Treason

Chapter 15 -- Man in the Wind

I came to Ku Kuei in realtime and laughed a bit when several of the young ones, not knowing who I was, tried to play quicktime games with me. I easily coped with their timeflows and stayed in realtime despite all they did. They must have got worried then, and called on someone older and more skilled. Which is why Man-Who-Knows-It-All came to greet me.

"Lake-drinker," he roared as he came into view, laughing and holding out his arms. "Gone forever! My worst student, the bad example I hold before all the children who come to me to learn. You stayed away so long, however long it's been, who can keep track of time? But it's been a long time, you old bastard, and come on, come on, come on, hurry!"

We hurried, the fat Ku Kuei leading the way briskly. I drank in the air of the forest. Forest wasn't the kind of land I called home, but this forest was my father's cemetery and the last place I had been when someone still loved me as a son and as a lover.

"Saranna," I said, and Man-Who-Knows-It-All looked puzzled. "Stump," I reminded him, and he laughed. "Oh, her. Her, what an incredible thing. A good student, for an outsider. We don't call her Stump anymore, you know. It's Stone now, Lady Stone, because there she stands in the slowest damn slowtime anyone's ever done. Do you want to see her?"

Did I want to see her? I didn't know how much until I stood there and realized that she was standing just as she had stood when I left, six subjective years and three real years before. Her hands were still reaching out to me. Her lips were still parted with her last words. The tears in her eyes had overflowed, and yet the first drops hadn't reached her chin.

I gazed at her and the last six years fell away and it was only a moment ago that I had left her. I walked close to her, slowing my time; I slowed beyond anything I had ever experienced before, slowed until even the trees seemed a blur, and then, at last, her tears began to move, and her eyes saw me, and her expression changed to hope, and she sad, "Lanik. I've changed my mind. I don't want to be young forever. Take me with you."

She embraced me, and I embraced her, and I kissed her cheek where it was wet. "I've been away for six years," I said.

"Hush," she said.

"I've done terrible things."

"I don't need to know it."

"I'm not a good person," I insisted.

She only kissed me, and whispered, "Good enough for me." And she smiled and I smiled and gradually we slipped out of slowtime and the world ceased to be a blur and we were in Ku Kuei again. There were hundreds of people gathered around us. I recognized none of them.

"Why are you watching us?" I asked.

"Because," one fat man said, "people told us the Stone Lovers were speeding up to realtime, and we to come to see."

"Stone lovers?"

"People have been born, grown old, and died, and only seen the two of you move an inch or two, or smile or seem to speak a single word. You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything."

"How long?" I asked.

"Two, three hundred years, I figure," he said. "But now I expect youll be just ordinary people."

"I hope so," I said, and Saranna smiled.

We left the forest and traveled east until at last we reached Britton, and in the easternmost part of Britton's east peninsula, we came to Humping. In the last few centuries nothing had changed. A new lord ruled from cliff house, but he called himself by the hereditary name Barton. Glain's and Vran's house was now a garden and someone else's house stood a few meters off, but the house was full of children and nothing had been changed. The people were still poor, still taciturn, still good to the heart.

Saranna and I built a sod house near the sea, where I began at once to teach her all that I had learned. After a time a shepherd came to see what we were up to. I healed his painful joints and Saranna cured his sick lamb, and then they all knew who I was. "Man-of-the-Wind," they called me, and Saranna became the "Man-of-the-Wind's Lady," and soon just "Windlady," and though the people of Humping loved us, they couldn't have loved us as we loved them. The legend of Man-of-the-Wind was well known-- how he had come from nowhere and lived with Glain and Vran, healing and doing good for everyone until someone told the lord in cliff house and Man-of-the-Wind went away and never came back again. This time, they vowed, it would be different. And in all the years we've lived here, the lord in cliff house has never sought us out.

The Humpers aren't surprised that though they grow old and die, we don't grow old. We have lived to cure the ills of children whose grandparents' broken legs we fixed. It's a quiet life, but a good one, and sometime soon Saranna and I plan to have children. When we have children, though, we will stop changing ourselves, and will grow old and the when our grandchildren are growing up, just like anyone else. Children don't need their parents to live forever.

But we're not quite ready for that now. Life is still sweet enough for us without children, though I look at Saranna and see that it won't be too long now; and I look at myself and see that I'm nearly ready. And that will be good, too, Even death will be good, I think, not because it ends old bitterness, but because I believe it will come as the last of the many sharp tastes that have taught me I am alive.

Under everything I still hear the scream of the earth, but it no longer taints the things I see and do. Instead, it heightens my pleasures, and sunrise is brighter because of the dark place inside me, and Saranna's smile is kinder because of the cruelty I have known, and healing the animals and children and adults that come to me is sweeter because once, against my own instincts but because of my own sense of right, I killed.

Whether Treason is a better place to live now I'm not the one to judge.

Whether we are progressing as well as we did before the Ambassadors were destroyed I don't know. It's not up to me to evaluate how well we've done with the opportunity I made.

Sometimes I marvel that I accomplished it at all. "You don't exist," Saranna often says after we make love, "you can't be real." She means it one way, but I believe it another, and for all the planning and plotting that I did before I acted, I know that I was shaped more by circumstance than by myown will. I wonder sometimes if I'm not, after all, a piece in some other player's game, following blindly his grand designs without ever knowing that my path along the board is only a feint, while the important matters are played out elsewhere by other men.

But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: To see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done, then the price, once paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value. Here among the shepherds, my cup is filled with the water of life; it overflows.