But the days went on and no chances came. A defensive society: a wary, jealous people, all their actions rigidly scheduled by rite, custom, and tabu. Though each Hunter had his tent, women were held in common and all a man’s doings were done with other men; they were less a community than a club or herd, interdependent members of one entity. In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect; Falk and Estrel had to snatch at any chance to talk for a moment. She did not know the forest dialect, but they could use Galaktika, which the Basnasska spoke only in a pidgin form.
“The time to try,” she said once, “might be during a snowstorm, when the snow would hide us and our tracks. But how far could we get on foot in a blizzard? You’ve got a compass; but the cold…”
Falk’s wintercloth clothing had been confiscated, along with everything else he possessed, even the gold ring he had always worn. They had left him one gun: that was integral with his being a Hunter and could not be taken from him. But the clothes he had worn so long now covered the bony ribs and shanks of the Old Hunter Kessnokaty and he had his compass only because Estrel had got it and hidden it before they went through his pack. He and she were well enough clothed in Basnasska buckskin shirts and leggings, with boots and parkas of red cowhide; but nothing was adequate shelter from one of the prairie blizzards, with their hard subfreezing winds, except walls, roof, and a fire.
“If we can get across into Samsit territory, just a few miles west of here, we could hole up in an Old Place I know there and hide till they give up looking. I thought of trying it before you came. But I had no compass and was afraid of getting lost in the storm. With a compass, and a gun, we might make it…We might not.”
“If it’s our best chance,” Falk said, “we’ll take it.”
He was not quite so naive, so hopeful and easily swayed, as he had been before his capture. He was a little more resistant and resolute. Though he had suffered at their hands he had no special grudge against the Basnasska; they had branded him once and for all down both his arms with the blue tattoo-slashes of their kinship, branding him as a barbarian, but also as a man. That was all right. But they had their business, and he had his. The hard individual will developed in him by his training in the Forest House demanded that he get free, that he get on with his journey, with what Zove had called man’s work. These people were not going anywhere, nor did they come from anywhere, for they had cut their roots in the human past. It was not only the extreme precariousness of his existence among the Basnasska that made him impatient to get out; it was also a sense of suffocation, of being cramped and immobilized, which was harder to endure than the bandage that blanked his vision.
That evening Estrel stopped by his tent to tell him that it had begun to snow, and they were settling their plan in whispers when a voice spoke at the flap of the tent. Estrel translated quietly: “He says, ‘Blind Hunter, do you want the Red Woman tonight?’” She added no explanation. Falk knew the rules and etiquette of sharing the women around; his mind was busy with the matter of their talk, and he replied with the most useful of his short list of Basnasska words—“Mieg!”—no.
The male voice said something more imperative. “If it goes on snowing, tomorrow night, maybe,” Estrel murmured in Galaktika. Still thinking, Falk did not answer. Then he realized she had risen and gone, leaving him alone in the tent. And after that he realized that she was the Red Woman, and that the other man had wanted her to copulate with.
He could simply have said Yes instead of No; and when he thought of her cleverness and gentleness towards him, the softness of her touch and voice, and the utter silence in which she hid her pride or shame, then he winced at his failure to spare her, and felt himself humiliated as her fellow man, and as a man.
“We’ll go tonight,” he said to her next day in the drifted snow beside the Women’s Lodge. “Come to my tent. Let a good part of the night pass first.”
“Kokteky has told me to come to his tent tonight.”
“Can you slip away?”
“Maybe.”
“Which tent is Kokteky’s?”
“Behind the Mzurra Society Lodge to the left. It has a patched place over the flap.”
“If you don’t come I’ll come get you.”
“Another night there might be less danger—”
“And less snow. Winter’s getting on; this may be the last big storm. We’ll go tonight.”
“I’ll come to your tent,” she said with her unarguing, steady submissiveness.
He had left a slit in his bandage through which he could dimly see his way about, and he tried to see her now; but in the dull light she was only a gray shape in grayness.
In the late dark of that night she came, quiet as the windblown snow against the tent. They each had ready what they had to take. Neither spoke. Falk fastened his oxhide coat, pulled up and tied the hood, and bent to unseal the doorflap. He started aside as a man came pushing in from outside, bent double to clear the low gap—Kokteky, a burly shaven-headed Hunter, jealous of his status and his virility. “Horressins! The Red Woman—” he began, then saw her in the shadows across the embers of the fire. At the same moment he saw how she and Falk were dressed, and their intent. He backed up to close off the doorway or to escape from Falk’s attack, and opened his mouth to shout. Without thought, reflex-quick and certain, Falk fired his laser at pointblank range, and the brief flick of mortal light stopped the shout in the Basnasska’s mouth, burnt away mouth and brain and life in one moment, in perfect silence.
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.
Hand-lasers 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 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 comer 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 comer and returned dragging a couple of heavy blankets. They stripped and rubbed down, then huddled in 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 impenetrable 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 aske
d, “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—”
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