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the saddle of the other, and this nearness to a wounded member of his own species had him in a white panic of terror, causing him to rear and kick and try to run away, causing him to find the strength even to drag the hurt one for little distances this way and that through the snow. And I, fighting to restore order, was forced to work in blackness and haste and exhaustion, encumbered by the cold and my bulky clothing and a missing hand.
As much as possible, I kept them between me and the line of light at the horizon. That way, it was possible to get occasional quick glimpses of them in silhouette as they reared and fought, attached to one another by that taut stout rope.
At first I tried merely to calm the uninjured one, but with absolutely no success. He was so mad with terror that he wasn't even aware of my existence, and I ran every risk of being knocked over and trampled by him as he leaped and writhed at the end of the rope. After a while, it seemed to me that if only the hurt one would be quite perhaps the other one would grow calm as well, but of course with his broken leg he wasn't ever going to be quiet. Unless he was dead.
I knew that I would have to kill him anyway, though I hated the thought. But my pistol had fallen out of my clothing when I'd taken the spill, and there was no way to find it in the blackness, and my rifle was still in its sheath, attached to the saddle on the wounded hairhorse.
The only thing to do was somehow get the rifle. The one on the ground was thrashing, and the other one was yanking him around this way and that, but I did manage at last to get in close enough and then—lying on my stomach on the beast's heaving flank—I found the saddle with my hand, and then the sheath, and then the rifle. I was kicked several times in the attempt, but no matter. Holding for life to that rifle I jumped back out of the way of all those kicking legs and got ready to do the killing.
A rifle is a hard thing for a man with one hand to fire. I held it in my right hand, my left arm up and across my chest so the rifle barrel could rest on the forearm, and in that position I could fire with fair accuracy one time. But there was no way for me to control the recoil, so that with each firing the rifle barrel would leap into the air and then drop back again painfully on my left forearm.
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It took three shots before I finally hit the silhouette of that streaming, thrashing, coughing head. Then it dropped to the snow as though yanked from beneath, and I fell down on my side on the snow and lay there panting as though I had run around the world.
Slowly the living one lost its panic and stopped making those terrible screams. When all was quiet I got again to my feet, dragging myself through all my movements, my limbs feeling as though weighted down with lead. I took fodder from the pack animal's back and fed it, dead grass in the snow beside the dead body. I took food out for myself as well, but I had no heart to eat it and so threw it away into the snow.
I looked at the light on the horizon, and took no pleasure in it.
I got my sleeping furs and dragged them a little off from where the living animal and the dead were tethered together. I scraped out a shallow pit for myself in the snow, made my bed, and settled into it sleeplessly to wait for the moon to rise.
XXIV
days lateb I came at last to a city and it was not the right one.
After turning to the left from my original direction, I moved directly toward the red sun for four days, traveling gradually from a world of black and white into a world of fever and rust. The cold lessened, the horizon grew brighter, and the moon dimmed in a steadily reddening sky.
I felt one instant of naked primitive fear when the arc of Hell first crept up into sight above the horizon's edge ahead of me. I wanted fiercely at that moment to turn back, to flee again into the darkness, to cross the dead land once more and find Torgrnund's cabin and stay there until I died. Out ahead of me, under the unmoving and baleful red sun, men crawled and cursed and preyed upon one another; when I rode among them they would surely fall upon me and gobble me up.
My mount felt it, too, the horror shimmering away out there under the red sun, or perhaps he merely sensed my own sudden disquiet. In any case, he grew restive, fidgety, and by
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his movements distracting my attention and breaking the spell. I soothed him, patting his long neck, and we moved on.
We traveled somewhat more rapidly now, as the light improved, even though my animal was more heavily loaded than before. I'd packed as much food as I could, leaving the remainder—and the extra furs—with the dead hairhorse back in the anonymous snow.
For the first two days of this stage of the journey it was
still possible to tell time by the moon, seen ever more faintly
in its passage across the sky from right to left. By the third
day, however, Hell had crept upward until it was fully in
view, a flaming red circle in the air just above the horizon,
making it no longer possible to see the moon. From then on
I counted the days by my own cycles: when I was hungry,
when I was tired, when I was rested. >
I came upon the road just as I was deciding to call the third day at its end. This road crossed my path at right angles, a broad bleak empty tan swath across the tundra-like plain. I halted at its edge, looking to left and right, seeing nothing. Since it was approximately time to stop in any case, I put off deciding which way to go until the following day. I turned about, retraced my steps until I found a shallow gully out of sight of the road, and bedded down there for the "night."
After I awoke, while feeding the hairhorse and myself, I considered the problem of where to go from here. Since I had turned left to come into dayside, it seemed to me that to turn left again would be to return to the rim. Still, this road had to lead from somewhere to somewhere, so that it was more sensible to take it than merely to cross it and keep going forward toward Hell. Although Hell's position didn't seem right for it, I finally made a guess that this was the road between Ulik and Yoroch Pass—where Gar was buried—and that if I turned right I would be moving toward Ulik and must eventually find it.
It was a wrong guess. As I worked it out later, I had been acting all along on certain wrong assumptions, such as that the mine was due east of Ulik when it was actually somewhat to the north-east. I had also assumed that Torgmund's cabin was east of the mine, but in fact it was almost straight north of there, with both mine and cabin to dayside of the
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Evening Mountains. (I should have realized my thinking was off when—besides the sun being in the wrong position-there was no mountain range to cross in my traveling, but my thoughts in that period were still none too clear.)
Again, the Anarchaotic moon did not travel from west to east, as I had supposed, but from north-west to south-east, so that I had been traveling north-west when I'd first left Torg-mund's cabin, and all of my wandering since then had been based on false postulates.
It is as though, on a map of Anarchaos, one were to draw a square, with Ulik at the lower right corner, the central city of Ni at the lower left corner, the northerly city of Prudence at the upper left corner, and the point where I caught my first glimpse of dayside being at the upper right corner. When I turned and moved toward the light on the horizon I was traveling, although I didn't know it, along a diagonal from corner to comer, angling down into the civilized dayside Anarchaos like an arrow through a heart, on a line that would have taken me eventually to Ni, far far away at the noon center of man's settlement on this evil planet.