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 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.