The Beginning Place

7

The grass was high, thick, tangled, showing no path. The girl set off confidently, angling towards the grey crags far across the great terrace of grass. There was no need to go single file here, as on the narrow forest trails. Hugh kept alongside her, but a couple of yards away, for she had left no doubt that she disliked to be crowded or even approached. The dense, lithe grasses tangled his feet, and he learned to set his foot straight down at each stride, as when walking in snow. The clumsy sword banged at his thigh, but it was pleasant to get a rhythmic stride going, instead of groping and climbing. And it was a pleasant and rare thing in this forest land to have their goal in sight, to watch the crags slowly towering higher.

After a long time he spoke. “Now I keep thinking it’s morning.”

The girl nodded. “Because it’s lighter up here, I guess. No trees.”

“And open to the east.”

They walked on steadily, silent. In this vast, empty grassland it seemed natural that there should be no sound but the faint lash and flick of the grass against their legs, and sometimes the hum of wind in the ears. A mild exultation came into Hugh’s body and mind, a buoyant rhythm in time with his stride. He was doing what he had come to do, going where he had to go. He had earned his right to be here, his right to love Allia.

It did not matter that she did not know the language in which he had said, “I love you.” It did not matter if they never met again. It was his love that mattered, that bore him onward, without grief or fear. He could not be afraid. Death is love’s sister, the sister with the shadowed face.

As they went on and slowly the cliff towered higher and the folds and scars and slides of its surface revealed themselves, and the wild grass lashed and flicked in the rhythm of his stride, and the depths of the sky lay overhead like water, he felt once more that he would be content to walk in silence across the high land forever. There was no weariness in him now. He would never grow tired. He could go on forever, his back to everything.

The girl was saying his name. She had said it more than once. He did not want to stop. There wasn’t anything worth stopping for. But her voice sounded thin, like the voice of a sea bird crying, and he stopped and turned back.

Some while ago they had come directly under the cliffs, and had since been walking northward in shorter grass beside huge falls and slides of broken rock half overgrown with broom and grasses. The girl stood a good way behind him, at the outer fold of a cleft in the base of the cliffs, which he saw as he came back to be the entrance to a path. It looked a dark, narrow way.

“This is the way up to the High Step,” she said.

He looked at it with disfavor.

“I want a break before we start up. It’s steep,” she said. She sat down in the grass, here dry and short, tawny, worn-looking. “Are you hungry?”

“Not very.” He did not want to bother with eating, though when he thought back he knew they had come a long way and walked a long time, that the dark road where Allia had stood was very far behind, below, down there. He wanted to go on. But the girl was right to stop, and she looked tired, her face pinched and frowning. He dropped his coat and swordbelt and sword and pack near her and went off behind a waste of huge fallen boulders to piss; came back, feeling with pleasure the warmth and spring of his whole body, untired but glad now to rest a little; and levered himself up onto a reddish boulder beside the girl sitting in the grass. She was eating. She passed a strip of dried meat and some chips of some kind of dried fruit to him; and it tasted good.

There was one sound: the wind whistling in the dry grass or past the tumbled stones, a tiny, cold piping, low to the ground.

She wrapped up the packet of food.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and sighed. He saw her round, sallow face turn towards the dark path.

“Listen,” he said. He wanted to say her name. “You don’t need to go on.”

She shrugged. She stood up, fastening her homemade backpack, a roll of red wool.

“The place I’m supposed to go is at the top of that path?” She nodded.

“O.K. No problem.”

She stood with her sullen look and then, startling him, she looked at him and smiled. “You’d get lost,” she said. “You keep getting lost. You need a navigator.”

“I can’t get lost on a path two feet wide—”

“You did, when we came, you walked right off the south road.” The smile broadened to a laugh, very brief. “When I get scared, you get lost. Seems to be how it works.”

“Are you scared now?”

“A little,” she said. “It’s starting again.” But the laugh was not altogether gone.

“Then you shouldn’t go on. It’s not necessary. I feel responsible. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t do it.”

But she had started up the path. He followed her at once, shrugging his pack on hurriedly. They entered the cleft, a raw vertical scar in the mountain wall. High, dry walls of red and blackish-brown rock closed in upon them. The way was stony, and immediately steep.

“You’re not responsible for what I do,” she said over her shoulder.

“Then you’re not responsible for keeping me from getting lost.”

“But we have to get there,” she said.

They climbed on. The path turned sharply back and forth. There was a scramble up, where rocks had slipped. Hugh looked at the girl’s hand as she steadied herself against a raw-edged boulder. It was a small hand, thin and dark, the crescent moons of the nails white.

“Listen,” he said. “I want to—I never did understand your name.”

She looked back at him. “Irena,” she said clearly, and spelled it.

He repeated it, and again the broad, sweet, secret smile went across her face as she looked down at him, steadying herself among the harsh ruin of raw earth and rock. Then she went on, going lightly.

The sword impeded him constantly here, the heavy leather scabbard either tripping him or whacking his thigh or driving like a crutch up under his arm; he finally got it riding secure at the right angle on the swordbelt, but in doing so fell back a long way behind the girl. As he went on he heard a sound of water running. He turned one of the numberless sharp elbows of the path and saw a small stream scurrying transparent across the way from its spring in the rocks, dropping down into a basin of green weeds and ferns. Irena was kneeling by it waiting for him to catch up; her face and hands were wet and muddy. He knelt too and drank, his hands sinking into the miniature bog beside the rivulet. The water tasted of iron or brass, like blood, but very cold.

The way was always narrow, always steep, following the fissures in the wall of stone. Where there was dust underfoot it was marked, dried mud scored, with the narrow hoofprints of the last flock that had been driven down the mountain. The strip of sky overhead stood high and remote. Not much light came down to the path except where it followed the side of a widening canyon for a while. When the walls narrowed in again Hugh felt that it was leading into, inside the mountain. His hiking boots slipped on the stone; his footing was uneasy. He envied the girl, who went like a shadow up the steep, twisting way ahead of him.

She stopped at the foot of a long straight stretch. He caught up with her and asked, whispering because of the deep silence, “You all right?”

“Just winded.” Like him, she was breathing hard.

“How long does it go on?”

The rocks overhanging the path were strangely shaped, bulbous, as if waterworn long ago. They looked like half-formed animals, tumors, huge entrails of stone.

“I don’t know. It took all day with the sheep.”

Her eyes, in this rock-weighted dusk, looked dark and frightened.

“Go slower,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

“I want to get out of here.”

Twisting and burrowing in the gorges, the path went mercilessly upward. Twice again they stopped to get their wind back. The last stretch was so steep that they clambered as on a ladder, using their hands. When abruptly the way leveled and there were no more walls, Hugh was on all fours. He stood up and then, his head swimming, dropped back to his knees. The cleft path had ended on the outer edge of a second alpine meadow, narrow, a green shelf. A thousand, two thousand feet below, the great meadow they had come from lay distance-misted, green as moss. He had no idea how to judge the height, the miles; but they were high up, for the enormous slant of the mountainside was now perceptible, both above this meadow and below it, as the main direction of this part of the earth, as absolute as the horizon, which itself lay so high and far that it was lost in the thickness of the twilit atmosphere. Overhead and north and east from the mountain arched the calm, unimpeded sky.

Irena was sitting in the grass, nearer the edge than he wanted to be. She was looking northward over the lower lands. Hugh looked to the east: down the slopes at first, wondering if from here you could see the gleam of the lights of Mountain Town, but it made him dizzy again to look down. He looked out, across the gulf of air, to the eastern mountains. Behind those dim outlines, as if drawn with grey pencil on grey paper, was there a hint of color, of brightening? He watched a long time, but could not be sure. When he followed Irena’s gaze to the north he saw no glimpse of the lights of towns, no faint clustering brightness that might be the City far away. All was blue-grey, indistinct, silent, vast.

She stood up finally and moved inward from the edge, walking carefully. “This is the High Step,” she said, half whispering. “My legs are all rubber from climbing.”

It made his head swim to see her stand between him and that immensity of empty air. He got up and faced inward towards the meadow. Across the grass—short, up here, and vivid, like a lawn—between the edge and the mountain wall rising above, there was an outcropping of rock, a kind of island in the grass. He walked towards that. It was a mass of big, licheny, grey rocks, tumbled and cracked, reassuring in size and solidity in this high, strange place. It felt good to get the rock at your back. They both sat down there with their backs against the main rock mass, fifteen or twenty feet high.

“That was a long pull,” he said. She only nodded. He got food out of his backpack and they shared it in silence. She leaned her head back against the rock and closed her eyes. The profile of her face was small and stem, like a bronze coin, against the sky.

“Irena.”

“What?”

“If you want to go to sleep I’ll watch out.”

“O.K.,” she said, and without more ado curled down against the rock with her red backroll for a pillow.

He ate another dry roll—hard, knot-shaped, grainy, with a pleasant taste—and a lump of goatsmilk cheese, which he did not like but was hungry enough to eat; after consideration, he ate one more roll stuffed with a strip of smoked mutton, and then put the food back into his pack. He wanted more but this would do. He felt a great deal better for it. It was a long time and a long way since they had left the town, and he was tired, but not worn out. Only if he sat here with his back comfortably against the rock he would fall asleep, like her. He ought to keep watch. He got up and began a leisurely patrol back and forth by the rock island.

In the clarity of this high-altitude light, less a dusk than a translucence, an everywhereness of light without source, the color of the grass was intense: dark and clear like an emerald. The forests closing off both ends of the shelf-meadow—nearby to the south, distant to the north—looked rough and black. Above the cliffs that overhung the meadow, the next riser of these huge stairs, hung the same rough blackness of trees, steep and remote; above that, bare rock, the summits. In this world of air and rock and forest there was no color but the dark jewel green. No flowers bloomed in the alpine grass. No flowers could open in the grass when no stars opened in the sky. This seemed clear to Hugh; then he decided his mind was getting fuzzy. To wake himself up he changed his patrol, going part way around the rock island; not all the way. He did not like to leave the sleeping girl out of sight.

Around the north end, in towards the cliffs, there was a bald place in the grass. The second time he came to that end of his semicircular route he went closer to see why the ground was bare there. It was not ground but stone, a shield-like expanse of rock, a shoulderblade of the mountain showing through the skin. The slightly swelling surface was broken at several places; he came closer to look. Iron rings were bolted into the stone, four of them, making a rectangle several feet long. Rust had stained the stone and lichen-scurf around the sockets of the bolts. He stepped up onto the flat rock and tugged at one of the rings, but it held firm. A strip of rawhide thong knotted around it and broken off at the knot had shrunk onto the metal till it seemed an excrescence of it. They were ugly, the thick, rust-scaled rings fastened to the rock, between cliff and gulf, an ugly place. The girl was sleeping there beyond the boulders on the open side, defenseless. That was wrong. He was wrong to be here. This was the wrong place. He turned his back on the flat stone and as he did so he heard the crying in the forest.

A crying, a distant, hissing, sobbing noise, hardly louder than the sudden pounding of his heartbeat.

He ran. The sense of the abyss of air beyond the edge swam in his head. The girl slept; he shook her, saying, “Wake up, wake up.”

“What is it?” she muttered, confused, scowling, and then her eyes went wide as she heard the voice, already much louder, nearer, howling and sobbing in the forests at the north end of the meadow.

“Come on,” he said, hauling her to her feet. She grabbed her bedroll and came, gasping and silent. He did not let go her arm, for at first she could hardly move, weak with sleep or terror. He pulled her along with him for a few steps, then suddenly with a spasm of release she shook off his hand and began to run. They headed for the forest at the near end of the meadow, running away from the voice. Neither had made any conscious decision. They ran. The voice loudened behind them, a sobbing howl beating and beating in their ears. They reached the forest that had offered a hiding place and now loomed a maze, a labyrinth of dark paths where they would be lost. “Wait!” Hugh tried to shout to the girl, but the breath burned in his lungs and he had no voice, and she could not hear, for the monstrous desolate howling filled the world. She stumbled and swerved from a tree trunk and ran up against Hugh, grabbing at him blindly, her mouth open in a strange square shape. She pulled him off the path they had been following. He plunged with her downhill between tree trunks and thickets, leaf and branch lashing face and eyes. The ground steepened, slipped underfoot, they stumbled and slid down the slope fifty feet or more to fetch up against the bulwark of a half-rotten fallen tree where, the breath knocked out of them, paralyzed, they cowered. The voice beat all thought from the mind, louder yet, horrible and desolate, enormous, craving. Hugh looked up and the creature from which the voice came was there, on the path above them, the thickets shaking and tossing as it came and passed, white, wrinkled, twice a man’s height, dragging its bulk painfully and with terrible quickness, round mouth open in the hissing howl of hunger and insatiable pain, and blind.

It passed. It was past, dragging the hideous sound behind it.

Hugh lay with his shoulders against the fallen tree, struggling to breathe, to get air into his lungs. The world slipped and whitened around him. When it began to steady, when the pain in his chest lessened, he became aware of warmth and weight pressed against him, against his left side and arm. “Irena,” he said in a voiceless whisper, giving that warmth a name, pulling himself back with the name, the presence. She was crouching doubled up, her face hidden. “It’s all right,” he said.

“It’s gone,” she said, “it’s gone.”

“Is it gone?”

“It went on.”

“Don’t cry.”

She had sat up but her warmth was still next to him, and he turned his face against her shoulder, in tears.

“It’s all right, Hugh. It’s all right now.”

After a long time his breath came evenly again. He raised his head, and sat up. Irena drew away a little and tried to comb the leaves and dirt out of her hair with her fingers, and rubbed her wet cheeks.

“What now?” she said in a little, husky voice.

“I don’t know. Are you O.K.?”

Neither had been hurt in their plunge down the hillside, though the cuts where branches had whipped Irena’s face showed like red pen lines. But Hugh felt beaten, weary, with that deathly weariness which had come over him on the road from the gateway; and Irena seemed to share it, sitting with eyes half closed, her head bent down.

“I can’t go any farther now,” she said.

“Neither can I. But we ought to get out of sight.” It was an effort even to speak.

They crawled and slid on hands and knees a few yards farther down the increasingly steep slope. A big stand of rhododendrons had made a niche for its roots, a kind of nook. Under the high old bushes the leafmold was deep, with a soft, bitter smell. Irena slid down into that niche, and sitting there hunched together like a child began to unstrap her woolen pack, which she had clutched under her left arm the whole time. Hugh crawled on a little way under the bushes till he could stretch out face down. He wanted to unbuckle his belt to get free of the sword, but was too tired. He put his head down on his arm.

She was sitting with her legs stretched out, under the outer branches of the rhododendrons. She looked round when she heard him moving. He levered himself down beside her, and hunched his shoulders to shake the stiffness out. He had slept so heavily his body was still soft with sleep, he could hardly close his hand. The lines on Irena’s face were black now, ink scratches, but it was no longer the skull-face of terror and exhaustion; it was round, soft, sad.

“Are you O.K.?”

She nodded.

“I wonder if there’s a stream down there,” she said after a little.

He was thirsty too. Neither felt like eating any of the dry food in her pack until they could drink. But neither moved to go seek water. This nook, walled and sheltered by the dark old bushes, seemed protected, protecting. They had found refuge here. It was hard to leave it.

“I don’t know what to do,” Hugh said.

Both spoke softly, not whispering but under their breath. The mountain forest was quiet, but not dead still; some faint motion of wind broke the hush.

“I know,” she said, meaning she did not know either.

After a while he said, “Do you want to go back?”

“Back?”

“To the town.”

“No.”

“I don’t either. But I can’t—What else is there to do?”

She said nothing.

“I have to take the damned sword back to them. And tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“That I can’t do it.” He rubbed his hands over his face, feeling the sore, stiff growth of beard on jaw and lip. “That when I saw it I fell down and cried,” he said.

“Come on,” she said fiercely, stammering. “What could you do? Nobody could. What do they expect?”

“Courage.”

“That’s stupid. You saw it!”

“Yes.” He looked at her. He wanted to ask her what she had seen, for he could neither forget nor believe the image in his own eyes. But he could not bring himself to speak directly of the thing.

“It would be stupid to try to face it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be courage, just stupid.” Her voice was thin. “When I even think of it I get sick.”

After a pause, his voice sticking in his throat, he said, “Is it—did it have eyes?”

“Eyes?” She pondered. “I didn’t see.”

“If it was blind…it acted blind. The way it ran.”

“Maybe.”

“You could be ready for it. If it’s blind.”

“Ready!” she mocked.

“It’s the noise. The damned noise it makes,” he said in despair.

“That’s the fear,” she said. “I mean it’s like that’s what happens when you feel the fear—you’re hearing that voice. I heard it once when I was asleep. It’s like it just turns your mind off. It’s just—I can’t do anything, Hugh. I can’t be any help. If it comes again I’ll just run again. Or not even be able to run.”

Not even be able to run: the words stood in his mind. He saw the flat stone in the grass. The iron rings in the stone. The knot of rawhide through the ring. His breath stuck and cold saliva welled into his dry mouth.

“What did they say to do?” he said. “They said a lot you didn’t translate. They gave me the sword, they sent us up here, to that meadow—”

“Lord Horn didn’t say anything. Sark said to go to the flat stone. I guess he meant that pile of rocks we sat down by.”

“No,” Hugh said; but he did not explain.

“I guess they just knew that if we went there we’d—it would come—” She was silent a while and then said very quietly, “Bait.”

He said nothing.

“I loved them,” she said. “For so long. I thought…”

“They were doing what they had to do. And we—we didn’t come here by accident.”

“We came here running away.”

“Yes. But we came here. We got here.”

This time she did not reply.

After a while he said, “I feel like I ought to be here. Even now. But you’ve done what you promised. You ought to go on now, go on back down to the gateway.”

“Alone?”

“I couldn’t protect you if I was with you.”

“That’s not the point!”

“It’s just dangerous for you here. I don’t need you, now. If I was alone, I could—I’d be able to act freely.”

“I already said you’re not responsible for me.”

“I can’t help it. Two people are always sort of responsible for each other.”

She sat silent, hugging her knees. When she spoke it was without defiance. “Hugh. What could you do better alone? Except get killed?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Presently she said, “We ought to eat something,” and crawled back under the rhododendrons for her bedroll. She laid out the packets of food and sat looking at them.

“My pack’s back by those rocks,” he said.

“I don’t want to go back there!”

“No. This is enough.”

“Well, it could be a couple of days’ worth. If we stretch it.”

“It’s enough.” It did not matter. Nothing mattered. He was defeated. He had run away and hid, again, and he was safe and always would be safe and never free. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”

“Go where?”

“Down to the gate. And get out of here.”

She looked up at him as he stood up. Her face was unhappy, indecisive. He refastened the swordbelt, settled the leather coat on his shoulders. His muscles ached, he felt ill and heavy. “Let’s go,” he repeated.

She rolled up her red pack and strapped it, keeping out a strip of dried mutton, which she held in her teeth as she slipped her arms into the straps. He set off, climbing the steep, thickly forested slope they had descended, until he came to the path that entered the forest from the High Step. On it he turned left.

Catching up to him with a considerable racket of rustling leaves and cracking twigs, Irena said, “Where are you going?”

“To the gate.” He pointed, with certainty, a little left of the direction of the path. “It’s down there.”

“Yes. But this path—”

He knew she meant but did not want to say that it was the path the white crying thing had used, had made.

“It goes the right direction. When it stops going the right direction we’ll cut across country to the axis path, the south road.”

She did not argue. She looked worried still, but there was no use worrying, it did not matter how they went or where. He went on, and she followed.

The trail was faint but quite clear, without side trails or deer crossings to confuse the way. It went fairly level, and the direction was south, though it wound left and right in u and v curves as it followed the hollows and musculature of the mountainside. The trees grew thin-trunked, close, and high. Often there were rock formations, outcrops of pale granite, and occasionally a bare rocky slope above the path. Where the earth was softer under the trees the fallen fir needles were swept off the path in places and the dirt was scraped aside and scored. Noticing that, Hugh thought of the heavy, pumping, pale, wrinkled legs, the dragging body. It ran upright, as a man runs. But it was much larger than a man, and ran heavily but very quickly, dragging itself and crying as if in pain. Once allowed into his mind the image was with him constantly. He thought there was an odor in the air along the path, vaguely familiar, no, intimately familiar, but he could not name it. There were white flowers in summer on some kind of bush that smelled like that, like semen, that was it, the sweet, dull smell. He went on and on and had nothing in his mind but the endless moment of the glimpse of the white thing running above him on this path.

A small stream crossed the way, rising from springs higher on the mountain. He stopped to drink, for he was very thirsty. The girl came up beside him. He had forgotten for a long time that she was there, behind him, coming along. The gleam of the water and the shape of her face came between him and the image of the white thing. After drinking, Irena washed her face, washing off dirt, salt, blood, sluicing the water up her arms and on the back of her neck. He imitated her, and the touch of the water roused him a little, though his mind worked slowly and everything seemed dull and dim, without meaning or difference.

She was saying something.

“I don’t know,” he said at random.

For a moment he saw her eyes, dark and bright in the formless twilight under the trees.

“If we’re still on the east side of the mountain, then that’s south,” she said, pointing. He nodded. “The gateway. But the path turns so much. I’m getting mixed up. If we’re going to leave this path we should do it now, maybe, while I still have some sense of the—of where the gate is.” Again she looked at him.

“We should stay on the path,” he said.

“You’re sure?” she asked with relief.

He nodded, and stood up. He crossed the little stream, and they went on. It was dark under the close, dark trees. There were no distances, there was no choice, there was no time. They went on. The trail descended gradually now. All its turns veered farther to the right than to the left as it led them around the mighty contour of the mountain westward. It will get darker as we go farther west, Hugh thought.

Irena pulled at his arm: she wanted him to stop. He stopped. She wanted him to sit down and share food with her. He was not hungry and could not stay there long, but it was pleasant to rest a little while. He got up, and they went on. Steep streams crossed the path now and then in the dark infolds of the canyons, and Hugh knelt to drink at each, for he was always thirsty, and the water roused him for a minute. He would look up and see the sky between the black jagged branches, and look beside him at the quiet, soft, severe face of the girl kneeling next to him at the stream’s edge; he would hear the sough of wind above and below them on the mountainside. He would be aware of these things, and perhaps of the small ferns and water plants beside his hands. Then he would get up and go on walking.

There was a place where the air was lighter, a stand of some round-leafed, pale-trunked trees. There the trail forked. One branch turned, going left and downhill; one went straight on.

“That one might go down to the south road,” Irena said, but he knew from her saying “that one” that it was not the right one.

“We should stay on this one.”

“It keeps going on. We must be going west by now. Maybe it just goes around the mountain and comes back out at the High Step. It just goes on and on.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“I’m tired, Hugh.”

It was no time since, it was a long time since they had stopped to rest or eat. He wanted to go on, but he sat down and waited there at the fork of the trail under the pale trees while she ate. They went on. When they came to a stream, they drank, and went on.

The way went uphill now. Those were the only directions: right and left, uphill and downhill. The sense of the axis was long since lost, meaningless. There was no gate. The trail became very steep, zigzagging in and out of the ravines that scored the mountain’s bulk, always uphill.

“Hugh!”

The name he hated came from a great distance in the silence. The wind had ceased to blow. There was no sound anywhere. Be quiet, he thought with a dull stirring of anxiety, you must be quiet now. He stopped walking, unwillingly, and turned around. He did not see the girl at all for a while. She was far down the path behind him, down the long, dim, steep path under the crowding trees, her face a white patch. If he had gone on a few steps more they would have been out of sight of each other. That would be better. But he stood and waited. She came very slowly, she toiled up the slope, that was a word from books, toiling, working, it was hard work to walk this road. She was tired. He felt no tiredness, only when he stopped and had to stand still, as now, that was hard. If he could go on he could go on forever.

“You can’t just keep going,” she said in a breathless, harsh whisper when at last she had come up to him.

It was a great effort for him to speak. “It’s not much farther,” he said.

“What’s not?”

Don’t talk, he wanted to tell her. He managed to whisper it, “Don’t talk.” He turned to go on.

“Hugh, wait!”

The anguish of fear was in her whispered cry. He turned back to her. He did not know what to say to her. “It’s all right,” he said. “You wait here a while.”

“No,” she said, staring at him. “Not if you’re going on.” She started past him up the narrow trail with a kind of plunge forward, walking with a jerky, driven gait. He came behind her. The path turned, and climbed, and turned, under the dark firs, under the rock faces. They went round a corner that jutted out over immense, dim, dropping forests, and saw all the evening land beneath them darkening into the distant west. They did not pause but went on, entering under trees, into leaf and branch, into the mountain, under rock. To the right the walls of the summit buckled, overhanging. The trees among the scarred crags and boulders grew short and sere. There was rock underfoot now, and the path went level.

Irena’s heavy, jerky pace faltered. She stopped. She took a few steps and stopped again. As he came up beside her she whispered, “There.”

They faced a cliff wall, around which the trail passed on the outside, narrowing. Hugh went those few steps more, and turning the corner saw the inner curve of the cliff, a rock face overhung by half-leafless bushes. In the rock was the mouth of a cave. There it was, of course; this was the place. He stood gazing at it without fear or any emotion. He was here. At last. Again. He had been coming here all his life and had never left it in the beginning.

It only remained to walk the few steps down to the stony level ground before the cave, and go in. In the cave it was dark. Not twilight: darkness. From the beginning of time until the end.

He started forward.

She ran past him, the girl, pushing past him on the narrow path, running down and across the stony level to the cave mouth, but she did not enter. She stooped and picked up a stone and flung it straight into the dark mouth, screaming in a thin voice like a bird, “All right then, come out! Come out! Come out!”

“Get back,” Hugh said, coming beside her in three strides. Holding the sheath with his left hand he drew the sword with his right, for there was no other help. The cold breath sighed out of the cave, and from the cold dark, wakened, came the huge voice, the gobbling howl. And the face that was no face, slit and eyeless, was lunging out, thrusting blind and white, groping down upon him. Holding the sword grip in both hands Hugh pushed the sword upward into the white, wrinkled belly and dragged the blade down with all his strength. The whistling sob rose into a scream. In a gush of pale blood and glistening intestines the creature reared up writhing, pulling the sword out of his hands, and then crashed down on him, crushing him as he tried, too late, to throw himself aside into the clear.