out. He climbed up on the sill, swung out on the gable, and left his home via the roof.
His usual route back to the Square was blocked: the Gaal were beginning to play the rooftop game too. He lost all but one of his pursuers quickly enough, but that one, armed with a dart-blower, came right after him, leaping an eight-foot gap between two houses that had stopped the others. Agat had to drop down into an alley, pick himself up and run for it.
A guard on the Esmit Street barricade, watching for just such escapes, flung down a rope ladder to him, and he swarmed up it. Just as he reached the top a dart stung his right hand. He came sliding down inside the barricade, pulled the thing out and sucked the wound and spat. The Gaal did not poison their darts or arrows, but they picked up and used the ones the men of Landin shot at them, and some of these, of course, were poisoned. It was a rather neat demonstration of one reason for the canonical Law of Embargo. Agat had a very bad couple of minutes waiting for the first cramp to hit him; then decided he was lucky, and thereupon began to feel the pain of the messy little wound in his hand. His shooting hand, too.
Dinner was being dished out in the Assembly Hall, beneath the golden clocks. He had not eaten since daybreak. He was ravening hungry until he sat down at one of the tables with his bowl of hot bhan and salt meat; then he could not eat. He did not want to talk, either, but it was better than eating, so he talked with everyone who gathered around him, until the alarm rang out on the bell in the tower above them: another attack.
As usual, the assault moved from barricade to barricade; as usual it did not amount to much. Nobody could lead a prolonged attack in this bitter weather. What they were after in these shifting, twilight raids was the chance of slipping even one or two of their men over a momentarily unguarded barricade into the Square, to open the massive iron doors at the back of Old Hall. As darkness came, the attackers melted away. The archers shooting from upper windows of the Old Hall and College held their fire and presently called down that the streets were clear. As usual, a few defenders had been hurt or killed: one crossbowman picked off at his window by an arrow from below, one boy who, climbing too high on the barricade to shoot down, had been hit in the belly with an iron-headed lance; several minor injuries. Every day a few more were killed or wounded, and there were less to guard and fight. The subtraction of a few from too few…
Hot and shivering again, Agat came in from this action. Most of the men who had been eating when the alarm came went back and finished eating. Agat had no interest in food now except to avoid the smell of it. His scratched hand kept bleeding afresh whenever he used it, which gave him an excuse to go down to the Records Room, underneath Old Hall, to have the bonesetter tie it up for him.
It was a very large, low-ceilinged room, kept at even warmth and even soft light night and day, a good place to keep old instruments and charts and papers, and an equally good place to keep wounded men. They lay on improvised pallets on the felted floor, little islands of sleep and pain dotted about in the silence of the long room. Among them he saw his wife coming towards him, as he had hoped to see her. The sight, the real certain sight of her, did not rouse in him that bitter tenderness he felt when he thought about her: instead it simply gave him intense pleasure.
“Hullo, Rolery,” he mumbled and turned away from her at once to Seiko and the bonesetter Wattock, asking how Huru Pilotson was. He did not know what to do with delight any more, it overcame him.
“His wound grows,” Wattock said in a whisper. Agat stared at him, then realized he was speaking of Pilotson. “Grows?” he repeated uncomprehending and went over to kneel at Pilotson’s side.
Pilotson was looking up at him.
“How’s it going, Huru?”
“You made a very bad mistake,” the wounded man said.
They had known each other and been friends all their lives. Agat knew at once and unmistakably what would be on Pilotson’s mind: his marriage. But he did not know what to answer. “It wouldn’t have made much difference,” he began finally, then stopped; he would not justify himself.
Pilotson said, “There aren’t enough, there aren’t enough.”
Only then did Agat realize that his friend was out of his head. “It’s all right, Huru!” he said so authoritatively that Pilotson after a moment sighed and shut his eyes, seeming to accept this blanket reassurance. Agat got up and rejoined Wattock. “Look, tie this up, will you, to stop the bleeding.—What’s wrong with Pilotson?”
Rolery brought cloth and tape. Wattock bandaged Agat’s hand with a couple of expert turns. “Alterra,” he said, “I don’t know. The Gaal must be using a poison our antidotes can’t handle. I’ve tried ’em all. Pilotson Alterra isn’t the only one. The wounds don’t close; they swell up. Look at this boy here. It’s the same thing.” The boy, a street-guerilla of sixteen or so, was moaning and struggling like one in nightmare. The spear-wound in his thigh showed no bleeding, but red streaks ran from it under the skin, and the whole wound was strange to look at and very hot to the touch.
“You’ve tried antidotes?” Agat asked, looking away from the boy’s tormented face.
“All of them. Alterra, what it reminds me of is the wound you got, early in Fall, from the klois you treed. Remember that? Perhaps they make some poison from the blood or glands of klois. Perhaps these wounds will go away as that did. Yes, that’s the scar. When he was a young fellow like this one,” Wattock explained to Seiko and Rolery, “he went up a tree after a klois, and the scratches it gave him didn’t seem much, but they puffed up and got hot and made him sick. But in a few days it all went off again.”
“This one won’t get well,” Rolery said very softly to Agat.
“Why do you say that?”
“I used to…to watch the medicine-woman of my clan. I learned a little…Those streaks, on his leg there, those are what they call death-paths.”
“You know this poison, then, Rolery?”
“I don’t think it’s poison. Any deep wound can do it. Even a small wound that doesn’t bleed, or that gets dirty. It’s the evil of the weapon—”
“That is superstition,” the old bonesetter said fiercely.
“We don’t get the weapon-evil, Rolery,” Agat told her, drawing her rather defensively away from the indignant old doctor. “We have an—”
“But the boy and Pilotson Alterra do have it! Look here—” She took him over to where one of the wounded Tevarans sat, a cheerful little middle-aged fellow, who willingly showed Agat the place where his left ear had been before an ax took it off. The wound was healing, but was puffed, hot, oozing…
Unconsciously, Agat put his hand up to his own throbbing, untended scalp-wound.
Wattock had followed them. Glaring at the unoffending hilf, he said, “What the local hilfs call ‘weapon-evil’ is, of course, bacterial infection. You studied it in school, Alterra. As human beings are not susceptible to infection by any local bacterial or viral life-forms, the only harm we can suffer is damage to vital organs, exsanguination, or chemical poisoning, for which we have antidotes—”
; “But the boy is dying, Elder,” said Rolery in her soft, unyielding voice. “The wound was not washed out before it was sewed together—”
The old doctor went rigid with fury. “Get back among your own kind and don’t tell me how to care for humans—”
“That’s enough,” Agat said.
Silence.
“Rolery,” Agat said, “if you can be spared here a while, I thought we might go…” He had been about to say, “go home.” “To get some dinner, maybe,” he finished vaguely.
She had not eaten; he sat with her in the Assembly Room, and ate a little. Then they put on their coats to cross the unlit, wind-whistling Square to the College building, where they shared a classroom with two other couples. The dormitories in Old Hall were more comfortable, but most of the married couples of which the wife had not gone out to the Stack preferred at least this semiprivacy, when they could have it. One woman was sound asleep behind a row of desks, bundled up in her coat. Tables had been up-ended to seal the broken windows from stones and darts and wind. Agat and his wife put their coats down on the unmatted floor for bedding. Before she let him sleep, Rolery gathered clean snow from a windowsill and washed the wounds in his hand and scalp with it. It hurt, and he protested, short-tempered with fatigue; but she said, “You are the Alterra—you don’t get sick—but this will do no harm. No harm…”
13
The Last Day
IN HIS FEVERISH SLEEP, in the cold darkness of the dusty room, Agat spoke aloud sometimes, and once when she was asleep he called to her from his own sleep, reaching out across the unlit abyss, calling her name from farther and farther away. His voice broke her dreaming and she woke. It was still dark.
Morning came early: light shone in around the upturned tables, white streaks across the ceiling. The woman who had been there when they came in last night still slept on in exhaustion, but the other couple, who had slept on one of the writing-tables to avoid the drafts, roused up. Agat sat up, looked around, and said in his hoarse voice, with a stricken look, “The storm’s over…” Sliding one of the tables aside a little they peered out and saw the world again: the trampled Square, snow-mounded barricades, great shuttered facades of the four buildings, snow-covered roofs beyond them, and a glimpse of the sea. A white and blue world, brilliantly clear, the shadows blue and every point touched by the early sunlight dazzling white.
It was very beautiful; but it was as if the walls that protected them had been torn down in the night.
Agat was thinking what she thought, for he said, “We’d better get on over to the Hall before they realize they can sit up on the rooftops and use us for target-practice.”
“We can use the basement tunnels to get from one building to another,” one of the others said. Agat nodded. “We will,” he said. “But the barricades have got to be manned…”
Rolery procrastinated till the others had gone, then managed to persuade the impatient Agat to let her look at his head-wound again. It was improved or at least no worse. His face still showed the beating he had got from her kinsmen; her own hands were bruised from handling rocks and ropes, and full of sores that the cold had made worse. She rested her battered hands on his battered head and began to laugh. “Like two old warriors,” she said. “O Jakob Agat, when we go to the country under the sea, will you have your front teeth back?”
He looked up at her, not understanding, and tried to smile, but failed.
“Maybe when a farborn dies he goes back to the stars—to the other worlds,” she said, and ceased to smile.
“No,” he said, getting up. “No, we stay right here. Come along, my wife.”
For all the brilliant light from the sun and sky and snow, the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe. They were hurrying across the Square to the arcades of the League Hall when a noise behind them made them turn, Agat with his dartgun drawn, both ready to duck and run. A strange shrieking figure seemed to fly up over the barricade and crashed down headfirst inside it, not twenty feet from them: a Gaal, two lances bristling out between his ribs. Guards on the barricades stared and shouted, archers loaded their crossbows in haste, glancing up at a man who was yelling down at them from a shuttered window on the east side of the building above them. The dead Gaal lay face down in the bloody, trampled snow, in the blue shadow of the barricade.
One of the guards came running up to Agat, shouting, “Alterra, it must be the signal for an attack—” Another man, bursting out of the door of the College, interrupted him, “No, I saw it, it was chasing him, that’s why he was yelling like that—”
“Saw what? Did he attack like that all by himself?”
“He was running from it—trying to save his life! Didn’t you see it, you on the barricade? No wonder he was yelling. White, runs like a man, with a neck like—God, like this, Alterra! It came around the corner after him, and then turned back.”
“A snowghoul,” Agat said, and turned for confirmation to Rolery. She had heard Wold’s tales, and nodded. “White, and tall, and the head going from side to side…” She imitated Wold’s grisly imitation, and the man who had seen the thing from the window cried, “That’s it.” Agat mounted the barricade to try and get a sight of the monster. She stayed below, looking down at the dead man, who had been so terrified that he had run on his enemy’s lances to escape. She had not seen a Gaal up close, for no prisoners were taken, and her work had been underground with the wounded. The body was short and thin, rubbed with grease till the skin, whiter than her own, shone like fat meat; the greased hair was interbraided with red feathers. Ill-clothed, with a felt rag for a coat, the man lay sprawled in his abrupt death, face buried as if still hiding from the white beast that had hunted him. The girl stood motionless near him in the bright, icy shadow of the barricade.
“There!” she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the wall, built of paving-stones and rocks from the sea-cliffs. He came down to her, his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the League Hall. “Saw it just for a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running, it swung its head towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?”
She did not know; she only knew Wold’s story of having killed a snowghoul singlehanded, among last Winter’s mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory. Umaksuman said positively that snowghouls often ran in packs, but the farborns would not take a hilf’s word, and had to go look in their books. The book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the first storm of the Ninth Winter running in a pack of twelve to fifteen.
“How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?”
Agat looked at her. They were at one of the long tables in the Assembly Room, drinking the hot, thin grass-soup the farborns liked; ti, they called it.
“No—well, yes, a little. Listen, Rolery, I’ll be going outside in a minute. You go back to the hospital. Don’t mind Wattock’s temper. He’s an old man and he’s tired. He knows a lot, though. Don’t cross the Square if you have to go to another building, use the tunnels. Between the Gaal archers and those creatures…” He gave a kind of laugh. “What next, I wonder?” he said.
“Jakob Agat, I wanted to ask you…”
In the short time she had known him, she had never learned for certain how many pieces his name came into, and which pieces she should use.
“I listen,” he said gravely.
“Why is it that you don’t speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to—to go. As you told me on the beach to run to the Stack. As your herdsman told the hann…”
“Men aren’t hann,” he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.
“The old one—Pasfal—she listened to the Gaal, when the big army was starting on south.”
“Yes. People with the gift and the training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind’s knowing it. That’s a bit like what any person does in a crowd of
people, he feels their fear or joy; there’s more to mindhearing than that, but it’s without words. But the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is different. An untrained man, if you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he’s heard anything. Especially if what he hears isn’t what he himself wants or believes. Non-Communicants have perfect defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal communication is mainly to learn how to break down one’s own defenses.”
“But the animals hear?”
“To some extent. That’s done without words again. Some people have that knack for projecting to animals. It’s useful in herding and hunting, all right. Did you never hear that farborns were lucky hunters?”
“Yes, it’s why they’re called witches. But am I like a hann, then? I heard you.”
“Yes. And you bespoke me—once, in my house. It happens sometimes between two people: there are no barriers, no defenses.” He drained his cup and looked up broodingly at the pattern of sun and jeweled circling worlds on the long wall across the room. “When that happens,” he said, “it’s necessary that they love each other. Necessary…I can’t send my fear or hate against the Gaal. They wouldn’t hear. But if I turned it on you, I could kill you. And you me, Rolery…”
Then they came wanting him out in the Square, and he must leave her. She went down to look after the Tevaran men in the hospital, which was her assigned job, and also to help the wounded farborn boy to die: a hard death that took all day. The old bonesetter let her take care of the boy. Wattock was bitter and rageful, seeing all his skill useless. “We humans don’t die your foul death!” he stormed once. “The boy was born with some blood defect!” She did not care what he said. Neither did the boy, who died in pain, holding onto her hand.
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