The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 10

When he woke, the sun was already well above the horizon. It was unlike him to sleep so heavily and long, out in the open. On the other hand, his headache was greatly reduced. As he came to he had not been conscious of it at all, but then it began to make itself felt, growing in intensity, and he had expected it to mount to the sharpness he had felt the night before. Clearly, though, the blow on his head had done no real harm.

However, the headache had stopped growing at a level that required hardly any concentration to put it aside from his attention. Still, since he wanted the whole of his mind free to concentrate on whatever they might run into, he made the mental effort to shift it out, off to the fringes of his consciousness. There it perched like a bird in a tree, at roost - still with him, but easily ignored except when a deliberate attempt was made to check on it.

Amanda had evidently been out gathering some of the wild fruit and vegetable products of the forest for their breakfast. She had them piled on a large lime-green leaf, others of which she had used to make a covering over the twigs which had provided the springs for Hal's forest bed. He recognized some variform bananas, custard apples, and ugli fruit among the eatables she had gathered, but most were probably variforms, or hybrid varieties, of the native flora, adapted to be usable by the human digestive system. Among these were a number of thick roots of various shapes and sizes, and what seemed to be several varieties of fruit with thick skins bristling with spines. They had all the unfriendly appearance of the Old Earth cactus pear. And there was something that was neither fruit nor root, but looked like the white pith stripped from inside the stems of some plant.

Cautiously, Hal sat up, prepared for his headache to explode in protest at the motion. But it did not. He moved forward and sat cross-legged at the edge of the leaf. Amanda was already seated, cross-legged herself, on its other side. "Breakfast," she said, waving at the scattering on the leaf. "I've been waiting for you. How are you?" "Much better," said Hal. "In fact, for practical purposes, I couldn't be much better." "Good!" she said. She pointed to the produce on the leaf before her. "Tuck in," she said.

Hal looked at the food Amanda spread out. "With all this why do they need to come out at night to plant fields?"

"Because they want and need a more balanced diet," she answered. "Also they want to store supplies for those days when the Occupation authorities won't let them get out into the woods to gather. Those allowed days have been set up so that if the local people depended on gathering alone they'd starve to death. Their passes simply aren't validated for enough so-called 'travel' days - days they're allowed outside the walls of the town. " "I see," said Hal. "Also, out here there're only a few variform rabbits and other small wild animals they can catch and kill to supplement the protein of which they don't get enough - they need garden vegetables to make that loss up. Plus they need the root vegetables that are best raised in quantity in a plot. Those people who attacked us last night probably thought we were either there to rob their plot, or we were hunters who might have meat with us they could legitimately take - since legally we're on their ground. It'd have to be one or the other, since there's nothing left to scavenge out here." "You knew they were there," said Hal. "That's why you called 'court.' "

"I know of that family," she said, "and when they jumped us I guessed it was one of the nights they stayed out. They leave town and simply don't go back until the evening of the next day, and either bribe one of the curfew patrol to report them in, or take their chances on being found out." "I forgot," said Hal, "this is your work district, isn't it?" "Right up to the Zipaca Mountains," she answered. "So that's why I had Simon set us down where he did. I wanted you to see something. That while they still believe in nonviolence and try to practice it, there's some things some of them'll fight for now, and one of those is survival. I don't mean all of them'll fight, even for that, but more than you'd think. It's one of the changes you needed to see firsthand, for yourself." "Hardly a change for the better," said Hal, "from their point of view, I'd think." "Wait until you've had time to see some more of them before you make up your mind about that," she said. "For now, it's enough that you've seen that much change. You'd better get some food into you."

Some small, sudden alteration in the tone of her voice made him look more closely at her. He thought he detected something nearly mischievous hiding in the corners of her eyes and mouth, at odds with the usual matter-of-factness of her appearance.

A suspicion stirred in him. The Morgans and the Graemes, growing up as close as cousins, had never been above playing small tricks on each other. It was strange, but somehow mind-clearing, to leave the puzzle of changes in the Exotics and his own frustrated search to think of himself for once in that youthful, long-ago context. "You shouldn't have waited," Hal said, calmly enough. He waved at the food spread between them. "Here, you go ahead."

She raised her eyebrows slightly, but reached out, picked up one of the strings of what looked like pith just before him and began eating. Evidently, it was more chewy than it looked. Otherwise her face told him nothing about its spiciness, bitterness, or any other aspect of its flavor. "By the way," he said, as he reached for some himself, and bit cautiously into the whitish cordlike length, "what kind of taste-" His mouth puckered instinctively, as if he had bitten into a lemon.

"Quite pleasant, actually, if a little bland," she replied cheerfully. "Of course, you have to be careful to eat it only when it has those pale yellow streaks like that - oh, that's too bad, you must have hit one that wasn't quite ripe yet, by mistake. Here, spit it out. There's no point trying to eat it at that stage. Try one of the others with the faint yellow streaks. I'm sorry! "

He got rid of what was in his mouth. "I'm sure you are!" he said - but she was smiling, and then suddenly they were both laughing. "So much for the sensitivity and kindness of an Amanda! Playing tricks like that on someone who might have had a concussion." "You didn't give me a chance to warn you," she said. "Oh? And it was pure chance nearly all the ones without yellow streaks are on this side of the leaf?" "Well, what do you know!" she answered with a perfectly straight face. "Those on your side are, at that!"

Hal carefully took one of the strips with pale yellow streaks -which were, in fact, almost invisible - and bit cautiously into it. The pith from the ripe plant was as bland-tasting as Amanda had said, with a flavor like bread and a decided texture. It was, indeed, more like chewing a crusty home-baked loaf than anything else he could think of. "From now on," he told her, "I expect you to warn me as I go, if something's going to be flame-hot or anything else." "I will," she said. Her voice was suddenly serious. "I'm sorry, Hal. You should have known me when I was young - but I forget, you couldn't have. Anyway, I didn't have all that much time to play, even then. There was always too much to learn. You're sure your head's going to be all right?" "Positive," he said. An unusual softness and gentleness made itself felt in him suddenly. "I'll bet you didn't have much time to play, at that, when you were small." "You didn't either," she said, almost fiercely.

He opened his mouth to disagree, then realized that she was right. From the time word had come of his uncle James's death, little of his time had gone into recreation, compared to that of the boys and girls his own age around Foralie. "That was different," he said. "I deliberately chose my life. " "Do you think I didn't choose mine?" she said. "The Second Amanda may have picked me to follow her when I was too young to have any say in the matter. But she picked me because of what I was when I was born. I was too young to know what I wanted to drive myself toward, but the driving was already in me, and working. But she saw it, even then, and gave it a goal, that was all. After that, I worked the way I did for her because it was what I wanted to do, not because it was something I had to do. I'd have been the third Amanda among the Morgans, no matter what my name or my training!" "Well," he said, still gently, "we are what we are now, in any case."

They finished eating and took up their traveling again. The day warmed as the sun rose, but it did not become so much warmer as to be actively uncomfortable. Still, with Procyon now a white point too bright to be looked anywhere close to, in the greenish-blue sky overhead, Hal found himself grateful for the fact they could walk in the shade of the vegetation alongside the road.

That vegetation was thick, but not tangled. It was undeniably tropical or perhaps it could be called subtropical, but if the latter, barely so. For one thing they were at a considerable altitude above sea level, for another, the angle of the planet to its orbit was something just over ten degrees less than that Old Earth made to its orbit, so that the tropical zone here was wider. Down in the steamy lowlands near sea level, the wild vegetation could honestly be called impenetrable jungle. Here, in spite of the fact it supported tropical fruits and warm-country plants, it had more of the openness of a forest. It would be possible to move through it at good speed without cutting one's way, as they would have had to do in the coastal jungle. There were even small, open, natural glades, as well as those areas that had been cleared for homes and their surrounding grounds.

But the roadside trees were tall enough - both the natives and those variforms which had been imported and found a home here - that the shade was pleasantly thick. The brilliant sky above was cloudless, and both before and behind them were the two ranges of mountains - what had Amanda called them? Oh, yes, the Zipaca and the Grandfathers of Dawn. It was the Zipaca that held the new Chantry Guild, and lay before them. The Grandfathers were behind.

Both were sharp-peaked. Geologically young ranges, clearly, by their appearance. They seemed to diverge to the far left, though this could not be established certainly, for in that direction the land became lost in distance and a blue haze. By the same token they seemed to angle together at the right, though this could also be an illusion of the distance. Ahead of Hal and Amanda, the land lifted gradually upward toward the Zipacas. But only gradually. In the main, between the ranges it was tableland, flat, with only an occasional swell or depression. "Where's the river?" Hal asked.

Amanda turned to smile at him. "So," she said, "you've been figuring out the terrain." "We're all but surrounded by watersheds in the shape of those ranges," Hal said. "And the general landslope is against us. There should be a fair number of smaller streams off the mountain slopes - particularly that of the Zipacas, ahead, to a large river running downward and back past where we landed." "Right you are," said Amanda, "there is. It's called the Cold River, and we landed just about half a kilometer this side of it, so we've been angling away from it. We'll also be crossing a few small streams today, but that's all. The place I'm taking you to is short of the next large stream off the mountains that feeds into the main river."

Hal nodded. "From what I've seen so far," he said, "this valley land ought to be overlaying older, sedimentary rock, younger than the ranges."

"Right. The ranges are young and still growing," answered Amanda, "and you're right, the rock under us here is sedimentary. In fact, you'll see the lower reaches of the mountains, when we come to them, are mainly limestone and sandstone, sheathing the granites and other igneous rocks that pushed up inside it. That's the reason the mountains seem to rise so suddenly from the valley floor. What you'll be looking at are slabs of the valley rock broken off and upended by the mountain rock lifting beneath it. The Exotics liked the contrast of building the peaceful sort of homes they made, in a geologically dramatic area like this one." "Little good it's done them," said Hal, looking at the road alongside them. "They've ended up getting drama with a vengeance."

Into the tar-black, melted-earth surface of the road, deep ruts had been gouged. "The garrison people drove heavy machinery along these roads deliberately to break them down," Amanda said. "It's part of their organized plan of destruction. Bleys isn't waiting for the normal effects of time, and the war with Earth, to manage his 'withering away' process for Kultis and Mara. The Exotics produce nothing he needs, and the Occupation troops he sent have all but explicit orders to keep trying to squeeze the local people until the last one's dead." "Squeeze them?" "Well, you see the road," said Amanda. "In addition to that kind of destruction, they've burned down all the country homes they didn't have a use for themselves, and made the people who had lived in them move into the nearest town or city. There, they've made them live in row house apartments they forced them to build for themselves, quickly and out of flimsy materials. Also, the town or city populace is under all sorts of rationing and restrictions. Every day the people there have to stand in line for hours for their chance to buy the barest necessities. I mean they're deliberately forced to stand in line for not enough of anything to go around, available from stores that can only be open too few hours a day to supply everyone who needs things. Then, there's a curfew at night and strict laws even about how and where you can move about in the towns during the day - that's why we're timing this little walk to get to the gates of Porphyry just a little before they close for the day, at sixteen hundred hours - not much more than midafternoon, here." "We're catching up with someone," Hal said, pointing ahead. "That's right," said Amanda. "You'll see more and more traffic as we get close to town. All the former off-planet workers here - they were mainly from St. Marie - Ste. Marie was a somewhat smaller agricultural world a little farther out from Procyon than the two planets of the Exotics. "- were shipped home, and most of the large farming areas they operated on both Mara and Kultis are deserted now, with no Exotics allowed to try and run them. The locals here can only get permits to go out of their town for about three hours a day on certain days to farm family plots of land that're too small, or too useless otherwise, to do them much good anyway. That's why we ran into that bunch last night, who were undoubtedly staying out overnight, breaking curfew so they could get some real work done on an illegal extra field, by moonlight. They just hope a surprise housecheck doesn't turn them up missing, meantime. It's part of the game to quarter the soldiers on the civilian populace, to the advantage of the soldiers and a better surveillance of the populace."

They had almost caught up now with the traveler ahead of them, who was a thin, balding man in middle age, pushing a handcart. He nodded in answer to their greeting as they passed but said nothing, evidently saving his breath for the job of maneuvering the wheels of the handcart amongst the ruts on the road - the cart being too wide for the more shady edge on which Hal and Amanda were traveling. There was nothing more than a scattering of sweet potatoes in the bottom of the cart, but the cart itself was obviously homemade, and clumsy as well as heavy. The man was streaming with sweat from pushing it in the sun. "He's taking the potatoes home to eat, or to sell?" Hal asked, once they were far enough past to be out of hearing. "Either that, or to barter with a neighbor," said Amanda. "He'd do better to put a bunch that smalI into a sack." "Against the law," said Amanda. "All produce, to be legal inside the city, must be brought in by cart, theoretically to let the gate guards inspect it for amount, which is limited, per trip, and possible plant diseases, of which there aren't any. "

They went on their way, and traffic, as Amanda had predicted, increased. All were people headed into the city, rather than away from it. A fair share of those were men or women with handcarts, like the man they had seen. Others simply carried sacks which, Hal assumed, contained something of value that was not produce. More than a few had the word DESTRUCT! marked in large letters with black paint on the front or back of their robes. "A lot of town-to-town travelers," said Hal. "No, they're local, too. Anything personal has to be brought in by the sack that's forbidden for produce - another law. The ones carrying those are townspeople who're taking advantage of the regulation that lets them use their free hours outside the city to scavenge the ruins of their old country property for anything useful inside town - not that anything really valuable will get by the gate guards. If there was, it'd be taken 'for inspection' to ensure there's nothing contraband hidden inside it. Scavengers are what we're supposed to be, you and I. I've got a fake address to give the gate guards. Theoretically, you and I have been out hunting through what's left of our old homestead." "I see," said Hal. They went on.

A sadness that seemed always to lurk inside him lately was beginning to grow once more to uncomfortable strength, as it had when he had stood in his quarters at the Encyclopedia, surrounded by the image of the estate as it had been at that moment down on Old Earth.

Now, sister birch, white-armed...

Essentially, the ruined buildings, the destroyed and harassed people she pointed out to him, were his doing. Doubly his doing, for it was his going back in spirit to animate the body of Paul Formain in the twentieth century that had helped lead to this. If he had not done that, there would not have been the splitting apart of the investigative animal instinct in every human, one part to adventure and grow, one to hold back, to stay safe and unchanged. He had set humanity free, for this.

He had done it only so that the inner conflict could become an outer one. So that the two conflicting urges could choose up adherents of individual humans and resolve the eons-old argument in an open conflict - from which would come what he had then been sure would be an inevitable victory for the part of humanity that wanted to grow.

But he had underestimated, even then, the complexity and strength in the balance of historic forces, the interweaving of every interaction between every human. That interweaving sought stability, and to get that stability, it had responded to his efforts by giving birth to those maverick, talented individuals who called themselves the Others, and whom none of the three great Splinter Cultures could conquer or control. Not the Exotics who had grown from the original Chantry Guild of Formain's time, nor the Friendlies, who had grown from the pure insectarian fanaticisms of Old Earth into the populations of two worlds which had produced true faith-holders like Rukh, nor yet the Dorsai, who had evolved from brutal soldiers-for-hire to a people who placed independence, honor and duty above all other things.

The Others had come, and utterly conquered, in effect, all the Younger Worlds except those of the Dorsai, Friendlies and Exotics. So these last, they had done their best to ruin. And he, Hal Mayne, who had been born the Dorsai Donal Graeme, had compounded the damage he had done as Paul Formain, by leaving the remaining populations of those Splinter Cultures helpless before the Others, while he withdrew the best that each of the three Cultures had to the defense of Old Earth. An Old Earth that was only now just beginning to appreciate what had been done for it.

And to what end? All this sacrifice had been made so that he, himself, should be free to find what no one else had ever been able to find before - a magic, hidden universe that would at once confound the Others and open a new stage of evolution for the human race. It had been a vain sacrifice. In the end, he had failed everyone else, after they had given the best of what they had, only to provide him with the chance. Worst of all...

The pain mounted in him. It was the deep hurt now inside him that was the personal retribution the historic forces had brought upon him for the damage he had done, and he had not even let himself recognize it untiI last night, when he had taken a blow on the head no adult combat-trained Dorsai would have taken, through his own ineptitude....

So now he must face it. He was no longer a Dorsai. He realized now that he had not been one for a long time, but for that same long time he had refused to face the fact. Now, it was inescapable. There were the Dorsai, and there was Hal Mayne, who had been Donal. But Donal was gone, and Hal Mayne had never been one of them, for all that he had believed himself to be so. He was separated from them as surely as Bleys had been locked away, once in a dream of Hal's, behind a gate of iron bars.

He half closed his eyes at the agony of realization. But it mounted still inside him, until he suddenly found his elbow caught, and the forward motion of his walking body stopped in its tracks. He was turned, and looked down into the face of Amanda. "What is it?" she said.

He opened his mouth to tell her, but he could not answer. His throat was so tight that no words were able to force their way out.

Amanda flung her arms around him and pressed herself against him, pressing her face into his shoulder. "My dearest dear," she said. "What is it? Tell me?"

Instinctively, his own arms went around her. He held to her, this one living link with humanity that he had, as if to let go would be to lose not only that life, itself, but all eternity before and after it. His voice came, brokenly and hoarsely, out of him.

"I've lost my people..."

It was all he could manage to say. But somehow she read through them to what was in him. She led him away from the road, out of sight of it. There, she made him sit down with his back to a tree and fitted herself to him, as if he was dangerously chilled and she would warm him with her body. He held her, and they lay together wordlessly.

He felt a tremendous comfort in her presence and her closeness to him. But it brought peace only to the top level of his mind. Below that was an ever-widening wound, as if he was a figure cut out of cardboard in which a hole had been made with a pinprick, which was now being enlarged and torn apart into a long rip by a pressure too great for him to resist.

But his gratitude for her comfort at this time was immeasurable. After a little while, still unable to speak, he lifted one hand and began to slowly stroke the shining curve of her hair. It seemed so wonderful to him that she should be this beautiful and this near to him, and so quickly understanding of what was breaking him apart inside.

After a long silence, she spoke. "Now, listen to me," she said. "You've lost nothing." Her voice was low and soft, but very certain. "I have." His voice was ragged with tears he did not know how to shed. "First I sold my people into a death contract, then I lost them." "You did neither." she said. in the same soft, even tones.

"Do you remember when you came to the Dorsai to talk about our folk coming - as many as could - to help defend Old Earth?" "And I met you," he said. "You met the Grey Captains, and I was one of them." "You arranged for the rest to meet me," he said, "and I sold them a contract with the Encyclopedia, to die, defending Earth. " "You sold nothing," she said, her voice unhurried, unchanged. "Have you already forgotten that the chance of death was always a part of any Dorsai military contract? Of those who met with you, only two others besides myself had never actually been in the field. Do you think, even not counting those three, that the men and women you talked to had not realized, long before, that one day they would have to face the Others? It was only a question of where or how."

She paused, as if to let her words sink in. "You showed them those things, as you had to others, when the part of you that was Donal broke through to your surface," she went on, "and made it plain to all of us, as he had always made things plain to people. Has your opinion of the Dorsai mind fallen so low that you think they - the Grey Captains - thought they could forever put off an eventual conflict with the Others? When it was the Others who wanted everything humanly owned, including the Dorsai itself? Our people couldn't become the assassins that the Exotics asked them to be, to kill the Others one by one, because life isn't worth certain costs, particularly if that cost is the abandonment of what you believe in. But you showed them a way to fight in the way they knew how to fight, and they took that way. How could it have been otherwise?"

He could not answer. What she said went through and through him, and, if it did not heal the great rent in him, it at least stopped its growing. "And you've lost no one," she went on after a while, still quietly. "You've only gone on ahead of everyone else a little way, so that you've passed over a hill which blocks your view of the rest of us when you looked back. You've stared at that hill so long now, you've come to believe it's all space and time. But it's not. You've lost no one. Instead, you've joined in the whole human race, of which the Dorsai were always a part - but only a part. You've gone on from where Donal stood, alone and solitary."

They continued to sit for some while after that, neither of them speaking. Slowly, what she had just said soaked into him, as sea water slowly soaks into a floating length of timber, until at last it can hold no more, and so, water-logged, it begins to sink slowly and quietly to the far bottom.

So, in time, what she had told him brought relief. He could not believe her, much as he would have liked to do so. Because, much as she was Amanda and understood, he thought he recognized his own life, and his own failure, in a way no one else could. But the very fact that she had tried to warm the chill of despair from him like this, as she might have warmed him back from a death-chill, helped him. So that in time he came back again to her and all other things. The pain that had come from the great torn place inside him was still with him, but it had at last become bearable, as bearable as his headache from the blow had become, when he had pushed it away from the center of his attention, out to the fringes of his consciousness. "We'd better go on," he said at last.

They got up and went back to the edge of the road, and continued along it under the pale brilliant star of Procyon toward the destination she had in mind for him.