Ursula Le Guin - The Beginning Place

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.

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.”