"Don't kill yourself for guilt," Stipock said coldly, and Wix turned to Dilna for support. "I tried to hold onto him," Wix insisted.
"I know it," she answered. "We all did."
And then they fell silent. They stood several meters from the edge. Waiting. For what? Stipock realized that the situation was impossible. They were waiting for Hoom to fall asleep, or lose his grip, or die of his injuries. At best they were waiting for him to die of thirst. If they had to stay there waiting, they'd all go crazy.
Hoom realized all that, too, and said so. "I'm going to let go!" he called out.
"No!" Dilna wailed, and the canyon shouted it back at her. "No! No!"
"I can't hold on forever! What should I wait for? Jason's flying ship?"
"Is Cammar anywhere near you?" Wix called, trying to keep Hoom from talking himself into dying.
"He's dead!" came the answer.
"Can you see him?" Wix called. There was a long wait before Hoom answered. "There's a lot of blood on this rock," Hoom said. "It isn't mine. There's nothing between here and the river." Hoom's voice quavered as he spoke.
Dilna began to vomit, retching loudly. The sound was terrible, and Stipock wanted to scream in his helplessness. Wix was crying, more in frustration than grief.
"Stipock!" Hoom called.
"Yes!"
"Tell them for me!"
"I will!" Stipock called back.
"Tell us what?" Wix asked, looking up in dread. "What?"
"That he knew. And that he forgives you both."
Wix and Dilna were silent now. Hoom called from below, "But you, Stipock! I'll never forgive you!"
Stipock felt a terrible pain, a wrenching of his bowels, and he breathed heavily. The boy couldn't mean it.
"I'll never forgive you for not teaching me more before I died!"
And, relieved, Stipock slowly sat down. But the feeling of guilt was still there. Because it was Stipock who had brought Hoom to this.
Hoom didn't say anymore. There was a sliding of rock. No scream, no cry. No sound of the body landing below. And in the deep silence after the sound of Hoom letting go, the gurgle of the river far below seemed remarkably loud.
Wix and Dilna just sat there, saying nothing, not touching. After a while Stipock went farther up the hill and looked for bushes he could use to make a fire. When he got it going, he came back to the two young people and led them up the hill to the fire. They came passively enough, but they didn't look him in the eye. Stipock could guess what they were thinking. Years of betrayal, and the fact that they hadn't stopped, had never stopped. Knowing that he knew that they had betrayed him. No wonder, Stipock thought, that they sit on opposite sides of the fire. Guilt couldn't keep them apart when Hoom was alive; but now that he's dead, it will, for a time at least, separate them more thoroughly than marriage had ever done.
Dilna and Wix both cried out in the night, at different times. Stipock also slept badly. The next day they backtracked, and found another way down the northwest slope of the mountains. They never found the river that had taken Dilna's husband and son, and were just as glad of that.
The forest swallowed them, and the going was slow, and at last Dilna was too pregnant to travel. They built a house, then, and hunted in the forest, trapping small animals and birds and laying in food for the winter, Wix and Stipock both leaving the house for days at a time, to make sure the winter would not catch them unprepared.
The snows in the forest here fell deep, deeper than they ever had in Heaven City. The trees were taller, too, and denser, and the darkness at noon in the middle of winter, even though the leaves had fallen from the trees, was dismal and depressing. But that winter Dilna's child was born. A son.
"You'll name it Hoom?" Stipock asked.
She shook her head. "Hoom told me he wanted a son named Aven." And there was little talk that day, though the snow confined them all indoors; they were thinking of death as the infant sucked pap from Dilna's breasts.
As night came, and they laid the logs for the night's fire, Dilna spoke from the bed where she lay, recovering from the birth. "I've been pregnant," she said, "six times. Six times, and Aven is all that I have now." As if in answer, the baby stirred and cried weakly. No one could think of anything to say to her.
And in the spring they set out again, following streams and rivers northward, trying to find a pass through the northern mountains that Stipock warned them of. And they found it soon — there was still snow on the ground as they hiked through the vast gap in the mountains, the peaks rising to the right and the left as they walked northward on the gentle hills.
It was nearing summer when they came to the Heaven River, the kilometers–wide torrent rushing westward to Heaven City . They stopped to build a small, crude boat, and two days after they launched it, they saw the shining metal of the Star Tower rise above the trees. Soon they saw boats ahead, plying back and forth across the river.
"Left bank? Or right?" asked Stipock, who was at the tiller.
"Left," Wix answered quickly.
"Left," Dilna agreed. They wouldn't try to hide among the people of Stipock's Bay, who would probably accept them more readily. They'd go to the Main Town . They'd find the Warden and take whatever answer he gave them.
They were greeted with amazement and open pleasure by the people in Linkeree's Bay, and a crowd followed them up Noyock's Road, over the hill where the ashes of Noyock's house had been cleared and a four–story house erected on the site, and down the other side to Main Town .
The new Warden was Jobbin, a great–grandson of Hux, a man younger than Wix. He embraced them, and showed them a paper left by Jason when he had come to take Noyock into the Star Tower .
"Stipock," said the letter, "are you ready now?"
Yes, thought Stipock.
"You and all who returned with you — welcome home. Be happy here in Heaven City . And at least make an effort to avoid causing trouble," and Jason had signed his name at the bottom.
Having read the letter, Wix and Dilna and Stipock smiled at each other, and then settled down to tell their story. Stipock gave the records of his colony to Jobbin, who read them carefully. Several people also took turns writing the account of their journey as they told it. The travelers, in turn, read the History of the last few years. It was an unbroken story of peace, plenty, growth, happiness. When it was done, Dilna looked at Wix and then at Stipock, and said, "It's good to be home again, isn't it?"
And then the three of them went to live in different parts of Heaven City , and had as little to do with each other as possible. Someone once asked Stipock why — after all they had been through together, shouldn't they be close friends?
"We all died in a chasm in the mountains," Stipock answered. "And these new people you see are strangers, with unpleasant memories of someone who looked very much like us. When those memories are gone, perhaps we'll be friends." That was the most he ever said on the subject. Wix and Dilna never said a thing.
But it was Wix who led the expedition that mapped the Heaven River clear to its delta. And it was Stipock who first minted money, and who taught them to make charcoal, and who built the first windmill, and who taught them to make glass.
And Dilna's son Aven became Warden — many said the best Warden of all — and when Jason brought Arran from the Star Tower and married her, it was Aven who performed the ceremony.
Jason eventually took both Wix and Stipock and their wives into the Star Tower . But when he asked Dilna to come and sleep so she could live forever, she refused. "I don't see anything wrong with dying," she said, "and I'd rather do it among friends than strangers, years from now, who never knew me." At her instructions, after she died her body was burned, and the ashes were scattered across Heaven River .