“Feel what?”
His heart had jumped, and was pounding uncomfortably.
She shook her head. She made a slight, hurried gesture towards the dark wall of the mountain.
“There’s something ahead of us—?”
“Yes,” she said, on the in-breath.
“Blocking our way?”
“I don’t know.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke. She was drawn together, hunched up like an old woman.
Hugh said aloud, “Listen, I want to get to the town.” His anger was not against the girl but against her fear. “Let me go first.”
“We can’t go on.”
“I have to go on.”
She shook her head, despairing.
Determined to resist her reasonless panic, Hugh put his hand gently on her arm and began to say, “We can make it—” but she dodged from his touch as if his hand were hot iron, and her pinched face went dark with anger as she said aloud, “Don’t ever touch me!”
“All right,” he said with a flash of answering contempt. “I won’t. Calm down. We have to go on. They’re waiting for us. I said I’d come. Come on!”
He led off. To save his pride he did not look back to see if she was following; but he kept listening, down the long descent, for the light sound of her coming behind him. When the path went up again, he looked back for her. He knew what it was like to be afraid here. She kept fairly close behind him, and did not falter or hang back. Her face was closed like a fist under the black tangle of hair. In the high trees the wind made a sound like the sea heard from far off, the sea that lay far, far, far to the west, to the left, in the direction of the dark. Between the night and day they walked on the long path. It went on and on, and if she had not been coming behind he would have stopped. There was no end to the slope of the mountain, and he was getting tired. He had never felt so tired in his life, a weakness all through his body, a languor that might have been pleasant if only he could sit down, could lie down, could stop and have rest. It was hard to go on, and it would be so much easier to go downhill.
“Hugh!”
He turned, and looked around bewildered for some time before he saw her. She was not behind him but above him on the slope, standing among dark firs. It was a dark place, the sky closed out by meeting branches and rocky slopes.
“This way,” she whispered.
He realized that she was standing on the path. He had slanted off on a random track between trees, downhill.
The few steep paces back up to the path were a heavy labor.
“I’m getting tired,” he said shakily.
“I know,” she whispered. She looked as if she had been crying, her face puffed and blotchy. “Keep on the path.”
“O.K. Come on.”
At the end of the slope under the firs the way leveled out but was no easier, because the weariness kept growing, the heaviness, the longing to lie down. She came beside him now; there was room for them to walk together. When had the path become so wide, a road? She forced his pace now. He tried to keep up. It was not fair. He had not hurried her when she could not go on by herself.
“There—”
The gleam in the wide, cold evening: firelight, lamplight. Fear and tiredness were only shadows cast by that yellow gleam, shadows that fell behind them on the road.
They came into the town. There between the first houses they stopped.
The girl stood beside him, her weary, puffy face cocked back in defiance. “I’m going to the inn,” she said.
He tried to shake off his dullness. Now that he was here where all his desire had tended he felt heavy, awkward, out of place. He had not the courage to go present himself at that great house, and did not know where else to go. “I guess I will too,” he said.
“They’re expecting you at the manor.”
“The what?”
“The manor. Isn’t that what they call where a lord lives? Lord Horns house. Where you were last time.”
Her tone was sharp and jeering. Why did she turn against him after the hard way they had come together? She was unreliable, not to be trusted. She liked to see him make a fool of himself. Well, that was a wish easily granted.
“So long,” he said, and turned towards the first side street that led up the hill.
“One street farther down. The one with the steps,” the girl said, and went on towards the peak-gabled, bow-windowed, galleon-like bulk of the inn.
He followed, passed the inn, turned left up the many-stepped street. The air smelled of woodsmoke like all autumn in a breath; a child’s voice called far off where the town below ran out into pale pastures. There was a strange noise in the low-fenced yard by the top house of the street: geese hissing, Hugh realised when he saw the big, white-shouldered birds eying him. There were birds and beasts here in the town, there were voices, but still no voice sang. The geese hissed and shifted. Although he had come where he desired to come he was tired and cold, a chill not from wind or weather but from within, from the marrow of the bone and the dark pit of the bowels, a hollow, weary coldness.
He passed under the iron gateway and between the lawns and came to the high house, its roofs dark against the evening sky, two windows throwing a soft light across the walk. He lifted the knocker in the shape of a ram’s head, and knocked.
The old servant opened the door, and he heard his own name pronounced as they said it here, foreign, all one word, spoken with energy and welcome. The old man hurried before him through the unlit galleries, and opening the door to a crimson-walled, firelit room, announced him joyously by that same splendid half-familiar name: “Hiuradjas!”
Allia was there in the glowing room. She rose, dropping some handwork, and came forward, her hands held out to him. Her light hair was lifted by the lift and turn of her body. There is no way to expect beauty, or to deserve it. He took her hands. He could have fallen at her feet. He did not know her language but her voice said, “You are welcome, welcome, welcome! You have come back at last!”
He said, “Allia,” and she smiled again.
She asked him something. The look of her blue eyes and the tone of her voice were so gentle in their concern that he said, “It was hard coming, it was frightening—I got tired—” but he saw from her gesture now that she was only asking him if he would sit down, which he did, gratefully. Then he was up again because Lord Horn had come in, greeting him with cordiality and with something else which Hugh did not recognize at first: respect. This man, elderly, called “Lord,” clearly used to personal authority, showed towards him not deference, not mere politeness, but the regard of equality: as if they were of the same family. As if Horn spoke to some quality in him which he did not know himself, but which the old man knew and greeted.
Allia’s friendliness, though shy and mannerly, was much less sober than her father’s. All conversation they could have was a kind of running language lesson. She happily performed the necessary pointing and handwaving and face-making, and laughed at her misunderstandings and at his mistakes. Yet in her too he sensed an attitude towards him which he did not want to call respect but dared not call love; the most he could admit to himself was that she seemed to like him, to admire him—what for? What had he done? Nothing. How could she value him for what he was? Equally nothing. Yet in her soft, frank look and voice and even in her laughter at his blunders there was the underlying grave temper of admiration. Such admiration as he felt for her: but it was her due. All she was and did was admirable and beautiful. If he was to be admired it was only by a kind advance. Nothing was due him. But to earn, to deserve what she gave him undeserved, to be the man she mistook him for, he would do anything.
They dined in a candlelit, long room. He was so tired that the meal passed in a blur of light and warmth. When he was alone in his room he felt drunk with weariness. The bedroom, where he had slept the three nights of his first stay here, surprised him by its deep familiarity: the walls painted in faded blue and almost-rubbed-off gold, the oak bedstead, the brass-capped andirons, were as
pleasant to recognize as if he had known them all his life. Though in no way like it, the room recalled to him a room he had carried in his mind for many years, an attic in the first house he had lived in, his father’s mother’s house. His bed had been by the window that looked out on the dark green fields and blue hills of Georgia. That was another country and a long time ago. Here the high windows were curtained. A fire burned, bright and almost soundless, in the small fireplace. The bed was high and hard, the sheets cold, heavy, silky to the touch. In that bed, the gold eye of the fire gleaming between half-closed lashes, there were no dreams. There was only sleep, the wide, drifting darkness of sleep. As he gave himself up to that all thoughts, distinctions of light, impulses of will slipped away from him; only for a moment he heard above the darkness a thin voice like a bird,
When the flower…
He turned over and buried his head in his arms, driving the song away, deeper down, into the source. It had no place here, where no flower came into bud, and no leaf fell, and no voice sang. But Allia was here, holding out her hands to him as he went gladly into darkness.
6
Why did I come back?—The question presented itself insistently, irritably, like a child whining. She turned on it with exasperation: Because I had to! And now she had to do what had to be done next. She went to the house at the top of the street of steps, and Fimol let her in, and in the beautiful room between the hearths she waited, so tense and apprehensive that all she saw and heard was uncannily vivid, disjointed, a primitive bright meaninglessness.
The Master came into the room. Not as she had seen him last, hunched in terror, whimpering, unseeing. None of that. Straight, alert, calm, and grim: the Master. “Welcome, Irena,” he said, and as always she was tongue-tied, unable to resist his ascendancy, and welcoming it with relief. This is how he truly is, I can forget that other face. He is my Master!
But on the other side of that awkward and passionate submission, as if through a pane of glass, a cold soul stood watching him and herself. That soul did not serve; nor did it judge. It watched. It watched her choose the stiff brocaded chair to sit in and wonder why she chose it. It watched him pace down the room, and saw that he was glad to have his back to her.
The fires were not lighted. The air of the long room was tranquil, like the air inside the lip of a thin-walled sea shell.
“Soon now we shall have to begin to slaughter the sheep,” the Master said. “There’s no forage left at all in the eastern low meadows.” The low meadows were the pastures close to town, normally used only in lambing season. “But since the salt traders haven’t come, we won’t be able to preserve much of the meat. A great feast; the feast of fear…”
The people of Tembreabrezi did not tend their flocks for meat but for wool; their wealth was the fine wool they dyed and spun and wove, and traded for what they needed from the plains. “The King’s cloak is of our weaving,” Irene had heard them say.
“Is there nothing you can do?” she asked, appalled by the idea of them killing their pride and livelihood, those flocks of beautiful, canny, patient beasts. She had been up on the mountain with the shepherds many times; she had held newborn lambs in her arms.
“No,” he said in his dry voice, his back to her, standing at the windows that looked on the terraced gardens of his house.
She bit her lip, because her question had hit the center of his shame. She had seen, seen with her eyes, that there was nothing he could do.
“There are things we could have done. The animals knew first. We should have heeded them. The wild goats came by—the sheep would not go up to the High Step; all that we saw. We knew, but still did nothing. I was not alone in saying there were those things that must be done. There were men who said it before I did. That we must take the price and make the bargain. But the old women cried, oh, no, no, this is not to be done, this is disgusting and needless. All the old women, the Lord of the Mountain among them…”
He had turned to face her. The light was behind him so she could not see his features. His voice was dry and reckless.
“So we took the counsel of the cowardly. And now we are all cowards. And all helpless. Instead of one lamb, all our flocks. No child of our own, but this boy, this stupid boy who cannot speak our tongue. He is to set us free! Lord Horn was a wise man, once, but it was long ago. If only I had gone to the City when I dreamed of it first. But I waited in deference to him…”
His last words meant nothing to her. Little of what he said made sense, but his vindictiveness had broken her habit of timidity. She asked without hesitation, “What do you mean? How is the stranger to set you free?” When he did not reply she insisted: “What is he to do?”
“To go up on the mountain.”
“And do what?”
“What he came to do. So says Lord Horn.”
“But he doesn’t know what he’s here for. He thinks you know. He doesn’t know anything. Even I felt the fear, coming, but he didn’t.”
“A hero is indifferent to fear,” the Master said, jeering.
He came a little closer to her.
“What is it that we fear?” she said steadily, though now she was afraid of him. “You must tell me what it is.”
“I cannot tell you, Irenadja.”
His face was dark, congested, his eyes bright. He smiled. “You see that picture,” he said, and she glanced for a moment where he pointed, at the portrait of the scowling man. “He was my grandfather’s father. He was Master of Tembreabrezi, as I am. In his day the fear came. He did not listen to the old women whimpering, but went out, went up to make the bargain, with the price in his hand. And he struck the bargain, and the ways were freed. He came down the mountain alone, and his hand was withered as you see it there. They say it was burned away. But my grandfather, who was a child then, said it was cold to the touch, cold as rotten wood in winter. But he paid the price for all!”
“What price?” Irene demanded, fierce with fear and revulsion. “What did he hold—what did he touch?”
“What he loved.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You have never understood. Who are you to understand us?”
“I have loved you,” she said.
“Would you do as he did, for love of us? Would you go there, to the flat stone, and wait?”
“I would do anything I could. Tell me what to do!”
His eyes burned now. He came so close to her that she felt the heat of his face.
“Go with him,” he said in a whisper. “The stranger. Horn will send him. Go with him. Take him to the High Step, to the stone, the flat stone. You know the way. You can go with him.”
“And then?”
“Let him make the bargain.”
“With whom? What bargain?”
“I cannot tell you,” he said, and the dark face burned and writhed. “I do not know. You say you have loved us. If you have loved me, go with him.”
She could not speak, but she nodded.
“You will save us, Irena,” he whispered. He turned his face as if to kiss her, but the touch of his lips was dry, feathery, hot, less touch than breath.
“Let me go,” she said.
He drew away from her.
She could not speak and did not want to look at him. She turned and walked the length of the long room to the door. He did not follow her.
She did not return to the inn, or go to see Trijiat. She went down the steep streets alone, and out the east end of town past Venno’s shop and Geba’s cottage, to the stone-yard. There she sat on the granite block, and on the wall by the road, and crumbled the little, elegant cones of the cedars in her hand, and thought; but it was not so much thinking as a long grieving, which she must grieve through as a musician plays a tune through, from beginning to end. Often her eyes were on the road north, the road that led down to the City, the road she could not go.
She was summoned the next day to the manor. She wore her red dress and her second-best stockings. Palizot tried to lend her a new pair
, and her thin-soled shoes, “to be proper at the Lord’s house,” but Irene refused and went off dogged and sorehearted, in the same dull, grieving mood under which lay, like the deep cold water under the reeds of a sea marsh, fear.
She did not look up towards the peak as she went from the iron gateway to the manor house.
As before, the old manservant took her to the windowed gallery, and the same people were there. This time they had got Hugh Rogers dressed up like themselves. She wished she had worn her jeans and shirt in defiance, and at the same time wished she had worn the thin shoes and striped stockings. She eyed his finery: narrow black trousers, heavy shirt of linen, long vest worked with dark embroidery. He looked well in it. He was heavy but well proportioned; his throat was white and massive in the high, open collar, he carried his head erect. He came forward eagerly to her and spoke to her with clumsy good will. He was happy in his fine clothes, with the old man patting him on the back, and the old man’s daughter simpering at him, and all the food and attention and friendship heart could desire, sure, and then out you go to do what can’t be done and thanks a lot; it’s what you came for, isn’t it?
The Master was there, talking with old Hobim and a couple of other townsmen. She did not once look directly at him, but was continually aware of him, and at the sound of his voice her heart stopped and waited.
Lord Horn’s daughter stood with Hugh. She was talking to him now, teaching him a word, the “adja” they tacked onto the end of your name when they wanted to call you friend, trying to explain that his name as they heard it, Hiuradjas, already had the word in it and would sound ridiculous if they added it, Hiuradjadja! and she laughed saying it, a soft, merry laugh. He stood staring at her porcelain face and sheepswool hair. Fool! Irene thought. Stupid fool! Can’t you see? But she saw the softening of his mouth, the stillness of his eyes, and she was awed.
“Alliadja,” he said, and went red, face and ears and neck red under the thick, fair, sweaty hair; and then white again.
Allia smiled, sweet and cool as water, and praised him.
The Beginning Place Page 12
