Planet Of Exile (5 page)

"It's a trick to get our men away up north on the Range, caught in the first snow, while the farborns steal our flocks and wives and rob the granaries here. They're not men, there's no good in them!" Walmek ranted. Rarely had he found so good a subject to rant on.

"That's all they've ever wanted, our women. No wonder they're growing few and dying out, all they bear is monsters. They want our women so they can bring up human children as theirs!" This was a youngish family-head, very excited. "Aagh!" Wold growled, disgusted at this mishmash of misinformation, but he kept sitting and let Umaksuman set the fellow straight.

"And what if the farborn spoke truth?" Umaksuman went on. "What if the Gaal come through our Range all together, thousands of them? Are we ready to fight them?"

"But the walls aren't finished, the gates aren't up, the last harvest isn't stored," an older man said. This, more than distrust of the aliens, was the core of the question. If the able men marched off to the north, could the women and children and old men finish all the work of readying the Winter City before winter was upon them? Maybe, maybe not. It was a heavy chance to take on the word of a farborn.

Wold himself had made no decision, and looked to abide by that of the Elders. He liked the farborn Agat, and would guess him neither deluded nor a liar; but there was no telling. All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens. You could not tell. Perhaps the Gaal were coming as an army. Certainly the Winter was coming. Which enemy first?

The Elders swayed toward doing nothing, but Umaksu-man's faction prevailed to the extent of having runners sent to the two neighboring Ranges, Allakskat and Pernmek, to sound them out on the project of a joint defense. That was all the decision made; the shaman released the scrawny harm he had caught in case a decision for war was reached and must be sealed by lapidation, and the Elders dispersed.

Wold was sitting in his tent with men of his Kin over a good hot pot of bhan, when there was a commotion outside. Umaksuman went out, shouted at everybody to clear out, and reentered the great tent behind the f arborn Agat.

"Welcome, Alterra," said the old man, and with a sly glance at Ms two grandsons, "will you sit with us and eat?"

He liked to shock people; he always had. That was why he had always been running off to the farborns in the old days. And this gesture freed him in his mind, from the vague shame he suffered since speaking before the other men of the farborn girl who had so long ago been his wife.

Agat, calm and grave as before, accepted and ate enough to show he took the hospitality seriously; he waited till they were all done eating, and Ukwet's wife had scuttled out with the leavings, then he said, "Eldest, I listen."

"There's not much to hear," Wold replied. He belched. "Runners go to Pernmek and Allakskat. But few spoke for war. The cold grows each day now: safety lies inside walls, under roofs. We don't walk about in timepast as your people do, but we know what the Way of Man has always been and is, and hold to it."

"Your way is good," the farborn said, "good enough, maybe, that the Gaal have learned it from you.

In past Winters you were stronger than the Gaal because your clans were gathered together against them. Now the Gaal too have learned that strength lies in numbers."

"that news is true," said Ukwet, who was one of Wold's grandsons, though older than Wold's son Umaksuman.

Agat looked up at him in silence. Ukwet turned aside at once from that straight, dark gaze.

"If it's not true, then why are the Gaal so late coming south?" said Umaksuman. "What's keeping them? Have they ever waited till the harvests were in before?"

"Who knows?" said Wold. "Last Year they came long before the Snowstar rose, I remember that. But who remembers the Year before last?" "Maybe they're following the Mountain Trail," said the other grandson, "and won't come through Askatevar at all."

"The runner said they had taken Tlokna," Umaksuman said sharply, "and Tlokna is north of Tevar on the Coast Trail. Why do we disbelieve this news, why do we wait to act?"

"Because men who fight wars in Winter don't live till Spring," Wold growled.

"But if they come—"

"If they come, we'll fight."

There was a little pause. Agat for once looked at none of them, but kept his dark gaze lowered like a human.

"People say," Ukwet remarked with a jeering note, sensing triumph, "that the farborns have strange powers. I know nothing about all that, I was born on the Summer-lands and never saw farborns before this moonphase, let alone sat to eat with one. But if they're witches and have such powers, why would they need our help against the Gaal?"

"I do not hear you!" Wold thundered, his face purple and his eyes watering. Ukwet hit his face.

Enraged by this insolence to a tent-guest, and by his own confusion and in-decisiveness which made him argue against both sides, Wold sat breathing heavily, staring with inflamed eyes at the young man, who kept his face hidden.

"I talk," Wold said at last, his voice still loud and deep, free for a little from the huskiness of old age. "I talk: listen! Runners will go up the Coast Trail until they meet the Southing. And behind them, two days behind, but no farther than the border of our Range, warriors will follow—all men born between Midspring and the Summer Fallow. If the Gaal come in force, the warriors will drive them east to the mountains; if not, they will come back to Tevar."

Umaksuman laughed aloud and said, "Eldest, no man leads us but you!"

Wold growled and belched and settled down. "You'll lead the warriors, though," he told Umaksuman dourly. Agat, who had not spoken for some time, said in his quiet way, "My people can send three hundred and fifty men. We'll go up the old beach road, and join with your men at the border of Askatevar."

He rose and held out his hand. Sulky at having been driven into this commitment, and still shaken by his emotion, Wold ignored him. Umaksuman was on his feet in a flash, his hand against the farborn's. They stood there for a moment in the firelight like day and night. Agat dark, shadowy, somber, Umaksuman fair-skinned, light-eyed, radiant.

The decision was made, and Wold knew he could force it upon the other Elders. He knew also that it was the last decision he would ever make. He could send them to war: but Umaksuman would come back, the leader of the warriors, and thereby the strongest leader among the Men of Askatevar.

Wold's action was his own abdication. Umaksuman would be the young chief. He would close the circle of the Stone-Pounding, he would lead the hunters in Winter, the forays in Spring, the great wanderings of the long days of Summer. His Year was just beginning ...

"Go on," Wold growled at them all. "Call the Stone-Pounding for tomorrow, Umaksuman. Tell the shaman to stake out a hann, a fat one with some blood in it." He would not speak to Agat. They left, all the tall young men. He sat crouched on his stiff hams by his fire, staring into the yellow flames as if into the heart of a lost brightness, Summer's irrecoverable warmth.

CHAPTER FIVE: Twilight in the Woods

THE FARBORN CAME out of Umaksuman's tent and stood a minute talking with the young chief, both of them looking to the north, eyes narrowed against the biting gray wind. Agat moved his outstretched hand as if he spoke of the mountains. A flaw of wind carried a word or two of what he said to Rolery where she stood watching on the path up to the city gate. As she heard him speak a tremor went through her, a little rush of fear, and darkness through her veins, making her remember how that voice had spoken in her mind, in her flesh, calling her to him.

Behind that like a distorted echo in her memory came the harsh command, outward as a slap, when on the forest path he had turned on her, telling her to go, to get away from him.

All of a sudden she put down the baskets she was carrying. They were moving today from the red tents of her nomad childhood into the warren of peaked roofs and underground halls and tunnels and alleys of the Winter City, and all her cousin-sisters and aunts and nieces were bustling and squealing and scurrying up and down the paths and in and out of the tents and the gates with furs and boxes and branches tearing at her clothes, catching her hood. The there beside the path and walked off toward the forest.

"Rolery! Ro-o-olery!" shrilled the voices that were for- ever shrilling after her, accusing, calling, screeching at her back. She never turned, but walked right on. As soon as she was well into the woods she began to run. When all sound of voices was lost in the soughing, groaning silence of the wind-strained trees, and nothing recalled the camp of her people except a faint, bitter scent of woodsmoke in the wind, she slowed down-Great fallen trunks barred the path now hi places, and must be climbed over or crawled under, the stiff dead branches tearing at her clothes, cathcing her hood. The woods were not safe in this wind; even now, somewhere off up-the ridge she heard the muttering crash of a tree falling before the wind's push. She did not care. She felt like going down onto those gray sands again and standing still, perfectly still, to watch the foaming thirty-foot wall of water come down upon her ... As suddenly as she had started off, she stopped, and stood still on the twilit path.

The wind blew and ceased and blew. A murky sky writhed and lowered over the network of leafless branches. It was already half dark here. All anger and purpose drained out of the girl, leaving her standing in a kind of scared stupor, hunching her shoulders against the wind. Something white flashed in front of her and she cried out, but did not move. Again the white movement passed, then stilled suddenly above her on a jagged branch: a great beast or bird, winged, pure white, white above and below, with short, sharp hooked lips that parted and closed, and staring silver eyes.

Gripping the branch with four naked talons the creature gazed down at her, and she up at it, neither moving. The silver eyes never blinked. Abruptly great white wings shot out, wider than a man's height, and beat among the branches, breaking them. The creature beat its white wings and screamed, then as the wind gusted launched out into the air and made its way heavily off between the branches and the driving clouds.

"A stormbringer." Agat spoke, standing on the path a few yards behind her. "They're supposed to bring the blizzards."

The great silver creature had driven all her wits away. The little rush of tears that accompanied all strong feelings in her race bunded her a moment. She had meant to stand and mock him, to jeer at him, having seen the resentment under his easy arrogance when people in Tevar slighted him, treated him as what he was, a being of a lower kind. But the white creature, the stormbringer, had frightened her and she broke out, staring straight at him as she had at it, "I hate you, you're not a man, I hate you!"

Then her tears stopped, she looked away, and they both stood there in silence for quite a while.

"Rolery," said the quiet voice, "look at me."

She did not. He came forward, and she drew back crying, "Don't touch me!" hi a voice like the stormbringer's scream, her face distorted. "Get hold of yourself," he said. "Here—take my hand, take it!" He caught her as she struggled to break away, and held both her wrists. Again they stood without moving.

"Let me go," she said at last in her normal voice. He released her at once.

She drew a long breath.

"You spoke—I heard you speak inside me. Down there on the sands. Can you do that again?"

He was watching her, alert and quiet. He nodded. "Yes. But I told you then that I never would."

"I still hear it. I feel your voice." She put her hands over her ears.

"I know ... I'm sorry. I didn't know you were a hilf— a Tevaran, when I called you. It's against the law. And anyhow it shouldn't have worked ..."

"What's a hilf?"

"What we call you."

"What do you call yourselves?"

"Men." She looked around them at the groaning twilit woods, gray aisles, writhing cloud-roof. This gray world in motion was very strange, but she was no longer scared. His touch, his actual hand's touch canceling the insistent impalpable sense of his presence, had given her calm, which grew as they spoke together. She saw now that she had been half out of her mind this last day and night.

"Can all your people do that... speak that way?"

"Some can. It's a skill one can learn. Takes practice. Come here, sit down a while. You've had it rough." He was always harsh and yet there was an edge, a hint of something quite different in his voice now: as if the urgency with which he had called to her on the sands were transmuted into an infinitely restrained, unconscious appeal, a reaching out. They sat down on a fallen basuk-tree a couple of yards off the path. She noticed how differently he moved and sat than a man of her race; the schooling of his body, the sum of his gestures, was very slightly, but completely, unfamiliar.

She was particularly aware of his dark-skinned hands, clasped together between his knees. He went on, "Your people could learn mindspeech if they wanted to. But they never have, they call it witchcraft, I think ... Our books say that we ourselves learned it from another race, long ago, on a world called Rokanan. It's a skill as well as a gift."

"Can you hear my mind when you want?"

"That is forbidden," he said with such finality that her fears on that score were quite disposed of.

"Teach me the skill," she said with suddea childishness.

"It would take all Winter."

"It took you all fall?"

"And part of Summer too." He grinned slightly.

"What does hilf mean?"

"It's a word from our old language. It means 'Highly intelligent life-form.'"

"Where is another world?" "Well—there are a lot of them. Out there. Beyond sun and moon."

"Then you did fall out of the sky? What for? How did you get from behind the sun to the seacoast here?"

"I'll tell you if you want to hear, but it's not just a tale, Rolery. There's a lot we don't understand, but what we do know of our history is true."

"I hear," she whispered in the ritual phrase, impressed, but not entirely subdued.