She laid the skin on the table, weighing its corners with stones, and wrote on it in charcoaclass="underline" Thank you for saving my life. She wanted to say something about how she would try to return, try to repay in the coin she had spent. But she did not think it was likely enough that she would be able to find this place again, even had she anything to bring; and so she wrote no more. Furthermore, the skin was small, and her charcoal lump large and clumsy.
She paused at the table a moment, rereading her unsatisfactory message. The flint was in the small leather pocket-bag sewn into the bodice of the deerskin dress; the knife, sheathed, hung in a loop at her hip, a loop made for just such a knife. She carried nothing else. "We're off," she said to her dog. "Can you tell me where we're going?"
Ash turned and trotted away under the trees: trotted downhill, across the little stream, opposite the way they had come at the beginning of the winter, as if the long months at the hut were but a pause on a preordained journey. Lissar turned her face away from the little, solitary, silent house, and followed her.
FIFTEEN
VERY QUICKLY TRAVELLING BECAME AS FAMILIAR, AS beginningless and endless, as the long snowbound time in the hut had been. At first Lissar followed Ash, as blindly as she had done during the long dreadful days before they found the cabin, but then she found that she too seemed to know where they were going-though she knew nothing more of it than in what direction it lay.
It was like following the direction of the wind beating in her face: if she fell off the point, she could feel the change at once; if the wind shifted, she felt that at once also; but where the wind blew from she did not know. Indeed, she thought, orienting herself to the-smell? sound? touch of air against her cheek?-of that directionless direction, wind would carry more messages of its source. Wind would be warm or cold; wet or dry; smelling of flowers or trees or fire or barnyard. This sensing was a trembling of the nerves, and she might not therefore have believed in it, except that she needed some direction to set her feet and this was at least as good as any other: better, then, because it was there, and it spoke to her. More significantly, it seemed Ash's nose pointed the same way.
She remembered something of the journey to the hut, and the sense of going forward to she knew not what aroused those older memories, of when she had dumbly followed Ash, sick and weak and stumbling. Now it was as though with every step, every touch of her bare tough foot to the ground, she grew stronger.
Soon she trotted side by side with her hunting hound when the way was wide enough, a stride almost as leggy and tireless as Ash's. She began to practice throwing stones; she found as if by some further magic a little detachable pocket in her deerskin dress that was just the right place for small stones to come easily to her hand; the pocket was there just as she began to think of carrying small stones. And with that discovery the stones seemed indeed to come more easily to her hand, and her wrist and shoulder seemed to know better how to twist and flick to set the stones where her eye had sighted. She felt that she was the ruler of all the kingdoms of the world the first time that a stone of hers knocked down dinner for her and Ash, though there were none but the two of them to celebrate, and Ash took it quite calmly. She slept sweetly that night, believing now in some new way that she would win through; she would reclaim her life-she would find a life to claim.
They travelled one Moon through and into a second. One day each of those months Lissar did no travelling, but lay curled up in what haven she could find, while her mind gave her red dreams and her body sent red blood into the air of the world from a small opening between her legs. She drowsed through those days, Ash close beside her, seeing red water and red sky and red Moon and sun in her mind's eye, and yet finding the visions strangely comforting, like the hand of the Lady upon her cheek. On the second day, each month, she tied sweet grass between her legs, that she might not leave a blood trail; and she found that the white deerskin dress took no stain from blood any more than it did from dirt or sap or sweat.
Lissar began to feel that perhaps this travelling was what her life was, and was to be about; travelling in this wilderness of trees and rocks, and peaks and valleys, for she thought they walked among mountains, although she never had a long enough view to be sure. At last this occurred to her as odd, that she should not know, or seek to find out; and so one day she struck straight uphill-away from the breath of direction on her skin-away from the complex of faint trails made by wild creatures through the trees, leading to the next stream, the next nook to creep into against the weather, the next sighting of something for Ash or for a quick-thrown rock to bring down.
She felt like a wild creature herself, breaking her own trail. But it was an odd goal for any such, not to food or water or even a lookout for danger, but for the satisfaction of simple inquisitiveness: what was this place she and Ash wandered through?
She had picked herself a steep climb. They came up above the trees in some little time, and a little while after that she began to notice that her breath hurt her throat; and then her eyes began to burn, and her head felt light. The ground began to seem almost a wall, rising abruptly up before her, so that it was as logical to grasp with her hands as to tread with her feet. Once or twice she had to stop and give Ash a boost.
It was a good day for seeing distances, however; the sky was blue and clear, and as she looked around she saw the mountain tops stretching out around her.... For the first time she thought of how long it had been since she'd seen another human being, heard a human voice other than her own. And she looked around her, thoughtfully, and noticed that in one direction the mountains sank away and became hills, and the forests covered their rounded tops. As she faced that way, she felt the faint tingle of direction. We will go that way, she thought. This is the way we are going.
It was still a long time that they were in the mountains, for all that Lissar now felt and understood that they were going slowly downhill. They saw more creatures as they descended; there was more game for them-and a less devastating sense of loss if either of them missed-but more competition for prey as well, and Lissar began to build a fire in the evening for its warding properties as well as for heat and cooking.
Spring wore on, and the last buds burst into leaf. The rabbits and ootag she and Ash ate were plump now, and there was sometimes enough for breakfast even after they had eaten till their stomachs felt tight at dinner-there was breakfast, that is, if they had hidden the remains of dinner well enough before they went to sleep.
Lissar's hair grew long; she thought, vaguely, that in her previous life she must have cut it sometimes, for she could not remember its ever being so long before, and it felt somehow odd under her fingers, thicker or softer or wirier or stronger, but she thought that if Ash's hair could undergo such an odd change then she should not be troubled with her own. She kept it braided, since she still had no way to comb it, and dreaded tangles; she found a way to weave a bit of vine into the braids, which gave her something to tie it off with; only fresh vines were flexible enough, and the sap made her hair sticky, but it had a fresh, sharp, pleasant smell, and she did not mind.