Ursula Guin - Planet Of Exile

The snow scarcely penetrated the branches. It was getting dark very early, he thought as he approached the place where the path divided, and this was 'the last thing in his mind when something caught his ankle in midstride and sent him pitching forward. He landed on his hands and was half-way up when a shadow on his left became a man, silvery-white in the gloom, who knocked him over before he was fairly up. Confused by the ringing in his ears, Agat struggled free of something holding him and again tried to stand up. He seemed to have lost his bearings and did not understand what was happening, though he had an impression that it had happened before, and also that it was not actually happening. There were several more of the silvery-looking men with stripes down their legs and arms, and they held him by the arms while another one came up and struck him with something across the mouth. There was pain, the darkness was full of pain and rage. With a furious and skillful convulsion of his whole body he got free of the silvery men, catching one under the jaw with his fist and sending him out of the scene backward: but there were more and more of them and he could not get free a second time. They hit him and when he hid his face in his arms against the mud of the path they kicked his sides. He lay pressed against the blessed harmless mud, trying to hide, and heard somebody breathing very strangely.

Through that noise he also heard Umaksuman's voice. Even he, then ... But he did not care, so long as they would go away, would let him be. It was getting dark very early.

It was dark: pitch dark. He tried to crawl forward. He wanted to get home to his people who would help him. It was so dark he could not see his hands. Soundlessly and unseen in the absolute blackness, snow fell on him and around him on the mud and leafmold. He wanted to get home. He was very cold. He tried to get up, but there was no west or east, and sick with pain he put his head down on his arm. "Come to me," he tried to call in the mindspeech of Alterra, but it was to hard to call so far into the darkness. It was easier to lie still right here. Nothing could be easier.

In a high stone house in Landin, by a driftwood fire, Alia Pasfal lifted her head suddenly from her book. She had a distinct impression that Jakob Agat was sending to her, but no message came.

It was queer. There were all too many queer by-products and aftereffects and inexplicables involved in mindspeech; many people here in Landin never learned it, and those who did used it very sparingly. Up north in Atlantika colony they had mindspoken more freely. She herself was a refugee from Atlantika and remem-bred how in the terrible Winter of her childhood she had mindspoken with the others all the time. And after her mother and father died in the famine, for a whole moon-phase after, over and over again she had felt them sending to her, felt their presence in her mind—but no message, no words, silence.

"Jakob!" She bespoke him, long and hard, but there was no answer. At the same time, in the Armory checking over the expedition's supplies once more, Huru Pilotson abruptly gave way to the uneasiness that had been preying on him all day and burst out, "What the hell does Agat think he's doing!"

"He's pretty late," one of the Armory boys affirmed. "Is he over at Tevar again?"

"Cementing relations with the mealy-faces," Pilotson said, gave a mirthless giggle, and scowled.

"All right, come on, let's see about the parkas."

At the same time, in a room paneled with wood like ivory satin, Seiko Esmit burst into a fit of silent crying, wringing her hands and struggling not to send to him, not to bespeak him, not even to whisper his name aloud:"Jakob!"

At the same time Rolery's mind went quite dark for a while. She simply crouched motionless where she was.

She was in the hunter's shelter. She had thought, with all the confusion of the move from the tents into the warren-like Kinhouses of the city, that her absence and very late return had not been observed last night. But today was different; order was reestablished and her leaving would be seen. So she had gone off in broad daylight as she so often did, trusting that no one would take special notice of that; she had gone circuitously to the shelter, curled down there in her furs and waited till dark should fall and finally he should come. The snow had begun to fall; watching it made her sleepy; she watched it, wondering sleepily what she would do tomorrow. For he would be gone. And everyone in her clan would know she had been out all night. That was tomorrow.

It would take care of itself. This was tonight, tonight ... and she dozed off, till suddenly she woke with a great start, and crouched there a little while, her mind blank, dark.

Then abruptly she scrambled up and with flint and tin-derbox lighted the basket-lantern she had brought with her. By its tiny glow she headed downhill till she struck the path, then hesitated, and turned west. Once she stopped and said, "Alterra ..." in a whisper. The forest was perfectly quiet in the night. She went on till she found him lying across the path.

The snow, falling thicker now, streaked across the lantern's dim, small glow. The snow was sticking to the ground now instead of melting, and it had stuck in a powdering of white all over his torn coat and even on his hair. His hand, which she touched first, was cold and she knew he was dead. She sat down on the wet, snow-rimmed mud by him and took his head on her knees.

He moved and made a kind of whimper, and with that Rolery came to herself. She stopped her silly gesture of smoothing the powdery snow from his hair and collar, and sat intent for a minute. Then she eased him back down, got up, automatically tried to rub the sticky blood from her hand, and with the lantern's aid began to seek around the sides of the path for something. She found what she needed and set to work.

Soft, weak sunlight slanted down across the room. In that warmth it was hard to wake up and he kept sliding back down into the waters of sleep, the deep tideless lake. But the light always brought him up again; and finally he was awake, seeing the high gray walls about him and the slant of sunlight through glass.

He lay still while the shaft of watery golden light faded and returned, slipped from the floor and pooled on the farther wall, rising higher, reddening. Alia Pasfal came in, and seeing he was awake signed to someone behind her to stay out. She closed the door and came to kneel by him. Alter-ran houses were sparsely furnished; they slept on pallets on the carpeted floor, and for chairs used at most a thin cushion. So Alia knelt, and looked down at Agat, her worn, black face lighted strongly by the reddish shaft of sun. There was no pity in her face as she looked at him. She had borne too much, too young, for compassion and scruple ever to rise from very deep in her, and in her old age she was quite pitiless. She shok her head a little from side to side as she said softly, "Jakob ... What have you done?"

He found that his head hurt him when he tried to speak, so having no real answer he kept still.

"What have you done ..."

"How did I get home?" he asked at last, forming the words so poorly with his smashed mouth that she raised her hand to stop him. "How you got here—is that what you asked? She brought you. The hilf girl. She made a sort of travois out of some branches and her furs, and rolled you onto it and hauled you over the ridge and to the Land Gate. At night in the snow. Nothing left on her but her breeches —she had to tear up her tunic to tie you on. Those hilfs are tougher than the leather they dress in. She said the snow made it easier to pull... No snow left now. That was night before last. You've had a pretty good rest all in all."

She poured him a cup of water from the jug on a tray nearby and helped him drink. Close over him her face looked very old, delicate with age. She said to him with the mindspeech, unbelievingly, How could you do this? You were always a proud man, Jakob!