He put out one hand to touch the wood-panelled wall, worn by the cleanings of years to a silky smoothness; and stood, fingertips against the vertical surface, gazing out at the slope seen so many times in the years of Donal's growing up, reaching… reaching. For a long moment he stayed as he was; and a fragment of the poem he had written in the Final Encyclopedia came without warning, to him…
Within the ruined chapel, the full knight
Woke from the coffin of his last-night's bed;
And clashing mailed feet on the broken stones -
Strode to the shattered lintel and looked out …
Then it was as if a wind that was purely of the mind blew through the room and he was suddenly made part of a whole - himself, the wall, and the slope outside, all welded together - caught up in one moment of experience no different from another such moment known many times by the one to whom he reached.
I am here, he thought.
The chill grew, spreading out to take over his whole body. The hair rose again on the back of his neck; and a soundless shrilling, as if the very temporal structure of the moment was in vibration, commenced and mounted swiftly, in and about him, as his identity with the man who had lived here came finally, fully into existence in his mind. He stood - as Donal - in the room; and he looked out - as Donal - on the scene beyond the bedroom window.
Chapter Forty-four
As abruptly as it had arrived, the moment was gone, leaving him unsure that it had ever been. His hand dropped from the wall; and a moment later, when he lifted it to his forehead, he felt the skin there chilled and damp, as if half the strength in him had just been drained away by a massive effort.
For a moment he continued to stand in the room. Then he turned and went back out into the corridor; and turned again toward the living room. Going up the corridor, the drained feeling was strong within him and he recognized its kinship, much greater, but like, to the emptiness and fatigue that had always followed upon the making of a poem that had come suddenly and unexpectedly to life within him, a reaction from the violence of a massive inner effort that had left him forever changed.
But with a poem, he told himself, he had always been left with something accomplished, something solid to hold that he had not had before. While in this case… but, even as he thought this, he realized that something had also been accomplished here. A change had taken place in him, so that now he was seeing the house about him with a difference.
Now, as he looked about him, there was a quality of familiarity that lay like a patina on everything at which he looked. As he stepped into the living room, the face of Eachan Khan in the portrait had become one he knew intimately, in all details. With the sword above the fireplace, his fingers and palm seemed to recall the grasp of its hilt, and his mind's eye saw the sudden flash and glitter of its blade, as it was drawn from its scabbard. All about him the rest of the room echoed and reechoed a similar sense of recognition.
He sank into the chair in which he had seated himself when he had first arrived; and sat there, feeling his strength slowly returning to refill the emptiness left by his last coldness at the graveside. All around him, now, the house vibrated with the silent noises of its past. He sat listening to them; and after a while an impulse brought him up out of the chair to his feet. He walked to the corner of the room where the last panel of the east wall touched the windowed north wall. The wood surface was a polished blank before him; but an impulse moved him to put the palm of his right hand flat upon it; and it moved easily, sliding to the right to open a tall, narrow entrance directly from the living room into the library.
He stood, gazing into the opening. He remembered now, hearing it spoken of by Malachi in the stories the old man had told him of Graemehouse. There had been talk of this doorway - and something special about it. For a moment he could not recall just what that was, and then it came back to him. This was the place in which the young Graemes had measured their height as they were growing up.
He looked at the left post of the doorway, from which the panel had slid back. Plain there, now that he gave his attention to it, were thin, neat, dark lines with initials and dates beside them. Looking down, he found Donal's initials, close to the floor, but none any higher than would indicate a measurement had been taken after he had been about five years of age.
Donal had been the smallest among the adult male Graemes of his time. Once he had become conscious of this, it would not have been surprising if the boy had avoided further measurement. Hal looked at the doorway. The patina of recognition lay heavily upon it also, and he remembered something more, how Malachi had told him that in all their generations, none of the Graeme family had ever filled that doorway from top to bottom and side to side, except the twins - Donal's uncles, Ian and Kensie. Hal stared at the doorway with its years of markings; and an emotion compounded of something like fear, mixed with a strange, strong longing moved in him. Ian and Kensie had been outsize, even for Dorsai - and it was Ian he imagined now, dark and massive, standing in the doorway, filling it.
It was foolish to think of measuring himself against the marks here, even in the privacy of this moment that no one else need know about. But the desire grew in him as he stood, until it was undeniable.
The logical front of his mind tried to push the notion aside. There was no real purpose to it. In any case, size alone meant nothing. On the fourteen worlds there must be no end of individuals not only big enough to fill the doorway, but too large to fit themselves into it. But the logical arguments had no strength. It was not a question of his size that was pulling him forward to measure himself, it was part of that same search for identity with those who had lived here, that had drawn him to reach for Donal in the small bedroom.
He shook off the last objection. What summoned him was only a part of what he had come to Foralie to do. He stepped into the doorway and stood erect there.
With a sudden, cold shock, he felt the underside of the frame's top rail come hard against the top of his head. He stayed as he was, unmoving. For a second his mind denied the implication of that contact with his scalp. He had been aware for years that his eventual height would be far above ordinary. He had even come to take for granted in recent years his looking down at other people. But still, inside him, he shrank from a reality in which his height was also the height of Ian Graeme. The Ian of his imagination had for so long towered like a giant above all others, that for a moment he would not accept what the doorway told him.
Slowly, acceptance came; and only after it had, did he realize that, while he had felt the top rail with his head, he had felt no corresponding touch of the vertical members of the frame against his shoulders. Looking right and left, now, he saw that four to six centimeters of space showed between the shoulder welts of his jacket and the stiles of the doorframe on either side of him. Granted that he still might grow and put on weight, it was hardly likely he could make up that much difference in shoulder width. Ridiculously, a feeling of pure relief woke in him. He was not ready - not yet - to try to be an Ian.
He stepped back out of the doorway. As if its sensors had been only waiting for his leaving, the door slid closed and the wall was whole once more. He turned back to the living room. With the moment of his identification with Donal in the bedroom, his awareness had heightened. But now with his measurement of himself in the doorway, that awareness had been raised near to a point of pain.