A warhorse, cropping by the chapel wall,
Raised maul-head, dripping thistles on the stones;
And struck his hooves; and jingled all his gear.
"Peace . . ." said the Knight. "Be still. Today, we rest.
"The mist is hiding all the battlefield.
"The wind whips on the wave-packs of the sea.
"Our foe is bound by this no less than we.
"Rest," said the Knight. "We do not fight today."
The warhorse stamped again. And struck his hooves.
Ringing on cobbled dampness of the stones.
Crying - "Ride! Ride! Ride!" And the Knight mounted him,
Slowly. And rode him slowly out to war.
. . . The chime of the room phone catapulted him out of his thoughts. He had been sitting, he realized, for some time with the written poem before him, his thought ranging on journeys across great distances. He reached out reflexively to the control keys.
"Who is it?"
"It's Ajela." From behind the void and the glowing lines of his poem, her voice came clearly and warmly, bringing back with it all of the reality he had abandoned during his recent ranging. "It's lunch time - if you're interested."
"Oh. Of course," he said, touching the keypad. The lines of verse vanished, to be replaced by the image of her face, occulting the imaged stars.
"Well," she said, smiling at him, "did you have a useful session with the Encyclopedia?"
"Yes," he said. "Very much."
"And where would you like to eat?"
"Any place," he said - and hastily amended himself. "Any place quiet."
She laughed.
"The quietest place is probably right where you are now."
" - any quiet place except my room, then."
"All right. We'll go back to the dining room I took you to the first time. But I'll arrange for a table away from other people where no one will be sent to sit near us," she said. "Meet you at the entrance there in five minutes."
By the time he figured out the controls to move his room close to the dining room, and got to the dining room entrance, Ajela was already there and waiting for him. As he came down the short length of corridor that was now between his room's front door and the entrance to the dining room, he was aware suddenly that this was probably the last time he would see her before he left. The two days just past had done a good deal to shift her in his mind from the category of someone belonging to the Encyclopedia, and therefore beyond his understanding, into someone he knew - and for whom he felt.
The result was that his perceptions were now sharpened. As far back as he could remember, his tutors had trained him to observe; as he met her now, spoke to her, and was led by her to a table in one deserted corner of the room, he saw her as perhaps he should have seen her from the start.
It was as if his vision of her had focused. He noticed now how straight she stood and how she walked with something like an air of command - certainly with an air of firmness and decision that was almost alien in an Exotic - as she led the way to their table. She was dressed in green today, a light green tunic that came down to mid-thigh, hugging her body tightly, over an ankle-length skirt that was slit all the way up the sides, revealing tight trousers of a darker green with the parting of the slits at each stride.
The tunic's green was that of young spring grass. There was a straightness to her shoulders, seen against the distant pearl-gray of the light-wall at the far end of the dining room. Her bright blonde hair was gathered into a pony-tail by a polished wooden barrette that showed the grain of the wood. The pony-tail danced against the shoulders of her tunic as she strode, echoing in its movements the undulations of her skirt. She reached their table, sat down, and he took the float opposite her.
She asked him again about his morning with the Encyclopedia as they decided what to eat, and he answered briefly, not wanting to go into details of how what he had learned had struck so deep a chord of response within him. Watching her now, he saw in the faint narrowing of her eyes that she had noticed this self-restraint.
"I don't mean to pry," she said. "If you'd rather not talk about it - "
"No - no, it's not that," he answered quickly. "It's just that my mind's everywhere at once."
She flashed her sudden smile at him.
"No need to apologize," she said. "I was just mentioning it. As for the way you feel - the Encyclopedia affects a lot of scholars that way."
He shook his head, slowly.
"I'm no scholar," he answered.
"Don't be so sure," she said gently. "Well, have you thought about whether you still want to go ahead and leave, the way you planned, in just a few hours?"
He hesitated. He could not admit that he would prefer to stay, without seeming to invite her to argue for his staying. He understood himself, starkly and suddenly. His problem was a reluctance to tell her he must leave, that there was no choice for him but to leave. Caught between answers, neither of which he wanted to give, he was silent.
"You've got reasons to go. I understand that," she said, after a moment. She sat watching him. "Would you like to tell me about them? Would you like to talk about it, at all?"
He shook his head.
"I see," she said. Her voice had gentled. "Do you mind, anyway, my telling you Tam's side of it?"
"Of course not," he replied.
Their plates, with the food they had ordered, were just rising to the surface of the table. She looked down at hers for a moment, and then looked back up at him levelly.
"You've seen Tam," she said as they began to eat, and the gentleness in her voice gave way to a certainty that echoed the authority of her walk. "You see his age. One year, several years, might not seem so much to you; but he's old. He's very old. He has to think about what will happen to the Encyclopedia if there's no one to take charge of it after… he steps down as Director."
He was watching her eyes, fascinated, as she spoke. They were a bluish green that seemed to have depths without end and reflected the color of her clothing.
He said, after a second since she had paused as if waiting response from him, "Someone else would take over the Encyclopedia, wouldn't they?"
She shook her head.
"No one person. There's a Board of Directors who'll step in, and stay in. The Board was scheduled to take over after Mark Torre's death. Then Mark found Tam and changed that part of the plan. But now, if Tam dies without a successor, the Board's going to take over, and from then on the Encyclopedia will be run by committee."
"And that's something you don't want to happen?"
"Of course I don't!" Her voice tightened. "Tam's worked all his life to point the Encyclopedia toward what it really should do, rather than let it turn into a committee-run library! What would you think I'd want?"
Her eyes were now full green, as green as the rare tinge that can color the wood flames of an open camp fire. He waited a second more to let her hear the echo of her words in her ears before he answered.
"You should want whatever it is you want," he said, echoing what he had been taught and believed in. Her eyes met his for a second more, burningly, then dropped their gaze to her plate. When she spoke again, the volume of her voice had also dropped.
"I… you don't understand," she said slowly. "This is very hard for me - "
"But I do understand," he answered. "I told you, one of my tutors was an Exotic. Walter the InTeacher."
What she had meant, he knew from Walter's teachings, was that it was difficult for her to plead with him to stay at the Encyclopedia, much as she plainly wanted to. As an Exotic, she would have been conditioned from childhood never to try to influence other people. This, because of the Exotic belief that participation in the historical process, even in the smallest degree, destroyed the clear-sightedness of a separate and dispassionate observer; and the Exotics' main reason for existence was to chart the movements of history, separately and dispassionately. They dreamed only of an end to which those movements could lead. But she was, he thought, as she had more or less admitted already, a strange Exotic.