She sat like a slim, erect shadow against the light of the fire. He looked at her almost from the side, but slightly ahead. She was wearing the dark brown work pants and the soft yellow shirt she had had on earlier at dinner; but her shirt had been opened at the neck, and the wings of the collar lay out on her shoulders. Her hair was untied from its earlier, workaday restriction and lay loosely on her neck. Her face was tilted slightly toward the fire, and pensive. Close as he was now, in the silence of the house, he could hear the clear magic of her voice, in spite of its softness, plainly singing:
"… green flows the water by my love's bright fancy.
Green are the pools at the foot of the falls,
Dark under willow—and past is the sleeping.
Light in the morning, a little bird calls …"
He drew back abruptly into darkness, closing his ears to the rest of the song. It was as if he had come upon her naked and sleeping. Silently, he retraced his steps to the kitchen; and stood, uncertain.
From the living room, the murmur of her singing ended. He took a deep breath, stooped to put his boots back on, then stepped back without a sound and reached for the door by which he had entered earlier. He opened it silently, closed it noisily, and walked forward without carefulness through the passage and into the living room.
She was standing by the fire as he entered, looking in his direction as he came through the entrance into the room. Her eyes focused on the sweater he wore and widened a little. He stopped, facing her with a little distance between them.
"I went for a walk," he said. "I grabbed this off one of the pegs to wear. I hope that was all right?"
"Of course," she said. There was a second's hesitation. "It was Ian Graeme's."
"Oh, it was?"
"Yes. One he knitted for himself, one winter." She smiled just a little. "We tend to keep our hands busy in the winter here, when we're snowed in."
There was another brief pause.
"You're feeling more lively, then?" Her eyes, darkened in the firelit room, watched him.
"I was. I'm ready for sleep now." He smiled back at her. Their eyes met for a second, then glanced aside.
"Goodnight," he said, and went on into the corridor leading to his bedroom, hearing her answer "goodnight" behind him and leaving the large room, the firelight and her, behind him.
He reached his own room, went in, and closed the door. He was conscious of the weight of the sweater, still upon him. He took it off and proceeded to undress, then lay down on his back on the bed. A wave of his hand over the night table signalled the sensor there to turn off the lighting; and the bedroom around him was plunged in darkness.
He lay there. After a while the sound of her steps came down the hall, passed his bedroom and went on to her own. Silence claimed the house. He continued to lie, awake, staring into the darkness, his heart torn by a sorrow and longing he did not dare to investigate too closely.
Chapter Forty-six
The following day was Sunday, according to the weekly calendar on the Dorsai. Amanda took Hal with her to visit several of the neighboring homesteads, where there were individuals who had offered to help at Foralie during his meeting with the Grey Captains.
One of these was the Debigné household; and Hal had his suspicions confirmed that the intensity of Amanda was not something shared by her younger sister. What was necessary was for someone to be in residence at Foralie from the day before to the day after the meeting; and for others to help with meals and maintenance from the time the first of the Captains arrived—as much as an estimated twenty-four hours ahead of the meeting time until the last of them left—as much as twenty-four hours after.
On the way back to Fal Morgan after lunch, Amanda took Hal by a route somewhat out of their way to an observation point even higher up than Foralie. It was a patch of grass on a flat ledge hardly large enough to have supported Fal Morgan. They dismounted; and Amanda took a scope out of one of her saddle bags.
"Sit down," she said to Hal, dropping down herself, cross-legged upon the grass. He settled beside her and she gave him the scope.
"Look there," she said, pointing. She was directing his attention beyond and below Graemehouse, the roof of which, with the roofs of its outbuildings, was visible perhaps a kilometer below and to the left of them.
Hal put the scope to his eyes and located the spot she had indicated. It was a green patch surrounded by trees somewhat less than eight hundred meters below the house.
"I see it," he said. "What is it?"
"The site of the original Foralie—the house," she said. "Foralie was built by Eachan Khan, in the first place. When Cletus married his daughter, Melissa, he built Graemehouse on Foralie land where you see it now. After Cletus defeated Dow deCastries in his attempt to control all the Younger Worlds with the power of Old Earth, and Melissa went with Cletus to Graemehouse, Eachan Khan began to show his age—he hadn't much before—and Melissa talked him into joining her and Cletus at Graemehouse. He did, and Foralie was left empty—but with everything still in it for a year or two. Eachan didn't seem to be able to make up his mind what to do with it. Then, one night, it caught fire and burned down. Since then Graemehouse has been Foralie."
"I see," said Hal. The green space below him was certainly a pleasant place to have put a house, much more sheltered among the trees than Graemehouse on its high perch. He lowered the scope and looked at Amanda.
"We could have ridden down there," said Amanda, "but there's nothing much to see when you get there; and actually from here you get a better picture of how it was."
"Yes," he said; and passed the scope back to her.
"No. Hang on to it for a bit," she said. "You can also see Fal Morgan down there—or at least part of its roofs. The trees get in the way, a bit. But you may remember you couldn't see it at all from Graemehouse, for the trees."
"You're right." He put the scope to his eyes again and looked. Then lowered it once more to look at her. All this about the original Foralie, and the rest of it, was certainly the sort of thing she might expect him to be interested in; but he could not help feeling that there was a reason behind her obvious one for telling him about this, and showing the original Foralie to him, from this vantage point.
"It was Foralie, the original house, that Cletus came back to after Dow deCastries had moved in with his troops to take over the Dorsai, when all her fighting men were gone," she said. "You know about that?"
Hal nodded.
"That was in the early days, wasn't it?" he said. "Nearly two hundred years ago, when the Earth was split between the Alliance and the Coalition? And Dow was a Coalition man who got the two governments to combine their forces, under him, so he could take over the newer worlds? I know about it. Cletus Grahame opposed Dow, Dow arranged contracts to drain all the trained soldiers off Dorsai, then moved in here to take the planet over; and those who were left here, the grandparents, the children and the mothers, stopped him."
He grinned.
"There're still historians who think Dow must have cut his own throat; because noncombatants can't defeat elite troops."
"Did you ever think that?" Amanda asked.
"No." He sobered. "But I heard about it first from Malachi when I was very young. It seemed perfectly natural to me, then, that they could do it, being Dorsai."
"Nothing happens by reputation alone," she said. "Each district—we didn't have cantons in those days—had to decide how to defend itself. Cletus left only Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer, with six trained men, to organize the defense…"
She fell silent, her eyes gazing down upon the slopes below. He watched her, still trying to understand what she was aiming at. Even seated, her body had an erectness that no man could have possessed without stiffness; and her face had the quality of a profile stamped on a silver coin.
"Amanda…" he said, gently.
She did not seem to have heard him; and he felt a clumsiness in himself that made him unsure of prodding her further. Beside her, in his much talle
r, larger-framed but gaunt, body, thinned down by the experiences of recent months, he felt like some dark bird of earth-bound flesh and bone, bending above an entity of pure spirit. But as he waited, her eyes lost their abstraction and she turned to him.
"What is it?" she said.
It crossed his mind to wonder if perhaps he should avoid further mention of the Defense of Dorsai—as it was called in the histories.
"I was just thinking how much you look like that painting in your hall—was it of the first Amanda? It could be a picture of you."
"Both the second Amanda and I look like her," she answered. "It happens."
"Does it just happen that she had her picture painted at the same age you are now?"
"No." She shook her head and smiled, almost mischievously. "It wasn't."
"It wasn't?" He gazed at her.
"No," Amanda laughed. "That picture in our hall was made when she was a good deal older than I am now."
He frowned.
"It's true," she said. "We age very slowly, we Morgans. And she was something special."
"Not as special as you," he said. "She couldn't be. You're end-result Dorsai. She lived before people like you had been born."
"That's not true," Amanda said swiftly. "She was Dorsai before there was a Dorsai world. What she was, was the material out of which our people and our culture's been made."
"How can you be so sure of what she was—nearly two centuries ago?"
"How can I?" She turned her head to face him and looked at him strangely. "Because in many ways I am her."
The last few words came out without any particular emphasis; but they seemed to ring in his ears with an unusual distinctness. He sat as he was, careful not to move or change his expression, but his inner awareness had just been alerted.
"A reincarnation?" he said, lightly, after a moment.
"No, not really," she answered. "But something more… as if time didn't matter. As if it's all the same thing; her, there in the beginning of this world of ours; and I, here…"
And now the feeling came clearly to him that her reason was out in the open, that she had told him—warned him, perhaps—of what she had brought him here to be warned about.
"Here at the end of it, you mean?" he challenged her.
"No." Her turquoise eyes had taken on a gray shade. "The end won't be until the last Dorsai is dead, and wherever that Dorsai dies. In fact, not even then. The end is only going to be when the last human is dead—because what makes us Dorsai is something that's a part of all humans; that part the first Amanda had when she was born, back on Earth."
Something—a fragment of cloud across the white dot of the sun, perhaps—shuttered the sunlight from his eyes for a split second. There was some connection between all this she was presently speaking of, the lost house of Foralie, the Defense of the Dorsai and herself, that was still eluding him.
"You think so much of her," he said thoughtfully. "But it's the Cletus Grahames and the Donal Graemes that the rest of the worlds think of when they talk about this world."
"We've had Graemes as our next neighbors since Cletus," she replied. "What's thought of them, they earned. But the first Amanda was here before either of them. She founded our family. She cleared the out-of-work mercenaries from these mountains before Cletus came; and it was when she was ninety-three that she held Foralie district against Dow deCastries' troops, who'd landed here, thinking they'd have no trouble with the children and women, the sick and the old, who were all that was left."
"So, she was given charge of Foralie district?" he said. "Why her? Had she been a soldier once?"
"No," she answered. "But, as I said, during the Outlaw Years here, she'd led the way in clearing out the lawless mercenaries. After she did that, and other things, with just the noncombatants to help her, the rest of the districts followed her example; and law came to the Dorsai. She led when Dow came because she was the one best fit to command in this district, in spite of her age."
"How did she do it?"
"Clean out the outlaws, or defeat deCastries?"
"Not the outlaws—though I'd like to hear about that sometime, too," he said. "No, how did she defeat deCastries when all the experts then and now claim there was no way a gaggle of housewives, children and old people could possibly have done it?"
Amanda's gaze went a long way past him.
"In a way you could say the troops did defeat themselves. Did you ever read Cletus' Tactics of Mistake?"
"Yes," he said. "But when I was too young to understand it well."
"What we did was in there—it was a matter of making them make the mistakes, putting our strength against the weaknesses of the invaders."
"Weaknesses? In first-line troops?"
She looked at him again with the gray tint to her eyes.
"They weren't as willing to die as we were."
"Willing to die?" he studied her. "Old people? Mothers—"
"And children. Yes."
The armor of sunlight around her seemed to invest her words with a quality of truth greater than he had ever known from anyone else.
"The Dorsai," she said, "was formed by people who were willing to pay with their lives in others' battles, in order to buy freedom for their homes. It wasn't only in the men who went off to fight. Those at home had that same image of freedom, and were willing to die for it."
"But simply being willing to die—"
"You don't understand, not being born here," she said. "It was a matter of our being able to make harder choices than the soldiers sent in to occupy us. Amanda and the others in the district who were best qualified to decide sat down before the invasion and considered a number of plans. All of the plans meant casualties—and the casualties could include the people who were considering the plans. They chose the one that gave the district its greatest effectiveness against the enemy for the least number of deaths; and, having chosen it, the ones who had done the choosing were ready to be among those who would have to pay for its success. The invading soldiers had no such plan—and no such will."
He shook his head.
"I don't understand," he said. "I suppose it's because I'm not a Dorsai."
She looked at him for a moment, like someone who considers saying something, then thinks better of it.
"Then you don't understand the first Amanda?" she said. "I think you'll need to if you're going to talk to the Grey Captains."
He nodded, soberly.
"How did it happen?" he asked. "How did she—how did they do it? I have to know."
"All right," she said, "I'll tell you."
And she did. Sitting there in the sunlight, listening to her talk of a past as if it was something she herself had lived through, he thought again of what she had said about the first Amanda and herself being the same person. The story was a simple one. Dow's troops had come in and bivouacked just beyond Foralie Town. The first Amanda had gotten their commander's permission to continue with a manufacturing process in town that was necessary to the district's economy; and the process, according to plan, had flooded the atmosphere of the town and its vicinity with vaporized nickel carbonyl. One part in a million of those vapors was enough to cause allergic dermatitis and an edema of the lungs that was irreversible. In short—a sure death.
What had lulled the suspicions of the invaders until too late had been that there were inhabitants of Foralie Town also getting sick and dying, just as the soldiers were. Even when at last they understood, it had been unbelievable to Dow's military that townspeople could choose to stay where they were and die, just to make sure that the invaders died with them.
At the last, there had been a situation in which Dow had held Cletus as a captive at Foralie, with healthy troops on guard. An assortment of the older children, armed, plus the eight professionals Cletus had left to organize defenses, and Amanda, had reversed the situation. Amanda, in her ninety-third year, had finally captured the soldiers guarding Foralie by threatening to blow them and herself up together.
Compelling as the story was, it was not so much that which caught at Hal's attention. It was Amanda's way of telling it, as if she herself had been there. More strongly than ever came the impression that there was something she was trying to tell him under the screen of words which he was failing to understand. An anger stirred in him that he should be so unperceptive. But there was nothing to be done but wait and hope for some word that would wake him suddenly to her meaning.
So, he sat with her in the bright sunlight, hearing not merely the story of the defense of Foralie District, but of Kensie's death on Ste. Marie; and about how the second Amanda, who had loved both Kensie and Ian (but Ian more) had decided at last to marry no one. But even when they remounted their horses, he still did not know what it was she wanted him to understand. The afternoon had moved in upon them as she had talked; and Fomalhaut was halfway down the sky by the time they rode once more into the yard of Fal Morgan.
"… And I," she said again at the end of the story, "am the first and second Amandas over again."
They did not get the chance to talk again at any length until after the meeting. The next day, Monday, Amanda was gone on a business trip; and on Tuesday she was busy away from Fal Morgan, directing and helping with the preparing of Graemehouse for the meeting. Hal stayed where he was at Fal Morgan, puzzling over her as much as over what he would say to convince the Grey Captains. There was something in him like a superstition—which, strangely, Amanda seemed to understand—that made him unwilling to return to Foralie until the actual meeting time should arrive.
The Captains from furthest away began to arrive late Tuesday; and were welcomed at Graemehouse by Amanda and the neighbors who were helping. She did not get back to Fal Morgan until late evening; and after a quick meal she sat with Hal over a drink in the living room for only a few minutes before going to bed.
The Final Encyclopedia Page 60
