“We have been afraid for you,” Sofir said. He steered her in to sit by the fire. It was late indeed: the company of the inn had all gone home, the fire had sunk down. Sofir and Palizot bustled about getting water for her to wash in, food for her to eat, talking away. “And you know he’s come!” Palizot said, and Irene said, “Who has come?”
The two well-known, well-loved faces turned to her in the jubilant firelight; Palizot looked to Sofir smiling, giving him the word for them both. “It’s him,” Sofir said, “he’s here now. Things will go better now!”—with such warmth of pleasure and such certainty of Irene’s sharing in that pleasure that she was unable to say anything. “There now, it’s hot,” said Palizot, serving up a plate for her, at sight of which Irene ceased to care about anything else whatever. Lapped in present bliss, food, rest, firelight, friendship, she ate; and then Sofir had her room ready for her, the room that looked out over the dark drop and reach of the forests to the eastern ridge.
Sofir was out and Palizot occupied, so she breakfasted alone. There was not much to breakfast on: a little thin milk, a pot of cheese, and a loaf so hard and small, compared to the round brown splendors of Sofir’s baking in other days, that she hardly had the heart to cut a slice off the poor wizened thing. Clearly, no wheat had come up the mountain from the merchants of the King’s City.
She had thought as she woke that when Sofir and Palizot said “he,” last night, “he has come,” they meant the King. A little wider awake, she had thought they had not meant the King himself, but a messenger from the King, somebody sent with the power to open the roads. Awake, she knew they had meant nothing of the kind.
“You’ll be going up to the Master’s house,” said Palizot, coming through the kitchen with an armload of clothing from the wash lines. “I freshened up your red dress a bit; it gets so creased lying in the chest. Have you got clean stockings? Look, how do you like these?”
“I suppose he’s there,” Irene said. Since “he” was not staying at the inn, he must have been invited, as she had never been, to stay at the Master’s house. Her pain, a sore one however petty its cause, and her determination not to show it, so preoccupied her that for a minute she did not absorb Palizot’s reply: “He? Oh, no, he’s at the manor. But the Master asked us a long time ago to tell you to come to him as soon as you could, whenever you came again.”
That was balm. “He” could stay at the manor all he pleased.
“They’re beautiful,” she said, admiring the fine-striped stockings Palizot was exhibiting atop the load of clothes. “You just knitted them?”
“From the good wool in four old pairs I unraveled,” Palizot said with the satisfaction of the canny artisan. “Wear them today, levadja. They’re for you.”
In the handsome stockings and the red dress Irene went out into the twilight of the street, and climbed the hiccuping steps to the Master’s house. The geese in the pen by the south wall, big creatures, their white necks and bodies vague and as if luminous, shifted and hissed; one beat its wings for an instant. She had always been a little afraid of the geese. She knocked at the twelve-paneled door and Fimol, calm as always, admitted her and took her across the hall, between the mournful stare of the ancestress and the scowl of the one-armed ancestor, to the door of the Master’s office. “Irena has come,” Fimol said in her clear, subdued voice. He turned from his desk, holding out his hands with open gladness: “Irena, Irenadja! Welcome! We have longed for you!”
I have longed for you, she wanted to say, but could not. Her tongue never would obey her, in the Master’s presence. It obeyed him.
“Come and sit down,” he said. His smile made him look young. His voice was kind. “Tell me, how was it for you coming here? Was the way clear? Was it hard for you?” His dark gaze was directly on her now. “I’ve been afraid you would not be able to come,” he said, speaking lower and hurriedly, and looked away.
“The gate was closed—until last night. I wanted—I tried to come!”
He nodded, grave and gentle.
She tried to get the right words. “I saw nothing, when the way opened—nothing was different. But I felt—There was a noise, maybe I didn’t hear it. There was something that I know I didn’t see—”
As she spoke, now, in this quiet room, the terror she had not allowed herself to feel yesterday coming through the forests on the mountainside came running through her body in one long, cold shockwave: she crouched and shuddered in her chair. Her voice went thin and dry. “I was never afraid in the forest before!”
She looked up into the Master’s dark face, wanting the reassurance of his strength. He said nothing for a while; then at last, his voice still muted. “Yet you came.”
“Someone else—Sofir said—someone else has come, a man—”
The Master nodded. He was concealing or constrained by some intensity of emotion. Finally he said a word or name Irene did not know, hiuradja, and met her gaze again, intense, questioning.
“Did he come from the north—from the City?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“From the south. Like you. On the south road. As you first came, not knowing the land or language.”
Curiosity, the wish to know the full flatness of the truth, was stronger than disappointment or resentment. “Is he—” She did not know the word for blond or fair; they were a dark people. “Has he straw hair, and he’s fat?”
The Master gave his brief nod.
“We are summoned to the manor to meet him,” he said, and something in his voice alerted Irene, a hint of irony, of anger-resentment? “Come.”
“Now?”
“As soon as may be, Lord Horn said.” Again that hint of dryness, or sarcasm; but he exchanged no glance of complicity with her, and impenetrable as ever led her out of his house and across the top of the street to the high, delicate, open gates that led to the manor. He did not speak as they walked between the lawns and groves. To their right the slopes of the mountain rose up, darkly forested, yielding one glimpse of the slanting rock faces of the distant summit. Before them stood the great house, built of a tawny stone in which a warmth lingered like the light of sunset, the afterglow.
An old man let them in and took them through cold, half-furnished, stately rooms, and upstairs to a many-windowed gallery. The windows looked east, over the great downward slope to the distant eastern ridges distinct against the sky. A fire burned in a marble fireplace at the far end of the gallery, and there Lord Horn and his daughter stood with the stranger.
It was him, of course, the dough face, the heavy hands.
She glanced at the man beside her: the dark, hard, fine profile, controlled, contained, vigorous. The Master said nothing, made no least gesture, but she knew his hatred as clearly as she knew her own.
Lord Horn had come forward in his stiff, slow way to greet them. The daughter was smiling pallidly. She was blonde, Irene had forgotten that; they were not all dark-haired after all. This girl’s hair was pale and fleecy like sheep’s wool.
“Irena, our friend,” Lord Horn said. “Our guest, your countryman, I think. He is called Hiuradjas.”
She saw him recognize her—the light dawning: dismay, then surprise, then hope, like a doubletake in a TV comedy. He stepped forward with heavy eagerness and said, in English, stammering, “Hi, I—I’m sorry it—I don’t know their language, like you said.”
She stepped back a pace, keeping her distance.
“Lord Horn,” she said, “when I am here I speak the language spoken here.” The intruder and the mealy-madonna-faced girl stared, and the Master grew alert as a hawk, as she knew from the turn of his head; but Horn said nothing; only he looked, slowly as always, at the Master. There was a curious silence, difficult to bear.
“He cannot speak our language,” the old man said. “Will you help us speak together?”
The Master made no sign. The old lord’s gravity was impressive. Unwilling and ungracious she turned to face the intruder, not looking at him but at the polished floor in front of his shoes—tennis
shoes, large, long, and dirty. “They want me to translate for you. Go on.”
“I know you don’t like my being here,” the young man’s voice said. “I don’t belong here, I guess. I don’t know. My name’s Hugh Rogers. If you tell them anything I’m saying, tell them thank you. They’ve been very kind to me.”
When his voice stuck she could hear it creak in his throat.
“He says he came here by mistake,” she said, turning towards Lord Horn, but not looking up as she spoke. “He wishes to thank you for your kindness.” She kept her voice neutral, a translating machine.
“He is welcome to us, thrice welcome.”
“He says you’re welcome,” she said in English, expressionless.
“Who is he? I don’t even know their names. You’re Rayna?”
That threw her off stride for a moment. He would call her Eye-reen. No one but her mother and the people of Mountain Town called her Irena. But he had heard her name from them, of course. It was none of his business anyway. “That is Aur Horn—Lord Horn. That is Dou Sark, Master Sark, the Master of Tembreabrezi. That is Horns daughter. I don’t know her name.”
“Allia,” the girl said unexpectedly, with a simper, speaking not to Irene but to Hugh, Rogers. He turned his sheepish look on her, then back to Irene.
“I think they think I’m somebody I’m not,” he said.
She did not help him out.
“Can you tell them that I don’t belong here—that I come from, you know, somewhere else, and it’s a mistake.”
“I can say that. It won’t change anything.”
Her contempt had finally stung him. He straightened up from his slouch, frowning. “Look,” he said, “when I got here, it was like they were waiting for me. They act like they know who I am. But I don’t know them and I can’t make them understand that they’ve got me mixed up with somebody else that I’m not.”
“You don’t know who you are, here.”
“They don’t. I do,” he said with unexpected solidity.
“It’s the way you came.”
“I didn’t come, I just got here, I didn’t know there was a town, I just followed a path!”
“None of them can walk on that path. Nobody here. Only people that come from-through the gate.”
He did not take this in. “Can’t you just tell them that whoever it is they’re expecting, I’m not him?”
She turned to Lord Horn and said, “He bids me tell you that he is not that man you wait for.”
“We take him for no other man than himself,” the old man said quietly. There were double or shadow meanings in the words he used. She turned them into English hesitantly: “Lord Horn says you are who you say you are, as far as they’re concerned.”
“I seem to be who they say I am.”
“What’s wrong with that?” she sneered.
“I have to go back soon. Do they know that?”
“They won’t stop you.”
“You warned me—back at the gate—that time. What of? Are they dangerous? Are they in danger?”
“Yes.”
“Which? What kind of danger?”
“Both. Why should I tell you? Do I owe you something? You said yourself you don’t belong here. You’re the danger, you’re what’s wrong, it began when you came. I do belong here, this is my place. You think I’m going to hand it over to you because you’re a man and own everything. Well, it’s not that way here!”
“Irena,” the Master said, beside her, “What is it? What has he said?”
“Nothing! He’s a fool. He doesn’t belong here, he shouldn’t be here. You must send him away and forbid him to come back!”
“What is this?” Lord Horn said, slowly as ever. “Do you not know this man, Irena?”
“No. I don’t know him, I will not know him!”
Allia spoke to her father in her light, even voice: “Irena speaks in fear for us.”
Lord Horn looked at his daughter, at Sark, at Irene. His eyes, the almost colorless eyes of an old man, held hers.
“We call you friend,” he said.
“I am your friend,” she said fiercely.
“You are. And he. No harm comes by that road, your road, Irena. You came to speak our word, he to serve our need; this is as it is to be. One and other, other and one. It is two that go that road.”
She stood silent, frightened.
“I go alone,” she whispered.
Then the stupid tears rose up in her eyes and she had to turn her back until she could control herself and had wiped her nose and eyes with the handkerchief Palizot had put in the pocket of her dress. It was hard to turn around and face them. Her face burned as she did so.
“I will try to do what you ask me to do,” she said. “What do you want me to say to him?”
“What seems best to you,” Lord Horn replied in his muted, steady tone. “You speak for us.”
To her bewilderment he stood back for Allia and grim-faced Sark, and with the slightest stiff nod to her and to Hugh Rogers followed them out of the room. She was left face to face with the stranger.
He sat down on a chair that was too narrow for him, then got up awkwardly and went to stand at the high windows.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The eastern light was cold. She moved closer to the hearth. The spasm of tears had left her cold and dull. She must do what she had promised to do.
“This is what they want to say to you, as far as I understand it. There’s something wrong here, there’s some reason they cant leave the town. Nobody can walk on the roads. Except us coming from the south. They’re afraid of something and it seems to keep getting worse. Until you came; they think that’s going to change it some way.”
“Change what?”
“This fear.”
“What fear? This is where I’m not afraid.” He turned from the window. “I don’t understand anything here, the language, why it’s never night or sunlight, but its never frightened me. What is there to be afraid of?”
“I don’t know. I don’t speak the language all that well. They won’t talk about it or I don’t understand when they do. They just say they can’t leave the town and nobody can come here from the plains.”
“The plains,” he repeated.
“Northward, down the mountain. The road goes across the plains to a city finally.”
She looked at him and saw his eyes, grey-blue or blue, wide, in the heavy, white, yearning face. He had turned to her but he did not see her, he was looking in his mind across the plains of the twilight.
“Have you gone there?”
She shook her head.
“Which way is the sea?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the word for sea.”
“The creeks all run west,” he said in a low voice. He looked at her with the anxious, bewildered look he had, like a steer, the wrinkled forehead and curly hair, blunt face, worried eye. There had been a picture on the cover of a book once long ago, a man with a bull’s head standing in a tiny room. It had come back to her in the darkness before sleep many times, the man’s body and the terrible heavy head.
“Do you know where we are?” he said, and she said, “No.”
After a while he said, “I have to go soon. I’m worried about being late getting back. Next weekend I can come overnight, it’s the long weekend. If they want me to do something. I can try.—Overnight clock time, I mean. Do you—do you figure it’s about an hour clock time to something like a day here, I mean a day and a night, if it…”
“If there was any day or night,” she confirmed. It was very strange to speak of anything like this with another person, to hear him speak of it. “How did you get through the gate, the first time?” she asked in pure curiosity, and asking knew she had wasted all her rage, had accepted the fact that he was here and let him know it.
“I was…” He blinked. His voice made the little creaking sound in his throat. “I was running away. From…I don’t know. See, I’m sort of stuck. Not doing what I wan
t to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Nothing. Important.” It came out in two separate words. “It’s just I want to go to school, but I can’t work it in.”
“What kind of school?”
“Library. It isn’t that important.”
“Well, if it’s what you want to do with your life it is. What do you do?”
“Checker at a grocery.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s good pay. It’s O.K. You know. How did you get here first?”
“Running away. Too.”
But her throat dried up. She couldn’t talk about all that, Doris getting raped, and all the hassle at home, and all that, it was a long time ago now and there wasn’t any use talking about it. She had got away from it. She had come here. None of that existed here. Here was peace, and silence, and nothing changed, it was always the same. Here you did not ask questions. You came home. He could not understand that, he was a stranger. She could not tell him that she came here because her love was here. Her love, her master. No one would ever know that, no one would ever understand it, that center and secret of her life, that silence. In his age, in his mastery, in his strangeness, in his hardness even, in all that divided them, in the distance that held them apart, there was room for desire without terror, there was room and time for love without effect, without penalty or pain. The only price was silence.
She was silent.
The stranger, massive against the window light, stood half turned from her, looking out.
“I wish I could stay,” he said half aloud.
But he turned away from the window, resolute; and went to take his leave of his hosts. She stayed only to give his assurance that he would come back to Lord Horn, who accepted both his parting and his promise to return without question, and then she left the manor. As she walked between the lawns to the iron gate she thought of the return trip she too must soon make. She looked at the dark mountain flank, the remote grey of the rock faces. The silence of the mountain was heavy, like a lid pressed down on a sound, some sound that was always there. She pressed her arms to her sides in a shiver, and walked on. Why go back at all? He had to go back, but that was nothing to her. Why make that long walk through the dark woods back to the gate, why not stay here in the ain country?
The Beginning Place Page 9
