Part 6 (2/2)

”Perhaps the wind whispered it to me.”

”Or perhaps the wise woman.”

”What are they, Kazimni?”

”We're great talkers here in the Barrens. Great tellers of tales. We fill the winter nights with talk. When our throats go dry with it we wet them with more khamm and talk again.”

”What are they?”

”The Ha.r.s.enyi nomads bring us tales, and so do the darkland traders. Sometimes they winter with us at Izvand, and those are good winters.” He paused. ”I have heard stories of Northhounds.”

Stark repeated the name. ”Northhounds.” It had a solemn ring to it.

”I can't tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove. Northhounds are a sort of demon to the Ha.r.s.enyi, and to some of the traders. Monsters that appear out of the snow-mist and do terrible things. It is said that the Lords Protector created them long ago, to guard their Citadel. It is said that they still guard it, and woe take any wanderer who stumbles into their domain.”

Hairs p.r.i.c.kled briefly at the back of Stark's neck, just at the memory of those shapes he had seen in the Water of Vision. ”I think you can believe in Northhounds, Kazimni.” He changed the subject. ”Is that why your people are content with life in the Barrens-because they are free?”

”Is it not enough?” Kazimni jerked his chin contemptuously toward the Irnanese. ”If we lived soft, as they do, we too would be slaves, as they are.”

Stark could understand that. ”You must have known what brought on the trouble at Irnan.”

”Yes. Good trouble. As soon as we've rested and seen our wives, we'll be back on the Border. There'll be need of fighting men.”

”No doubt. But how would your people feel about emigrating?”

”To another world?” Kazimni shook his head. ”The land shapes us. We are what we are because of it. If we were in another place, we would be another people. No. Old Sun will last us yet a while. And life in the Barrens is not so bad. You will see that when we come to Izvand.”

The road looped and wound among the frozen ponds. There were other travelers on it, though not as many as in the Fertile Belt. They were of a different breed, darker and grimmer than the flotsam of the southern roads. There was a good deal of trade back and forth across the border; drovers with herds for the markets of Izvand and Komrey, merchants with wagon-loads of grain and wool, strings of pack-animals carrying manufactured goods from the southern workshops, long lines of great creaking wains hauling timber from some far place in the mountains. Coming the other way were caravans bringing furs and salt and dried fish. All traveled in groups, well armed, each lot keeping to itself. There were inns and rest-houses along the way but Kazimni avoided them, preferring to camp in the open. ”Thieves and robbers,” he said of the inn-keepers. And of the accommodations, ”They stink.”

The Izvandians moved rapidly, pa.s.sing everything else on the road. And yet sometimes Stark felt as though that movement was only an illusion and they were trapped forever in the unchanging landscape.

Gerrith felt his impatience. ”I share it,” she told him. ''For you, one man. For me, a people. Yet things must go at their own pace.”

”Does your gift tell you that?”

She smiled at him. It was night, with the Three Ladies s.h.i.+ning through gaps in scudding cloud-wrack. They were in an unfamiliar quarter of the sky now, but still beautiful. Old friends. Stark had grown quite fond of them. Nearer at hand, the light of a little fire flared and flickered across Gerrith's face.

”Something tells me. Everything is in train now, and the end has already been written. We have only to meet it.”

Stark grunted, unconvinced. The beasts, huddled together with their tails to the wind, munched at heaps of moss piled up for them. The Izvandians laughed and chattered around their fires. The Irnanese were wrapped bundles, suffering in silence.

Gerrith said, ”Why do you love this man Ashton so deeply?”

”But you know that. He saved my life.”

”And so you cross the stars to risk losing it on a world you never heard of before? To go through all this when you know that he may already be dead? It's not enough, Stark. Will you tell me?”

”Tell you what?”

”Who you are. What you are. A lesser gift even than mine could sense that you're different. Inside, I mean. There's a stillness, something I can't touch. Tell me about you and Ashton.”

So he told her, of his childhood on a cruel planet far too close to its sun, where the heat killed by day and the frost by night, where the sky thundered and the rocks split, where the ground shook and the mountains fell down.

”I was born there. We were part of a mining colony. A quake and a great fall of rock killed everyone but me. I'd have died too, but the People took me in. They were the aborigines. They weren't human, not quite. They still had their hairy pelts, and they didn't talk much, a few clicks and grunts, cries for hunting and warning and calling-together. They shared all they had with me.”

Heat and cold and hunger. Those were the most of it. But their hairy bodies warmed his small nakedness in the bitter night, and their hard hands fed him. They taught him love, and patience, how to hunt the great rock-lizard, how to suffer, how to survive. He remembered their faces, wrinkled, snouted, toothed. Beautiful faces to him, beautiful and wise with the wisdom of first beginnings. His people. Always his people, his only people. And yet they had named him Man-Without-a-Tribe.

”More Earthmen came, in time,” Stark said. ”They needed the food and water the People were using, so they killed them. They were only animals. Me they put in a cage and kept for a curiosity. They poked sticks between the bars to make me snap and snarl at them. They were going to kill me too, when the novelty wore off. Then Ashton came.”

Ashton the administrator, armed with the lightnings of authority. Stark smiled wryly.

”To me he was just another flat-faced enemy, something to be hated and killed. I'd lost all my human origins, of course, and the humans I'd met had given me little cause to love them. Ashton took me, all the same. I couldn't have been a very pleasant charge, but he had the patience of mountains. He tamed me. He taught me house manners, and how to speak in words, and most of all he taught me that while there are bad men, there are also good ones. Yes, he did give me much more than just my life.”

”I understand now, ” Gerrith said, and he thought she did, truly, as well as anyone could. She stirred the fire and sighed. ”I'm sorry I can't tell you whether your friend is still alive.”

”We'll know that soon enough,” Stark said, and lay down on the cold ground and slept.

And dreamed.

He was following Old One up a cliff, angry because his feet did not have long clever toes, fiercely determined to make up for his deformity by climbing twice as hard and twice as high. The sun burned terribly on his naked back. The rock scorched him. Black peaks pierced the sky on all sides.

Old One slid without sound into a crevice, making the imperative sign. The boy N'Chaka crept in beside him. Old One pointed with his throwing-stick. High above them on a ledge, its huge jaws open in sensuous languor, a rock-lizard slept half-lidded in the sun.

With infinite care, moving one muscle at a time, his belly tight with emptiness and hope, the boy began again to follow Old One up the cliff- He did not like the dream. It saddened him even in sleep, so that he started awake in order to escape it. He sat a long time by the dying fire, listening to the lonely sounds of the night. When he slept again it was without memories.

Next day, in the afternoon, they saw the roofs of a stockaded town by the sh.o.r.e of a frozen sea. With pride and affection, Kazimni said, ”There is Izvand.”

11.

It was a st.u.r.dy town, solidly built of timber brought from the mountains, with steep roofs to shed the snow. Izvand was the trade center for this part of the Inner Barrens, so that there was a constant coming and going of wagons and pack trains. Traffic churned the narrow streets by day, and at night the mud froze into ankle-breaking chaos. In the summer, Kazimni said, fis.h.i.+ng was the business of many Izvandians, and as soon as the ice went out of the harbor the high-prowed boats would be hauled from their winter sheds.

”Not a bad life,” he said. ”Not bad at all. Plenty of food and fighting. Why don't you stay with us, Stark?”

Stark shook his head, and Kazimni shrugged. ”Very well. This is the season for the darkland traders to start moving north. I'll see if I can arrange something. Meantime, I know a good inn.”

The inn had a creaking sign, much weathered, depicting some large and improbable fish with horns. There were stabling and fodder for the beasts, and rooms for the people. These were small and cold, sleeping four apiece in two close-beds, and they had lacked soap and water for a long time. The common-room steamed with warmth and sweat and the not-unappetizing odor of fish soup. It was good to be warm again, to eat hot food and drink khamm, which was like sweet white lightning. Stark enjoyed these simple pleasures without guilt.

When he saw that the others were all finished he stood up, and Halk said, ”Where are you going?”

”I have a mind to see the town.”

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