"But the boy is dying, Elder," said Rolery in her soft, unyielding voice. "The wound was not washed out before it was sewed together—"
The old doctor went rigid with fury. "Get back among your own kind and don't tell me how to care for humans—"
"That's enough," Agat said.
Silence.
"Rolery," Agat said, "if you can be spared here a while, I thought we might go ..." He had been about to say, "go home." "To get some dinner, maybe," he finished vaguely.
She had not eaten; he sat with her in the Assembly Room, and ate a little. Then they put on their coats to cross the unlit, wind-whistling Square to the College building, where they shared a classroom with two other couples. The dormitories in Old Hall were more comfortable, but most of the married couples of which the wife had not gone out to the Stack preferred at least this semiprivacy, when they could have it. One woman was sound asleep behind a row of desks, bundled up in her coat. Tables had been up-ended to seal the broken windows from stones and darts and wind. Agat and his wife put their coats down on the unmatted floor for bedding. Before she let him sleep, Rolery gathered clean snow from a windowsill and washed the wounds in his hand and scalp with it.
It hurt, and he protested, short-tempered with fatigue; but she said, "You are the Alterra—you don't get sick—but this will do no harm. No harm ..."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Lost Day
IN HIS FEVERISH sleep, in the cold darkness of the dusty room, Agat spoke aloud sometimes, and once when she was asleep he called to her from his own sleep, reaching out across the unlit abyss, calling her name from farther and farther away. His voice broke her dreaming and she woke. It was still dark.
Morning came early: light shone in around the upturned tables, white streaks across the ceiling.
The woman who had been there when they came in last night still slept on in exhaustion, but the other couple, who had slept on one of the writing-tables to avoid the drafts, roused up. Agat sat up, looked around, and said in his hoarse voice, with a stricken look, "The storm's over ..."
Sliding one of the tables aside a little they peered out and saw the world again: the trampled Square, snow-mounded barricades, great shuttered facades of the four buildings, snow-covered roofs beyond them, and a glimpse of the sea. A white and blue world, brilliantly clear, the shadows blue and every point touched by the early sunlight dazzling white.
It was very beautiful; but it was as if the walls that protected them had been torn down in the night.
Agat was thinking what she thought, for he said, "We'd better get on over to the Hall before they realize they can sit up on the rooftops and use us for target-practice." "We can use the basement tunnels to get from one building to another," one of the others said.
Agat nodded. "We will," he said. "But the barricades have got to be manned"
Rolery procrastinated till the others had gone, then managed to persuade the impatient Agat to let her look at his head-wound again. It was improved or at least no worse. His face still showed the beating he had got from her kinsmen; her own hands were bruised from handling rocks and ropes, and full of sores that the cold had made worse. She rested her battered hands on his battered head and began to laugh. "Like two old warriors," she said. "O Jakob Agat, when we go to the country under the sea, will you have your front teeth back?"
He looked up at her, not understanding, and tried to smile, but failed.
"Maybe when a f arborn dies he goes back to the stars— to the other worlds," she said, and ceased to smile.
"No," he said, getting up. "No, we stay right here. Come along, my wife."
For all the brilliant light from the sun and sky and snow, the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe. They were hurrying across the square to the arcades of the League Hall when a noise behind them made them turn, Agat with his dartgun drawn, both ready to duck and run. A strange shrieking figure seemed to fly up over the barricade and crashed down headfirst inside it, not twenty feet from them: a Gaal, two lances bristling out between his ribs. Guards on the barricades stared and shouted, archers loaded their crossbows in haste, glancing up at a man who was yelling down at them from a shuttered window on the east side of the building above them. The dead Gaal lay face down in the bloody, trampled snow, in the blue shadow of the barricade.
One of the guards came running up to Agat, shouting "Alterra, it must be the signal for an attack—" Another man, bursting out of the door of the College, interrupted him, "No, I saw it, it was chasing him, that's why he was yelling like that—"
"Saw what? Did he attack like that all by himself?"
"He was running from it—trying to save his life! Didn't you see it, you on the barricade? No wonder he was yelling. White, runs like a man, with a neck like—God, like this, Alterra! It came around the corner after him, and then turned back."
"A snowghoul," Agat said, and turned for confirmation to Rolery. She had heard Wold's tales, and nodded. "White, and tall, and the head going from side to side ..." She imitated Wold's grisly imitation, and the man who had seen the thing from the window cried, "That's it." Agat mounted the barricade to try and get a sight of the monster. She stayed below, looking down at the dead man, who had been so terrified that he had run on his enemy's lances to escape. She had not seen a Gaal up close, for no prisoners were taken, and her work had been underground with the wounded. The body was short and thin, rubbed with grease till the skin, whiter than her own, shone like fat meat; the greased hair was interbraided with red feathers. Ill-clothed, with a felt rag for a coat, the dead man lay sprawled in his abrupt death, face buried as if still hiding from the white beast that had hunted him. The girl stood motionless near him in the bright, icy shadow of the barricade.
"There!" she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the wall, built of paving-stones and rocks from the seacliffs. He came down to her, his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the League Hall. "Saw it just for a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running, it swung its head towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?"
She did not know; she only knew Wold's story of having killed a snowhoul single-handed, among last Winter's mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory.
Umaksuman said positively that snowghouls often ran in packs, but the farborns would not take a hilf's word, and had to go look in their books. The book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the first storm of the Ninth Winter running in a pack of twelve to fifteen.
"How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?"
Agat looked at her. They were at one of the long tables in the Assembly Room, drinking the hot, thin grass-soup the farborns liked; ti, they called it.
"No—well, yes, a little. Listen, Rolery, I'll be going outside in a minute. You go back to the hospital. Don't mind Wattock's temper. He's an old man and he's tired. He knows a lot, though.
Don't cross the Square if you have to go to another building, use the tunnels. Between the Gall archers and those creatures ..." He gave a kind of laugh. "What next, I wonder?" he said.
"Jakob Agat, I wanted to ask you ..."
In the short time she had known him, she had never learned for certain how many pieces his name came into, and which pieces she should use.
"I listen," he said gravely.
"Why is it that you don't speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to—to go. As you told me on the beach to run to the Stack. As your herdsman told the hann ..."
"Men aren't hann," he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.
"The old one—Pasfal—she listened to the Gaal, when the big army was starting on south."
"Yes. People with the gift and the training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind's knowing it. That's a bit like what any person does in a crowd of people, he feels their fear or joy; there's more to mindhearing than that, but it's without words. But the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is different. An untrained man, if you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he's heard anything. Especially if what he hears isn't what he himself wants or believes. Non-Communicants have perrio feet defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal communication is mainly to learn how to break down one's own defenses."