To his own surprise his voice came out like a whisper. His throat was raw from repeating the words that still thrummed in his mind. "You walked for twenty-three hours, Hal!" said Amanda. "I think you'd have killed yourself the way a horse can run itself to death, if we hadn't pulled you out of the circle. Now, lean on us. We'll have you in bed in a minute."
Suddenly, he felt a longing to be where she had promised. Horizontal, on a flat surface, in the darkness of a quiet, closed room. Consciousness of the exhaustion of his body flooded in on him. His knees gave at every step and his legs wobbled with weakness. He staggered on between Old Man and Amanda to the dormitory building and the outside entrance that led directly to the office, to the bed... and onto it.
"Thank you," said Amanda to Old Man. He smiled back at her, then went softly and swiftly out. She took a blanket from the bed and hung it over the windows on a rod above them that had not been there when Hal had last seen them. The blanket did not completely shut out Procyon's intense light, but it dimmed the room and Hal luxuriated in the dimness.
Amanda went around to the other side of the bed and lay down on top of the bedcovers beside him. She put her arms around him. "Now, sleep!" she commanded.
He closed his eyes, and sleep swooped down to carry him away.
When he woke, the room was totally dark. Amanda slumbered beside him, now tucked in under the covers in ordinary fashion. She opened her eyes as he stirred. He laid his hand on her shoulder, lightly. "You sleep," he whispered. "I'll be back in a while."
He got up, found his clothes - Amanda or someone had obviously undressed him while he was still too deep in sleep to notice - and let himself into the outer air on the other side of the office door.
Beyond the walls and the blanket that served as a curtain over the window, he found the first faint light of dawn. He guessed it at about four in the morning. He must have slept for nearly as long as Amanda had said he had walked. His body worked better now than it had on its way to bed from the circle, but it still held a feeling of having been used and overused. He was not so much weak as drained of strength.
A few lights were on in the two dormitory buildings, particularly in the part of each one which held kitchen and dining facilities. The mountains to the east were a distant darkness beyond the lip of the ledge, and a few figures moved about the area with the intentness of those on duty of one kind or another. But in the near distance, where two lights still could be seen burning, paled by the approaching day's illumination, the circle still turned. Those in it still chanted and four people stood in a small group, waiting their turn.
He walked away from the building, toward the circle and those who waited. But he stopped back a little from joining the waiters, and stood, merely watching them and those in the circle for a few moments. Then he turned and went on, parallel with the stream beyond them, toward the edge of the ledge. At the point where the stream emptied into the pond, he found a level space of ground beside it and sat down, looking across it toward the end of the ledge, only some five meters beyond, and at the black ridge of the Grandfathers of Dawn, distant, their upper edges now a jagged, glowing line from the ascending sun hidden behind them.
Slowly, as he sat watching that glowing line, he found himself beginning to understand how Tam's dying, with his guilt still unexpiated in him, could stop Hal from ever finding the Creative Universe.
Amanda had been right. The way he searched for was to be found out here among people, rather than back there in that artificial, if valuable and special, atmosphere of the Encyclopedia.
What would happen if Tam died unfulfilled, in his own mind unforgiven, for his responsibility for the deaths of his sister's young husband, David Hall, of Jamethon Black, who had sacrificed himself to stop the attack that Tam had mounted against the whole Friendly culture, and the assassination of Kensie by a political group on St.Marie as a direct result? Unless Hal found the Universe in time to prove to him that, if nothing else, these things had had a purpose to a good end, for all the race? Lacking that, plainly, Tam was determined to leave life as the legendary King Arthur had, in sadness and remorse.
If Tam died that way Ajela would die with him, in spirit, and that part-death would make her unable to continue running the Final Encyclopedia, precious as it had always been to her, as to Tam. If that happened, who else was there who could guide and order it? Rukh had helped out to a great degree, these last months, but it was not her job.
Rukh's job was the kindling of a faith in the new future to be, in the people of all the worlds, and that was a larger, more important duty than steering the Final Encyclopedia. He, Hal, should not, because his job was also elsewhere, leading those who would be the pioneers into this new untouched infinity of potential that the Creative Universe would be - if he ever achieved it. But if Ajela could not, Hal must. It was a special trust, handed into his keeping by Tam, who had gotten it from Mark Torre in equal trust. And that would be an end to his search for the Creative Universe. As Amanda had now shown him, the way to that was to be found not in special places but out among people.
Sitting, waiting for the dawn, he was aware of the presence of Tam, keeping him company. It was not an unpleasant awareness. The sky had brightened, though the sun was not yet in sight above the Grandfathers of Dawn. Below, the valley was a deep lake of white mist hiding everything, but thinning as he watched. Slowly, as he sat with the daylight growing stronger all about him, he felt himself gradually enclosed by peace. Behind that peace came the order and reason he realized now he had needed for some time.
Just as his frustration at the Final Encyclopedia had made him blind to Tam's completion being necessary to the completion of his own search, so he had been blind to the obvious fact that what had blocked him in his search at the Final Encyclopedia must have been implied in the historic beginnings of that search.
He knew of the man he had envisioned while walking the circle, from his military studies as Donal and his readings as the young Hal. And he doubted that any histories held the moment he had relived while walking the circle. That had been a creative reconstruction of his own imaginative unconscious. He had not been able to enter the Creative Universe, except in his dreams, but he had been able to reach into it from the circle to build something that must fit closely with the known facts.
Historically, therefore, his fight against the Enemy had had its roots in the chronicled life of a man known to history as Sir John Hawkwood, citizen of fourteenth century Europe, and English knight in the early years of the Hundred Years War between England and France. A man destined to become one of the earliest of the great condottieri - professional military captains of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in Italy - and the individual some later military historians were to call "the first of the modern generals. " The circle and the Creative Universe had at last led him to this man. Not to Hawkwood's whole life, but that special moment of it, on a field of victory, which paradoxically had been the lowest point of the dreams and hopes in Sir John's life - as the past year had been Hal's lowest.
At Poitiers, Sir John had been entering into middle age, a knight with only a modest name as a military captain and no fortune to show for the scars of twenty years in arms and armor. And with the final defeat now of the French, let alone the capture of King John of France which Hawkwood at that moment had not yet known about, the war that had promised him a way to better himself was apparently over. He had stood empty-handed in the middle of his life and looked, it seemed, nowhere but downward into old age, penury and oblivion.