A woman sat at the table, her head down, her shoulders hunched high. Two grown sisters had lived in this hut for the past half-dozen years. Rahm pulled away sharply when it struck him what it likely meant that only one was there tonight.
He turned and hurried across the road and ducked into the darkness between two houses. For a moment he wondered if he was lost, but, at the glow from another hut’s shutter, open perhaps three inches, he realized where he was.
Going up to the dim strip of light, he looked through. On a table a lot more rickety than the one in the last hut, a clay lamp burned with a flame more orange than yellow. Sitting on a bench, back against the wall and staring straight forward, was a man—whose name Rahm didn’t know.
But he knew those shoulders—and the short, spiky hair: and the face. The man, not half a dozen years older than Rahm, worked on one of the quarry crews, sometimes with Abrid and… Kern.
Odd, Rahm thought, that there are people in my town whom I really don’t know—though I’ve seen them, now and again, all my life. I probably know the names and the names of most of the relatives of practically every field worker. But do I know more than a dozen of those who work in the stone pits…?
The surprise, of course, was that the man lived
here.
But then, Rahm went on thinking, that is what makes this town mine. It still holds for me perfectly simple things to learn, like what the name is or where the house lies of one of its stone workers…
Then the thought interrupted itself: Is he blind… ? The man’s eyes were open. He looked right
at the window. Only inches out in the darkness, Rahm could not believe himself unseen. But the man’s expression was the complete blank of one who slept with his eyes wide. Standing in the darkness, concentrating to read that blankness, Rahm was equally still, equally blank—
The man started forward.
Rahm started back—but something held him.
The man was up, moving to the window. He looked out at Rahm, and gave a grunt—the way quarrymen so often did. “I thank thee,” he said, softly, roughly—though Rahm had no idea why—and smiled. “But thou hast better go. The patrol comes soon.” He pulled the window closed.
Rahm stood in the dark, bewildered by the exchange. What, he found himself wondering, would I have seen had I looked into this same window last night before the wailing? Two other quarry workers sharing the hut with him? Perhaps a woman—perhaps two?
Some children? What absences in the house today did the blankness—or the smile—mean?
The return from his wander the previous day had started Rahm pondering all he knew of his village. But his return tonight, after the violence of the night before and the wonders of the day, had started him pondering all he did not know of it.
Rahm crossed the dark path. Nearing the common, he walked by more close-set huts.
Old Hara the Weaver’s cottage had never had a shutter—at least not on its back window. But a hanging had been tacked up across it—although, at one edge, it had fallen away so that a little light
came through. Within, he could hear the old woman talking—to herself, Rahm realized, as, with his fingertips on the window ledge, he put his eye to the opening between the window edge and the cloth.
“They shall not have it! They shall not! I said it in the council, and I say it now: they shall not have it!” He could see Hara moving about before the fire, a sharp-shouldered figure. Now she put down an armful of cloth—and, taking up a cooking blade, she began to slash at one piece and another as she lifted them. “Never for them—they shall not!” With a hard, hard motion, she flung one handful and another of rags into the flames.
Rahm pulled back—even though the pieces did not flare.
He turned from the hut’s sagging wall, to start away, when, from around the corner—
—lights, horses, hooves!
“There, Çironian! What are you doing out?”
Rahm whirled, hands up over his eyes against the light.
“You know the ordinance, Çironian. No windows or doors are to be open after dark! No man, woman, or child is to be on the street! You’re under arrest! Come with us.”
“With you—?” Rahm began, squinting between his fingers as he pulled them from his eyes.
“Anyone the patrol catches out past sundown is under arrest, Çironian. Do not make further trouble for yourself.”
A rope dropped over his shoulders to be yanked tight. Another soldier was down off his horse to grasp Rahm’s hands and pull them behind him. “We’ll take him with us on the rest of the patrol around the
common, before we deliver him to the holding cell.” Another rope went round his wrists.
As the horse in front started away, Rahm was tugged forward, so that he stumbled, nearly falling.
He kept his feet though. The feeling was a kind of numbness. (The other Myetran soldier was back on his horse now. Horses clopped on the street at both sides of him.) But within the numbness there was something else: it was a feeling hard for Rahm to describe. It was as if the thing that had, the night before, grown to fill him, that had almost become him, had now, at the horse’s first tug, torn loose from him. It was as if his flesh had parted and the thing that had filled him had remained standing, unmoving on the street—so that only the rind of him was dragged away, a limp thing collapsing through the light-lashed dark.
Not that the thing left behind stayed still.
It followed. It came steadily, easily after them, even as Rahm stumbled on. It moved firmly, watched impassively. (For moments Rahm was convinced that if he glanced back, he would see it, coming after them, lowering in the dark.) It observed them, impartial, now like something circling them,’ now like something walking with them. That impartiality, that impassivity, that sheer chill, was more unsettling than the indifference of the soldiers in front of him and beside him, taking him through the streets about the common—because Rahm’s stumbling was, anyway—most of it—feigned. When his wrists had yanked from the soldier’s hands, the knot hadn’t been pulled tight yet: it would have been nothing to bunch his fingers and, though the hemp might burn, wrench a hand free. The rope around his arms and chest was only, he was sure, one great shrug away from coming loose. These
Myetrans, Rahm thought, were used to dealing with terrified men and women.
But, Rahm realized, as he stumbled and blinked in their passing lights, trying to look terrified and cringing, the thing that went with them—the thing that was really he—was
not
frightened. (Did they, Rahm wondered, find the sight of a frightened man or woman somehow beautiful? But they did not even look at him. Were they, perhaps, like the Winged Ones, listening? He did not think so.) It was not frightened at all.
F
ROM
the corner of Hara’s hut, Naä watched the soldiers ride off with Rahm. She
had seen him at the first
house, followed him to the second—recognizing him only in the light from the open shutter, before it closed (till now, she’d assumed him killed in the first night’s massacre)—and come behind him quietly at the third. She’d followed him, through the breezy night, excitement growing, anticipating what he might say to her, his surprise at seeing her, his pleasure at knowing she was alive and free as he was, when finally she would overtake him with a word—
Really, she’d been
about
to speak—when the patrol had come up, and, in a moment’s cowardice she cursed herself for, she’d ducked back out of the light and stood, still and stiff as she could stand, one fist tight against her belly, her back against the shack wall’s shaggy bark.
The whole capture quivered before her, leaving her with the anger, the frustration, the outrage you might have at a child or lover snatched from your arms. She watched them ride off with Rahm—and, by starts, hesitations, and sprints, at a safe distance, one street away from the common, she followed them.
Since she
had first left Calvicon, Naä had pretty much done as she wanted—within the constraints necessity placed about a wandering singer’s song. She was a woman of strong feeling and quiet demeanor. Last night, she’d watched what had happened in the Çironian village, but from the ends of alleys, crouching behind fences, up through the chink in a grain-cellar door, while soldiers and villagers had rattled the boards above her, till one arm broke through, to flail, bloody, about her in the dark, hitting her on the ear and shoulders, while she knelt in the three-foot space below, trying not to make a sound while others screamed above her.
Before sun-up, Naä had climbed quietly out, stumbled over the bodies, and—like Rahm—started from the town. She had not, however, gone as far.
She walked an hour in the dark, till the salmon-streaked promise of sunrise hemmed the night. She stopped beneath a maple grove, looked down among dark roots squirming at her feet, put her hands to the sides of her head and, breathing deeply, stood awhile, now with eyes opened, now with them closed. A few times, she gave an audible gasp.
Once she shook her head.
Then she took her hands down slowly, to let them fall, finally, against her thighs.
A minute later, she whispered,
“No…!”
Then she turned and began to walk
briskly back. At the edge of the burial meadow, she crouched in a clump of brush, while one and another wagon pulled up to the field all through the morning, each accompanied by three or four soldiers, to dump its corpses.
To the sound of creaking cart-beds and thumping bodies, she fell asleep—and woke, hours later, in the hot sun,with a nauseous smell in her nose and a bad taste in her mouth. Looking carefully through the brush, she saw that no attempt had been made to cover the bodies on the grass.
One cart had been left near.
But no one was about.
Keeping to the woods, she went around to the charred ruins of Ienbar’s shack. Again, she waited for moments. Then, she pulled her harp around before her, dropped to her knees, tugged aside a half burned log, and dug out a hole for the instrument. With some cloth, burned along one side, she wrapped it. A large rock went over the opening. Then she scattered dirt and cinders on it. Fifteen minutes later, as she kicked away knee prints, footprints, then stepped back onto the grass, she was sure no one would know her harp was entombed there. Walking along the burned foundation, she paused to look back, then beat at the charcoal on her knees and hands, now and again wiping at her smudged face. Just inside, on a log gone gray and black over its burned-away side, the blade discolored near the bone handle with burn marks but the point sharp and the edge bright, one of Ienbar’s well-sharpened cooking knives lay. She stepped in, picked it up, looked at it on both sides, then pushed it under the sash at her belt.
Very soon she’d hunted up the site of the Myetran camp.
Hidden in the brush and low trees on a slight rise, Naä
watched awhile. She thought hard. When she decided what she might do, she turned back—
And caught her breath.
She let it out again, with one hand at her throat; then, as she recovered herself, touched the tree beside her. “Qualt—I didn’t realize you were…”
When he dropped from the low branch on which he’d been sitting, she caught her breath again, because he was so loud in the leaves around them. “Naä,” he said, though obviously he’d been watching her for minutes, “what dost thou here?”
“The same thing I bet you are. Look,” and she turned back to the camp below them. “Those open carts there—can you believe it, they’ve brought their water in them, over from the quarry. Someone goes to get a dipper of water from them perhaps every five or ten minutes. It would be easy to get behind them and… What could you put in them, Qualt, to foul the supply and make the drinker gut-sick… ? And—”
The youth settled on one hip, grinning. “Yes?”
“Right over there is the back of their enclosure, where they’ve put their horses. It’s very close to the woods. If I could get some tinder and start some dry weeds burning, I could heave them inside—I know horses, Qualt. They don’t like fire. And if they bolted, those railings wouldn’t hold five minutes… now if there were only something we could do about the prisoners. I think that’s the corral where they’ve got them, way across there. But I don’t believe I could get that far without being spotted. There was all this activity there, just about twenty minutes back—”
The young garbage collector nodded, dappled light behind one ear making it luminously red—Qualt had tied his
long hair back. “They took many of them back into town—to put them in the council building.”
“In the council building?” Naä asked.
“It looked to me as if they took everyone between fifteen and fifty years old and decided to put them in the cellar of the strong building. Only the old ones—and the little children—are left out there, in the hot sun.”
“You saw them?” she said. “I was here twenty minutes ago, and I couldn’t… But you saw them—take the prisoners from here, all the way into town and put them in the council building… ?”
Qualt pursed his lips a moment, blinking. Then he said: “Come. Thou knowest where my hut is, by the dump?”
“I’ve never been there. But Rimgia once pointed out the path to it.”
Qualt snuffled, grinning; she realized it was a joke when he said: “There—thy nose will tell thee where it is if thou comest anywhere close. Go on—and meet me there.”