The Beginning Place

4

In daylight he did not look so big, and he was younger than she had thought, her own age or younger, a heavy, stoop-shouldered, white-faced boy. He was stupid, not understanding anything she said. “I need to come back,” he said, as if asking her permission, as if she could or would permit him. “I’m trying to warn you,” she said, but he did not understand, and she could bear it no longer. She had walked from Mountain Town to the gateway and was tired from that and from the anger and terror of this confrontation with him, and she had to go on and get home, clean up, eat, get to work—Patsi would be asking where she’d spent the night—it was broad daylight, Wednesday, she had promised to take her mother’s stuff to the dry cleaner’s. He stood there, the charcoal of her sign smeared on his face, the contemptible enemy, and she had to leave him there and go, not knowing if she would find the way open to her when she came back.

It was earlier than she had thought. She got to the apartment a little after six. Rick and Patsi had not been talking to each other for a couple of days, and she got included in their vindictive silence, so no questions were asked about where she had spent the night. When she got back from work that evening, Patsi continued to interpret her night’s absence as a sign of disloyalty, and loftily ignored it; Rick alluded to it only for his own purposes—“Shit, what does anybody want to sleep here for?”

She had been glad to move in with Rick and Patsi last fall. They were generous without overdoing the sharing bit, and liked the place clean enough to live in but not clean enough to drive you up the wall. Her paying a third of the rent was important to them since Rick wasn’t working. It had been a good arrangement, and still would be, except that Rick and Patsi were breaking up, and so no arrangement that involved them as a couple could be good. The worst of it now was that Rick wanted to use her against Patsi, and her staying out a night and offering no explanation gave him the idea that she might be available for more than a phony pass. All she had to say was that she’d spent the night at her mother’s place, but she didn’t want to stoop to lying to him; he no longer deserved the honor of a lie. He kept trying to come into her room and talk. On Thursday night he kept at it, it was serious, he said, they had to discuss the future, Patsi wasn’t willing to talk seriously but somebody had to. Not me, Irene thought. Rick, a thin fellow of twenty-five covered with reddish, curly hair like a well-worn Teddy bear, stood with lounging persistence between her and the door to her room. He wore only a pair of jeans with the worn-through knees gaping open weirdly. His toes were very long and thin. “I don’t feel like talking about anything specially,” Irene said, but he went on, talking through his nose about how somebody around here had to talk sometime and he wanted to explain some things about him and Patsi that Irene ought to know.

“Not tonight,” Irene said, slamming a kitchen drawer, and bolted past him into her room and shut the door. He lounged around the kitchen for a while swearing and then slammed his way out of the apartment. Patsi, in the other bedroom, slammed nothing, maintaining a righteous silence.

Irene sat on the edge of her bed with her shoulders hunched forward and her hands between her knees and thought, This can’t last. End of the month, we’ve had it. Then where?

She had been lucky, being able to stay out here near her mother and paying only one-third rent. She had been able to pay off the car, which her job for Mott and Zerming depended on, and pay for a brake job and two new tires. She could afford to pay more for rent, but not as much as an efficiency out here would cost. The thing to do would be move into the city, downtown, and pay about half as much, but then her mother would worry about her getting raped and hassled; and it would take half an hour or forty minutes to get out here, so she would worry about her mother. If only she would call when Victor got drunk. But she wouldn’t call.

Irene got up and went out, slamming the front door a little, and walked over to see her mother.

It was a hot, still night. A lot of people were out. Chelsea Gardens Avenue was a roar of cars gunning, idling, drag racing, cruising. At the farm, Victor had rigged up a floodlight so he could work on his car in the front yard. There was no reason why he should do it at night, he had the whole day and was no good at fixing cars anyhow, Irene had taken auto shop and knew twice as much as he did about engines; but he liked to be in the spotlight. He had a wrench in one hand and a beer can in the other and was yelling at the boys, “Get the fuck away from those tools, you little bastards!” Two or three of his sons, Irene’s half brothers, rushed past her through the glare and darkness of the yard. They paid no attention to her arrival, but the dogs did, the three little dogs yapping hysterically at her ankles and the crazy Doberman that Victor kept chained up choking off his terrible bark by lunging on his chain. Irene’s mother was in the cavernous kitchen with Treese, the four-year-old. Treese was at the table eating chocolate-flavored cereal from the package while her mother moved slowly about collecting the dinner dishes to wash. It was nine o’clock. “Hello, Irena my darling,” Mrs. Hanson said with a slow, happy smile, and they hugged each other.

Mary Hanson was thirty-nine years old and had had three miscarriages and six pregnancies carried to term. Michael and Irene were the children of her first husband, Nick Pannis, dead of leukemia three months after Michael’s birth. Nick’s aunt had taken in the young widow and her babies. The aunt owned the farmhouse and a share in the tree nursery across the road, where she worked. When she retired and took her savings to a mobile home in Florida, she gave the farmhouse and its half acre to Mary. Shortly after that Victor Hanson moved in, married Mary, and begot Wayne, then Dalton, then David, then Treese and the miscarriages. Victor had theories about many things, including sex, and liked to expound them to people: “See, if the man doesn’t get rid of the fertile material, you understand what I mean, the fertile cells, they back up and cause the prostrate gland. That material has to be cleared out regularly or they make poison, same as anything doesn’t get cleared out regularly. Same as clean bowels, or blowing your nose, if you don’t blow your nose you can get impacted sinus trouble.” Victor was a big, well-made, handsome man, much concerned with his body and its functions and appearance, a central reality of which the rest of the world and other people were mere reflections without substance: the self-concern of the athlete or the invalid, though he was neither, being healthy and inactive. He had worked for an aluminum-siding company, but the job disappeared after a while. Sometimes he worked for a friend who sold used cars. Sometimes he went off with friends named Don and Fred, or Dwight and Roy, who were in the TV repair business or the auto-parts business; he would come back with some money, always in cash. From time to time a lot of bicycles were stored in the old tractor shed, which he kept padlocked. The little boys were crazy to get at the bikes, good ten-speeds, new-looking, but he knocked Dalton across the room once for even mentioning the bicycles, which he was storing as a favor for his friend Dwight.

Michael, at fourteen, discovered that his stepfather had gone in for drug pushing in a small way, and was keeping his supplies, mostly speed, in Mary’s chest of drawers. He and Irene discussed turning him in to the police. They finally flushed the stuff down the toilet and said nothing to anybody. How could they talk to the cops when they couldn’t even talk to their mother? There was no telling what she knew and did not know; the word “know,” in this situation, grew hard to define. The one certain fact was, she was loyal. Victor was her husband. What he did was all right with her.

Michael was her first-born son, and what he did was all right too. But he would not accept that. It was immoral. If she had stayed loyal to his dead father, then her loyalty to him would have counted; but she had remarried…At seventeen Michael moved out, having got a job with a construction firm on the other side of the city. Irene had seen him only twice in the two years since.

As children she and Michael, less than two years apart in age, had been very close in spirit, sharing their world entirely. When he got to be about eleven Michael began to turn away from her, which seemed right or inevitable to her and so was a loss but no heavy grief; but as he came into full adolescence his rejection of her had become absolute. He spent his time with a male clique, adopting all their manner and rhetoric of contempt for the female, and sparing her none of it. This, which she could only feel as betrayal, happened at about the same time that her stepfather began to get really pushy, waylaying her on the way to the bathroom upstairs, pressing himself against her when he passed her in the kitchen, coming into her bedroom without knocking, trying to get his hand up her skirt. Once he caught her behind the tractor shed, and she tried to joke with him and make fun of him, because she could not believe he was serious until he was all over her suddenly heavy as a mattress, smothering and brutal, and she got away with a moment of luck and a sprained wrist. After that she knew never to be alone in the house with him and not to go into the back yard at all. It was hard always to be worrying about that. She wanted to tell Michael and get some support from him, a little help. But she couldn’t tell him now. He would despise her for allowing, inviting, Victor to hassle her. He already despised her for it, for being a woman, therefore subject to lust, therefore unclean.

So long as Michael lived at home, if she had actually yelled for help he would have come to her help. But if she yelled then her mother would know, and she didn’t want her mother to know. Mary’s life was built upon, consisted of, her love and loyalty, her family. To break those bonds would be to break her. If she had to choose, forced to it, she would probably stand up for her daughter against her husband: and then Victor would have all the excuse to punish her he wanted. Once Michael left, the only thing Irene could do was leave too. But she could not just clear out, like Michael, so long, been good to know you. Her mother had to have somebody around to depend on. She had had four pregnancies in the last five years, three of them ending in miscarriage. She was on the pill now but Victor didn’t know it because he believed that contraception “blocked the fertile material up in the glands” and forbade her to use contraceptives, which she probably wouldn’t do if Irene wasn’t there to encourage her and make a woman’s mystery of it. She had circulatory troubles; she had pyorrhea and needed major dental work, which she could get cheap at the Dental School, but only if somebody was willing to drive her clear out there every Saturday. Victor hit her around when he was drunk, not dangerously so far, though once he had dislocated her shoulder. Nobody was there with her most of the time but the children, and if she got seriously hurt or ill nobody might do anything about it at all.

She said to her daughter, with the tenderness that had to replace honesty between them, “Honey, why do you stick around out in this old dump? You ought to get a room downtown where you work, and be with some nice young people. It used to be nice out here, but these suburbs, housing developments, trash.”

Irene would defend her arrangement with Patsi and Rick.

“Patsi Sobotny, is that what you call a friend!”

Mary disapproved absolutely of Patsi for living with Rick unmarried. Once, exasperated, Irene had shouted at her, “What’s so great about marriage, according to you?” Mary had taken the attack straight on, without defense. She had stood still a minute, gazing across the dark kitchen at the window, and answered, “I don’t know, Irena. I’m old-fashioned, I think like people used to think, I know. But your father, see. Nick. It was—with him, you know, the sex, that was beautiful, you know, I can’t say it, but it was just one part. There was the whole thing. Everything else, your whole life, the world, see, is a part of it, like it’s a part of you, being a husband and wife like that. I don’t know how to say it. Once you know what it’s like, like that, once you felt that, nothing else makes so very much difference.”

Irene was silent, seeing in her mother’s face some hint of that central glory; seeing also the fearful fact that all the glory can happen and be done with by the age of twenty-two, and one can live for twenty, thirty, fifty years after that, work and marry and bear children and all the rest, without any particular reason to do so, without desire.

I am the daughter of a ghost, Irene thought.

Tonight, as she helped her mother clean up the kitchen, she told her that Patsi and Rick were on the way to breaking up. “So kick out that no-good Rick and you and Patsi find some nice girl to share with,” Mary suggested, enlisting promptly on the women’s side.

“I don’t think Patsi’ll want to. I don’t much want to go on rooming with her either.”

“Better than nobody,” Mary said. “You go around too much by yourself, you never have any fun, my baby. Hiking in the country by yourself! You ought to be dancing, not hiking. Or anyhow get into some kind of hiking club where there’s nice young people.”

“You got nice young people on the brain, mama.”

“Somebody has to have brains,” Mary said with calm self-satisfaction. She came up behind Irene at the sink and stroked her hair softly, making it into a cloudy, twisted mane. “Terrible hair you got. Greek hair, just like mine. You ought to move downtown. This is a dump out here.”

“You live here.”

“For me it’s right. For you not.”

The three boys irrupted into the kitchen and at once made Treese cry by grabbing her box of cereal and stuffing their mouths. They were so cataclysmic as a group that it was always surprising to find that, one at a time, each was a mousy little boy with a husky, mumbling voice. Mary had no control over anything they did outside the house, and they ran wild; indoors her sense of decorum prevailed over all the mindless disorder of their existence, and they obeyed her. She cleared them straight off to watch television, and turned back to her elder daughter. She was smiling, the slow, happy smile that showed her bad teeth and gums. She told the good news, the news too good to tell at once, too good to put off telling any longer: “Michael telephoned.”

“What did he say?”

“Just how he was, and he asked about everybody here, you and everybody. He’s got a car, too.”

“Why doesn’t he drive it over to see us?”

“He’s working very hard,” said the mother, turning away to close the doors of the dish cupboard.

So he’s working hard, Irene thought, he could come see his mother once a year. But telephoning’s a big enough favor for Big Mister Man to do. And Mister Man’s mother laps it up and says thanks…

I can’t take it, I really can’t take it any more. Now I just hurt mama saying that about why doesn’t he drive over to see us. Everybody I know just hurts each other. All the time. I have got to get out. I can’t keep coming home. Next time Victor tries to cop a feel or even touches me or treats her like shit I’m going to blow, I can’t shut up any more, and that’ll just make it worse and hurt her more, and I can’t do anything, and I can’t take it. Love! What good is love? I love her. I love Michael, just like she does. So what? God help me, I’ll never fall in love, never be in love, never love anybody. Love is just a fancy word for how to hurt somebody worse. I want to get out. Clear out, clear out, clear out.

That night when she left her mother she did not go down the road to Chelsea Gardens, but turned left from the house, walking up the gravel road till she was out of the glare of Victor’s floodlight and then cutting off left again across the fields. It was unpleasant walking in the dark, for the ground was hard and uneven under the tangled grass, and she carried no flashlight for fear of attracting the attention of a bunch of leatherjackets or the suburban weirdo gang that sometimes hung around near the factory. The same stupid fear that spoiled all walks alone since her school friend Doris had been raped by a gang in a half-built house in Chelsea Gardens, the stupid fear that left no free place except the sweet desolation of the ain country.

But in the woods the path did not lead down between the laurels and the pine into the clear, eternal evening. It was warm, dark; crickets sang loud and soft, near and far; under that singing was a heavy, continual sound or vibration, cars on the highway perhaps or the sound of the whole city, whose glow in the heavy night sky made it possible to walk even here in the woods. But there was no sound of water running. She walked a few steps past where the threshold should have been, and then turned back. There was no way.

She remembered then how she had watched him go through the gate, across the threshold, the heavy stranger, how he had walked on and the twilight had flowed on before him like a wave. That had been frightening; she did not like to think of it. It had been his fault. It had happened to him, not to her. She could always get back. She had brought him back. It was from this side that she could not always cross.

Could he? Was he there now, where she could not come?

Dogged, she came back to Pincus’s woods the next afternoon after work, and every two or three days for a week, two weeks, as if it were a contest that must be won by willpower, by refusal to give up. At the end of the second week she began to drive every afternoon after work first to the paint factory parking lot, leave the car there, and cross the fields to the wood. She found she was beating a path in the dry August grass and changed her route, going round about one way or another each time, so as to leave no track for others, that other, to follow. But there was nothing to hide. The woods; blackberry thickets; a path; a culvert; after a while a barbed-wire fence straggling across the foot of a hill among the trees. A couple of sparrows chirping, the faint drum of the cars on the highway, and the sound of the city like the breathing of an animal thirty miles long, so big you couldn’t hear it. The hot, late sunshine and the soft, bluish air. Usually she stood a minute where the path came down, where the threshold should have been, then turned around, plodded back across the fields to her car, drove to the apartment, a few blocks west of Chelsea Gardens Avenue.

Patsi and Rick had been having a hectic sexual reconciliation, the last flare-up. On a Saturday night after a visit with her mother she got back in the middle of the biggest fight yet. She could not get out of it. She was part of the family. When Patsi accused Rick of sleeping with Irene she had to defend him and herself; when Rick accused Patsi of not sharing fair on the money she had to stand up for Patsi, who then turned on her for pushing everybody around. After hours and hours of it she realised that the only thing to do, and she should have done it hours ago, was to pack up, pay up, and get out.

Patsi and Rick were sullen, shellshocked. Patsi made an elaborately fair division of the raspberry preserves they had put up together last month, insisting that Irene take exactly half the jars; she kept crying, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks, but she did not say goodbye. Rick helped Irene carry her stuff down to the car and kept saying, “Ah, shit. Well, shit.” It was after eight on Sunday morning when Irene got away. She drove her car, loaded with her worldly goods in two grocery cartons and a handleless suitcase, down Chelsea Gardens Avenue and Chelsea Gardens Place across the road to the farm. The three little dogs began to yap and the Doberman to bellow at the sound of the car in the Sunday-morning silence. Except for the dogs, the farmhouse, surrounded by gutted automobile carcasses, looked derelict. She backed out of the yard, turned right on the gravel road, drove to the parking lot below the paint factory, and parked there. She locked the car and set off once more across the weedy fields already simmering in the heat of what was going to be a fierce day. If the way’s closed I’ll wait there, she thought. I’ll sit down and wait there till it opens. I don’t care if it takes a month…She was crazy-headed from the endless night of quarreling, arguing, explaining, recriminating, excusing. She had had no breakfast, though between four and five A.M. she had eaten a box of pretzel sticks and drunk a quart of milk while Rick was telling Patsi how she played power games and she was telling him that he was a male chauvinist…I’ll go to sleep there in front of the threshold, and wake up every now and then and see if it’s open yet, Irene told herself. Open, open, open, the word jolted in her head as her steps jolted her body. Hot daylight glared in her eyes. Open, eyes. Open, door. There’s the woods, there’s the way into the woods. There’s the ditch, there’s the ivy patch. There’s the big thicket, there’s the path down, the pine with the red trunk, the gateway and the gate, the opened door, the way into my country, my own country, my heart’s home.

She entered into the twilight. She drank from the stream, then crossed and went a little way upriver to a nook sheltered by two big elder bushes where, years ago, she had used to sleep. She lay down there, and made a little moaning sob in pure weariness and the bewilderment of a wish fulfilled; and slept.

Sleep in the ain country was so deep it had no dreams. I am the dream, she thought drowsily, the dream am I. I am the mare but there’s no night. What’s that?—and she was awake sitting bolt upright and her heart pounding, for it had been a noise that waked her, a high gobbling scream far off in the woods—had there been a noise?

Nothing but the sound of water running and the sighing of wind high up in the trees. The sky was quiet. Nothing moved in the forest.

After a while she stood up cautiously, looking about her for any sign of change, of danger. It’s his fault, she thought, that fat face, that slug. He’s changed everything. It’s not the same any more. She was glad to give her uneasiness a cause, and a detestable cause. But as she looked about for traces of the intruder, his hearthplace, his pack, and saw nothing, she was in no way relieved of fear. Her heart went on pounding, her breath came short. What am I afraid of? she demanded, outraged. Here, here of all places? It’s the same as ever, the safe place. I must have had a dream, a bad dream. I want to go to Tembreabrezi. I wish I was there now, indoors, in the inn. I’m hungry. That’s what’s wrong with me, I’m hungry.

She drank again long and deep to fill her stomach, and picked stalks of mint to chew as she went, and set off on the way to Mountain Town. She went lightfoot as always, lighter and faster than ever, for hunger drove her, and fear drove her, and she could not afford to stop and think about either one, for if she did they became unbearable. So long as she kept going she need not think, and the dusk forest flowed past her like the water of the streams; so light, so fast she went that nothing would hear her steps, nothing would notice her, nothing would rise up before her on the path closing the way to her with white, wrinkled arms.

There were candles in the windows of the inn, as if they were expecting her. No one was in the street. It must be late, suppertime or past. At the thought of supper, of soup, bread, stew, porridge, anything, anything at all to eat, she felt her head spin; and when Sofir opened the inn door to her and there was warmth and light and the smell of cooking and the sound of his deep voice, she found it difficult to keep standing up. “Oh, Sofir,” she said, “I am so hungry!”

At the sound of her voice Palizot came, and though she was a woman not lavish of gesture, she kissed Irene and held her for a moment.

“We have been afraid for you,” Sofir said. He steered her in to sit by the fire. It was late indeed: the company of the inn had all gone home, the fire had sunk down. Sofir and Palizot bustled about getting water for her to wash in, food for her to eat, talking away. “And you know he’s come!” Palizot said, and Irene said, “Who has come?”

The two well-known, well-loved faces turned to her in the jubilant firelight; Palizot looked to Sofir smiling, giving him the word for them both. “It’s him,” Sofir said, “he’s here now. Things will go better now!”—with such warmth of pleasure and such certainty of Irene’s sharing in that pleasure that she was unable to say anything. “There now, it’s hot,” said Palizot, serving up a plate for her, at sight of which Irene ceased to care about anything else whatever. Lapped in present bliss, food, rest, firelight, friendship, she ate; and then Sofir had her room ready for her, the room that looked out over the dark drop and reach of the forests to the eastern ridge.

Sofir was out and Palizot occupied, so she breakfasted alone. There was not much to breakfast on: a little thin milk, a pot of cheese, and a loaf so hard and small, compared to the round brown splendors of Sofir’s baking in other days, that she hardly had the heart to cut a slice off the poor wizened thing. Clearly, no wheat had come up the mountain from the merchants of the King’s City.

She had thought as she woke that when Sofir and Palizot said “he,” last night, “he has come,” they meant the King. A little wider awake, she had thought they had not meant the King himself, but a messenger from the King, somebody sent with the power to open the roads. Awake, she knew they had meant nothing of the kind.

“You’ll be going up to the Master’s house,” said Palizot, coming through the kitchen with an armload of clothing from the wash lines. “I freshened up your red dress a bit; it gets so creased lying in the chest. Have you got clean stockings? Look, how do you like these?”

“I suppose he’s there,” Irene said. Since “he” was not staying at the inn, he must have been invited, as she had never been, to stay at the Master’s house. Her pain, a sore one however petty its cause, and her determination not to show it, so preoccupied her that for a minute she did not absorb Palizot’s reply: “He? Oh, no, he’s at the manor. But the Master asked us a long time ago to tell you to come to him as soon as you could, whenever you came again.”

That was balm. “He” could stay at the manor all he pleased.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, admiring the fine-striped stockings Palizot was exhibiting atop the load of clothes. “You just knitted them?”

“From the good wool in four old pairs I unraveled,” Palizot said with the satisfaction of the canny artisan. “Wear them today, levadja. They’re for you.”

In the handsome stockings and the red dress Irene went out into the twilight of the street, and climbed the hiccuping steps to the Master’s house. The geese in the pen by the south wall, big creatures, their white necks and bodies vague and as if luminous, shifted and hissed; one beat its wings for an instant. She had always been a little afraid of the geese. She knocked at the twelve-paneled door and Fimol, calm as always, admitted her and took her across the hall, between the mournful stare of the ancestress and the scowl of the one-armed ancestor, to the door of the Master’s office. “Irena has come,” Fimol said in her clear, subdued voice. He turned from his desk, holding out his hands with open gladness: “Irena, Irenadja! Welcome! We have longed for you!”

I have longed for you, she wanted to say, but could not. Her tongue never would obey her, in the Master’s presence. It obeyed him.

“Come and sit down,” he said. His smile made him look young. His voice was kind. “Tell me, how was it for you coming here? Was the way clear? Was it hard for you?” His dark gaze was directly on her now. “I’ve been afraid you would not be able to come,” he said, speaking lower and hurriedly, and looked away.

“The gate was closed—until last night. I wanted—I tried to come!”

He nodded, grave and gentle.

She tried to get the right words. “I saw nothing, when the way opened—nothing was different. But I felt—There was a noise, maybe I didn’t hear it. There was something that I know I didn’t see—”

As she spoke, now, in this quiet room, the terror she had not allowed herself to feel yesterday coming through the forests on the mountainside came running through her body in one long, cold shockwave: she crouched and shuddered in her chair. Her voice went thin and dry. “I was never afraid in the forest before!”

She looked up into the Master’s dark face, wanting the reassurance of his strength. He said nothing for a while; then at last, his voice still muted. “Yet you came.”

“Someone else—Sofir said—someone else has come, a man—”

The Master nodded. He was concealing or constrained by some intensity of emotion. Finally he said a word or name Irene did not know, hiuradja, and met her gaze again, intense, questioning.

“Did he come from the north—from the City?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“From the south. Like you. On the south road. As you first came, not knowing the land or language.”

Curiosity, the wish to know the full flatness of the truth, was stronger than disappointment or resentment. “Is he—” She did not know the word for blond or fair; they were a dark people. “Has he straw hair, and he’s fat?”

The Master gave his brief nod.

“We are summoned to the manor to meet him,” he said, and something in his voice alerted Irene, a hint of irony, of anger-resentment? “Come.”

“Now?”

“As soon as may be, Lord Horn said.” Again that hint of dryness, or sarcasm; but he exchanged no glance of complicity with her, and impenetrable as ever led her out of his house and across the top of the street to the high, delicate, open gates that led to the manor. He did not speak as they walked between the lawns and groves. To their right the slopes of the mountain rose up, darkly forested, yielding one glimpse of the slanting rock faces of the distant summit. Before them stood the great house, built of a tawny stone in which a warmth lingered like the light of sunset, the afterglow.

An old man let them in and took them through cold, half-furnished, stately rooms, and upstairs to a many-windowed gallery. The windows looked east, over the great downward slope to the distant eastern ridges distinct against the sky. A fire burned in a marble fireplace at the far end of the gallery, and there Lord Horn and his daughter stood with the stranger.

It was him, of course, the dough face, the heavy hands.

She glanced at the man beside her: the dark, hard, fine profile, controlled, contained, vigorous. The Master said nothing, made no least gesture, but she knew his hatred as clearly as she knew her own.

Lord Horn had come forward in his stiff, slow way to greet them. The daughter was smiling pallidly. She was blonde, Irene had forgotten that; they were not all dark-haired after all. This girl’s hair was pale and fleecy like sheep’s wool.

“Irena, our friend,” Lord Horn said. “Our guest, your countryman, I think. He is called Hiuradjas.”

She saw him recognize her—the light dawning: dismay, then surprise, then hope, like a doubletake in a TV comedy. He stepped forward with heavy eagerness and said, in English, stammering, “Hi, I—I’m sorry it—I don’t know their language, like you said.”

She stepped back a pace, keeping her distance.

“Lord Horn,” she said, “when I am here I speak the language spoken here.” The intruder and the mealy-madonna-faced girl stared, and the Master grew alert as a hawk, as she knew from the turn of his head; but Horn said nothing; only he looked, slowly as always, at the Master. There was a curious silence, difficult to bear.

“He cannot speak our language,” the old man said. “Will you help us speak together?”

The Master made no sign. The old lord’s gravity was impressive. Unwilling and ungracious she turned to face the intruder, not looking at him but at the polished floor in front of his shoes—tennis shoes, large, long, and dirty. “They want me to translate for you. Go on.”

“I know you don’t like my being here,” the young man’s voice said. “I don’t belong here, I guess. I don’t know. My name’s Hugh Rogers. If you tell them anything I’m saying, tell them thank you. They’ve been very kind to me.”

When his voice stuck she could hear it creak in his throat.

“He says he came here by mistake,” she said, turning towards Lord Horn, but not looking up as she spoke. “He wishes to thank you for your kindness.” She kept her voice neutral, a translating machine.

“He is welcome to us, thrice welcome.”

“He says you’re welcome,” she said in English, expressionless.

“Who is he? I don’t even know their names. You’re Rayna?”

That threw her off stride for a moment. He would call her Eye-reen. No one but her mother and the people of Mountain Town called her Irena. But he had heard her name from them, of course. It was none of his business anyway. “That is Aur Horn—Lord Horn. That is Dou Sark, Master Sark, the Master of Tembreabrezi. That is Horns daughter. I don’t know her name.”

“Allia,” the girl said unexpectedly, with a simper, speaking not to Irene but to Hugh, Rogers. He turned his sheepish look on her, then back to Irene.

“I think they think I’m somebody I’m not,” he said.

She did not help him out.

“Can you tell them that I don’t belong here—that I come from, you know, somewhere else, and it’s a mistake.”

“I can say that. It won’t change anything.”

Her contempt had finally stung him. He straightened up from his slouch, frowning. “Look,” he said, “when I got here, it was like they were waiting for me. They act like they know who I am. But I don’t know them and I can’t make them understand that they’ve got me mixed up with somebody else that I’m not.”

“You don’t know who you are, here.”

“They don’t. I do,” he said with unexpected solidity.

“It’s the way you came.”

“I didn’t come, I just got here, I didn’t know there was a town, I just followed a path!”

“None of them can walk on that path. Nobody here. Only people that come from-through the gate.”

He did not take this in. “Can’t you just tell them that whoever it is they’re expecting, I’m not him?”

She turned to Lord Horn and said, “He bids me tell you that he is not that man you wait for.”

“We take him for no other man than himself,” the old man said quietly. There were double or shadow meanings in the words he used. She turned them into English hesitantly: “Lord Horn says you are who you say you are, as far as they’re concerned.”

“I seem to be who they say I am.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she sneered.

“I have to go back soon. Do they know that?”

“They won’t stop you.”

“You warned me—back at the gate—that time. What of? Are they dangerous? Are they in danger?”

“Yes.”

“Which? What kind of danger?”

“Both. Why should I tell you? Do I owe you something? You said yourself you don’t belong here. You’re the danger, you’re what’s wrong, it began when you came. I do belong here, this is my place. You think I’m going to hand it over to you because you’re a man and own everything. Well, it’s not that way here!”

“Irena,” the Master said, beside her, “What is it? What has he said?”

“Nothing! He’s a fool. He doesn’t belong here, he shouldn’t be here. You must send him away and forbid him to come back!”

“What is this?” Lord Horn said, slowly as ever. “Do you not know this man, Irena?”

“No. I don’t know him, I will not know him!”

Allia spoke to her father in her light, even voice: “Irena speaks in fear for us.”

Lord Horn looked at his daughter, at Sark, at Irene. His eyes, the almost colorless eyes of an old man, held hers.

“We call you friend,” he said.

“I am your friend,” she said fiercely.

“You are. And he. No harm comes by that road, your road, Irena. You came to speak our word, he to serve our need; this is as it is to be. One and other, other and one. It is two that go that road.”

She stood silent, frightened.

“I go alone,” she whispered.

Then the stupid tears rose up in her eyes and she had to turn her back until she could control herself and had wiped her nose and eyes with the handkerchief Palizot had put in the pocket of her dress. It was hard to turn around and face them. Her face burned as she did so.

“I will try to do what you ask me to do,” she said. “What do you want me to say to him?”

“What seems best to you,” Lord Horn replied in his muted, steady tone. “You speak for us.”

To her bewilderment he stood back for Allia and grim-faced Sark, and with the slightest stiff nod to her and to Hugh Rogers followed them out of the room. She was left face to face with the stranger.

He sat down on a chair that was too narrow for him, then got up awkwardly and went to stand at the high windows.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The eastern light was cold. She moved closer to the hearth. The spasm of tears had left her cold and dull. She must do what she had promised to do.

“This is what they want to say to you, as far as I understand it. There’s something wrong here, there’s some reason they cant leave the town. Nobody can walk on the roads. Except us coming from the south. They’re afraid of something and it seems to keep getting worse. Until you came; they think that’s going to change it some way.”

“Change what?”

“This fear.”

“What fear? This is where I’m not afraid.” He turned from the window. “I don’t understand anything here, the language, why it’s never night or sunlight, but its never frightened me. What is there to be afraid of?”

“I don’t know. I don’t speak the language all that well. They won’t talk about it or I don’t understand when they do. They just say they can’t leave the town and nobody can come here from the plains.”

“The plains,” he repeated.

“Northward, down the mountain. The road goes across the plains to a city finally.”

She looked at him and saw his eyes, grey-blue or blue, wide, in the heavy, white, yearning face. He had turned to her but he did not see her, he was looking in his mind across the plains of the twilight.

“Have you gone there?”

She shook her head.

“Which way is the sea?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know the word for sea.”

“The creeks all run west,” he said in a low voice. He looked at her with the anxious, bewildered look he had, like a steer, the wrinkled forehead and curly hair, blunt face, worried eye. There had been a picture on the cover of a book once long ago, a man with a bull’s head standing in a tiny room. It had come back to her in the darkness before sleep many times, the man’s body and the terrible heavy head.

“Do you know where we are?” he said, and she said, “No.”

After a while he said, “I have to go soon. I’m worried about being late getting back. Next weekend I can come overnight, it’s the long weekend. If they want me to do something. I can try.—Overnight clock time, I mean. Do you—do you figure it’s about an hour clock time to something like a day here, I mean a day and a night, if it…”

“If there was any day or night,” she confirmed. It was very strange to speak of anything like this with another person, to hear him speak of it. “How did you get through the gate, the first time?” she asked in pure curiosity, and asking knew she had wasted all her rage, had accepted the fact that he was here and let him know it.

“I was…” He blinked. His voice made the little creaking sound in his throat. “I was running away. From…I don’t know. See, I’m sort of stuck. Not doing what I want to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Nothing. Important.” It came out in two separate words. “It’s just I want to go to school, but I can’t work it in.”

“What kind of school?”

“Library. It isn’t that important.”

“Well, if it’s what you want to do with your life it is. What do you do?”

“Checker at a grocery.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s good pay. It’s O.K. You know. How did you get here first?”

“Running away. Too.”

But her throat dried up. She couldn’t talk about all that, Doris getting raped, and all the hassle at home, and all that, it was a long time ago now and there wasn’t any use talking about it. She had got away from it. She had come here. None of that existed here. Here was peace, and silence, and nothing changed, it was always the same. Here you did not ask questions. You came home. He could not understand that, he was a stranger. She could not tell him that she came here because her love was here. Her love, her master. No one would ever know that, no one would ever understand it, that center and secret of her life, that silence. In his age, in his mastery, in his strangeness, in his hardness even, in all that divided them, in the distance that held them apart, there was room for desire without terror, there was room and time for love without effect, without penalty or pain. The only price was silence.

She was silent.

The stranger, massive against the window light, stood half turned from her, looking out.

“I wish I could stay,” he said half aloud.

But he turned away from the window, resolute; and went to take his leave of his hosts. She stayed only to give his assurance that he would come back to Lord Horn, who accepted both his parting and his promise to return without question, and then she left the manor. As she walked between the lawns to the iron gate she thought of the return trip she too must soon make. She looked at the dark mountain flank, the remote grey of the rock faces. The silence of the mountain was heavy, like a lid pressed down on a sound, some sound that was always there. She pressed her arms to her sides in a shiver, and walked on. Why go back at all? He had to go back, but that was nothing to her. Why make that long walk through the dark woods back to the gate, why not stay here in the ain country?

She had used to say that to herself, lying in bed in the high, still bedroom of the inn: Why not just stay here, never go back…But she had never imagined what she would do if she stayed, how she could fit into the life of the town, which was complete without her. She came, needing help and willing to help, and learned to spin and card from the women, and went up to the Long Meadow with the children, and went down to Three Fountains with the traders, and made people laugh by her mistakes in speaking, and then left again. This was not her home; she had always called it her home, but she had no home; she stayed at the inn, there was no room here or anywhere that was hers.

She stood still under the iron gateway with her hands clenched.

“Irena.”

She turned and saw him smiling at her.

“Come to my house,” he said.

She went with him without speaking.

In the hall of the two hearths she stopped, and he stopped and turned to face her.

“Let me go north for you,” she said. “To the City. Lord Horn won’t send me. He’ll send the man. Let me go for you.”

As she spoke she saw the long roads across the twilit plain, the towers glimmering, the gates, the beautiful grey streets that went upward to the palace. She saw herself, the messenger, walk those streets. She did not believe it yet she saw it.

“With me,” the Master said. “You will go with me.”

She stared, utterly taken aback.

“The man leaves tonight. Tomorrow: meet me in the morning by Gahiar’s yard.”

“You can—We can go together?”

He gave one nod. His face was grim and set, but the incredulous blissfulness growing in her sang out O my master, my love, together!—but in silence; always in silence.

Sark walked on a few steps. “I shall be lord,” he said very softly, his voice light and dry. “Not he, and not he, but I.” He looked round at Irene with a curious smile. “Are you not afraid?” he said, with the old mockery.

She shook her head.

After early breakfast she left the inn; where the south road entered the street she turned left, passing Venno the carpenter’s shop and old Geba’s cottage. She strode along quickly, her stout shoes kicking her skirt aside so the striped stockings flashed. Her hands were closed and her lips set. The unpaved way ran beside the stonecutter’s yard, deserted. She waited there, restless at first, pacing among the cedars and the blocks of roughcut stone, then sinking into a passivity of waiting, so that when she saw him come at last it was without relief and even without much understanding. Her feelings seemed detached from her mind and senses. She watched him come, a lithe, lean, dark man with a dark handsome face, and it was as if she had never seen him before and did not know him. He walked rapidly, rather stiffly, and did not halt as he came past the stonecutter’s yard. He seemed not to look at her. “Come on,” he said. She joined him on the road. He looked as usual, only that he wore a duffel coat and a sheathed knife or dagger on a loose belt, as the traders had done when they went down the mountain, but there was some change in him; he looked as he always looked but she did not know him.

The road turned a little. Now their backs were to the town, and to the threshold far behind. The way began to slope down into a cutting between high, reddish banks of earth.

“Come on!” he repeated. She had only slowed her pace to stay with him.

She went on a little way.

“Master,” she said, turning. He had stopped. He stared at her. His eyes and face were very strange. He came on, walking directly towards her as if he were blind. She was afraid of him.

“Wait there,” he said; his voice was thin and she saw that his jaw was trembling. “Wait. I—” He had stopped again. He looked around, his head shaking, looked up at the banks of the cutting, and past her at the road. He took one more step forward, and then with a whistling, whimpering cry tried to turn, his knees giving; he stumbled onto hands and knees and then lurching and staggering plunged back up the road. They had come no more than a hundred yards past the stonecutter’s yard. She caught up with him there. “Master,” she said, “don’t, it’s all right—” She tried to take his arm. He pushed her off with the blind strength of panic, throwing her right across the road, and ran on towards the town, making that thin, whistling cry.

She picked herself up, her head spinning a little and her forearm scraped on stone. She dusted her skirt, and stood dazed for a little while. She went slowly to a roughcut block of granite nearby and sat down on it, her arms pressed in against her belly and her head sunk between her shoulders. She felt a little sick, and kept wanting to urinate; at last she crept over to the ditch under the old cedars and squatted there. Up beside Geba’s cottage the pair of scrawny goats blatted softly. She returned to the stone and stood staring down at it, the chisel marks and the patterns in the rock.

I wasn’t afraid, she said to herself, but she did not know if that was true or false: his fear had so dominated and absorbed her.

He will never forgive me for seeing him like that, she thought, and knew that it was true, and could not bear the knowledge.

She left the stonecutter’s yard, walking slowly past Geba’s cottage and Venno’s shop.

I could go, I could go on to the City, if it wasn’t for him, she said to herself, vengefully, ragefully; but that she knew was false. Neither with him nor alone would she come to the City. It was all false, all lies and boasts and stupid daydreams. There was no way.

She stayed on only that one day and night more. She did not much want to stay at all, now. It was all spoilt, here. And she had left everything unsettled on the other side. She would get a place to live and so on and then she would come back here; maybe; if she felt like it. She was nobody’s servant. She would do what she liked.

Her heart pounded as she set out on the south road, but it was fear of fear, nothing more; she walked on steadily.

She did not look back. You don’t look back, over your shoulder. She had learned that long ago, a child afraid of the dark, in the weird night aisles of the tree nursery, running. If you look back it will get you. In the city streets downtown, footsteps behind you and a long way to the next street crossing. You go on and you don’t look back. The way down was steep and the woods very thick; she had never been so aware of the crowding of the trunks and mesh of branches. She tried to walk silently and then tried not to walk silently, for that was fear. At last she heard ahead the murmur of water, Third River, the stream at the foot of the mountain. It was beautiful, that sound of water running, the only music of the ain country. For you hardly saw the birds and they never sang, and the people of Tembreabrezi never sang, not even the children. The wind whispered or made its lonesome roaring in the high branches, but only the water sang aloud, for it rose from the places deeper than fear. She came to the stream, wide and shallow at the ford, gleaming and glancing under the old, moss-grown, leaning alders, quarreling cheerfully with every boulder in its course. She crossed, and then turned and knelt to drink. Now water ran between her and the mountain, and her heart was easier.

She was moving in the familiar half-trance of steady walking, the body alert and the mind occupied with thoughts so long and slow they cannot be put in words, for there are no words long enough, nor sentences, when her body carefully but without warning brought her to a halt, and only when she was standing stockstill, listening, did her mind ask, What was that?

The noise had been ahead of her. What she feared was behind her—but there! the white bulk lunging by the turn, ahead, there!—She held a branch she had picked up on the mountain for a walking stick—so she had called it to herself—and swung it up before her in a rage of terror and struck out. The blow was straight in his face but his arm was up as he broke through the thickets, and he took the blow on it. He stood, his head fallen back a little, his mouth open, his breath loud. His eyes were the eyes of the bull with a mans body in the narrow room. Her hand clutching the broken stick was numb. She took one step backwards on the path, a second, her eyes on him.

His gaping mouth shut, opened. “I can’t,” he said, thick and gasping, and shook his head. “Can’t get out.”

He sat down then, letting himself down heavily and shakily onto the weed-thick verge of the trail. He sat with his head bowed and arms lying on his knees, the heavy, simple posture of exhaustion. Her legs now were shaky with the aftermath of shock. She sat down crosslegged at a little distance from him, put down the broken stick, and rubbed her cramped right hand.

“You got lost?”

He nodded. His chest rose and fell. “Past the gate.”

“You left town two days ago.”

“The path kept going on.”

“You stayed on it? Past the—where the gate should have been?”

“I thought it had to come out somewhere.”

“You’re crazy,” she murmured, contemptuous, admiring the obstinate courage.

“It was stupid,” he said in his hoarse, thick voice. “I finally turned around. But I thought I’d lost the path.” He was mechanically rubbing the arm that had taken her blow. It was the white of his shirt she had seen in the thickets. Not very white close up, streaked with dirt and sweat.

She opened her belt pouch and got out the bread Sofir had given her—she had eaten all the cheese but only half the hard, dark bread at Third River—and handed it across the path.

He looked up; took it slowly; and ate it as she had never seen anyone eat bread: holding it in both hands and bringing his head forward to it, as if he were drinking or praying. It was very soon gone. He raised his head then and thanked her.

“Come on,” she said, and he stood up at once. She felt the inward lurch and turn of pity, the body’s blind compassion for the wound, seeing his heavy obedience and the white, weary face. “Let’s go,” she said as she would have said it to a child, and led off down the path.

After Middle River she asked him if he wanted to rest; he was late, he said; they went on.

They came down the last slope, across that beloved water, into the beginning place. She did not pause, for his fear drove her. She led on straight across the glade, between the high pine and the laurels, across the threshold.

At the top of the path in the heat and light of broad day and the sound of a jet dying off in the east and the reek of burning rubber from somewhere over the hill she stopped and let him catch up to her. “OK.?” she asked with a little triumph.

“O.K.,” he said. He was grey and wrinkled like a man of fifty, a bum with a two-day beard, a drunk or junkie, stooped and shaky.

“Oh, man,” she said with awe, “you look terrible.”

“Need something to eat,” he said.

Since they had walked so far together they walked on farther together.

“You come every week?” she asked.

“Every morning.”

That soaked into her for a while.

“You can always get in? The gate’s always there?”

He nodded.

After a while she said, “I can always get out.”

They came out of Pincus’s woods. The light over the waste pastures was so bright it stopped them. A bank of smog lay translucent brown over the city westward. The sun burned through the haze with bleared, blinding radiance, all the air blurred with smog and burning with light. Each grass stem cast its shadow. The piercing rattle of a cicada swelled and died away and a bird called once, sharply, in the woods behind them. Their eyes stung, there was already sweat on their faces.

“Look,” he said. “About your sign. I’m sorry. But I can’t keep out.”

“All right. I know.”

She hunched her shoulders, staring out over the fields to the distant freeway. The running metal thread of cars flicked and stabbed the sunglare back. “It doesn’t belong to me. Mostly I cant even get there any more.”

They set off across the fields.

“I get here about five-thirty in the morning, usually,” he said.

She kept silent.

“But I can’t get to the town on the mountain and back before work…” He was thinking aloud, slowly. “Next weekend. Labor Day. I get Sunday and Monday off. I can come then. They were—It seemed like they were asking me to come back.”

“They were.”

“O.K. So I could come then and stay a long time.” He mumbled off into silence again, then said abruptly, “So if you want to.”

After fifteen or twenty paces he said, “You helped me get out.”

Irene cleared her throat and said, “O.K. When?”

“Six in the morning all right? Sunday.”

“Fine.”

As they came up the bank below the gravel road he turned right.

“My car’s parked this way.”

“O.K. So long then.”

“Hey!”

He went shambling on.

“Hey, Hugh!”

He turned.

“You want a ride? You said you were late. Where do you live, anyway?”

“Kensington Heights.”

“O.K.”

As they walked toward the paint factory she said, “That must be a long walk from here. You don’t have a car?”

“Rent on the crappy apartment costs too much,” he said with sudden lucid violence.

“My stepfather’d sell you a car for fifty dollars.”

“Yeah?”

“It’d run all week.”

He didn’t get the joke, such as it was. He was dumb with fatigue. In her car he sat hunched up in the deathseat. He was bigger than anybody who had ever ridden in the car with her, it was full of him. He smelled of dried sweat, rank fear-sweat. The hair on the backs of his big, white hands was brassy gold. His thighs were thick. She said nothing to him as she drove except to ask directions. She let him out at the sixplex apartment house he showed her, and drove away relieved to be rid of the crowding bulk and presence. She had not told him where she lived although they had driven past the farm. Did she live there? She didn’t live anywhere else at the moment. For all she knew Rick and Patsi had made it up again by now, but screw them. Her mother wouldn’t mind having her home again for a while, and it would be O.K. if she could just keep out of Vic’s way so no trouble got started. She would be sleeping with Treese and that might discourage him. Or maybe not. But anyhow there was nowhere else to go until she found a place of her own. Maybe downtown. Did her mother need her nearby or was she just clinging to her mother? She ought to try. If only there was somebody who wanted to share an apartment downtown. At a stoplight she reached back to pick up and look at the alarm clock that lay on top of her stuff in the carton in the back seat. It was two-fifteen. She could go home and dump her stuff, and wash and eat something, and then start looking for an apartment. Maybe there would be something she could afford by herself. The Sunday papers were good for finding rentals, and there would still be time to go look at a place. Maybe she would find a place to live today, and not have to sleep at the farm at all, if she was lucky.