The storm was over. A night's rain had laid the black earth bare, and the last hollowed drifts of snow dripped and sparkled. Falk stood at the top of the stairway, sunlight on his hair, wind fresh on his face and in his lungs. He felt like a mole done hibernating, like a rat come out of a hole. "Let's go," he called to Estrel, and went back down to the cavern only to help her pack up quickly and clear out.
He had asked her if she knew where her people were, and she had answered, "Probably far ahead in the west, by now."
"Did they know you were crossing Basnasska territory alone?"
"Alone? It's only in fairytales from the Time of the Cities that women ever go anywhere alone. A man was with me. The Basnasska killed him." Her delicate face was set, unexpressive.
Falk began to explain to himself, then, her curious passivity, the want of response that had seemed almost a betrayal of his strong feeling. She had borne too much and could no longer respond. Who was the companion the Basnasska had killed? It was none of Falk's business to know, until she wanted to tell him. But his anger was gone and from that time on he treated Estrel with confidence and with tenderness.
"Can I help you look for your people?"
She said softly, "You are a kind man, Falk. But they will be far ahead, and I cannot comb all the Western Plains…"
The lost, patient note in her voice moved him. "Come west with me, then, till you get news of them. You know what way I take."
It was still hard for him to say the name "Es Toch," which in the tongue of the Forest was an obscenity, abominable. He was not yet used to the way Estrel spoke of the Shing city as a mere place among other places.
She hesitated, but when he pressed her she agreed to come with him. That pleased him, because of his desire for her and his pity for her, because of the loneliness he had known and did not wish to know again. They set off together through the cold sunshine and the wind. Falk's heart was light at being outside, at being free, at going on. Today the end of the journey did not matter. The day was bright, the broad bright clouds sailed overhead, the way itself was its end. He went on, the gentle, docile, unwearying woman walking by his side.
V
THEY CROSSED the Great Plains on foot—which is soon said, but was not soon or easily done. The days were longer than the nights and the winds of spring were softening and growing mild when they first saw, even from afar, their goal: the barrier, paled by snow and distance, the wall across the continent from north to south. Falk stood still then, gazing at the Mountains.
"High in the mountains lies Es Toch," Estrel said, gazing with him. "There I hope we each shall find what we seek."
"I often fear it more than I hope it…Yet I'm glad to have seen the mountains."
"We should go on from here."
"I'll ask the Prince if he is willing that we go tomorrow."
But before leaving her he turned and looked eastward at the desert land beyond the Prince's gardens a while, as if looking back across all the way he and she had come together.
He knew still better now how empty and mysterious a world men inhabited in these later days of their history. For days on end he and his companion had gone and never seen one trace of human presence.
Early in their journey they had gone cautiously, through the territories of the Samsit and other Cattle-Hunter nations, which Estrel knew to be as predatory as the Basnasska. Then, coming to more arid country, they were forced to keep to ways which others had used before, in order to find water; still, when there were signs of people having recently passed, or living nearby, Estrel kept a sharp lookout, and sometimes changed their course to avoid even the risk of being seen. She had a general, and in places a remarkably specific, knowledge of the vast area they were crossing; and sometimes when the terrain worsened and they were in doubt which direction to take, she would say, "Wait till dawn," and going a little away would pray a minute to her amulet, then come back, roll up in her sleepingbag and sleep serenely: and the way she chose at dawn was always the right one. "Wanderer's instinct," she said when Falk admired her guessing. "Anyway, so long as we keep near water and far from human beings, we are safe."
But once, many days west of the cavern, following the curve of a deep stream-valley they came so abruptly upon a settlement that the guards of the place were around them before they could run. Heavy rain had hidden any sight or sound of the place before they reached it. When the people offered no violence and proved willing to take them in for a day or two, Falk was glad of it, for walking and camping in that rain had been a miserable business.
This tribe or people called themselves the Bee-Keepers.
A strange lot, literate and laser-armed, all clothed alike, men and women, in long shifts of yellow wintercloth marked with a brown cross on the breast, they were hospitable and uncommunicative. They gave the travelers beds in their barrack-houses, long, low, flimsy buildings of wood and clay, and plentiful food at their common table; but they spoke so little, to the strangers and among themselves, that they seemed almost a community of the dumb. "They're sworn to silence. They have vows and oaths and rites, no one knows what it's all about," Estrel said, with the calm uninterested disdain which she seemed to feel for most kinds of men. The Wanderers must be proud people, Falk thought. But the Bee-Keepers went her scorn one better: they never spoke to her at all. They would talk to Falk, "Does your she want a pair of our shoes?"—as if she were his horse and they had noticed she wanted shoeing. Their own women used male names, and were addressed and referred to as men. Grave girls, with clear eyes and silent lips, they lived and worked as men among the equally grave and sober youths and men. Few of the Bee-Keepers were over forty and none were under twelve. It was a strange community, like the winter barracks of some army encamped here in the midst of utter solitude in the truce of some unexplained war; strange, sad, and admirable. The order and frugality of their living reminded Falk of his Forest home, and the sense of a hidden but flawless, integral dedication was curiously restful to him. They were so sure, these beautiful sexless warriors, though what they were so sure of they never told the stranger.
"They recruit by breeding captured savage women like sows, and bringing up the brats in groups. They worship something called the Dead God, and placate him with sacrifice—murder. They are nothing but the vestige of some ancient superstition," Estrel said, when Falk had said something in favor of the Bee-Keepers to her. For all her submissiveness she apparently resented being treated as a creature of a lower species. Arrogance in one so passive both touched and entertained Falk, and he teased her a little:
"Well, I've seen you at nightfall mumbling to your amulet. Religions differ…"
"Indeed they do," she said, but she looked subdued.
"Who are they armed against, I wonder?"
"Their Enemy, no doubt. As if they could fight the Shing. As if the Shing need bother to fight them!"
"You want to go on, don't you?"
"Yes. I don't trust these people. They keep too much hidden."
That evening he went to take his leave of the head of the community, a gray-eyed man called Hiardan, younger perhaps than himself. Hiardan received his thanks laconically, and then said in the plain, measured way the Bee-Keepers had, "I think you have spoken only truth to us. For this I thank you. We would have welcomed you more freely and spoken to you of things known to us, if you had come alone."
Falk hesitated before he answered. "I am sorry for that. But I would not have got this far but for my guide and friend. And…you live here all together, Master Hiardan. Have you ever been alone?"
"Seldom," said the other. "Solitude is soul's death: man is mankind. So our saying goes. But also we say, do not put your trust in any but brother and hive-twin, known Since infancy. That is our rule. It is the only safe one."
"But I have no kinsmen, and no safety, Master," Falk said, and bowing soldierly in the Bee-Keepers' fashion, he took his leave, and next morning at daybreak went on westward with Estrel.
From tune to time as they went
they saw other settlements or encampments, none large, all wide-scattered—five or six of them perhaps in three or four hundred miles. At some of these Falk left to himself would have stopped. He was armed, and they looked harmless: a couple of nomad tents by an ice-rimmed creek, or a little solitary herdboy on a great hillside watching the half-wild red oxen, or, away off across the rolling land, a mere feather of bluish smoke beneath the illimitable gray sky. He had left the Forest to seek, as it were, some news of himself, some hint of what he was or guide towards what he had been in the years he could not remember; how was he to learn if he dared not risk asking? But Estrel was afraid to stop even at the tiniest and poorest of these prairie settlements. "They do not like Wanderers," she said, "nor any strangers. Those that live so much alone are full of fear. In their fear they would take us in and give us food and shelter. But then in the night they would come and bind and kill us. You cannot go to them, Falk"—and she glanced at his eyes—"and tell them I am your fellow-man…They know we are here; they watch. If they see us move on tomorrow they won't trouble us. But if we don't move on, or if we try to go to them, they'll fear us. It is fear that kills."
Windburned and travelweary, his hood pushed back so the keen, glowing wind from the red west stirred his hair, Falk sat, arms across his knees, near their campfire in the lee of a knobbed hill. "True enough," he said, though he spoke wistfully, his gaze on that far-off wisp of smoke.
"Perhaps that's the reason why the Shing kill no one."
Estrel knew his mood and was trying to hearten him, to change his thoughts.
"Why's that?" he asked, aware of her intent, but unresponsive.
"Because they are not afraid."
"Maybe." She had got him to thinking, though not very cheerfully. Eventually he said, "Well, since it seems I must go straight to them to ask my questions, if they kill me I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that I frightened them…"
Estrel shook her head. "They will not. They do not kill."
"Not even cockroaches?" he inquired, venting the ill-temper of his weariness on her. "What do they do with cockroaches, in their City—disinfect them and set them free again, like the Razes you told me about?"
"I don't know," Estrel said; she always took his questions seriously. "But their law is reverence for life, and they do keep the law."
"They don't revere human life. Why should they?—they're not human."
"But that is why their rule is reverence for all life—isn't it? And I was taught that there have been no wars on Earth or among the worlds since the Shing came. It is humans that murder one another!"
"There are no humans that could do to me what the Shing did. I honor life, I honor it because it's a much more difficult and uncertain matter than death; and the most difficult and uncertain quality of all is intelligence. The Shing kept their law and let me live, but they killed my intelligence. Is that not murder? They killed the man I was, the child I had been. To play with a man's mind so, is that reverence? Their law is a lie, and their reverence is mockery."
Abashed by his anger, Estrel knelt by the fire cutting up and skewering a rabbit he had shot. The dusty reddish hair curled close to her bowed head; her face was patient and remote. As ever, she drew him to her by compunction and desire. Close as they were, yet he never understood her; were all women so? She was like a lost room in a great house, like a carven box to which he did not have the key. She kept nothing from him and yet her secrecy remained, untouched.
Enormous evening darkened. Over rain-drenched miles of earth and grass. The little flames of their fire burned red-gold in the clear blue dusk.
"It's ready, Falk," said the soft voice.
He rose and came to her beside the fire. "My friend, my love," he said, taking her hand a moment. They sat down side by side and shared their meat, and later their sleep.
As they went farther west the prairies began to grow dryer, the air clearer. Estrel guided them southward for several days in order to avoid an area which she said was, or had been, the territory of a very wild nomad people, the Horsemen. Falk trusted her judgment, having no wish to repeat his experience with the Basnasska. On the fifth and sixth day of this southward course they crossed through a hilly region and came into dry, high terrain, flat and treeless, forever windswept. The gullies filled with torrents during the rain, and next day were dry again. In summer this must be semidesert; even in spring it was very dreary.
As they went on they twice passed ancient ruins, mere mounds and hummocks, but aligned in the spacious geometry of streets and squares. Fragments of pottery, flecks of colored glass and plastic were thick in the spongy ground around these places. It had been two or three thousand years, perhaps, since they had been inhabited. This vast steppe-land, good only for cattle-grazing, had never been resettled after the diaspora to the stars, the date of which in the fragmentary and falsified records left to men was not definitely known.
"Strange to think," Falk said as they skirted the second of these long-buried towns, "that there were children playing here and…women hanging out the washing…so long ago. In another age. Farther away from us than the worlds around a distant star."
"The Age of Cities," Estrel said, "the Age of War…I never heard tell of these places, from any of my people. We may have come too far south, and be heading for the Deserts of the South."
So they changed course, going west and a little north, and the next morning came to a big river, orange and turbulent, not deep but dangerous to cross, though they spent the whole day seeking a ford.
On the western side, the country was more arid than ever. They had filled their flasks at the river, and as water had been a problem by excess rather than default, Falk thought little about it. The sky was clear now, and the sun shone all day; for the first time in hundreds of miles they did not have to resist the cold wind as they walked, and could sleep dry and warm. Spring came quick and radiant to the dry land; the morning star burned above the dawn and wildflowers bloomed under their steps. But they did not come to any stream or spring for three days after crossing the river.
In their struggle through the flood Estrel had taken some kind of chill. She said nothing about it, but she did not keep up her untiring pace, and her face began to look wan. Then dysentery attacked her. They made camp early. As she lay beside their brushwood fire in the evening she began to cry, a couple of dry sobs only, but that was much for one who kept emotion so locked within herself.
Uneasy, Falk tried to comfort her, taking her hands; she was hot with fever.
"Don't touch me," she said. "Don't, don't. I lost it, I lost it, what shall I do?"
And he saw then that the cord and amulet of pale jade were gone from her neck.
"I must have lost it crossing the river," she said controlling herself, letting him take her hand.
"Why didn't you tell me—"
"What good?"
He had no answer to that. She was quiet again, but he felt her repressed, feverish anxiety. She grew worse in the night and by morning was very ill. She could not eat, and though tormented by thirst could not stomach the rabbit-blood which was all he could offer her to drink. He made her as comfortable as he could and then taking their empty flasks set off to find water.
Mile after mile of wiry, flower-speckled grass and clumped scrub stretched off, slightly rolling, to the bright hazy edge of the sky. The sun shone very warm; desert larks went up singing from the earth. Falk went at a fast steady pace, confident at first, then dogged, quartering out a long sweep north and east of their camp. Last week's rains had already soaked deep into this soil, and there were no streams. There was no water. He must go on and seek west of the camp. Circling back from the east he was looking out anxiously for the camp when, from a long low rise, he saw something miles off to westward, a smudge, a dark blur that might be trees. A moment later he spotted the nearer smoke of the campfire, and set off towards it at a jogging run, though he was tired, and the low sun hammered its light in his eyes, and his mouth was dry as chalk.
Estrel had kept the fire smoldering to guide him back. She lay by it in her worn-out sleepingbag. She did not lift her head when he came to her.
"There are trees not too far to the west of here; there may be water. I went the wrong way this morning," he said, getting their things together and slipping on his pack. He had to help Estrel get to her feet; he took her arm and they set off. Bent, with a blind look on her face, she struggled along beside him for a mile and then for another mile. They came up one of the long swells of land. "There!" Falk said; "there—see it? It's trees, all right—there must be water there."
But Estrel had dropped to her knees, then lain down on her side in the grass, doubled up on her pain, her eyes shut. She could not walk farther.
"It's two or three miles at most, I think. I'll make a smudge-fire here, and you can rest; I'll go fill the flasks and come back—I'm sure there's water there, and it won't take long." She lay still while he gathered all the scrub-wood he could and made a little fire and heaped up more of the green wood where she could put it on the fire. "I'll be back soon," he said, and started away. At that she sat up, white and shivering, and cried out, "No! don't leave me! You mustn't leave me alone—you mustn't go—"
There was no reasoning with her. She was sick and frightened beyond the reach of reason. Falk could not leave her there, with the night coming; he might have, but it did not seem to him that he could. He pulled her up, her arm over his shoulder, half pulling and half carrying her, and went on.
On the next rise he came in sight of the trees again, seeming no nearer. The sun was setting away off ahead of them in a golden haze over the ocean of land. He was carrying Estrel now, and every few minutes he had to stop and lay his burden down and drop down beside her to get breath and strength. It seemed to him that if he only had a little water, just enough to wet his mouth, it would not be so hard.
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