“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-druin-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.”
T
he 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.