Planet Of Exile (2 page)

She shrugged again. She felt sick and wanted to cry, but did not. Climbing the next flight of stairs cut in the black rock, she put her hair straight, and from its shelter glanced up for a split second sideways at the farborn's face. It was strong, rough, and dark, with grim, bright eyes, the dark eyes of the alien.

"What were you doing on the sands? Didn't anyone warn you about the tide?"

"I didn't know," she whispered.

"Your Elders know. Or they used to last Spring when your tribe was living along the coast here.

Men have damn short memories." What he said was harsh, but his voice was always quiet and without harshness. "This way now. Don't worry—the whole place is empty. It's been a long time one of you people set foot on the Stack ..."

They had entered a dark door and tunnel and come out into a room which she thought huge till they entered the next one. They passed through gates and courts open to the sky, along arched galleries that leaned far out above the sea, through rooms and vaulted halls, all silent, empty, dwelling places of the sea-wind. The sea rocked its wrinkled silver far below now. She felt light-headed, insubstantial.

"Does nobody live here?" she asked hi a small voice.

"Not now."

"It's your Whiter City?"

"No, we winter in the town. This was built as a fort. We had a lot of enemies in the old Years ... Why were you on the sands?"

"I wanted to see ..."

"See what?"

"The sands. The ocean. I was hi your town first, I wanted to see ..."

"All right! No harm hi that." He led her through a gallery so high it made her dizzy. Through the tall, pointed arches crying seabirds flew. Then passing down a last narrow corridor they came out under a gate, and crossed a clanging bridge of swordmetal onto the causeway.

They walked between tower and town, between sky and sea, hi silence, the wind pushing them always towards the right. Rolery was cold, and unnerved by the height and strangeness of the walk, by the presence of the dark false-man beside her, walking with her pace for pace.

As they entered the town he said abruptly, "I won't mind-speak you again. I had to then."

"When you said to run—" she began, then hesitated, not sure what he was talking about, or what had happened out on the sands.

"I thought you were one of us," he said as if angry, and then controlled himself. "I couldn't stand and watch you drown. Even if you deserved to. But don't worry. I won't do it again, and it didn't give me any power over you. No matter what your Elders may tell you. So go on, you're free as air and ignorant as ever."

His harshness was real, and it frightened Rolery. Impatient with her fear she inquired, shakily but with impudence, "Am I also free to come back?"

At that the farborn looked at her. She was aware, though she could not look up at his face, that his expression had changed. "Yes. You are. May I know your name, daughter of Askatevar?"

"Rolery of Wold's Kin."

"Wold's your grandfather?—your father? He's still alive?"

"Wold closes the circle hi the Stone Pounding," she said loftily, trying to assert herself against his air of absolute authority. How could a farborn, a false-man, kinless and beneath law, be so grim and lordly?

"Give him greeting from Jakob Agat Alterra. Tell him that I'll come to Tevar tomorrow to speak to him. Farewell, Rolery." And he put out his hand in the salute of equals so that without thinking she did the same, laying her open palm against his.

Then she turned and hurried up the steep streets and steps, drawing her fur hood up over her head, turning from the few farborns she passed. Why did they stare in one's face so, like corpses or fish? Warm-blooded animals and human beings did not go staring hi one another's eyes that way. She came out of the landward gate with a great sense of relief, and made her quick way up the ridge in the last reddish sunlight, down through the dying woods, and along the path leading to Tevar. As twilight verged into darkness, she saw across the stubble-fields little stars of fire light from the tents encircling the unfinished Winter City on the hill. She hurried on towards warmth and dinner and humankind. But even in the big sister-tent of her Kin, kneeling by the fire and stuffing herself with stew among the womenfolk and children, still she felt a strangeness lingering in her mind. Closing her right hand, she seemed to hold against her palm a handful of darkness, where his touch had been.

CHAPTER TWO: In the Red Tent

"Tats SLOP'S COLD," he growled, pushing it away. Then seeing old Kerry's patient look as she took the bowl to reheat it, he called himself a cross old fool. But none of his wives—he had only one left—none of his daughters, none of the women could cook up a bowl of bhan-meal the way Shakatany had done. What a cook she had been, and young...his last young wife. And she had died, out there in the eastern range, died young while he went on living and living, waiting for the bitter Winter to come.

A girl came by in a leather tunic stamped with the trifoliate mark of his Kin, a granddaughter probably. She looked a little like Shakatany. He spoke to her, though he did not remember her name. "Was it you that came in late last night, kinswoman?"

He recognized the turn of her head and smile. She was the one he teased, the one that was indolent, impudent, sweet-natured, solitary; the child born out of season. What the devil was her name?"

"I bring you a message, Eldest."

"Whose message?"

"He called himself by a big name—Jakat-abat-bolter-ra? I can't remember it all."

"Alterra? That's what the farborns call their chiefs. Where did you see this man?" in'

"It wasn't a man, Eldest, it was a farborn. He sent greetings, and a message that he'll come today to Tevar to speak to the Eldest."

"Did he, now?" said Wold, nodding a little, admiring her effrontery. "And you're his messagebearer?"

"He chanced to speak to me ..."

"Yes, yes. Did you know, kinswoman, that among the Men of Pernmek Range an unwed woman who speaks to a farborn is ... punished?"

"Punished how?"

"Never mind."

"The Pernmek men are a lot of kloob-eaters, and they shave their heads. What do they know about farborns, anyway? They never come to the coast. ... I heard once in some tent that the Eldest of my Kin had a farborn wife. In other days."

"That was true. In other days." The girl waited, and Wold looked back, far back into another time: timepast, the Spring. Colors, fragrances long faded, flowers that had not bloomed for forty moonphases, the almost forgotten sound of a voice ... "She was young. She died young. Before Summer ever came." After a while he added, "Besides, that's not the same as an unwed girl speaking to a farborn. There's a difference, kinswoman."

"Why so?"

Though impertinent, she deserved an answer. "There are several reasons, and some are better than others. This mainly: a farborn takes only one wife, so a true-woman marrying him would bear no sons."

"Why would she not, Eldest?"

"Don't women talk in the sister-tent any more? Are you all so ignorant? Because human and farborn can't conceive together! Did you never hear of that? Either a sterile mating or else miscarriages, misf ormed monsters that don't come to term. My wife, Arilia, who was farborn, died in miscarrying a child. Her people have no rule; their women are like men, they marry whom they like. But among Manland there is law: women lie with human men, marry human men, bear human children!"

She looked a little sick and sorry. Presently, looking off at the scurry and bustle on the walls of the Winter City, she said, "A fine law for women who have men to lie with ...

She looked to be about twenty moonphases old, which meant she was the one born out of season, right in the middle of the Summer Fallow when children were not born. The sons of Spring would by now be twice or three times her age, married, remarried, prolific; the Fall-born were all children yet. But some Spring-born fellow would take her for third or fourth wife; there was no need for her to complain. Perhaps he could arrange a marriage for her, though that depended on her affiliations. "Who is your mother, kinswoman?"

She looked straight at his belt-clasp and said, "Shaka-tany was my mother. Have you forgotten her?"

"No, Rolery," he replied after a little while. "I haven't. Listen now, daughter, where did you speak to this Al-terra? Was his name Agat?"

"That was part of his name."

"So I knew his father and his father's father. He is of the kin of the woman ... the farborn we spoke of. He would be perhaps his sister's son or brother's son."

"Your nephew then. My cousin," said the girl, and gave a sudden laugh. Wold also grinned at the grotesque logic of this affiliation.

"I met him when I went to look at the ocean," she explained, "there on the sands. Before I saw a runner coming from the north. None of the women know. Was there news Is the Southing going to begin?"

"Maybe, maybe," said Wold. He had forgotten her name again. "Run along, child, help your sisters in the fields there," he said, and forgetting her, and the bowl of bhan he had been waiting for, he got up heavily and went round his great red-painted tent to gaze at the swarming workers on the earth-houses and the walls of the Winter City, and beyond them to the north. The northern sky this morning ! was very blue, clear, cold, over bare hills. : Vividly he remembered the life in those peak-roofed : warrens dug into the earth: the huddled bodies of a hun-dred sleepers, the old women waking and lighting the fires that sent heat and smoke into all his pores, the smell of boiling wintergrass, the noise, the stink, the close warmth of winter in those burrows under the frozen ground. And the cold cleanly stillness of the world above, wind-scoured or snow-covered, when he and the other young hunters ranged far from Tevar hunting the snowbirds and korio and the fat wespries that followed the frozen rivers^ down from the remotest north. And over there, right across the valley, from a patch of snowcrop there had risen up the lolling white head of a snowghoul... . And before then, before the snow and ice and white beasts of Winter, there had once before been bright weather like this: a bright day of golden wind and blue sky, cold above the hills. And he, no man, only a brat among the brats and women, looking up at flat white faces, red plumes, capes of queer, feathery grayish fur; voices had barked like beasts in words he did not understand, while the men of his Kin and the Elders of Askatevar had answered in stern voices, bidding the flat-faces go on. And before that there had been a man who came running from the north with the side of his face burnt and bloody, crying,

"The Gaal, the Gaal! They came through our camp at Pekna! ..."

Clearer than any present voice he heard that hoarse shout ring across his lifetime, the sixty moonphases that lay between him and that staring, listening brat, between this bright day and that bright day. Where was Pekna? Lost under the rains, the snows; and the thaws of Spring had washed away the bones of the massacred, the rotted tents, the memory, the name.

There would be no massacres this time when the Gaal came south through the Range of Askatevar. He had seen to that. There was some good in outliving your tune and remembering old evils. Not one clan or family of the Men of all this Range was left out in the Summerlands to be caught unawares by the Gaal or the first blizzard. They were all here. Twenty hundreds of them, with the little Fall-borns thick as leaves skipping about under your feet, and women chattering and gleaning in the fields like flocks of migratory birds, and men swarming to build up the houses and walls of the Winter City with the old stones on the old foundations, to hunt the last of the migrant beasts, to cut and store endless wood from the forests and peat from the Dry Bog, to round up and settle the harm in great byres and feed them until the wintergrass should begin to grow. All of them, in this labor that had gone on half a moonphase now, had obeyed hun, and he had obeyed the old Way of Man. When the Gaal came they would shut the city gates; when the blizzards came they would shut the earth-house doors, and they would survive till Spring. They would survive.

He sat down on the ground behind his tent, lowering himself heavily, sticking out his gnarled, scarred legs into the sunlight. Small and whitish the sun looked, though the sky was flawlessly clear; it seemed half the size of the great sun of Summer, smaller even than the moon. "Sun shrunk to moon, cold comes soon ..." The ground was damp with the long rains that had plagued them all this moonphase, and scored here and there with the little ruts left by the migrating footroots.

What was it the girl had asked him—about farborns, about the runner, that was it. The fellow had come panting hi yesterday—was it yesterday?—with a tale of the Gaal attacking the Winter City of Tlokna, up north there near the Green Mountains. There was lie or panic in that tale. The Gaal never attacked stone walls. Flat-nosed barbarians, in their plumes and dirt, running southward like homelsss animals at the approach of Winter—they couldn't take a city. And anyway, Pekna was only a little hunting camp, not a walled city. The runner lied. It was all right. They would survive. Where was the fool woman with his breakfast? Here, now, it was warm, here in the sun ...

Wold's eighth wife crept up with a basket of steaming bhan, saw he was asleep, sighed grumpily, and crept away again to the cooking-fire.

That afternoon when the farborn came to his tent, dour guards around him and a ragtag of leering, jeering children trailing behind, Wold remembered what the girl had said, laughing: "Your nephew, my cousin." So he heaved himself up and stood to greet the farborn with averted face and hand held out in the greeting of equals.

As an equal the alien greeted him, unhesitating. They had always that arrogance, that air of thinking themselves as good as men, whether or not they really believed it. This fellow was tall, well-made, still young; he walked like a chief. Except for his darkness and his dark, unearthly eyes, he might have been thought to be human.

"I am Jakob Agat, Eldest."

"Be welcome in my tent and the tents of my Kin, Al-terra."