A dozen gables and dormers broke dark, sharp angles on the sky; the windows, bay and bow, many-paned, lay no two on one level, so that there was no counting the stories of the house except on the evidence of three great beams across the front. The door was massive, twelve-paneled. As she lifted the brass knocker ring and struck it on the polished disc of brass, it came into Irene’s mind that she had dreamed of this door many times, on the other side.
Fimol the housekeeper, erect and imperturbable in high-necked, long-sleeved, long-skirted grey, opened the heavy door and greeted the visitor to the Master’s house. Fimol never smiled, and Irene had always been in awe of her. She noticed with a sense almost of disloyalty, as she followed her, that Fimol’s hair had gone white and that her stiff figure was thin, the body of a frail, aging woman. They came into the hall of the house.
This was the center of it all, this high room. Facing the long wall of paneled oak were twelve high, leaded windows looking out upon the terraced garden. The sparse furniture was carved oak, the carpets of local weave, crimson, orange, and brown, warming the room even when the candles were not lit and there was only the clear constant twilight from the windows. In each end wall was a huge stone chimney-piece, and on each of these, high over the wide hearth and the mantel, hung a portrait: a stiff, melancholy lady stared with round black eyes down the length of the room at her lord,
who concealed the hand of a crippled right arm inside his coat and scowled blackly back at her.
To the right of that farther hearth, near the door to his offices, the Master stood in conversation with the stonecutter Gahiar. Seeing Irene enter with the housekeeper he stared with that black ancestral scowl; then his face changed; he turned from Gahiar and strode down the long room to her, his hands held out. “Irena! You have come!”—such welcome as she had imagined from him, in daydream, often, but not in expectation, and not wondering what came next.
The Master or mayor of Tembreabrezi was a spare, swarthy man with a hawk nose and dark eyes. He wore black, rusty, neatly-mended, homespun black trousers, vest, and jacket. A harsh man, a dark man. She had loved him since she first saw his face.
He brought her out of the hall into his offices, where a fire burned and the curtains were drawn as if against the grey of a day of winter. He set her a chair, and aided by the dignity of her clothing, the dark-red skirt and homespun blouse that Palizot kept for her, she sat down without awkwardness. He stood beside the high desk where he worked standing—he was a man one seldom saw sitting down—and turned his intense look on her. She drew a deep breath and held herself quiet, her hands in her lap.
“It has been a long time, Irena.”
“I could not come.”
“The way—?”
“I could not—mid—” Nor could she find the words she
needed. “The place,” she said, and then remembering what they called the stone arch in the wall of the manor, “The gateway. It was shut.”
“You could not walk on the road,” he said, not impatient with her stumbling, but dauntingly intent.
“When I—when I could come to the road, I could walk on it. But at the beginning—” She stuck again.
“You were afraid.”
His voice was gentle; she had never heard him speak so gently.
“When I came through the gateway. It had been so long. And there, at the beginning place, beside the river, there was—”
He said a word, almost in a whisper. It was the word little Virti had shouted when he was playing monster and she would not fall down, and Aduvan had scolded him, Shut up, don’t say that, both children over-excited, near tears. A huge, pale, deformed arm groping out across the grass—
“A man,” she said. “A stranger.”
The Master listened, intent, alert.
“A stranger, like me. Not like me, but—” She knew no other way to say it. The Master, evidently understanding, nodded once.
“Did you speak with him?”
“No. He was asleep. I came on. I didn’t want—I was afraid—” She stuck again. She could not explain her first panic. Surely he would see why a woman alone might have reason to be afraid of a strange man. But she could not express
the rage she felt now recalling her fear and recalling the stranger, the gross sleeper, the litter of plastic trash: the sense of desecration and of danger. She clasped her hands hard in her lap and struggled again for the words she wanted, forcing herself to speak. “If he found the gateway, maybe others will find it. There are—there are so many, many people there—”
If the Master understood what she meant by “there,” his only response was a black frown.
“You must guard your walls, Master!” she said desperately. She would have said “borders” but knew no such word in his language, nor any word for boundary or fence but the word that meant a wall of wood or stone.
He nodded. But he said, “There are no walls, Irena. And now, for us, no ways.”
The tone of his voice held her silent. He turned to his desk and went on presently with the same forced quietness, “We can’t go on the roads. They are closed. You know that some have been closed to us for a long time. The south road, your road—you know that we don’t use that.” She had not known it, and stared uncomprehending. “But we had the summer pastures and the High Step, and all the eastern ways, and the north road. Now we have none of them. Nobody comes from Three Fountains, or the foothill villages. No traders or merchants. Nothing from the plains. No news from the City of the King. For a while we could go westward, up the mountain, on the paths; but not now. All the gates of Tembreabrezi are locked.”
There were no gates to lock. Only the street that led out to the south road and the north road, and the paths up and down the mountain west and east, all open, without gate or barrier.
“Is it the King that says you cannot use the roads?” Irene asked, in frustration at not understanding, and then was alarmed at her rashness in questioning the Master. Learning his language had not, after all, been like learning Spanish in high school,
la casa
the house,
el rey
the king … . The word
rediai
, which she thought meant king, did not necessarily mean king, or what she meant by king; she had no way to know what it meant except by hearing it used, and it was not used often, except when they spoke of the City of the King. Perhaps it was her year of Spanish and the beginning syllable “re” that had made her decide that the word meant king. She had no way to be sure. She was afraid she had said something stupid, sacrilegious. The Master’s dark face was turned away from her. She saw that his hands were clenched before him on the desk.
He had perhaps not even heard her question. “This stranger,” he said, turning but not looking at her, his voice very low but harsh. And he too hesitated.
“It could be—a mistake—he mistook the way—” A tramp, she wanted to say, a wanderer, a blunderer, camping there overnight without noticing anything about the place, maybe for him there was nothing special about the place, maybe he had crossed no threshold, and he would go on the next day, hitchhiking on into the city probably, he was gone
already, he did not belong here. She wanted to say all this, though she could not. She was sure now it was true. It was the truth she wanted and, she saw, that the Master also wanted, for he understood her and considered the possibility with evident relief. He was perhaps not convinced, but she had given him some hope he wanted. He looked directly at her at last, and smiled. His smile was rare, very brief and sweet. “I did not dare hope you would come back, Irena,” he said softly. If she had spoken all she could have said was, “I have always loved you,” but she could not, and there was no need to. He knew his power. He was the Master.
“Will you stay with us?” he asked.
Did he mean for good? His tone was restrained; she was not sure what he meant.
“As long as I can. But I must go back.”
He nodded.
“And then when I try to come back, if the gate is shut again—”
“It will open for you, I think.”
His eyes were strange, dark as caverns; nothing he said changed that inward gaze.
“But why—”
“Why? When you know the answer there’s no question, when there’s no answer there never was a question.” It sounded like a proverb, and his voice was dry and a little mocking; that was the way he had used to talk to her; his return to it comforted her.
“That is your road,” he said.
He turned to his desk again, adding, almost indifferently, “The south road and the north.”
“Could I go north? If something is wrong—Could I go ask for help—carry a message—?”
“I do not know,” he said, only glancing at her; but there was a flicker of praise or triumph on his face, and it was that that stayed with her, after he had taken her, in accordance with the sedate ways of the house, to greet his mother and have a little formal collation and conversation with her, and after she had left the house and returned to spend the day with Trijiat. For the first time, she thought, he wanted something of her. There was something she could give him, if she could find what it was. She had come closest to it when she spoke of going north. He had turned their talk away from that at once, but not before she had seen the flicker of pleasure, of praise.
If only she could understand him better! She must take seriously what he had said half-mockingly about questions and answers: He, and she, and all of them here, were subject to the laws of the place, laws as absolute as the law of gravity, as impossible to disobey and as difficult to explain. He had told her, if she understood him at all, that none of the townsfolk could leave the town, prevented by some power or law. But it was possible that she, since she could come to Tembreabrezi, might be able to leave it. Or perhaps he had meant that, being from outside this land, she was outside its laws, and need not obey? Was that what he had meant? But
she would obey him. He was her law. If she could please him: if she could find what he wanted! If he would ask, so that she could give …
This was the longest she had ever stayed in Mountain Town. In the old days her visits had been frequent but short; now that she could spend a week or a fortnight (a night or weekend, on the other side of the gate) if she chose to, the gate had mostly been closed to her. All her longing had been to find it open, to come through. Now she was here, settled in, living at the inn and working with Sofir and Palizot as always, visiting with her friends, playing with their children. All, as always, sat her down to table if they were eating, put her to work if they were working, made her at once and entirely at home. That had been the bliss of the old days, and was still a pleasure. But it was no longer enough. It seemed to her, now, that there was an element of falseness in it, of pretense. The peace she felt here, the homeliness, was truly theirs; but not hers. She came and would leave again, no true part of their life. They did not need her help in their work. They did not need her.
Unless, as the Master had suggested—or had he?—she could help them not by coming here, not by being here, but by going on farther.
No one but he had yet spoken of there being anything wrong, so that at first she thought little about it. Then, as she noticed that in fact no one came to the town, and no one left the town, that they were taking the flocks only to the nearer pastures, that there were shortages of salt, of wheat flour,
that when Trijiat lost her good sewing needle she was upset and looked for it for days … as she noticed this and that and the other thing she realised that what the Master had said was true: all the roads were closed. But why? by whom, by what? She tried once or twice to speak of the matter, with Trijiat, with Sofir; they avoided answering, Sofir with a meaningless laugh, Trijiat with such open fear that Irene knew she could not bring the subject up again. It was a taboo, or a dread so deep they could not speak of it at all. They spoke of nothing but the day’s doings, and pretended that nothing was wrong. And that was the falseness she felt, the discomfort. They did need help, but they would not admit it.
What would it be like to go on from Tembreabrezi, northward, down to the plains?
A couple of years ago, a long Sunday on the other side, she had gone with Sofir and old Hobim the merchant and his crew and a train of tiny donkeys laden with woven goods, first to a village a day’s walk north over the shoulder of the mountain, and then on to the town called Three Fountains, in the northeastern foothills; they had stayed there two days to trade and then come back, six days’ journey altogether. She remembered where the road to Three Fountains turned off eastward and the north road went straight on towards a dark pass. How far down from there to the plains? How far across the plains to the City they spoke of? She had no idea; many days’ walking, no doubt; but she could take food, and there would surely be villages or towns along the way, and so she
could cross the long, twilit plains and come to the City and ask help for Tembreabrezi. If they would send help. Or was she forbidden to go on the roads too? But they had no right to forbid her. If the Master asked her to go, she would go.
He did not send for her. She grew impatient and restless. She could not understand her friends here going about their work and never talking about what was wrong, like people with cancer saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” like her own mother always saying, “Everything is all right,” she did not want to think about that here, she resented having to think about it. Why didn’t they talk about it? Why didn’t they do something? What were they waiting for?