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.
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
Seven days later 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 Torgmund’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 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 fumed 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 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 Torgmund’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 comer, the central city of Ni at the lower left comer, the northerly city of Prudence at the upper left comer, and the point where I caught my first glimpse of dayside being at the upper right comer. 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 char would have taken me eventually to Ni, far far away at the noon center of man’s settlement on this evil planet.
And the road I had come across was the equivalent diagonal the other way, a tine drawn between Prudence at the north and Ulik at the east. I had stumbled on the Prudence-Ulik road, carefully but erroneously thought out what to do, and turned my back on Ulik, going off to the right, north-easterly again, toward distant Prudence.
I traveled this road for the next three days. In that time I occasionally caught glimpses of other travelers at a distance, but my uneasiness was so great that I invariably left the road and went into hiding until they had passed. Several times I considered approaching a party of travelers — I was the only solitary wayfarer to be seen on this road — in order to ask directions and be sure I was heading toward Ulik, but fear and caution and bad memories induced me to remain hidden.
Toward the end of the third day I began to see the towers of a city far ahead. The animal and I were both tired, both hungry, but I pressed on. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been gone — two months, six months — but all at once a great urgency came over me, I felt the full weight and impact of my purpose as I had not felt it since the day I’d been shot in the entrance of Piekow Lastus’ hovel, and I found myself wanting to know now who had killed Gar, and why, and why they had thought it necessary to kill me also.
A short while later I reached the scrubby outskirts of the city, where the ramshackle huts and lean-tos were far apart, abandoned, most of them collapsing. It was as though the people who had once lived out here had decided to move closer to the center of town, like animals who huddle closer together on the coldest nights. In actual fact, it was not movement which had caused these shacks to be abandoned, it was shrinkage. The population of Anarchaos, which had gone steadily upward in its first fifty years or so, had then leveled off for a generation and was now on the decline. Anarchaos was moving slowly — too slowly — toward its inevitable dissolution. These empty shacks on the outskirts of the city would never be used again.
And the city was not Ulik. Looking at the towers, still far away, I could see that they were different, that this was some other city. I couldn’t yet understand it, and pressed forward even faster, looking for someone to explain to me where I was.