Anarchaos

XXIII

Although it was no colder at night than in the false moonday, it somehow seemed colder then. I assumed it was so because I was no longer in motion, but had to huddle fireless in one spot and wait for the moon to rise ahead of me once again. I would have preferred to travel constantly but of course could not; there was nothing but the moon itself to give me my direction.

Until the end of the third day, I saw nothing to indicate whether I was going in the right or wrong direction. It had seemed to me that the temperature must noticeably go either up or down, depending on whether or not I was moving toward dayside, but the biting cold, so far as I could tell, remained unchanged. That is, it seemed to be at one temperature when I was in.motion and at a lower one when I was at rest, and these two temperatures did not seem to vary.

Toward evening of each day — the inaccuracy of these terms grates on me, but they are the only ones I can use — I would dismount, hobble the animals, and dig for myself a shallow sort of trench in the snow. In this I would lie, with furs beneath me and above me and sleep or think the hours away until moonrise.

The cold affected my wrist badly, making it sting and bum. I kept it wrapped in furs, but to no effect, and the constant pain caused me to be irritable and impatient when there was no value in such feelings.

I don’t know how long the faint light was visible before I noticed it. My attention was exclusively, vitally, almost balefully upon the black horizon ahead of me or — as we moved through the dark “afternoon” — in quick glances behind me to be sure I was still moving directly away from the declining moon. I was staring ahead more intently than ever as my self-imposed time limit neared its end; three days I had given myself and three days were just about up. The thought of having to retrace all that distance to the cabin, and then to have to begin the journey all over again in the opposite direction, both depressed and maddened me. If only, far out there across the snowy waste ahead of me, there would come some slight tinge of color on the horizon.

But it wasn’t ahead of me that the light appeared. I had just about decided to stop for the night, and was looking around for a shallow dip in which to bed down — there was sometimes wind out here — when I saw that thin vague rosy line far far away, the line of light on a flat horizon.

Could it be man-made, some sort of city? No, that was impossible. It extended too far along the horizon, in the first place, and in the second place there was no city anywhere along the rim. The cities of Anarchaos were five; Ulik, Moro-Geth, Prudence and Chax at the four points of a diamond, and Ni at their center. The sun had to be off in that direction, to my left.

I turned at once, prodding the hairhorses to greater speed, riding along as though I expected to attain that horizon in half an hour. The moon, low to my left, winked out in its abrupt manner, and all about me now the land was black as the bottom of death. But I kept going, with that thin rusty glowing line to guide me, pushing on past the time when the animals and I usually stopped for food and rest, pushing on until all at once the hairhorse I was riding seemed to stumble, and for just an instant to regain its balance, and then down it went, head foremost, somersaulting in the air and hurling me clear to land bruisingly out in front on the snow and ice.

I rolled and rolled, then staggered to my feet and limped back to them, guided by the sounds they were making; the fallen one had a constant, almost an apologetic, cough, while the other was filling the night with ear-splitting whinny-shrieks, as though someone were torturing the mate of the missing link.

The next little while was a nightmare, as I tried in the darkness to regain control. The animal I’d been riding had stumbled in a hole or some such thing and had broken his leg, and was lying now on the ground, thrashing about and making that coughing sound. The other one was still attached to the hurt one by the rope that went from his own neck to the saddle of the other, and this nearness to a wounded member of his own species had him in a white panic of terror, causing him to rear and kick and try to run away, causing him to find the strength even to drag the hurt one for little distances this way and that through the snow. And I, fighting to restore order, was forced to work in blackness and haste and exhaustion, encumbered by the cold and my bulky clothing and a missing hand.

As much as possible, I kept them between me and the line of light at the horizon. That way, it was possible to get occasional quick glimpses of them in silhouette as they reared and fought, attached to one another by that taut stout rope.

At first I tried merely to calm the uninjured one, but with absolutely no success. He was so mad with terror that he wasn’t even aware of my existence, and I ran every risk of being knocked over and trampled by him as he leaped and writhed at the end of the rope. After a while, it seemed to me that if only the hurt one would be quite perhaps the other one would grow calm as well, but of course with his broken leg he wasn’t ever going to be quiet. Unless he was dead.

I knew that I would have to kill him anyway, though I hated the thought. But my pistol had fallen out of my clothing when I’d taken the spill, and there was no way to find it in the blackness, and my rifle was still in its sheath, attached to the saddle on the wounded hairhorse.

The only thing to do was somehow get the rifle. The one on the ground was thrashing, and the other one was yanking him around this way and that, but I did manage at last to get in close enough and then — lying on my stomach on the beast’s heaving flank — I found the saddle with my hand, and then the sheath, and then the rifle. I was kicked several times in the attempt, but no matter. Holding for life to that rifle I jumped back out of the way of all those kicking legs and got ready to do the killing.

A rifle is a hard thing for a man with one hand to fire. I held it in my right hand, my left arm up and across my chest so the rifle barrel could rest on the forearm, and in that position I could fire with fair accuracy one time. But there was no way for me to control the recoil, so that with each firing the rifle barrel would leap into the air and then drop back again painfully on my left forearm.

It took three shots before I finally hit the silhouette of that streaming, thrashing, coughing head. Then it dropped to the snow as though yanked from beneath, and I fell down on my side on the snow and lay there panting as though I had run around the world.

Slowly the living one lost its panic and stopped making those terrible screams. When all was quiet I got again to my feet, dragging myself through all my movements, my limbs feeling as though weighted down with lead. I took fodder from the pack animal’s back and fed it, dead grass in the snow beside the dead body. I took food out for myself as well, but I had no heart to eat it and so threw it away into the snow.

I looked at the light on the horizon, and took no pleasure in it.

I got my sleeping furs and dragged them a little off from where the living animal and the dead were tethered together. I scraped out a shallow pit for myself in the snow, made my bed, and settled into it sleeplessly to wait for the moon to rise.