Anarchaos

XXII

It was odd to think of moonlight as signifying day, but the period without moon was so utterly black that the time of moonglow by comparison took on a radiance as bright as day on any world in the cosmos. The moon itself was about half again as large as the moon of Earth, and much yellower in color, the result no doubt of the red sun it was reflecting. The light it produced on the ground was pale and luminescent, with perhaps a touch more of a swollen yellow than in moonlight on Earth.

This moon didn’t exactly rise in the normal sense of the term. It appeared at first as a thin curving crescent low toward the horizon, thickened to half-moon shape by “midmorning,” was a full moon when at its zenith in the sky, and reversed this process as it slid down the curve of sky toward the horizon again, ending as a crescent, thinner, thinner, then abruptly slicing out, as though a switch had been clicked in some massive control room in the sky.

The night, that time when the moon was blindly groping through the dayside sky, was almost utterly black. Hell stood lonely in a sparsely starred sector of space, as though ostracized for its sins from some civilized star cluster; only a few stray spots of light broke the blind blackness of the sky.

I never left the cabin at night. Once the afternoon moon had reached three-quarter I went inside for good, bolting the door and listening often for the sounds of my enemies approaching. I no longer slept in the bunk, but made for myself a mounded bed of skins and blankets by the door, and slept there with a pistol dose by my hand. In the mornings I left the cabin cautiously, clutching Torgmund’s rifle as I opened the door inch by inch, prepared to fight off those who might be skulking just out of sight against the outer wall. I felt a great and continuous fear during those days I spent at the cabin, believing the world to be full of faceless enemies out to capture me. I was never afraid that they might murder me, but only that they would capture me. I allowed my beard to grow, dressed myself in Torgmund’s home-made clothing, and when walking about outside did my best to change my normal posture and manner — all to keep those unknown watching enemies from recognizing me. Because it was me I believed they were after, me personally, though I couldn’t have said why.

I was full of strange thoughts then, like the business of Torgmund’s body. Killing him had affected me badly, given me nightmares and worried my mind. I had returned now to a full awareness of what I had come to Anarchaos for in the first place, the vengeance of my dead brother, and it seemed to me that if I were to be worthy and capable of avenging him I would have to have a stronger and more impersonal attitude toward death, so for the first few days I wouldn’t bury him. He kept well, lying in the cold and the snow, and I made a point of eating one meal each day outdoors, where I could see him, forcing myself to watch him as I downed a bowl of stew or gnawed at the hard biscuits. But after three days I could stand it no more, and decided to bury him anyway.

It was then I discovered that the cabin was not built on the ground but on a thickness of permanent ice down under the snow. I chopped through it with Torgmund’s pick, swinging it one-handed, and reached dirt about a foot down. My pick bounced back from that ground as though it were hitting iron. So Torgmund would have to do without burial.

Eventually I merely dragged him some distance away from the cabin and covered him with snow. In the night after that I heard the moaning and yapping of animals a little way off, but I never went to look and so I don’t know precisely what happened.

I stayed at the cabin ten days, building my strength. Torgmund had left me almost endless provisions, including a separate unheated shack filled with smoked and frozen meat. Also there were sacks of flour, quantities of a root vegetable like a cross between a potato and a carrot, and commercial tins of powder which combined with hot water to make that coffee-like drink.

All in all, Torgmund had created a fine principality for himself, consisting of three and a half structures, the half being the slave quarters for me that he had never had a chance to finish. In addition to the cabin itself and the storage shed there was a kind of squat barn containing quantities of hay and two hairhorses, with his wagon sitting just out front. Also in the barn were a number of traps, mostly looking as though they’d been brought in for repairs.

I spent many of the moonlight hours in the barn, familiarizing myself with the hairhorses and them with me, since I would need them eventually to take me out of here and back to the Anarchaos version of civilization.

They never shied away from me at all, not even at first. Perhaps, with Torgmund’s coat on, they thought I was their master. I doubt they had a much-developed sense of smell, since their own odor was quite strong and likely to blot out subtler aromas. The smell of them reminded me of rancid soup.

Before this I had seen hairhorses only at a certain distance and in passing. Now that I was close to them I saw they were somewhat larger than I’d thought, as powerfully built as a Terran plowhorse but somewhat taller, with long thick gray-black hair like that of a mountain goat back on Earth. Their heads were somewhat wider and shorter than a horse’s, but otherwise they were built very similiarly indeed. Their eyes were large and brown and inevitably studied me with the calmness of a cow, lacking that nervousness always to be seen in the eyes of horses on Earth.

Since they were mostly like a horse I treated them like horses, patting their sides and speaking softly to them. They seemed totally unafraid, even disinterested, showing enthusiasm only when I daily kicked fodder down to them from the tiny loft above their heads. At such times they came very close to actually prancing.

I had never ridden a horse on Earth and knew next to nothing about them, but in a way I considered that possibly an advantage, since I couldn’t make any mistake in handling these creatures based on their similarity in appearance to something they were not. I was learning from scratch and therefore moved with a caution I might not otherwise have shown.

There was a saddle in the barn, and by a process of trial and error I learned how to put it on. Beginning the fifth day, when I felt strong enough, I taught myself to mount, and then to sit astride the unmoving beast, and then to ride it at a slow and even walk, and ultimately how to ride it at a trot. I practiced with both of them, alternating with scrupulous fairness, wanting them both to get a full opportunity to become familiar with me. They would soon become vital to my progress, even to my life.

In all of this I had remarkably fine weather, losing only one day, the seventh, due to bad conditions. A snowstorm had blown up the night before, a whirling raging monster that lashed at the cabin as though enraged to find it poaching on the storm god’s land, and though it was blown out by “morning” there was still full cloud cover, which lasted the full day. The moon, of course, had not the strength to cast illumination through cloud, and that day remained as blindly black as any night. Blacker; there were not even the dozen or so faint stars I was used to seeing in the sky.

I remained within the cabin all that day, sullen and pouring, angered at the moon for having deserted me. I left only once, lighting my way fearfully with a burning branch from the fire, going by necessity to the barn to feed the hairhorses. I couldn’t carry both the torch and a weapon, so I had Torgmund’s pistol tucked inside my belt and was prepared at any instant to hurl the torch into the snow, yank out the pistol, and fight my way back to safety. However, I was unmolested, fed the hairhorses successfully, and returned at once to the warm protection of the cabin, locking the door again behind me.

As to the wood — a heavy, almost smokeless, beautifully slow-burning variety — it was stacked against the cabin’s rear wall. There were no trees, no vegetation of any kind growing within sight of the cabin, which meant that Torgmund must have had to make frequent trips in the direction of dayside for both fuel and fodder.

In the totally atomistic society of anarchists, Torgmund had chosen for himself perhaps the only sensible and viable form of life; absolute separation from and independence of all other human beings. And, of course, it was only when he forcibly introduced a second human being into his atomistic existence that he ran into trouble.

So here was another face of Anarchaos, the ragged individualist’s heaven. So long, that is, as he never bent a fraction of an inch from the solitary implications of his principles.

There were no books in the cabin, no pictures, no films or music tapes. In many ways, Torgmund had been no more than an unusually clever animal, a son of beaver combined with bear. His remote freehold, though it used a few of the most immediately practical of man’s discoveries and inventions, was finally a refutation of and a turning away from all of man’s history, all of his progress, all of his unending attempt at self-civilization.

After ten days, and though the outer world still frightened me, I was much relieved to be getting away from there.

I took both hairhorses. One I saddled, and would ride, while the other I loaded with Torgmund’s provisions. His rifle and pistol and axe and knife I kept with me; spare furs and clothing I added to the pack animal’s load, and at moonrise on the eleventh day I was ready to leave.

There remained only one problem, but that one insoluble. I had no idea in which direction lay dayside. In deepest night I had gone outside — in terror, of course — to stare toward the horizon in all directions, but had seen not even the faintest glow anywhere. Torgmund had no compass, and even if he had it would have done me no good as I didn’t know what an Anarchaotic compass would be oriented toward.

My only clue was Torgmund’s statement that the moon did cross dayside, which meant that the spot where the moon first appeared above the horizon had to be either east or west and could not be north or south. I also knew that I was one day’s ride from the evening zone in which Torgmund had found me, though I had no way of knowing what this meant in absolute terms, or how one day of Torgmund’s travel would equate with one day of my own.

Still, one had to make a choice. I finally decided to travel toward the morning moon, giving three days to the trip, and if by the end of third day I had not come within sight of the dayside horizon I would turn around and come back and try the other way. If I had guessed wrong it would mean a full week wasted, but there was nothing else to do. And, just in case, I brought along a number of thin branches from the woodpile in back, to leave as markers along the way, to guide me should I have to turn back. If my first guess was wrong, I would want to be able to find the cabin again, in order to restock myself with supplies.

I set off the first thing, on the morning of the eleventh day, with the moon barely a slit crescent — like a nearly closed eye — at the far horizon ahead of me. I rode the lead hairhorse, with the pack second beast trailing us, kept to us by a rope around its neck and tied at the other end around the pommel of the saddle.

We moved at a steady lope, the hairhorses trotting with easy muscularity across the snowy and icy ground. The rhythmic chack-chack-chack of their hoofs on the crust of snow and ice was the only sound.

We moved directly toward the thin crescent of moon, passing near to where I had left Torgmund’s body. I did not look in that direction as we went by, though it was anyway probably still too dark for me to have seen anything.

When, a few minutes later, I looked back, the cabin was a tiny black smudge against the pale whiteness of the snow. I faced front again, folded my gloved hand around the pommel, felt the flex and flow of the animal’s muscles against my knees, and rode onward toward the slowly opening luminous yellow eye.