The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 30

Shawnee, a slightly stout, middle-aged woman, with her gray hair pulled back above her ankle-length blue robe and sandals, had the round, calm face of a typical Exotic and was on sentry duty just outside the entrance under the rock that led to the mountain trail. "We heard you coming," she said, as the group reached her, "and got you on the scopes by relay from the ledge. The blocking boulder's moved back and the way's clear. You can take Artur through, and we'll block the way again behind you. "

There was a short period of difficulty, for the bearers had to bend double to pass through the entrance and this made Artur an impossible load for the four of them. It ended up with seven people, including Hal, crawling through with the stretcher essentially carried on their backs, until they reached the other side of the rock face and the opening beyond where the path up the mountainside began. The large granite boulder, as Shawnee had promised, was off to one side.

They stopped to rest while the boulder was rolled back. Once in place, it cut off not only entrance, but any light from above. Now anyone crawling under the rock face would have no alternative but to believe they had come up against the solid mountainside and that nothing but stone was beyond. "Amid said we shouldn't need to bother digging up the plug rock, if the soldiers were leaving," said Shawnee, "unless, you've got some reason to." "No. No reason to now," answered Hal. He felt weariness, but with the warm hearth-glow of success at its heart.

But then began the labor of getting Artur up the steep slope of the mountainside track to the ledge. In spite of the Guild members' own experience with the way in, and the fact Hal had warned them, the carriers found they could only work in five-minute stretches before needing to be relieved. Hal stayed beside them all the way, on one side of the stretcher, ready to help catch it if one of the bearers should slip and fall. On the other side climbed Onete, her syringes ready, and beyond her, scrambling sometimes on all fours like a mountain goat, but with the sling loaded and its vine-ends caught up short, ready in one grimy fist, was Cee - her eyes continually on Hal.

There was one uncomfortable moment when Artur began to come to, and moaned. Cee was instantly upright, the vine-ends of her sling sliding down through her fists to their full length, and in the same moment Onete stepped up to the side of the stretcher, her body directly blocking Hal from any throw by Cee. "He's all right! Hal's done nothing!" she snapped at Cee. "I'm going to make your uncle comfortable and put him back to sleep, right now. "

The stretcher bearers had stopped. Any excuse for a moment in which to catch their breath. Onete turned about, still blocking any throw at Hal with her own body, and gave Artur another injection. He relaxed on the stretcher.

"Let's get on," said Hal, taking his own grip on the side of the stretcher again, and they resumed their painful way upward.

When they finally stepped out onto the level surface of the ledge itself, everybody was at the end of their strength. "We'll take him to a room in the clinic," Onete told Hal. "You can find him there later, if you want him. Tannaheh has some people trained as nurses and assistants. There'll be somebody with him all the time." "Tell Tannaheh someone who's been through what Artur's been through is going to have to be brought out of it gradually," Hal said. "For a while at first after he comes to, he's going to think he's still in the hands of his torturers - but Tannaheh probably already knows that."

"I'll tell him anyway," said Onete. "You better get some rest yourself. You've been up more than twenty-four hours, haven't you?" "Perhaps," said Hal. "Anyway, I've got a few words I want to have with Amid before I call it done. I'll see you later." "He turned away from her and the stretcher bearers, who were now brand new at their job, being from among those who had stayed up on the ledge. Some of those who had helped the stretcher up the last few meters of slope had simply sat down, or lain down, where they had stopped, although to Hal's eyes none of them looked in need of more than an ordinary night's rest to put them back on their feet. He turned away and went toward Amid's office.

The heat of the rising sun of midmorning struck at his face and chest through his sweat-soaked shirt, and the level ground felt strange under his feet. He slanted across the open ground, approaching Amid's office from the front and side. He reached it at its right corner and walked along its front toward its entrance. As he passed, he glanced in one of the windows that were the best compromise these forest-built structures could make with the former Exotic homes, where it had been hard to tell from one room to the next whether you were outdoors or indoors. It had suddenly occurred to him that the small, old head of the Chantry Guild might be somewhere else about the establishment, and the thought of a prolonged search for him on legs wobbly with weariness was not attractive.

But Amid was there. Hal saw him through the window, seated in one of the chairs around the now fireless central fireplace. In a chair facing him was Amanda.

Hal stopped for a second. Down below, he had forgotten Amanda might show up. He went on, but at the door, set open to the warming morning air, he paused and looked through its aperture at those inside.

He was not quite sure why he had stopped. It was as if an instinct had put out its hand to stop him for a second, to make him stop and think, first.

Perhaps, he thought, with sudden unnatural clarity, he did need to think before entering. A number of times in his life before, it had been when he was most tired, after great and prolonged effort of mind and body, that his mind had taken on a strange, almost feverish clarity. The most important of those had been a moment there in which he had been some years back now, in the militia cell on Harmony, where he had been left burning up with fever, to die, and instead, in that moment, his mind had seen and worked clearly as never before.

Something like that was on him now, although he did not seem to be able to put it all together. But, out of the dull hopelessness from which Amanda had brought him, when she had led him here, he had finally climbed - to this.

But what was this? One thing was certain, it was not anything resembling his former despondency. He was alive again, and the feeling that the cause to which he had dedicated himself could not be lost was with him again. Also, there were some new bits and pieces of understanding. But they did not fit together. More than ever in his existence before, he felt he stood on the brink of the answer he searched for, but could not quite see the final step that would take him to it.

Part of it was Jathed, that wild Exotic philosopher, who had preached a separate universe for each living individual. Part of it was Cee. Part of it was the fact that he had gone with the others and succeeded in rescuing both Cee and Artur, while sending the soldiers away harmlessly. And done it without harming anyone. True, Cee had killed. But Cee was no more to be held accountable as a murderer than a wolf who had killed in defense of itself and one of its cubs.

Somehow, all these things tied together, but also, somehow his mind failed at the moment to connect them. Particularly, it failed to connect them with Amanda, who was part of the understanding. Amanda, from the moment she had met him on Dorsai, had made him the gift of that insight of hers. The full value of that gift he was yet to know, any more than he could yet appreciate the full implication of the connection of the other bits of discovery afloat in his mind. All he knew about the gift was that it had been a part of herself, and that it was something no one else could have given him, because no one else had had it to give.

It was an awareness of that gift that had stopped him now. Stopped him, because it had made him more perceptive, and that added perception in him now rang a nameless dread of whatever she might have to tell him.

He remembered sitting in her kitchen in the Morgan homestead, Fal Morgan, on the Dorsai world, that first morning after meeting her. There had been a moment there in which he had had a chance to compare her with the telephoned picture of her sister. He remembered then that he had thought to himself that the sister was equally beautiful, but lacked something which Amanda possessed-something which in that moment he had called "intensity."

But it had not been and was not intensity. It was something much more. Amanda went beyond. Part of her extended invisibly into another dimension, lived in another dimension. Everyone, it struck him now, had the potential to extend into that further dimension, but only particular individuals chose to do so, and only in some of these could it be seen in them by another individual - as he saw it now, where he had never been able to see it before. Now, remembering Rukh, he realized he had always seen it in her, and perhaps a little even in Ajela and some of the true faith-holders on Harmony, like James Child-of-God. It had been, now he thought of it, very clearly visible in Ajela, as it was in Tam Olyn, and it had been there in his three tutors - so that he now realized he had learned, partly at least, to recognize it from what he saw in them, without identifying what it was, but imitating it in his own life as he imitated the three old men in other ways.

But it was in other, more unlikely people, too. It was in Cee, surprisingly enough. And it must have been in Jathed. In fact, what he had come here to ask Amid, tired as he was, without knowing why he needed the answer, but knowing he could not sleep until he had it-was whether Jathed had, in those early years down in the forest, had some sort of contact with Cee. Perhaps he had visited her parents? Then the sudden discovery of Amanda here had all but driven the questions from his mind, until he realized, suddenly, that Amanda was connected to them, herself a part of them, in fact.

He went in, and the other two turned at the sound of his boots on the wooden floor. Amid, he was now able to see, had his own extended element, and it came to Hal that both Amanda and Amid, as well as others like them, were not only part of what he had chosen to spend his life finding but part of what he had hoped for when he had let Amanda bring him to Kultis. She would not have identified this specific element as one of the things he needed to discover, but, that strange, almost mystic part of her that had always set her family apart from other Dorsai must have sensed both his need and the location of this, among what else he reached for.

That sensitivity to his need and that which would answer it was part of what made her what she was. So that wherever she happened to be, as now in Amid's office, the perceived universe seemed to fall into order about her, to become sensible and clear of purpose. It was as if she shone with a light that, though invisible in itself, let those about her see more clearly.

He reached her and they held each other for a long moment without saying anything. Then, still holding him with her hands, she stood back a little from him and turned his face to the light of the nearest window. "Better," she said, studying it. "Yes, you're better. But not all the way back to what you should be." "I'm closer," he answered. "All the more close now that you're here."

She let him go, and frowned as he put out a hand to Amid's desk for support. He would have fallen otherwise. His legs felt as if they had no strength left in them. "The grapevine brought me news of the soldiers coming up here to look around," she said. "I came as soon as I could, but I waited for full night to go up to that group you had guarding the rock blocking the trail in. I've been here since about an hour or so after you took your party down there. It was a temptation to follow you down, but if you'd planned what you'd planned without me, there was no point in my barging in and upsetting things. I've been waiting for you since - but you're ready to collapse." "You could say that," he told her with a weary grin. "But I had a question or two to ask Amid before I folded up." "Anything, of course," said Amid, getting spryly up from his chair and coming forward. "But do you have to have the answers right now? Amanda's right. You're exhausted." "Two quick questions," said Hal. "Was Jathed around down there when Cee was living with her parents? I believe he was already dead when she began to run wild - but could they have talked to each other, somehow - would they have talked to each other?"

Amid frowned. "I'm sure he was around, for a couple of years at least," he said. "And as for Jathed talking to her, what I've heard of him is - that he would have talked to, lectured at, anyone - all in the same way, regardless of their age or situation. But whether he and Cee actually communicated - I'd have to ask some of the more longtime members of the Guild. I'll do that and let you know tomorrow. The question isn't going to be whether Jathed would talk to Cee, but whether they encountered each other - and whether Cee, young as she was, would be able to understand anything. But maybe she might. She might even have sensed he was no sort of threat to her, or even saw him as special - children can do that." "That's what I wanted to know," said Hal.

He turned away from the desk, reeling as he lost the support of it, and being caught and held upright by the strong grasp of Amanda. "Sleep for you," she said, "this way."