At last the Master sent for her to come to a gathering at his house. She had been asked to such gatherings before. Business was largely carried on at the inn, in the public room, but decisions involving more than trade were taken during unhurried, long-drawn-out, chin-rubbing conversations in the hall of the two hearths. Both men and women came; and not always, but often, the Lord of the Manor; and any visitors from other towns who were people of substance or manners. The Master’s mother, Dremornet, white-haired and dark-eyed, sat in state in a velvet armchair under the portrait of the ancestor with a withered arm. If there were not many guests, most gathered about her, leaving the other hearth for private conversations; when there were more people, a group formed at each end of the room. This evening a quiet circle of women and several young men had drawn about the velvet armchair, while three or four elderly men pontificated at the Master at the other hearth. There were of course no strangers there this night but Irene. She stayed in the party with the Master’s mother until he came by, signaling both of them with a glance. Lord Horn had come.
Dremornet gathered up her skirts and rose to greet the visitor, making him a full curtsy, after which the other women bobbed at him. Lord Horn was a thin, stiff, grey man. He made a brief, stiff bow. Not even the spectacle of the tiny, self-important old lady performing a superbly self-important curtsy uncreased the cold folds of his face. His daughter, a pace behind him, blonde, dressed in pale silks, bowed and smiled palely, and they passed on. Their function, Irene thought, was to be bowed to and to bow; they were figurehead people, empty titles. The master of the town was the one called Master, Dou Sark. But they were old-fashioned people here and kept to old ways and habits, and so they thought they had to have a lord.
The Master had glanced at her again in passing, and she soon followed him. At the second hearth the townsmen, who had been croaking away like a pond of bullfrogs, now stood solemnly about. Lord Horn listened without expression and to all appearances without interest to something the Master was telling him. The daughter had sat down, characteristically selecting the only uncomfortable chair in the room, a stiff, spindly piece covered in faded brocade. She sat bolt upright and motionless. Between her pastel insipidity and Horn’s dull coldness, the Master’s face was bright and dark as the embers of the fire.
“The Master tells me,” Lord Horn said to Irene, and paused, looking down at her as if from a distance, from a tower several miles off, with bleared windows through which it was hard to see clearly—“Sark tells me that you met another traveler, on the south road.”
“I saw a man. I did not speak to him.”
“Why,” said Lord Horn, and paused again while he got his slow, cold words together—“why did you not speak to him?”
“He was asleep. He was—he did not belong here—” Her need for words was hot and hasty, she grabbed at the nearest one: “He was a thief.”
Another long pause, hard to endure. Lord Horn’s grey eyes, which had put her in mind of tower windows, did not look at her any longer; but he spoke again. “How did you know that?”
“Everything about him,” she said, and hearing the defensive rudeness of her tone she grew angry with the same sudden vindictive rage she had felt seeing the intruder and whenever she thought of him. What right did this old man have to ask her questions? Lordship, the hell with his lordship, another of the thousand words for bully.
“You think then that the man was not…” a long silence, as if Horn had run permanently out of words, “…could not be the one, the man who…”
“I do not understand.”
“The man for whom we wait,” Horn said.
She saw then that all of them standing there by the fireplace were watching her, and that their faces, the worn, heavy faces of middle-aged and elderly men, were intent, pleading—pleading for the right answer, the word of hope.
She looked to the Master for help, to tell her what she should say. His face was set, unreadable. Did he, all but imperceptibly, shake his head?
“The man for whom you wait,” she repeated. “I do not understand. What are you waiting for? Why wait? I can go.” She glanced again at the Master; his eyes were on her now, his expression though still guarded was warm; she was saying what he wanted. “If none of you can go on the roads, send me. I can carry a message. Perhaps I can bring help. Why must you wait for someone else? I am here now. I can go to the City—”
She looked from the Master to Lord Horn, and was checked by the old man’s expression.
“It is a long way to the City,” he said in his slow, quiet voice. “A longer journey than you know. But your courage is beyond praise. I thank you, Irena.”
She stood confused, all the wind out of her sails, till the Master, frowning, drew her away, and she understood that her interview with the Lord of the Mountain was over.
Alone in her room, early, before her departure, she opened the shutters and watched the dreaming twilight over the roofs and chimneys of the town. She was still warm from bed, she wanted to sleep longer, she wanted to stay longer. When she left would the gate close again? When would she be able, would she ever be able, to come back? The reason why she must go was remote, meaningless: She had been gone a whole night now and if she did not get back to the apartment by seven in the morning she would be late to work…Work, apartment, night, morning, none of it made sense here, words without meaning. Yet, like the force or fear that kept the townspeople from leaving their town, senseless as it might be it must be obeyed. As they must not go, so she must.
As always, Palizot and Sofir were up to breakfast with her before she left, and Sofir had a packet of bread and cheese for her to take on the long walk back to the gate. They were troubled, and unable to hide their trouble. They were, she saw, afraid for her.
She looked back once as the way turned. The windows of the town glimmered faint gold in the dark sweep of the forests to the valley floor. Northward above the mountain shoulder she saw one bright star shine clear, gone the next instant, lost, like the reflection in a raindrop or the glitter of mica in sand.
After crossing the Middle River she ate Sofir’s bread and cheese, and drank the aching-cold water of the river; rested a while and would have liked to fall asleep, but did not, could not; and went on. Nothing threatened her in the forest, nothing frightened her, but she could not rest. She must keep on. She held her light, fast pace, and came at last to the last rise, the crest between red-trunked firs, down the long slope to the rhododendron thickets and through them to the beginning place, the gateway clearing—and saw, before she crossed the water, the blackened ring of stones, the plastic sack half hidden under ferns, the ugly rubbish of the intruder’s camp.
She drew back at once to the thickets and from their shelter watched for some while. There was no sign of the man himself. Her heartbeat slowed, her face began to burn and her ears to sing a little. She crossed the river, went to the hearth ring—cold—and kicked it apart stone by stone, kicking the stones into the water. She picked up the plastic sack and the bedroll and turned to the river; then, whispering under her breath, “Out, get out, clear out,” she lugged the stuff through the gateway, up the path, and dumped it in the middle of Pincus’s woods at the foot of a blackberry thicket, just off the path. Hurrying on to the edge of the woods she picked out of the ditch a board nailed to a post, the NO HUNTING sign long torn or rotted away, which her eyes if not her mind had noted twelve days (or hours) ago when she came this way. With it she returned at a run to the threshold. Only when she was across it did she think, “What if I couldn’t have got through?”—but without any thrill of retrospective alarm. She was too angry for fear. She snatched a lump of charred wood from the ruined hearthplace, crossed the river, and sat down on a boulder with the signboard on her knees. Carefully, in black block letters on the ribbed, rain-bleached wood, she printed: KEEP OUT—NO TRESPASSING.