W
hy 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.