"Snow," one of them said, pausing near her. She looked up from the stone she was pushing foot by foot down the street, and saw the white flakes whirling before her, falling thicker every moment.
They all stood still. Now there was no wind, and the monstrous voice howling at the gate fell silent. Snow and darkness came together, bringing silence.
"Look at it," a boy's voice said hi wonder. Already they could not see the end of the street. A
feeble yellowish glimmer was the light from the League Hall, only a block away.
"We've got all Whiter to look at the stuff," said another lad. "If we live that long. Come on!
They must be passing out supper at the Hall."
"You coming?" the youngest one said to Rolery.
"My people are in the other house, Thiatr, I think."
"No, we're all eating hi the Hall, to save work, Come on." The boys were shy, gruff, comradely.
She went with them.
The night had come early; the day came late. She woke in Agat's house, beside him, and saw gray light on the gray walls, slits of dimness leaking through the shutters that hid the glass windows.
Everything was still, entirely still. Inside the house and outside it there was no noise at all. How could a besieged city be so silent? But siege and Gaals seemed very far off, kept away by this strange daybreak hush. Here there was warmth, and Agat beside her lost hi sleep. She lay very still.
Knocking downstairs, hammering at the door, voices. The charm broke; the best moment passed. They were calling Agat. She roused him, a hard job; at last, still blind with sleep, he got himself on his feet and opened window and shutter, letting in the light of day.
The third day of seige, the first of storm. Snow lay a foot deep in the streets and was still falling, ceaseless, sometimes thick and calm, mostly driving on a hard north wind. Everything was silenced and transformed by snow. Hills, forest, fields, all were gone; there was no sky. The near rooftops faded off into white. There was fallen snow, and falling snow, for a little ways, and then you could not see at all.
Westward, the tide drew back and back into the silent storm. The causeway curved out into void.
The Stack could not be seen. No sky, no sea. Snow drove down over the dark cliffs, hiding the sands.
Agat latched shutter and window and turned to her. His face was still relaxed with sleep, his voice was hoarse. "They can't have gone," he muttered. For that was what they had been calling up to him from the street: "The Gaal have gone, they've pulled out, they're running south . * ."
There was no telling. From the walls of Landin nothing could be seen but the storm. But a little way farther into the storm there might be a thousand tents set up to weather it out; or there might be none.
A few scouts went over the walls on ropes. Three returned saying they had gone up the ridge to the forest and found no Gaal; but they had come back because they could not see even the city itself from a hundred yards off. One never came back. Captured, or lost in the storm?
The Alterrans met in the library of the Hall; as was customary, any citizen who wished came to hear and deliber- ate with them. The Council of the Alterrans was eight now, not ten. Jonkendy Li was dead and so was Haris, the youngest and the oldest. There were only seven present, for Pilotson was on guard duty. But the room was crowded with silent listeners.
"They're not gone ... They're not close to the city ... Some ... some are ..." Alia Pasfal spoke thickly, the pulse throbbed in her neck, her face was muddy gray. She was best trained of all the f arborns at what they called mindhearing: she could hear men's thoughts farther than any other, and could listen to a mind, that did not know she heard it.
That is forbidden, Agat had said long ago—a week ago? —and he had spoken against this attempt to find out if the Gaal were still encamped near Landin. "We've never broken that law," he said,
"never in all the Exile." And he said, "We'll know where the Gaal are as soon as the snow lets up; meanwhile we'll keep watch."
But others did not agree with him, and they overrode his will. Rolery was confused and distressed when she saw him withdraw, accepting their choice. He had tried to explain to her why he must; he said he was not the chief of the city or the Council, that ten Alterrans were chosen and ruled together, but it all made no sense to Rolery. Either he was their leader or he was not; and if he was not, they were lost.
Now the old woman writhed, her eyes unseeing, and tried to speak in words her unspeakable halfglimpses into alien minds whose thoughts were in an alien speech, her brief inarticulate grasp of what another being's hands touched—"I hold—I hold—1-line—rope—" she stammered.
Rolery shivered in fear and distaste; Agat sat turned from Alia, withdrawn.
At last Alia was still, and sat for a long time with bowed head.
Seiko Esmit poured out for each of the seven Alterrans and Rolery the tiny ceremonial cup of ti; each, barely touching it with his lips, passed it on to a fellow-citizen, and he to another till it was empty. Rolery looked fascinated at the bowl Agat gave to her, before she drank and passed it on. Blue, leaf-frail, it let the light pass through it like a jewel.
"The Gaal have gone," Alia Pasfal said aloud, raising her ravaged face. "They are on the move now, in some valley between two ranges—that came very clear."
"Giln Valley," one of the men murmured. "About ten kilos south from the Bogs."
"They are fleeing from the Winter. The walls of the city are safe."
"But the law is broken," Agat said, his hoarsened voice cutting across the murmur of hope and jubilation. "Walls can be mended. Well, we'll see ..."
Rolery went with him down the stair case and through the vast Assembly Room, crowded now with trestles and tables, for the communal dining-hall was there under the golden clocks and the crystal patterns of planets circling their suns. "Let's go home," he said, and pulling on the big hooded furcoats that had been issued to everyone from the storerooms underneath the Old Hall, they went out together into the blinding wind in the Square. They had not gone ten steps when out of the blizzard a grotesque figure plastered with red-streaked white burst on them, shouting, "The Sea Gate, they're inside the walls, at the Sea Gate—"
Agat glanced once at Rolery and was gone into the storm. In a moment the clangor of metal on metal broke out from the tower overhead, booming, snow-muffled. They called that great noise the bell, and before the siege began had all learned its signals. Four, five strokes, then silence, then five again, and again: all men to the Sea Gate, the Sea Gate ...
Rolery dragged the messenger out of the way, under the arcades of the League Hall, before men came bursting from the doors, coatless or struggling into their coats as they ran, armed and unarmed, pelting into the whirling snow, vanishing in it before they were across the Square. No more came. She could hear some noise in the direction of the Sea Gate, seeming very remote through the sound of the wind and the hushing of the snow. The messenger leaned on her, in the shelter of the arcade. He was bleeding from a deep wound in his neck, and would have fallen if she had let him. She recognized his face; he was the Alterran called Pilotson, and she used his name to rouse him and keep him going as she tried to get him inside the building. He staggered with weakness and muttered as if still trying to deliver his message, "They broke in, they're inside the walls ..."
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Siege of the Square
THE HIGH, narrow Sea Gate clashed to, the bolts shot home. The battle in the storm was over. But the men of the city turned and saw, over the red-stained drifts in the street and through the still-falling snow, shadows running.
They took up their dead and wounded hastily and returned to the Square. In this blizzard no watch could be kept against ladders, climbers; you could not see along the walls more than fifteen feet to either hand. A Gaal or a group of them had slipped in, right under the noses of the guards, and opened the Sea Gate to the assault. That assault had been driven out, but the next one could come anywhere, at any time, in greater force.