Planet Of Exile

CHAPTER FIVE: Twilight in the Woods

THE FARBORN CAME out of Umaksuman's tent and stood a minute talking with the young chief, both of them looking to the north, eyes narrowed against the biting gray wind. Agat moved his outstretched hand as if he spoke of the mountains. A flaw of wind carried a word or two of what he said to Rolery where she stood watching on the path up to the city gate. As she heard him speak a tremor went through her, a little rush of fear, and darkness through her veins, making her remember how that voice had spoken in her mind, in her flesh, calling her to him.

Behind that like a distorted echo in her memory came the harsh command, outward as a slap, when on the forest path he had turned on her, telling her to go, to get away from him.

All of a sudden she put down the baskets she was carrying. They were moving today from the red tents of her nomad childhood into the warren of peaked roofs and underground halls and tunnels and alleys of the Winter City, and all her cousin-sisters and aunts and nieces were bustling and squealing and scurrying up and down the paths and in and out of the tents and the gates with furs and boxes and branches tearing at her clothes, catching her hood. The there beside the path and walked off toward the forest.

"Rolery! Ro-o-olery!" shrilled the voices that were for- ever shrilling after her, accusing, calling, screeching at her back. She never turned, but walked right on. As soon as she was well into the woods she began to run. When all sound of voices was lost in the soughing, groaning silence of the wind-strained trees, and nothing recalled the camp of her people except a faint, bitter scent of woodsmoke in the wind, she slowed down-Great fallen trunks barred the path now hi places, and must be climbed over or crawled under, the stiff dead branches tearing at her clothes, cathcing her hood. The woods were not safe in this wind; even now, somewhere off up-the ridge she heard the muttering crash of a tree falling before the wind's push. She did not care. She felt like going down onto those gray sands again and standing still, perfectly still, to watch the foaming thirty-foot wall of water come down upon her ... As suddenly as she had started off, she stopped, and stood still on the twilit path.

The wind blew and ceased and blew. A murky sky writhed and lowered over the network of leafless branches. It was already half dark here. All anger and purpose drained out of the girl, leaving her standing in a kind of scared stupor, hunching her shoulders against the wind. Something white flashed in front of her and she cried out, but did not move. Again the white movement passed, then stilled suddenly above her on a jagged branch: a great beast or bird, winged, pure white, white above and below, with short, sharp hooked lips that parted and closed, and staring silver eyes.

Gripping the branch with four naked talons the creature gazed down at her, and she up at it, neither moving. The silver eyes never blinked. Abruptly great white wings shot out, wider than a man's height, and beat among the branches, breaking them. The creature beat its white wings and screamed, then as the wind gusted launched out into the air and made its way heavily off between the branches and the driving clouds.

"A stormbringer." Agat spoke, standing on the path a few yards behind her. "They're supposed to bring the blizzards."

The great silver creature had driven all her wits away. The little rush of tears that accompanied all strong feelings in her race bunded her a moment. She had meant to stand and mock him, to jeer at him, having seen the resentment under his easy arrogance when people in Tevar slighted him, treated him as what he was, a being of a lower kind. But the white creature, the stormbringer, had frightened her and she broke out, staring straight at him as she had at it, "I hate you, you're not a man, I hate you!"

Then her tears stopped, she looked away, and they both stood there in silence for quite a while.

"Rolery," said the quiet voice, "look at me."

She did not. He came forward, and she drew back crying, "Don't touch me!" hi a voice like the stormbringer's scream, her face distorted. "Get hold of yourself," he said. "Here—take my hand, take it!" He caught her as she struggled to break away, and held both her wrists. Again they stood without moving.

"Let me go," she said at last in her normal voice. He released her at once.

She drew a long breath.

"You spoke—I heard you speak inside me. Down there on the sands. Can you do that again?"

He was watching her, alert and quiet. He nodded. "Yes. But I told you then that I never would."

"I still hear it. I feel your voice." She put her hands over her ears.

"I know ... I'm sorry. I didn't know you were a hilf— a Tevaran, when I called you. It's against the law. And anyhow it shouldn't have worked ..."

"What's a hilf?"

"What we call you."

"What do you call yourselves?"

"Men." She looked around them at the groaning twilit woods, gray aisles, writhing cloud-roof. This gray world in motion was very strange, but she was no longer scared. His touch, his actual hand's touch canceling the insistent impalpable sense of his presence, had given her calm, which grew as they spoke together. She saw now that she had been half out of her mind this last day and night.

"Can all your people do that... speak that way?"

"Some can. It's a skill one can learn. Takes practice. Come here, sit down a while. You've had it rough." He was always harsh and yet there was an edge, a hint of something quite different in his voice now: as if the urgency with which he had called to her on the sands were transmuted into an infinitely restrained, unconscious appeal, a reaching out. They sat down on a fallen basuk-tree a couple of yards off the path. She noticed how differently he moved and sat than a man of her race; the schooling of his body, the sum of his gestures, was very slightly, but completely, unfamiliar.

She was particularly aware of his dark-skinned hands, clasped together between his knees. He went on, "Your people could learn mindspeech if they wanted to. But they never have, they call it witchcraft, I think ... Our books say that we ourselves learned it from another race, long ago, on a world called Rokanan. It's a skill as well as a gift."

"Can you hear my mind when you want?"

"That is forbidden," he said with such finality that her fears on that score were quite disposed of.

"Teach me the skill," she said with suddea childishness.

"It would take all Winter."

"It took you all fall?"

"And part of Summer too." He grinned slightly.

"What does hilf mean?"

"It's a word from our old language. It means 'Highly intelligent life-form.'"

"Where is another world?" "Well—there are a lot of them. Out there. Beyond sun and moon."

"Then you did fall out of the sky? What for? How did you get from behind the sun to the seacoast here?"

"I'll tell you if you want to hear, but it's not just a tale, Rolery. There's a lot we don't understand, but what we do know of our history is true."

"I hear," she whispered in the ritual phrase, impressed, but not entirely subdued.

"Well, there were many worlds out among the stars, and many kinds of men living on them. They made ships that could sail the darkness between the worlds, and kept traveling about and trading and exploring. They allied themselves into a League, as your clans ally with one another to make a Range. But there was an enemy of the League of All Worlds. An enemy coming from far off. I don't know how far. The books were written for men who knew more than we know ..."

He was always using words that sounded like words, but meant nothing; Rolery wondered what a ship was, what a book was. But the grave, yearning tone in which he told his story worked on her and she listened fascinated.

"For a long time the League prepared to fight that enemy. The stronger worlds helped the weaker ones to arm against the enemy, to make ready. A little as we're trying to make ready to meet the Gaal, here. Mindhearing was one skill they taught, I know, and there were weapons, the books say fires that could burn up whole planets and burst the stars ... Well, during that time my people came from their home-world to this one. Not very many of them. They were to make friends with your peoples and see if they wanted to be a world of the League, and join against the enemy. But the enemy came. The ship that brought my people went back to where it came from, the help in fighting the war, and some of the people went with it, and the ... the far-speaker with which those men could talk to one another from world to world. But some of the people stayed on here, either to help this world if the enemy came here, or because they couldn't go back again: we don't know. Their records say only that the ship left. A white spear of metal, longer than a whole city, standing up on a feather of fire. There are pictures of it. I think they thought it would come back soon... That was ten Years ago."

"What of the war with the enemy?"

"We don't know. We don't know anything that happened since the day the ship left. Some of us figure the war must have been lost, and others think it was won, but hardly, and the few men left here were forgotten in the years of fighting. Who knows? If we survive, some day we'll find out; if no one ever comes, we'll make a ship and go find out..." He was yearning, ironic. Rolery's head spun with these gulfs of time and spice and incomprehension. "This is hard to live with," she said after a while.

Agat laughed, as if startled. "No—it gives us our pride. What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don't belong to. Five Years ago we were a great people. Look at us now."

"They say farborns are never sick, is that true?"

"Yes. We don't catch your sicknesses, and didn't bring any of our own. But we bleed when we're cut, you know ... And we get old, we die, like humans ..."

"Well of course," she said disgustedly.

He dropped his sarcasm. "Our trouble is that we don't bear enough children. So many abort and are stillborn, so few come to term."

"I heard that. I thought about it. You do so strangely. You conceive children any time of the Year, during the Winter Fallow even—why is that?"

"We can't help it, it's how we are." He laughed again, looking at her, but she was very serious now. "I was born out of season, in the Summer Fallow," she said. "It does happen with us, but very rarely; and you see—when Winter's over I'll be too old to bear a Spring child. I'll never have a son. Some old man will take me for a fifth wife one of these days, but the Winter Fallow has begun, and come Spring I'll be old ... So I will die barren. It's better for a woman not to be born at all than to be born out of season as I was ... And another thing, it is true what they say, that a farborn man takes only one wife?"

He nodded. Apparently that meant what a shrug meant to her.

"Well, no wonder you're dying out!"

He grinned, but she insisted, "Many wives—many sons. If you were a Tevaran you'd have five or ten children already! Have you any?"

"No, I'm not married."

"But haven't you ever lain with a woman!"

"Well, yes," he said, and then more assertively, "Of course! But when we want children, we marry."

"If you were one of us—"

"But I'm not one of you," he said. Silence ensued. Finally he said, gently enough, "It isn't manners and mores that make the difference. We don't know what's wrong, but it's in the seed. Some doctors have thought that because this sun's different from the sun our race was born under, it affects us, changes the seed in us little by little. And the change kills."

Again there was silence between them for a time. "What was the other world like—your home?"

"There are songs that tell what it was like," he said, but when she asked timidly what a song was, he did not reply. After a while he said, "At home, the world was closer to its sun, and the whole year there wasn't even one moonphase long. So the books say. Think of it, the whole Winter would only last ninety days ..." This made them both laugh. "You wouldn't have time to light a fire,"

Rolery said.

Real darkness was soaking into the dimness of the woods. The path in front of them ran indistinct, a faint gap among the trees leading left to her city, right to his. Here, between, was only wind, dusk, solitude. Night was coming quickly. Night and winter and war, a time of dying. "I'm afraid of the Winter," she said, very low. "We all are," he said. "What will it be like? ... We've only known the sunlight."

There was no one among her people who had ever broken her fearless, careless solitude of mind; having no age-mates, and by choice also, she had always been quite alone, going her own way and caring little for any person. But now as the world had turned gray and nothing held any promise beyond death, now as she first felt fear, she had met him, the dark figure near the tower-rock over the sea, and had heard a voice that spoke in her blood.

"Why will you never look at me?" he asked.

"I will," she said, "if you want me to." But she did not, though she knew his strange shadowy gaze was on her. At last she put out her hand and he took it.

"Your eyes are gold," he said. "I want... I want... But if they knew we were together, even now..."

"Your people?"

"Yours. Mine care nothing about it."

"And mine needn't find out." They both spoke almost in whispers, but urgently, without pauses.

"Rolery, I leave for the north two nights from now."

"I know that."

"When I come back—"

"But when you don't come back!" the girl cried out, under the pressure of the terror that had entered her with Autumn's end, the fear of coldness, of death. He held her against him telling her quietly that he would come back. As he spoke she felt the beating of his heart and the beating of her own. "I want to stay with you," she said, and he was saying, "I want to stay with you."

It was dark around them. When they got up they walked slowly in a grayish darkness. She came with him, towards his city. "Where can we go?" he said with a kind of bitter laugh. "This isn't like love hi Summer ... There's a hunter's shelter down the ridge a way ... They'll miss you in Tevar."

"No," she whispered, "they won't miss me."