So here was another face of Aanrchaos, the rugged individualist's heaven. So long, that is, as he never bent a fraction of an inch from the solitary implications of his principles.
There were no books in the cabin, no pictures, no films or music tapes. In many ways, Torgmund had been no more than an unusually clever animal, a sort of beaver combined with bear. His remote freehold, though it used a few of the most immediately practical of man's discoveries and inventions, was finally a refutation of and a turning away from all of man's history, all of his progress, all of his unending attempt at self-civilization.
After ten days, and though the outer world still frightened me, I was much relieved to be getting away from there.
I took both hairhorses. One I saddled, and would ride, while the other I loaded with Torgmund's provisions. His rifle and pistol and axe and knife I kept with me; spare furs and clothing I added to the pack animal's load, and at moon-rise on the eleventh day I was ready to leave.
There remained only one problem, but that one insoluble. I
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had no idea in which direction lay dayside. In deepest night I had gone outside—in terror, of course—to stare toward the horizon in all directions, but had seen not even the faintest glow anywhere. Torgmund had no compass, and even if he had it would have done me no good as I didn't know what an Anarchaotic compass would be oriented toward.
My only clue was Torgmund's statement that the moon did cross dayside, which meant that the spot where the moon first appeared above the horizon had to be either east or west and could not be north or south. I also knew that I was one day's ride from the evening zone in which Torgmund had found me, though I had no way of knowing what this meant in absolute terms, or how one day of Torgmund's travel would equate with one day of my own.
Still, one had to make a choice. I finally decided to travel toward the morning moon, giving three days to the trip, and if by the end of third day I had not come within sight of the dayside horizon I would turn around and come back and try the other way. If I had guessed wrong it would mean a full week wasted, but there was nothing else to do. And, just in case, I brought along a number of thin branches from the woodpile in back, to leave as markers along the way, to guide me should I have to turn back. If my first guess was wrong, I would want to be able to find the cabin again, in order to restock myself with supplies.
I set off the first thing, on the morning of the eleventh day, with the moon barely a slit crescent—like a nearly closed eye— at the far horizon ahead of me. I rode the lead hairhorse, with the pack second beast trailing us, kept to us by a rope around its neck and tied at the other end around the pommel of the saddle.
We moved at a steady lope, the hairhorses trotting with easy muscularity across the snowy and icy ground. The rhythmic chack-chack-chack of their hoofs on die crust of snow and ice was the only sound.
We moved directly toward the thin crescent of moon, passing near to where I had left Torgmund's body. I did not look in that direction as we went by, though it was anyway probably still too dark for me to have seen anything.
When, a few minutes later, I looked back, the cabin was a tiny black smudge against the pale whiteness of the snow. I
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faced front again, folded my gloved hand around the pommel, felt the flex and flow of the animal's muscles against my knees, and rode onward toward the slowly opening luminous yellow eye.
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although it was no colder at night than in the false moon-
day, it somehow seemed colder then. I assumed it was so be
cause I was no longer in motion, but had to huddle fireless in
one spot and wait for the moon to rise ahead of me once
again. I would have preferred to travel constantly but of
course could not; there was nothing but the moon itself to
give me my direction. .
Until the end of the third day, I saw nothing to indicate whether I was going in the right or wrong direction. It had seemed to me that the temperature must noticeably go either up or down, depending on whether or not I was moving toward dayside, but the biting cold, so far as I could tell, remained unchanged. That is, it seemed to be at one temperature when I was in .motion and at a lower one when I was at rest, and these two temperatures did not seem to vary.
Toward evening of each day—the inaccuracy of these terms grates on me, but they are the only ones I can use—I would dismount, hobble the animals, and dig for myself a shallow sort of trench in the snow. In this I would lie, with furs beneath me and above me, and sleep or think the hours away until moonrise.
The cold affected my wrist badly, making it sting and burn. I kept it wrapped in furs, but to no effect, and the constant pain caused me to be irritable and impatient when there was no value in such feelings.
I don't know how long the faint light was visible before I noticed it. My attention was exclusively, vitally, almost bale-fully upon the black horizon ahead of me or—as we moved through the dark "afternoon"—in quick glances behind me to be sure I was still moving directly away from the declining moon. I was staring ahead more intently than ever as my self-imposed time limit neared its end; three days I had given myself and three days were just about up. The thought of hav-
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ing to retrace all that distance to the cabin, and then to have to begin the journey all over again in the opposite direction, both depressed and maddened me. If only, far out there across the snowy waste ahead of me, there would come some slight tinge of color on the horizon.
But it wasn't ahead of me that the light appeared. I had just about decided to stop for the night, and was looking around for a shallow dip in which to bed down—there was sometimes wind out here—when I saw that thin vague rosy line far far away, the line of light on a flat horizon.
Could it be man-made, some sort of city? No, that was impossible. It extended too far along the horizon, in the first place, and in the second place there was no city anywhere along the rim. The cities of Anarchaos were five; Ulik, Moro-Geth, Prudence and Chax at the four points of a diamond, and Ni at their center. The sun had to be off in that direction, to my left.
I turned at once, prodding the hairhorses to greater speed, riding along as though I expected to attain that horizon in half an hour. The moon, low to my left, winked out in its abrupt manner, and all about me now the land was black as the bottom of death. But I kept going, with that thin rusty glowing line to guide me, pushing on past the time when the animals and I usually stopped for food and rest, pushing on until all at once the hairhorse I was riding seemed to stumble, and for just an instant to regain its balance, and then down it went, head foremost, somersaulting in the air and hurling me clear to land bruisingly out in front on the snow and ice.
I rolled and rolled, then staggered to my feet and limped back to them, guided by the sounds they were making; the fallen one had a constant, almost an apologetic, cough, while the other was filling the night with ear-splitting whinny-shrieks, as though someone were torturing the mate of the missing link.
The next little while was a nightmare, as I tried in the darkness to regain control. The animal I'd been riding had stumbled in a hole or some such thing and had broken his leg, and was lying now on the ground, thrashing about and making that coughing sound. The other one was still attached to the hurt one by the rope that went from his own neck to