Neverness (42 page)

I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that delight in searching which drives the sails toward the undiscovered is in me; if a seafarer's delight is in my delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

For I love you, O eternity!

   fifth death meditation of the warrior-poets

Somewhere along the stream below the cave, we stopped to heave shagshay meat off the sleds, to lighten our loads. I took my mother into the woods, through the yu trees sparkling with snow. I made her tell me everything. At first, she lied to me, saying that she had no idea why the Devaki had thought Katharine was a witch. But then she grew angry and said, "Wasn't Katharine a witch? What is a scryer, if not a witch? Why else would my son lie with a scryer? Why would you be so careless? To rut like a beast and have your fun - how did it feel? You men! You have your fun, and then we must have the child. But Katharine wanted the child, didn't she?
Your
child. Yes, I know, the child was yours. Your seed. I heard Katharine say so. Your
cousin
and ... and Soli's daughter, Katharine. She
knew
. She was a scryer and she saw the truth. Willingly, she took you willingly! That witch! And so I went to her and called her a witch. Can you blame me? She should have aborted the fetus. When she had the chance."

   It was the second time in my life when I almost struck her. I was sweating and hot despite the bitter cold. I could hardly look at her. "You killed her, then," I said.

   "_Who_ killed her? Was it I who wanted this expedition? Was it I who went to her bed? My seed? The things you say - my son can be cruel when he forgets to think before speaking,"

   In silence we walked through the deep snow back to the sleds. The fingers of my wounded arm were numb as I gripped the rails. We followed the stream down through the hills below the cave. We wound our way east away from Kweitkel, where the mountain's many frozen rills and brooks flowed into the stream, swelling it into a small river. Rising up above a bend in the river was a barren hill the Devaki call Winterpock. (The hill is visible from the cave but because of its peculiar barrenness, when the light is poor or diffuse, the hill appears as a depression rather than as a prominence. Hence its ugly name.) The river cut through the woods below Winterpock, a gleaming, white iceway twisting through the trees. Close to the river's south bank we found Soli spearing fatfish through a hole in the ice. He was out on the river, gazing into the water below him, standing over a pile of fish. As we rounded the bend, his dogs started barking at us. He straightened suddenly, looking at us. He had keen eyes, and he dropped his fish spear, grabbed his shagshay spear from his sled and ran to meet us. "Where's Katharine?" he called out. He ran along the river bank from sled to sled. He rammed the end of his spear against the bank. "What happened? Where's Katharine?"

   Justine went up to him and began whispering furiously in his ear. His face hardened and he did not breathe. Then Justine sobbed out the whole story of Katharine's death. She did not tell him the complete truth. She did not want him to know that my mother had called Katharine a witch, so she told him that Anala had spied on Katharine, had caught her sorting her sample. "Our girl is dead," she whimpered. "Oh, Leopold she's dead!"

   "Why would Anala spy on Katharine?" he asked.

   My mother embroidered the lie, saying, "Anala never liked Katharine. We were friendly, and I know. She didn't like Yuri talking. Talking and saying Liam should marry Katharine. A few days ago I heard her mention that maybe Katharine had bewitched Liam. I told her this was nonsense. I thought she believed it was nonsense."

   I sat on the bed of my sled listening to this lie. I had my furs off so Bardo could dress my wounds, which were bleeding, painful and deep. How I hated lying and liars! Is there anything more infectious and ruinous than disinformation, the twisted words of untruth? I looked at Bardo, but he seemed more worried about my wounds than the deepness and poison of my mother's lies. He wrapped newl skins around the gashes in my arm. He made a knot and tightened the skins. I was cold and numb, shivering like a naked puppy. I wanted to expose this lie of my mother's, but I was afraid that if I did, Soli might kill her.

   "Nonsense!" Soli said. He stood over my mother looking down at her. "Wasn't Katharine a scryer? Wouldn't she have
seen
it if Anala was spying on her? Why would she be so stupid?"

   "Who knows a scryer's ways?" my mother said as she twisted her hands together.

   "Why? Why?"

   "Maybe she wanted to die. She seemed to know. All about her death."

   Soli dropped his head, exhaling a cloud of steam. "Why did she become a scryer?" he said, talking to the rocks of the river bank. "And if she saw her death, why not prevent it? Why? No, no, I should never have let her become a
scryer
." He said the word as if it were the filthiest word he knew. He stared at the river while he clenched the shaft of his spear. Then he asked us why we had not rescued Katharine's body. "That was careless. Yes, so careless, wasn't it, Pilot?"

   I was gasping from the pain of my bandage. "There ... was ... no time," I blurted out.

   "You might have saved her," Soli accused.

   "Saved her? She was dead."

   "_If_," Soli whispered to me, "if you had rescued the body, we might have frozen her in the river and taken her to the cryologists. They might have healed her. But you say there was no time. Wasn't there? Yes, there was time. There was a chance - she might have been saved. But you were not thinking of Katharine, you had to have your little rage, your revenge, your stupid murder, and you say there was no time."

   In truth, it had never occurred to me to save her this way. Why hadn't it occurred to me? What was wrong with my thinking? Why was Soli quicker to see the possibilities than I, quicker to grasp the main chance?
Could
I have saved Katharine? To this day, I do not know.

   "It was too late," I said. "It was warm in the rear of the cave; her brain would have been dead too long. Would you want the cryologists to restore a drooling child to you?"

   "She was such a pretty girl," he said as he paced the river bank. "Even when she drooled on me when she was a baby, even when she spat rice cakes in my face. Oh, so long ago, too long - she was so pretty and
innocent
." (I must admit that he said this word as if it were the most beautiful word in the universe.) "So innocent before she became a scryer."

   Justine began to cry, and then, unbelievably, he walked over to her and put his arms around her, and he dropped his head down against her black hair and wept like a boy. I watched this unbelievable scene in silence. The great Lord Pilot stood weeping like a novice, and I turned away, put on my furs, and walked out on the river where the ice was clear and blue. The wind cut me to the skin. I was numb with cold, but the image of Katharine alive and whole was more chilling than the wind. I wondered if Katharine could have been saved and resurrected even as Shanidar had once been saved. But saved for what? No cryologist in the City, I thought - or in the universe - had the skill to resurrect dead, disassociated brain cells. It was an impossible thing. Clearly, Katharine had known this. Somehow she had believed in the rightness of her death. Unlike Shanidar - and how I wanted to believe this! - she had died at the right time.

   When I returned to the sleds, Soli and Justine were leaning against the gray trunk of a yu tree, holding each other. Their grief had infected Bardo, and he was weeping, too. Huge tears rolled down his cheeks into his beard, which was frozen with ice drops. He looked at me through wet, red eyes; I could tell he was angry at me.

   "Katharine's dead!" he shouted. "And look at you! Dry-eyed as a dead bird! What's wrong with you? What kind of man are you? She's dead, and you can't even cry like a man!"

   How could I tell him the truth? I loved Katharine, and now part of me was dead; to weep for her would be to weep for myself, which would have been a cowardly, shameful thing to do.

   Soli and Justine broke apart, and he walked toward me. The skin of his cheeks was glazed but his eyes were as clear and dry and sober as the eyes of a pilot should be. He asked me, "And what of the child? What happened to my
grandson
?"

   I was so cold that I didn't immediately understand his question.

   "Did he die when they took him away from Katharine? Did they smother him?"

   "Of course he's dead," I said. "No, it's more that that - he never really lived. How could he have lived, born thirty-some days too soon? And not
born
. They gutted her like a seal, Soli, like a damned seal!"

   "You're sure?"

   I was sure of nothing except my need to build a fire and stare at the flames, to escape the cold ice of Soli's eyes. "He's dead," I repeated. "He must be dead."

   We talked for a while; everyone except Soli agreed that the child could not have lived. Bardo kept looking off into the woods, obviously afraid that the Devaki men would follow us once they discovered Liam's body. We were all afraid of this. "We've got to hurry," Bardo said. "Ah, there's so little time and so far to go."

   The light was quickly fading from the hills; the shadows drew out long and gray and thin across the chalky snow. Like the sea before a false winter storm, the trees were dark green and rippling in the wind. Already the sky was darkening, bruised with purples and dark blues. We hoped the Devaki would not pursue us through the forest at night. Perhaps they would not pursue us at all. We decided to follow the river down to the sea. There, off the eastern shore of the island, we would turn southward, circling until we came to our rendezvous point. Then we would wait the five days until the jammer fetched us back to the City.

   So began our retreat through the woods homeward to the City. Bardo and I had the lead sled, followed by my mother. Soli and Justine, who seemed to need their privacy, took turns driving the rear sled. Night fell, and it grew very cold. The dogs flung themselves at their harnesses, pulling and panting in the hard air, and we shot along the starlit trail by the river. It was an eerie journey, this nighttime sledding through the nightmare forest. Except for the cracking whips and the dogs' whines and the occasional shriek of a snow loon (and the river's eternal roar), the hills were quiet and deserted. The air flowing down the valley carried the essence of wood dust and pine and other scents I could not quite recognize. For half the night, the starlight was so feeble that it illuminated only the white snowpack and the icicles hanging from the trees; the trees themselves were sunken in darkness and nearly invisible. Behind us and ahead, the dogs and sleds were strung out along the trail like gray pearls on a silver strand. Through the forest the strand twisted and wound and seemed to quiver, and we floated above the silken snow buoyed by the frictionless glide of the runners and by our private feelings of fate and fear. The forest turned beneath the starry sky, and the landscape began to brighten. On the eastern horizon Pelablinka rose, a great white blister of light bursting above the conical yu trees. Although it had been a while since the supernova had exploded, its radiance was still intense. I could almost make out the reds of the yu fruit and the blue-green needles. I stared up at Pelablinka, stared at this most recent of the Vild's exploding stars and wondered how long it would be before the sky was so full of Pelablinka's that there would never be night again? How long before the light, the gamma and the alpha of the supernovas bathed the Civilized Worlds in a radiance of death? How long before human beings had to abandon their planets and flee from the light, flee across the black dreams of space to the farthest arms of the galaxy? How long before the stars and the dreams of human beings and a billion billion other living things all died? How long before I died?
Never
, Katharine had said to me,
you will never die
. But Katharine was dead, and I was dying inside, slowly dying as I fled through the shimmering trees of the forest. In the bed of my sled, tucked safely beneath the furs, were the krydda spheres full of life, possibly full of life's secrets. But Katharine was dead, and Pelablinka's light hurt my eyes, and the krydda spheres meant nothing to me, nothing at all.

   In this manner, each of us silent and alone with our separate thoughts, we followed the river down to where it broadened and straightened a few miles from the sea. We entered a thicket of Yarkona fir. I remember this well. On either side of the trail, the trees were dense and close, two walls of gray needles almost prickling our furs as we guided the sleds between. The wind, what little wind there was, blew at our backs, urging us forward. The bright nimbus of Pelablinka was high in the sky; the whole of the forest seemed made of silver-steel. As we neared the thicket's edge, the wind died altogether, and it was so quiet I could distinguish the individual pants of the dogs. Tusa was sniffing the air, lifting his paws high, slogging through the powder. Suddenly the wind shifted; it blew at our faces from the east, from the edge of the thicket where the shatterwood trees loomed like straight, black, silent gods. Tusa whipped his head up and barked. All at once Rufo and the rest of the dogs let loose a chorus of howls and barks. There was a blur of black against gray. A spear - it was thick enough to be a mammoth spear - flew out of the woods and struck Sanuye in the side. So powerful was the cast that it pinned the dog to the snow. Instantly there was a tangle of snarled harnesses and yelping, furious dogs. More spears flew from the thicket. One of my mother's dogs was hit and shrieked like an old woman.