Ursula Guin - Planet Of Exile

All food in Landin was strictly rationed now. People ate communally in one of the great buildings around the square, or if they chose took their rations home to their houses. The women who had been herding were late. After a hasty dinner in the strange building called Thiatr, Rolery went with Seiko Esmit to the house of the woman Alia Pasfal. She would rather have gone to Agat's empty house and been alone there, but she did whatever she was asked to do. She was no longer a girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an an Alterran, and a prisoner on sufferance. For the first time in her life she obeyed.

No fire burned in the hearth, yet the high room was warm; lamps without wicks burned in glass cages on the wall. In this one house, as big as a whole Kinhouse of Tevar, one old woman lived by herself. How did they bear the loneliness? And how did they keep the warmth and light of summer inside the walls? And all Year long they lived in these houses, all their lives, never wandering, never living in tents out on the range, on the broad Sum-merlands, wandering ... Rolery pulled her groggy head erect and stole a glance at the old one, Pasfal, to see if her sleepiness had been seen. It had. The old one saw everything; and she hated Rolery.

So did they all, the Alterrans, these farborn Elders. They hated her because they loved Jakob Agat with a jealous love; because he had taken her to wife; because she was human and they were not.

One of them was saying something about Tevar, something very strange that she did not believe. She looked down, but fright must have showed hi her face, for one of the men, Dermat Alterra, stopped listening to the others and said, "Rolery, you didn't know that Tevar was lost?"

"I listen," she whispered.

"Our men were harrying the Gaal from the west all day," the farborn explained. "When the Gaal warriors attacked Tevar, we attacked their baggage-line and the camps their women were putting up east of the forest. That drew some of them off, and some of the Tevarans got out—but they and our men got scattered. Some of them are here now; we don't really know what the rest are doing, except it's a cold night and they're out there in the hills ..."

Rolery sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was taken, destroyed. Could that be true? She had left her people; now her people were all dead, or homeless in the hills in the Winter night. She was left alone. The aliens talked and talked hi their hard voices. For a while Rolery had an illusion, which she knew for an illusion, that there was a thin film of blood on her hands and wrists. She felt a little sick, but was not sleepy any longer; now and then she felt herself entering the outskirts, the first stage, of Absence for a minute. The bright, cold eyes of the old one, Pasfal the witch, stared at her. She could not move. There was nowhere to go.

Everyone was dead.

Then there was a change. It was like a small light far off hi darkness. She said aloud, though so softly only those nearest her heard, "Agat is coming here."

"Is he bespeaking you?" Alia Pasfal asked sharply.

Rolery gazed for a moment at the air beside the old woman she feared; she was not seeing her.

"He's coming here," she repeated.

"He's probably not sending, Alia," said the one called Pilotson. "They're in steady rapport, to some degree."

"Nonsense, Huru."

"Why nonsense? He told us he sent to her very hard, on the beach, and got through; she must be a Natural. And that established a rapport. It's happened before."

"Between human couples, yes," the old woman said. "An untrained child can't receive or send a paraverbal message, Huru; a Natural is the rarest thing in the world. And this is a hilf, not a human!"

Rolery meanwhile had got up, slipped away from the circle and gone to the door. She opened it.

Outside was empty darkness and the cold. She looked up the street, and in a moment could make out a man coming down it at a weary jogtrot. He came into the shaft of yellow light from the open door, and putting out his hand to catch hers, out of breath, said her name. His smile showed three front teeth gone; there was a blackened bandage around his head under his fur cap; he was grayish with fatigue and pain. He had been out hi the hills since the Gaal had entered Aska- tevar Range, three days and two nights ago. "Get me some water to drink," he told Rolery softly, and then came on into the light, while the others all gathered around him.

Rolery found the cooking-room and in it the metal reed with a flower on top which you turned to make water run out of the reed; Agat's house also had such a device. She saw no bowls or cups set out anywhere, so she caught the water in a hollow of the loose hem of her leather tunic, and brought it thus to her husband in the other room. He gravely drank from her tunic. The others stared and Pasfal said sharply, "There are cups in the cupboard." But she was a witch no longer; her malice fell like a spent arrow. Rolery knelt beside Agat and heard his voice.

THE WEATHER HAD warmed again after the first snow. There was sun, a little rain, northwest wind, light frost at night, much as it had been all the last moonphase of Autumn. Winter was not so different from what went before; it was a bit hard to believe the records of previous Years that told of ten-foot snowfalls, and whole moonphases when the ice never thawed. Maybe that came later.

The problem now was the Gaal...

Paying very little attention to Agat's guerillas, though he had inflicted some nasty wounds on their army's flanks, the northerners had poured at a fast march down through As-katevar Range, encamped east of the forest, and now on the third day were assaulting the Winter City. They were not destroying it, however; they were obviously trying to save the granaries from the fire, and the herds, and perhaps the women. It was only the men they slaughtered. Perhaps, as reported, they were going to try to garrison the place with a few of their own men. Come Spring the Gaal returning from the south could march from town to town of an Empire.

It was not like the hilfs, Agat thought as he lay hidden under an immense fallen tree, waiting for his little army to take their positions for their own assault on Tevar. He had been in the open, fighting and hiding, two days and nights now. A cracked rib from the beating he had taken in the woods, though well bound up, hurt, and so did a shallow scaip-wound from a Gaal slingshot vesterday; but with immunity to infection wounds healed very fast, and Agat paid scant attention to anything less than a severed artery. Only a concussion had got him down at all. He was thirsty at the moment and a bit stiff, but his mind was pleasantly alert as he got this brief enforced rest. It wasn't like the hilfs, this planning ahead. Hilfs did not consider either time or space in the linear, imperialistic fashion of his own species. Time to them was a lantern lighting a step before, a step behind—the rest was indistinguishable dark. Time was this day, this one day of the immense Year. They had no historical vocabulary; there was merely today and "timepast." They looked ahead only to the next season at most. They did not look down over time but wer" in it as the lamp in the night, as the heart hi the body. And so also with space: space to them was not a surface on which to draw boundaries but a range, a heart1 and, centered on the self and clan and tribe. Around the Range were areas that brightened as one approached them and dimmed as one departed; the farther, the fainter. But there were no lines, no limits. This planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across both snace and time, was untypical; it showed—what? An autonomous change in a hilf culture-pattern, or an infection from the old northern colonies and forays of Man?