“I don’t know. I don’t speak the language all that well. They won’t talk about it or I don’t understand when they do. They just say they can’t leave the town and nobody can come here from the plains.”
“The plains,” he repeated.
“Northward, down the mountain. The road goes across the plains to a city finally.”
She looked at him and saw his eyes, grey-blue or blue, wide, in the heavy, white, yearning face. He had turned to her but he did not see her, he was looking in his mind across the plains of the twilight.
“Have you gone there?”
She shook her head.
“Which way is the sea?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the word for sea.”
“The creeks all run west,” he said in a low voice. He looked at her with the anxious, bewildered look he had, like a steer, the wrinkled forehead and curly hair, blunt face, worried eye. There had been a picture on the cover of a book once long ago, a man with a bull’s head standing in a tiny room. It had come back to her in the darkness before sleep many times, the man’s body and the terrible heavy head.
“Do you know where we are?” he said, and she said, “No.”
After a while he said, “I have to go soon. I’m worried about being late getting back. Next weekend I can come overnight, it’s the long weekend. If they want me to do something. I can try.—Overnight clock time, I mean. Do you—do you figure it’s about an hour clock time to something like a day here, I mean a day and a night, if it…”
“If there was any day or night,” she confirmed. It was very strange to speak of anything like this with another person, to hear him speak of it. “How did you get through the gate, the first time?” she asked in pure curiosity, and asking knew she had wasted all her rage, had accepted the fact that he was here and let him know it.
“I was…” He blinked. His voice made the little creaking sound in his throat. “I was running away. From…I don’t know. See, I’m sort of stuck. Not doing what I want to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Nothing. Important.” It came out in two separate words. “It’s just I want to go to school, but I can’t work it in.”
“What kind of school?”
“Library. It isn’t that important.”
“Well, if it’s what you want to do with your life it is. What do you do?”
“Checker at a grocery.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s good pay. It’s O.K. You know. How did you get here first?”
“Running away. Too.”
But her throat dried up. She couldn’t talk about all that, Doris getting raped, and all the hassle at home, and all that, it was a long time ago now and there wasn’t any use talking about it. She had got away from it. She had come here. None of that existed here. Here was peace, and silence, and nothing changed, it was always the same. Here you did not ask questions. You came home. He could not understand that, he was a stranger. She could not tell him that she came here because her love was here. Her love, her master. No one would ever know that, no one would ever understand it, that center and secret of her life, that silence. In his age, in his mastery, in his strangeness, in his hardness even, in all that divided them, in the distance that held them apart, there was room for desire without terror, there was room and time for love without effect, without penalty or pain. The only price was silence.
She was silent.
The stranger, massive against the window light, stood half turned from her, looking out.
“I wish I could stay,” he said half aloud.
But he turned away from the window, resolute; and went to take his leave of his hosts. She stayed only to give his assurance that he would come back to Lord Horn, who accepted both his parting and his promise to return without question, and then she left the manor. As she walked between the lawns to the iron gate she thought of the return trip she too must soon make. She looked at the dark mountain flank, the remote grey of the rock faces. The silence of the mountain was heavy, like a lid pressed down on a sound, some sound that was always there. She pressed her arms to her sides in a shiver, and walked on. Why go back at all? He had to go back, but that was nothing to her. Why make that long walk through the dark woods back to the gate, why not stay here in the ain country?
She had used to say that to herself, lying in bed in the high, still bedroom of the inn: Why not just stay here, never go back…But she had never imagined what she would do if she stayed, how she could fit into the life of the town, which was complete without her. She came, needing help and willing to help, and learned to spin and card from the women, and went up to the Long Meadow with the children, and went down to Three Fountains with the traders, and made people laugh by her mistakes in speaking, and then left again. This was not her home; she had always called it her home, but she had no home; she stayed at the inn, there was no room here or anywhere that was hers.
She stood still under the iron gateway with her hands clenched.
“Irena.”
She turned and saw him smiling at her.
“Come to my house,” he said.
She went with him without speaking.
In the hall of the two hearths she stopped, and he stopped and turned to face her.
“Let me go north for you,” she said. “To the City. Lord Horn won’t send me. He’ll send the man. Let me go for you.”
As she spoke she saw the long roads across the twilit plain, the towers glimmering, the gates, the beautiful grey streets that went upward to the palace. She saw herself, the messenger, walk those streets. She did not believe it yet she saw it.
“With me,” the Master said. “You will go with me.”
She stared, utterly taken aback.
“The man leaves tonight. Tomorrow: meet me in the morning by Gahiar’s yard.”
“You can—We can go together?”
He gave one nod. His face was grim and set, but the incredulous blissfulness growing in her sang out O my master, my love, together!—but in silence; always in silence.
Sark walked on a few steps. “I shall be lord,” he said very softly, his voice light and dry. “Not he, and not he, but I.” He looked round at Irene with a curious smile. “Are you not afraid?” he said, with the old mockery.
She shook her head.
After early breakfast she left the inn; where the south road entered the street she turned left, passing Venno the carpenter’s shop and old Geba’s cottage. She strode along quickly, her stout shoes kicking her skirt aside so the striped stockings flashed. Her hands were closed and her lips set. The unpaved way ran beside the stonecutter’s yard, deserted. She waited there, restless at first, pacing among the cedars and the blocks of roughcut stone, then sinking into a passivity of waiting, so that when she saw him come at last it was without relief and even without much understanding. Her feelings seemed detached from her mind and senses. She watched him come, a lithe, lean, dark man with a dark handsome face, and it was as if she had never seen him before and did not know him. He walked rapidly, rather stiffly, and did not halt as he came past the stonecutter’s yard. He seemed not to look at her. “Come on,” he said. She joined him on the road. He looked as usual, only that he wore a duffel coat and a sheathed knife or dagger on a loose belt, as the traders had done when they went down the mountain, but there was some change in him; he looked as he always looked but she did not know him.
The road turned a little. Now their backs were to the town, and to the threshold far behind. The way began to slope down into a cutting between high, reddish banks of earth.
“Come on!” he repeated. She had only slowed her pace to stay with him.
She went on a little way.
“Master,” she said, turning. He had stopped. He stared at her. His eyes and face were very strange. He came on, walking directly towards her as if he were blind. She was afraid of him.