He lay back, suddenly very grateful to be able to do so, resting his head on a half-buried root emerging from some large native plant, a sort of tree-sized bush. He closed his eyes and concentrated his attention, not merely on isolating the pain, but on holding back the natural responses of his body that wanted to pour fluid into the bruised area beneath the unyielding bone of his skull.
Awareness of his body, of its pressure against the naked ground, the moonlight on his eyelids, and all his other feelings, began to dwindle into nonexistence. He was relaxing. The pain was dwindling too. The forest around him ceased to be and time began to lose its meaning. He was only automatically and distantly aware of Amanda helping him to shift over a half meter or so to his right, on to a soft and springy bed a little above the surface on which he had been lying.
All things moved away from him into nothingness and he slept.
Out of that same nothingness he came into the place he had dreamed of twice before. He was aware that he dreamed now, but it changed nothing, because the dream was reality and reality was the dream.
He was once more on the rubbled plain, the small stones underfoot long since grown to giant boulders. Far back, on his last visit here, he had passed the vine-covered gate of metal bars through which he had seen Bleys, who was unable to pass through and be on the same side as he was... of what? A made wall of stone? Some natural barrier of rock? He could not remember, and it did not matter now.
What mattered was that he was at last coming close to the tower. Always, it had seemed to recede from him as he worked his way toward it, but now it was undeniably close - although how close that closeness was, there was no telling. A kilometer? Half or a quarter that distance? Double or more that distance?
But it was close. Undeniably, no longer distant. It loomed over him, with its black, narrow apertures that were windows. He should be able at last, now, to reach it with just a little more effort.
But that was the problem. He was close to weeping with frustration. He lay on the lip of a steep but short drop to the bottom of a trench perhaps twenty meters wide, with as steep an upward sweep on its far side. It was perhaps four times his height in depth, but its sides were not absolutely vertical. He could slide down this side and go up the other on his hands and knees.
Only, he could not. A terrible weakness had come on him, gradually, over the long distance he had traveled. That was why he lay on the rocks now like a man half dead. Now he lacked the strength even to rise to his feet. The trench was nothing, easily passable ordinarily to anyone with even half his normal strength, but that was just what he did not have. A lack of strength like that of the dying Tam Olyn held him where he was.
He concentrated, trying to drive his body with everything that he had been taught as Donal, and as the boy Hal Mayne by all of his tutors. Sheer fury alone should have been enough to move this dead carcass that was his body, at least down the slope before him.
But it would not. He realized slowly that the enemy this time was within him. He could fight what lay outside, but it was himself who kept him from crossing the trench, though every fiber of his being and all his life was concentrated and dedicated to the effort of getting through and beyond it to the tower.
He struggled to isolate that inner enemy, to bring it to grips, but it was everywhere and nowhere in him. Desperate, still fighting, he slipped at last back into the grayness of slumber and slept until daylight woke him to the reality that was Kultis.
CHAPTER 10
When he woke, the sun was already well above the horizon. It was unlike him to sleep so heavily and long, out in the open. On the other hand, his headache was greatly reduced. As he came to he had not been conscious of it at all, but then it began to make itself felt, growing in intensity, and he had expected it to mount to the sharpness he had felt the night before. Clearly, though, the blow on his head had done no real harm.
However, the headache had stopped growing at a level that required hardly any concentration to put it aside from his attention. Still, since he wanted the whole of his mind free to concentrate on whatever they might run into, he made the mental effort to shift it out, off to the fringes of his consciousness. There it perched like a bird in a tree, at roost - still with him, but easily ignored except when a deliberate attempt was made to check on it.
Amanda had evidently been out gathering some of the wild fruit and vegetable products of the forest for their breakfast. She had them piled on a large lime-green leaf, others of which she had used to make a covering over the twigs which had provided the springs for Hal's forest bed. He recognized some variform bananas, custard apples, and ugli fruit among the eatables she had gathered, but most were probably variforms, or hybrid varieties, of the native flora, adapted to be usable by the human digestive system. Among these were a number of thick roots of various shapes and sizes, and what seemed to be several varieties of fruit with thick skins bristling with spines. They had all the unfriendly appearance of the Old Earth cactus pear. And there was something that was neither fruit nor root, but looked like the white pith stripped from inside the stems of some plant.
Cautiously, Hal sat up, prepared for his headache to explode in protest at the motion. But it did not. He moved forward and sat cross-legged at the edge of the leaf. Amanda was already seated, cross-legged herself, on its other side. "Breakfast," she said, waving at the scattering on the leaf. "I've been waiting for you. How are you?" "Much better," said Hal. "In fact, for practical purposes, I couldn't be much better." "Good!" she said. She pointed to the produce on the leaf before her. "Tuck in," she said.
Hal looked at the food Amanda spread out. "With all this why do they need to come out at night to plant fields?"
"Because they want and need a more balanced diet," she answered. "Also they want to store supplies for those days when the Occupation authorities won't let them get out into the woods to gather. Those allowed days have been set up so that if the local people depended on gathering alone they'd starve to death. Their passes simply aren't validated for enough so-called 'travel' days - days they're allowed outside the walls of the town. " "I see," said Hal. "Also, out here there're only a few variform rabbits and other small wild animals they can catch and kill to supplement the protein of which they don't get enough - they need garden vegetables to make that loss up. Plus they need the root vegetables that are best raised in quantity in a plot. Those people who attacked us last night probably thought we were either there to rob their plot, or we were hunters who might have meat with us they could legitimately take - since legally we're on their ground. It'd have to be one or the other, since there's nothing left to scavenge out here." "You knew they were there," said Hal. "That's why you called 'court.' "
"I know of that family," she said, "and when they jumped us I guessed it was one of the nights they stayed out. They leave town and simply don't go back until the evening of the next day, and either bribe one of the curfew patrol to report them in, or take their chances on being found out." "I forgot," said Hal, "this is your work district, isn't it?" "Right up to the Zipaca Mountains," she answered. "So that's why I had Simon set us down where he did. I wanted you to see something. That while they still believe in nonviolence and try to practice it, there's some things some of them'll fight for now, and one of those is survival. I don't mean all of them'll fight, even for that, but more than you'd think. It's one of the changes you needed to see firsthand, for yourself." "Hardly a change for the better," said Hal, "from their point of view, I'd think." "Wait until you've had time to see some more of them before you make up your mind about that," she said. "For now, it's enough that you've seen that much change. You'd better get some food into you."