“He found her,” she whispered. “She hid in your room. He went straight there. Gav, what will you do?” She took my hand. Her hand was cold.
I shook my head, which made it ring and spin again. I kept swallowing blood.
“What will he do to her?” I said. She shrugged.
“He’s angry—he could kill her—”
“He’ll hurt her. He doesn’t kill women. Gav. You can’t stay here.” I thought she meant this room.
“You must go. Leave! She went to your room. She didn’t know where to hide. Oh, poor child. Oh, Gav! I have loved you so much!” She put her face down on my hand, weeping silently for a moment, then raised her head again. “We’ll be all right. We’re not men, we don’t matter. But you have to go.”
“I’ll take you,” I said. “And them—Irad and Melle—“ “No, no, no,” she whispered. “Gav, he’ll kill you. Go now. Now! The girls and I are safe.” She got up, pulling herself up by the table, and stood shakily a minute; then she went into the bedroom. I heard her soft voice talking to the child. She came out carrying her. Melle clung to her, hiding her face.
“Melle-sweet, you must say goodbye to Gav.”
The child turned and held out her arms, and I took her and held her tight. “It will be all right, Melle,” I said. “Do your lessons with Diero. Promise? And help Irad with them. Then you’ll both be wise.” I didn’t know what I was saying. I was in tears. I kissed the child and set her down. I took Diero’s hand and held it against my mouth a moment, and went out.
I went to my room, belted on my knife, put on my coat, and put the small copy of the Cosmologies in the pocket. I looked around the little room with its one high window, the only room of my own I’d ever had.
I left Barna’s house by the back way and went round through the streets to the cobblers’ barrack. In the great’ wash of moonlight the city of wood was a city of silver-blue, shadowed, silent, beautiful.
PART THREE
♦ 11 ♦
Chamry roused up quickly when I sat down on his bunk. I told him I wanted to stay with him a while, as there’d been a misunderstanding at Barna’s house. “What do you mean?” he said. He got the story out of me, though I didn’t want to say much. “That girl? She was in your room? Oh by the Stone! You get clear out, clear away, tonight!”
I argued. It had merely been a misunderstanding. Barna had been drunk. But Chamry was out of bed, rummaging under the bunk. “Where’s that stuff you left, your fishing gear and all—There. Knew it was here. All right. Take this stuff of yours and go to the gate. Tell the watch that you want to be at the trout pool before sunrise, it’s the best fishing just at sunrise—”
“The best fishing’s at sunset,” I said.
He looked at me with pained disgust. Then his look sharpened. He touched my cheek. “Got a whack, did you? Lucky he didn’t kill you right there. If he sees you again he will. He turns on men like that. Over women. Or somebody trying to shake his power. I’ve seen it. Saw him kill a man. Strangled him and broke his neck with his bare hands. You take this stuff. Here’s your old blanket, take it too. Go to the gate.” I stood there blank as a post. “Oh, I’ll go with you,” he said crossly. And he did walk me, hastily and by the back streets, towards the city gate, talking with me all the way, telling me what to say to the watchmen, and what to do when I was in the woods. “Don’t go by the paths! Don’t take any path. They’re all guarded, one time or another. I wish—Yes! that’s it, he can take you—Come on, this way!” He changed course, turning off on the street where Venne lived with his raiding group. He left me standing in the black shadow of the barrack and went in. I stood there looking at the silver-blue roofs, which danced a little to the throbbing in my head. Chamry came out again, with Venne. “It’s hunting you’re going,” he said, “not fishing. Come on!”
Venne was carrying a couple of bows and had his quiver on his back. “Sorry you’re in trouble, Gav,” he said mildly.
I tried to explain that I wasn’t in trouble, Barna had just been drunk, and all this panic was unnecessary. Chamry said, “Don’t listen to him. Got his brains knocked loose. Just take him to where he can get clear away.”
“I can do that,” Venne said. “If they’ll let us out the gate.”
“Leave that to me,” said Chamry. And indeed he talked us out the city gate with no trouble. Chatting with the guards, he made sure at once that Barna hadn’t sent out anybody after me. The guards knew all of us, and let us go with nothing but a warning to be back by sunset. “Oh, I’ll be back in no time,” said Chamry. “I don’t set out on hunting trips at midnight! I’m just seeing these idiots off.”
He went with us till we were past the gardens and at the forest’s edge. “What’ll I tell them when I come back?” Venne asked.
“You lost him. At the river. Looked for him all day. He fell in, or maybe he ran off.—Think it’ll do?”
Venne nodded.
“It’s thin,” Chamry said judiciously, “pretty thin. But I’ll say I’d heard Gav talking about running off to Asion. So, he tricked you into taking him out hunting, and then gave you the slip. You’ll be all right.”
Venne nodded again, unworried.
Chamry turned to me. “Gav,” he said, “you’ve been nothing but a burden and trouble to me ever since you turned up and tried to wear my kilt on your head. You dragged me back here, and now you’re running out on me. Well, have a good run. Go west.”
He looked for confirmation to Venne, who nodded.
“And stay out of the Uplands,” Chamry said. He put his arms round me in a hard embrace, turned away, and was gone in the darkness under the trees.
Unwillingly, I followed Venne, who set off without hesitation on a path I could scarcely make out at all. The flashes of moonlight through the branches and trunks of the trees dazzled and bewildered me. I kept stumbling. Venne realised that I was having trouble and slowed down. “Fetched you a whack, eh?” he saidv “Dizzy?”
I was a little dizzy, but I said it would wear off, and we went on. I was still sure that everybody had gone into a foolish panic, urging me into running away from a mere misunderstanding that could all be explained in the morning. I’d seen Barna in a rage before. His anger was mindless, brutal while it lasted, but it didn’t last, it blew over like a thunderstorm. I planned that at dawn I’d tell Venne I was turning around and going back.
But as we went on at an easy pace in the cool night air and silence, my head gradually cleared. What had happened in Barna’s house began to come back to me; I began to see it again. I saw Barna fondling the motionless, expressionless girl while men and women watched. I saw the terror in Irad’s face when she ran to us to hide from him, and the madness in his face. I saw the dark red bruise on Diero’s cheek.
Venne halted on the rocky, steep bank of a small stream to drink. I washed my face. My right ear and both cheeks were sore and swollen. A little owl wailed away off in the woods. The moon had just set.
“Let’s wait here till there’s a bit of light,” Venne said in his low voice, and we sat there in silence. He dozed. I wet my hand and laid the cool
of it against my swollen ear and temples again and again. I looked into the darkness. I cannot say how my mind moved in that darkness, but as the trees and their leaves and the rocks of the stream bank and the movement of the water began mysteriously to take on being in the grey dim beginning of the light, I knew, with a certainty beyond decision, that I could not go back to Barna’s house.
The only emotion I felt was shame. For him, for myself. Again I had trusted, and again I had betrayed and been betrayed.