Ursula Guin - Planet Of Exile

He replied the same way, wordlessly. Put into words what he told her was: / can't get on without her.

The old woman flinched physically away from the sense of his passion, and as if in self-defense spoke aloud: "But what a time to pick for a love affair, for a romance! When everyone depended on you—"

He repeated what he had told her, for it was the truth and all he could tell her. She bespoke him with harshness: But you're not going to marry her, so you'd better learn to get on without her.

He replied only, No.

She sat back on her heels a while. When her mind opened again to his it was with a great depth of bitterness. Well, go ahead, what's the difference. At this point whatever we do, any of us, alone or together, is wrong. We can't do the right thing, the lucky thing. We can only go on committing sui- cide, little by little, one by one. Till we're all gone, till Al-terra is gone, all the exiles dead ...

"Alia," he broke in aloud, shaken by her despair, "the ... the men went ... ?"

"What men? Our army?" She said the words sarcastically. "Did they march north yesterday—without you?"

"Pilotson—"

"If Pilotson had led them anywhere it would have been to attack Tevar. To avenge you. He was crazy with rage yesterday."

"Andthey..."

"The hilfs? No, of course they didn't go. When it became known that Wold's daughter is running off to sleep with a farborn in the woods, Wold's faction comes in for a certain amount of ridicule and discredit—you can see that? Of course, it's easier to see it after the fact; but I should have thought—"

"For God's sake, Alia."

"All right. Nobody went north. We sit here and wait for the Gaal to arrive when they please."

Jakob Agat lay very still, trying to keep himself from falling headfirst, backwards, into the void that lay under him. It was the blank and real abyss of his own pride: the self-deceiving arrogance from which all his acts had sprung: the lie. If he went under, no matter. But what of his people whom he had betrayed?

Alia bespoke him after a while: Jakob, it was a very little hope at best. You did what you could.

Man and unman can't work together. Six hundred home-years of failure should tell you that. Your folly was only their pretext. If they hadn't turned on us over it, they would have found something else very soon. They're our enemies as much as the Gaal. Or the Winter. Or the rest of this planet that doesn't want us. We can make no alliances but among ourselves. We're on our own. Never hold your hand out to any creature that belongs to this world.

He turned his mind away from hers, unable to endure the finality of her despair. He tried to lie closed in on himself, withdrawn, but something worried him insistently, dragged at his consciousness, until suddenly it came clear, and struggling to sit up he stammered, "Where is she? You didn't send her back—"

Clothed in a white Alterran robe, Rolery sat crosslegged, a little farther away from him than Alia had been. Alia was gone; Rolery sat there busy with some work, mending a sandal it seemed. She had not seemed to notice that he spoke; perhaps he had only spoken in dream. But she said presently in her light voice, "That old one upset you. She could have waited. What can you do now? ... I think none of them knows how to take six steps without you."

The last red of the sunlight made a dull glory on the wall behind her. She sat with a quiet face, eyes cast down as always, absorbed in mending a sandal.

In her presence both guilt and pain eased off and took their due proportion. With her, he was himself. He spoke her name aloud.

"Oh, sleep now; it hurts you to talk," she said with a nicker of her timid mockery.

"Will you stay?" he asked.

"Yes."

"As my wife," he insisted, reduced by necessity and pain to the bare essential. He imagined that her people would kill her if she went back to them; he was not sure what his own people might do to her. He was her only defense, and he wanted the defense to be certain.

She bowed her head as if in acceptance; he did not know her gestures well enough to be sure. He wondered a little at her quietness now. The little while he had known her she had always been quick with motion and emotion. But it had been a very little while ... As she sat there working away her quietness entered into him, and with it he felt his strength begin to return.

BRIGHT ABOVE the roofpeaks burned the star whose rising told the start of Whiter, as cheerlessly, bright as Wold remembered it from his boyhood sixty moonphases ago. Even the great, slender crescent moon opposite it in the sky seemed paler than the Snowstar. A new moonphase had begun, and a new season. But not auspiciously.

Was it ture what the farborns used to say, that the moon was a world like Askatevar and the other Ranges, though without living creatures, and the stars too were worlds, where men and beasts, lived and summer and winter came? ... What sort of men would dwell on the Snowstar? Terrible beings, white as snow, with pallid lipless mouths and fiery eyes, stalked through Wold's imagaination. He shook his head and tried to pay attention to what the other Elders were saying.

The fore-runners had returned after only five days with various rumors from the north; and the Elders had built a fire in the great court of Tevar and held a Stone-Pounding. Wold had come last and closed the circle, for no other man dared; but it was meaningless, humiliating to him. For the war he had declared was not being fought, the men he had sent had not gone, and the alliance he had made was broken.

Beside him, as silent as he, sat Umaksuman. The others shouted and wrangled, getting nowhere. What did they ex- pect? No rhythm had risen out of the pounding of stones, there had been only clatter and conflict.

After that, could they expect to agree on anything? Fools, fools, Wold thought, glowering at the fire that was too far away to warm him. The others were mostly younger, they could keep warm with youth and with shouting at one another. But he was an old man and furs did not warm him, out under the glaring Snowstar in the wind of Winter. His legs ached now with cold, his chest hurt, and he did not know or care what they were all quarreling about.

Umaksuman was suddenly on his feet. "Listen!" he said, and the thunder of his voice (He got that from me, thought Wold) compelled them, though there were audible mutters and jeers. So far, though everybody had a fair idea what had happened, the immediate cause or pretext of their quarrel with Landin had not been discussed outside the walls of Wold's Kinhouse; it had simply been announced that Umaksuman was not to lead the foray, that there was to be no foray, that there might be an attack from the farborns. Those of other houses who knew nothing about Rol-ery or Agat knew what was actually involved: a power-struggle between factions in the most powerful clan. This was covertly going on in every speech made now in the Stone-Pounding, the subject of which was, nominally, whether the farborns were to be treated as enemies when met beyond the walls.

Now Umaksuman spoke: "Listen, Elders of Tevar! You say this, you say that, but you have nothing left to say. The Gaal are coming: within three days they are here. Be silent and go sharpen your spears, go look to our gates and walls, because the enemy comes, they come down on us—see!" He flung out his arm to the north, and many turned to stare where he pointed, as if expecting the hordes of the Southing to burst through the wall that moment, so urgent was Umak-suman's rhetoric.

"Why didn't you look to the gate your kinswoman went out of, Umaksuman?" Now it was said.

"She's your kinswoman too, Ukwet," Umaksuman said wrathfully.

One of them was Wold's son, the other his grandson; they spoke of his daughter. For the first time in his life Wold knew shame, bald, helpless shame before all the best men of his people. He sat moveless, his head bowed down.