The Beginning Place

2

Maybe the gate was always shut now, shut forever: gone. To go to Pincus’s woods and to the place where it should be and see the stupid daylight, the dusty thickets, the culvert, finally the barbed-wire fence across the first slope of the hill, no path down, no gate, there was no use doing that over and over. The first time it had been shut, two years ago, she had stood there where it should have been and willed to open it, willed it to be open, commanded it to be. And come back the next day and the next, and crouched down and cried. Then after a week she had come back and the gate was there, and she had gone in, as easy as that. But she could not count on it. Probably it would not be there. She had not even tried for months; it was stupid to keep trying. It made her feel like a fool, like a kid playing games, playing hide and seek with nobody to play with. But the gate was there. She went through into the twilight.

She went forward squinting and suspicious, walking as if the ground might get pulled out from under her like a rug. Then she dropped down on all fours and kissed the dirt, pressing her face against it like a suckling baby. “So,” she whispered, “so.” She stood up and reached up at full stretch toward the sky, then went to the water’s edge, knelt, washed her face and hands and arms noisily, drank, answered the water’s loud, continual singing, “So you are, so I am, so.” She sat down crosslegged on the shelving rock, sat still, shut her eyes to contain her joy.

It had been so long, but nothing was changed, nothing ever changed. Here was always. She should do what she always did when she was a kid, thirteen, when she first found the beginning place, before she had even crossed the river; she could do the things she used to do, the fire worship and the endless dance, the time she had buried the four stones in the place under the grey tree upriver. They would still be there. Nothing would move them here. Four stones in a square, black, blue-grey, yellow, white, and the ashes of her burnt offering, the wooden figure she had carved, in the center. That had all been silly, kid stuff. The things people did in church were silly too. There were reasons for doing them. She would dance the endless dance if she felt like it; keep it going; that was the thing about it, it didn’t end. This was the place where she did what she felt like. This was the place where she was her self, her own. She was home, home—No, but on the way home, on the way at last again, now she could go, now she would go, across the triple river and on to the dark mountain, home.

She stood up on the shelf-rock, and with arms stretched out wide and hands held hollowed as if they bore bells or bowls of flame or water, danced on the rock, quick swaying sweeping movements, danced to the beach, to the crossing—and stopped short.

In a circle of stones on the sand a few yards downriver from the crossing lay the ashes of a fire.

Nearby, utensils and packets, half hidden under the drooping branches of an elder. Plastic, steel, paper.

Noiseless, she took one step forward. The ashes were still hot: she caught the tang of burning.

No one came here. No one ever. Her place alone. The gateway for her, the path for her, alone. Who, hiding, had watched her dance, and laughed? She turned, searching, rigid, to defy the enemy, “Come on, come out, then!” when, with a shock of pure fear that took all breath, she saw the pale enormous arm grope out towards her across the grass—

seeing even as she saw the monstrous reaching thing what it was, a dun-colored sleeping bag, somebody in a sleeping bag on the grass there by the bushes. But the shock had been so hard that she sank down now, squatting, rocking her body a little, till her breath came back and the whiteness left the edges of her vision. Then, cautiously, she stood up once more and peered across the bushy edge of the riverbed. She could tell only that the sleeping bag was motionless. If she took another step here she must step on soft sand and leave a footprint. She drew back to the shelf-rock, stepped up from it to the grass, and circled back behind the elder bushes till she got a clear view of the intruder. A white heavy face blanked out by sleep, jaw slack, light hair loose, the long mound of the bag like a sack of garbage, like a dog turd lying on the ground of the beloved place, the ground she had kissed, her own, the ain country.

She stood there as motionless as the sleeper. Then she turned suddenly and went quick and light, noiseless in tennis shoes, to the crossing and across in the familiar pattern of rock to rock above the merry water, up the far bank, and off on the south road; going a traveler’s pace, not a run or trot but a fast, even, lightfoot walk that put the distances behind her. As she went she gazed straight ahead and for a long way, a long time there was no clear thought in her mind, only the backwash of terror and anger and, that gone, the dry emptiness she knew too well, whatever one called it, maybe it was grief.

There was nowhere, nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Even here no peace or place.

But the way she went itself said you are going home. Her skin touched the air of the ain country, her eyes looked into the dusk forests. The rhythm of walking, of the up-slopes, the downslopes, the rivers, the long rhythms of the land quieted grief, filled emptiness at last. The farther she went into the twilight the more wholly she belonged to it, till all thought of the daylight world was gone and even the memory of the intruder at the beginning place was dulled, her mind tuned to what was about her as she walked and to the goal of her walking. The forests darkened, the way grew steep. It was a long time since she had come to Mountain Town.

And a long way. She always forgot how long, how hard. When she had first found the way she used to break the journey with a sleep at Third River, at the foot of the mountain. Since she was sixteen she had been able to get to Tembreabrezi all in one pull, but a tough one, up the steep, dark slopes and up and on, always farther than she remembered. She was footsore, legweary, and very hungry when she came at last to the clear road and the long turning. But that was the joy of it, to come there worn out, craving food and warmth and rest, glad to the heart to see the lighted windows in the cold sweep of mountainside and sky, and smell the woodsmoke of the fires, the smell that from the ancient beginnings whispers, You are coming out of the wilderness, coming home. And to hear the voices speak her name.

“Irena!” cried little Aduvan, in the street in front of the inn yard, startled at first, then breaking into a smile and a shout to her playmates, “Irena tialohadji!”—Irena has come back!

Irene hugged and swung the child till she squealed, and the troop of four little ones all shrieked in their sweet, thin voices to be hugged and swung, dancing about her till Palizot looked out of the courtyard to see what the commotion was, and came forward wiping her hands on her apron, calm, saying, “Come in, come in, Irena. You’ve come a long way, you’ll be tired.” So she had welcomed Irene the first time she ever came to Mountain Town, fourteen years old, hungry, dirty, tired, frightened. She had not known the language then but she had understood what Palizot said to her: Come in, child, come home.

The fire was burning in the big hearth of the inn. An excellent perfume of onion, cabbage, and spices pervaded the rooms. Everything was as it had been, as it ought to be, with a couple of improvements to be admired: the floors were covered with a reddish straw matting, instead of sand scattered on the bare wood. “That’s nice, it’s warmer,” Irene said, and Palizot, pleased but judicious, “I don’t know yet how it will wear. Let’s have some light in here beside the fire. Sofir! Irena has come! Will you stay a while with us, levadja?”

Child, the word meant, dear child; they added the ‘adja’ onto names too, making them endearments. It pleased her deeply when Palizot called her that. She nodded, having already resolved to spend twelve days here, overnight on the other side of the gate. She was trying to arrange the words for a question, and they did not come at once, for it had been months since she spoke the language. “Palizot. Tell me. Since I was here—has anyone come, on the south road?”

“No one has come on any road,” Palizot said, a strange answer, her voice calm and grave. Then Sofir came up from the cellars with cobwebs in his thick black hair, a baritone man the same size from chest to hip so you could have made round sections of him like a treetrunk; he hugged Irene, shook both her hands, rumbling joyfully, “A long while, Irenadja, a long while, but you’ve come!”

They gave her her favorite room, and she helped Sofir carry up wood for the hearthfire there. He laid and lit the fire at once to warm and air the room, which felt as if it had not been used for a long time. There were no other guests staying at the inn. In itself that was nothing unusual, but she began to notice other indications that few travelers and little trade had been coming to the inn. The big pewter beer cans hung in a row along the wall had not been taken down and used lately, from the look of them, for a boisterous tradesmen’s evening or to welcome a party of cloth buyers up from the plains. She went to see what beasts were in the inn stable, but there were none, the stalls and mangers empty. Despite Sofir’s excellent cooking the food at supper was coarse, and there was none of his fine wheat bread with it, only the stiff dark porridge made of the grains they grew here on the mountain. About Sofir and Palizot there was some air of trouble or constraint, but they said nothing directly about the lack of business, and Irene found she could not ask them. With them she was “the child” still, welcomed and cherished because she had no part in their adversities and cares. So it had always been heart’s holiday for her with them; and she did not know how to change that if she wanted to. As always, then, they talked of nothing important, the important thing being their love.

After supper a few townsfolk came in to spend the evening. Sofir tended bar in the big front room for the men. The women joined Palizot by the fire in the snug room off the kitchen. They drank the local beer and chatted; old Kadit knocked back a quarter pint or so of apple brandy. Irene had a very small mug of the beer, which was powerful stuff, and helped Palizot sew patchwork. She detested sewing, but this work with Palizot was an old pleasure, one of the things she thought of with yearning from the other side of the gate: the scraps of soft colored wool, the firelight and lamplight, Palizot’s long, grave, mild face, the women’s quiet voices and Kadit’s huffing laugh, the buzz and grumble of the men talking in the other room, her own sleepiness, the stillness of the great old house overhead and the quietness of the streets of the town, of the forests beyond the streets.

When the lamps were lighted and the curtains and shutters closed it always seemed that it was night outside. She did not open the shutters of her bedroom window till she got up after the night’s sleep, when the unchanging twilight looked like the dusk of a winter morning. So the townspeople spoke of it, saying morning, midday, night. Learning their language Irene had learned those words, but they did not always come unquestioned to her tongue. What meaning could they have, here? But she could not ask Palizot or Sofir, or Aduvan’s mother Trijiat, or the other women she was fond of; her questions did not come clear; they laughed and said, “Morning comes before midday and evening after it, child!”—always entertained by her difficulties with the language, and ready to help her, but not to question their own certainties. There was no one in Mountain Town who might be able to speak of such matters but the Master. So she used to plan to ask him why there was no day and night here, why the sun never rose and yet you never saw the stars, how this could be. But she had never asked him a word of it. What were the words in his language for sun, for star? And if she said, “Why is it never day or night here?” it would sound stupid, since day meant waking and night meant sleeping, and they waked and worked and slept like anybody on the other side. She could begin to explain, “Where I came from there is a round fire in the sky,” but it would sound like a Hollywood caveman in the first place, and in the second and larger place she never talked about where she came from. From the start, from the first time she went through the gate, the first time she crossed First River, the first time she came to Mountain Town, she had known that you did not talk of one place in the other place. You did not tell them where you came from, unless they asked. No one, in either country, ever asked.

She was convinced that the Master knew something of the existence of the gate. Perhaps he knew much more than that; though she did not admit it quite clearly to herself she believed that in fact he knew much more than she did and would, when he chose, explain it all to her. But she dared not ask him. It was not yet time. She knew so little, even yet, of the ain country, except for the south road, and the town itself, the people of the town and their trades and feuds and jokes and crafts and gossip and manners, which she never tired of learning, and their language, which she could chatter away in and yet sometimes did not understand at all. Always outside the benign hearth-center lay the twilight and the silence, the unexplained, the unexplored. She had been content that it was so. She had wished that nothing here be changed. But this time, even the first night, at the first hearthfire, she felt the circle broken. It was no longer safe. Though she might wish it, and they might wish it, she was not a child any more.

After breakfast she went for a visit with Trijiat, and then walked Aduvan and her little brother to the cobbler’s, at the other end of town, to leave their mother’s good shoes to be resoled. The little girl talked all the way and the little boy chirped like a cricket. Their heads were full of some ghost story or tall tale they had been told, and they kept asking Irene if she wasn’t scared when she walked on the mountain. Virti ran ahead, hid behind a porch, leapt out at her making terrifying roars like a cricket gone hysterical, and she performed suitable cries of terror and dismay. “You have to fall down!” Virti said, but she declined to fall down. The errand done, she left the children with their grandmother, and turned from the town’s main street to the steepest of the narrow cobbled ways going up the hillside, so steep that at intervals the street broke into steps, like a person breaking into giggles or hiccups, and then resumed its sober climb, until it had another fit of steps. At the top of it stood the wall of the garden of the manor, the arched stone gate beautiful against the clear sky. Turning to the right before she reached that gate Irene halted for a moment, and looked up at the Master’s house.

A dozen gables and dormers broke dark, sharp angles on the sky; the windows, bay and bow, many-paned, lay no two on one level, so that there was no counting the stories of the house except on the evidence of three great beams across the front. The door was massive, twelve-paneled. As she lifted the brass knocker ring and struck it on the polished disc of brass, it came into Irene’s mind that she had dreamed of this door many times, on the other side.

Fimol the housekeeper, erect and imperturbable in high-necked, long-sleeved, long-skirted grey, opened the heavy door and greeted the visitor to the Master’s house. Fimol never smiled, and Irene had always been in awe of her. She noticed with a sense almost of disloyalty, as she followed her, that Fimol’s hair had gone white and that her stiff figure was thin, the body of a frail, aging woman. They came into the hall of the house.

This was the center of it all, this high room. Facing the long wall of paneled oak were twelve high, leaded windows looking out upon the terraced garden. The sparse furniture was carved oak, the carpets of local weave, crimson, orange, and brown, warming the room even when the candles were not lit and there was only the clear constant twilight from the windows. In each end wall was a huge stone chimney-piece, and on each of these, high over the wide hearth and the mantel, hung a portrait: a stiff, melancholy lady stared with round black eyes down the length of the room at her lord, who concealed the hand of a crippled right arm inside his coat and scowled blackly back at her.

To the right of that farther hearth, near the door to his offices, the Master stood in conversation with the stonecutter Gahiar. Seeing Irene enter with the housekeeper he stared with that black ancestral scowl; then his face changed; he turned from Gahiar and strode down the long room to her, his hands held out. “Irena! You have come!”—such welcome as she had imagined from him, in daydream, often, but not in expectation, and not wondering what came next.

The Master or mayor of Tembreabrezi was a spare, swarthy man with a hawk nose and dark eyes. He wore black, rusty, neatly-mended, homespun black trousers, vest, and jacket. A harsh man, a dark man. She had loved him since she first saw his face.

He brought her out of the hall into his offices, where a fire burned and the curtains were drawn as if against the grey of a day of winter. He set her a chair, and aided by the dignity of her clothing, the dark-red skirt and homespun blouse that Palizot kept for her, she sat down without awkwardness. He stood beside the high desk where he worked standing—he was a man one seldom saw sitting down—and turned his intense look on her. She drew a deep breath and held herself quiet, her hands in her lap.

“It has been a long time, Irena.”

“I could not come.”

“The way—?”

“I could not—find—” Nor could she find the words she needed. “The place,” she said, and then remembering what they called the stone arch in the wall of the manor, “The gateway. It was shut.”

“You could not walk on the road,” he said, not impatient with her stumbling, but dauntingly intent.

“When I—when I could come to the road, I could walk on it. But at the beginning—” She stuck again.

“You were afraid.”

His voice was gentle; she had never heard him speak so gently.

“When I came through the gateway. It had been so long. And there, at the beginning place, beside the river, there was—”

He said a word, almost in a whisper. It was the word little Virti had shouted when he was playing monster and she would not fall down, and Aduvan had scolded him, Shut up, don’t say that, both children over-excited, near tears. A huge, pale, deformed arm groping out across the grass—

“A man,” she said. “A stranger.”

The Master listened, intent, alert.

“A stranger, like me. Not like me, but—” She knew no other way to say it. The Master, evidently understanding, nodded once.

“Did you speak with him?”

“No. He was asleep. I came on. I didn’t want—I was afraid—” She stuck again. She could not explain her first panic. Surely he would see why a woman alone might have reason to be afraid of a strange man. But she could not express the rage she felt now recalling her fear and recalling the stranger, the gross sleeper, the litter of plastic trash: the sense of desecration and of danger. She clasped her hands hard in her lap and struggled again for the words she wanted, forcing herself to speak. “If he found the gateway, maybe others will find it. There are—there are so many, many people there—”

If the Master understood what she meant by “there,” his only response was a black frown.

“You must guard your walls, Master!” she said desperately. She would have said “borders” but knew no such word in his language, nor any word for boundary or fence but the word that meant a wall of wood or stone.

He nodded. But he said, “There are no walls, Irena. And now, for us, no ways.”

The tone of his voice held her silent. He turned to his desk and went on presently with the same forced quietness, “We can’t go on the roads. They are closed. You know that some have been closed to us for a long time. The south road, your road—you know that we don’t use that.” She had not known it, and stared uncomprehending. “But we had the summer pastures and the High Step, and all the eastern ways, and the north road. Now we have none of them. Nobody comes from Three Fountains, or the foothill villages. No traders or merchants. Nothing from the plains. No news from the City of the King. For a while we could go westward, up the mountain, on the paths; but not now. All the gates of Tembreabrezi are locked.”

There were no gates to lock. Only the street that led out to the south road and the north road, and the paths up and down the mountain west and east, all open, without gate or barrier.

“Is it the King that says you cannot use the roads?” Irene asked, in frustration at not understanding, and then was alarmed at her rashness in questioning the Master. Learning his language had not, after all, been like learning Spanish in high school, la casa the house, el rey the king…The word rediai, which she thought meant king, did not necessarily mean king, or what she meant by king; she had no way to know what it meant except by hearing it used, and it was not used often, except when they spoke of the City of the King. Perhaps it was her year of Spanish and the beginning syllable “re” that had made her decide that the word meant king. She had no way to be sure. She was afraid she had said something stupid, sacrilegious. The Master’s dark face was turned away from her. She saw that his hands were clenched before him on the desk.

He had perhaps not even heard her question. “This stranger,” he said, turning but not looking at her, his voice very low but harsh. And he too hesitated.

“It could be—a mistake—he mistook the way—” A tramp, she wanted to say, a wanderer, a blunderer, camping there overnight without noticing anything about the place, maybe for him there was nothing special about the place, maybe he had crossed no threshold, and he would go on the next day, hitchhiking on into the city probably, he was gone already, he did not belong here. She wanted to say all this, though she could not. She was sure now it was true. It was the truth she wanted and, she saw, that the Master also wanted, for he understood her and considered the possibility with evident relief. He was perhaps not convinced, but she had given him some hope he wanted. He looked directly at her at last, and smiled. His smile was rare, very brief and sweet. “I did not dare hope you would come back, Irena,” he said softly. If she had spoken all she could have said was, “I have always loved you,” but she could not, and there was no need to. He knew his power. He was the Master.

“Will you stay with us?” he asked.

Did he mean for good? His tone was restrained; she was not sure what he meant.

“As long as I can. But I must go back.”

He nodded.

“And then when I try to come back, if the gate is shut again—”

“It will open for you, I think.”

His eyes were strange, dark as caverns; nothing he said changed that inward gaze.

“But why—”

“Why? When you know the answer there’s no question, when there’s no answer there never was a question.” It sounded like a proverb, and his voice was dry and a little mocking; that was the way he had used to talk to her; his return to it comforted her.

“That is your road,” he said.

He turned to his desk again, adding, almost indifferently, “The south road and the north.”

“Could I go north? If something is wrong—Could I go ask for help—carry a message—?”

“I do not know,” he said, only glancing at her; but there was a flicker of praise or triumph on his face, and it was that that stayed with her, after he had taken her, in accordance with the sedate ways of the house, to greet his mother and have a little formal collation and conversation with her, and after she had left the house and returned to spend the day with Trijiat. For the first time, she thought, he wanted something of her. There was something she could give him, if she could find what it was. She had come closest to it when she spoke of going north. He had turned their talk away from that at once, but not before she had seen the flicker of pleasure, of praise.

If only she could understand him better! She must take seriously what he had said half-mockingly about questions and answers: He, and she, and all of them here, were subject to the laws of the place, laws as absolute as the law of gravity, as impossible to disobey and as difficult to explain. He had told her, if she understood him at all, that none of the townsfolk could leave the town, prevented by some power or law. But it was possible that she, since she could come to Tembreabrezi, might be able to leave it. Or perhaps he had meant that, being from outside this land, she was outside its laws, and need not obey? Was that what he had meant? But she would obey him. He was her law. If she could please him: if she could find what he wanted! If he would ask, so that she could give…

This was the longest she had ever stayed in Mountain Town. In the old days her visits had been frequent but short; now that she could spend a week or a fortnight (a night or weekend, on the other side of the gate) if she chose to, the gate had mostly been closed to her. All her longing had been to find it open, to come through. Now she was here, settled in, living at the inn and working with Sofir and Palizot as always, visiting with her friends, playing with their children. All, as always, sat her down to table if they were eating, put her to work if they were working, made her at once and entirely at home. That had been the bliss of the old days, and was still a pleasure. But it was no longer enough. It seemed to her, now, that there was an element of falseness in it, of pretense. The peace she felt here, the homeliness, was truly theirs; but not hers. She came and would leave again, no true part of their life. They did not need her help in their work. They did not need her.

Unless, as the Master had suggested—or had he?—she could help them not by coming here, not by being here, but by going on farther.

No one but he had yet spoken of there being anything wrong, so that at first she thought little about it. Then, as she noticed that in fact no one came to the town, and no one left the town, that they were taking the flocks only to the nearer pastures, that there were shortages of salt, of wheat flour, that when Trijiat lost her good sewing needle she was upset and looked for it for days…as she noticed this and that and the other thing she realised that what the Master had said was true: all the roads were closed. But why? by whom, by what? She tried once or twice to speak of the matter, with Trijiat, with Sofir; they avoided answering, Sofir with a meaningless laugh, Trijiat with such open fear that Irene knew she could not bring the subject up again. It was a taboo, or a dread so deep they could not speak of it at all. They spoke of nothing but the day’s doings, and pretended that nothing was wrong. And that was the falseness she felt, the discomfort. They did need help, but they would not admit it.

What would it be like to go on from Tembreabrezi, northward, down to the plains?

A couple of years ago, a long Sunday on the other side, she had gone with Sofir and old Hobim the merchant and his crew and a train of tiny donkeys laden with woven goods, first to a village a day’s walk north over the shoulder of the mountain, and then on to the town called Three Fountains, in the northeastern foothills; they had stayed there two days to trade and then come back, six days’ journey altogether. She remembered where the road to Three Fountains turned off eastward and the north road went straight on towards a dark pass. How far down from there to the plains? How far across the plains to the City they spoke of? She had no idea; many days’ walking, no doubt; but she could take food, and there would surely be villages or towns along the way, and so she could cross the long, twilit plains and come to the City and ask help for Tembreabrezi. If they would send help. Or was she forbidden to go on the roads too? But they had no right to forbid her. If the Master asked her to go, she would go.

He did not send for her. She grew impatient and restless. She could not understand her friends here going about their work and never talking about what was wrong, like people with cancer saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” like her own mother always saying, “Everything is all right,” she did not want to think about that here, she resented having to think about it. Why didn’t they talk about it? Why didn’t they do something? What were they waiting for?

At last the Master sent for her to come to a gathering at his house. She had been asked to such gatherings before. Business was largely carried on at the inn, in the public room, but decisions involving more than trade were taken during unhurried, long-drawn-out, chin-rubbing conversations in the hall of the two hearths. Both men and women came; and not always, but often, the Lord of the Manor; and any visitors from other towns who were people of substance or manners. The Master’s mother, Dremornet, white-haired and dark-eyed, sat in state in a velvet armchair under the portrait of the ancestor with a withered arm. If there were not many guests, most gathered about her, leaving the other hearth for private conversations; when there were more people, a group formed at each end of the room. This evening a quiet circle of women and several young men had drawn about the velvet armchair, while three or four elderly men pontificated at the Master at the other hearth. There were of course no strangers there this night but Irene. She stayed in the party with the Master’s mother until he came by, signaling both of them with a glance. Lord Horn had come.

Dremornet gathered up her skirts and rose to greet the visitor, making him a full curtsy, after which the other women bobbed at him. Lord Horn was a thin, stiff, grey man. He made a brief, stiff bow. Not even the spectacle of the tiny, self-important old lady performing a superbly self-important curtsy uncreased the cold folds of his face. His daughter, a pace behind him, blonde, dressed in pale silks, bowed and smiled palely, and they passed on. Their function, Irene thought, was to be bowed to and to bow; they were figurehead people, empty titles. The master of the town was the one called Master, Dou Sark. But they were old-fashioned people here and kept to old ways and habits, and so they thought they had to have a lord.

The Master had glanced at her again in passing, and she soon followed him. At the second hearth the townsmen, who had been croaking away like a pond of bullfrogs, now stood solemnly about. Lord Horn listened without expression and to all appearances without interest to something the Master was telling him. The daughter had sat down, characteristically selecting the only uncomfortable chair in the room, a stiff, spindly piece covered in faded brocade. She sat bolt upright and motionless. Between her pastel insipidity and Horn’s dull coldness, the Master’s face was bright and dark as the embers of the fire.

“The Master tells me,” Lord Horn said to Irene, and paused, looking down at her as if from a distance, from a tower several miles off, with bleared windows through which it was hard to see clearly—“Sark tells me that you met another traveler, on the south road.”

“I saw a man. I did not speak to him.”

“Why,” said Lord Horn, and paused again while he got his slow, cold words together—“why did you not speak to him?”

“He was asleep. He was—he did not belong here—” Her need for words was hot and hasty, she grabbed at the nearest one: “He was a thief.”

Another long pause, hard to endure. Lord Horn’s grey eyes, which had put her in mind of tower windows, did not look at her any longer; but he spoke again. “How did you know that?”

“Everything about him,” she said, and hearing the defensive rudeness of her tone she grew angry with the same sudden vindictive rage she had felt seeing the intruder and whenever she thought of him. What right did this old man have to ask her questions? Lordship, the hell with his lordship, another of the thousand words for bully.

“You think then that the man was not…” a long silence, as if Horn had run permanently out of words, “…could not be the one, the man who…”

“I do not understand.”

“The man for whom we wait,” Horn said.

She saw then that all of them standing there by the fireplace were watching her, and that their faces, the worn, heavy faces of middle-aged and elderly men, were intent, pleading—pleading for the right answer, the word of hope.

She looked to the Master for help, to tell her what she should say. His face was set, unreadable. Did he, all but imperceptibly, shake his head?

“The man for whom you wait,” she repeated. “I do not understand. What are you waiting for? Why wait? I can go.” She glanced again at the Master; his eyes were on her now, his expression though still guarded was warm; she was saying what he wanted. “If none of you can go on the roads, send me. I can carry a message. Perhaps I can bring help. Why must you wait for someone else? I am here now. I can go to the City—”

She looked from the Master to Lord Horn, and was checked by the old man’s expression.

“It is a long way to the City,” he said in his slow, quiet voice. “A longer journey than you know. But your courage is beyond praise. I thank you, Irena.”

She stood confused, all the wind out of her sails, till the Master, frowning, drew her away, and she understood that her interview with the Lord of the Mountain was over.

Alone in her room, early, before her departure, she opened the shutters and watched the dreaming twilight over the roofs and chimneys of the town. She was still warm from bed, she wanted to sleep longer, she wanted to stay longer. When she left would the gate close again? When would she be able, would she ever be able, to come back? The reason why she must go was remote, meaningless: She had been gone a whole night now and if she did not get back to the apartment by seven in the morning she would be late to work…Work, apartment, night, morning, none of it made sense here, words without meaning. Yet, like the force or fear that kept the townspeople from leaving their town, senseless as it might be it must be obeyed. As they must not go, so she must.

As always, Palizot and Sofir were up to breakfast with her before she left, and Sofir had a packet of bread and cheese for her to take on the long walk back to the gate. They were troubled, and unable to hide their trouble. They were, she saw, afraid for her.

She looked back once as the way turned. The windows of the town glimmered faint gold in the dark sweep of the forests to the valley floor. Northward above the mountain shoulder she saw one bright star shine clear, gone the next instant, lost, like the reflection in a raindrop or the glitter of mica in sand.

After crossing the Middle River she ate Sofir’s bread and cheese, and drank the aching-cold water of the river; rested a while and would have liked to fall asleep, but did not, could not; and went on. Nothing threatened her in the forest, nothing frightened her, but she could not rest. She must keep on. She held her light, fast pace, and came at last to the last rise, the crest between red-trunked firs, down the long slope to the rhododendron thickets and through them to the beginning place, the gateway clearing—and saw, before she crossed the water, the blackened ring of stones, the plastic sack half hidden under ferns, the ugly rubbish of the intruder’s camp.

She drew back at once to the thickets and from their shelter watched for some while. There was no sign of the man himself. Her heartbeat slowed, her face began to burn and her ears to sing a little. She crossed the river, went to the hearth ring—cold—and kicked it apart stone by stone, kicking the stones into the water. She picked up the plastic sack and the bedroll and turned to the river; then, whispering under her breath, “Out, get out, clear out,” she lugged the stuff through the gateway, up the path, and dumped it in the middle of Pincus’s woods at the foot of a blackberry thicket, just off the path. Hurrying on to the edge of the woods she picked out of the ditch a board nailed to a post, the NO HUNTING sign long torn or rotted away, which her eyes if not her mind had noted twelve days (or hours) ago when she came this way. With it she returned at a run to the threshold. Only when she was across it did she think, “What if I couldn’t have got through?”—but without any thrill of retrospective alarm. She was too angry for fear. She snatched a lump of charred wood from the ruined hearthplace, crossed the river, and sat down on a boulder with the signboard on her knees. Carefully, in black block letters on the ribbed, rain-bleached wood, she printed: KEEP OUT—NO TRESPASSING.

She planted the sign on the crest of the bank, where it would dominate the whole clearing to the eyes of anyone coming through the gateway. The foot of the post went into the sandy soil easily enough, but the whole thing tended to slant, and she was fetching a rock to pound it in solid when some movement across the water caught her eye. She froze, looking up over the glimmering rush of the river. The man, coming down from the threshold, straight at her. Nothing between them but the water.

He knelt down, there on the far bank, and put his head down to the water to drink. Only then did she understand that he had not seen her.

She was near enough to the great rhododendron bushes that she could crouch and draw back, all in one long pulling motion, till the white of her shirt and face was concealed by leaf and shadow. When she looked for the man again he was standing up there across the river, staring—staring at the sign, of course, her sign, KEEP OUT! Her heart leapt again and her mouth opened in a soundless, gasping laugh.

Standing up he was big, heavy-bodied, as he had looked in the sleeping bag. When he moved at last he was heavy-footed, turning to plod back up the bank. He stopped to stare at the places where his hearth, his pack, his bedroll had been. He moved, stopped, stared. Finally he turned slowly, turned his back and headed for the gateway between the laurels and the pine. Irene clenched her hands in triumph. He stopped again. He turned, and came back, straight down and across the water in a heavy, stumbling charge that brought him up the bank in a rush. He pulled up the sign, broke the board off the post, broke the board across his thigh, the charcoal smearing off on his wet hands, threw down the pieces, and looked around. “You bastards!” he said in a thick voice. “You sneaking bastards!”

“Same to you,” Irene’s voice said, and her legs stood up under her.

At once he turned and was coming at her. She stood her ground because her legs refused to go anywhere. “Get out,” she said. “Clear out. This is private property.”

The staring eyes steadied and fixed on her. He stopped. He was massive. The staring face was white and blank, mindless. The mouth said words she did not understand.

He came towards her again. She heard her own voice but had no idea what it said. She was still holding the rock she had picked up. She would try to kill him if he touched her.

“You don’t have to,” he said in a strained, husky voice, a boy’s voice. He had stopped. He turned away from her now and went back, clumsily crossing the water, up the bank, across the clearing, to the threshold.

She stood without moving and watched him.

He passed between the pine and laurels and went on. It was strange; had she never looked through the gateway from this side? The path that went up so steep and dark into the daylight looked level and open, from here across the water; it looked no different from the paths of the twilight land. She could see along it for a long way in the dusk under the trees, and could see the man walking down it, still walking away under the trees in the grey unchanging light.