Planet Of Exile

CHAPTER EIGHT: In The Alien City

THE STRANGEST thing in all the strangeness of this house was the painting on the wall of the big room downstairs. When Agat had gone and the rooms were deathly still she stood gazing at this picture till it became the world and she the wall. And the world was a network: a deep network, like interlacing branches in the woods, like inter-running currents in water, silver, gray, black, shot through with green and rose and a yellow like the sun. As one watched their deep network one saw in it, among it, woven into it and weaving it, little and great patterns and figures, beasts, trees, grasses, men and women and other creatures, some like farborns and some not; and strange shapes, boxes set on round legs, birds, axes, silver spears and feathers of fire, faces that were not faces, stones with wings and a tree whose leaves were stars.

"What is that?" she asked the farborn woman whom Agat had asked to look after her, his kinswoman; and she in her way that was an effort to be kind replied, "A painting, a picture—your people make pictures, don't they?"

"Yes, a little. What is it telling of?"

"Of the other worlds and our home. You see the people in it...It was painted long ago, in the first Year of our exile, by one of the sons of Esmit." , "What is that?" Rolery pointed, from a respectful distance.

"A building—the Great Hall of the League on the world called Davenant."

"And that?"

"An erkar."

"I listen again," Rolery said politely—she was on her best manners at every moment now—but when Seiko Esmit seemed not to understand the formality, she asked, "What is an erkar?"

The farborn woman pushed out her lips a little and said indifferently, "A ... thing to ride in, like a ... well, you don't even use wheels, how can I tell you? You've seen our wheeled carts?

Yes? Well, this was a cart to ride in, but it flew in the sky."

"Can your people make such cars now?" Rolery asked in pure wonderment, but Seiko took the question wrong. She replied with rancor, "No. How could we keep such skills here, when the Law commanded us not to rise above your level? For six hundred years your people have failed to learn the use of wheels!"

Desolate in this strange place, exiled from her people and now alone without Agat, Rolery was frightened of Seiko Esmit and of every person and every thing she met. But she would not be scorned by a jealous woman, an older woman. She said, "I ask to learn. But I think your people haven't been here for six hundred years."

"Six hundred home-years is ten Years here." After a moment Seiko Esmit went on, "You see, we don't know all about the erkars and many other things that used to belong to our people, because when our ancestors came here they were sworn to obey a law of the League, which forbade them to use many things different from the things the native people used. This was called Cultural Embargo. In time we would have taught you how to make things—like wheeled carts. But the Ship left. There were few of us here, and no word from the League, and we found many enemies among your nations in those days. It was hard for us to keep the Law and also to keep what we had and knew. So perhaps we lost much skill and knowledge. We don't know."

"It was a strange law," Rolery murmured.

"It was made for your sakes—not ours," Seiko said in her hurried voice, in the hard distinct farborn accent like Agat's, "In the Canons of the League, which we study as children, it is written: No Religion or Congruence shall be disseminated, no technique or theory shall be taught, no cultural set or pattern shall be exported, nor shall para-verbal speech be used with any non- Communicant high-intelligence lifeform, or any Colonial Planet, until it be judged by the Area Council with the consent or the Plenum that such a planet be ready for Control or for Membership... It means, you see, that we were to live exactly as you live. In so far as we do not, we have broken our own Law."

"It did us no harm," Rolery said. "And you not much good."

"You cannot judge us," Seiko said with that rancorous coldness; then controlling herself once more, "There's work to be done now. Will you come?"

Submissive, Rolery followed Seiko. But she glanced back at the painting as they left. It had a greater wholeness than any object she had ever seen. Its somber, silvery, unnerving complexity affected her somewhat as Agat's presence did; and when he was with her, she feared him, but nothing else. Nothing, no one.

The fighting men of Landin were gone. They had some hope, by guerilla attacks and ambushes, of harrying the Gaal on southward towards less aggressive victims. It was a bare hope, and the women were working to ready the town for siege. Seiko and Rolery reported to the Hall of the League on the great square, and there were assigned to help round up the herds of hann from the long fields south of town. Twenty women went together; each as she left the Hall was given a packet of bread and hann-milk curd, for they would be gone all day. As forage grew scant the herds had ranged far south between the beach and the coastal ridges. The women hiked about eight miles south and then beat back, zigzagging to and fro, collecting and driving the little, silent, shaggy beasts in greater and greater numbers.

Rolery saw the farborn women in a new light now. They had seemed delicate, childish, with their soft light clothes, their quick voices and quick minds. But here they were out in the ice-rimmed stubble of the hills, in furs and trousers like human women, driving the slow, shaggy herds into the north wind, working together, cleverly and with determination. They were wonderful with the beasts, seeming to lead rather than drive them, as if they had some mastery over them. They came up the road to the Sea Gate after the sun had set, a handful of women in a shaggy sea of trotting, high-haunched beasts. When Landin walls came in sight a woman lifted up her voice and sang. Rolery had never heard a voice play this game with pitch and time. It made her eyes blink and her throat ache, and her feet on the dark road kept the music's time. The singing went from voice to voice up and down the road; they sang about a lost home they had never known, about weaving cloth and sewing jewels on it, about warriors killed in war; there was a song about a girl who went mad for love and jumped into the sea, "O the waves they roll far out before the tide .. ." Sweet-voiced, making song out of sorrow, they came with the herds, twenty women walking in the windy dark. The tide was in, a soughing blackness over the dunes to their left. Torches on the high walls flared before them, making the city of exile an island of light.

All food in Landin was strictly rationed now. People ate communally in one of the great buildings around the square, or if they chose took their rations home to their houses. The women who had been herding were late. After a hasty dinner in the strange building called Thiatr, Rolery went with Seiko Esmit to the house of the woman Alia Pasfal. She would rather have gone to Agat's empty house and been alone there, but she did whatever she was asked to do. She was no longer a girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an an Alterran, and a prisoner on sufferance. For the first time in her life she obeyed.

No fire burned in the hearth, yet the high room was warm; lamps without wicks burned in glass cages on the wall. In this one house, as big as a whole Kinhouse of Tevar, one old woman lived by herself. How did they bear the loneliness? And how did they keep the warmth and light of summer inside the walls? And all Year long they lived in these houses, all their lives, never wandering, never living in tents out on the range, on the broad Sum-merlands, wandering ... Rolery pulled her groggy head erect and stole a glance at the old one, Pasfal, to see if her sleepiness had been seen. It had. The old one saw everything; and she hated Rolery.

So did they all, the Alterrans, these farborn Elders. They hated her because they loved Jakob Agat with a jealous love; because he had taken her to wife; because she was human and they were not.

One of them was saying something about Tevar, something very strange that she did not believe. She looked down, but fright must have showed hi her face, for one of the men, Dermat Alterra, stopped listening to the others and said, "Rolery, you didn't know that Tevar was lost?"

"I listen," she whispered.

"Our men were harrying the Gaal from the west all day," the farborn explained. "When the Gaal warriors attacked Tevar, we attacked their baggage-line and the camps their women were putting up east of the forest. That drew some of them off, and some of the Tevarans got out—but they and our men got scattered. Some of them are here now; we don't really know what the rest are doing, except it's a cold night and they're out there in the hills ..."

Rolery sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was taken, destroyed. Could that be true? She had left her people; now her people were all dead, or homeless in the hills in the Winter night. She was left alone. The aliens talked and talked hi their hard voices. For a while Rolery had an illusion, which she knew for an illusion, that there was a thin film of blood on her hands and wrists. She felt a little sick, but was not sleepy any longer; now and then she felt herself entering the outskirts, the first stage, of Absence for a minute. The bright, cold eyes of the old one, Pasfal the witch, stared at her. She could not move. There was nowhere to go.

Everyone was dead.

Then there was a change. It was like a small light far off hi darkness. She said aloud, though so softly only those nearest her heard, "Agat is coming here."

"Is he bespeaking you?" Alia Pasfal asked sharply.

Rolery gazed for a moment at the air beside the old woman she feared; she was not seeing her.

"He's coming here," she repeated.

"He's probably not sending, Alia," said the one called Pilotson. "They're in steady rapport, to some degree."

"Nonsense, Huru."

"Why nonsense? He told us he sent to her very hard, on the beach, and got through; she must be a Natural. And that established a rapport. It's happened before."

"Between human couples, yes," the old woman said. "An untrained child can't receive or send a paraverbal message, Huru; a Natural is the rarest thing in the world. And this is a hilf, not a human!"

Rolery meanwhile had got up, slipped away from the circle and gone to the door. She opened it.

Outside was empty darkness and the cold. She looked up the street, and in a moment could make out a man coming down it at a weary jogtrot. He came into the shaft of yellow light from the open door, and putting out his hand to catch hers, out of breath, said her name. His smile showed three front teeth gone; there was a blackened bandage around his head under his fur cap; he was grayish with fatigue and pain. He had been out hi the hills since the Gaal had entered Aska- tevar Range, three days and two nights ago. "Get me some water to drink," he told Rolery softly, and then came on into the light, while the others all gathered around him.

Rolery found the cooking-room and in it the metal reed with a flower on top which you turned to make water run out of the reed; Agat's house also had such a device. She saw no bowls or cups set out anywhere, so she caught the water in a hollow of the loose hem of her leather tunic, and brought it thus to her husband in the other room. He gravely drank from her tunic. The others stared and Pasfal said sharply, "There are cups in the cupboard." But she was a witch no longer; her malice fell like a spent arrow. Rolery knelt beside Agat and heard his voice.