Five Ways to Forgiveness

Betrayals

“ON THE planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years,” she read, “and on Gethen there has never been a war.” She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. “There has never been a war”: in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief.

So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes, thinking, “I am a liar.” Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.

Tikuli, sleeping curled up around his tail in the weak sunshine, sighed as if imitating her, and scratched a dreamflea. Gubu was out in the reeds, hunting; she could not see him, but now and then the plume of a reed quivered, and once a marsh hen flew up cackling in indignation.

Absorbed in a description of the peculiar social customs of the Ithsh, she did not see Wada till he was at the gate letting himself in. “Oh, you’re here already,” she said, taken by surprise and feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all. “Come on in,” she said, getting up and dropping her book and picking it up and feeling her back hair where the knot was coming loose. “I’ll just get my bag and be off, then.”

“No hurry,” the young man said in his soft voice. “Eyid won’t be here for a while yet.”

Very kind of you to tell me I don’t have to hurry to leave my own house, Yoss thought, but said nothing, obedient to the insufferable, adorable selfishness of the young. She went in and got her shopping bag, reknotted her hair, tied a scarf over it, and came out onto the little open porch. Wada had sat down in her chair; he jumped up when she came out. He was a shy boy, the gentler, she thought, of the two lovers. “Have fun,” she said with a smile, knowing she embarrassed him. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours—before sunset.” She went down to her gate, let herself out, and set off the way Wada had come, along the path up to the winding wooden causeway across the marshes to the village.

She would not meet Eyid on the way. The girl would be coming from the north on one of the bog-paths, having left the village at a different time and in a different direction than Wada, so that nobody would notice that for a few hours every week or so the two young people were gone at the same time. They were madly in love, had been in love for three years, and would have lived in partnership long since if Wada’s father and Eyid’s father’s brother hadn’t quarreled over a piece of reallocated Corporation land and set up a feud between the families that had so far stopped short of bloodshed, but put a love match out of the question. The land was valuable; the families, though poor, each aspired to be leaders of the village. Nothing would heal the grudge. The whole village took sides in it. Eyid and Wada had nowhere to go, no skills to keep them alive in the cities, no tribal relations in another village who might take them in. Their passion was trapped in the hatred of the old. Yoss had come on them, a year ago now, in each other’s arms on the cold ground of an island in the marshes—blundering onto them as once she had blundered onto a pair of fendeer fawns holding utterly still in the nest of grass where the doe had left them. This pair had been as frightened, as beautiful and vulnerable as the fawns, and they had begged her “not to tell” so humbly, what could she do? They were shivering with cold, Eyid’s bare legs were muddy, they clung to each other like children. “Come to my house,” she said sternly. “For mercy sake!” She stalked off. Timidly, they followed her. “I will be back in an hour or so,” she said when she had got them indoors, into her one room with the bed alcove right beside the chimney. “Don’t get things muddy!”

That time she had roamed the paths keeping watch, in case anybody was out looking for them. Nowadays she mostly went into the village while “the fawns” were in her house having their sweet hour.

They were too ignorant to think of any way to thank her. Wada, a peat-cutter, might have supplied her fire without anyone being suspicious, but they never left so much as a flower, though they always made up the bed very neat and tight. Perhaps indeed they were not very grateful. Why should they be? She gave them only what was their due: a bed, an hour of pleasure, a moment of peace. It wasn’t their fault, or her virtue, that nobody else would give it to them.

Her errand today took her in to Eyid’s uncle’s shop. He was the village sweets-seller. All the holy abstinence she had intended when she came here two years ago, the single bowl of unflavored grain, the draft of pure water, she’d given that up in no time. She got diarrhea from a cereal diet, and the water of the marshes was undrinkable. She ate every fresh vegetable she could buy or grow, drank wine or bottled water or fruit juice from the city, and kept a large supply of sweets—dried fruits, raisins, sugar-brittle, even the cakes Eyid’s mother and aunts made, fat disks with a nutmeat squashed onto the top, dry, greasy, tasteless, but curiously satisfying. She bought a bagful of them and a brown wheel of sugar-brittle, and gossiped with the aunts, dark, darting-eyed little women who had been at old Uad’s wake last night and wanted to talk about it. “Those people”—Wada’s family, indicated by a glance, a shrug, a sneer—had misbehaved as usual, got drunk, picked fights, boasted, got sick, and vomited all over the place, greedy upstart louts that they were. When she stopped by the newsstand to pick up a paper (another vow long since broken; she had been going to read only the Arkamye and learn it by heart), Wada’s mother was there, and she heard how “those people”—Eyid’s family—had boasted and picked fights and vomited all over the place at the wake last night. She did not merely hear; she asked for details, she drew the gossip out; she loved it.

What a fool, she thought, starting slowly home on the causeway path, what a fool I was to think I could ever drink water and be silent! I’ll never, never be able to let anything go, anything at all. I’ll never be free, never be worthy of freedom. Even old age can’t make me let go. Even losing Safnan can’t make me let go.

Before the Five Armies they stood. Holding up his sword, Enar said to Kamye: My hands hold your death, my Lord! Kamye answered: Brother, it is your death they hold.

She knew those lines, anyway. Everybody knew those lines. And so then Enar dropped his sword, because he was a hero and a holy man, the Lord’s younger brother. But I can’t drop my death. I’ll hold it to the end, I’ll cherish it, hate it, eat it, drink it, listen to it, give it my bed, mourn it, everything but let it go.

She looked up out of her thoughts into the afternoon on the marshes: the sky a cloudless misty blue, reflected in one distant curving channel of water, and the sunlight golden over the dun levels of the reedbeds and among the stems of the reeds. The rare, soft west wind blew. A perfect day. The beauty of the world, the beauty of the world! A sword in my hand, turned against me. Why do you make beauty to kill us, my Lord?

She trudged on, pulling her headscarf tighter with a little dissatisfied jerk. At this rate she would soon be wandering around the marshes shouting aloud, like Abberkam.

And there he was, the thought had summoned him: lurching along in the blind way he had as if he never saw anything but his thoughts, striking at the roadway with his big stick as if he was killing a snake. Long grey hair blowing around his face. He wasn’t shouting, he only shouted at night, and not for a long time now, but he was talking, she saw his lips move; then he saw her, and shut his mouth, and drew himself into himself, wary as a wild animal. They approached each other on the narrow causeway path, not another human being in all the wilderness of reeds and mud and water and wind.

“Good evening, Chief Abberkam,” Yoss said when there were only a few paces between them. What a big man he was; she never could believe how tall and broad and heavy he was till she saw him again, his dark skin still smooth as a young man’s, but his head stooped and his hair grey and wild. A huge hook nose and the mistrustful, unseeing eyes. He muttered some kind of greeting, hardly slowing his gait.

The mischief was in Yoss today; she was sick of her own thoughts and sorrows and shortcomings. She stopped, so that he had to stop or else run right into her, and said, “Were you at the wake last night?”

He stared down at her; she felt he was getting her into focus, or part of her; he finally said, “Wake?”

“They buried old Uad last night. All the men got drunk, and it’s a mercy the feud didn’t finally break out.”

“Feud?” he repeated in his deep voice.

Maybe he wasn’t capable of focusing any more, but she was driven to talk to him, to get through to him. “The Dewis and Kamanners. They’re quarreling over that arable island just north of the village. And the two poor children, they want to be partners, and their fathers threaten to kill them if they look at each other. What idiocy! Why don’t they divide the island and let the children pair and let their children share it? It’ll come to blood one of these days, I think.”

“To blood,” the Chief said, repeating again like a half-wit, and then slowly, in that great, deep voice, the voice she had heard crying out in agony in the night across the marshes, “Those men. Those shopkeepers. They have the souls of owners. They won’t kill. But they won’t share. If it’s property, they won’t let go. Never.”

She saw again the lifted sword.

“Ah,” she said with a shudder. “So then the children must wait… till the old people die…”

“Too late,” he said. His eyes met hers for one instant, keen and strange; then he pushed back his hair impatiently, growled something by way of good-bye, and started on so abruptly that she almost crouched aside to make way for him. That’s how a chief walks, she thought wryly, as she went on. Big, wide, taking up space, stamping the earth down. And this, this is how an old woman walks, narrowly, narrowly.

There was a strange noise behind her—gunshots, she thought, for city usages stay in the nerves—and she turned sharp round. Abberkam had stopped and was coughing explosively, tremendously, his big frame hunched around the spasms that nearly wracked him off his feet. Yoss knew that kind of coughing. The Ekumen was supposed to have medicine for it, but she’d left the city before any of it came. She went to Abberkam and when the paroxysm was over and he stood gasping, grey-faced, she said, “That’s berlot: are you getting over it or are you getting it?”

He shook his head.

She waited.

While she waited she thought, what do I care if he’s sick or not? Does he care? He came here to die. I heard him howling out on the marshes in the dark, last winter. Howling in agony. Eaten out with shame, like a man with cancer who’s been all eaten out by the cancer but can’t die.

“It’s all right,” he said, hoarse, angry, wanting her only to get away from him; and she nodded and went on her way. Let him die. How could he want to live knowing what he’d lost, his power, his honor, and what he’d done? Lied, betrayed his supporters, embezzled. The perfect politician. Big Chief Abberkam, hero of the Liberation, leader of the World Party, who had destroyed the World Party by his greed and folly.

She glanced back once. He was moving very slowly or perhaps had stopped, she was not sure. She went on, taking the right-hand way where the causeway forked, going down onto the bog-path that led to her little house.

Three hundred years ago these marshlands had been a vast, rich agricultural valley, one of the first to be irrigated and cultivated by the Agricultural Plantation Corporation when they brought their slaves from Werel to the Yeowe Colony. Too well irrigated, too well cultivated; fertilizing chemicals and salts of the soil had accumulated till nothing would grow, and the Owners went elsewhere for their profit. The banks of the irrigation canals slumped here and there and the waters of the river wandered free again, pooling and meandering, slowly washing the lands clean. The reeds grew, miles and miles of reeds bowing a little under the wind, under the cloud-shadows and the wings of long-legged birds. Here and there on an island of rockier soil a few fields and a slave-village remained, a few sharecroppers left behind, useless people on useless land. The freedom of desolation. And all through the marshes there were lonely houses.

Growing old, the people of Werel and Yeowe might turn to silence, as their religion recommended them to do: when their children were grown, when they had done their work as householder and citizen, when as their body weakened their soul might make itself strong, they left their life behind and came empty-handed to lonely places. Even on the Plantations, the Bosses had let old slaves go out into the wilderness, go free. Here in the North, freedmen from the cities had come out to the marshlands and lived as recluses in the lonely houses. Now, since the Liberation, even women came.

Some of the houses were derelict, and any soulmaker might claim them; most, like Yoss’s thatched cabin, were owned by villagers who maintained them and gave them to a recluse rent-free as a religious duty, a means of enriching the soul. Yoss liked knowing that she was a source of spiritual profit to her landlord, a grasping man whose account with Providence was probably otherwise all on the debit side. She liked to feel useful. She took it for another sign of her incapacity to let the world go, as the Lord Kamye bade her do. You are no longer useful, he had told her in a hundred ways, over and over, since she was sixty; but she would not listen. She left the noisy world and came out to the marshes, but she let the world go on chattering and gossiping and singing and crying in her ears. She would not hear the low voice of the Lord.

Eyid and Wada were gone when she got home; the bed was made up very tight, and the foxdog Tikuli was sleeping on it, curled up around his tail. Gubu the spotted cat was prancing around asking about dinner. She picked him up and petted his silken, speckled back while he nuzzled under her ear, making his steady roo-roo-roo of pleasure and affection; then she fed him. Tikuli took no notice, which was odd. Tikuli was sleeping too much. She sat on the bed and scratched the roots of his stiff, red-furred ears. He woke and yawned and looked at her with soft amber eyes, his red plume of tail stirring. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked him. I will eat to please you, Tikuli answered, getting down off the bed rather stiffly. “Oh, Tikuli, you’re getting old,” Yoss said, and the sword stirred in her heart. Her daughter Safnan had given her Tikuli, a tiny red cub, a scurry of paws and plume-tail—how long ago? Eight years. A long time. A lifetime for a foxdog.

More than a lifetime for Safnan. More than a lifetime for her children, Yoss’s grandchildren, Enkamma and Uye.

If I am alive, they are dead, Yoss thought, as she always thought; if they are alive, I am dead. They went on the ship that goes like light; they are translated into the light. When they return into life, when they step off the ship on the world called Hain, it will be eighty years from the day they left, and I will be dead, long dead; I am dead. They left me and I am dead. Let them be alive, Lord, sweet Lord, let them be alive, I will be dead. I came here to be dead. For them. I cannot, I cannot let them be dead for me.

Tikuli’s cold nose touched her hand. She looked intently at him. The amber of his eyes was dimmed, bluish. She stroked his head, scratched the roots of his ears, silent.

He ate a few bites to please her, and climbed back up onto the bed. She made her own dinner, soup and rewarmed soda cakes, and ate it, not tasting it. She washed the three dishes she had used, made up the fire, and sat by it trying to read her book slowly, while Tikuli slept on the bed and Gubu lay on the hearth gazing into the fire with round golden eyes, going roo-roo-roo very softly. Once he sat up and made his battlecall, “Hoooo!” at some noise he heard out in the marshes, and stalked about a bit; then he settled down again to staring and roo-ing. Later, when the fire was out and the house utterly dark in the starless darkness, he joined Yoss and Tikuli in the warm bed, where earlier the young lovers had had their brief, sharp joy.

She found she was thinking about Abberkam, the next couple of days, as she worked in her little vegetable garden, cleaning it up for the winter. When the Chief first came, the villagers had been all abuzz with excitement about his living in a house that belonged to the headman of their village. Disgraced, dishonored, he was still a very famous man. An elected Chief of the Heyend, one of the principal Tribes of Yeowe, he had come to prominence during the last years of the War of Liberation, leading a great movement for what he called Racial Freedom. Even some of the villagers had embraced the main principle of the World Party: No one was to live on Yeowe but its own people. No Werelians, the hated ancestral colonizers, the Bosses and Owners. The War had ended slavery; and in the last few years the diplomats of the Ekumen had negotiated an end to Werel’s economic power over its former colony-planet. The Bosses and Owners, even those whose families had lived on Yeowe for centuries, had all withdrawn to Werel, the Old World, next outward from the sun. They had run, and their soldiers had been driven after them. They must never return, said the World Party. Not as traders, not as visitors, they would never again pollute the soil and soul of Yeowe. Nor would any other foreigner, any other Power. The Aliens of the Ekumen had helped Yeowe free itself; now they too must go. There was no place for them here. “This is our world. This is the free world. Here we will make our souls in the image of Kamye the Swordsman,” Abberkam had said over and over, and that image, the curved sword, was the symbol of the World Party.

And blood had been shed. From the Uprising at Nadami on, thirty years of fighting, rebellions, retaliations, half her lifetime, and even after Liberation, after all the Werelians were gone, the fighting went on. Always, always, the young men were ready to rush out and kill whoever the old men told them to kill, each other, women, old people, children; always there was a war to be fought in the name of Peace, Freedom, Justice, the Lord. Newly freed tribes fought over land, the city chiefs fought for power. All Yoss had worked for all her life as an educator in the capital had come to pieces not only during the War of Liberation but after it, as the city disintegrated in one ward-war after another.

In all fairness, she thought, despite his waving Kamye’s sword, Abberkam, in leading the World Party, had tried to avoid war and had partly succeeded. His preference was for the winning of power by policy and persuasion, and he was a master of it. He had come very near success. The curved sword was everywhere, the rallies cheering his speeches were immense. ABBERKAM AND RACIAL FREEDOM! said huge posters stretched across the city avenues. He was certain to win the first free election ever held on Yeowe, to be Chief of the World Council. And then, nothing much at first, the rumors. The defections. His son’s suicide. His son’s mother’s accusations of debauchery and gross luxury. The proof that he had embezzled great sums of money given his party for relief of districts left in poverty by the withdrawal of Werelian capital. The revelation of the secret plan to assassinate the Envoy of the Ekumen and put the blame on Abberkam’s old friend and supporter Demeye…. That was what brought him down. A chief could indulge himself sexually, misuse power, grow rich off his people and be admired for it, but a chief who betrayed a companion was not forgiven. It was, Yoss thought, the code of the slave.

Mobs of his own supporters turned against him, attacking the old APCY Manager’s Residency, which he had taken over. Supporters of the Ekumen joined with forces still loyal to him to defend him and restore order to the capital city. After days of street warfare, hundreds of men killed fighting and thousands more in riots around the continent, Abberkam surrendered. The Ekumen supported a provisional government in declaring amnesty. Their people walked him through the bloodstained, bombed-out streets in absolute silence. People watched, people who had trusted him, people who had revered him, people who had hated him, watched him walk past in silence, guarded by the foreigners, the Aliens he had tried to drive from their world.

She had read about it in the paper. She had been living in the marshes for over a year then. “Serve him right,” she had thought, and not much more. Whether the Ekumen was a true ally or a new set of Owners in disguise, she didn’t know, but she liked to see any chief go down. Werelian Bosses, strutting tribal headmen, or ranting demagogues, let them taste dirt. She’d eaten enough of their dirt in her life.

When a few months later they told her in the village that Abberkam was coming to the marshlands as a recluse, a soulmaker, she had been surprised and for a moment ashamed at having assumed his talk had all been empty rhetoric. Was he a religious man, then? —Through all the luxury, the orgies, the thefts, the powermongering, the murders? No! Since he’d lost his money and power, he’d stay in view by making a spectacle of his poverty and piety. He was utterly shameless. She was surprised at the bitterness of her indignation. The first time she saw him she felt like spitting at the big, thick-toed, sandaled feet, which were all she saw of him; she refused to look at his face.

But then in the winter she had heard the howling out on the marshes, at night, in the freezing wind. Tikuli and Gubu had pricked an ear but been unfrightened by the awful noise. That led her after a minute to recognize it as a human voice—a man shouting aloud, drunk? mad?—howling, beseeching, so that she had got up to go to him, despite her terror; but he was not calling out for human aid. “Lord, my Lord, Kamye!” he shouted, and looking out her door she saw him up on the causeway, a shadow against the pale night clouds, striding and tearing at his hair and crying like an animal, like a soul in pain.

After that night she did not judge him. They were equals. When she next met him she looked him in the face and spoke, forcing him to speak to her.

That was not often; he lived in true seclusion. No one came across the marshes to see him. People in the village often enriched their souls by giving her food, harvest surplus, leftovers, sometimes at the holy days a dish cooked for her; but she saw no one take anything out to Abberkam’s house. Maybe they had offered and he was too proud to take. Maybe they were afraid to offer.

She dug up her root bed with the miserable short-handled spade Em Dewi had given her, and thought about Abberkam howling, and about the way he had coughed. Safnan had nearly died of the berlot when she was four. Yoss had heard that terrible cough for weeks. Had Abberkam been going to the village to get medicine, the other day? Had he got there, or turned back?

She put on her shawl, for the wind had turned cold again, the autumn was getting on. She went up to the causeway and took the right-hand turn.

Abberkam’s house was of wood, riding a raft of tree trunks sunk in the peaty water of the marsh. Such houses were very old, going back two hundred years or more to when there had been trees growing in the valley. It had been a farmhouse and was much larger than her hut, a rambling, dark place, the roof in ill repair, some windows boarded over, planks on the porch loose as she stepped up on it. She said his name, then said it again louder. The wind whined in the reeds. She knocked, waited, pushed the heavy door open. It was dark indoors. She was in a kind of vestibule. She heard him talking in the next room. “Never down to the adit, in the intent, take it out, take it out,” the deep, hoarse voice said, and then he coughed. She opened the door; she had to let her eyes adjust to the darkness for a minute before she could see where she was. It was the old front room of the house. The windows were shuttered, the fire dead. There was a sideboard, a table, a couch, but a bed stood near the fireplace. The tangled covers had slid to the floor, and Abberkam was naked on the bed, writhing and raving in fever. “Oh, Lord!” Yoss said. That huge, black, sweat-oiled breast and belly whorled with grey hair, those powerful arms and groping hands, how was she going to get near him?

She managed it, growing less timid and cautious as she found him weak in his fever, and, when he was lucid, obedient to her requests. She got him covered up, piled up all the blankets he had and a rug from the floor of an unused room on top; she built up the fire as hot as she could make it; and after a couple of hours he began to sweat, sweat pouring out of him till the sheets and mattress were soaked. “You are immoderate,” she railed at him in the depths of the night, shoving and hauling at him, making him stagger over to the decrepit couch and lie there wrapped in the rug so she could get his bedding dry at the fire. He shivered and coughed, and she brewed up the herbals she had brought, and drank the scalding tea along with him. He fell suddenly asleep and slept like death, not wakened even by the cough that wracked him. She fell as suddenly asleep and woke to find herself lying on bare hearthstones, the fire dying, the day white in the windows.

Abberkam lay like a mountain range under the rug, which she saw now to be filthy; his breath wheezed but was deep and regular. She got up piece by piece, all ache and pain, made up the fire and got warm, made tea, investigated the pantry. It was stocked with essentials; evidently the Chief ordered in supplies from Veo, the nearest town of any size. She made herself a good breakfast, and when Abberkam roused, got some more herbal tea into him. The fever had broken. The danger now was water in the lungs, she thought; they had warned her about that with Safnan, and this was a man of sixty. If he stopped coughing, that would be a danger sign. She made him lie propped up. “Cough,” she told him.

“Hurts,” he growled.

“You have to,” she said, and he coughed, hak-hak.

“More!” she ordered, and he coughed till his body was shaken with the spasms.

“Good,” she said. “Now sleep.” He slept.

Tikuli, Gubu would be starving! She fled home, fed her pets, petted them, changed her underclothes, sat down in her own chair by her own fireside for half an hour with Gubu going roo-roo under her ear. Then she went back across the marshes to the Chief’s house.

She got his bed dried out by nightfall and moved him back into it. She stayed that night, but left him in the morning, saying, “I’ll be back in the evening.” He was silent, still very sick, indifferent to his own plight or hers.

The next day he was clearly better: the cough was phlegmy and rough, a good cough; she well remembered when Safnan had finally begun coughing a good cough. He was fully awake from time to time, and when she brought him the bottle she had made serve as a bedpan he took it from her and turned away from her to piss in it. Modesty, a good sign in a Chief, she thought. She felt pleased with him and with herself. She had been useful. “I’m going to leave you tonight; don’t let the covers slip off. I’ll be back in the morning,” she told him, pleased with herself, her decisiveness, her unanswerability.

But when she got home in the clear, cold evening, Tikuli was curled up in a corner of the room where he had never slept before. He would not eat, and crept back to his corner when she tried to move him, pet him, make him sleep on the bed. Let me be, he said, looking away from her, turning his eyes away, tucking his dry, black, sharp nose into the curve of his foreleg. Let me be, he said patiently, let me die, that is what I am doing now.

She slept, because she was very tired. Gubu stayed out in the marshes all night. In the morning Tikuli was just the same, curled up on the floor in the place where he had never slept, waiting.

“I have to go,” she told him, “I’ll be back soon—very soon. Wait for me, Tikuli.”

He said nothing, gazing away from her with dim amber eyes. It was not her he waited for.

She strode across the marshes, dry-eyed, angry, useless. Abberkam was much the same as he had been; she fed him some grain pap, looked to his needs, and said, “I can’t stay. My kit is sick, I have to go back.”

“Kit,” the big man said in his rumble of voice.

“A foxdog. My daughter gave him to me.” Why was she explaining, excusing herself? She left; when she got home Tikuli was where she had left him. She did some mending, cooked up some food she thought Abberkam might eat, tried to read the book about the worlds of the Ekumen, about the world that had no war, where it was always winter, where people were both men and women. In the middle of the afternoon she thought she must go back to Abberkam, and was just getting up when Tikuli too stood up. He walked very slowly over to her. She sat down again in her chair and stooped to pick him up, but he put his sharp muzzle into her hand, sighed, and lay down with his head on his paws. He sighed again.

She sat and wept aloud for a while, not long; then she got up and got the gardening spade and went outdoors. She made the grave at the corner of the stone chimney, in a sunny nook. When she went in and picked Tikuli up she thought with a thrill like terror, “He is not dead!” He was dead, only he was not cold yet; the thick red fur kept the body’s warmth in. She wrapped him in her blue scarf and took him in her arms, carried him to his grave, feeling that faint warmth still through the cloth, and the light rigidity of the body, like a wooden statue. She filled the grave and set a stone that had fallen from the chimney on it. She could not say anything, but she had an image in her mind like a prayer, of Tikuli running in the sunlight somewhere.

She put out food on the porch for Gubu, who had kept out of the house all day, and set off up the causeway. It was a silent, overcast evening. The reeds stood grey and the pools had a leaden gleam.

Abberkam was sitting up in bed, certainly better, perhaps with a touch of fever but nothing serious; he was hungry, a good sign. When she brought him his tray he said, “The kit, it’s all right?”

“No,” she said and turned away, able only after a minute to say, “Dead.”

“In the Lord’s hands,” said the hoarse, deep voice, and she saw Tikuli in the sunlight again, in some presence, some kind presence like the sunlight.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” Her lips quivered and her throat closed up. She kept seeing the design on her blue scarf, leaves printed in a darker blue. She made herself busy. Presently she came back to see to the fire and sit down beside it. She felt very tired.

“Before the Lord Kamye took up the sword, he was a herdsman,” Abberkam said. “And they called him Lord of the Beasts, and Deer-Herd, because when he went into the forest he came among the deer, and lions also walked with him among the deer, offering no harm. None were afraid.”

He spoke so quietly that it was a while before she realised he was saying lines from the Arkamye.

She put another block of peat on the fire and sat down again.

“Tell me where you come from, Chief Abberkam,” she said.

“Gebba Plantation.”

“In the east?”

He nodded.

“What was it like?”

The fire smouldered, making its pungent smoke. The night was intensely silent. When she first came out here from the city the silence had wakened her, night after night.

“What was it like,” he said almost in a whisper. Like most people of their race, the dark iris filled his eyes, but she saw the white flash as he glanced over at her. “Sixty years ago,” he said. “We lived in the Plantation compound. The canebrakes; some of us worked there, cut cane, worked in the mill. Most of the women, the little children. Most men and the boys over nine or ten went down the mines. Some of the girls, too, they wanted them small, to work the shafts a man couldn’t get into. I was big. They sent me down the mines when I was eight years old.”

“What was it like?”

“Dark,” he said. Again she saw the flash of his eyes. “I look back and think how did we live? how did we stay living in that place? The air down the mine was so thick with the dust that it was black. Black air. Your lantern light didn’t go five feet into that air. There was water in most of the workings, up to a man’s knees. There was one shaft where a soft-coal face had caught fire and was burning so the whole system was full of smoke. They went on working it, because the lodes ran behind that coke. We wore masks, filters. They didn’t do much good. We breathed the smoke. I always wheeze some like I do now. It’s not just the berlot. It’s the old smoke. The men died of the black lung. All the men. Forty, forty-five years old, they died. The Bosses gave your tribe money when a man died. A death bonus. Some men thought that made it worth while dying.”

“How did you get out?”

“My mother,” he said. “She was a chief’s daughter from the village. She taught me. She taught me religion and freedom.”

He has said that before, Yoss thought. It has become his stock answer, his standard myth.

“How? What did she say?”

A pause. “She taught me the Holy Word,” Abberkam said. “And she said to me, ‘You and your brother, you are the true people, you are the Lord’s people, his servants, his warriors, his lions: only you. Lord Kamye came with us from the Old World and he is ours now, he lives among us.’ She named us Abberkam, Tongue of the Lord, and Domerkam, Arm of the Lord. To speak the truth and fight to be free.”

“What became of your brother?” Yoss asked after a time.

“Killed at Nadami,” Abberkam said, and again both were silent for a while.

Nadami had been the first great outbreak of the Uprising which finally brought the Liberation to Yeowe. At Nadami plantation slaves and city freedpeople had first fought side by side against the owners. If the slaves had been able to hold together against the owners, the Corporations, they might have won their freedom years sooner. But the liberation movement had constantly splintered into tribal rivalries, chiefs vying for power in the newly freed territories, bargaining with the Bosses to consolidate their gains. Thirty years of war and destruction before the vastly outnumbered Werelians were defeated, driven offworld, leaving the Yeowans free to turn upon one another.

“Your brother was lucky,” said Yoss.

Then she looked across at the Chief, wondering how he would take this challenge. His big, dark face had a softened look in the firelight. His grey, coarse hair had escaped from the loose braid she had made of it to keep it from his eyes, and straggled around his face. He said slowly and softly, “He was my younger brother. He was Enar on the Field of the Five Armies.”

Oh, so then you’re the Lord Kamye himself? Yoss retorted in her mind, moved, indignant, cynical. What an ego! —But, to be sure, there was another implication. Enar had taken up his sword to kill his Elder Brother on that battlefield, to keep him from becoming Lord of the World. And Kamye had told him that the sword he held was his own death; that there is no lordship and no freedom in life, only in the letting go of life, of longing, of desire. Enar had laid down his sword and gone into the wilderness, into the silence, saying only, “Brother, I am thou.” And Kamye had taken up that sword to fight the Armies of Desolation, knowing there is no victory.

So who was he, this man? this big fellow? this sick old man, this little boy down in the mines in the dark, this bully, thief, and liar who thought he could speak for the Lord?

“We’re talking too much,” Yoss said, though neither of them had said a word for five minutes. She poured a cup of tea for him and set the kettle off the fire, where she had kept it simmering to keep the air moist. She took up her shawl. He watched her with that same soft look in his face, an expression almost of confusion.

“It was freedom I wanted,” he said. “Our freedom.”

His conscience was none of her concern. “Keep warm,” she said.

“You’re going out now?”

“I can’t get lost on the causeway.”

It was a strange walk, though, for she had no lantern, and the night was very black. She thought, feeling her way along the causeway, of that black air he had told her of down in the mines, swallowing light. She thought of Abberkam’s black, heavy body. She thought how seldom she had walked alone at night. When she was a child on Banni Plantation, the slaves were locked in the compound at night. Women stayed on the women’s side and never went alone. Before the War, when she came to the city as a freedwoman, studying at the training school, she’d had a taste of freedom; but in the bad years of the War and even since the Liberation a woman couldn’t go safely in the streets at night. There were no police in the working quarters, no streetlights; district warlords sent their gangs out raiding; even in daylight you had to look out, try to stay in the crowd, always be sure there was a street you could escape by.

She grew anxious that she would miss her turning, but her eyes had grown used to the dark by the time she came to it, and she could even make out the blot of her house down in the formlessness of the reedbeds. The Aliens had poor night vision, she had heard. They had little eyes, little dots with white all round them, like a scared calf. She didn’t like their eyes, though she liked the colors of their skin, mostly dark brown or ruddy brown, warmer than her greyish-brown slave skin or the blue-black hide Abberkam had got from the owner who had raped his mother. Cyanid skins, the Aliens said politely, and ocular adaptation to the radiation spectrum of the Werelian System sun.

Gubu danced about her on the pathway down, silent, tickling her legs with his tail. “Look out,” she scolded him, “I’m going to walk on you.” She was grateful to him, picked him up as soon as they were indoors. No dignified and joyous greeting from Tikuli, not this night, not ever. Roo-roo-roo, Gubu went under her ear, listen to me, I’m here, life goes on, where’s dinner?

The Chief got a touch of pneumonia after all, and she went into the village to call the clinic in Veo. They sent out a practitioner, who said he was doing fine, just keep him sitting up and coughing, the herbal teas were fine, just keep an eye on him, that’s right, and went away, thanks very much. So she spent her afternoons with him. The house without Tikuli seemed very drab, the late autumn days seemed very cold, and anyhow what else did she have to do? She liked the big, dark raft-house. She wasn’t going to clean house for the Chief or any man who didn’t do it for himself, but she poked about in it, in rooms Abberkam evidently hadn’t used or even looked at. She found one upstairs, with long low windows all along the west wall, that she liked. She swept it out and cleaned the windows with their small, greenish panes. When he was asleep she would go up to that room and sit on a ragged wool rug, its only furnishing. The fireplace had been sealed up with loose bricks, but heat came up it from the peat fire burning below, and with her back against the warm bricks and the sunlight slanting in, she was warm. She felt a peacefulness there that seemed to belong to the room, the shape of its air, the greenish, wavery glass of the windows. There she would sit in silence, unoccupied, content, as she had never sat in her own house.

The Chief was slow to get his strength back. Often he was sullen, dour, the uncouth man she had first thought him, sunk in a stupor of self-centered shame and rage. Other days he was ready to talk; even to listen, sometimes.

“I’ve been reading a book about the worlds of the Ekumen,” Yoss said, waiting for their bean-cakes to be ready to turn and fry on the other side. For the last several days she had made and eaten dinner with him in the late afternoon, washed up, and gone home before dark. “It’s very interesting. There isn’t any question that we’re descended from the people of Hain, all of us. Us and the Aliens too. Even our animals have the same ancestors.”

“So they say,” he grunted.

“It isn’t a matter of who says it,” she said. “Anybody who will look at the evidence sees it; it’s a genetic fact. That you don’t like it doesn’t alter it.”

“What is a ‘fact’ a million years old?” he said. “What has it to do with you, with me, with us? This is our world. We are ourselves. We have nothing to do with them.”

“We do now,” she said rather fliply, flipping the bean-cakes.

“Not if I had had my way,” he said.

She laughed. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” he said.

After they were eating, he in bed with his tray, she at a stool on the hearth, she went on, with a sense of teasing a bull, daring the avalanche to fall; for all he was still sick and weak, there was that menace in him, his size, not of body only. “Is that what it was all about, really?” she asked. “The World Party. Having the planet for ourselves, no Aliens? Just that?”

“Yes,” he said, the dark rumble.

“Why? The Ekumen has so much to share with us. They broke the Corporations’ hold over us. They’re on our side.”

“We were brought to this world as slaves,” he said, “but it is our world to find our own way in. Kamye came with us, the Herdsman, the Bondsman, Kamye of the Sword. This is his world. Our earth. No one can give it to us. We don’t need to share other peoples’ knowledge or follow their gods. This is where we live, this earth. This is where we die to rejoin the Lord.”

After a while she said, “I have a daughter, and a grandson and granddaughter. They left this world four years ago. They’re on a ship that is going to Hain. All these years I live till I die are like a few minutes, an hour to them. They’ll be there in eighty years—seventy-six years, now. On that other earth. They’ll live and die there. Not here.”

“Were you willing for them to go?”

“It was her choice.”

“Not yours.”

“I don’t live her life.”

“But you grieve,” he said.

The silence between them was heavy.

“It is wrong, wrong, wrong!” he said, his voice strong and loud. “We had our own destiny, our own way to the Lord, and they’ve taken it from us—we’re slaves again! The wise Aliens, the scientists with all their great knowledge and inventions, our ancestors, they say they are— ‘Do this!’ they say, and we do it. ‘Do that!’ and we do it. ‘Take your children on the wonderful ship and fly to our wonderful worlds!’ And the children are taken, and they’ll never come home. Never know their home. Never know who they are. Never know whose hands might have held them.”

He was orating; for all she knew it was a speech he had made once or a hundred times, ranting and magnificent; there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in her eyes also. She would not let him use her, play on her, have power over her.

“If I agreed with you,” she said, “still, still, why did you cheat, Abberkam? You lied to your own people, you stole!”

“Never,” he said. “Everything I did, always, every breath I took, was for the World Party. Yes, I spent money, all the money I could get, what was it for except the cause? Yes, I threatened the Envoy, I wanted to drive him and all the rest of them off this world! Yes, I lied to them, because they want to control us, to own us, and I will do anything to save my people from slavery—anything!”

He beat his great fists on the mound of his knees, and gasped for breath, sobbing.

“And there is nothing I can do, O Kamye!” he cried, and hid his face in his arms.

She sat silent, sick at heart.

After a long time he wiped his hands over his face, like a child, wiping the coarse, straggling hair back, rubbing his eyes and nose. He picked up the tray and set it on his knees, picked up the fork, cut a piece of bean-cake, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. If he can, I can, Yoss thought, and did the same. They finished their dinner. She got up and came to take his tray. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It was gone then,” he said very quietly. He looked up at her directly, seeing her, as she felt he seldom did.

She stood, not understanding, waiting.

“It was gone then. Years before. What I believed at Nadami. That all we needed was to drive them out and we would be free. We lost our way as the war went on and on. I knew it was a lie. What did it matter if I lied more?”

She understood only that he was deeply upset and probably somewhat mad, and that she had been wrong to goad him. They were both old, both defeated, they had both lost their child. Why did she want to hurt him? She put her hand on his hand for a moment, in silence, before she picked up his tray.

As she washed up the dishes in the scullery, he called her, “Come here, please!” He had never done so before, and she hurried into the room.

“Who were you?” he asked.

She stood staring.

“Before you came here,” he said impatiently.

“I went from the plantation to education school,” she said. “I lived in the city. I taught physics. I administered the teaching of science in the schools. I brought up my daughter.”

“What is your name?”

“Yoss. Seddewi Tribe, from Banni.”

He nodded, and after a moment more she went back to the scullery. He didn’t even know my name, she thought.

Every day she made him get up, walk a little, sit in a chair; he was obedient, but it tired him. The next afternoon she made him walk about a good while, and when he got back to bed he closed his eyes at once. She slipped up the rickety stairs to the west-window room and sat there a long time in perfect peace.

She had him sit up in the chair while she made their dinner. She talked to cheer him up, for he never complained at her demands, but he looked gloomy and bleak, and she blamed herself for upsetting him yesterday. Were they not both here to leave all that behind them, all their mistakes and failures as well as their loves and victories? She told him about Wada and Eyid, spinning out the story of the star-crossed lovers, who were, in fact, in bed in her house that afternoon. “I didn’t use to have anywhere to go when they came,” she said. “It could be rather inconvenient, cold days like today. I’d have to hang around the shops in the village. This is better, I must say. I like this house.”

He only grunted, but she felt he was listening intently, almost that he was trying to understand, like a foreigner who did not know the language.

“You don’t care about the house, do you?” she said, and laughed, serving up their soup. “You’re honest, at least. Here I am pretending to be holy, to be making my soul, and I get fond of things, attached to them, I love things.” She sat down by the fire to eat her soup. “There’s a beautiful room upstairs,” she said, “the front corner room, looking west. Something good happened in that room, lovers lived there once, maybe. I like to look out at the marshes from there.”

When she made ready to go he asked, “Will they be gone?”

“The fawns? Oh yes. Long since. Back to their hateful families. I suppose if they could live together, they’d soon be just as hateful. They’re very ignorant. How can they help it? The village is narrow-minded, they’re so poor. But they cling to their love for each other, as if they knew it… it was their truth…”

“‘Hold fast to the noble thing,’” Abberkam said. She knew the quotation.

“Would you like me to read to you?” she asked. “I have the Arkamye, I could bring it.”

He shook his head, with a sudden, broad smile. “No need,” he said. “I know it.”

“All of it?”

He nodded.

“I meant to learn it—part of it anyway—when I came here,” she said, awed. “But I never did. There never seems to be time. Did you learn it here?”

“Long ago. In the jail, in Gebba City,” he said. “Plenty of time there…. These days, I lie here and say it to myself.” His smile lingered as he looked up at her. “It gives me company in your absence.”

She stood wordless.

“Your presence is sweet to me,” he said.

She wrapped herself in her shawl and hurried out with scarcely a word of good-bye.

She walked home in a crowd of confused, conflicted feelings. What a monster the man was! He had been flirting with her: there was no doubt about it. Coming on to her, was more like it. Lying in bed like a great felled ox, with his wheezing and his grey hair! That soft, deep voice, that smile, he knew the uses of that smile, he knew how to keep it rare. He knew how to get round a woman, he’d got round a thousand if the stories were true, round them and into them and out again, here’s a little semen to remember your Chief by, and bye-bye, baby. Lord!

So, why had she taken it into her head to tell him about Eyid and Wada being in her bed? Stupid woman, she told herself, striding into the mean east wind that scoured the greying reeds. Stupid, stupid, old, old woman.

Gubu came to meet her, dancing and batting with soft paws at her legs and hands, waving his short, end-knotted, black-spotted tail. She had left the door unlatched for him, and he could push it open. It was ajar. Feathers of some kind of small bird were strewn all over the room and there was a little blood and a bit of entrail on the hearthrug. “Monster,” she told him. “Murder outside!” He danced his battle dance and cried Hoo! Hoo! He slept all night curled up in the small of her back, obligingly getting up, stepping over her, and curling up on the other side each time she turned over.

She turned over frequently, imagining or dreaming the weight and heat of a massive body, the weight of hands on her breasts, the tug of lips at her nipples, sucking life.

She shortened her visits to Abberkam. He was able to get up, see to his needs, get his own breakfast; she kept his peatbox by the chimney filled and his larder supplied, and she now brought him dinner but did not stay to eat it with him. He was mostly grave and silent, and she watched her tongue. They were wary with each other. She missed her hours upstairs in the western room; but that was done with, a kind of dream, a sweetness gone.

Eyid came to Yoss’s house alone one afternoon, sullen-faced. “I guess I won’t come back out here,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

The girl shrugged.

“Are they watching you?”

“No. I don’t know. I might, you know. I might get stuffed.” She used the old slave word for pregnant.

“You used the contraceptives, didn’t you?” She had bought them for the pair in Veo, a good supply.

Eyid nodded vaguely. “I guess it’s wrong,” she said, pursing her mouth.

“Making love? Using contraceptives?”

“I guess it’s wrong,” the girl repeated, with a quick, vengeful glance.

“All right,” Yoss said.

Eyid turned away.

“Good-bye, Eyid.”

Without speaking, Eyid went off by the bog-path.

“Hold fast to the noble thing,” Yoss thought, bitterly.

She went round the house to Tikuli’s grave, but it was too cold to stand outside for long, a still, aching, midwinter cold. She went in and shut the door. The room seemed small and dark and low. The dull peat fire smoked and smouldered. It made no noise burning. There was no noise outside the house. The wind was down, the ice-bound reeds were still.

I want some wood, I want a wood fire, Yoss thought. A flame leaping and crackling, a story-telling fire, like we used to have in the grandmothers’ house on the plantation.

The next day she went off one of the bog-paths to a ruined house half a mile away and pulled some loose boards off the fallen-in porch. She had a roaring blaze in her fireplace that night. She took to going to the ruined house once or more daily, and built up a sizeable woodpile next to the stacked peat in the nook on the other side of the chimney from her bed nook. She was no longer going to Abberkam’s house; he was recovered, and she wanted a goal to walk to. She had no way to cut the longer boards, and so shoved them into the fireplace a bit at a time; that way one would last all the evening. She sat by the bright fire and tried to learn the First Book of the Arkamye. Gubu lay on the hearthstone sometimes watching the flames and whispering roo, roo, sometimes asleep. He hated so to go out into the icy reeds that she made him a little dirt-box in the scullery, and he used it very neatly.

The deep cold continued, the worst winter she had known on the marshes. Fierce drafts led her to cracks in the wood walls she had not known about; she had no rags to stuff them with and used mud and wadded reeds. If she let the fire go out, the little house grew icy within an hour. The peat fire, banked, got her through the nights. In the daytime often she put on a piece of wood for the flare, the brightness, the company of it.

She had to go into the village. She had put off going for days, hoping that the cold might relent, and had run out of practically everything. It was colder than ever. The peat blocks now on the fire were earthy and burned poorly, smouldering, so she put a piece of wood in with them to keep the fire lively and the house warm. She wrapped every jacket and shawl she had around her and set off with her sack. Gubu blinked at her from the hearth. “Lazy lout,” she told him. “Wise beast.”

The cold was frightening. If I slipped on the ice and broke a leg, no one might come by for days, she thought. I’d lie here and be frozen dead in a few hours. Well, well, well, I’m in the Lord’s hands, and dead in a few years one way or the other. Only, dear Lord, let me get to the village and get warm!

She got there, and spent a good while at the sweet-shop stove catching up on gossip, and at the news vendor’s woodstove, reading old newspapers about a new war in the eastern province. Eyid’s aunts and Wada’s father, mother, and aunts all asked her how the Chief was. They also all told her to go by her landlord’s house, Kebi had something for her. He had a packet of cheap nasty tea for her. Perfectly willing to let him enrich his soul, she thanked him for the tea. He asked her about Abberkam. The Chief had been ill? He was better now? He pried; she replied indifferently. It’s easy to live in silence, she thought; what I could not do is live with these voices.

She was loath to leave the warm room, but her bag was heavier than she liked to carry, and the icy spots on the road would be hard to see as the light failed. She took her leave and set off across the village again and up onto the causeway. It was later than she had thought. The sun was quite low, hiding behind one bar of cloud in an otherwise stark sky, as if grudging even a half hour’s warmth and brightness. She wanted to get home to her fire, and stepped right along.

Keeping her eyes on the way ahead for fear of ice, at first she only heard the voice. She knew it, and she thought, Abberkam has gone mad again! For he was running towards her, shouting. She stopped, afraid of him, but it was her name he was shouting. “Yoss! Yoss! It’s all right!” he shouted, coming up right on her, a huge wild man, all dirty, muddy, ice and mud in his grey hair, his hands black, his clothes black, and she could see the whites all round his eyes.

“Get back!” she said, “get away, get away from me!”

“It’s all right,” he said, “but the house, but the house—”

“What house?”

“Your house, it burned. I saw it, I was coming to the village, I saw the smoke down in the marsh—”

He went on, but Yoss stood paralysed, unhearing. She had shut the door, let the latch fall. She never locked it, but she had let the latch fall, and Gubu would not be able to get out. He was in the house. Locked in: the bright, desperate eyes: the little voice crying—

She started forward. Abberkam blocked her way.

“Let me get by,” she said. “I have to get by.” She set down her bag and began to run.

Her arm was caught, she was stopped as if by a sea wave, swung right round. The huge body and voice were all around her. “It’s all right, the kit is all right, it’s in my house,” he was saying. “Listen, listen to me, Yoss! The house burned. The kit is all right.”

“What happened?” she said, shouting, furious. “Let me go! I don’t understand! What happened?”

“Please, please be quiet,” he begged her, releasing her. “We’ll go by there. You’ll see it. There isn’t much to see.”

Very shakily, she walked along with him while he told her what had happened. “But how did it start?” she said, “how could it?”

“A spark; you left the fire burning? Of course, of course you did, it’s cold. But there were stones out of the chimney, I could see that. Sparks, if there was any wood on the fire—maybe a floorboard caught—the thatch, maybe. Then it would all go, in this dry weather, everything dried out, no rain. Oh my Lord, my sweet Lord, I thought you were in there. I thought you were in the house. I saw the fire, I was up on the causeway—then I was down at the door of the house, I don’t know how, did I fly, I don’t know—I pushed, it was latched, I pushed it in, and I saw the whole back wall and ceiling burning, blazing. There was so much smoke, I couldn’t tell if you were there, I went in, the little animal was hiding in a corner—I thought how you cried when the other one died, I tried to catch it, and it went out the door like a flash, and I saw no one was there, and made for the door, and the roof fell in.” He laughed, wild, triumphant. “Hit me on the head, see?” He stooped, but she still was not tall enough to see the top of his head. “I saw your bucket and tried to throw water on the front wall, to save something, then I saw that was crazy, it was all on fire, nothing left. And I went up the path, and the little animal, your pet, was waiting there, all shaking. It let me pick it up, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I ran back to my house, and left it there. I shut the door. It’s safe there. Then I thought you must be in the village, so I came back to find you.”

They had come to the turnoff. She went to the side of the causeway and looked down. A smear of smoke, a huddle of black. Black sticks. Ice. She shook all over and felt so sick she had to crouch down, swallowing cold saliva. The sky and the reeds went from left to right, spinning, in her eyes; she could not stop them spinning.

“Come, come on now, it’s all right. Come on with me.” She was aware of the voice, the hands and arms, a large warmth supporting her. She walked along with her eyes shut. After a while she could open them and look down at the road, carefully.

“Oh, my bag—I left it— It’s all I have,” she said suddenly with a kind of laugh, turning around and nearly falling over because the turn started the spinning again.

“I have it here. Come on, it’s just a short way now.” He carried the bag oddly, in the crook of his arm. The other arm was around her, helping her stand up and walk. They came to his house, the dark raft-house. It faced a tremendous orange-and-yellow sky, with pink streaks going up the sky from where the sun had set; the sun’s hair, they used to call that, when she was a child. They turned from the glory, entering the dark house.

“Gubu?” she said.

It took a while to find him. He was cowering under the couch. She had to haul him out, he would not come to her. His fur was full of dust and came out in her hands as she stroked it. There was a little foam on his mouth, and he shivered and was silent in her arms. She stroked and stroked the silvery, speckled back, the spotted sides, the silken white belly fur. He closed his eyes finally; but the instant she moved a little, he leapt, and ran back under the couch.

She sat and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Gubu, I’m sorry.”

Hearing her speak, the Chief came back into the room. He had been in the scullery. He held his wet hands in front of him and she wondered why he didn’t dry them. “Is he all right?” he asked.

“It’ll take a while,” she said. “The fire. And a strange house. They’re… cats are territorial. Don’t like strange places.”

She could not arrange her thoughts or words, they came in pieces, unattached.

“That is a cat, then?”

“A spotted cat, yes.”

“Those pet animals, they belonged to the Bosses, they were in the Bosses’ houses,” he said. “We never had any around.”

She thought it was an accusation. “They came from Werel with the Bosses,” she said, “yes. So did we.” After the sharp words were out she thought that maybe what he had said was an apology for ignorance.

He still stood there holding out his hands stiffly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need some kind of bandage, I think.”

She focused slowly on his hands.

“You burned them,” she said.

“Not much. I don’t know when.”

“Let me see.” He came nearer and turned the big hands palm up: a fierce red blistered bar across the bluish inner skin of the fingers of one, and a raw bloody wound in the base of the thumb of the other.

“I didn’t notice till I was washing,” he said. “It didn’t hurt.”

“Let me see your head,” she said, remembering; and he knelt and presented her a matted shaggy sooty object with a red-and-black burn right across the top of it. “Oh, Lord,” she said.

His big nose and eyes appeared under the grey tangle, close to her, looking up at her, anxious. “I know the roof fell onto me,” he said, and she began to laugh.

“It would take more than a roof falling onto you!” she said. “Have you got anything—any clean cloths— I know I left some clean dish towels in the scullery closet— Any disinfectant?”

She talked as she cleaned the head wound. “I don’t know anything about burns except try to keep them clean and leave them open and dry. We should call the clinic in Veo. I can go into the village, tomorrow.”

“I thought you were a doctor or a nurse,” he said.

“I’m a school administrator!”

“You looked after me.”

“I knew what you had. I don’t know anything about burns. I’ll go into the village and call. Not tonight, though.”

“Not tonight,” he agreed. He flexed his hands, wincing. “I was going to make us dinner,” he said. “I didn’t know there was anything wrong with my hands. I don’t know when it happened.”

“When you rescued Gubu,” Yoss said in a matter-of-fact voice, and then began crying. “Show me what you were going to eat, I’ll put it on,” she said through tears.

“I’m sorry about your things,” he said.

“Nothing mattered. I’m wearing almost all my clothes,” she said, weeping. “There wasn’t anything. Hardly any food there even. Only the Arkamye. And my book about the worlds.” She thought of the pages blackening and curling as the fire read them. “A friend sent me that from the city, she never approved of me coming here, pretending to drink water and be silent. She was right, too, I should go back, I should never have come. What a liar I am, what a fool! Stealing wood! Stealing wood so I could have a nice fire! So I could be warm and cheerful! So I set the house on fire, so everything’s gone, ruined, Kebi’s house, my poor little cat, your hands, it’s my fault. I forgot about sparks from wood fires, the chimney was built for peat fires, I forgot. I forget everything, my mind betrays me, my memory lies, I lie. I dishonor my Lord, pretending to turn to him when I can’t turn to him, when I can’t let go the world. So I burn it! So the sword cuts your hands.” She took his hands in hers and bent her head over them. “Tears are disinfectant,” she said. “Oh I’m sorry, I am sorry!”

His big, burned hands rested in hers. He leaned forward and kissed her hair, caressing it with his lips and cheek. “I will say you the Arkamye,” he said. “Be still now. We need to eat something. You feel very cold. I think you have some shock, maybe. You sit there. I can put a pot on to heat, anyhow.”

She obeyed. He was right, she felt very cold. She huddled closer to the fire. “Gubu?” she whispered. “Gubu, it’s all right. Come on, come on, little one.” But nothing moved under the couch.

Abberkam stood by her, offering her something: a glass: it was wine, red wine.

“You have wine?” she said, startled.

“Mostly I drink water and am silent,” he said. “Sometimes I drink wine and talk. Take it.”

She took it humbly. “I wasn’t shocked,” she said.

“Nothing shocks a city woman,” he said gravely. “Now I need you to open up this jar.”

“How did you get the wine open?” she asked as she unscrewed the lid of a jar of fish stew.

“It was already open,” he said, deep-voiced, imperturbable.

They sat across the hearth from each other to eat, helping themselves from the pot hung on the firehook. She held bits of fish down low so they could be seen from under the couch and whispered to Gubu, but he would not come out.

“When he’s very hungry, he will,” she said. She was tired of the teary quaver in her voice, the knot in her throat, the sense of shame. “Thank you for the food,” she said. “I feel better.”

She got up and washed the pot and the spoons; she had told him not to get his hands wet, and he did not offer to help her, but sat on by the fire, motionless, like a great dark lump of stone.

“I’ll go upstairs,” she said when she was done. “Maybe I can get hold of Gubu and take him with me. Let me have a blanket or two.”

He nodded. “They’re up there. I lighted the fire,” he said. She did not know what he meant; she had knelt to peer under the couch. She knew as she did so that she was grotesque, an old woman bundled up in shawls with her rear end in the air, whispering, “Gubu, Gubu!” to a piece of furniture. But there was a little scrabbling, and then Gubu came straight into her hands. He clung to her shoulder with his nose hidden under her ear. She sat up on her heels and looked at Abberkam, radiant. “Here he is!” she said. She got to her feet with some difficulty, and said, “Good night.”

“Good night, Yoss,” he said. She dared not try to carry the oil lamp, and made her way up the stairs in the dark, holding Gubu close with both hands till she was in the west room and had shut the door. Then she stood staring. Abberkam had unsealed the fireplace, and some time this evening he had lighted the peat laid ready in it; the ruddy glow flickered in the long, low windows black with night, and the scent of it was sweet. A bedstead that had been in another unused room now stood in this one, made up, with mattress and blankets and a new white wool rug thrown over it. A jug and basin stood on the shelf by the chimney. The old rug she had used to sit on had been beaten and scrubbed, and lay clean and threadbare on the hearth.

Gubu pushed at her arms; she set him down, and he ran straight under the bed. He would be all right there. She poured a little water from the jug into the basin and set it on the hearth in case he was thirsty. He could use the ashes for his box. Everything we need is here, she thought, still looking with a sense of bewilderment at the shadowy room, the soft light that struck the windows from within.

She went out, closing the door behind her, and went downstairs. Abberkam sat still by the fire. His eyes flashed at her. She did not know what to say.

“You liked that room,” he said.

She nodded.

“You said maybe it was a lovers’ room once. I thought maybe it was a lovers’ room to be.”

After a while she said, “Maybe.”

“Not tonight,” he said, with a low rumble: a laugh, she realised. She had seen him smile once, now she had heard him laugh.

“No. Not tonight,” she said stiffly.

“I need my hands,” he said, “I need everything, for that, for you.”

She said nothing, watching him.

“Sit down, Yoss, please,” he said. She sat down in the hearthseat facing him.

“When I was ill I thought about these things,” he said, always a touch of the orator in his voice. “I betrayed my cause, I lied and stole in its name, because I could not admit I had lost faith in it. I feared the Aliens because I feared their gods. So many gods! I feared that they would diminish my Lord. Diminish him!” He was silent for a minute, and drew breath; she could hear the deep rasp in his chest. “I betrayed my son’s mother many times, many times. Her, other women, myself. I did not hold to the one noble thing.” He opened up his hands, wincing a little, looking at the burns across them. “I think you did,” he said.

After a while she said, “I only stayed with Safnan’s father a few years. I had some other men. What does it matter, now?”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I mean that you did not betray your men, your child, yourself. All right, all that’s past. You say, what does it matter now, nothing matters. But you give me this chance even now, this beautiful chance, to me, to hold you, hold you fast.”

She said nothing.

“I came here in shame,” he said, “and you honored me.”

“Why not? Who am I to judge you?”

“‘Brother, I am thou.’”

She looked at him in terror, one glance, then looked into the fire. The peat burned low and warm, sending up one faint curl of smoke. She thought of the warmth, the darkness of his body.

“Would there be any peace between us?” she said at last.

“Do you need peace?”

After a while she smiled a little.

“I will do my best,” he said. “Stay in this house a while.”

She nodded.