For that matter, he thought, the coming of the technological age five hundred years ago had brought the old tale to a newer version still; the concept of the Iron Mistress, that artifact of work that could capture a human soul and never let it loose again to live naturally among its own kind.
It was an update of an Iron Mistress, that historic purpose, which held him captive now; and had held him from his beginning.
He shook off the self-pitying notion. Ever since he had been last on the Dorsai, he had been missing Amanda, deeply and unyieldingly. The pain of not having her within sight and hearing and touch was a feeling of deep wrongness and loss, like the pain of an amputated limb that would not grow again. No, he corrected himself, it was as if the pain and sense of loss from an earlier amputation had finally made him aware of it. The feeling was something that could be buried temporarily under the emergencies of the moment, during most of his waking hours. But at times when exhaustion stripped him down to bones and soul, as aboard the courier ship leaving Freiland recently, or when he was alone, as now, it came back upon him.
What were the later six lines in Keats' poem - about the hillside and the pale kings and warriors, with their warning? Oh, yes…
… The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hillside.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all
Who cried - "La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"
"… The Iron Mistress hath thee in thrall! …"
Once more, he pushed the feeling of depression from him. There was no need for this. The time would not be too long before he and Amanda would be together, permanently. It was not like him to waste time on gloomy thoughts, fantasies of despair summoned up out of old writings. He made an effort to examine why he should be acting like this, now; but his mind shied away from the question.
It was only his coming back here and finding the estate so empty, he told himself. For that matter, when poetry could hurt, poetry could also heal. The heart of the same ancient story had been dealt with less than thirty-four years later by another poet, Robert Browning, in the first volume of his Men and Women. Browning had written Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, a poem similar in subject - but with all the difference in the universe, in theme. As an antidote to the earlier verse, Hal quoted the last verse of Browning's poem to himself aloud, softly, into the face of the chill river of air coming at him across the cooling water of the lake -
… There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
Browning had been a Childe all his life - an aspirant to a greater knighthood - although that part of him had passed, invisible before the conscious eyes of almost everyone, with the exception of his wife. As Hal was, himself, a Childe now, though in a different time and place and way, and never as a poet. It was no Iron Mistress that drove Browning, and perhaps even himself, after all, but the fire of a hope that would not let itself be put out.
At the same time, even with this small bit of understanding, the emptiness inside him that reached for Amanda echoed back the emptiness of this place he had known so well, but from which the three old men who had given it life and meaning were now departed. The estate had not become strange to him. He had become a stranger within it.
But an instinct had drawn him back to spend the night here; and spend it, he would. He turned back from the terrace and toward the French windows that would let him into the house, glancing through them, instinctively, down into the library where already the automatic lighting had gone on; and where, the last time he had looked in, he had seen Bleys and Danno standing toe to toe.
He opened one of the windows and stepped through, closing it behind him. The warmth of the atmosphere within, guarded by that same automatic machinery that had kept the place so well that all these years its caretaker had needed only to glance occasionally into the surveillance screens in his own home, five miles away, to make sure all was well, wrapped itself around him. He was enclosed by the still air, the smell of the leather bindings on the hundreds of old-fashioned books, dustless and waiting still on their long shelves of polished, honey-colored wood. He had read them all in those early years, devouring them one after the other, whenever he had the chance, like some starving creature fallen into a land of plenty.
Now that he was within doors, he was made aware of the darkening of the day beyond the windows. In just these last few moments the sun had gone behind the mountains. He walked to the fireplace at the end of the room. It, too, was waiting; laid ready for firing. He took the ancient sparker from its clip on the mantelpiece and with it touched the kindling under the logs alight.
Flames woke and raced among the shavings and the splinters beneath the kindling, reaching up to make the bark on the logs spark and glow. He seated himself in one of the large, overstuffed, wing-backed chairs flanking the hearth and fastened his eyes on the growing fire. The flames ran like small heralds among the dark structure of the wood, summoning its parts to holocaust. The heat of the burning reached out to warm him; but he could still feel the emptiness of the house at his back.
He had not been so conscious of being alone since he had run for the Encyclopedia, after the killing on the terrace beyond these windows. In all that time since, except for the moment in the Harmony prison when they would not come, he had never made the fully necessary effort to summon up self-hypnotically the images of his three dead tutors. But now, feeling the hollowness and darkness at his back, he reached within himself, keeping his eyes on the fire, and let the mental technique, in which Walter the InTeacher had coached him as a child, channel the force of his memories into subjective reality.
When I lift my eyes from the fire, he thought, they will be there.
He sat, gazing at the fire which was now sending flames halfway up inside the squared central pile of logs; and after a bit, he felt presences in the room behind him. He lifted his head, turned and saw them.
Malachi Nasuno. Obadiah Testator. Walter the InTeacher.
They sat in other chairs of the room, making a rough semi-circle facing him; and he turned the back of his own chair to the fire, in order to look directly at them.
"I've missed you," he told them.
"Not for a long time," said Malachi. The massive torso of the old Dorsai dwarfed the tall carved chair that held him; and his deep voice was as unyielding as ever. "And before that, only now and then, at times like this. If you'd done anything else, we'd have failed with you."
"And that we did not," said Obadiah. Scarecrow thin, looking taller than he was by virtue of his extreme uprightness as he sat in his chair. "Now you've met my own people, as well as others, and you understand more than I ever could have taught you."
"That's true," said Hal. He looked at Walter the InTeacher and saw the Exotic's old, blue eyes quiet upon him. "Walter? Aren't you going to say hello?"
"I was thinking, only." Walter smiled at him. "When I was alive, I would have asked you at a moment like this why you needed us in the first place. Being only a figment of your imagination and memory, I don't have to ask. I know. You needed us to help you do the kind of learning that was only possible to the open, fresh mind of someone discovering the universe for the first time. But do you even know now where the end of this journey of yours lies?"