'But when you don't come back!' the girl cried out, under the pressure of the terror that had entered her with Autumn's end, the fear of coldness, of death. He held her against him telling her quietly that he would come back. As he spoke she felt the beating of his heart and the beating of her own. 'I want to stay with you,' she said, and he was saying, 'I want to stay with you.'
It was dark around them. When they got up they walked slowly in a grayish darkness. She came with him, towards his city. 'Where can we go?' he said with a kind of bitter laugh. 'This isn't like love hi Summer ... There's a hunter's shelter down the ridge a way ... They'll miss you in Tevar.'
'No,' she whispered, 'they won't miss me.'
CHAPTER SIX: Snow
THE FORE-RUNNERS had gone; tomorrow the Men of Askatevar would march north on the broad vague trail that divided their Range, while the smaller group from Landin would take the old road up the coast. Like Agat, Umaksu-man had judged it best to keep the two forces apart until the eve of fighting. They were allied only by Wold's authority. Many of Umaksuman's men, though veterans of many raids and forays before the Winter Peace, were reluctant to go on this unseasonal war; and a sizable faction, even within his own Kin, so detested this alliance with the farborns that they were ready to make any trouble they could. Uk-wet and others had said openly that when they had finished with the Gaal they would finish off the witches. Agat discounted this, foreseeing that victory would modify, and defeat end, their prejudice; but it worried Umaksuman, who did not look so far ahead.
'Our scouts will keep you in sight all along. After all, the Gaal may not wait on the border for us.'
'The Long Valley under Cragtop would be a good place for a battle,' Umaksuman said with his flashing smile. 'Good luck, Alterra!'
'Good luck to you, Umaksuman.' They parted as friends, there under the mud-cemented stone gateway of the Winter City. As Agat turned something flickered in the dull afternoon air beyond the arch, a wavering drifting movement. He looked up startled, then turned back. 'Look at that.'
The native came out from the walls and stood beside him a minute, to see for the first time the stuff of old men's tales. Agat held his hand out palm up. A flickering speck of white touched his wrist and was gone. The long vale of stubble-fields and used-up pasture, the creek, the dark inlet of the forest and the farther hills to south and west all seemed to tremble very slightly, to withdraw, as random flakes fell from the low sky, twirling and slanting a little, though the wind was down.
Children's voices cried in excitement behind them among the high-peaked wooden roofs.
'Snow is smaller than I thought,' Umaksuman said at last, dreamily.
'I thought it would be colder. The air seems warmer than it did before ...' Agat roused himself from the sinsiter and charming fascination of the twirling fall of the snow. 'Til we meet in the north,' he said, and pulling his fur collar close around his neck against the queer, searching touch of the tiny flakes, set out on the path to Landin.
A half-kilo into the forest he saw the scarcely marked side path that led to the hunter's shelter, and passing it felt as if his veins were running liquid light. 'Come on, come on,' he told himself, impatient with his recurrent loss of self-control. He had got the whole thing perfectly straight in the short intervals for thinking he had had today. Last night—had been last night. All right, it was that and nothing more. Aside from the fact that she was, after all, a hilf and he was human, so there was no future in the thing, it was foolish on other counts. Ever since he had seen her face, on the black steps over the tide, he had thought of her and yearned to see her, like an adolescent mooning after his first girl; and if there was anything he hated it was the stupidity, the obstinate stupidity of uncontrolled passion. It led men to take blind risks, to hazard really important things for a mere moment of lust, to lose control over their acts. So, in order to stay in control, he had gone with her last night; that was merely sensible to get the fit over with. So he told himself once more, walking along very rapidly, his head high, while the snow danced thinly around him. Tonight he would meet her again, for the same reason. At the thought, a flood of warm light and an aching joy ran through his body and mind; he ignored it. Tomorrow he was off to the north, and if he came back, then there would be time enough to explain to the girl that there could be no more such nights, no more lying together on his fur cloak in the shelter in the forest's heart, starlight overhead and the cold and the great silence all around ... no, no more ... The absolute happiness she had given him came up in him like a tide, drowning all thought. He ceased to tell himself anything. He walked rapidly with his long stride in the gathering darkness of the woods, and as he walked, sang under his breath, not knowing that he did so, some old love-song of his exiled race.
The snow scarcely penetrated the branches. It was getting dark very early, he thought as he approached the place where the path divided, and this was 'the last thing in his mind when something caught his ankle in midstride and sent him pitching forward. He landed on his hands and was half-way up when a shadow on his left became a man, silvery-white in the gloom, who knocked him over before he was fairly up. Confused by the ringing in his ears, Agat struggled free of something holding him and again tried to stand up. He seemed to have lost his bearings and did not understand what was happening, though he had an impression that it had happened before, and also that it was not actually happening. There were several more of the silvery-looking men with stripes down their legs and arms, and they held him by the arms while another one came up and struck him with something across the mouth. There was pain, the darkness was full of pain and rage. With a furious and skillful convulsion of his whole body he got free of the silvery men, catching one under the jaw with his fist and sending him out of the scene backward: but there were more and more of them and he could not get free a second time. They hit him and when he hid his face in his arms against the mud of the path they kicked his sides. He lay pressed against the blessed harmless mud, trying to hide, and heard somebody breathing very strangely.
Through that noise he also heard Umaksuman's voice. Even he, then ... But he did not care, so long as they would go away, would let him be. It was getting dark very early.
It was dark: pitch dark. He tried to crawl forward. He wanted to get home to his people who would help him. It was so dark he could not see his hands. Soundlessly and unseen in the absolute blackness, snow fell on him and around him on the mud and leafmold. He wanted to get home. He was very cold. He tried to get up, but there was no west or east, and sick with pain he put his head down on his arm. 'Come to me,' he tried to call in the mindspeech of Alterra, but it was to hard to call so far into the darkness. It was easier to lie still right here. Nothing could be easier.
In a high stone house in Landin, by a driftwood fire, Alia Pasfal lifted her head suddenly from her book. She had a distinct impression that Jakob Agat was sending to her, but no message came.
It was queer. There were all too many queer by-products and aftereffects and inexplicables involved in mindspeech; many people here in Landin never learned it, and those who did used it very sparingly. Up north in Atlantika colony they had mindspoken more freely. She herself was a refugee from Atlantika and remem-bred how in the terrible Winter of her childhood she had mindspoken with the others all the time. And after her mother and father died in the famine, for a whole moon-phase after, over and over again she had felt them sending to her, felt their presence in her mind—but no message, no words, silence.
'Jakob!' She bespoke him, long and hard, but there was no answer. At the same time, in the Armory checking over the expedition's supplies once more, Huru Pilotson abruptly gave way to the uneasiness that had been preying on him all day and burst out, 'What the hell does Agat think he's doing!'
'He's pretty late,' one of the Armory boys affirmed. 'Is he over at Tevar again?'
'Cementing relations with the mealy-faces,' Pilotson said, gave a mirthless giggle, and scowled.
'All right, come on, let's see about the parkas.'
At the same time, in a room paneled with wood like ivory satin, Seiko Esmit burst into a fit of silent crying, wringing her hands and struggling not to send to him, not to bespeak him, not even to whisper his name aloud:'Jakob!'
At the same time Rolery's mind went quite dark for a while. She simply crouched motionless where she was.
She was in the hunter's shelter. She had thought, with all the confusion of the move from the tents into the warren-like Kinhouses of the city, that her absence and very late return had not been observed last night. But today was different; order was reestablished and her leaving would be seen. So she had gone off in broad daylight as she
