Rahm crossed the dark path. Nearing the common, he walked by more close-set huts.
Old Hara the Weaver’s cottage had never had a shutter — at least not on its back window. But a hanging had been tacked up across it — although, at one edge, it had fallen away so that a little light came through. Within, he could hear the old woman talking — to herself, Rahm realized, as, with his fingertips on the window ledge, he put his eye to the opening between the window edge and the cloth.
“They shall not have it! They shall not! I said it in the council, and I say it now: they shall not have it!” He could see Hara moving about before the fire, a sharp-shouldered figure. Now she put down an armful of cloth — and taking up a cooking blade, she began to slash at one piece and another as she lifted them. “Never for them — they shall not!” With a hard, hard motion, she flung one handful and another of rags into the flames.
Rahm pulled back — even though the pieces did not flare.
He turned from the hut’s sagging wall, to start away, when, from around the corner —
— lights, horses, hooves!
“There, Çironian! What are you doing out?”
Rahm whirled, hands up over his eyes against the light.
“You know the ordinance, Çironian. No windows or doors are to be open after dark! No man, woman, or child is to be on the street! You’re under arrest! Come with us.”
“With you?” Rahm began, squinting between his fingers as he pulled them from his eyes.
“Anyone the patrol catches out past sundown is under arrest, Çironian. Do not make further trouble for yourself.”
A rope dropped over his shoulders to be yanked tight. Another soldier was down off his horse to grasp Rahm’s hands and pull them behind him. “We’ll take him with us on the rest of the patrol around the common before we deliver him to the holding cell.” Another rope went round his wrists.
As the horse in front started away, Rahm was tugged forward so that he stumbled, nearly falling.
He kept his feet, though. The feeling was a kind of numbness. (The other Myetran soldier was back on his horse now. Horses clopped on the street at both sides of him.) But within the numbness there was something else: it was a feeling hard for Rahm to describe. It was as if the thing that had, the night before, grown to fill him, that had almost become him, had now, at the horse’s first tug, torn loose from him. It was as if his flesh had parted and the thing that had filled him had remained standing, unmoving on the street — so that only the rind of him was dragged away, a limp thing collapsing through the light-lashed dark.
Not that the thing left behind stayed still.
It followed. It came steadily, easily after them, even as Rahm stumbled on. It moved firmly, watched impassively. (For moments Rahm was convinced that if he glanced back, he would see it, coming after them, lowering in the dark.) It observed them, impartial, now like something circling them, now like something walking with them. That impartiality, that impassivity, that sheer chill, was more unsettling than the indifference of the soldiers in front of him and beside him, taking him through the streets about the common — because Rahm’s stumbling was, anyway (most of it), feigned. When his wrists had yanked from the soldier’s hands, the knot hadn’t been pulled tight yet: it would have been nothing to bunch his fingers and, though the hemp might burn, wrench a hand free. The rope around his arms and chest was only, he was sure, one great shrug away from coming loose. These Myetrans, Rahm thought, were used to dealing with terrified men and women.
But Rahm realized, as he stumbled and blinked in their passing lights, trying to look terrified and cringing, the thing that went with them — the thing that was really he — was not frightened. (Did they, Rahm wondered, find the sight of a frightened man or woman somehow beautiful? But they did not even look at him. Were they, perhaps, like the Winged Ones, listening? He did not think so.) It was not frightened at all.
Chapter Five
From the corner of Hara’s hut, Naä watched the soldiers ride off with Rahm. She had seen him at the first house, followed him to the second — recognizing him only in the light from the open shutter before it closed (till now, she’d assumed him killed in the first night’s massacre) — and come behind him quietly at the third. She’d followed him through the breezy night, excitement growing, anticipating what he might say to her, his surprise at seeing her, his pleasure at knowing she was alive and free as he was, when finally she would overtake him with a word —
Really, she’d been about to speak when the patrol had come up, and in a moment’s cowardice she cursed herself for, she’d ducked back out of the light and stood, still and stiff as she could stand, one fist tight against her belly, her back against the shack wall’s shaggy bark.
The whole capture quivered before her, leaving her with the anger, the frustration, the outrage you might have at a child or lover snatched from your arms. She watched them ride off with Rahm — and by starts, hesitations, and sprints, at a safe distance, one street away from the common, she followed them.
Since she had first left Calvicon, Naä had pretty much done as she wanted — within the constraints necessity placed about a wandering singer’s song. She was a woman of strong feeling and quiet demeanor. Last night she’d watched what had happened in the Çironian village, but from the ends of alleys, crouching behind fences, up through the chink in a grain-cellar door, while soldiers and villagers had rattled the boards above her, till one arm broke through to flail, bloody, about her in the dark, hitting her on the ear and shoulders, while she knelt in the three-foot space below, trying not to make a sound while others screamed above her.
Before sunup, Naä had climbed quietly out, stumbled over the bodies, and — like Rahm — started from the town.
She had not, however, gone as far.
She walked an hour in the dark, till the salmon-streaked promise of sunrise hemmed the night. She stopped beneath a maple grove, looked down among dark roots squirming at her feet, put her hands to the sides of her head, and, breathing deeply, stood awhile, now with eyes opened, now with them closed. A few times, she gave an audible gasp.
Once she shook her head.
Then she took her hands down slowly to let them fall finally against her thighs.
A minute later, she whispered, “No!”
Then she turned and began to walk briskly back. At the edge of the burial meadow, she crouched in a clump of brush, while one and another wagon pulled up to the field all through the morning, each accompanied by three or four soldiers, to dump its corpses.
To the sound of creaking cart beds and thumping bodies, she fell asleep — and woke, hours later, in the hot sun, with a nauseous smell in her nose and a bad taste in her mouth. Looking carefully through the brush, she saw that no attempt had been made to cover the bodies on the grass.
One cart had been left near.
But no one was about.
Keeping to the woods, she went around to the charred ruins of Ienbar’s shack. Again, she waited for moments. Then she pulled her harp around before her, dropped to her knees, tugged aside a half-burned log, and gutted out a hole for the instrument. With some cloth, burned along one side, she wrapped it. A large rock went over the opening. Then she scattered dirt and cinders on it. Fifteen minutes later, as she kicked away knee prints, footprints, then stepped back onto the grass, she was sure no one would know her harp was entombed there. Walking along the burned foundation, she paused to look back, then beat at the charcoal on her knees and hands, now and again wiping at her smudged face. Just inside, on a log gone gray and black over its burned-away side, the blade discolored near the bone handle with burn marks but the point sharp and the edge bright, one of Ienbar’s well-sharpened cooking knives lay. She stepped in, picked it up, looked at it on both sides, then pushed it under the sash at her belt.