"Yes, but hasn't it been strange, though?" she said. "Everybody else starts at the bottom and works up. Actually, what you've done is start at the top and work down. From Donal, controller of worlds, you've struggled your way down to being as much like an ordinary person as you can."
"It's because the solution's got to be for the ordinary person level - or it's no solution. Donal started out to mend the race by main force; and he learned it didn't work. Force never really changes the inner human. When Genghis Khan was alive, they said a virgin with a bag of gold could ride from one border of his empire to the other end and no one would molest her, or it. But once he was dead, the virgins and the gold started moving again under heavy armed guard, as they always had before. All anyone can ever do for even one other human being is break trail for him or her, and hope whoever it is follows. But how could I even break trail for people unless I could think like them, feel like them - know myself to be one of them?"
His voice sounded strange in the quiet nighttime room and his own ears.
"You couldn't, of course," Amanda said gently. "But how did Donal go wrong?"
"He didn't really," Hal said, to her and the shadowy ceiling. "He went right, but without enough understanding; and it may be I don't have enough understanding, even yet. But his start was in the right direction and what he dedicated me to as a child is still my path, my job."
"Dedicated you?" she said. "You mean, as Donal, as a child, you dedicated yourself to what you're doing now? How - so early?"
A remembered pain moved in him. A memory of the cell on Harmony closed around him once more.
"Do you remember James Graeme?" he asked her.
"Which James?" she asked. "There've been three by that name down the Graeme generations since Cletus."
"The James who was Donal's youngest uncle," he answered. "The James who was killed at Donneswort when I - when Donal was still a child."
He paused, looking at her calm face, resting now with the one cheek against his chest, looking back at him in the remains of the moonlight.
"Did I tell you the last time I was here about my dreaming about a graveyard and a burial, while I was in the cell on Harmony?" he asked.
"No," she said. "You told me a lot about the cell and what you thought your way through to, when you were there. But you didn't mention any dream of a burial."
"It was when I was just about to give up," he said. "I didn't realize it then, but I was just on the brink, finally, of finding what I'd sent myself out as Hal Mayne to find. What I'd come to understand began to crack through the barrier I'd set up to keep myself as Hal from knowing what had happened to me before, and what came through was a memory of the ceremony at Foralie held over James' grave, when I was a boy…"
His voice was lost in the pain of remembering for a moment, then he brought it back.
"That was the moment of Donal's decision, his commitment," Hal went on. "James had been closer to him than his own brother - it sometimes happens that way. Mor was between us in age, but Mor - "
His voice did not die this time, it stuck. Mor's name blocked his throat.
"What about Mor?" Amanda asked after a moment. Her hand moved gently to touch his, her fingertips resting on the skin at the back of his hand as it lay on the bed.
"Donal killed Mor," he said, from a long distance away.
He could feel her fingertips as if they touched the naked nerves below the skin and reached up along them to touch the innermost part of his identity.
"That's not the truth." He heard her voice a little way off. "You're making more of it than it is, somehow. It's right, but not that right. What is true?"
"Donal was responsible for Mor's death," he answered, as if she had commanded him.
The feeling of her reaching into him withdrew.
"Yes," she said. "That's all right, then, for now. You were telling me about James' death and how it brought about Donal's commitment to what's driven you all these lifetimes and all these years. What happened?"
"What happened?" His mind pulled itself back from the vision of Mor, as the finally-insane William of Ceta had left him, and came back to the vision of James' burial. "They just accepted it. Even Eachan - even my father - he just accepted James' being killed, reasonlessly, like that; and I… couldn't. I - he went into a cold rage - Donal did. The same sort of thing you brought me back from a little while ago."
"He did?" Amanda's voice broke on a note of incredulity. "He couldn't - he was far too young. How old was he?"
"Eleven."
"He couldn't at that age. It's impossible."
Hal laughed, and the laugh rang harshly in the quiet bedroom.
"He did. Kensie felt the same way you're feeling… when Kensie found him, in the stables where he'd gone after the ceremony, when all the rest had gone up to the house. But he could and did. He was Donal."
With the last word, as if the name had been a trigger, he felt within him a return, not only the coldness, but of a sweep of power that woke in him without warning, threatening to carry him off like a tidal bore sweeping up in its wall of water anything caught in its naked channel at high water time.
"I am Donal," he said; and the power took and lifted him, irresistible, towering -
"Not Bleys."
Amanda's quiet voice reached out and cut the power off at its source. Clear-mindedness came back to him, in a rush of utter relief. He lay for a few seconds, saying nothing.
"What have I told you about Bleys?" he asked her, then, turning to look through the gloom at her.
"A great deal," she answered, softly, "that first night you were at Fal Morgan, when you talked so much."
"I see." He sighed. "The sin of the Warrior, still with me. It's one of the things I still have to leave behind, as you saw… when I remembered Rukh's rescue. No, thank God, I'm not Bleys. But at eleven years old, I wasn't Bleys either. I only knew I couldn't endure that nothing be done about James' unnecessary death, about all such unnecessary evils in the universe - all the things people do to each other that should never be done."
"And you committed yourself then, to stop that?"
"Donal did. Yes," he said. "And he gave all his own life to trying. In a sense, it wasn't all his fault he went wrong. He was still young…"
"What did he do?" her voice gently drew him back onto the path of what he had been about to tell her, earlier.
"He went looking for a tool, a tool to make people not do the sort of things that had caused James' death," Hal said. "And he found one. I call it - he called it - intuitive logic. It's either logic working with the immediacy of intuition, or intuition that gets its answers according to the hard rules of a logic. Take your pick. Actually, he was far from the first to find it. Creative people - artists, writers, composers of music, musicians themselves, had used it for years. Researchers had used it. He only made a system for it and used it consciously, at his will and desire."
"But what it is?" Amanda's voice prodded him.
"It can't be explained - in the same sense a mathematics can't be explained - in words," he said. "You have to talk the language in which it exists to explain it - and even before that, your mind has to begin by making the quantum jump to a first understanding of that language, before you can really start learning what it is. I can give you a parallel example. You'll have seen, at one time or another, some great painting that reached out and captured you, heard a piece of music that was genius made audible, read a book that was beyond question one of the everlasting books?"
"Yes," she said.
"Then you know how all those things have one element in common, the fact you can come back and back to them. You can look, and look again, at the painting without ever exhausting what's to be found in it. You can listen to the music over and over, and each time find something new in it. You can read and reread the book without ever getting out of it all that's there for you to discover and enjoy."