Planet Of Exile

CHAPTER TEN: The Old Chief

THE OLD CHIEF was tough. He survived stroke, concussion, exhaustion, exposure, and disaster with intact will, and nearly intact intelligence.

Some things he did not understand, and others were not present to his mind at all times. He was if anything glad to be out of the stuffy darkness of the Kinhouse, where sitting by the fire had made such a woman of him; he was quite clear about that. He liked—he had always liked—this rockfounded, sunlit, windswept city of the farborns, built before anybody alive was born and still standing changeless in the same place. It was a much better built city than Tevar. About Tevar he was not always clear. Sometimes he remembered the yells, the burning roofs, the hacked and disemboweled corpses of his sons and grandsons. Sometimes he did not. The will to survive was very strong in him.

Other refugees trickled in, some of them from sacked Winter Cities to the north; in all there were now about three hundred of Wold's race in the farborns' town. It was so strange to be weak, to be few, to live on the charity of pariahs, that some of the Tevarans, particularly among the middleaged men, could not take it. They sat in Absence, legs crossed, the pupils of their eyes shrunk to a dot, as if they had been rubbing themselves with gesin oil. Some of the women, too, who had seen their men cut into gobbets in the streets and by the hearths of Tevar, or who had lost children, grieved themselves into sickness or Absence. But to Wold the collapse of the Tevaran world was only part of the collapse of his own life. Knowing that he was very far along the way to death, he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting.

Sunlight shone now in the stone streets, bright on the painted housefronts, though there was a vague dirty smear along the sky above the dunes northward. In the great square, in front of the house called Thiatr where all the humans were quartered, Wold was hailed by a farborn. It took him a while to recognize Jaokob Agat. Then he cackled a bit and said, "Alterra! you used to be a handsome fellow. You look like a Pernmek shaman with his front teeth pulled. Where is ... (he forgot her name) where's my kinswoman?"

"In my house, Eldest."

"This is shameful," Wold said. He did not care if he offended Agat. Agat was his lord and leader now, of course; but the fact remained that it was shameful to keep a mistress in one's own tent or house. Farborn or not, Agat should observe the fundamental decencies.

"She's my wife. Is that the shame?"

"I hear wrongly, my ears are old," Wold said, wary.

"She is my wife."

Wold looked up, meeting Agat's gaze straight on for the first time. Wold's eyes were dull yellow like the whiter sun, and no white showed under the slanting lids. Agat's eyes were dark, iris and pupil dark, white-cornered in the dark face: strange eyes to meet the gaze of, unearthly.

Wold looked away. The great stone houses of the farborns stood all about him, clean and bright and ancient in the sunlight.

"I took a wife from you, Farborn," he said at last, "but I never thought you'd take one from me ... Wold's daughter married among the false-men, to bear no sons—"

"You've got no cause to mourn," the young farborn said unmoving, set as a rock. "I am your equal, Wold. In all but age. You had a farborn wife once. Now you've got a farborn son-in-law. If you wanted one you can swallow the other."

"It is hard," the old man said with dour simplicity. There was a pause. "We are not equals, Jakob Agat. My people are dead or broken. You are a chief, a lord. I am not. But I am a man, and you are not. What likeness between us?"

"At least no grudge, no hate," Agat said? still unmoving.

Wold looked about him and at last, slowly, shrugged assent.

"Good, then we can die well together," the farborn said with his surprising laugh. You never knew when a farborn was going to laugh. "I think the Gaal will attack in a few hours, Eldest."

"In a few—?"

"Soon. When the sun's-high maybe." They were standing by the empty arena. A light discus lay abandoned by their feet. Agat picked it up and without intent, boyishly, sailed it across the arena. Gazing where it fell he said, "There's about twenty of them to one of us. So if they get over the walls or through the gate ... I'm sending all the Fall-born children and their mothers out to the Stack. With the drawbridges raised there's no way to take it, and it's got water and supplies to last five hundred people about a moon-phase. There ought to be some men with the womenfolk. Will you choose three or four of your men, and the women with young children, and take them there?" They must have a chief. Does this plan seem good to you?"

"Yes. But I will stay here," the old man said.

"Very well, Eldest," Agat said without a flicker of protest, his harsh, scarred young face impassive. "Please choose the men to go with your women and children. They should go very soon.

Kemper will take our group out."

"I'll go with them," Wold said in exactly the same tone, and Agat looked just a trifle disconcerted. So it was possible to disconcert him. But he agreed quietly. His deference to Wold was courteous pretense, of course—what reason had he to defer to a dying man who even among his own defeated tribe was no longer a chief?—but he stuck with it no matter how foolishly Wold replied. He was truly a rock. There were not many men like that. "My lord, my son, my like," the old man said with a grin, putting his hand on Agat's shoulder, "send me where you want me. I have no more use, all I can do is die. Your black rock looks like an evil place to die, but I'll do it there if you want..."

"Send a few men to stay with the women, anyway," Agat said, "good steady ones that can keep the women from panicking. I've got to go up to the Land Gate, Eldest. Will you come?"

Agat, lithe and quick, was off. Leaning on a farborn spear of bright metal, Wold made his way slowly up the streets and steps. But when he was only halfway he had to stop for breath, and then realized that he should turn back and send the young mothers and their brats out to the island, as Agat had asked. He turned and started down. When he saw how his feet shuffled on the stones he knew that he should obey Agat and go with the women to the black island, for he would only be in the way here.

The bright streets were empty except for an occasional farborn hurrying purposefully by. They were all ready or getting ready, at their posts and duties. If the clansmen of Tevar had been ready, if they had marched north to meet the Gaal, if they had looked ahead into a coming time the way Agat seemed to do ... No wonder people called far-borns witchmen. But then, it was Agat's fault that they had not marched. He had let a woman come between allies. If he, Wold, had known that the girl had ever spoken again to Agat, he would have had her killed behind the tents, and her body thrown into the sea, and Tevar might still be standing ... She came out of the door of a high stone house, and seeing Wold, stood still.

He noticed that though she had tied back her hair as married women did, she still wore leather tunic and breeches stamped with the trifoliate dayflower, clan-mark of his Kin.

They did not look into each other's eyes.

She did not speak. Wold said at last—for past was past, and he had called Agat "son"—"Do you go to the black island or stay here, kinswoman?"

"I stay here, Eldest."

"Agat sends me to the black island," he said, a little vague, shifting his stiff weight as he stood there in the cold sunlight, in his bloodstained furs, leaning on the spear.

"I think Agat fears the women won't go unless you lead them, you or Umaksuman. And Umaksuman leads our warriors, guarding the north wall."

She had lost all her lightness, her aimless, endearing insolence; she was urgent and gentle. All at once he recalled her vividly as a little child, the only little one hi all the Sum-merlands, Shakatany's daughter, the summer-born. "So you are the Alterra's wife?" he said, and this idea coming on top of the memory of her as a wild, laughing child confused him again so he did not hear what she answered.

"Why don't all of us in the city go to the island, if it can't be taken?"

"Not enough water, Eldest. The Gaal would move into this city, and we would die on the rock."

He could see, across the roofs of the League Hall, a glimpse of the causeway. The tide was in; waves glinted beyond the black shoulder of the island fort.

"A house built upon sea-water is no house for men," he said heavily. "It's too close to the land under the sea ... Listen now, there was a thing I meant to say to Arilia—to Agat. Wait. What was it, I've forgotten. I can't hear my mind ..." He pondered, but nothing came. "Well, no matter.

Old men's thoughts are like dust. Goodbye, daughter." He went on, shuffling halt and ponderous across the Square to the Thiatr, where he ordered the young mothers to collect their children and come. Then he led his last foray—a flock of cowed women and little crying children, following him and the three younger men he chose to come with him, across the vasty dizzy air-road to the black and terrible house.

It was cold there, and silent. In the high vaults of the rooms there was no sound at all but the sound of the sea sucking and mouthing at the rocks below. His people huddled together all hi one huge room. He wished old Kerly were there, she would have been a help, but she was lying dead hi Tevar or in the forests. A couple of courageous women got the others going at last; they found grain to make bhanmeal, water to boil it, wood to boil the water. When the women and children of the farborns came with their guard of ten men, the Tevarans could offer them hot food. Now there were five or six hundred people in the fort, filling it up pretty full, so it echoed with voices and there were brats underfoot everywhere, almost like the women's side of a Kinhouse in the Winter City. But from the narrow windows, through the transparent rock that kept out the wind, one looked down and down to the water spouting on the rocks below, the waves smoking hi the wind.

The wind was turning and the dirtiness in the northern sky had become a haze, so that around the little pale sun there hung a great pale circle: the snowcircle. That was it, that was what he had meant to tell Agat. It was going to snow. Not a shake of salt like last time, but snow, winter snow. The blizzard ... The word he had not heard or said for so long made him feel strange. To die, then, he must return across the bleak, changeless landscape of his boyhood, he must reenter the white world of the storms.

He still stood at the window, but did not see the noisy water below. He was remembering Winter. A

lot of good it would do the Gaal to have taken Tevar, and Landin too. Tonight and tomorrow they could feast on hann and grain. But how far would they get, when the snow began to fall? The real snow, the blizzard that leveled the forests and rilled the valleys; and the winds that followed, bitter cold. They would run when that enemy came down the roads at them!

They had stayed North too long. Wold suddenly cackled out loud, and turned from the darkening window. He had out-lived his chiefdom, his sons, his use, and had to die here on a rock in the sea; but he had great allies, and great warriors served him—greater than Agat, or any man. Storm and Winter fought for him, and he would outlive his enemies.

He strode ponderously to the hearth, undid his gesin-pouch, dropped a tiny fragment on the coals and inhaled three deep breaths. After that he bellowed, "Well, women! Is the slop ready?" Meekly they served him; contentedly he ate.