Invoking any function made her want to read more books. Ada looked up at the glowing windows of the library—she could see the heads of others in there now, sigling away—and she wished she was with them, running her hands across the spines of the new volumes brought in and stacked in recent days, watching the golden words flow down her hands and arms into her mind and heart. But she’d read fifteen thick books already this short winter day, and even the thought of more sigling made her nausea surge.
Reading—or at least sigl-reading—is a lot like being pregnant, she thought, rather pleased with the metaphor. It fills you with feelings and reactions you’re not ready for …it makes you feel too full, not quite yourself, suddenly moving toward some destined moment that will change everything in your life forever. She wondered what Harman would say about her metaphor—he was brutal in critiquing his own metaphors and analogies, she knew—and then she felt the nausea in her belly move to her heart as the concern flooded back in. Where are they? Where is he? Is my darling all right?
Ada’s heart was pounding as she walked out toward the glowing open hearth and web of wooden scaffolding that was Hannah’s cupola, manned twenty-four hours a day now that bronze and iron and other metals were being shaped for weapons.
Hannah’s friend Loes and a group of the younger men were stoking and maintaining the fires tonight. “Good evening, Ada Uhr,” called down the tall, thin man. He’d known her for years, but always preferred the formality of the honorific.
“Good evening, Loes Uhr. Any word from the watchtowers?”
“None, I’m afraid,” called down Loes, stepping away from the opening at the top of the cupola. Ada noticed in her distraction that the man had shaved his beard and that his face was red and sweaty from the heat. He was working bare-chested up there on a night when it might snow.
“Is there a pour tonight?” asked Ada. Hannah always informed her of such things—and night pours were dramatic to watch—but the metal furnace was not one of Ada’s responsibilities and a fact of their new life that was only of passing interest to her.
“In the morning, Ada Uhr. And I’m sure that Harman Uhr and the others will be back soon. They can find their way easily enough in ring-light and starlight.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” called Ada. Then, as an afterthought, she asked, “Have you seen Daeman Uhr?”
Loes mopped his brow, spoke softly to one of the other men who ran to get firewood, and then called down, “Daeman Uhr left for Paris Crater this evening, do you remember? He’s fetching his mother here to Ardis Hall.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” said Ada. She bit her lip, but had to ask, “Did he leave before dark? I certainly hope he did.” The voynix attacks between Ardis and the faxnode had increased in recent weeks.
“Oh, yes, Ada Uhr. He left with plenty of time to get to the pavilion before dark. And he was carrying one of the new crossbows. He’ll wait until after sunrise here to return with his mother.”
“That’s good,” said Ada, looking north toward the wooden wall and the forest beyond it. It was already dark here on the open hillside, the last of the light fled from the western sky where dark clouds were massing, and she could imagine how very dark it must be under the trees out there. “I’ll see you at dinner, Loes Uhr.”
“A good evening to you until then, Ada Uhr.”
She pulled her shawl up over her head as the wind came up. She was walking toward the north gate and the watchtower there, but she knew she wouldn’t call up to distract the guards there with her anxiety. Besides, she’d spent an hour out there in late afternoon, watching the northern approaches, waiting almost happily. That was before the anxiety had set in like nausea. Ada walked aimlessly around the eastern side of Ardis Hall, nodding to the guards leaning on their spears near the circular driveway. The torches along the drive had been lit.
She couldn’t go inside. Too much warmth, too much laughter, too much conversation. She saw young Peaen on the porch, talking earnestly with one of her young admirers who had moved to Ardis from Ulanbat after the Fall—one of the many disciples of Odysseus back when the old man had been a teacher, before he had become Noman and taciturn—and Ada turned back into the relative darkness of the side yard, not wishing to be drawn into so much as a greeting.
What if Harman dies? What if he is dead already somewhere out there in the dark?
Putting the thought into words made her feel better, made the nausea recede. The words were like objects, making the idea more solid—less a poisonous gas and more a loathsome cube of crystallized thought that she could rotate in her hands, studying its terrible facets.
What if Harman dies? She would not die herself—Ada, always a realist, knew that. She would live on, have the child, perhaps love again.
That last thought made the nausea return and she sat on a cold stone bench where she could look at the blazing cupola and at the closed north gate beyond it.
Ada knew that she had never really been in love before Harman—even when she had wanted to be, she’d known as both girl and young woman that the flirtations and dalliances had not been love, in a world before the Fall that had amounted to little more than flirtations and dalliances—with life and others and oneself.
Before Harman, Ada had never known the deep soul-satisfying pleasure of sleeping with one’s beloved—and here she did not use a euphemism, but was thinking of sleeping next to him, waking next to him in the night, feeling his arm around her as she fell asleep and often first thing when she woke in the morning. She knew Harman’s least self-conscious sounds and his touch and his scent—an outdoor and masculine scent, mixing the smell of leather of the tack in the stables visible there beyond the cupola and the autumn richness of the forest floor itself.
Her body had imprinted itself on his touch—and not just the intimate touch of their frequent lovemaking, but the slightest pressure of his hand on her shoulder or arm or back as he passed. She knew that she would miss the pressure of his gaze almost as much as she would miss his physical touch—indeed, his awareness of her and attention to her had become a sort of constant touch to Ada. She closed her eyes now and allowed herself to feel his large hand enclosing her cold, smaller hand—her fingers had always been long and thin, his were blunt and wide, his calloused palm always warmer than hers. She would miss his warmth. Ada realized that what she would miss most if Harman were dead—miss as much as the essence of her beloved—was his embodiment of her future. Not her fate, but her future—the ineffable sense that tomorrow meant seeing Harman, laughing with Harman, eating with Harman, discussing their unborn child with Harman, even disagreeing with Harman—she would forevermore miss the sense that the continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.
Sitting there on the cold bench with the rings revolving overhead and the nightly meteor shower increasing in intensity, her shadow thrown across the frost-whitened lawn by the glow of that light and the cupola, Ada realized that it was easier to contemplate one’s own mortality than the death of one’s beloved. This wasn’t a total revelation to her—she had imagined such a perspective before, Ada was very, very good at imagining—but the reality and totality of the feeling itself was a revelation. As with the sense of the new life within her, the sensation of loss and love for Harman infused her—it was somehow, impossibly, larger not only than herself but than her capacity for such a thought or feeling.