The Beginning Place

6

Why did I come back?—The question presented itself insistently, irritably, like a child whining. She turned on it with exasperation: Because I had to! And now she had to do what had to be done next. She went to the house at the top of the street of steps, and Fimol let her in, and in the beautiful room between the hearths she waited, so tense and apprehensive that all she saw and heard was uncannily vivid, disjointed, a primitive bright meaninglessness.

The Master came into the room. Not as she had seen him last, hunched in terror, whimpering, unseeing. None of that. Straight, alert, calm, and grim: the Master. “Welcome, Irena,” he said, and as always she was tongue-tied, unable to resist his ascendancy, and welcoming it with relief. This is how he truly is, I can forget that other face. He is my Master!

But on the other side of that awkward and passionate submission, as if through a pane of glass, a cold soul stood watching him and herself. That soul did not serve; nor did it judge. It watched. It watched her choose the stiff brocaded chair to sit in and wonder why she chose it. It watched him pace down the room, and saw that he was glad to have his back to her.

The fires were not lighted. The air of the long room was tranquil, like the air inside the lip of a thin-walled sea shell.

“Soon now we shall have to begin to slaughter the sheep,” the Master said. “There’s no forage left at all in the eastern low meadows.” The low meadows were the pastures close to town, normally used only in lambing season. “But since the salt traders haven’t come, we won’t be able to preserve much of the meat. A great feast; the feast of fear…”

The people of Tembreabrezi did not tend their flocks for meat but for wool; their wealth was the fine wool they dyed and spun and wove, and traded for what they needed from the plains. “The King’s cloak is of our weaving,” Irene had heard them say.

“Is there nothing you can do?” she asked, appalled by the idea of them killing their pride and livelihood, those flocks of beautiful, canny, patient beasts. She had been up on the mountain with the shepherds many times; she had held newborn lambs in her arms.

“No,” he said in his dry voice, his back to her, standing at the windows that looked on the terraced gardens of his house.

She bit her lip, because her question had hit the center of his shame. She had seen, seen with her eyes, that there was nothing he could do.

“There are things we could have done. The animals knew first. We should have heeded them. The wild goats came by—the sheep would not go up to the High Step; all that we saw. We knew, but still did nothing. I was not alone in saying there were those things that must be done. There were men who said it before I did. That we must take the price and make the bargain. But the old women cried, oh, no, no, this is not to be done, this is disgusting and needless. All the old women, the Lord of the Mountain among them…”

He had turned to face her. The light was behind him so she could not see his features. His voice was dry and reckless.

“So we took the counsel of the cowardly. And now we are all cowards. And all helpless. Instead of one lamb, all our flocks. No child of our own, but this boy, this stupid boy who cannot speak our tongue. He is to set us free! Lord Horn was a wise man, once, but it was long ago. If only I had gone to the City when I dreamed of it first. But I waited in deference to him…”

His last words meant nothing to her. Little of what he said made sense, but his vindictiveness had broken her habit of timidity. She asked without hesitation, “What do you mean? How is the stranger to set you free?” When he did not reply she insisted: “What is he to do?”

“To go up on the mountain.”

“And do what?”

“What he came to do. So says Lord Horn.”

“But he doesn’t know what he’s here for. He thinks you know. He doesn’t know anything. Even I felt the fear, coming, but he didn’t.”

“A hero is indifferent to fear,” the Master said, jeering.

He came a little closer to her.

“What is it that we fear?” she said steadily, though now she was afraid of him. “You must tell me what it is.”

“I cannot tell you, Irenadja.”

His face was dark, congested, his eyes bright. He smiled. “You see that picture,” he said, and she glanced for a moment where he pointed, at the portrait of the scowling man. “He was my grandfather’s father. He was Master of Tembreabrezi, as I am. In his day the fear came. He did not listen to the old women whimpering, but went out, went up to make the bargain, with the price in his hand. And he struck the bargain, and the ways were freed. He came down the mountain alone, and his hand was withered as you see it there. They say it was burned away. But my grandfather, who was a child then, said it was cold to the touch, cold as rotten wood in winter. But he paid the price for all!”

“What price?” Irene demanded, fierce with fear and revulsion. “What did he hold—what did he touch?”

“What he loved.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have never understood. Who are you to understand us?”

“I have loved you,” she said.

“Would you do as he did, for love of us? Would you go there, to the flat stone, and wait?”

“I would do anything I could. Tell me what to do!”

His eyes burned now. He came so close to her that she felt the heat of his face.

“Go with him,” he said in a whisper. “The stranger. Horn will send him. Go with him. Take him to the High Step, to the stone, the flat stone. You know the way. You can go with him.”

“And then?”

“Let him make the bargain.”

“With whom? What bargain?”

“I cannot tell you,” he said, and the dark face burned and writhed. “I do not know. You say you have loved us. If you have loved me, go with him.”

She could not speak, but she nodded.

“You will save us, Irena,” he whispered. He turned his face as if to kiss her, but the touch of his lips was dry, feathery, hot, less touch than breath.

“Let me go,” she said.

He drew away from her.

She could not speak and did not want to look at him. She turned and walked the length of the long room to the door. He did not follow her.

She did not return to the inn, or go to see Trijiat. She went down the steep streets alone, and out the east end of town past Venno’s shop and Geba’s cottage, to the stone-yard. There she sat on the granite block, and on the wall by the road, and crumbled the little, elegant cones of the cedars in her hand, and thought; but it was not so much thinking as a long grieving, which she must grieve through as a musician plays a tune through, from beginning to end. Often her eyes were on the road north, the road that led down to the City, the road she could not go.

She was summoned the next day to the manor. She wore her red dress and her second-best stockings. Palizot tried to lend her a new pair, and her thin-soled shoes, “to be proper at the Lord’s house,” but Irene refused and went off dogged and sorehearted, in the same dull, grieving mood under which lay, like the deep cold water under the reeds of a sea marsh, fear.

She did not look up towards the peak as she went from the iron gateway to the manor house.

As before, the old manservant took her to the windowed gallery, and the same people were there. This time they had got Hugh Rogers dressed up like themselves. She wished she had worn her jeans and shirt in defiance, and at the same time wished she had worn the thin shoes and striped stockings. She eyed his finery: narrow black trousers, heavy shirt of linen, long vest worked with dark embroidery. He looked well in it. He was heavy but well proportioned; his throat was white and massive in the high, open collar, he carried his head erect. He came forward eagerly to her and spoke to her with clumsy good will. He was happy in his fine clothes, with the old man patting him on the back, and the old man’s daughter simpering at him, and all the food and attention and friendship heart could desire, sure, and then out you go to do what can’t be done and thanks a lot; it’s what you came for, isn’t it?

The Master was there, talking with old Hobim and a couple of other townsmen. She did not once look directly at him, but was continually aware of him, and at the sound of his voice her heart stopped and waited.

Lord Horn’s daughter stood with Hugh. She was talking to him now, teaching him a word, the “adja” they tacked onto the end of your name when they wanted to call you friend, trying to explain that his name as they heard it, Hiuradjas, already had the word in it and would sound ridiculous if they added it, Hiuradjadja! and she laughed saying it, a soft, merry laugh. He stood staring at her porcelain face and sheepswool hair. Fool! Irene thought. Stupid fool! Can’t you see? But she saw the softening of his mouth, the stillness of his eyes, and she was awed.

“Alliadja,” he said, and went red, face and ears and neck red under the thick, fair, sweaty hair; and then white again.

Allia smiled, sweet and cool as water, and praised him.

“They could be sister and brother,” said a voice speaking near Irene—speaking to her, she realized, startled from the absorbed compassion with which she had been watching Hugh.

Lord Horn had come to stand by her. He was not looking at her but at Allia and Hugh, set apart by their blondness from the others there. The old man’s long face was severe and calm as always. Irene said nothing, taken aback by the curious irony or intimacy of his remark. Presently he turned to her. “Will you be long with us, this time, Irenadja?”

“Only as long as I can be useful,” she said with sarcasm. Then she was ashamed. It was Horn who had said to her, “Your courage is beyond praise,” words she had treasured against frustration and self-doubt. There in the other land, where she could find no home, she had not thought who had said them to her, but had held fast to them: your courage, you have courage…You will not force your mother to make the choice she cannot make; you will not ask for help she cannot give. You don’t need help. Your courage is beyond praise.

“Lord Horn,” she said, “I wish I had gone to the City, when—when people still could go.”

“There is more than one road to the City,” he said.

“Were you ever there?”

He looked at her with his grey, distant gaze.

“I have been to the City. That is why I am called lord, because I have been there,” he said, kind and cold and calm.

“Did you see the King?”

“The shadow,” Horn said, “I saw the bright shadow of the King,” but the word was feminine so that it must mean the Queen or the Mother; and none of the words he spoke meant anything, and she understood them as she had never understood anything in her life. His eyes that looked always from a distance were on hers. If I reach out my hand and touch him I will see clearly, she thought. The screen will be gone and I will stand both there and here. But in that knowledge I am destroyed.

Horn’s grey eyes said gently, Do not touch me, child.

Someone was approaching them where they stood beside the hearth. She turned away slowly from Horn and saw, with indifference, that it was Master Sark.

“Now that Irena is here, my lord, we can speak to your guest more freely,” the Master said, deferent yet officious, impatient.

The old man looked at him and spoke as always after a pause: “Very well. Will you speak for us and for him, Irena?”

“Yes,” she said. She felt released from the stupor that had bound her down so long. She felt she could trust her own will again. She caught Hugh’s attention; the other people, falling silent, gathered round the hearth in a loose half-circle. Allia stood nearest Hugh. He looked from her to Irene with alert, clear eyes, a little apprehensive, candid as a child. Lord Horn spoke, and Irene translated his words and Hugh’s.

“We are asking your service, we are asking your help.”

Hugh nodded.

“We have no claim on you. If you do what we ask it is in pure mercy to those who have no other hope.”

“I understand.”

“We cannot help you, and you will be in danger.”

After a moment Hugh said, “What is the danger?”

She did not understand all Horn’s reply, but put it into English as well as she could: “We who live here are afraid—are the fear, he said—and so cannot face the enemy—only the other, the stranger, can turn its face, his face—I don’t understand what he’s saying, really.”

“Ask him who the enemy is.”

She asked. Horn answered, “The eye that sees gives form; the mind that knows, names.” So his words came out in English as she spoke them.

“Riddles,” Hugh said with a smile. He thought it over, began to ask a question, and checked himself; he waited. Patience became him, Irene thought. There was dignity in him, under the clumsiness. Part of the clumsiness, perhaps.

“What will you give him to take, my lord?” the Master said.

“The sword I was given, if he wants it,” Horn replied.

“What will you give him to give, my lord?”

She had begun to translate this for Hugh when she realized that the old man was speaking, slowly as ever, but with harsh weight: “You are your grandfather’s grandson, Sark, but where are the children of his daughter?”

“All of us,” the dark man said. “All of us are her children.”

“The children of fear. And so we are bound. And our right hands useless. Would you sell us again, Sark? Allia, bring the sword.”

She crossed the room to a chest against the inner wall, and knelt, and opened the lid.

The tension between Horn and the Master was so great, and its sources so obscure to Irene, that she did not try to interpret their exchange to Hugh. She and he both stood watching Allia.

Her pale fleece of hair floating, the girl returned across the room carrying on her hands a bright, thin strip of light. She stopped before her father; he motioned briefly and gravely towards Hugh. She turned to Hugh and raised her hands a little; she was smiling, but her lips and face were pale.

Hugh looked at the sword, and said under his breath, “My God.”

Without looking up from it at Allia or Horn or Irene, he took hold of the grip, awkwardly and with a dogged expression on his face, and lifted the sword from the girl’s hands. It was evidently heavy. He did not raise it or try to test or flourish it, but held it clumsily across the air in front of him, like a barrier.

“I judge from this,” he said with detachment, “that whatever it is I have to face is real.”

“I guess it is,” Irene whispered.

“I was hoping it would be magic. It would be easier. Listen. You’d better tell them that I didn’t take fencing in high school.”

He set the point of the sword down carefully on the polished floor and stood with his hand on the pommel, looking down at the handle and blade with an expression of grudging respect. The beautifully modeled grip looked right for his big hand; the blade was very thin and long. The hilt, where Irene looked for a crosspiece as in a picture-book sword, was a massive oval flange set with a ring of yellow stones.

Looking up from the sword at last, she saw that she was the first of them to do so. Sark’s face was pinched and aged; Horn gazed imperturbable.

“He says he has no skill with swords, my lord,” Irene said, and felt a strange small pleasure of malice in doing so, a solidarity, against Horn and all of them, with Hugh.

“I do not know if any skill would serve him,” the old man said. “I could not send him out unarmed.” His voice was sad, and the spark of defiance died down in Irene.

“It’s his sword, from the City, I think,” she said to Hugh.

“Thank you,” Hugh said to the old man, in the language of the twilight; and to Irene, “Well, can they tell me where to go, and what to do?”

When she asked his question, several of the men who had stood silent, listening, replied: “On the mountain,” one said, and another said, “In the mountain,” and old Hobim said, “It is the mountain.” The Master took the word from them. “Up the mountain, in the summer pasture on the High Step. Irena knows the way there.”

“No!” Allia broke in, her face gone wild and terrified. “Let me go—I will go with him—”

“You cannot,” Sark said. “You will be crawling on hands and knees, begging to turn back, before you have crossed the bridge.” He spoke with vindictive satisfaction, not trying to conceal it. Allia turned to her father, with her hands up over her white face, weeping.

“Tell me what they say,” Hugh said to Irene, desperately.

“They want you to go up the mountain, to the highest meadow. Allia wants to show you the way, but she knows she can’t. Lord Horn—”

But the old man was speaking, to Sark: “You would send the child, again, Sark? You know only the one way. But you can no longer send her, or keep her. And a road goes two ways. Where are their faces set, who came to us from the south?”

“Tell them never mind,” Hugh said. “I’ll go where they say. If I go out looking for trouble with this thing, I expect I’ll find it.”

“It’s a long way and there are different paths. I’ll go with you, I’ve been up there.”

“All right,” he said, unquestioning.

She turned to Horn. “He will go. I will go with him.”

The old man bowed his head.

“When shall we go?”

“When you will.”

“When do you want to go?” she asked Hugh. She was beginning to feel shaky; Allia’s tears made her want to cry.

“The sooner the better.”

“You think so?”

“Want to get it over with,” he said with simplicity. He looked at Allia, who stood protected by her father’s arm; she did not look up to meet his eyes.

“Tomorrow,” he said, after a little pause. “Ask them if that’s O.K.”

“You’re the boss.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Why can’t they say—It isn’t fair. For all I know they’re just sending you out as a—I don’t know. A scapegoat. A—.” But she could not think of the word she wanted, that meant something given up as an offering.

“They’re stuck,” he said. “They can’t do what they have to do. If I can, then I will. It’s all right.”

“I don’t think you ought to go.”

“It’s what I came for,” he said. He looked at her, completely unselfconscious. “What about you, though? If you think it’s a mug’s game…No use both of us being stupid.”

She saw the firelight run in long slivers of tawny red up the blade of the sword.

“I know the way, you’ll need somebody. But anyhow. I don’t want to stay here. Any more.”

“I could stay here forever,” he said under his breath, looking at Allia, not at her face but at the white hand against the blue-green dress.

“Most likely you will,” Irene said, but an unwilling pity muted her bitterness, her sense of betraying and having been betrayed; and he did not understand her.

She was asked to stay and dine with them at the manor, but excused herself and got away as soon as she could. Hugh didn’t need an interpreter; he got on better without speaking the language than she did speaking it. And she could not bear to be with them any longer. It was her fault, she had been a fool, but it was too late now. It was all too late. She had paid no heed to the wise and dangerous man, and had made her promise to the empty-hearted one. She had mistaken herself, and chosen to be a slave. So she was left now to look at her master, her mirror, and see no trust, no honesty, no courage. His darkness was emptiness, and all he felt was envy.

And yet, if Allia were to look at him, would she not see that proud man Irene had seen? It was they that belonged together, he dark and bright, she fair and cool. How could he not be envious when Hugh stood beside her? Sister and brother, Lord Horn had said looking at Hugh and Allia, but looking at Allia and Sark he would say lover and lover, man and wife. And that was as it should be. All here was as it should be, as it must be; all but her, who did not belong here, or anywhere, having no house, no people of her own.

She ate supper with Palizot and Sofir, and spent a little while in the firelit kitchen with Palizot after supper, but there was no going back to the old tranquillity. The thread on which she had strung her life was tied off; the game was done. She had pretended to be their daughter but it had never been the truth, and now the pretense was only a constraint upon affection. And, knowing she was going up on the mountain in the morning, though they tried not to show it they were in awe of her. Sofir was miserable. Palizot carried it off better, but the hypocrisy was trying to all three of them, and Irene soon bade them good night and went to her room.

She drew the curtains across the changeless clarity of the sky, lighted the fire, and sat down to think. No thoughts worth thinking came. She was weary. She went to bed. There, before she slept, listening to the wind which was gusting a little, buffeting the dormers of the old house, she thought, “Whatever happens, I won’t come back to Tembreabrezi. It’s time to go. To be gone. He only made me promise to do what I would have done anyway.” There was no comfort in the thought, yet it quieted her. Resentment, the sense of betrayal, rose from resisting the knowledge that she must go, pretending she could keep what she had loved. There was nothing to keep, except maybe the willingness to love. If she lost that she was lost, all right.

She asked herself why she was no longer afraid. Her tiredness now was the memory in nerve and muscle of the endless sickening fear she had felt coming, this time; but though she made herself imagine going out on the road, going up on the mountain, no awful chill began in the pit of her stomach, no panic in pulse or mind. Maybe that meant she had finally made the right choice—done what you came for, as Hugh said, poor Hugh, heavy and anxious, with his honest eyes. He was going though he did not want to go, wanted to stay. What choice was right, then? But that would prove itself, and meanwhile there was no fear, but only sleep, here rising from the sources deeper than dream, beyond the screen of word or touching hand, the mountain that is within the mountain, the sea that is in the spring, here where no rain fell.

When the household woke and she got up, she dressed in her jeans and shirt and desert boots, intending, as always when she left the ain country, to take nothing across the threshold with her; but then she went to the chest in the hall for an old, patched cloak that Palizot had given her when she went down the north road with the merchants. It was of dark red wool, much stained, ragged at the hem, but warm, and easily carried as a little back roll. Sofir, with the same idea that this journey might not be over with in a day, had made her a hefty packet of dried meat and cheese and hard bread, enough for several days certainly, and she rolled that up in the cloak.

She and Palizot clung to each other for a minute. Neither could say anything. It was an end, and words are for beginnings. She kissed Sofir and he kissed her, and she left the inn.

As she came out into the courtyard she saw Aduvan and Virti and other children, waiting for her, looking excited but a little frightened or bewildered. They did not say much, but clustered around her as if for reassurance. A group of people were coming down the street of steps: Horn and Allia, Sark and Fimol, a group of old men and women, and Hugh amongst them, tall and white-faced, the ox led to slaughter. They waited at the foot of the street and Irene with her escort of children came to join them.

Other people stood in their doorways along the street that led westward through town. They greeted Lord Horn softly by his title, and Hugh and herself by name. “Irena, Irenadja.” Some joined their group, and others gathered at the crossings. She realised that this was their parade. Sad and quiet the people of Tembreabrezi gathered to honor them, to wish them well, to send their hope with them.

A young father held his baby up to see Hugh go by. That made her want to laugh, a foolish, jeering laugh, and she scowled to prevent the laugh. Big Hugh, in the handsome leather coat they had given him, and his backpack, and the sword in a leather sheath at his side, would have looked like a hero if only he had known he was a hero; but he looked wretched, embarrassed, hunching his shoulders and losing his share in glory because nobody had ever told him he had a share in glory.

The street leading west out of town became a road, pavement stones giving way to packed earth. The houses on either hand were lower, and then fewer, and then the fields began, walled with rock, and the long low pastures where all the flocks were now, west and north of town. People had joined them so that as they walked between the walled fields there were forty or fifty walking along together, easily and quietly. With a leap of the heart Irene thought, “Maybe they’re coming with us, maybe all they needed was to start out with us, and we can all keep together and go on.” But the parents of the children were walking with the children, now. They had taken the children’s hands; they stooped to them and spoke softly. No voice spoke aloud. “Irena,” Aduvan said in an unhappy whisper, standing beside her mother and little brother. Irene turned back to them. Other children put up their arms to her, whispering, “Goodbye!” Virti would not kiss her; he cried, whimpering, “I don’t want to see the bad thing, I don’t want to see it!” Trijiat turned back with him. Irene went on; she looked back once; the children stood there on the road, in the dusk. No lights showed behind them in the town.

Women and men stopped, one by one. They stood still on the road, watching the others go on. The soft, restless wind blew by them.

The shoulder-high wall of dryset stones continued on the left, and on the right a high hedge darkened the way. She could just make out the whitish stones of the bridge that carried the mountain road over a small torrent which spread out below as a stream watering the pastures. That would be the boundary: the bridge.

“Goodbye, Irena,” a woman said softly as she came past. The wind blew out her grey skirt a little, her face looked pale in the dim light on the road. She was Aduvan’s grandmother, Trijiat’s mother; she had taught Irene to spin. “Goodbye,” Irene said to her. The road curved a little to the left, towards the bridge. She passed the Master standing rigid and desperate, his hands clenched at his sides. She said, “Goodbye, Sark,” calling him by his name for the first time and the last. He did not or could not speak. She went on a little farther and halted beside Lord Horn. Near him, Allia’s hair shimmered in the dusk of the road as if it held light in it, as she stood facing Hugh.

“May our hope go with you, may our trust support you,” Allia said in her soft, clear voice in her own language. He said only, and only Irene understood it, “I love you.”

“Farewell!” Allia said, and he repeated the word.

Lord Horn’s hand, thin and light, was on Irene’s shoulder. She looked up at him startled. Smiling, he kissed her on the forehead. “Go without looking back, my daughter,” he said.

She stood bewildered.

Hugh was going on towards the bridge. She must go with him. She passed Allia, standing silent in the dark road like a statue. He called me daughter, her heart said, he called me daughter. She went on. They all stood silent in the dusk on the road behind her. She did not look back.

The road crossed the bridge and curved further left, west, beginning to go up onto the mountain. Thick trees on one hand now, the high hedge on the other. It was dark on this road.

Hugh kept a swinging pace, a little ahead of her and to her right; she saw him as a bulk and movement in twilight.

The hedgerow had given place to forest. Dark branches met overhead. The road was walled and roofed by tree trunks, branches, leaves. A tunnel. Glimpses of sky between the branches. The heavy, ferny odor of the forest. Something huge, pallid loomed by the road ahead. As Irene’s heart lurched, her mind said, it’s the boulder, calm down, it’s only the boulder by the high trail. Already? Yes, already, it’s been a long time since we left the town, since we crossed the bridge, a couple of miles. “Hugh,” she said.

Only now, speaking, though she spoke barely above a whisper, did she hear the silence. The wind had died. Nothing moved. It was like deafness. There was no sound.

Hugh had stopped and turned to her.

“This way,” she whispered, pointing left. She could not make herself speak louder. “The trail up to the high meadows.”

He nodded, and followed her as she turned off the roadway onto the narrower, steeper track, worn deep by the hooves of the flocks, that led up into the mountain.

Her heart continued to beat hard, her ears to sing. It was the climbing, she told herself, but it wasn’t that. It was the silence. If only something would make some sound, something besides her own walking and her breathing and the faint drum-drum-drum in her ears, and Hugh coming along behind her, not making very much noise, but any noise was too much here.

I will not be afraid, I will not be afraid. Just keep on going the way you have to go. Just don’t get lost like a fool.

It had been a couple of years since she had been on this path. She had used to come with the shepherds and the children and the flocks, following. Now she must find the way alone. She kept questioning it, but there was no mistaking: look at the path, she told herself, it’s the sheep path, that’s dried sheepshit there, there’s the marks their hooves make, this is the right way. I will not be afraid.

Brush had begun to encroach across the trail since it had gone unused. It was not a hard trail but it took ceaseless alertness, and was all uphill. Abruptly, at the top of a sharp pull, they came out of the forest darkness. The air seemed almost bright. There was a clear view of land and sky. They had come out at one end of the Long Meadow, an immense alpine pasture, a terrace in the northeast face of the mountain.

She stood under the last trees, in the high grass, getting her breath after the climb. Hugh stood beside her. She saw his chest rise and fall in deep, even breaths as he looked along the distances of the meadow and the slopes that rose sheer above it.

“Is this the place?” he asked.

It was the first word he had spoken since they crossed the bridge.

“No. About halfway I guess. The High Step is on up there.” She pointed to grey cliffs and crags overhanging the Long Meadow far to the right of where they stood. “With the sheep it took two days to get up there; they always camped here in the Long Meadow.”

“I wondered why they gave me all this food.”

“Saint George and the sandwiches,” Irene said, and a fit of crazy laughter came over her and went away as fast as it had come. She looked at Hugh. He had slipped off his backpack and leather coat and was readjusting his belt, scowling. “Damned sword keeps tripping me.” He looked up and met her eyes. “It’s all fake,” he said, and turned red. “Playacting.”

“I know.”

But the silence hung around their voices, and they heard it.

“You don’t feel the—” he hesitated, with clumsy delicacy—“the fear?”

“Not exactly. I feel nervous, but not…I feel like it had its back turned.”

He got the sword slung to his satisfaction, ran his hand through his hair, and sighed, a big houf! sigh.

“You never have felt it?” she asked with curiosity.

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s good.”

“Last time, when I went past the gate, I was scared. You know. Really scared, panicked. But that was because I was afraid of getting lost. It isn’t like that, is it?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. It’s more like you’re going to find something you don’t want to find.”

He grimaced.

“It’s awful,” she said. “But I’ve never been afraid of getting lost, here. I always know where the gateway is. And the town. And the city, I guess.”

He nodded. “It’s all on the same line, the same axis. But when I went past the gate I lost that. It all looked alike. I didn’t even recognize the gateway creek when I crossed it. If I hadn’t met you—”

“But you were on the path—almost on it. It’s more like you panicked and didn’t think.”

“When they said I had to go up the mountain, off the axis, I was about ready to panic again. When you said you’d come, that made…you know. Like I had a chance.”

He was trying to thank her, but she did not know how to be thanked.

“What did you mean about playacting?”

“I don’t know.” He stood looking out across the meadow. Miles of high, flowerless grass, silvery green in the unchanging light, bowed very slightly to the wind. The sky was empty. No bird, no wisp of cloud. “The sword, I guess.”

“You think you won’t need it?”

“Need it?” He looked at her rather stupidly.

“What’s it for? What is it you’re supposed to fight with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if you aren’t even supposed to fight—it isn’t any good? If there is something up here, some sort of creature or power or something, why don’t they tell us what it is? What if there’s no use trying to fight it?”

“Why would they trick us?” he asked, his voice grave.

“Because it’s all they can do. I don’t mean Lord Horn is bad. I don’t know what he is. You can’t say good and bad about what they do. Like you said, they do what they have to. The Master talked about making the bargain, about paying. He meant—I don’t know what he meant. I just don’t understand it, I don’t know what we’re trying to do here.”

Again he ran his hand through his thick, sweaty hair. “But you didn’t have to come up here,” he said in his gentle, obstinate way.

“Yes, I did. I don’t know. I had to. It was time to go.”

“But why this way? You could have just gone home.”

“Home!” she said.

He did not reply for a while. He nodded once. “I guess so,” he said. And after a moment, “Let’s go on. I keep thinking it’s going to get dark soon.”